Cravings

Rob Bodeen

Pardon me sir, do you have time for a light and some conversation? I’ve only just stopped in to get a feel for the local color, as it were, and thought I’d see who was about with whom I could strike up some decent conversation. You seem to be a sensible young man that wouldn’t be opposed to such a thing. Really? You don’t mind? I don’t want to intrude on your dinner at all, you understand. Well, you really are too kind, thank you very much indeed. You mind if I smoke? Lovely, I’ll only be a moment.

It’s a charming restaurant, really, the sort of place where any average person could come get a nice bowl of pasta and not worry about what was infesting it. Tell me, which type did you try? Some Primavera, or maybe something with a nice creamy base? Ah… the angel hair with marinara sauce. I dare say that sounds downright delectable. I’ve always preferred the meat-sauce, personally, but I don’t intend to rain on your parade about it. That’s what’s made this country great, you know? The ability to choose and choose freely. If you want to have marinara, you can eat it all day long whether or not I prefer a few bits of ground meat in my own. That wouldn’t work in a Socialist society, I don’t suspect. Not that the socialists are necessarily to blame for all of our wrongs, but I believe it takes a truly capitalist society to have a wide expanse of cuisine.

No, I’m not really saying that capitalism is the proper way of doing things either. Well, not necessarily. I think that as human beings in the twentieth century, we fool ourselves into thinking we can govern ourselves, but there are rather deep inherent flaws in every form of government so far. The only time human beings have been truly free is when we were fighting for survival in small tribes and packs in the plains of Northern Africa and the like. Do you think housewives went about complaining about their floors being sparkly and ‘pine-fresh’ in the fertile crescent?

I’m joking of course, and it’s good to see that you can have a laugh at it too. But honestly, are we happy in this society? Sure, the buildings have grown taller and the pockets have grown fatter, but at what cost? People are soulless drones that waste their lives away to make their bosses richer, spending hours, months, and years draining themselves of vitality in the hopes that their bosses will remember them, smile on them, and give them a few more pennies per hour. Oh yes, excuse me, the American Dream, yes? Everyone can stand on his or her own two feet, yes? Surely you must be joking. For example, what do you do for work? An Architect? Surely it seems respectable, now tell me, how many hours do you average a week?

That’s my point exactly. It’s obscene, it’s absolutely preposterous, and yet it’s normal, and you even have the justification ready on hand that it’s ‘because you had a project due’. But you always have a project due, there’s always another fire to extinguish, and you’re always hopping from one foot to the next. One of the hideous truths that no one wants to face is that we really are slaves, and no better off than the Jews in Egypt or the black man here. Ah… but never mind about all that. I hadn’t intended to start in with the heavy philosophical rhetoric right from the beginning. Best to start light, especially with pasta, eh? So where do you come from, then? Buffalo? But I mean where are you from originally? I’d guess you’re like me, with a bit of Irish Mutt in you.

I’m Irish, you know. Well, Polish-Irish, really, but I prefer just to say that I’m Irish as the Poles still have a rather bad reputation for how they acted during the war. I’ve always said that they did the best thing given the situation. They made it out without many losses, right? So the country gets occupied a while, at least they got it back, and more importantly, they got it back without many deaths. I mean, we’re talking the German army, here! Those men were so steeped in National Pride that they could put the French to shame with their patriotism, and it takes a lot to put the French to shame about anything. No, my people, the Irish, didn’t even get involved, but then they were sort of sucked into their own civil war at the time, so I don’t blame them. To this day, they’re still fighting against the Brits for autonomy.

Brits did I say? Brutes, more like it. Have you ever seen the way the British treat their meat? It’s really quite hideous. It’s as though they have no concern for where their meat has been. They’ll gladly feed cows their own shit and keep them in diseased conditions, even with the foreknowledge that they’ll be putting it in their meat. I say if you’re going to eat something, you should probably treat it well while you’re raising it. If you’re planning on eating something, it seems to me that it would behoove you to condition it, care for it, check its needs, and keep it as pure as possible. Even the actual slaughter should be well conducted, or you’ll get tense, nasty meat with bits of adrenaline inside. No thank you.

Well, you’re absolutely right. No need to belabor the point about how badly the British treat their food. Their culinary skills are renown enough as it is. So you’re mostly Irish and Scottish, with a hint of Cherokee by way of Buffalo, have I gotten it right? Where did you receive your degree from, then? Ah… good school, that Penn State. What caused you to choose that? Surely you could have gone for a school more fit for architecture. Well, that makes sense then. Stay close to home, but not too close.

Ah! But of course, of course, excuse me… We’ve forgotten the most important part of this whole conversation, haven’t we? I’m sorry, my name is Dominic. Dominic Asile, if you’d like my fully christened name. Truth be told, I’m not in the habit of exchanging names with people most of the time. More often than not, the conversations tend to be quick and anonymous, enough time for a smoke and a few words with someone, and I don’t bother with learning the names any longer. Around here? No, I’m rather certain that you wouldn’t have seen me around here. It’s true that I frequent restaurants here and there, but I’ve not been in here, before. I’m a man of rather simple qualities, and I find very often that people are mistaking me for others all the time; more probably you saw someone that looked very near to me around here. Honest mistake though, happens all the time.

Well, at any rate, I don’t mean to keep you from your evening. If you need to go, I wouldn’t be offended in the least if you were to take your leave of me this evening. I was planning to take a stroll through the village on the way back to my apartment after our conversation, myself. Are you going that direction? I’ve taken up residence in Shady Village, one of those manufactured condo communities that contributes to the conformity of our society. You’re heading over that direction as well? What a curious coincidence! Well, what do you say we walk together? A walk with someone is always preferable to a walk alone, I believe. Let’s be off, then.

I’m a firm believer that after a meal one should take the time to walk it off a bit. The human body has a remarkable metabolism that works the most efficiently after a meal. That’s how the great Sumo wrestlers of Japan get their mass, you know. It’s not that they eat enormous amounts of greasy food. They eat a lot of carbohydrates, rice in their case, and then sleep for an hour or two after each meal. The carbohydrates have nowhere to go and no action in which to expend themselves, so they become stored as fat. It’s really rather sobering in this society where we’re all so concerned with trimming down. There are men that are three and four hundred pounds for a living that eat less than most folks. Anyhow, a walk should help allay that, and I’m all about trimming down.

Obesity really is one of the downfalls of this society. You know how many people are considered obese? Two-Thirds. That’s sixty-seven percent of our nation that is overweight, and unhealthily so. Two Thirds, can you believe it? I can’t. I think it’s disgusting. We know how to be healthy. We can’t turn on the television without seeing how to diet or pills to take or what is the right exercise video to purchase. It’s not all that difficult to keep a healthy weight. Eat good food and exercise. That’s all there is to it. But people love their grease and they hate to sweat. What if a foreign country invaded us? We’d be too busy sitting on our couches and eating chips to defend ourselves.

It’s not as though we should stop eating. Far from it, in fact. Food is an art. Food is more than sustenance, more than simply feeding a craving. What we consume is directly related to how we’re living and the style to which we’re accustomed. The whole method of collecting food is a beautiful cycle that relates very easily to the cycle of life that we all experience. If you want to know how well a society is doing, look at what it’s eating. Is it prospering and flourishing? It will be eating whatever it chooses to eat, from the finest caviar to specialty breads and on down the line to fast-food. Is the society in a tumultuous spiral downward? It will be whatever they can get their hands on. In the Franco-Prussian war, the Prussians had Paris surrounded for several weeks, and the cuisine of choice became rats and feces. But here… today our economy has never been better, and we have the choice to do more than consume nutrients for base sustenance. No, today we may dine and relish in every bite we take.

Anyone can buy a hamburger. The factories raise millions of cows a year. It’s killed predictably and methodically, and the meat is extracted, the remains are put to use, and the American people have officially consumed another animal. But the good restaurants, the finest eateries, the greatest chefs, will know exactly how their cow or steer has been raised. The best chefs will sometimes kill the animal themselves to ensure ultimate freshness, but not before caring for it and soothing it as they would their own children.

You’re absolutely right, though. We as humans don’t necessarily raise our own children with the foreknowledge that they’ll be turned into hamburger meat. But the fact of the matter is that we human beings think we’re so much evolved from the animals, when we’re really just as basic as much of the animal kingdom. I mean, just look at how predatory we are. Ah! There we go… This is always one of the more touchy subjects, one that I often try to avoid with someone. I mention the correlation between animals and man and my companion instantly becomes offended. So what would you say is the difference, then?

It’s certainly an interesting thought that the separation between the species is hard to see, except that we have a longing for something deeper and more meaningful that animals don’t have. I’ll give you that much, but I don’t think the lack of a deeper sense of being is necessarily the answer we’re looking for. Consider how strange it is that human beings are always out to pray on one another in this society. ? You’d think that we’d try our best to preserve the society we live in, to make it better and brighter for our children and grandchildren. But really we’re no better than the animals in this case. In fact, maybe we’re worse than the animals, for at least the beasts of the fields, though they may fight each other, don’t kill themselves to extinction. We think we’re so much higher than the animals because we stand erect, talk, and drive Volvos, but we don’t realize we’re just as predatory, maybe worse, than the animals in the Savannas. Litigation is at an all-time high, we sue at the drop of a hat, and we wish vengeance upon complete strangers for something as simple as driving too slow or using too many coupons in the "Express Lane". In today’s movies, we’re not satisfied until the antagonist dies a gruesome death, and there’s no denying the sheer addiction to staring at a crime or accident scene. Human beings are totally willing to stare at death and destruction committed upon other humans, and want very much to be able to profit from someone else’s misery, but there’s one line that we won’t cross.

Perhaps we’d do better to discuss this over a bottle of wine? If you’ve nothing better to do for the evening, perhaps I could invite you to a favored pub of mine and we could finish the conversation there? Again, if you’ve better things to do, it’s absolutely understandable and we could simply part ways here with no hard feelings. Mmm… perhaps not, I can see the hesitance in both your eyes and your step. Look, I can assure you that not only am I not interested in ‘picking you up’, you’re obviously a strapping young lad that could fend me off in a heartbeat, and I’d only intended on a nice bottle of wine. See? The very idea is preposterous! Yes, it does certainly sound good, doesn’t it? Here, here’s the pub, let’s stop in for a moment or two, yes? Ah! That’s what I like to hear. It’ll be all my pleasure.

I like to sit and sip some wine after a meal out. It gives me time to sit and reflect on what I’ve learned. See, I do this every so often. I’ll be sitting in a restaurant or café, and I’ll see someone that seems honest and upright, and I’ll see what he has to say. You like the wine, yes? It’s not very old, a ninety-six, I believe, but it’s my personal favorite. It’s a California Chardonnay. California gets downplayed a lot by some of the most fickle wine-snobs. They assume if it isn’t European, it’s not worth drinking. Well, people who honestly care about the flavor are glad to get it from California. Even Brazilian and Australian wines are starting to come up in place of those sticky old French wines these days. I personally like the white. I’m sorry I didn’t ask you sooner if you wanted to perhaps have some red or rosé, but you seemed the type to be drinking a white with me. Again sir, I’m quite positive that you haven’t seen me around before. It’s curious that you keep having such a recollection. Do I seem that familiar to you? How exceedingly peculiar.

Drinking is another vice that’s going to be our downfall. I’m not ashamed to admit that I drink, but if you cannot control your habit, that means your habit controls you. In reality, people don’t have as much free will as they think they do. Someone with a severe addiction has no choice whether or not he goes for the bottle or the pills. Take yourself, for example. Now, I can tell by watching you that you’re no alcoholic. You take the wine in moderation, you enjoy it, and you had no drink with dinner. It’s only now that you begin to drink, and still not to excess. I think that’s very honorable. You’re a young man, fresh from college, in good shape and not an alcoholic. I’m sure the ladies must find you quite the catch. What? No girlfriend? Oh, that’s really too bad. Well, I’m sure soon enough someone will happen along that catches your fancy.

What’s that? I’m sorry, I completely forgot. Here I’d been blathering on about wines and alcoholism and forgot the pain point that I was discussing when we’d first come in. No, what was saying was that humans in this society have a very distinct line that they won’t cross. We will hunt and prey on people, we will cheer on miserable and gruesome deaths, but we refuse to actually finish the deed and consume their flesh. Doesn’t it seem odd that we won’t go full circle and actually feed ourselves from the body we’ve so joyously killed? Why do you think that is?

I don’t think it’s a function of civility, really. I think it’s mostly empathy. People think of the pain that they themselves feel when their skin is peeled back to reveal blood and nerves, and they cannot free themselves from that association to actually eat the meat of another man. A cow is a different story. Any given human being has never felt what it’s like to be a cow, so therefore it’s impossible to imagine what pain is like to a cow, and thus they don’t have a problem taking the flesh and grinding it up for mass consumption. That and they don’t want to admit that they enjoy the ultimate consuming of another human. Wouldn’t that be more satisfying for the families of the victims? Instead of watching them die, the families could simply receive a nice marinated human-shank or some such to feed what’s left of the family. Even better, if instead of prison, prisoners found guilty of murder and violent crimes were sent to a farm. They would work out, they would be detoxed of any harmful chemicals in their bodies, and when they were ready, they were systematically and methodically killed. The meat could be sent to packaging plants, the bones could be sent to glue factories, and the organs could be donated back to science. Is it so terrible that the very criminals that preyed on our society should then feed it again? They could complete the circle of life and give back in a way that they never could sodomizing each other in cramped prison cells.

I will admit that it’s unorthodox, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call it repulsive. Admit first that the idea seems intriguing. I’m not saying you have to like the taste of human, in fact it’s rather an acquired taste, as I understand it, but surely this prison system isn’t working as smoothly as it could. Shouldn’t there be a better way to deal with the deviants in our society? Consider a child molester or some such. There’s no love in anyone’s heart for someone who commits such heinous acts on children like that. Wouldn’t you just as soon see him not only killed, but also killed in such a way that would benefit the society? So what crimes then, would you want to see punished this way?

Let’s be careful with our definitions though. When you say murderer, do you mean to say anyone that kills another man? What about self defense? What about the army? What about that supposed standard ‘insanity’ defense? No, to say ‘murderer’ you really need to qualify that a bit more efficiently. There are some in fact that don’t consider murder a punishable crime. I know you find that hard to believe, but there are some that hold to the belief, as I touched upon earlier, that humans aren’t much further along than animals. Animals kill other animals for food, and not one of them thinks twice about it.

Oh! Look at the time… I’m afraid that I’m going to have to be off, my friend. The bottle has been splendid and the conversation surely quite stimulating, but I’ve a boorish day tomorrow that requires that I be rested. Would you care to walk the last block or so with me? Wonderful. Put your wallet away, there’s no need for that. I invited; it only makes sense that I would pick up the bill for the one bottle of wine that we both managed to consume.

I always look forward to going home at night. It’s one of the small treasures that sustains me throughout the day. I’ve taken great pains to make sure that where I live is as comfortable as possible. I have central heating, but a fireplace is still good for mood, a couch that will put you to sleep in a heartbeat. There is an over-stuffed chair to read in, and a kitchen with the most convenient accessories. I like to cook, as you may have surmised at this point. Although my tastes are mostly eclectic, you know, things that wouldn’t be found on the menu in any restaurants, I still love fine dining, and sometimes the most tender of meat can only be found right inside the home, yes? Well of course, that’s all a matter of opinion. Anyhow, with all respect, let’s be off, yes?

I like to take this way home most every evening. It’s a favorite of mine, and it passes by the park, and when the moon shimmers across the lake just so, it could make even the staunchest politician remember that he has a heart and a spirit. No, I’m quite positive that you’ve not seen me before. It’s rather easy to confuse me with half the population of this town, I suspect you’re just misinterpreting.

Do you do any hunting, Mr. Phoenix? I suspect it’s not easy in this city, but it’s always good to go commune with nature every now and again, even if it is for the sake of taking another life to feed one’s own. Well, like it or not it’s the ordained order of things. We didn’t get to the top of the food chain by eating carrot sticks. Do you know how they kill veal? Most people are under the impression that a rather large man comes in and beats the cows to death, but that’s both messy and tenses the meat up. If the calf knows death is coming then all the muscles tighten up and adrenaline is released into the bloodstream, making for a very tough and downright acidic meal later on. But it’s hard to have your steak and eat it too. You can’t hunt veal, it needs to be raised and cared for, then killed carefully and methodically. Thus, the instinctual thrill of the hunt is lost, and no joy is rendered from the kill. When an animal realizes that it’s being hunted, the ‘fight or flight’ reaction kicks in, the adrenaline begins to flow, and the animal that gives you the satisfaction of being caught ultimately turns out to be tough and ‘gamy’. So the problem for the true connoisseur of meat becomes how to both hunt, and have the animal totally relaxed and at ease at the same time. Only that will bring about true satisfaction. There’s really only one animal though, that is large enough to be a true challenge, but can still be relaxed into nice, tender steaks.

No, that’s not it. Bears are definitely a good hunt but it takes so many shots to bring one down that the meat is rarely tender. No, Mr. Phoenix, the best animal for this sort of thing is far and above the human. It’s a quick little hunt, little more than an evening, you know where to find them, and if you can relax them enough, the meat comes out… oh, buggar.

***

Och. I spend all evening with you Mr. Phoenix, and then you have to go and tense up right at the end. It’s all my fault, really, I should have struck you with a stun gun or something before you bolted, but I couldn’t resist playing the game out until the last. God only knows what’s in your bloodstream at this point. Well, sleep now Mr. Phoenix, and dream of the day at work you’ll be missing or the date you won’t make next Friday night. You do certainly look very peaceful like this. Then, in a moment or two, we’ll have your wrists opened up into a nice steaming bath and you’ll never feel any differently. Might get some nice tenderloin out of you yet. It’s taken me nearly three weeks to get your schedule and housing down, and I’m glad that I was finally able to fall into synch long enough to seem convincing. If you had a lesson to learn for next time, I dare say it’s follow your instincts. Of course, I followed my instincts, and we see where it got you. Good night, my dear friend, and above all…

…thank you for the hunt.