by Jim Harrison
Now I am back rowing a boat down large rivers and trout fishing. This and cooking seem quite enough though occasionally a strophe will land on my head in the form of an undiscovered bird. I have become involved in a perhaps doomed money project I call “The Michelangelo Mode” in order to earn enough to buy expensive food and French wine. The project involves the relatively new nano science, and also a stray dog I met in Florence last October that was obviously related to a dog of Michelangelo’s. Five stories under the Uffizi in a subbasement full of skulls the dog led me to a trove of manuscripts unknown to the museum’s employees who sit around all of the time drinking prosecco. The manuscripts smelled like white truffles but the odor may have emanated from my fingertips and mustache because I had been eating white truffles twice a day for thirteen days. The number thirteen is a key here and it precipitated a trip to Arlington, Texas, a nasty headquarters for training Homeland Security employees, but then I needed to use some of their high-tech equipment. A young woman who helped me also smelled like white truffles though it was somewhat veiled by the scent of her lunch at Burger King.
My deep thinking has recently driven my wife, children, and friends quite batty. We all began as female and weighing virtually nothing but immediately began gathering volume. Our enclosed nano souls are a millionth the size of a grain of average beach sand tainted by suntan lotion. We began as the Nano People and our souls retain their original size, while our bodies vary, but can reach a thousand pounds in a number of instances (a big guy named Walter ate several chickens and quarts of Pepsi for breakfast). When the young woman in Arlington noted this soul particle through an electron microscope she insisted on naming it a “wiggly squiggly,” which lacks resonance.
The use of nanotechnology on Michelangelo’s manuscript revealed, among other things, his prediction that God would abandon our galaxy in 1907 in hopes of doing a better job somewhere among the ninety-five billion other galaxies. This is a tad discouraging but not to an elm tree. I can imagine the approach of a friendly Holstein, her udder swaying slightly in a southern breeze that also ripples my leaves. My root hairs suck gently at the soil in an endless meal. The Holstein turns around because the obnoxious fly bite is near her nether parts. She rubs her butt against my bark. What a fabulous memory of my past life.
The Spirit of Wine
I have long since publicly admitted that I seek spirituality through food and wine. In France, Italy, and Spain, I seem more drawn to markets and cafés than to churches and museums. Too many portraits of bleeding Jesus and His lachrymose Momma make me thirsty. The Lord Himself said on the cross, “I thirst” and since our world itself has become a ubiquitous and prolonged crucifixion it is altogether logical that we are thirsty.
Yesterday afternoon I was far up a canyon near the Mexican border trying to shoot a few doves to roast when I came upon a calf who was willing to be petted, perhaps because she had no previous contact with brutish humans. While scratching her pretty ears I segued to a tangled group of emotions toward wine. Why does Bordeaux make me feel Catholic, crisp, and confident—an illusion indeed—while Burgundy causes an itchy, sexy, somnolent mood? With my day-to-day Côtes du Rhône I am a working writer with vaguely elevated thoughts of my responsibilities, but also with my mind’s eye on a plumpish waitress at a local Mexican restaurant.
Heading back down the canyon with the calf following me, I recalled some splendid wines I had drunk at a private home in Malibu during my manic days in Hollywood. The collector’s house red was a 1961 Lafite, a pleasant substitute for a predinner martini. I was in the kitchen one evening preparing dinner and drinking a bottle of Romanée-Conti from the 1950s when a fashion model asked, “How can you drink that shit? It makes me dizzy.” She properly mistook me for a servant and asked for a “Jack and Coke,” surely an inscrutable drink, but then so is taste in general. On Friday nights in college two of my best friends would drink an entire case of beer apiece and didn’t seem to mind the ensuing vomiting. I was the driver and of limited means so my weekend binge meant only a seventy-cent bottle of Gallo Burgundy. Both of these friends, of course, are now dead and I’m still on the lid of earth rather than under, and drinking wine daily.
During a general state of rebellion in my early teens I went to the Baptist church though our family was Congregationalist, a kind of lowercase Episcopalian. I told my dad who was an agriculturalist that the Baptists claimed that in biblical days the wine was simple grape juice. He said, “Bullpoop,” adding that they had been making true wine in the Middle East for four thousand years, and that non-drinkers liked to spread lies about alcohol. He said that when Saint Paul maintained, “A little wine for thy stomach’s infirmities,” he was talking about actual wine, not grape juice. Since then it has occurred to me that if Christianity offered a six-ounce glass of solid French red for Communion, churches would be happier and consequently more spiritual places.
In the early 1970s during a hokum banquet in Ireland I drank several goblets of mead and was ill for a week with ravaged intestines. The physical mischief caused by bad forms of alcohol is infinite. I have posited the idea, perhaps fact, that heavy beer drinkers must find a type of sexual release in their relentless peeing. One warm day in my favorite saloon in a village near my former cabin in the Upper Peninsula, an old man drank thirty-eight bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon. This is clearly too much, and he just as clearly endangered his body during his dozens of walks to the toilet. This amount comes to twenty-eight pounds of liquids which cannot be retained indefinitely by the human body, thus the walks to the toilet were a necessary peril. Another friend in the area, a huge mixed-blood Chippewa, wasn’t feeling well drinking two fifths of whiskey a day and under my wise counsel reduced it to a single fifth. Last summer in Montana I advised an unruly friend that after a hot day of fishing a quintuple martini might be unwise as the alcohol will shoot through the dehydrated body and land on the brainpan like an ICBM. In the remoter areas of the country my advice is sought whereas on our two dream coasts everyone is smart, albeit petulant, and I am considered a bumpkin. Also a slow study. It took me three years of hard work and unfathomable willpower to make a bottle of wine last an hour. Sipping seemed quite unnatural to a mouth disposed toward gulping.
In a lifetime of thousands of visits to country taverns, I have noticed that beer drinking causes fistfights and wife beating. A French theologian, Michel Braudeau, has suggested that heavy beer drinking cleared the moral way for Germany to begin World War I and World War II. Beer drinking is at the root of the lugubrious sentimentality that makes murder for an idea logical. Conversely, drinking nothing at all is equally dangerous. Try to imagine Washington D.C.’s infamous Beltway as a moral Berlin Wall within which low-rent chiselers concoct wars and other forms of our future suffering. I recently read that there are sixty lobbyists per member of Congress. Think if liquor and beer were forbidden within the Beltway and each day the lobbyists were limited to giving each member of Congress a good bottle of French wine. Grace would return quickly to our bruised republic. I would also like to remind those teetotaler fundamentalist titans, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, who are so enamored of political power, that the Catholic Church has maintained its political power nearly two thousand years no doubt because the leaders drink wine. I well remember a group of bulbous priests at a Roman trattoria quite literally pouring down wine. I asked the waiter what they were celebrating and he said enviously that they did it every day. They were drinking Antinori Vipera which is scarcely cheap plonk. Come to think of it, I would gladly contribute to any church that replaced its Communion wine with Côtes du Rhône.
At a wonderful local Mexican restaurant called Las Vigas, I often begin a meal with a shot of Herradura tequila, a Pacifico beer, and an ample bowl of chicharrones which, of course, are deep-fried intestines, after which I have a plate of machaca and beans (Mexican reconstituted dried beef laden with chiles). I hosted a feast for twenty-five friends last April in this restaurant which included a w
hole wild pig spit-roasted, giant Guaymas shrimp (eight to a pound), platters of machaca, and Herradura and Pacifico. Wine simply isn’t appropriate for these flavors. We also had a couple of divine mariachi singers who had a dulcet effect on the crowd, singing their melancholy plaints about love and death which neutralized any strident effects of the beer.
Curiously, New York City is the only place on earth where I feel an urgent need for a vodka martini, actually a raving desire. A day of back-to-back insignificant meetings and the sight of thousands of nitwits milling around talking on their cell phones deeply enervates me. My soul becomes splenetic and I need to Taser myself before a predinner nap. A bar next to my hotel on Irving Place is kind enough to serve me a martini for only thirteen dollars, a price at which you can buy four in Montana. In New York City, however, you can hear expensively dressed career people talking about themselves at a speed that will remind you of the old Alvin the Chipmunk phonograph records. You leave the bar in a hurry, thinking that Castro had some good ideas, and take a snooze after planning the evening’s wines.
Life is rarely instructive. One of the wisest and best writers I know, Peter Matthiessen, who loves good wine, once said, “I have never learned from experience.” Put that in your pipe and smoke it. Anyway, a Hollywood studio had put me up in the Hôtel Plaza Athénée for a significant meeting about the fate of a hundred-million-dollar movie. I was stressed and jet-lagged over the nastiness of the business world which is as morally compromised as the literary world, and went into the hotel bar for a double shot of V.O. Canadian whiskey which was forty-two dollars, a tad stiff price-wise. I’m not comfortable in the Plaza Athénée in Paris or the Ritz in my collection of fifty-dollar sport coats. I’ve been easygoing about taking friends out for a seven-hundred-dollar meal but it would be unthinkable to spend that much on an article of clothing. I said to the Plaza Athénée barman, “Are you fucking kidding” and he poured me a four-dollar glass of Côtes du Rhône saying that it was the solution to all the problems in life.
I rarely feel spiritual in New York or Paris except when I’ve stopped at the old church across the side street from Les Deux Magots on St. Germain and lit candles for the liver of my friend, the renowned gourmand Gérard Oberlé, who caught hepatitis in Egypt and couldn’t drink wine for two years. His suffering was incalculable and on several occasions I lit five bucks’ worth of candles which brought about his recovery.
The other day on a very warm border winter afternoon, I was sitting on the patio with my wife Linda, sharing a bottle of delightful Bouzeron. We were watching a rare pair of hepatic tanagers at the feeder. These birds evidently don’t get hepatitis. It was all very pleasant and I recalled again a passage from the journal of a southern artist who had been hospitalized with schizophrenia. He wrote, “Birds are holes in heaven through which man may pass.” I had this little epiphany that wine could do the same thing if properly used. We all have learned, sometimes painfully, that more is not necessarily better than less. When Baudelaire wrote in his famed “Enivrez-Vous,” “Be always drunk on wine or poetry or virtue,” he likely didn’t mean commode-hugging drunk. Wine can offer oxygen to the spirit, I thought, getting off my deck chair and going into the kitchen to cook some elk steak and dietetic potatoes fried in duck fat, and not incidentally opening a bottle of Domaine Tempier Bandol because I had read a secret bible in France that said to drink red after dark to fight off the night in our souls.
Here I Stand for a
Few Minutes
My words are only hot pads for an unacceptable reality. Many intelligent people, Canadians among them, have recently noted that the world is apparently committing suicide. This fact is having severe effects on our mental and physical health. The question is, How can we personally counterattack the horrors of the world around us without using excessive amounts of alcohol, drugs, and television watching, the latter being the curse the Indian chief Seattle put upon us? The answer, of course, is to achieve the ultimate in physical and mental health. We have to become like those virtual superheroes in comics and movies so beloved by children and politicians.
To show you what’s possible, in the bad old days when I abused alcohol and drugs I would regularly need nine cups of coffee and nine cigarettes to get started in the morning and now I’m down to five of each. I did it all with willpower, a much-neglected secret ability within all of us albeit in minimal amounts.
We are taught that knowledge is power but then we are unsure of what power is. If I go to the doctor tomorrow to find out if fifty years of heavy smoking has damaged my lungs, what kind of power will this knowledge give me? During the many years I made a partial living by screenwriting, producers would ask me to create characters who become empowered but I never really got a fix on this concept, thus my Hollywood career was doomed. I met many people out there who said that they felt empowered but I couldn’t determine by their behavior what this might mean except for their giddy aggressiveness while snorting cocaine. Another hot issue at the time (more than ten years ago) was the mind-body connection. Millions were spent trying to make this concept visual. I inappropriately said in a meeting, “Yeah, I get it. On a hot day a dog wakes up and thinks, I’m thirsty, so he walks across the porch and drinks water from a bowl.” The important producer said, “We’re not making a dog picture.” I segued to a more pungent aspect of this high concept. “You’re watching Penélope Cruz in Jamón, Jamón. Your mind watches her and your body springs a woody, you know, a boner.” The producer took a few calls before he said, “Penélope isn’t bankable. Give me something where she’s teamed with Michelle Pfeiffer.” My fertile mind kicked in and I said, “Perhaps Penélope and Michelle are partners in a low-rent feminist detective agency in Encino. They’re framed by a Republican senator and put in a women’s prison. There’s the obligatory riot and twenty-three naked women are shot by guards with AK-47s in a huge stark-white shower room.” I got the assignment and wrote the screenplay in ten days aided by a case of vodka, thus continuing to support my vice of writing books of poems and novels.
But I have digressed. Obviously our livelihoods can be discouraging. An old fishing friend attached bumpers at an Oldsmobile factory for twenty years before he moved up to windshields. His brother taught a seminar on Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene at a prominent university for thirty years. Once when we were camped out trout fishing, the brothers agreed that their jobs were remarkably similar. Everyone involved knows that the arts are a cruel mistress and few of us indeed earn room and board from our strophes and etchings, and if you make a buck or two there is the additional worry that your work is primarily a soiled toy for the elitist children who can afford twenty-five dollars for a novel or a book of poems.
I couldn’t help noticing that even in show business good food is the true source of power and health especially at the highest level. I was lucky enough to take meals with Orson Welles, John Huston, and Federico Fellini, and these big boys were not quick to push back from their plates or wineglasses. A legion of the dweebs and snivelers that make up our population of body-Nazis were startled indeed when Huston and Welles achieved their biblical three score and ten, given their reputations as tosspots and trenchermen. One of my few regrets after a dinner conversation with Fellini is that he said, “We must cook together,” and I never made it to Rome to do so.
Of late I’ve been concentrating on wild food. In November in a twenty-four-hour period I ate an antelope liver and heart and the resulting sense of well-being was astonishing except for the goutish big toe of my right foot, which was a signal not to do this every day. Shortly thereafter I set about making some English game pies. I’m not particularly a fan of English food except for the gorgeous cookbook of Fergus Henderson called The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating. I realize the signs are now good over there but their grand traditions ceased after the First World War when citizens tired of being servants or cooks and it took nearly a century for these ruddy clowns to learn to cook for themselves and b
egin to rediscover the grandeur of their food past.
The game pies were labor-intensive because first of all you have to shoot the game, which requires a fair amount of walking in rough country. I used a couple of mallard ducks, a half dozen Hungarian partridge, which abound in Montana, also a chunk of venison from a hindquarter of mule deer. To help bind the contents I used a half dozen pounds of osso buco with their delightful marrow. I am savagely incompetent as a baker so my wife, Linda, made the necessary lard pie crust. Our long marriage would not have survived without our cooking together.
Everyone who shared in these game pies became light of foot and full of wild laughter but you don’t necessarily have to hunt in order to eat food that is powerful. The words wild and vivid are mostly states of mind. When Mario Batali visited in October he made a marvelous paella using rabbit, lobster, and shrimp. He also brought along some four-inch-thick porterhouses from beef especially fed and raised for his restaurants, and our pasta courses every day included white truffles, a delightfully wild flavor as the literary princelings of Toronto well know.
Now in December down here in our tiny casita on the Mexican border I have been shooting a fair amount of doves lately. They roast up beautifully on a wood fire. Yesterday we ate tamales made with elk meat for lunch, then doves and pork ribs for dinner. Everyone should be careful not to buy pork raised on factory farms, which has been denatured of its vivid flavors. A free-range pig is a delightful creature and this characteristic makes its flesh toothsome. Of course feral pigs that you have to trap or shoot are even better. When I cook ribs I usually go two different ways to avoid the monochromatic. I’ll go half with a piquant Chinese sauce and the other with a baste I call “the sauce of lust and violence,” which is full of various chiles and hot sauces and prevents sinusitis, impotence, and any number of biological infections. I have about a gallon of Tabasco in my pantry in preparation for a possible outbreak of avian flu. On airlines, which are a hotbed, a greenhouse for vermin, I spray all my food with Tabasco, even the brown wilted salads and the puddings writhing with invisible maggots.
