by Nick Tosches
If it was true that I was eating a lot, it was also true that I was eating well. More than well. One night I got hold of one of the last white truffles of the season, a beautiful firm fawny-brown nugget from a parcel of them flown in that day to my friend Silvano’s restaurant on Sixth Avenue, the soil from the oak roots of Alba still clinging to them. The next morning I fried some thick, smoky duck bacon over low heat, dropped six quail eggs into the fat for less than a minute, removed them to a plate, covered them with truffle shavings, and ate them with the bacon, double-smoked Irish salmon with chopped red onion, Pantelleria capers, lemon, and dill, some good warm rosemary sourdough bread and butter, and a bowl of yellow, orange, pink, and red raspberries over which I spooned fresh single-dairy heavy cream whipped with a bit of wildflower honey from Casteggio. The Lapsang souchong tea I drank with it was good, black, strong, and hot. Its faint smoky aftertaste of kerosene mingled perfectly with the scent of truffle that perfumed the kitchen.
As I ate at the little table by the window, I looked down across the street at those who scurried to their daily servitude, with their Styrofoam cups of bitter watery coffee, their dupe’s containers of treacly Starbucks swill, their industrially dyed and flavored sugar-water “energy drinks,” their assembly line donuts, their stale rubbery bagels, their tasteless doughy croissants.
I washed the dishes, took a Valium, poured a glass of cold goat milk, lit a cigarette, and relaxed. The day was mine to do what I would, or to do nothing at all.
It was a good feeling, an exhilarating feeling. I had long grown to despise this fallen, wearisome world. Now I sensed it held unseen timeless chambers yet to be explored.
Chambers of light. Chambers of dead souls awaiting release. Chambers of passage to what lay beyond imagining. Chambers of what the gods kept hidden. Chambers of wisdom proscribed. Chambers of experience and pleasure untasted for eternity. Chambers of stilled ageless magic breezes waiting to stir. Chambers to be unbolted by hieratic spell, or by a serendipitous movement of the hand—the swatting away of an illusory fly, perhaps, or the waving away of the world itself—that constituted unawares a mudra of primordial power, or by desire, or by the merest unconscious modulation of breath. And I became aware of the singular creeping suspicion that these unseeable but real chambers, which seemed to be secreted so far away, were in fact within me.
I looked down at the scurrying submissives, the divested. Some of them jostled for taxis. At this time of day, it took a lot longer to get anywhere by taxi than by subway. I figured they were too lazy to walk the few blocks to the subway station. They were fool enough to jog along the West Side Highway or on stationary treadmills, presenting a droll spectacle either way, panting toward their one true destination, which was nowhere. But they sat in taxis in traffic rather than walk, rather even than walk to the subway. Did they avoid the subway from fear of crime? Or from a fear of black people, even though they would never admit to it, even though the women they poorly paid to take care of their homes and chores and children, whom they themselves saw no more of than the designer dogs they paid others to walk for them, were invariably black? I think, in many cases, this was so. They were a funny lot, these white slaves of ignoble careers of lucrative indolence. To say that they were deserving of death would be to demean death. It would be without meaning as well, for they were in a way already dead. The jogging dead. Carbohydrate-conscious cadavers with frozen smiles of chilling insensate fake vibrancy on their dull scrubbed pampered faces. A slave who believes himself free conceives of no escape, for he conceives of no freedom beyond that which his station in life allows him. A slave who espouses the freedoms of slavery is a right good slave indeed.
If only they labored nobly, in fields or factories or mills, rather than abetting the masters of finance, whose only products were theft, usury, and lies, or masters of technology, whose only products were cheap and shoddily cobbled toys of degeneration. These slaves made nothing, except perhaps devalued money for themselves, and far more of it for those whom they served. For nothing was any longer made in this country. What did the financial sector produce that could be seen, touched, held, or put to use? Even the handheld devices made on the cheap far from any American workplace were only trifling toys, little more than electric rattles for the overgrown slave-babies in the vast playpen scrouge of their yowling, gurgling nervosity.
Servilia nervosa. They want children, they want dogs. But they seem to want to have little to do with either of these hideous yapping, shitting things, which they seem to regard as accoutrements of what they call their lifestyle—a ludicrous word invented quite fittingly by a psychotherapist.
When they buy inferior overpriced meat, they ask the butcher how to cook it.
On a recent day I had stood at a meat counter behind a woman who, while chattering into a cell phone, asked the butcher if the ground beef came from grass-fed cows. She believed that grass-fed beef was somehow preferable to grain-fed beef, which in fact is superior to it. But the notion of grass-fed beef was enjoying a cachet among au courant imbeciles. She did not ask if the ground beef was from a single cow rather than a mélange of scraps from many cows, which not only compromises the taste and freshness but exponentially increases the risk of taint. Worst of all were the uniform patties of ground beef, which were sliced from long roll-like loaves fashioned from cheap sources by industrial-grade suppliers. It was these patties that she was looking at and asking about, haughtily commenting that she wanted to make steak tartare. But the main event was when she turned around. She was about fifty, in leather pants, with desiccated hair dyed raven black, and a frightfully fallen facelift that could barely have been remedied by a linoleum cutter, a staple gun, a pound of putty, and a trowel. This had not prevented her from applying mascara, rouge, and lipstick in thick, bold, garish strokes, as if working from a palette with expressionistic strokes of a wide-bristled brush. I wondered who would be fated to share her grass-fed dog food tartare with her that evening.
The slaves and indentured laborers who made this country had their elderberry wine, their honeysuckle wine, their sorghum grain alcohol, their purloined whiskey when they could get it. The slaves of today, who raze what little is left with an empty greed that brings forth nothing, have what doctors with straight faces refer to as lifestyle drugs.
White Betty had a baby, bam-de-lam; white Betty had a baby, bam-de-lam. Damn thing gone crazy, bam-de-lam; damn thing gone crazy, bam-de-lam. Whoa, white Betty, bam-de-lam; oh, white Betty, bam-de-lam…
Baby’s first lifestyle drug. Baby’s first handheld device. Baby’s first breakdown. Baby’s first organic grass-fed beef. Baby’s first step to slavery. Baby’s first intimation of something like death.
If you want to make lobster fra diavolo as it should be made, you must forget the nonsense of sending the lobster to what you have been told is a painless sleep unto death in a pot of boiling water. You must hack the raw lobster to pieces in its shell. There is a merciful way to go about this, and that is by first severing the thorax from the tail of the living lobster. If you want to witness something disarmingly bizarre, lay the lobster on its back on a cutting board and bring down your cleaver hard and fast to separate the upper body from the whole of the tail. Then move the two halves so that there is a good inch between them. Touch one of the detached halves. The other half will twitch and stir.
This is how those slaves scurried and jerked, implausibly nervose, in their living death. From the vantage of my window, from a distance, I drew pleasure in a way from observing them. I detested their presence in the neighborhood, but their nature, and the cruel comedy of their existence, seemed a just punishment. When I was among them I drew no such pleasure. The lobster was undeserving of its fate. They were not. And the disturbing movement of the pieces of them was too loud, overbearing, invasive, and insufferable to allow either the mean entertainment or the malicious satisfaction that distance afforded.
Fuck them. Their lives, their death-in-life, their soulless devotion to mindless ulterior
greed, the lowest of monotheisms, were the cast lots of their own ruin. Unlike them, I was free. If I could not cherish their inevitable demise, I could escape. I was resistant to the idea of fleeing from invaders. But I was not resistant to the idea of fleeing from pestilence. This city, once so full of life, was now little more than a necropolis. I could get away from this putrid stinking shit hole of Judeo-Christian perfidy. I could get a nice little stone house somewhere, in the countryside near some small town. An acre or two would insure peace, quiet, privacy, domain.
But these thoughts were unfinished. There was the matter of my desires, the matter of my continuance in the new world, the new life, that was just now opening to me. There was the matter of willing young flesh and warm blood, so plentiful in this city of night. Then again, maybe willingness was not of the essence. Maybe willingness was an unnecessary nicety. I shook away this thought. As I drank the last of my milk, my mind wandered through an entablature of images of bucolic solitary quiescence. Maybe someday, I thought. Yes, someday, somehow. Little more than a month ago I had felt that death was near. Now I could envision smiling at the late afternoon sun of my eightieth year and more.
Melissa returned the borrowed book that evening and placed it on the shelf where she had found it. As she did so, my eyes and hands savored the curve of the small of her back and her flanks.
I had a girl that other men—younger men and older fools too—would dedicate the sum of lies, sacrifice, and shifting purchase to have and to hold, to be with and to woo, to follow to where their dreams might come true. I too wanted to have and to hold her. And I did. But my dreams were not of the garden path variety. Since that night in the bar to this night, we had come to breathe in unison; and that breath gently blew away the years between us like so many feathery pappus harls from the seed head of a dandelion fondled by a sigh of soft summer air.
I more than liked her, more than luxuriated in her. I felt at times that I was falling in love with her. Was this a dangerous state of affairs? After so long in cold darkness of heart and soul, I had come once again to believe in love and happiness. Indeed, I now was beginning to feel their goodness banishing the cold and the dark with warmth and light. And the transformation from which the restoration of mind, body, and being grew, the miracle born of deathward desperation, was a rare and marvelous flowering. But it was a flowering not of the sun but of the moon. It was a flowering in the deep foreboding woods of night. A flowering not by spring rain but by the blood of those who, rambling lost in the springtime of their lives, chanced upon it and paused to wonder.
Melissa had paused and not turned away. She was one with the flowering. Her nectar and its nectar were one, and I alone drank of it, the nectar of new and full life. That she was still a child, sending into the air as a child might, playfully, the dandelion fluff of the years that imposed, did not trouble me. She was more mature in her ways, brighter and more intelligent, than many women twice her age. Her beauty was far from childlike. I could easily imagine living happily ever after with her. I had the means to provide for her, to lavish on her.
What troubled me, what quenched my moments of daydreaming, was the simple fact that there was not much blood in a human body. The three or so pints she had lost that horrible night when her artery opened had been very nearly enough to do her in. My flourishing would be her wasting away. The transfusions she had already received were bad enough. There was no knowing where that blood had come from. It could have come from that old bitch asking about grass-fed beef. I needed young blood, fresh and full of life. I wanted it to be Melissa’s. But if it could not be—and it could not be, not without draining her, not without turning her into a ghastly anemic wretch, even if she were to allow it—then, to spare her, to save me, I would have to hunt. I would have to hunt as I had done not so long ago, before I even knew what I was hunting for.
I was living happily ever after right now, in this infinite moment, this present breath that was the sum of life’s promise, the only ever after we really had. As Melissa stood atop the little library stepladder, stretching to replace the borrowed book, the curve of the small of her back that I savored was level with my eyes, and as she nestled the book into its place on the shelf, the waistband of her sweater rose from her low-cut jeans to reveal the dimples at the upper cleft of her buttocks. I put my mouth to those dimples, stroking her haunches and flanks as she lingered on the stepladder, her hands on the bookshelf edge, steadying herself as she flexed to enhance the curvature of her lower spine and swayed her pelvis ever so slightly, ever so slowly. Lowering one hand from the shelf, she pulled her sweater higher from the front, baring the scalloped satiny black back-strap of her bra. I was a sucker for the loose-librarian look. If only she wore glasses, I thought as I stepped onto the ladder behind her and undid the fastenings of her brassiere with my teeth. The ponytail more than made up for the lack of eyeglasses. I kissed the pink crenulations left behind by the loosened cincture of the bra.
Just as that lacy harness had bitten into her, so did I, but harder and more deeply. There was not much flesh to clamp between my teeth, and very little blood issued from it. I tasted more of her skin than of the red liquor that trickled thinly into my mouth. It was a taste that reminded me faintly of delicate Iranian caviar. Was it the trace of an ancient sea-magic, the pull of the moon on the tide within her as on the tides of oceans? Could I even have tasted what I thought I had: a scintilla of the suggestion of scented Caspian spray and roe of luscious life cut fresh from dead wombs? How had the taste of skin and droplets of blood brought such an imagining to my senses? All I knew was that this taste, this insinuation of a taste, real or imagined, left me hungering for more.
I drew a hot bath for her, lathered her and washed her all over with neem oil soap, lingering long not only on the cut on her back but on her breasts and the secret beauty between her legs. Her hips rose to the level of the bathwater as I lathered there until her hips sank once again and she quaked and there came from her a small deep sound, like a last gasp before drowning, or a first gasp after being saved from it. Only then did she seem self-conscious of the scar near to where I had lathered her to orgasm, the scar where she had been stitched. I felt that she wanted neither my hand nor my eyes on it, even clouded as it was beneath the soapy water and further obscured by the dimmed lights and steam.
I wrapped her in a big soft towel and dried her. I swabbed the cut with peroxide and rubbed some thick vitamin E on it with my fingertip. She smiled and raised her lips to mine. When I took her lower lip between my teeth, she stepped back and her smile did not return until she sat in my robe beside me on the couch, sipping Roquette 1797 from a pony glass. I had finally found some good parmigiano reggiano and had bought a hunk with a good deep tawny layer beneath the rind. I broke off pieces of it with a narrow chisel, put them on a plate, drizzled some unfiltered olive oil over them, ground some black pepper over them, peeled a blood orange, added the segments to the plate, and laid it down beside her glass of absinthe.
I wanted to talk to her about stone houses and rolling hills and sunlight and shadows in the pines. I wanted to talk to her about the difference between hunting and infidelity. But I said nothing. She was stroking my shin with her bare foot, and it felt good. I thought of the odd faint taste of caviar that I had experienced. I thought of the watery slightness of the blood, barely enough to moisten my lips and mouth and evoke that faint odd taste. There was not much blood, hardly any, to be drawn from the capillary vessels where I had broken her skin. There were not many nerve endings in that part of the body, either. You could stick a pen, an index finger, a comb, anything to that part of someone’s back and tell them it was a gun or a knife, and they would never be able to feel that it was not. It was a trick that every mugger knew, the principal anatomy lesson of the school of crime. I wondered what she had felt when I bit her there. I wondered if she felt anything there now. It had been somewhat like taking a mere few drops of light, bracing aperitif or—that impossible taste—a mere smidgen of caviar fr
om a dainty little mother-of-pearl spoon. Something that was so very deliciously satisfying while intensifying the appetite that rendered it satisfying. Something so wonderfully satisfying and so maddeningly unsatisfying at the same time. This effect was quite perversely pleasant, like catching sight of a wondrously beautiful bird in the instant that it vanished in flight from the visible sky.
In Vientiane one late afternoon, in the ghostly quiet before owl-light descended, I wandered through the winding dirt streets on my way back to the old hotel where I was staying. I had spent the day on my hip and on my back in an opium den, smoking and dreaming, smoking and dreaming, on the rotten wood-plank floors of paradise. A chicken crossed before me in the dust as I made my way. The moment I saw the chicken I knew why it was crossing that road. Utterly and truly and precisely, as if—no, not as if, but simply as—its mind and purpose were conveyed to me in a beam of irrefutable revelation, I knew. A life of “Why did the chicken cross the road?” A life of “To get to the other side.” It was over. I knew. And what I knew, the inestimable truth of this sudden supernatural knowledge, was so overwhelming and life-altering that I felt that it would imbue my days and guide me ever thence. The knowledge filled me. I could never, would never breathe another breath that was without this knowledge that had claimed my mind and my existence.
By the time I made it to the next bend in the dirt road, maybe a distance of three or four yards, I had completely forgotten why the chicken crossed the road. The evaporation of this knowledge has tormented me ever since. I know that I will never recapture it. My only consolation is that I knew, if only for a fleeting, fated instant, why the chicken crossed the road. This great and mystical knowledge was mine. For that instant I had and I knew what no other human being ever had or ever knew.