Understanding
Understanding Owls
Does there come a day in every man’s life when he looks around and says to himself, I’ve got to weed out some of these owls? I can’t be alone in this, can I? And, of course, you don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. Therefore you keep the crocheted owl given to you by your second-youngest sister and accidentally on purpose drop the mug that reads “Owl Love You Always” and was sent by someone who clearly never knew you to begin with. I mean, mugs with words on them! Owl cocktail napkins stay, because everyone needs napkins. Ditto owl candle. Owl trivet: take to the charity shop along with the spool-size Japanese owl that blinks his eyes and softly hoots when you plug him into your computer.
Just when you think you’re making progress, you remember the owl tobacco tin and the owl tea cozy. Then there are the plates, the coasters, the Christmas ornaments. This is what happens when you tell people you like something. For my sister Amy, that thing was rabbits. When she was in her late thirties, she got one as a pet, and before it had chewed through its first phone cord, she’d been given rabbit slippers, cushions, bowls, refrigerator magnets, you name it. “Really,” she kept insisting, “the live one is enough.” But nothing could stem the tide of crap.
Amy’s invasion started with a live rabbit, while Hugh’s and mine began, in the late 1990s, with decorative art. We were living in New York then, and he had his own painting business. One of his clients had bought a new apartment, and on the high, domed ceiling of her entryway she wanted a skyful of birds. Hugh began with warblers and meadowlarks. He sketched some cardinals and blue tits for color and was just wondering if it wasn’t too busy when she asked if he could add some owls. It made no sense naturewise—owls and songbirds work different shifts, and even if they didn’t they would still never be friends. No matter, though. This was her ceiling, and if she wanted turkey vultures—or, as was later decided, bats—that’s what she would get. All Hugh needed was a reference, so he went to the Museum of Natural History and returned with Understanding Owls. The book came into our lives almost fifteen years ago, and I’ve yet to go more than a month without mentioning it. “You know,” I’ll say. “There’s something about nocturnal birds of prey that I just don’t get. If only there was somewhere I could turn for answers.”
“I wish I could help you,” Hugh will say, adding, a second or two later, “Hold on a minute…what about…Understanding Owls?”
We’ve performed this little routine more times than I can count, but back then, when the book was still fresh-smelling and its pages had not yet yellowed, I decided that because Hugh actually did get a kick out of owls, I would try to find him a stuffed one. My search turned up plenty of ravens. I found pheasants and ducks, and foot-tall baby ostriches. I found a freeze-dried turkey’s head attached to its own foot, but owls, no luck. That’s when I learned that it’s illegal to own them in the United States. Even if one dies naturally of a stroke or old age. If it chokes on a mouse or gets kicked by a horse. Should one fly against your house, break its neck, and land like magic on your front stoop, you’re still not allowed to stuff it or even to store its body in your freezer. Technically, you’re not even allowed to keep one of its feathers—that’s how protected they are. I learned this at a now-defunct taxidermy shop in midtown Manhattan. “But if you’re really interested,” the clerk I spoke to said, “I’ve got a little something you might want to see.” He stepped into the back room and returned with what I could only identify as a creature. “What we’ve done,” he boasted, “is stretch a chicken over an owl form.”
“That’s really…something,” I said, groping for a compliment. The truth was that even a child would have seen this for what it was. The beak made from what looked to be a bear claw, the feet with their worn-down, pedestrian talons: I mean, please! This was what a chicken might wear to a Halloween party if she had ten minutes to throw a costume together. “Let me think about it,” I said.
Years later we moved to Paris, where, within my first week, I found an albino peacock. I found swans and storks and all manner of seabirds but, again, no owls, because stuffing them is forbidden in France. In the U.K., though, it’s a slightly different story. You can’t go out and shoot one, certainly. They’re protected in life just as they are in the U.S., but afterward, in death, things loosen up a bit. Most of the owls I saw in Great Britain had been stuffed during the Victorian era. I’d see them at English flea markets and in Scottish antique shops, but, as is always the case, the moment you decide to buy one they’re nowhere to be had. I needed one—or decided I did—in February 2008. Hugh and I were moving from our apartment to a house in Kensington, and, after going through our owl objects and deciding we could do without nine-tenths of them, I thought I’d get him the real thing for Valentine’s Day. I should have started looking a month or two in advance, but with Christmas and packing and helping to ready our new place, it had slipped my mind. Thus I wound up on February 13 calling a London taxidermy shop and asking if they had any owls. The person who answered the phone told me he had two of them, both recent specimens, and freestanding, not behind glass as most of the old ones are. The store was open only by appointment, and after arranging to come by the following afternoon, I went to where Hugh was packing books in the next room and said, “I am giving you the best Valentine’s Day gift ever.”
This is one of those things I do and immediately hate myself for. How is the other person supposed to respond? What’s the point? For the first sixteen years we were together, I’d give Hugh chocolates for Valentine’s Day, and he’d give me a carton of cigarettes. Both of us got exactly what we wanted, and it couldn’t have been easier. Then I quit smoking and decided that in place of cigarettes I needed, say, an eighteenth-century scientific model of the human throat. It was life-size, about four inches long, and, because it was old, handmade, and designed to be taken apart for study, it cost quite a bit of money. “When did Valentine’s Day turn into this?” Hugh asked when I told him that he had to buy it for me.
What could I say? Like everything else, holiday gifts escalate. The presents get better and better until one year you decide you don’t need anything else and start making donations to animal shelters. Even if you hate dogs and cats, they’re somehow always the ones who benefit. “Eventually we’ll celebrate by spaying a few dozen kittens,” I said, “but until that day comes, I want that throat.”
On Valentine’s Day, I carried a few boxes from our apartment to the house we’d bought. It looked like the sort of place where Scrooge might have lived—a narrow brick building, miserly in terms of space, and joined to identical, equally grim houses on either side of it. From there I walked around the corner and got on the Underground. The taxidermy shop was on a quiet street in North London, and as I approached I saw a man and his two sons with their faces pressed against the barred front windows. “A polar bear!” one of the boys shouted. The other tugged on his father’s coat. “And a penguin! Look at the baby penguin!”
My heart raced.
The man who owned the shop was so much taller than me that, in order to look him in the eye, I had to throw my head all the way back, like I do at the dentist’s office. He had enviably thick hair, and as he opened the door to let me in I noticed an orange kitten positioned on the floor beside a dalmatian puppy. Casting a shadow upon them was a rabbit standing upright on its hind legs, and above him, on a shelf, sat two tawny owls, each mounted to a stump and standing around twenty inches high. Both were females, and in great shape, but what I’d really wanted was a barn owl. Those are the ones with spooky white faces, like satellite dishes with eyes.
“We do get those from time to time, but they’re rare,” the taxidermist said. Above his head hung a massive seagull with its beak open, and next to him, on a tabletop, lounged a pair of hedgehogs.
I’ve seen better variety, but there was no denying that the man did beautiful work. Nothing had crooked eyes or bits of exposed plaster at the corners of its mouth. If seen in a photo, you’d think that these animals were alive and had gathered peacefully to boast about their excellent health. The taxidermist and I discussed the owls, and when my eyes cut to a glass-doored cabinet with several weather-beaten skulls inside it, he asked if I was a doctor.
“Me?” For some reason I looked at my hands. “Oh, goodness no.”
“Then your interest in those skulls is nonprofessional?”
“Exactly.”
The taxidermist’s eyes brightened, and he led me to a human skeleton half hidden in the back of the room. “Who do you think this was?” he asked.
Being a layman, all I had to go by was the height—between four and a half and five feet tall. “Is it an adolescent?”
The taxidermist invited me to guess again, but before I could he blurted, “It’s a Pygmy!” He then told me that in the nineteenth century the English went to what is now the Congo and hunted these people, tracked them down and shot them for sport.
Funny how quickly this changed the mood. “But he could have died of a heart attack, right?” I said. “I mean, how are we to know for certain that he was murdered?”
“Oh, we know, all right,” the taxidermist told me. It would have been disturbing to see the skeleton of a slain Pygmy in a museum, but finding him in a shop, for sale, raised certain questions, uncomfortable ones, like How much is he?
“If you like the odd bits and pieces, I think I’ve got something else you might enjoy.” The taxidermist retreated to the area behind his desk and pulled a plastic bag off an overhead shelf. It was, I noticed, from Waitrose, a grocery store described to me upon my move to England as “a cut above.” From the bag he removed what looked like a platter with an oblong glass dome over it. Inside was a man’s forearm, complete with little hairs and a smudged tattoo. The taxidermist said, completely unnecessarily, “Now there’s a story behind this.” For what human limb in a Waitrose bag is not without some sort of story?
He placed the platter on the table, and as the lid was lifted and set to the side, I was told that, a hundred years ago, the taxidermist’s grandfather witnessed a bar fight between two sailors. One was armed with a saber, and the other, apparently, was disarmed with one. After it happened, the crowd went wild. The amputee fell on his back, and as he lay there in shock, bleeding to death, the taxidermist’s grandfather looked down at the floor, at the blood-soaked fingers that may have still been twitching, and likely thought, Well, it’s not like it’s doing him any good.
The story sounds a bit far-fetched, but there was no denying that the arm was real. The cut had been made two inches south of the elbow, and the exposed end, with its cleanly severed radius and ulna, reminded me of osso buco. “It was my grandfather who mummified it,” the taxidermist said. “You can see it’s not the best job in the world, but it’s really rather good for a first attempt.”
I leaned closer.
“Touch it,” he whispered.
As if I were under a spell, I did, shuddering a little at the feel of the hairs. Equally creepy was the arm’s color, which was not Caucasian flesh tone but not brown either, the way most desiccated body parts are. This was the same slightly toasted shade as a spray-on tan.
“I think I’ll just take one of those owls,” I said. “The one on the left, if that’s okay.”
The taxidermist nodded. Then he reached to an even higher shelf and brought down another plastic grocery bag, this one from Tesco, which is decidedly less upscale. “Now, a smell is going to hit you when I open this up, but don’t worry,” he said. “It’s just the smoke they used to preserve the head.”
That’s a phrase you don’t hear too often, so it took a moment for it to sink in. When he opened the bag, I saw that he might more accurately have said “the head of this teenage girl,” for she’d been no older than fourteen at the time of her death. This sounds super grisly but is, I propose, just medium grisly. The head was four hundred years old and came from somewhere in South America—Peru, I think he said. The skin was dry and thin, like leather on an old worn-out purse. Parts of it were eaten away, exposing the skull beneath it, but what really struck me was her hair, which was sleek and black, divvied into delicate, slender braids.
I didn’t ask the price but said a little more emphatically, “I really think the owl will do it for me today. It’s a Valentine’s Day present—perfect for our new place. A house, actually—no basement, and three stories tall.” I wasn’t trying to be boastful. I just wanted him to know that I was loved, and that I lived aboveground.
A few minutes later, the owl secured in a good-size cardboard box, I headed back to the Underground. Ordinarily I’d be elated—I’d been determined to find Hugh the perfect present, and, by golly, I had done it—but instead I felt unhinged, not by the things I had seen so much as by the taxidermist. It’s common to be misread by people who don’t know you. “Like to try Belligerent, the new fragrance for men?” I’ll be asked in a department store. And I always think, Really? Do I seem like the kind of guy who would wear cologne? Hotel operators so often address me as “Mrs. Sedaris” that I no longer bother to correct them. I’ve been mistaken for a parent, a pickpocket, and even, God forbid, an SUV owner, and I’ve always been able to brush it off. What’s rare is not to be misread. The taxidermist knew me for less time than it took to wipe my feet on his mat, and, with no effort whatsoever, he looked into my soul and recognized me for the person I really am: the type who’d actually love a Pygmy and could easily get over the fact that he’d been murdered for sport, thinking breezily, Well, it was a long time ago. Worse still I would flaunt it, hoping in the way a Porsche owner does that this would become a part of my identity. “They say he has a Pygmy,” I could imagine my new neighbors whispering as I walked down the street. “Hangs him plain as day in the corner of his living room, next to the musket he was shot with.”
I’d love to be talked about in this way, but how did the taxidermist know? Plenty of people must go into his store, ask for a kitten or a seagull or whatever, and walk out five minutes later knowing nothing about the human parts. Why show me the head in the grocery bag? As for the arm, how had he known I’d been dying to touch it? I hadn’t said anything one way or the other, so what was the giveaway?
At the station I went through the turnstile and stood on the platform until a train arrived. The owl wasn’t heavy—in fact it was surprisingly light—but the box was cumbersome, so I was happy to find a seat. At our first stop, a teenage girl in a school uniform got on and took the spot across from me. Deal with a kid her age today and the thought of her head winding up behind some shop counter in a plastic bag might not be all that troubling. I mean, the mouths on some of them! That said, it shouldn’t be just any kid that age. The one the taxidermist showed me, for instance—what was her story? Fourteen-year-olds existed four hundred years ago, but teenagers, with their angst and rebelliousness, their rage and Ritalin and very own version of Vogue magazine, are a fairly recent construct. In the seventeenth-century jungles of Peru, a girl that age would have babies already. Half her life would probably be over, and that’s if she was lucky. To have your chopped-off head preserved and then wind up in a Tesco bag some six thousand miles away—that was the indignity. Tesco! At least the arm was in a Waitrose bag.
It bothered me that the bag bothered me more than the head did, but what are you going to do? A person doesn’t consciously choose what he focuses on. Those things choose you, and, once they do, nothing, it seems, can shake them. Find someone with a similar eye, and Christmas shopping is a breeze. I can always spot something for my sisters Gretchen and Amy. The three of us can walk into a crowded party and all zoom in on the person who’s missing a finger, or who has one regular-size ear and one significantly smaller one, while my sister Lisa will pick up something else entirely.
Hugh and I don’t notice the same things either. That’s how he can be with me. Everything the taxidermist saw is invisible to him: my superficiality, my juvenile fascination with the abnormal, my willingness to accept and sometimes even celebrate evil—point this out, and he’ll say, “David? My David? Oh no. He’s not like that at all.”
A person who’s that out of it deserves both an owl and chocolate, so I got off the train at Piccadilly Circus and picked him up a box. Then I caught a bus and hurried toward home, thinking about love, and death, and about that throat, so elegant in its detail, which was, no doubt, awaiting me.
#2 to Go
“I have to go to China,” I told people, this in the way I might say, “I need to insulate my crawl space,” or, “I’ve got to get these moles looked at.” That’s the way it felt, though. Like a chore. What initially put me off was the food. I’ll eat it if the alternative means starving, but I’ve never looked forward to it, not even when it seemed exotic to me. I was in my early twenties when a Chinese restaurant opened in Raleigh. It was in a new building, designed to look vaguely templish, and my mother couldn’t get enough of it. “What do you say we go Oriental!”
I think she liked that the food was beyond her range. Anyone could imitate the twice-baked potatoes at the Peddler, or turn out a veal Parmesan like the Villa Capri’s, but there was no way a non-Chinese person could make moo shu pork, regardless of his or her training. “And the egg rolls,” she’d say. “Can you imagine!”
The restaurant didn’t have a liquor license, but they allowed you to brown-bag. Thus we’d arrive with our jug of hearty burgundy. I always got my mother to order for me, but when the kung pao chicken was brought to the table I never perked up the way I did at the steak house or the Villa Capri. And it wasn’t just Raleigh’s Chinese food. I was equally disinterested in Chicago and, later, New York, cities with actual Chinatowns.
Everyone swore that the food in Beijing and Chengdu would be different from what I’d had in the United States. “It’s more real,” they said, meaning, it turned out, that I could dislike it more authentically.
I think it hurt that before landing in China, Hugh and I spent a week in Tokyo, where the food was, as always, sublime, everything so delicate and carefully presented. With meals I drank tea, which leads me to another great thing about Japan—its bathrooms. When I was younger they wouldn’t have mattered so much. Then I hit fifty and found that I had to pee all the time. In Tokyo every subway station has a free public men’s room. The floors and counters are aggressively clean, and beside each urinal is a hook for hanging your umbrella.
This was what I had grown accustomed to when we flew from Narita to Beijing Capital International, where the first thing you notice is what sounds like a milk steamer, the sort a café uses when making lattes and cappuccinos. That’s odd, you think. There’s a coffee bar on the elevator to the parking deck? What you’re hearing, that incessant guttural hiss, is the sound of one person, and then another, dredging up phlegm, seemingly from the depths of his or her soul. At first you look over, wondering, Where are you going to put that? A better question, you soon realize, is Where aren’t you going to put it?
I saw wads of phlegm glistening like freshly shucked oysters on staircases and escalators. I saw them frozen into slicks on the sidewalk and oozing down the sides of walls. It often seemed that if people weren’t spitting they were coughing without covering their mouths, or shooting wads of snot out of their noses. This was done by plugging one nostril and using the other as a blowhole. “We Chinese think it’s best just to get it out,” a woman told me over dinner one night. She said that, in her opinion, it’s disgusting that a Westerner would use a handkerchief and then put it back into his pocket.
“Well, it’s not for sentimental reasons,” I told her. “We don’t hold on to our snot forever. The handkerchief’s mainly a sanitary consideration.”
Another thing you notice in China are the turds. Oh please, you’re probably thinking. Must you?
To this I answer, “Yes, I must,” for if they didn’t affect the food itself, they affected the way I thought about it. Once, in Tokyo, I saw a dog pee on the sidewalk. Then its owner reached into a bag, pulled out a bottle of water, and rinsed the urine off the pavement. As for dog feces, I never saw any trace of them. In Beijing you see an overwhelming amount of shit. Some of it can be blamed on pets, but a lot of it comes from people. Chinese babies do without diapers, wearing instead these strange little pants with a slit in the rear. When a child has to go, its parents direct it toward the curb or, if they’re indoors, to a spot they think of as “curby.” “Last month I saw a kid shit in the produce aisle of our Chengdu Walmart,” a young woman named Bridget told me.
This was the seventh day of my visit, and so desensitized was I that my first response was “You have a Walmart?”
There are the wild outdoor turds of China, and then there are the ones you see in the public bathrooms, most of which feature those squat-style toilets—holes, basically, level with the floor. And these bathrooms, my God. The sorriest American gas station cannot begin to match one of these things. In the men’s room of a Beijing subway stop, I watched a man walk past the urinal, lift his three-year-old son into the air, and instruct him to pee into the sink—the one we were supposed to wash our hands in.
My trip reminded me that we are all just animals, that stuff comes out of every hole we have, no matter where we live or how much money we’ve got. On some level we all know this and manage, quite pleasantly, to shove it toward the back of our minds. In China it’s brought to the front and nailed there. The supermarket cashier holds out your change and you take it thinking, This woman squats and spits on the floor while shitting and blowing snot out of her nose. You think it of the cab driver, of the ticket taker, and, finally, of the people who are cooking and serving your dinner. Which brings me back to food.
If someone added a pinch of human feces to my scrambled eggs, I might not be able to detect it, but I would most likely realize that these particular eggs tasted different from the ones I had yesterday. That’s with something familiar, though. And there wasn’t a lot of familiar in China. No pork lo mein or kung pao chicken, and definitely no egg rolls. On our first night in Chengdu, we joined a group of four for dinner—one Chinese woman and three Westerners. The restaurant was not fancy, but it was obviously popular. Built into our table was a simmering cauldron of broth, into which we were to add side dishes and cook them until they were done. “I’ve taken the liberty of ordering us some tofu, some mushrooms, and some duck tongues,” said the Western woman sitting across from me. “Do you trust me to keep ordering, or is there anything in particular you might like?”
I looked at her, thinking, You whore! Catherine was English and had lived in China for close to twenty years. I figured the duck tongues were a sort of test, so I made it a point to look unfazed. Excited even.
When I was eventually forced to eat one, I found that it actually wasn’t so bad. The only disconcerting part was the shape, particularly the base, from which dangled tentacle-like roots. This reminded you that the tongues had not been cut off but, rather, yanked out, possibly with pliers. Of course, the duck was probably dead by then, wasn’t it? It’s not like they’d jerk out the tongue and then let it go, traumatized and quackless but otherwise whole.
It was while eating my second duck tongue that the man at the next table hacked up a loud wad of phlegm and spat it onto the floor.
“I think I’m done,” I said.
The following morning, and with a different group, Hugh and I took a drive to the mountain where tea originally came from. It was late January, and the two-hour trip took us by countless factories. Mustard-colored smoke drifted into the sky, and the rivers we passed ran thick with waste and rubbish. Eventually we hit snow, which improved things visually but made it harder to move about. By the time we headed back down the mountain, it was almost three. Most restaurants had quit serving lunch, so we stopped at what’s called a Farming Family Happiness. This is a farmhouse where, if they’re in the mood, the people who live there will cook and serve you a meal.
One of the members of our party was a native of Chengdu, and of the five Americans, everyone but Hugh and I spoke Mandarin. Thus we hung back as they negotiated with the farm wife, who was square-faced and pretty and wore her hair cut into bangs. We ate in what was normally the mah-jongg parlor, a large room overlooking the family’s tea field. Against one wall were two televisions, each tuned to a different channel and loudly playing to no one. On the other wall was a sanitation grade—C—and the service grade, which was a smiley face with the smile turned upside down.
As far as I know there wasn’t a menu. Rather, the family worked at their convenience, with whatever was handy or in season. There was a rooster parading around the backyard, and then there just wasn’t. After the cook had slit its throat, he used it as the base for five separate dishes, one of which was a dreary soup with two feet, like inverted salad tongs, sticking out of it. Nothing else was nearly as recognizable.
I’m used to standard butchering: here’s the leg, the breast, etc. At the Farming Family Happiness, rather than being carved, the rooster was senselessly hacked, as if by a blind person, a really angry one with a thing against birds. Portions were reduced to shards, mostly bone, with maybe a scrap of meat attached. These were then combined with cabbage and some kind of hot sauce.
Another dish was made entirely of organs, which again had been hacked beyond recognition. The heart was there, the lungs, probably the comb and intestines as well. I don’t know why this so disgusted me. If I was a vegetarian, okay, but if you’re a meat eater, why draw these arbitrary lines? “I’ll eat the thing that filters out toxins but not the thing that sits on top of the head, doing nothing.” And why agree to eat this animal and not that one?
I remember reading a few years ago about a restaurant in the Guangdong Province that was picketed and shut down because it served cat. The place was called the Fangji Cat Meatball Restaurant, which isn’t exactly hiding anything. Go to Fangji and you pretty much know what you’re getting. My objection to cat meatballs is not that I have owned several cats and loved them, but that I try not to eat things that eat meat. Like most Westerners I tend toward herbivores and things that like grain: cows, chickens, sheep, etc. Pigs eat meat—a pig would happily eat a human—but most of the pork we’re privy to was raised on corn or horrible chemicals rather than on other pigs and dead people.
There are distinctions among the grazing animal eaters as well. People who like lamb and beef, at least in North America, tend to draw the line at horse, which in my opinion is delicious. The best I’ve had was served at a restaurant in Antwerp, a former stable called, cleverly enough, the Stable. Hugh was right there with me, and though he ate the same thing I did, he practically wept when someone in China mentioned eating sea horses. “Oh, those poor things,” he said. “How could you?”
I went, “Huh?”
It’s like eating poultry but taking a moral stand against Peeps, those sugarcoated chicks they sell at Easter. “A sea horse is not related to an actual horse,” I said. “They’re fish, and you eat fish all the time. Are you objecting to this one because of its shape?”
He said he couldn’t eat sea horses because they were friendly and never did anyone any harm. This as opposed to those devious, bloodthirsty lambs whose legs we so regularly roast with rosemary and new potatoes.
The dishes we had at the Farming Family Happiness were meant to be shared, and as the pretty woman with the broad face brought them to the table, the man across from me beamed and reached for his chopsticks. “You know,” he said, “this country might have its faults, but it is virtually impossible to get a bad meal here.”
I didn’t say anything.
Another of the dishes that day consisted of rooster blood. I’d thought it would be liquid, like V8 juice, but when cooked it coagulated into little pads that had the consistency of tofu. “Not bad,” said the girl who was seated beside me, and I watched as she slid one into her mouth. Jill was American, a peace corps volunteer who’d come to Chengdu to teach English. “In Thailand last year, I ate dog face,” she told me.
“Just the face?”
“Well, head and face.” She was in a small village, part of a team returning abducted girls to their parents. To show their gratitude, the locals prepared a feast. Dog was considered good eating. The head was supposedly the best part and, rather than offend her hosts, Jill ate it.
This, for many, is flat-out evil, but the rest of the world isn’t like America, where it’s become virtually impossible to throw a dinner party. One person doesn’t eat meat, while another is lactose intolerant or can’t digest wheat. You have vegetarians who eat fish and others who won’t touch it. Then there are vegans, macrobiotics, and a new group, flexitarians, who eat meat if not too many people are watching. Take that into consideration, and it’s actually rather refreshing that a twenty-two-year-old from the suburbs of Detroit will pick up her chopsticks and at least try the char-pei.
I’d like to be more like Jill, but in China, something kept holding me back. In clean, sophisticated Japan, the rooster blood, arranged upon a handmade plate between the perfect tempura snow pea and a radish carved to look like a first-trimester fetus, would have seemed like a fine idea. “We ought to try making this at home,” I’d have said to Hugh. Here, though, I thought of the sanitation grade and of the rooster, pecking maggots out of human feces before being killed. Most of the restaurants in China smelled dirty to me, though what I was picking up on was likely some unfamiliar ingredient, and I was allowing the things I’d seen earlier in the day—the spitting and snot-blowing, etc.—to fill in the blanks.
Then again, maybe not.
While on our trip we ate at normal, everyday places and sometimes bought food on the street. Our only expensive meal was in Beijing, where we went alone to a fancy restaurant recommended by an acquaintance. The place was located in an old warehouse and had been lavishly decorated. There was a wine expert and someone whose job it was to drop by every three minutes and refill your water glass. We had the Peking duck, which was expertly carved rather than hacked and was served with little pancakes. Toward the end of the meal I stepped into the men’s room to pee, and there, disintegrating in the Western-style toilet, was an unflushed turd, a little reminder saying, “See, you’re still in China!”
Back at the table I asked for the bill. Then I remembered where I was and amended it to “the check.” In France, you can die waiting to pay for your meal, which is something I’ve never understood. How can they not want me out of here? I’ll think. Ten minutes might pass. Then twenty, me watching as the waiter does everything but accept my goddamn money.
I’ll say that for China, though, offer to pay, and before you can stab a rooster with a rusty screwdriver someone has taken you up on it. I think they want to catch you before you get sick, but whatever the reason, within minutes you’re back on the street, searching the blighted horizon and wondering where your next meal might be coming from.
Health-Care Freedoms and Why I Want My Country Back
Dear Fellow Patriot/Patriotess,
Like many of you, I’d originally planned to carry a sign. The one I’d worked on pictured a witch doctor with the face of—it kills me to say it—our president, with a bone through his nose and that African-type paint on his cheeks. Under that I had written, “Indonesian Muslim Welfare Thug Hands Off My Healthcare You Kenyan Socialist Baby Grandma Killer.” I thought it looked pretty good, but then I ran it by my son, Todd. He’s the artistic one in the family. “Well, Mom,” he said to me, “it’s a little…busy.”
We got to talking about my concerns, and because I have so many of them, he suggested I go the flyer route. The last I heard, our God-given right to mimeograph has not been taken away—Chairman Obama’s left us that, at least!—and Todd assures me that this will work just as well as a picket sign. “The key, Mom, is to hand these to as many people as possible.”
He then gave me the T-shirt I’m wearing, which I unfolded and held before me to read: “Big…Dyke?” I said.
And Todd said, “Exactly!” A dyke, he explained, is someone who holds back the flood of encroaching socialism. And that pretty much sums me up in a nutshell! “Let’s add the word ‘proud’ to that,” I said. So out came the press-on letters, and voilà!
He’s made such a turnaround, that boy of mine. Back at college he was as liberal as they come—all “Down with Bush” and “Satan/Cheney ’08!” But that’s what our universities do now—they brainwash.
I said, “Get out into the real world, then you’ll see!” I said, “Pay some taxes for once in your life and you’ll be mad as hell too!”
And that’s exactly what happened. After graduating with a useless degree in Dance History, Todd got a job at our local community college, working in the admissions office, and when he saw the bite Uncle Sam was taking out of his paycheck, he came right around, I’ll tell you what. So did his roommate, Miles. The two of them met in college and have been as thick as thieves ever since. I actually sometimes call him “Shadow,” not because he’s black, which he is, but because he and my son are so close. It’s actually him who xeroxed these flyers for me.
Both Miles and Todd are familiar with protest marches, mostly from their misguided college days, but as my son said, “Walking is walking, Mom, and whether you’re for torture or against it, you’re going to need to drink lots of water. That’s rule number one: Stay Hydrated! You’ll also need some good, comfortable shoes and a hat that’ll keep the sun off your face.”
I got a sombrero and hung tea bags off the brim, but Todd said it sent a mixed message, like I supported illegal immigration—which I don’t! He said it was better to wear this cone-shaped thing, a wimple, he called it, though it looked to me more like a dunce cap. He said, “Mom, please. A little sophistication!”
I said, “How will it keep the sun off my face?” So he added a visor to the front of it. As for the writing that runs top to bottom, it might look like ASSHOLE, but it’s actually A.S.S.H.O.L.E., which stands for:
Another
Savvy
Senior
Hopes
Obama
Loses
Everything
That might sound harsh, but it’s how I feel. His teeth, his family, the keys to his car—I want that man to be left with nothing, just like he’s trying to leave us with nothing. My only worry was that it was vague, and people would think that I was the a*shole.
“Not at all,” my son told me. “It’s a very common acronym, like CPAC, and everyone will know what it means.” So now here I am in my Big Proud Dyke T-shirt. I’ve got my cone-shaped hat on, and I’m here to say that I’m mad as hell and I want my country back. I want a Christian president who was born in America, not Africa, and I don’t want a death panel telling me when I can and cannot live. Then there’s the tax business, which really makes my blood boil. The way it is now, if I win the lottery I’ll have to give the government a much higher percentage than I would have if I’d won it when Bush was in office.
“What else gets your goat?” Todd asked when he was typing up my flyer. And I told him I was sick of the president talking down to me. “Like I’m some kind of a…some kind of a…”
“Uninformed idiot?” he said.
And I told him that was it exactly. “I’m tired of being talked to like I’m an uninformed idiot. I think a lot of Americans are, but we’ll see who’s the idiot when I join that historic march on Washington!”
Todd agreed 100 percent, and then he took me to the Greyhound station, where I got on the bus for Seattle.