The biggest corrective in my cooking was to become friends and acquaintances with a number of fine chefs. Early on it was Alice Waters and Mario Batali. My friendship with Mario led me to Tony Bourdain. When my seventieth birthday came up, Mario, April Bloomfield from The Spotted Pig, and Adam Perry Lang came out from New York City and Chris Bianco from Phoenix. We had a dozen lovely courses, ending with 1937 Château d’Yquem, 1937 Madeira, and 1938 Armagnac to get close to my birth year. On another trip Mario brought Loretta Keller from San Francisco and Michael Schlow from Boston, the fastest knife I’ve ever seen.
The immediate lesson of being in the kitchen with a fine or great chef is humility. You properly want to go hide behind the woodpile until the dinner bell. You are a minor tennis club player from South Dakota in the presence of Roger Federer. What astounds you other than the product is the speed and dexterity with which they work. You feel like a sluggard because you are a sluggard. I can truthfully say that I wrote my novella Legends of the Fall in nine days, but by then I had twenty-plus years of practice. The same with chefs. There are no accidents or miracles, there is just hard work accompanied by taste.
It is a somber situation with the best home or amateur chefs. When I watch my elder daughter, Jamie, forty years after our first forays into French cooking, I am aware that I have fallen behind her until I’m around the corner out of sight, but then after university she worked in New York for Dean & DeLuca catering. When I cook and learn from my friend Peter Lewis from Seattle I remind myself that he owned the restaurant Campagne for about fifteen years. In France my friend the writer and book dealer Gérard Oberlé, who hosted the thirty-seven-course lunch, can bone a lamb shoulder in minutes, while I take a half hour. And who else makes a lovely sixteenth-century stew out of fifty baby pigs’ noses? The owner of the vineyard Domaine Tempier, Lulu Peyraud, now in her nineties, has cooked me a dozen meals, and a few courses of each have caused goose bumps. You watch closely and hopefully manage the humility of the student again.
Cooking becomes an inextricable part of life and the morale it takes to thrive in our sodden times. A good start, and I have given away dozens of copies, is Bob Sloan’s Dad’s Own Cookbook. There is no condescension in the primer. Glue yourself to any fine cooks you meet. They’ll generally put up with you if you bring good wine. Don’t be a tightwad. Owning an expensive car or home and buying cheap groceries and wine is utterly stupid. As a matter of simple fact you can live indefinitely on peanut butter and jelly or fruit, nuts, and yogurt, but then food is one of our few primary aesthetic expenses, and what you choose to eat directly reflects the quality of your days. Your meals in life are numbered and the number is diminishing. Get at it.
The Logic of Birds and
Fishes As It Relates to
Shingles
I admit I’m not often found browsing ancient Sufi texts. You take your chances but come willing for your life to take a radical shift. This isn’t helpful but the confusion always comes with my lame sense of order. I had anticipated (wrong) a dulcet spring watching our migrant birds arrive, walking the dogs, good hygiene, and no apocalypse, donating Lady Gaga and the Tea Party rubes to the proctologists. Instead I’ve had forty-nine days of shingles thus far, the feeling of which is to be bound in tightly stretched hot barbed wire and to be treated generally like Gustave Doré treated Dante’s hell-bound travelers.
Since this is by nature a food column I’m beginning this ritual by eating two junior buffalo tongues, much lower in fat and tastier than beef tongues. They were raised not far from Crazy Horse’s home, to which I ascribe great meaning. Our trail of butchery followed east to west and is still continuing. We are as pathetic as the plastic in which we survive. There’s an immense section of the Pacific dense with plastic, which is our heritage. We have spent our history shitting in the sandbox and giving ourselves rewards for it.
Nothing new here, dumb people are dumb people. Sad, though, when they’re proud of it. Much care must be spent diverting yourself from irritation. For forty-nine days I’ve had no problem, what with having this severe case of zona, as they say it in Europe. The pain is relentless and I’ve spent a lot of time trying to make sense of it without success under the heading “The Theory and Practice of Pain.” You can read all you need to know in an hour and come up empty-handed except for your jolts and spasms. Doctors are somewhat embarrassed because there’s not much they can do beyond the pain pills, which I stay distant from except minimally because they’re soul deadening. It is here that I finally understood Rilke, who denied himself pain pills while dying because life was too precious to waste on nothing. Naturally older people go through streaks of illness that are plain bad luck, though I was told mine was likely nervous exhaustion precipitated by writing at least fifteen books in fifteen years. It isn’t fun to be obsessive but I’ve always been what they call fugal. Coincidentally my wife fell victim to an incurable skin disease called bullous pemphigoid a few months before my shingles, though it can be contained. It had never been diagnosed in Montana but can be treated at the University of Arizona Medical Center in Tucson, near which we live in the winter.
Now for the interesting stuff. Other people’s illnesses are a tough go. Thank God it’s not me, we think. Or we say, “Why me?” to a doctor and he says, “Why not you?” I once wrote in a poem, “Our bodies are women who were never meant to be faithful to us.”
My plan was a bit scattered at first, but it made my experience endurable, if barely. During the first week my mind got totally hooked on a new book by the young Turkish writer Elif Batuman (she is an American born in New York City to Turkish parents), The Possessed, possession being, ostensibly, what happens to people who spend too much time reading Russian literature. Since this happened to me between eighteen and twenty-five I found the book darkly comic and anxiety-provoking. I had read that Dostoevsky drank fifty cups of tea a day so it seemed in order to buy a teapot. The drawback was to be spending most of your time peeing. For a break Finnegans Wake was wonderfully sexy.
However, fifty years later, these books do not add much in the way of clues to my own true nature. Three doctors have attributed my infirmity to nervous exhaustion, something the Russians were good at. When you get the idea of writing it doesn’t mean that you have to do it fifty years without stopping and neither does it mean you should try to memorize Notes from the Underground. It has occasionally occurred to me that if I hadn’t gotten interested in cooking early on I’d be a goner. The same way with fishing. If I write for four hours then go fishing there’s a semblance of calm, as fishing replaces the writer’s black lung disease, drinking.
There was a gift this time. I had to stop writing because of the somewhat electrical jolts and spasms of pain. I couldn’t flow. I recalled that when Suzuki Roshi was dying of cancer he thought of the pain as a caboose trailing off behind him. In my case my curiosity had to drive me ahead with nothing for the pain to feed on. Mind you if the emotions aren’t there to feed on, the sense of pain is far less brutish. It’s pain, but it’s pain unadorned, less acute, of course, than gout and kidney stones but more tolerable if your brainpan is active. I have lived fairly actively with birds and fishes all of my life and once my mind had released me to live with them moment by moment a great deal of pleasure arrived.
This easily could be misunderstood as sleight of hand but I welcomed them as distant relatives in behavior and the logic that fueled their lives. I could at least abandon my largely worthless nomenclature as long as I was ill.
There was a radical event one day at dawn. It was two degrees for the first time since 1879. “This is abnormal,” I said. “This was a radical event,” I said loudly. “My sores hurt.”
Another day. Before dawn. Loud crashing sounds in our brushy front yard next to the creek. I felt weak and old so didn’t investigate. It wasn’t light enough to shoot. At mid-morning I took the dogs for a walk and there was what was left of a large buck deer in three pieces. A couple do
zen ravens. I imagined the battle, the leaps, the twisting. By evening it was largely gone and the bones turned from red to white. For the two (mountain) lions, it was a Michelin three-star.
Perhaps the worst pain today but the best recent meal, a lavish lamb tagine with a simple wine that wouldn’t be canceled out. Odd that wine was devised in southern Iran thousands of years ago.
Pain is causing the nature of my curiosity to change. It is a far more intense need to find out why I hurt, which is at best simple-minded because you hurt because you hurt, a medical explanation that without a doctor at your elbow presumes you know a thousand physiological details and terms. It’s more likely that the pain amps up the whole system, which subconsciously feels threatened, thus science was invented. One grand scientist I know, Danny Hillis, has posited that his position as a prominent inventor is a sexual boost. Women in the tribe turn to the inventor because he makes their lives more gracious and easy. The hunter of course keeps their tummies fed. When the medicine man tells the attractive female patient exactly what shingles is she yawns and bobs her hair because she metaphorically is going to get her ass kicked for weeks.
I can’t recommend anything about life indoors. On several occasions in the past few years a group of Chihuahua ravens, fifteen plus, decided to take a walk with me and the dogs. They were noisy, as if giving me a lecture while guiding me up a steep canyon. My Scottish Labrador tended to ignore them but they made my wife’s English cocker intensely irritable, like one of those jaw-flapping English politicians one sees on TV. It was clear that Mary the cocker wanted to kill a raven but she never came close. Then she pretended she didn’t want to kill one but in any event never came close. I sat on a log and began to think of a splendid eel stew I ate in Narbonne with a Côte-Rôtie. It was my first eel stew, a natural match with this feeder. I had been feeling a little poorly because my books had become successful in France and I was convinced something was wrong. Why should my books do that much better in France than America? Early in the morning before the stew I had been wandering around Montpellier and found where Rabelais went to college. This made me feel better as I had revered Rabelais in high school, thinking he would be a perfect friend. Occasionally while cooking I’d think of something Rabelais might like, say a duck and rabbit cooked in a barbecue sauce my wife makes from fresh plums. We had a petite miracle wandering, looking for food. An American woman from Tennessee had a little restaurant on a side street. Her name was Whitney Blanc and her husband was a French chef but they had moved back to Montpellier, a wise choice as I love its spaciousness. The chef had made a young turkey fricassee that had surpassed anything I have had of that order. Meanwhile at the next table they were having a birthday party for a hundred-year-old woman who was drinking a good deal of wine and flirting with us, one of those pure, gorgeous interludes. We stayed an extra morning for an equally fine lunch. The next evening we were way out in the country where an ex-croupier was cooking us peerless sardines a la plancha on the route of the new Paris-to-Barcelona train I’ll take this May.
Unrestricted travel is to take yourself by surprise with otherness. In Villeneuve-lès-Avignon outside Avignon by the river, there is a little three-star hotel called de l’Atelier, the back of which is in a thicket and near a splendid wine bar and restaurant, the AOC. After dinner we sat out in a soft rain under a big umbrella listening to dozens of chatting birds and my vertebrae were humming. There had been very few birds in Paris, Lyon, Nîmes, Arles, though of course many out in the Camargue, where I try to visit every time I’m in France, and also see the Mediterranean. And in a garden restaurant, La Chassagnette, a friend was at a nearby table with Canut Reyes, a member of the Gipsy Kings, who played guitar for an hour, a wonderful substitute for a bird. In hopefully the waning days of my zona I am at least in the heaven of birds, this being the apex of northward migration with many exotics and rarities. One day while grilling a baby goat I saw a lazuli bunting and four different orioles, and one day while finishing a novel I saw an elegant trogon three feet out the window.
Of course our curiosity brings us to beauty, without which we couldn’t bear up under pain. When you are covered with sores you naturally wonder why but then you don’t pursue the question because you know that pain is in grand supply. I certainly had no urge, no matter how dramatic, to see the mountain lions kill the deer. I like to turn the volume down to the equilibrium of the ordinary. On my many trips to Paris on publishing business I visit the bistro Le Bon Saint Pourçain as much as five times because everything about it suits me, including the terrier Vickie who hangs out there. The food is superlative and I don’t get drunk or stay sober. It urges me to the middle whether I am eating brandade or beef with olives.
We miss nearly everything. Yes, I got my work done to the tune of thirty-five books but more pain arrives with the obvious lacunae in botany, physics, mathematics. The odds were against me camping with Marilyn Monroe in a pup tent at fourteen.
Pain
Pain (2)
Pain is at the steering wheel
swerving left and right for a year now.
It costs a fortune, which I don’t have,
to try to get rid of pain. Maybe a girl
could help or more vodka but I doubt it.
Or a trip to the tropics where the pain would boil away
like the hot cabin last summer where you awoke
and thought you were a corned beef boiling in a pot.
You want to give up, throw in the towel but you
can’t give up because you’re all you have.
Maybe they should put you down like an old dog
like our beloved cocker spaniel Mary who is nearing
the end with paralysis. But unlike me
she’s happy much of the time. On walks
she keeps falling down and I pick her up
to get her started again. She seems to smile.
Neither of us wants to die
when there’s work to be done,
other creatures to be snuck up on,
food to be eaten, a creek to wade,
though I hope to eventually ask God to fully
explain the meaning of Verdun where 300,000 died.
I begin with this frolicsome poem to try to clear the air of any literary particulates, the pollution of pretty sentiment. Pain is really about the struggle of drowning and it has been the primary fact of my life, occasionally removed by a chicken tagine or some other fascinating dinner or say a drink on the veranda. The birds are attentive because one of their own is being cooked, a distant cousin also of the dinosaur.
Pain is all in the details. When you awake with alarm at four A.M. you are not suffering from an abstraction. Since you are unable to remove this fact of life you do what you can to lessen its severity. For me this doesn’t include powerful drugs because I become too loopy to write—my livelihood, important because I’m at least the partial support of eleven people. I recall reading that Faulkner’s family in Mississippi would put him on the train for Hollywood whether or not he wished to go. I don’t mind my life. I never expected to make a living as a writer and the fact that I do startles me. This is mostly true because of the generosity of the French toward my work rather than the citizens of New York.
So I’m not really whining. At least I am not a wee child blasted in the gut in Syria. Those with shingles and the following post-herpetic neuralgia form quite a voting bloc. We don’t like anything or anybody except occasionally our children, dogs, and birds. We vote “NO” in thunder. I recently in desperation had an expensive trip to the Mayo in Arizona but nothing happened in terms of a cure. When I entered, there was a large pool of bloody vomit on the front sidewalk which was off-putting. Someone wasn’t feeling well. I had the perhaps erroneous conviction that the dead are liquefied and piped directly to hell. Why not? Or to the desert as organic fertilizer.
My new plans include a trip to Mexico to se
e a witch, or bruja, and if this doesn’t work a trip to France where the medical community, unlike America’s, is motivated far less by profit. There’s a paucity of BMWs in France. I have the feeling if shingles produced more profit we would have solved the puzzle by now. There’s the local case of a girl whose mouth was engorged by shingles. Her weight got down to fifty pounds and her parents threw her away by mistake during spring house cleaning. She was found barely alive at the dump and taken in by a pedophiliac foster parent. Not surprisingly Kafka was a lifelong victim of shingles.
My trip to the Phoenix Mayo was not without its pleasures. The famed chef and friend of mine and Mario Batali’s, Chris Bianco, has several restaurants in the city. It’s been my experience that gluttony and public drunkenness help allay pain. We had a quick four pizzas washed down by an equal number of rare vintages. In my opinion the famed La Casaccia is the best of all breakfast fruit juices if a little pricey. The next evening after an afternoon of getting pawed over we had four pastas and then a marvelous Ligurian fish soup and five excellent wines. A prime cause of illness is the failure of people to hydrate during meals. A slight difficulty was finding my room. My ace secretary had gotten me a suite at an immense golf resort full of Republicans dressed in golf fashion like Kansas pimps. I was bilious and sobbing by the time I got to bed to Fox News announcing that God was changing his name to Fred.