What's the Deal with Food?

Food has always rated very high on the list of things people like to eat. You would think, therefore, that in this plentiful country of ours, food would be in evidence on almost every dinner table. Sadly, this is no longer true. The fact is, there are now only two days out of the year, Thanksgiving and Christmas, when we can be assured of seeing food on a dinner table--and that's because our grandmothers have stubbornly held the line and manage to serve food on these holidays in bitter opposition to Duane, Colin, Trevor, Randall and America's other precious chefs who plan to stamp out food by the year 1990. This being the case, I look forward more than ever to Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner, because I know I can count on something to eat: a nice roasted turkey without kiwi, dressing without radicchio, giblet gravy without prawns, mashed potatoes without grapes and green beans cooked in salt pork instead of Giorgio perfume. Real food, in other words. Food, hold the fag.

Yeah, I get angry about food today. That's because I grew up on food. I never ate a peanut-butter-and-carambola sandwich, OK? I never said, "Meemaw, can I have some more of that jicama-and-babaco salad you do so well?" And if a wrinkled, purple leaf--a salad savoy, they call it--had ever made its way into my grandmother's kitchen, it would have had its ass kicked by a good old American head of lettuce.

It's clearly time for food eaters to take a tough stand on the issue of food. If we don't, a hearty meal in another couple of years will consist of a mesquite-smoked quail's egg sitting on a little bed of tomato ice. Which brings to mind an important question: Who the fuck ever ate a tomato snow cone?

When I say (continued on page 244) What's the Deal? (continued from page 156) we should take a tough stand on food, what I have in mind is murder. If each food eater in the United States went out and killed one precious chef, it would be a start toward correcting the problem. Precious chefs are multiplying quicker than exotic relatives of the mustard family.

There would still be thousands of precious chefs around, but they might get the idea that food eaters were serious about retaliation and go back to their old, familiar pleasures: mounting campaigns against smokers in San Francisco, designing clothes that don't fit anyone who weighs more than 98 pounds, selling new draperies and Victorian chairs to people who don't need them and keeping the Broadway musical in a state of tuneless, pretentious incoherence.

These pursuits used to be enough to keep the precious people occupied. Of course, this was before they came out of the closet, which is where they were happiest--and so were we. Out of the closet, however, they've grown restless. They've obviously decided to devote their energies to making all food look like Monet's lilies. It's not entirely coincidental that the gay-rights movement started about the same time as the public's unwitting acceptance of green pasta, arugula, anchovy paste and blood orange, the "connoisseur's citrus." It was during those lurid days that I happened to gag on a piece of zucchini that some precious chef had cleverly disguised as a French fry.

"What the fuck was that?" I said, spitting on the floor of a homey Manhattan hangout that a Texas friend insists on referring to as "Ilene's."

"Zucchini," somebody said, smiling and reaching for a zucchini.

"It looks like a French fry."

"It's summer squash."

"You're shitting me."

The nearest disinfectant was my glass of J&B. I poured it down my neck. Moments later, I sampled the platter of onion rings.

"Jesus Christ!" I blurted out, trying to swallow. "What happened to the onion rings?"

"This is calamary," I was informed by the adventuress who had ordered it.

"Who ...?"

"Squid."

I stared at the woman incredulously. Two friends at the table noticed the look on my face and began digging foxholes.

"Squid ...?"

"Try some; it's good."

"Squid?" I said again, glaring. "Like in octopus squid? Like that thing it took John Wayne and Ray Milland an hour to kill in Reap the Wild Wind?"

"It's not the same thing."

"The fuckers eat submarines!"

I looked around the table. Two of my companions were motioning for the check. The others sank deeper into their chairs.

"That's it for fags," I said. "I mean, fuck it. They've got Broadway. They've got half of Hollywood. They've got books, museums, fashion. They've got furniture. What is it, antiques don't keep 'em busy? Now they want French fries and onion rings? They're gonna take squash and squid and make 'em look like my French fries and onion rings? I'm gonna go chip all their fucking antique vases."

In the next breath, I'm afraid I unleashed a dialog.

"'What are your plans, Colin--after we come out of the closet, I mean?' 'I'm not sure, Randall. I've been giving some thought to food.' 'In what sense?' 'Oh, just various ways to fuck it up, generally.' 'Sounds like fun. With mousse alone, the possibilities are limitless.' 'Actually, I've been thinking a lot about colors. Yellow, orange, green, mauve--a few mottled tones, perhaps.' 'With food, you mean?' 'Yes.' 'Now that you mention it, food has never, never kept pace with the four-color process of magazine printing.' 'Well, one of the problems, of course, is that it comes in so many odd shapes. If food could be confined to stringy little things or small ovals, let's say, preferably those with a soft, creamy texture, there wouldn't be any real need to change it. Veggies, for instance--they should all have a green skin and a yellowy flesh.' 'Heaven, Colin. Absolute heaven! Do you know, can you imagine how many people we can piss off if we really get heavy into food?'"

I suppose my eyes were ablaze as I then said in my own voice, "Yeah, I know one, you tender-crisp, goat-cheese, zucchinisquid, no-smoking assholes!"

A woman idly said, "I didn't know you did drugs."

"I don't do that shit!" I snapped. "I hate that shit! This is me talking--a food guy! A guy who doesn't drink skim milk and wear those fucking Everlast weights around his ankles when he goes to the deli, all right? Let me tell you about food. Food is brown and white and not crinkly. Ok, it's orange sometimes--if it's cheese. Maybe maroon--if it's pinto beans. I'll give you two kinds of green. Lettuce green--and none of that Bibb or romaine shit--and dark green for green beans, which you cook in lard if you don't have a ham bone or a slab of bacon around. Don't get the white mixed up with cheese. You want Swiss cheese on a cheeseburger, go to the West Side! The only time cheese can be white is when it's on a goddamn pizza! Food don't make noise, either. Like when you bite into some kind of vegetable that's been steamed and you hear a crack, that's bullshit! Only four kinds of food can make noise. A taco makes noise. A potato chip makes noise. Corn on the cob makes noise. And the lower half of an ice-cream cone makes noise. You want to gimme popcorn, don't you? Wrong. Popcorn don't make noise if it's got enough butter on it. How do you get enough butter on it? You wring the Puerto Rican's neck at Cinema I! The key to good food is grease. Grease got us through the Depression; grease is coming back. You know the first thing grease is gonna do? Go round up aspic and start kicking ass. That'll be some fucking blood bath, man, and I don't want to miss it. Who needs a drink?"

Nobody. I'd cleared the room.

I'm sorry my friends didn't get to hear about the prison offenses. Precious chefs can do time for the following crimes.

1. Putting sugar in corn bread.

2. Putting tomatoes and/or kidney beans in chili.

3. Putting anchovies on anything.

4. Putting mushrooms on anything.

5. Cooking fried chicken in corn-meal batter like it's some kind of fucking fish.

6. Using seed buns for cheeseburgers.

7. Not using enough salt and pepper on everything but Häagen-Dazs.

8. Saying bad things about grease.

9. Not frying bacon crispy-chewy.

10. Not cooking eggs runny-hard.

11. Not cooking meat well-done pink.

12. Getting the spaghetti sauce too red.

13. Leaving too much open space on the plate.

14. Leaving strangers in the chicken and dumplings.

15. Pushing mousse.

16. Serving tomatoes that have cancer in the center.

17. Not having cold-meat-loaf sandwiches on hand at all times.

18. Trying to "liven up" tuna fish.

19. Sneering at black-eyed peas.

20. Putting sweet sauce on any meat.

21. Fat omelets.

22. Putting sour cream on enchiladas.

23. Calling it barbecue if it don't come from Texas.

24. Fucking around with aspic.

25. Making any dessert that's not strawberry shortcake or peach cobbler.

I would be remiss if I didn't comment on some foods of the world. Here's all you need to know.

Mexican Food

Tex-Mex is the only kind that's unprecious or any good. And the only place where they know how to do it right, outside of Texas, is a place called Juanita's, in New York City, which my wife happens to own. Everything else sucks, either stupidly or preciously.

Chinese Food

That pork stuff you roll up in a leaf of straight lettuce is OK, but the rest is shoelaces and sweet-and-sour coat buttons.

Japanese Food

Some guy throws knives into the air and a raw thing crawls through your bean sprouts.

Indian Food

Curry will make your armpits glow, but you can deal with the minced lamb on a stick and the white beans you spread on the big biscuit.

French Food

Omelets, soup, French fries, bread. Otherwise, you're looking at a fat duck or a puréed rabbit.

Italian food

If you haven't been to Italy, you haven't eaten it. All we know how to do in this country is bury noodles under a pile of red shit.

"California Cuisine"

"I'll just have a little dish of feijoas with some fern on the side, and perhaps a tiny glass of babaco. And get me out of here early, you fucking swine, so I can go get something to eat."

•

There's only one more thing you need to know about food. That's how to fix a good cheeseburger, which is what you're mostly going to eat, anyhow.

First, don't charcoal-broil the meat, not unless you want it to taste like charcoal and be reminded of your neighbor's back yard in the late Fifties.

You cook the meat in a skillet filled with grease. This is after you've chopped up onions and mashed them into the meat and showered the meat with enough salt and pepper.

While the meat's sizzling in the delicious grease, you prepare the lower half of the seedless bun. You put mustard and mayonnaise on it, then dill chips, some straight lettuce and a slice of tomato that doesn't have a malignancy in the center.

Finally, just before you take out the meat, you put double cheese (orange, American) on it and sit the top of the bun on the cheese. You wait a couple of minutes for the cheese to melt slightly, mashing grease into the top of the bun with the spatula. If you've done it right, all kinds of juice will run down your wrist when you bite into the cheeseburger.

All in all, I guess you get the idea that I don't go for that myth about how you can't be too rich or too thin. Precious people fall for that shit, not me. The line that suits me better is that one in the song about the perfect Englishman: The food I don't eat, I wear.

And that's your basic deal on food.

"The key to good food is grease. Grease got us through the Depression; grease is coming back."