But the success of the McNugget came with a shadowy cost: not only did it inadvertently help fuel the country’s type 2 diabetes epidemic, it also created millions of tons of unusable, unsellable chicken wings. These un-Nuggetable wings went to the landfill. Imagine thousands of garbage trucks swarmed by millions of skreeing seagulls eager for a taste of gelatinous decomposing wing. I don’t mean to get poetic, but the sheer biological mass of it all amazes me. Hundreds of millions of people eating a lot of anything is pretty scary. Every massively popular food comes with significant and frightening biological side effects.
The second factor that created the early-1980s perfect food storm was the drinking laws in America’s northeastern states. In order for bars to be open at happy hour between five and seven p.m., the bar needed to serve some kind of food to soak up the underpriced happy hour booze. Enter some unsung hero out there in Boston or Providence or Bangor, who thought about those tens of millions of unwanted, unloved chicken wings and said to himself/herself: You know, technically, legally, if pressed, you could actually view these surplus wings as…food.
Soon people no longer viewed wings as something disgusting to be trucked to the landfill. Wings became Buffalo wings! Cajun wings!
“Honey, what’s that wing recipe of yours that everybody loves?”
I mention all this to explain why, after I began my research into the history of fast-food chicken in America, I became a vegetarian. And why, though everyone in my family loves chicken wings, I refuse to buy them or cook them or do anything with them. I mean, just look at them. They’re gross: pink and goosebumpy and kind of fetal.
The irony is that part of my job is ordering food in bulk. On any working day I may order three thousand beef hearts, eight hundred pounds of liver and a mile of hot dogs made from a wide range of body parts like urethras and fallopian tubes, ingredients that would make even a cat-food producer cringe.
One day it got to me. I clicked the return key to order one ton of reticular beef tripe (a honeycombed entity that comes from a cow’s second stomach chamber), then sat back in my chair and confessed to my assistant, Azita, that I was going to ask to be reassigned.
“Sharon, ordering tripe is spooky even at the best of times,” she replied. “Order some vegetables. That’s what I do when I get trapped down a meat hole.”
“Somehow I don’t think even that will fix my brain.”
“Then have some of my carrot sticks. I chopped them fresh this morning.”
“Thanks.”
My husband, Taylor, and my sons, Taylor Junior and Brandon (fifteen and seventeen), were perplexed when I told them I was going vegetarian. Taylor Junior said, “Sharon, are you turning into a fifteen-year-old girl? You’re the queen of the four food groups. If you don’t eat meat, aren’t you being kind of hypocritical, considering your job?”
“I’m applying for a transfer.”
“What?” My husband has been unemployed since COVID.
“I’m not quitting. I asked to be moved elsewhere in the hospital.”
“So, Mom, does this mean you’re going to stop cooking meat?”
“I suppose I can still cook it, but I don’t think I can taste-test it while it’s cooking.”
My gag reflex soon informed me that, no, I couldn’t cook meat. Even the thought of meat sharing the same shelf as my vegetarian options in the fridge soon weirded me out. Taylor and the boys tried to be okay with my choice, but after my first few attempts to make tasty vegetarian fare (mostly macaroni), they began to get testy. I found myself ordering Uber Eats to deal with the family’s different menus, but that was expensive, so not a long-term strategy.
And then it was Super Bowl Sunday. Taylor’s friends usually come over in sports jerseys and turn the TV room into a beer garden. The food is traditionally, almost superstitiously, guacamole, onion chip dip and massive trays of takeout Cajun wings from the bar on the corner. Even when I was a meat-eater, I usually avoided the whole event and went over to my friend Diane’s place, where we would knit and watch a romcom. But I had a cold and was feeling draggy, so I stayed upstairs, bracing myself for the onslaught of walrusy woo-hooing.
Eventually I heard the doorbell ring, and I knew it was the delivery guy bringing the four massive trays of Cajun wings. Shortly afterwards, I heard a tremendous crash from the kitchen. I ran downstairs and found Taylor’s friend Norm on his back, giggling—he was drunk—and the four trays of fallen wings, which had shat out their contents in all directions. Wings were glued to the cabinet doors, the walls, the chairs, my windowsill succulents, the stove. Norm looked like a zombie who had just feasted on a family of five.
Taylor helped him up and told him to strip down to his gonch. He pushed Norm into the half bath to wash off, and fetched him a pair of his old sweatpants and a T-shirt. Then my husband actually looked at me and asked, “Hon, could you take care of this mess? We’re just at the start of the third quarter.”
At that moment, a wing came unstuck from the fridge and splatted onto the floor.
“No,” I said, and I grabbed my purse and got into my car and checked into a motel a few miles away.
I don’t know what to do. But I’m not sure I can go back.
57
Using
ONE DAY MY MOTHER was normal and then she wasn’t. Two years ago, she came home from work one night and announced that she was becoming a vegetarian. A week later, she went full vegan and soon she had moved out of the house into a monthly rental place. I soon learned that when you tell your friends that a woman over thirty has gone vegan, they assume she’s coming out as lesbian, which wasn’t the case with Mom. (Although it would be nice for her to have someone, anyone, in her life.)
What makes Mom’s transformation so weird is that she was kind of an old-fashioned TV mom who worked as a dietitian for a big hospital chain. When I was little, it was like the four food groups were always seated at the dinner table like invisible themed mascots.
I think I’m closer to my mother than most guys are, though she was always cool with me or my brother asking her questions. When I wanted to know why she had changed food gears twice, she said, “First I couldn’t eat anything that was once a body—an organism with bilateral symmetry—which meant no animals. But then I was cleaning out the fridge and there was a milk carton at the back that I’d somehow overlooked for months, and when I poured it into the sink it was a gray-blue color and I realized I couldn’t eat anything that came from a body either.”
After she left home was when I started using.
Someone at the clinic tried to tell me that I was being juvenile and using drugs to punish my mother for becoming a weirdo, but that’s lame. I love my Mom and I don’t trust any guy who doesn’t feel the same about his mother. It’s like a litmus test for detecting damaged men. Try it sometime.
But yeah. Me using stuff? That surprised me, too. I thought I liked myself, but apparently I don’t. I mean, we’re the ones stuck inside our bodies, so you’d think it’d be way easier to understand yourself and to refrain from doing anything so destructive. But it isn’t. Instead, you have to go to rehab, where you’re stuck with thirty other people who are all trapped inside their bodies just like you. And just like you, they’ve lost the ability to know themselves. Or at least that’s the impression I came away with.
Why be so weird about food? Why get into drugs? And also, why sex? After Mom left, my dad almost immediately turned into a horndog glued to Tinder. I still haven’t told Mom about that, nor will I.
My younger brother became orthorexic, which is kind of like anorexia in that it indicates a damaged relationship with your body. (Yes, I speak like a rehab person, but humor me.) Instead of not eating at all, you start eating only skinless chicken breasts, protein powders and steamed vegetables; instead of going for a jog, you run marathons and live at the gym. You also pull away from people and the world. It’s anorexia in disguise.
/> People say quitting drugs is just mind over matter, but they’re not the ones stuck inside a body starving for a drug that is scientifically known to be 1,000 percent addictive. Some people are also more prone to addiction than others. That would be me. I’ve actually never tried cigarettes or booze because I know it would be a one-way street. And I don’t know if I’ll ever be truly free from meth, or the drugs I used that led to my meth addiction.
I was a lone user. I’m the one whose face you see in the obituaries looking way too young. I don’t yet have the missing teeth and facial sores of a meth-head. I think I got off the bus in time—I won’t ever get that bad—but I know a few people who didn’t. Their faces now look like chew toys, and they’ll likely be dead within a year.
When Mom moved out, I became the family’s official problem, maybe so we wouldn’t have to discuss her being gone.
When you heard the word “rehab,” you probably assumed my family’s loaded. Ha. Mom works, but Dad’s been unemployed for years. All of my family’s savings ended up going to New Promises. They likely financed the repaving of the rehab center’s outdoor smoking area, along with the huge dreamcatcher they hung in the entry lobby, where they admit you after taking away everything you brought with you. And then you sit around with people who, like you, are thinking of drugs every waking moment. I hate myself for doing this to my family. I really do.
I was released a day earlier than expected and nobody was there to pick me up. My phone was dead, so I ended up hitchhiking home, which took maybe six hours. When I walked into the house, nobody was home. It was the saddest, quietest moment of my life.
In the kitchen, I poured myself a glass of water and, as I drank it, I stared at the windowsill where Mom’s succulents were dying from neglect. I gave them half of my glass of water, and suddenly I had the shivers. There we were, me and a few plants, sharing a holy bond of aliveness, both of us needing care and also needing to give care.
I gathered all the succulents together in a cardboard box and called a taxi. And then I went to see my mother, as though for the first time since I was a child.
58
Starbursts
I USED TO BE A COP, but four years ago, during that big cold snap, I severed my Achilles tendon chasing a meth-head over a chain-link fence. All that time I spent getting my badge, followed by fifteen years on the force, and my sergeant is like, “Dan, would it kill you to do desk duty for awhile?”
“Actually, yes, it would. I like being out in the world. Sitting in a chair all day, filling out forms, is a living death.”
When he wouldn’t give an inch, I did desk duty for a little while. And then I quit and became the same thing that all cops who quit early do: a private detective.
Being a private dick mostly involves sitting in a car all day, staking out houses or mailboxes, waiting for people who pretty much never show up. But at least I make a $500 per diem. You need to know that about detectives: everything costs you $500. Me answering the phone will cost you $500, and me sitting in my Challenger for a day will cost you $500 plus expenses. If you like getting paid handsomely for doing fuck all, then this gig’s for you. Forget driving for Uber or all that twenty-first-century gig shit.
Before I’ll work for you, I have to interview you. Why? Because how do I know you’re not the psycho? Maybe you’re a stalker and you want me to help you raise your game.
I have three basic kinds of jobs. First, following people who are making personal injury medical claims. I usually end up filming them lifting heavy things into the beds of their trucks. Second, trying to find people who don’t want to be located, which, thank you Facebook and internet, is almost impossible these days. Third, trying to catch a good old-fashioned cheating spouse.
Catching cheating spouses in the act is the most profitable gig, because the client is going crazy with suspicion and jealousy, so you can tack on all kinds of fees to your basic rate and they’ll say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah—just nail that bitch/bastard.”
In general, cheaters are very lazy. Nine times out of ten I just have to stake out a motel parking lot. But one day last year, when I was sitting in a lot, I was startled by a knock on my car window. It was a woman who clearly matched the photo my client had given me of his wife, Mrs. Kerry-Ann Knox. She was smiling, which I thought unusual.
“Yes, it’s me. And I’m not the psycho one.”
I was flustered at being made. “I’m—that obvious?”
“I can’t imagine what Kevin’s paying you for all of this, but your car looks pretty expensive. I love the color, by the way.”
She complimented my car! I already liked her way better than her creepster husband. “Uh, thanks. Red’s always been my favorite.”
“Me too. In college I had a red Ford El Camino.”
“Wow! I used to have an El Camino. What year?”
“Seventy-seven.”
“That’s a classic. You’ve got good taste.”
“I had to sell it after college and it almost killed me. I loved that car.”
“You can always get another one.”
“I know, but at my age it’d look like I borrowed it from my kid.”
“I sometimes go to the car shows down in Arizona, which are filled with 1970s muscle cars. And every single guy there—”
“No women, I’m guessing.”
I smiled. “Nope. All the men are exactly my age, and we’re all lusting after the cars we couldn’t afford in high school. I felt like some kind of punchline.”
“Good taste is never a cliché. How long have you had this Challenger?”
“Almost a year now.”
“And?”
“And it totally hauls ass!”
“What’s the fastest you’ve taken it?”
“I, uh…”
“Come on. How fast?”
“On the straight stretch down by the water, I got her up to 140.”
“Booyah!”
“But don’t tell anyone. I don’t want them to know I red-lined it when I trade it in.”
“Your secret is my secret. Oh—are those Starburst fruit chews on the seat beside you?”
“Only the finest.”
“Can I have an orange one? I have coffee breath and it’s grossing me out.”
I reached over and removed two orange Starbursts from the pack. “Take two, on the house.”
“You’re a lifesaver.” She opened one, popped it into her mouth and started chewing. Then she said, “Make sure you bill Kevin a few hundred for the candy.”
“You know how this works?”
“I looked up the cost of hiring someone to follow Kevin a few months back. The way you guys bill is insane.”
“We’re not regulated.”
“You certainly aren’t. It almost got me wondering if I should get into the business.”
“Don’t! It’s so boring, you wouldn’t believe it. The past three minutes have been more interesting than the past four years combined.”
“You sweet-talking devil, you.” She paused and stared for a moment at the door to room 106. “So, you’re probably wondering why I’m in a motel parking lot at…” she looked at her iPhone, “2:47 on a Wednesday afternoon.”
“I, uh…”
“I’m here meeting my ex-husband, Reid.”
“You have an ex?”
“I got married when I was sixteen.”
“That’s legal?”
“It was a different era, and it didn’t last long. I never told Kevin.”
“Oh.”
“There’s more…”
“I’m listening.”
“I’m helping Reid become a woman.”
I snorted. “Holy fuck.”
“He’ll make a good woman! I swear!”
“I don’t doubt you.” I popped a Starburst myself. Banana. “Man, this is sort of
like that old movie, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, where it turns out Holly Whatshername has a secret hillbilly husband.”
“You’ve seen that? It’s kind of how I feel with Reid and Kevin.”
“I admit I kind of liked it.”
“Wait—that’s like the song lyric based on the movie, you know?” And she hummed it: “Breakfast at Tiffany’s…We both kind of liked it…”
We were married within a year and now we run stings together. We’re a crime-fighting duo, and you know what? Life rocks. Booyah!
59
DUI
I DROVE TO PATTI’S in a fog. Two hours before, I’d plowed my FJ Cruiser into the side of a Windstar minivan driven by a soccer mom with two kids in car seats in the back. The kids were okay, but the soccer mom was in intensive care. Technically it was 100 percent the soccer mom’s fault. She blew through a blinking red light. The two drivers behind me had it on dashcam footage. But if I hadn’t been drinking Patti’s margaritas just beforehand, the whole thing might not have happened. Fortunately, I have enough power over my faculties that my possible impairment never entered the cops’ minds.
I went back to Patti’s. She let me in.
“Jesus, Dave, you look like shit. What happened?”
I went to sit on the same couch where, two hours previously, we’d been karaokeing to 1990s rap and sipping pink lemonade and tequila.
“This van came out of nowhere. I mean, like a comet or something. I didn’t have enough time to stop and…Jesus, the woman driving it was covered in blood like the end of Carrie, and the two kids in the car seats in the back seat were stunned and making no noise at all.”
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