One Fell Soup

by Roy Blount

  With one reflex motion of my arm, at any rate, I shut the window. The faces of the running couple outside fell as the train pulled away from them, and a paper bag hit the window and dropped back inside, onto the woman beside me.

  “He closed the window,” from another woman across the car, was the only comment on my action that I heard; its tone seemed moderately surprised, but too tired to be censorious. The man who had thrown the bag picked it up off the lady’s lap and went back to his seat.

  He and the man next to him opened the bag, revealing the contents to themselves only, and the other people in the car murmured a bit and then lapsed back into their previous attitudes.

  I couldn’t put the thing out of my mind so easily. I went over to the two men, losing my seat to a blind woman as I did. “What was that all about?” I asked.

  Both men shrugged, but then they showed me what was inside the bag. A blond wig and a sandwich.

  It all came clear to me then. The young running couple had left his or her wig and lunch on the seat by mistake and had been calling for someone to throw them out through the window before the train departed.

  The two men put the bag back down on the seat. They didn’t want to wear the wig, and they didn’t trust human nature enough to eat the sandwich.

  By getting involved, not wisely but too well, I had prevented what might have been the only spontaneous and niftily coordinated friendly effort between strangers going on at that moment throughout the metropolis. I felt bad. I wanted to account for my actions. But nobody would look at me. I glared at the blind woman and stood there impersonally rattling and groaning on underground the rest of the way to work. Urban life is too complex.

  I THINK IT WAS LITTLE RICHARD

  I HAVE HAD A good deal of experience in stores. For instance, department stores:

  I have accompanied a wealthy couple through Dallas’s Neiman-Marcus (which meant fighting off little squeezes from floorwalkers); have been collared falsely and accused of shoplifting at Christmastime by a temporary store detective, a nervous middle-aged woman, on Lenox Square (which gave me the only opportunity of my life so far to say, “There must be some mistake!”); and have bought a plastic water-bottle (un eau-flacon plastique) in a big Brussels store that not long thereafter burned down.

  Never, however, until one day a while back, had I been addressed by any salesperson as “Customer.”

  I chanced one day to be walking past a dimly lit clothier’s, in a depressed area of the downtown, and noticed in the window some gum-rubber gloves coated with little bits of cork. They looked as though they had been rolled in crushed peanuts.

  Somehow, they seemed at the moment to fill in my clothing needs a small void. I can’t remember the last time that I did anything in rubber gloves, but there must have been some critical moment in my early youth when I was holding on to something valuable with rubber gloves, and it slipped out because there were no bits of cork for traction.

  There was a time in my boyhood, I remember, when I was fishing off a dock in Florida, and an old lady fishing near me brought in a little fish, a nice whiting, which jumped off the hook, and I leapt up to grab it for her, and it squirted out of my hands into the water and the old lady cried.

  At any rate, I felt a need for the gloves, and since they were cheap I went inside.

  “Some of those … cork-studded gloves … caught my eye …” I said to a saleswoman who was leaning against a counter.

  “Find those in the basement, Customer,” she said firmly.

  I did buy the gloves, but found no use for them until the wedding of my friends the Fants came up and I was able to slip them into the honeymoon luggage. More important, the “Customer” appellation struck me as a salutary convention; one that might well be widely applied.

  Think of the hypocrisy that would be obviated, for instance, if it were established practice to say, “How about a little lunch with me Wednesday, Client?” Or “It’s been awfully good getting to know you, Contact.”

  Then, however, I asked myself whether I could apply the practice to my own profession.

  For instance, I talked to Little Richard, the rock-and-roll figure, on the phone some years ago. I think it was Little Richard.

  Little Richard was certainly, or certainly allegedly, robbed in Atlanta, by his onstage valet, of $19,000 that he had in his hotel room in a sack, and since I happened to be on the police beat that day I called his hotel room to get the story.

  But when someone answered, I couldn’t bring myself to say, “Little Richard?”

  I couldn’t bring myself to say “Mr. Penniman?” either—which I knew from the police report to be his formal name. It is like interviewing baseball managers. “Herman” is too familiar, and “Mr. Franks” seems silly.

  But neither, it occurs to me on reflection, would “Interviewee” have rung true. Or “Subject”—which would in theory have been appropriate not only as in “subject of an interview” but also as in the standard police-report usage: “Subject was located lying under bush and wouldn’t move.”

  “Subject? This is a Reporter.”

  No, it is too cold.

  The human element must be trafficked with. Or one must be a monk, or open a dimly lit store.

  THE SOCKS PROBLEM

  I WISH TO BROACH a matter close to every man’s, and most modern women’s, feet: “Whatever happened to socks?”

  Everybody I know agrees: It doesn’t matter whether you are living alone in a tepee, or married to two different people in two different bungalows, or just floating around with no fixed address, or pursuing a career as a recluse in the family manse, or lying chained to the floor in a tiny basement room off the initiation chamber in a sorority house. The one result you can depend on is attrition of your socks. A person could stay in the same room with all of his or her socks for a month, never (except to sleep) taking his or her eyes off the drawer in which his or her socks are kept, and at the end of that period he or she would have three to seven fewer socks than he or she began with.

  In my case, I believe I have considered all of the natural outlets:

  A member of my household, who is being blackmailed and can’t make the payments out of the change on the dresser, sells them. I doubt this, because no member of my household can keep a secret. If they were involved in something that would worry me if I knew about it, they would tell me.

  The washing machine, or the dryer, digests them. This may be. The dryer produces, I know for a fact, something that is very suggestive of socks. This is probably why so many of my washables are translucent—and if any member of my household were handier, a good many socks could no doubt be re-created annually from this lint, or fluff, three or four wash-loads’ worth of which would cover a sheep. But this ongoing leaching of fiber from the nation’s clothing, while it is something that the Federal Trade Commission might well look into, appears to be a gradual process, which cannot account for the sudden disappearance of whole socks.

  The modern sock is made of a material designed to disintegrate, of its own accord, after a period of time. I would not put this past American industry, but in this case a sock would occasionally go poof while I was wearing it, or while I was holding it up to the morning light trying to decide what color it was.

  Dust is dead socks. If it isn’t dead socks, what is it? Certainly if you let the dust of two or three rooms accumulate for a while, you can shuffle your feet around the baseboards and have bedroom slippers that will serve in mild climates. But I have in my drawer, where hope springs eternal (and where, in fact, a sock has been known to resurface, magically, after up to eighteen months’ absence), single socks whose ages range from three months to four years. Some of the older ones have been with me at seven different addresses. If the socks that match have gone to dust, why haven’t they? Often, heartrendingly, it is almost-new socks that are missing. The poets have not written adequately of the near-erotic pleasure of easing your foot into a new, lissome, gladly yielding sock. And then one day it
is gone, and you are left with shrunken, cankered old socks that may require lubrication.

  Of course, one thing about socks is that they don’t mate for life. You can buy fourteen identical black ones, and at the end of three weeks, even if they were all still extant in sock form, no two of them would quite match. It may be that people across the country should get together on socks. I have a newspaper clipping that tells of two one-legged ladies who, although one lives in Wisconsin and one in Ohio, have been sharing pairs of shoes for more than two years. (Incidentally, the report notes, both ladies “agreed they wouldn’t want an artificial leg even if it could be easily fitted. The extended reach of a crutch is great for disciplining recalcitrant children, Mrs. Gruenbaum said, and Mrs. Harma sticks a cloth on the end of hers and washes ceilings.”) People could advertise single socks in a newsletter and trade off by mail.

  I don’t know. Maybe one of my loved ones is saving all my missing socks to present to me, sewn together into an effigy of someone I admire, on the occasion of my retirement from active life. Maybe if the cat could only talk she could explain quite simply how it is that socks are transmuted into kittens. But I think it more likely that socks get off in some supernatural or wholly illegal way. I will not presume to trace the process by which they do it. But I think I know what becomes of them.

  Every so often, usually at the change of seasons, when I dig into my closet for my summer or winter wardrobe, I find things I have never seen before in my entire life: a pair of pants, perhaps, that resembles a pair of pants only as a raisin resembles a grape; a sweater that a Red Guard might have denounced as too tacky; a knit tie with a horse painted on it.

  Let us assume, then, in the absence of any compelling evidence to the contrary, that socks die and are reincarnated, perhaps in groups, as a variety of garments.

  It is the work of the Devil—maybe—or maybe a sock-manufacturing-and-rummage-sale cabal, about which the media are so strangely silent.

  ANIMAL AND VEGETABLE SPIRITS

  running, leaping dog-paws

  and wagging dog-tails

  and no dog in between

  —Hans Arp

  (translated by

  Harriett Watts)

  CHICKENS

  I THINK THERE IS more to the chicken than it gets credit for. We hear much about the dignity, mystery, and vulnerability of more alien, not to say less upfront, animals and aspects of nature. Chickens we only chew on or chuckle over. Some people probably hold the belief, whether they articulate it or not, that either a chicken sandwich or a rubber chicken is a purer representation of what it is to be a chicken, essentially, than a living chicken is.

  Yet the chicken is as close to man and as savory as the apple, as full of itself as the lynx or the rose. A hen’s feathers feel downy but organized when you lift her up. She has a peck like a catcher’s snap-throw to first. A chicken never makes eye contact with a person. Who is to say why it crosses the road?

  A good thing to read is The Chicken Book, by Page Smith and Charles Daniels, published by Little, Brown a few years ago. This book undertakes to see the chicken from all angles and to see it whole; to treat the chicken as an entity, multifarious: the chicken in literature, in history, in its own inner and outer workings, in the pharmacopoeia, in orange wine sauce. A fine idea, an estimable work, a rare advance in integrated thinking.

  Then again, perhaps it is not the book (which required two authors, aided by a class of their students) that is integrated so much as the animal. Beyond the volume stands the fowl: a few feathers floating in the air, but far from exhausted. The chicken warrants further pursuit. It is hard, however, to discuss the chicken seriously. It is possible to talk about even the sheep seriously, or the badger; but you cannot reflect for sixty seconds, even to yourself, upon “the chicken” without something in the back of your head going “Booo-uk buk buk,” dipping its head suddenly and pecking a bug. So I will not try to develop any thesis. I will just set down one person’s Chicken Notes.

  Which First Chicken or Egg?

  On this point, The Chicken Book’s authors, without admitting it, throw up their hands: “Even when the chick is in the egg there are eggs within the chick, microscopically small but full of potential.” And so on. That is like going through a daisy saying, “Even if she loves me, she might not. Even if she loves me not, she might.” The chicken/egg is one of those questions like:

  Do the same tastes really taste the same to different people, and if so, in what sense?

  If you watched an area of your skin steadily for several hours while coming down with the chicken pox, could you discern the moment when a given pock appeared? And if not, why not?

  If you could get inside another person’s head, would you know it, or would you think you were the other person?

  One of those questions, I mean, that people have, with mounting irritation, been wanting the answer to since early childhood.

  Okay. No one is going to be able to track down an eyewitness account of the moment when one or the other, chicken or egg, first emerged. Lacking that best evidence, it is up to each of us to make his own best determination. I say, the chicken. If an egg were first, the chances are that Adam, Eve, one of the beasts of the field, even one of the beasts of the air, whatever was around then, would have broken and/or eaten (I mean eaten and/or broken) it. We have no way of knowing how many projected species were nipped off because they made the mistake of starting out as eggs. I assume that the chicken was first, and that it evaded destruction long enough to lay several dozen eggs. This is just elementary Darwinism. Also, if the egg came first, then what fertilized it? In point of fact, the egg must have come third.

  At any rate, talking about chickens gets us back to first principles.

  Chickens in Quotations

  I’ve always figured that, when the time come I couldn’t farm a crop of cotton and a crop of corn and keep one woman faithful, I’d get me a tin bill and pick bugs with the chickens.

  —from Walls Rise Up, a novel

  by George Sessions Perry

  When I warned [the French] that Britain would fight on whatever they did, their generals told their Prime Minister and his divided Cabinet, “In three weeks England will have her neck wrung like a chicken.” Some chicken; some neck.

  —Winston Churchill

  How come a chicken can eat all the time and never get fat in the face?

  —Roger Miller

  On Fried Chicken: Goodness: Eating

  My mother’s (rolled in flour and dropped in hot shortening in a hot, heavy iron skillet, at just the right time, for just the right length of time) is not only the best fried chicken but it still represents to me the highest form of eating. It is crisp without seeming encrusted. In the best fried chicken, you can’t tell where the crust leaves off and the chicken begins.

  In the comic books they talked about caviar and pheasant under glass. I accepted these things as literary conventions. But in my thoughts they did not crunch, give, tear, bloom brownly. The richest brown—or sometimes auburn—in the synesthesial spectrum is well-fried chicken.

  Which is not to say that the crackle is all. I once heard Blaze Starr ask an audience whether they would like her to uncover entirely her (larger than life) breasts. When the audience cried out yes, yes, ma’am, they certainly would, she froze; rolled her eyes; replied, with great, pungent reserve, “I reckon you would like some friiiied chicken.”

  The sweetest chicken pieces, though, are not the fleshiest. The wishbone—destroyed in most commercial cutting—and the “little drumstick,” which is the meatiest section of the wing, are both delicacies. So is the heart. But when chicken is fried right, the tastiest meat of all—delicate, chewy, elusive—is between the small bones of the breast: chicken rib meat. I have never heard anyone mention this meat, and I have never spoken of it myself, even privately, until now. Fried chicken is a personal experience, like the woods out beside your house. But look for the rib meat. It’s worth the trouble.

 
; Another thing I recommend is to go off alone with the largely de-meated carcass of a roasted whole chicken and explore all its minor crisps and gristles for tidbits. You get to know a chicken that way. I’m not sure that tenderness and bustiness are the absolute virtues that Frank Perdue assumes them to be. I like chicken meat that offers some resistance. Meat should be earned, at each end. Chickens themselves, given the chance, are rangy, resourceful eaters. Remember, in the comic strip “Smilin’ Jack,” the overweight sidekick character who was followed around by a chicken that ate his shirt buttons as they popped off?

  Chickens in the News

  I have lost the clipping on this, but it appeared in the Cape Cod Standard Times a few summers ago. Chicken growers, disgruntled at low chicken prices, had parachuted great numbers of ready-for-market chickens onto a town in Rhodesia—it was either Rhodesia or Rumania, and it wouldn’t have been Rumania. The clipping said the original plan had been for live chickens to be dropped, but that project had been abandoned as inhumane. It would be nice to think that there was a local character named Sky Little who ran around shouting, “The chickens is falling! The chickens is falling!”

  On June 5, 1975, the New York Times, in a rare acknowledgment by it of this sort of thing, reported that on June 5, 1904, it had reported that “a Pochuck, N.J., man found a woodchuck that was raising four chickens.” Even assuming that the woodchuck was raising them not for profit but out of maternal instinct, and even rejecting the possible inference that neither chicken nor egg came first but rather the woodchuck, this is quite a little story. So why doesn’t the modern-day Times give its readers such news? When a chicken lays an egg in the shape of a heart, as sometimes happens, you never read about it in the Times. You will never come upon an individual chicken in the Times. Poultry raising, to be sure, and therefore chickens in the mass. But never one chicken singled out, nor one chicken’s egg.