When I walked into the apartment that night, I knew something had happened. It was just after eleven, and the phone was ringing, and somebody had shoved dozens of little pieces of paper underneath my door. I waded through them to answer the phone, but when I got there, I noticed the message light flashing on the answering machine and, looking closer, saw that I had twenty-seven messages, and the twenty-eighth was being recorded as I stood there listening.
“This is Ivan Singer calling from the CBS news desk again. Please give us a call....”
I waited until the machine had reset, then rewound it and hit Play. One after the other, every-major television news program and talk show in the country had left an urgent message requesting that I get in touch immediately. There were messages in Japanese as well, from the networks there, and also from several European stations. “Mrs. Dunn gave us your number,” each first-time caller prefaced his request, and then: “We want to talk with you about the footage.”
Finally, there was a message from Bunny.
“Howdy there, Jane. I’m real sorry about all this. I’ve been trying to call you all morning, but I can’t get through ’cause your line is always busy, so you probably already know what’s happening. But I just wanted to tell you that the documentary tape you made was put together real good, and thanks for blocking out me and Rosie’s faces like that. Guess it sort of bothered me after all, even though I said it was okay.... Anyway, I gave a few people your number. Hope it’s okay with you.”
I disengaged my call-waiting feature and phoned her immediately. I got her answering machine.
“Bunny, pick up, it’s me, Jane. Bunny, are you there? It’s Jane. Jane Takagi-Little. Bunny... ?”
“Hey there, Jane.”
“Figured you were screening your calls....”
“You said it! Ain’t this something!”
“Bunny, what the hell is going on?”
“Yeah, well ...” Bunny sighed. “It was the documentary tape that you sent? Of Gale and the slaughterhouse and me and Rosie?”
“I figured. What happened?”
“Well, what happened was, a couple of weeks after y’all left, I took Rosie to Texas, to a big hospital there, and sure enough, it was just like you said, some kinda hormone poisoning, and they speculated it was from the feedlot. I couldn’t bring her back here, so I left her with her grandma in Texas for a spell and came back to make things right with John. I told him, not everything, but a little about what was wrong, and he didn’t believe me, you know? I mean, it all sounds pretty crazy, right? So just then, your tape came in the mail, and I watched it.... I showed it to him—” And right there, Bunny giggled and couldn’t go on.
“Bunny, what happened?”
“He went ballistic!” she shrieked. “I shouldn’t laugh. But I was so relieved, you know? Like finally he understood. He made me drive him down to the feedlot and get Gale, and then he showed him the tape too. And I’ll never forget Gale’s face, all twisted up and pink when them pictures of Rosie’s chest and down below came on.... I mean, that boy was sorry! He was sobbing, ‘I never knew, Daddy, you gotta believe me I never knew....’ ”
“He did know. I told him.”
“That’s what I said. So John made him get on the phone and call the guy at the local USDA office? And he made Gale ’fess up to everything, the whole thing.”
“Whole thing?”
“Yeah, well, it seems like he’s been using that DES stuff and injecting the cattle with it. Getting it from somewhere, I don’t know. Him and a lot of other guys around here ...”
“But I still don’t understand. How’d this get to the press, then? And how’d they find out about the footage?”
“Well, after Gale finished telling about the DES and the cattle, John got on the line and he told ‘em about Rosie. And then we get this call from the USDA in Washington, D.C., and then another from the FDA, all wanting to know exactly what he was talkin’ about. I guess this kinda thing happened before. Anyway, somebody in one of them offices musta leaked it to the press, because before you know it, it’s all over the place and we’re gettin’ calls right and left from the TV stations and everybody, and there’s John, sittin’ in his wheelchair on the porch with a shotgun in his lap, holding them reporters off. No pictures, we told ’em. Of course, Rosie ain’t even here, but nobody knows that, you see. But then me and John talked it over and figured, hell, we’ll just turn ‘em all over to you. Seeing as you blocked out our faces and everything. John liked that. Figured you’re to be trusted. You’ll know what’s best to do with ’em. And as far as Gale and the feedlot is concerned, John is fed up with all of it and figures Gale’s just gittin’ his just deserts.”
“So what is it you and John want me to do, Bunny?” I asked helplessly.
“Spread the word,” said Bunny. “Give ’em your documentary. Nah, you ain’t got no money. Sell it to them. Whatever you want. The main thing is, people gotta know.”
And that was that. A feeding frenzy ensued during the next couple of weeks. I sold pieces of the footage to all the major U.S. networks and to foreign TV as well, in Europe and Asia, including the network in Japan that carried My American Wife! Aside from the footage sales, public television in the U.S., England, and Japan bought the edited documentary in its entirety. But people wanted my story too, how I uncovered the illegal hormone ring. I was so swamped I couldn’t handle it all, so I called Dave Schultz in from Colorado and we rented a little office, where he slept on a couch. With his grasp of the facts and figures, it took him no time at all to get up to speed, fielding the questions from the press.
Kenji called to tell me that he and Ueno were in deep shit. Apparently, the Bunny Dunn episode of My American Wife! (directed by “John” Ueno) was a virtual celebration of the wholesomeness of beef, and the program aired the same day that the DES story broke. As the Dunn feedlot figured prominently in both, it didn’t take long for the press to catch on. Now, in addition to the beef scandal, they found themselves at the heart of a media controversy over reliability in television and the power of corporate sponsorship to determine content and truth.
And there was yet another angle. Gale’s interview about cattle feed, especially the practice of feeding cow parts back to cattle, stirred up a wave of media concern about bovine spongiform encephalopathy and its human equivalent, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. It had first made the news back in 1987, when the disease was identified in England and given the media-sexy name “mad cow.” Yet despite awareness of the dangers, the practice of feeding offal to ruminants continued in America. The Japanese didn’t like this.
Ueno was demoted, sent out to one of the regional offices in the provinces to make local TV commercials for hot-springs resorts and conference centers. This made me very happy, but I felt truly sorry for Kenji: My American Wife! was being canceled, and the New York office was closing.
“Well, at least you’ll be able to go back to Tokyo, right?” I asked.
Kenji sounded glum. “I’ll never direct, you know. Not after this.”
“I’m sorry.... But you know, Kenji, it’s not what I thought it would be. It’s no fun directing for TV. Too many compromises.”
“Yes, well, I don’t mind compromises. Shikataganai ...” He sighed deeply. “Oh, I almost forgot. I sent that damn tape to Suzie Flowers. I’m sorry, Jane, I had to. She was driving us all insane. But it didn’t help, and she’s still calling every other day. She wants to speak to you. You simply have to make her stop.”
My heart sank but I finally did it. I called her.
“Jane!”
“Suzie, I’m so sorry—”
“I got the tape! Of the show!”
“I know. I’m so sorry—”
“It was wonderful!”
“What?”
“It was so beautiful, and so ... I don’t know... so authentic, you know?”
“Authentic?”
“Uh huh. Especially that part after the Survey, where you guys put in that boinnggg! I mean, that�
�s exactly what it felt like to me at that time. Like I’d been hit on the head with one of those rubber mallets or something.”
“Really?”
“Uh huh, so I sent the show to Fred, you know? And you’ll never believe ... He actually watched it, and then he brought it back to me, in person! Like, I opened the door and there he was, just standing there holding the tape in one hand and roses in the other! Roses! I couldn’t believe it. And then he asked me for a second chance, and it was just like the show, the way you guys ended it, with a big kiss and everything! I just had to tell you ... !”
And suddenly—boinnggg!—there it was. Suzie hit me on the head, and the puzzling and multifaceted shape of my year became clear to me. Like Mrs. Bukowsky had said to the Mayor, “You never know who it’s going to be, or what they’ll bring, but whatever it is, it’s always exactly what is needed.”
I had started my year as a documentarian. I wanted to tell the truth, to effect change, to make a difference. And up to a point, I had succeeded: I got a small but critical piece of information about the corruption of meats in America out to the world, and possibly even saved a little girl’s life in the process. And maybe that is the most important part of the story, but the truth is so much more complex.
I am haunted by all the things—big things and little things, Splendid Things and Squalid Things—that threaten to slip through the cracks, untold, out of history.
Like all the parts of the Gulf War we didn’t see on TV, parts that were never reported. That war was certainly a Thing That Gained by Being Painted.
And like Suzie’s tale, a small but Outstandingly Splendid Thing. I mean, I take a Japanese television crew out to Iowa to film a documentary about this American wife, we make a total fiction of the facts of her life, and now, a year later, she tells me that those facts have turned right around and aligned themselves with our fiction. So go figure.
I hung up the phone after my conversation with Suzie and stood at my window, looking out through the iron security bars onto the street. Fresh snow was falling, covering up the dirty slush and the urine-stained embankments of hard-packed snow that lined the side-walks. The forecast was for a record-breaking blizzard, another “Storm of the Century.” The city looked sparkling clean and white.
There’s no denying, I thought. In the Year of Meats, truth wasn’t stranger than fiction; it was fiction. Ma says I’m neither here nor there, and if that’s the case, so be it. Half documentarian, half fabulist... Maybe sometimes you have to make things up, to tell truths that alter outcomes.
As a DES daughter, I need hope for my outcome. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to bear children of my own, but still, I’m one of the lucky ones—the peak-risk age group for developing fatal adenocarcinoma is fourteen to twenty-three, and I made it. I not only survived but did so in blissful ignorance. But there is a strong chance of a second “age-incidence peak,” starting in my forties, and I might not be so lucky the next time around.
I don’t think I can change my future simply by writing a happy ending. That’s too easy and not so interesting. I will certainly do my best to imagine one, but in reality I will just have to wait and see. For now, though, it is January again. Like Shōnagon, I have “set about filling my notebooks with odd facts, stories from the past ... ,” or at least this past year, and “everything that I have seen and felt is included.” However, unlike Shōnagon, living in the Heian days, for whom modesty, however false, was still a prerequisite, I live at the cusp of the new millennium. Whatever people may think of my book, I will make it public, bring it to light unflinchingly. That is the modern thing to do.
So here it is. My Year of Meats. Not so easy. But done.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Although this book is a novel, and therefore purely a work of my imagination, as a lapsed documentarian I feel compelled to include a bibliography of the sources I have relied on to provoke these fictions.
—J. T.-L.
Choy, Christine, and Spiro Lampros, directors. “The Shot Heard Round the World” (a documentary film about the trial following the shooting death of Yoshihiro Hattori). Distributed by NAATA, 346 9th Street, San Francisco, CA 94103, and Filmmakers’ Library, 124 East 40th Street, New York, N.Y. 10016.
Coe, Sue. Dead Meat. New York/London: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1996.
Colbom, Theo, Dianne Dumanoski, and John Peterson Myers. Our Stolen Future: Are We Threatening Our Fertility, Intelligence, and Survival?—A Scientific Detective Story. New York: Plume, 1997.
Fenichell, Stephen, and Lawrence S. Charfoos. Daughters at Risk: A Personal D.E.S. History. New York: Doubleday, 1981.
Marcus, Alan I. Cancer from Beef: DES, Federal Food Regulation, and Consumer Confidence. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.
Mason, Jim, and Peter Singer. Animal Factories: What Agribusiness Is Doing to the Family Farm, the Environment and Your Health. New York: Harmony Books, 1990.
Orenberg, Cynthia Laitman. DES: The Complete Story. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981.
Rifkin, Jeremy. Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture. New York: Dutton, 1992.
Schell, Orville. Modern Meat: Antibiotics, Hormones, and the Pharmaceutical Farm. New York: Random House, 1984.
Shurtleff, William, and Akiko Aoyagi. The Book of Kudzu: A Culinary & Healing Guide. Brookline, Mass.: Autumn Press, 1977.
Ziegler, P. Thos. The Meat We Eat. Danville, III.: The Interstate Printers and Publishers, 1948.
For more information about DES, please contact: DES Action U.S.A., 1615 Broadway, #510, Oakland, CA 94612
Tel: 1-800-DES-9288 or 510-465-4011
E-mail: [email protected]
http://www.desaction.org
DES Cancer Network, 514 10th Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20004
Tel: 1-800-DES-NET4 or 202-628-6330
E-mail: [email protected]
NOTES
1 Ivan Morris, in his translation of The Pillow Book, eschews literal translations of the pre-Heian names of months: “Charming though many of these names are, I have avoided them in my translation for fear that they might produce a false exoticism of the ‘Honourable Lady Plum Blossom’ variety.” As a coordinator for television, I know that false exoticism is my trade. It’s what sells meat.
2 “A genus of deciduous shrubs, native in Asia and belonging to the Saxifrage Family. They are attractive in early summer with their wealth of flowers, mostly white but some tinged pinkish.” The Wise Garden Encyclopedia (New York: William H. Wise & Co., 1970), p. 383.
3 The following definitions are taken from Webster’s New World Dictionary: CAPITAL n. [ME. & OFr. < L. capitalis, of the head < caput, the HEAD: see CHIEF] wealth (money or property) owned or used in business by a person, corporation, etc. 1. an accumulated STOCK of such wealth or its value 2. wealth, in whatever form, used or capable of being used to produce more wealth 3. capitalists collectively: distinguished from labor make capital of to make the most of; exploit
STOCK n. [ME. stocke < OE. stocc, akin to G. stock, Du. stok. a stick < IE. base *steu-, to push, hit, chop] 1. a) the first of a line of descent; original progenitor, as of a human line, or type, as of a group of animals or plants b) any of the major subdivisions of the human race 2. short for LIVESTOCK ; farm animals collectively 3. the CAPITAL invested in a company or corporation by the owners through the purchase of shares, usually entitling them to interest, dividends, voting rights, etc.
CATTLE n. [ME. & Anglo-Fr. catel (O Fr. chatel) < ML. captale, property, stock < L. capitalis, principal, chief < caput, the head: orig. sense in var. CHATTEL: CF. CAPITAL] 1. farm animals collectively; LIVESTOCK 2. domesticated bovine animals collectively; cows, bulls, steers, or oxen. 3. people in the mass: contemptuous term
4 lvan Morris, in his footnote to this passage, says, “Normally the soup and vegetables were eaten together with the rice; to finish each of the dishes separately and with such speed was unspeakably ill-mannered.” The Pillow Book, p. 373.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My deepest gratitude, as follows:
To Marina Zurkow, for her risks and her rigor; to Cliff Colnot, for real help at the right times; and to my parents for urging me to do what I love ...
To Arthur Levine, Judy Klassen, and Ann Yamamoto, for their generous and careful reading; to Molly Friedrich, for her breathtaking speed; to my friend and editor, Carole DeSanti, without whom this book simply would not be ...
And for their wisdom, to the whole wide world of wives.
AN INTRODUCTION TO MY YEAR OF MEATS
“My Year of Meats. It changed my life.
You know when that happens—when something rocks your world,
and nothing is ever the same after?”
When Jane Takagi-Little, an unemployed Japanese-American documentary filmmaker, answers the phone at two in the morning, her life is forever altered. She accepts a job working on My American Wife!, a Japanese television show sponsored by an American national lobby organization that represents American meats of all kinds—beef pork, lamb, goat, and horse, just to name a few. In the early-morning hours, wrapped in a blanket and huddled over her computer keyboard, Jane writes a pitch for the new program: “Meat is the Message.... It’s the meat (not the Mrs.) who’s the star of our show! She must be attractive, appetizing, and all-American. She is the Meat Made Manifest: ample, robust, yet never tough or hard to digest.” And so Jane, a self-described polyracial prototype, embarks on her year of meats, zigzagging across the country in search of healthy American wives.
My Year of Meats Page 34