Imagine you are a bland, doughy mail clerk named Waldo (Bill Devlin), unburdened by dreams or desires or interests. You may well be. Imagine are on vacation with your wife, Valveeta, a philandering sociopath who wants you dead. Unbeknownst to either of you, a Mexican butt-humping bullfrog has penetrated you physically and without your consent, leaving you with an inexplicable pain in your rear end.
Back home your proctologist, an overzealous, pointy-eared connaisseur du postérieur, recognizes this immediately as reptilian rape, but when it comes to cures, he throws his hands up. There’s simply nothing western medicine can do for you, he’s sorry to say. Unless…
Unless what? I’ll do anything, you cry!
Well, he says, there is one solution. A Japanese scientist (“very authentic: accent, slanty eyes, little penis,” drawls the doctor) can provide you with an experimental, radioactive rod-based procedure to quell your problems. Only — oops! — he’s just broken off his rod in your rectum, and your ass has turned a glowing green.
It seems your bottom (now looking more like a hairy rum babà than anything) has broken off from its top, and is killing those who have wronged you. Unaffiliated fat people, too.
Your ass has grown to colossal proportions and is now attacking the city. Your ass must be stopped.
Detective Cosacca getting his just desserts.
It took three evenings for me to watch the full ninety-five minutes of Mark Pirro’s Rectuma (2003), a film which aspires to the no-budget heights of Troma Entertainment, but with 100% less surf nazis dying. While I can conclude from this viewing that Rectuma (pronounced “Reck-uh-tooma”) is most certainly a film, it did leave me with a few questions.
Why Them? Often in films of this particular strain, tragedy befalls the most virtuous loser in a world of unvirtuous winners, forcing our hero to face his fears and whip the world back into a more suitable state. No doubt, the exasperated, cuckolded Waldo hardly deserved to be violated by the flippant frog. Still, I found myself wondering: why his butt? More, why his butt? While the good Detective Cipolla (Italian for “onion”, amongst the most sulphuric of foods) must face down her own fear of the bare derriere in order to crack this case, does she really? Perhaps a result of my own formulaic and chauvinistic inclinations, I found myself wanting for a Waldo-Cipolla union to rationalize her very presence in the film; her gobsmacking Clarice Starling impersonation was the only sense I could make of it. In sum: more butt backstory, more bottom b-plot, or both, would’ve gone a long way in activating poor Waldo.
Why music? All due respect to the composer Andrew Gold (not that Andrew Gold, is it?!), but I would’ve liked further elaboration on the lone, haunting melody that repeats, ad infinitum, from start to end. Please, give us more of that floating chorus, that bone-chilling duet droning self-reflexive lyrics in anticipation of the audience’s bewilderment, superimposed into urinals and onto rocks like the supercilious sirens they are…but perhaps spring for an extra melody along the way? I would counter, however, that preferable to this plinky earworm driving us toward certain madness might be liberating us of the convention of a soundtrack altogether. Moreover, ignoring the recurring, onscreen debate over the value of subtitles, why not dispense with sound altogether? Other than the fart noises. The fart noises stay.
Singing in the bathtub.
Why not Jews? For all the, um, subtle, playful jabs at feminists (the severe, sexless reporter “Gloria Sternvirgin”), Muslims (the gibberish-speaking terrorist “Summa Cum Laden”), African-Americans (the large-phallused adulterer “Johnny Peck”), Asians (“Dr. Wansamsake”), and homosexuals (“Detective Cocksucker”), as a Jewish-American I must admit I felt left out. When Summa Cum Laden, straddling a rocket housed within Waldo’s giant rear, declares, “smells like home!” I could only dream of the type of punchline awaiting my people. Perhaps in the forthcoming sequel about Waldo’s radioactive nuts, my people shall be liberated.
Why now? Certainly with today’s popularity of ‘90s pastiche, from the Adult Swim universe to dad fashion to the reboot of Walker, Texas Ranger, one is tempted to declare Rectuma ahead of its time. Apart from its metamodern glitch aesthetics, shot perhaps on an Omnimovie VHS, apart from Cipolla’s constant references to Jodie Foster’s career-making turn in Silence of the Lambs (Demme, 1991), we are treated to punchlines that scream 1995, not 2003. Regarding the size of Waldo’s mutant ass: “Are we talking Oprah large or Sally Struthers large?” Regarding the revelation that, with the city under attack, Waldo indeed has no ass: “neither does Courtney Cox.” To watch Rectuma is to be transported back to a time well in advance of its year of release, forcing one to ask: why now? Why am I watching this right now?
All of this is not to say that I am questioning Mark Pirro’s filmic intuition or mettle. Certainly, with a career spanning four decades (from 1978’s burger-slasher short, Buns, to the forthcoming zombie vengeance feature, The Dead Don’t Desist!), the folks and Pirromount must be doing something right. Rather, at a time when we must consider ourselves lucky to have our own asses still intact, Rectuma compels one to oneself toward self-examination, top to bottom, for the ultimate question of all: in the case of the dismembered ass, where does all the shit come from? Thanks to the unsinkable Mark Pirro, we have both question and answer.
A confused, pseudo-sexual investigation into prosciutto, the Cadillac of dead animals.
You pig eaters should be ashamed of yourselves. Consuming these beautiful, intelligent beings is the ultimate act of indulgence, of cruelty, an act that borders on the profane, the cannibalistic, on the transcendently delicious and sustainable.
To eat a pig is to sin in the eyes of the God, according a quarter of the world’s population (myself included). I couldn’t possibly explain to you why this is, but neither can Marvin Harris, despite the lengths he goes to investigate this in his fascinating essay, “The Abominable Pig”. Nevertheless, a rule is a rule, and traditions are the foundation of a society.
More, to dress a pig carcass with one’s bare hands, to massage salt into its skin, is as if to caress the cheek of a newly shaved, recently slaughtered lover. If the fondling of a fresh, uncut chiccarón verges on the homicidal, it’s no wonder: the pig is our dear, intimate friend, and has been long before we could afford to equate it with shame at all.
Myths and contradictions abound with regard to the domestic history of this unspeakably sexy beast. Giulio Cesare Croce’s La vera historia della piacevolissima festa della porchetta (The True Story of the Extremely Delightful Feast of the Roast Pork) details a celebration on St. Bartholomew’s Day in 1584 in Bologna (a city famously nicknamed “La grassa”, or “The Fat”) wherein all citizens — even the most destitute — would gather in Piazza Maggiore to evade their persistent hunger for one to and enjoy a bit of porchetta amongst the upper classes.
In truth, the pig is the humblest of animals, neither the exotic game that was a symbol of power at the banquet tables of the aristocracy during the High Middle Ages, nor the more delicate fowl that the noble chivalry opted for in subsequent years to leave their warlike ways behind them. Capable of consuming almost anything, and living nearly anywhere, the pig furnishes us with the most democratic of meats.
Pork is also relatively sustainable: it converts 35% of energy from its feed into muscle and fat, compared to only 6.5% in the case of cattle, and the concept of “going whole hog” (or better, “totus porcus” in Dog — as opposed to Pig — Latin) exists because pig’s blood, pig’s feet, and trotters are not only delicious, but considered delicious throughout the world and across classes.
Nevertheless, this article is not about sustainability, and it’s not about recalibrating socioeconomic disparities. Instead, we here claim the leg of this poor animal not with the purehearted charity of Fra Ginepro, who only procured the meat at the dying request of a beggar in the Little Flowers of St. Francis. Indeed, neither San Francesco nor my Rabbi would be so pleased by my consumption of this meat, particularly on this, the evening of the Shabbat. Rather, this is about sharing our findings to you, the reader, after having tasted some of the most expensive, least sustainable, least healthy, most commercially available meat products on earth, and doing so in the most 2021-appropriate way possible: via videoconference.
~
Tonight, from Florence to Berlin, six poor little piggies donate their leg shavings, senza consenso, to three friends in the interest of your pseudo-education. What are these meats, you ask? Well, some of the greats:
A generic culatello (the so-called “Quintessence” of the prosciutto, to cite Bernardo Bertolucci);
a Schwarzwälder Schinken IGP (a raw, smoked Black Forest ham);
a prosciutto from the Chianti region (automatically Fede’s favorite as it is Tuscan, and so is he);
Prosciutto di Parma, and
ProsciuttoSan Daniele (each amongst the first 158 items so culturally valuable to Europe as to be declared DOP, or Protected Designation of Origin, on the first day that measure was established);
another Prosciutto San Daniele, from a different producer and exported to Germany;
This experiment is greeted immediately by failure. Having done my share of Googling, I’m determined to accompany my hams with unsalted, whole grain bread and a Lambrusco, one of the few noteworthy wines to come from Parma. Fede chastises me via text message as I’m in the checkout line: “Lambrusco is cheap trash for grandpas and students. A chianti would be better, along with a nice, salty schiacciata to balance out the sweetness of the Prosciutto di Parma.” What a motherfucking Tuscan.
Abandoning my place in line, I settle instead for a volcanic prosecco and a Tuscan vin novello in the interest of defying his instructions. And the schiacciata, but only because I like it and not because he told me to get some, you hear me?
~
Some crucial notes before we begin. Firstly, all of the meats here are salumi, from the Latin salumen, effectively meaning “salted things.” One salame (or several salami) can be considered both an example of salume (or salumi), but also of insaccati, which are types of salumi cured in sacs, often the intestine of the same pathetic beast. Mortadella, for example, the most grassa of grasse things from La grassa, is an insaccato. Prosciutto, typically, is not, except for Exhibit #1, the culatello.
Yes, culo means ass. Yes, –ello is can be either diminutive (a small fountain, or fontana, is a fontanella, for example) or attenuative (instead of directly calling someone poor, povero, you might soften the blow by calling them poverino or poverello). Either way, it’s a dirty, vulgar word, this culatello, and that’s appropriate enough, given that it is, in essence, an ass stuffed in an asshole. Nevertheless, though made from pigs reared in the Parma region (a proper culatello comes from the, uh, hamlet of Zibello), it’s a cured world apart from the others even in process, given that it is deboned, and is cured with not only sea salt, but also garlic, pepper, and white wine: unthinkable additives to a traditional prosciutto.
Culatelli from Strategia del ragno (Bertolucci, 1970)
Our culatello, though more than twice the cost of the other options listed here, is decidedly not the prized Culatello di Zibello. Pre-sliced and overexposed to the elements, it comes with salt crystals collected on the surface; the meat, from the leanest part of the leg, is dry and sinewy. It is so salty that if eaten with the schiacciata I might go into anaphylactic shock, and I’m inclined to throw the rest of the prosciutto in the trash, so disappointed by this so-called “king.” It not only goes with the prosecco, it requires it, and serves as a reminder that with all things, it’s not so much the make but the maker.
The Schwarzwälder Schinken PGI (a step below Italy’s DOP, but still a regional specialty protected by the EU) is what is to be expected for a meat cured in potpourri of spices like juniper, coriander and pepper, and then pinewood-smoked. Fede notes that it tastes like a forest fire and absolutely nothing else. Why do they mask the flavor of a perfectly good pig like this? Presumably Southern Germany has shitty pigs, or insecure farmers, or both.
The Chianti is the cheapest horse in our race, and I’m afraid to admit to my Tuscan friend that it’s succulent as shit and the sweetest of all, almost bubble gum-fruity, suited perfectly for the goddamned schiacciata. Truthfully, we foreigners may mock Italians for being so regional with their food, but then you find things like this that just fit together like two puzzle pieces. My only complaint is that the ham, tender as she is, is impossible to peel apart in whole strips.
As for the issue of make vs. maker, the Prosciutto di Parma, the most famous of all our samples and certainly the oldest, is sold under one brand name but sourced from around 150 different farms within a few miles of the city (by comparison, San Daniele boasts only 28). For this reason, the characteristics of the stuff can vary slightly depending on both the supplier and the cut: mine, freshly sliced into small polygons from a recently tapped leg at the market, is blood-red, relatively lean, and a bit too salty; the pre-cut German export is pale, oblong, bland and greasy. In neither case do we get a whiff of anything but flesh: they’re delicious, no doubt, but straightforward.
The San Daniele is by far the best of this group. That’s all, there’s just no question. Despite being pre-sliced, commercial as can be, and right in the middle in terms of cost (cheaper than the Prosciutto di Parma and culatello, and twice the cost of the Chianti and the Schinken). Truthfully, it is the only one of these options to boast the complexity and richness in flavor that one finds in a world-beating Jamón ibérico or a knife-cut leg from a small, traditional farm. Is it because of the smaller production size? Is it because, prior to aging, they press the leg to push out any extra liquid and concentrate the flavor? Is it because I’ve been brainwashed by all of this damned propaganda?
San Daniele: Un Prodotto
But no. With a sniff, you can differentiate between the band of fat, which smells of acorn, and the deep red flesh, which is earthy and full of butt stank (the good kind). The ham, though a bit stringy, melts in your fucking mouth, and its flavor evolves as it swishes around your tongue: nutty, honey-sweet, marine, creamy, mineral, and mammalian (whatever that is). Who knows! By now I’m nearly done with the schiacciata, and I’ve almost cut off my finger in slicing the whole wheat bread which, saltless as it is, merges so nicely with this stuff. I’m sure toilet paper would as well, honestly.
I’m also all but done with the prosecco. An entire bottle. I jump ship from the white glera to the red novello, a federal crime in some circles, just in the interest of tasting the whole gamut and definitely not because I’m a drunkard in the midst of a pandemic. Believe it or not, my gums now swollen with pig salt, the San Daniele goes well with the surprisingly heavy, bright, yeasty red. Sign me up for whatever promotional budgets you have, Saint Daniel, ‘cause I’m with you! You are looking down on me from heaven, having left earth with your marvelous ham, and this guilt-addled Jew thanks you for it.
~
The next day, all day, my pores reek of cured meat. My fingers are slick with fat, an unsettling sensation that no quantity of soap will cut, and my ears seem to be ringing. It is said that one serving of prosciutto is about two slices: I reckon I’d consumed around six servings that night, totalling to over 8,000 milligrams of sodium in one sitting. If that’s not enough, I still have perhaps half a beautiful, (formerly) intelligent piglet drying out in my fridge, and I can’t stand the sight or smell of it anymore, let alone the imagery of abject cruelty it conjures, images which I shall never erase from my brain.
Me now, or: still from Society (Yuzna, 1989)
The truth is, it would be infinitely better for our hearts, our bodies, our souls, our environment, and doubtlessly our pigs — who never asked, it goes without saying, to be born into this cruel cycle from their mud to my feces — if we simply abstained from this, if we never touched another slice of dead pig leg ever again.
So why do we do it? I would argue, setting aside the famished families of the 13th century who had to survive for a week off of a tiny strip of lardo, that we are greedy, selfish motherfuckers, and that prosciutto is just that good. Neither with soy protein nor with leghaemoglobin, there is no duplicating that feeling you get when tasting Prosciutto San Daniele for the first time, no matter when any vegetarian tells you.
That this marvelous, relatively harmless, exceedingly affable creature happens to render so wondrously in my mouth is, I might argue, something to take up with God and not me. Now if you need me, I’ll be in hell, puking my brains out.
1. This is extremely hasty, unscientific math, derived from various Pew polls from 2011 to 2015 which estimate 1.8 billion Muslims (already 24% of our population), 36 million members of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, 14.7 million Jews, and 3 million members of the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. Internal estimates from the Seventh-Day Adventist Church also adds 21.4 million abstinents. This does not include vegetarian Buddhists or Hindus; I’m certainly missing others.
2. Harris cites Leviticus 11:1 (“Whatever parts the hoof and is cloven footed and chews the cud among animals, you may eat.”) as explanation for the stigma, but remains unconvinced.
3. Though it appears the tradition dates back to 1294, and continued until Napoleon stormed the city in 1796, when the little stinker successfully outlawed all future celebrations.
4. “Dog Latin” is an imitative version of the language that “Latinizes” foreign words. In Classical Latin, “pork” might be suilla or porcina, and yet “totus porcus” remains in use.
5. Florentines like calling it schiacciata. The Sienese call it ciaccino. Ligurians call it focaccia, or fügassa in dialect. Other than the Venetian fugassa, which is an entirely different thing altogether, I defy anyone to tell me what the damn difference is between any of these, let alone the Roman pizza bianca! Feudalists, all.
6. Volcanic in that the Euganean Hills between Venice and Padova are of prehistoric volcanic origin. By the way, prosecco is the most popular Italian wine in the world and yet who’s ever heard of the grape they make it with.Glera? Certainly not I.
7. Basically a Beaujolais, this is a new harvest wine that’s force-fermented with CO2 and is only available from Halloween to New Year’s. It’s weird.
8. In a letter to his friend, the famous poet/libertine/proto-Fascist Gabriele D’Annunzio pulls a bit of double entendre, joking that he is an “extremely lustful lover of culatello (is that one ‘t’ or two?).”
9. Technically it’s the upper thigh stuffed in the intestine, but close enough.
10. The consortium claims that Hannibal sang its praises after having “liberated” Parma in 217 B.C.
11. For those interested in avoiding cancer, cardiovascular disease, stroke, hypertension, and basically every other disease, the daily recommendation of sodium from the CDC is 2,300mg; in Italy, it is 1,500.
Well. If you’re looking for a real man’s man movie, you found it! Just a couple o’ boys riding the rails in Depression-era Oregon, drankin’ hooch, trying to stick it to The Man (so to speak). This is a story of glory, glory for story, where men while away their days trying to outwit one another for no real reason other than to uphold some kind of illusory reputation amongst peers to whom they don’t seem particularly close.
Based loosely on the memoirs of Jack London his travels with the Leon Ray Livingston, king of the hobos, the film finds A-No. 1 (Lee Marvin) — AKA “Emperor of the North Pole”, the President of Shitlandia — makes it his mission to defy the balmy, sadistic conductor Shack (Ernest Borgnine at his sexiest since Marty) by hitching the #19 train all the way to Portland. Shack, feared by all and loved by none, exists only to bludgeon hobos who try to ride without paying. In A-No. 1, he has finally met his match, and only one man shall emerge victorious.
Ernest Borgnine, eternal sex symbol.
Filmed in 1973 by a septuagenarian Robert Aldrich, this film is seemingly a parable of the anti-authoritarian spirit split between generations. On one hand there’s A-No. 1, a virtuous wayfarer who, like his rival Shack, is known and respected for a lusty commitment to his values. Though his moral code exists outside of polite society, he is willing to sacrifice everything to uphold it, and for this reason he is A No. 1 and you are not.
Trailing A-No. 1 and dumb as a puppy is the young Cigaret (Keith Carradine, brother of David, who coincidentally had starred in Boxcar Bertha, Martin Scorcese’s Depression-era debut released the year prior), a fellow hobo determined to claim A-No. 1’s throne. Two-faced and vain, Cigaret assumes the goal to ride the #19 without clear cause, power for power’s sake, risking the life of the elder vagrant who does his darndest to teach the damn kid a lesson along the way.
Ernie shows ’em who’s boss.
The issue, then, is that between the virtuously committed A-No. 1, the craven-but-also-committed and extremely attractive Shack, and the capricious Cigaret, the whole fight to the death is nothing if not pointless. The #19 will make it to Portland: the fireman and his team keep the train running smoothly without Shack’s involvement, and indeed it is only when the conductor gets too involved in his hunt for hobos that any real harm comes to the #19 and her crew. While Aldrich is sure to show that the cargo cars are only shown empty, leaving plenty of room for a few of the two million-odd jobless rail riders in America at the time, A-No. 1’s mission is presented without context or rationale: his goal of making it to Portland exists merely to prove a point, a point that very nearly derails the whole train.
Tape it to my bedroom ceiling.
Aldrich stakes his film on an empty cause, siding with A-No. 1 and The Old Way, leaving an imbalance between high stakes and a lack of payoff. Unfortunately, it seems like this was made in and by the wrong generation: a wretched score by Marty Robbins, combined with sappy strings by Frank De Vol, undermine the grit and oversell the glamor (De Vol, I’ll note, scored The Dirty Dozen, Aldrich’s first and most famous collaboration with Marvin and Borgnine; he also provided the arrangement for “Nature Boy”, a song of the perdigiorno if there ever was one).
Marty Robbins + Lee Marvin = No Thanks.
In the final shot of the film, the recently-victorious A-No. 1 can take no more of Cigaret’s opportunistic praise, and throws the kid from a moving train into a river. This is just quite the power move, even for a guy who just fought an axe-and-chain battle to the death. Ultimately, though, we are left looking down upon the floppy Cigaret, bobbing in the water, as A-No. 1 lectures his lungs out from the train. Perhaps we’re meant to slap our knee and say, by golly, the old man’s still got it!, yet there’s something pathetic about him yelling, alone again and increasingly distant, at the closest chance at a friend he had left. It’s as if all of this violent chest-puffing was pointless after all. Yes, sure, A-No. 1 wins, but what’s he going to do once he gets to Portland? Having finally conquered the #19, all he’ll have left is to drink himself to death, and maybe that was Aldrich’s point, cynical as it is.
On the surface, however, with its static panoramas of Dust Bowl Oregon, Emperor of the North Pole reads as little more than a love letter to the past, punctuated by absurdly delicious action scenes fought by some well-greased veterans. Replace the constant ranting about freedom and class, though, with two full hours of Ernest Borgnine swinging a chain, or Lee Marvin swinging a chicken, and I’d be happy. Unfortunately, and much to Aldrich’s disbelief, audiences failed to relate to the film’s values, whatever they may be, and the film flopped.
Lee Marvin and his chicken.
Best: Lee Marvin fights off a man and three boys with a live chicken.
Worst: Lee Marvin forcing a sad old cop to bark like a dog, and then take a slug of moonshine, much to the delight of his “friends” in the hobo jungle. Screw the cop, yes, but also screw all those people hooping and hollering as the fat old guy nearly pukes himself.
“Fun” fact: Producers shortened the title to “Emperor of the North” so that audiences wouldn’t confuse it for a Christmas movie. As such, it makes no sense.
Recommended pairing: If your friends stole your chicken, see if you can’t scare up a pigeon. Otherwise you’ll be stuck stewing dandelion greens with some barley and a flask of hooch.
In the threadbare aftermath of World War II, the Florentine Jewish publisher Corrado Tedeschi, alongside Other Human Man Ugo Cavallini, founded the Partito Nettista Italiano. This was an ideologically-oriented political organization which promised “450 grams of bistecca [alla fiorentina] guaranteed daily to all people,” at a time when Italians were struggling to fill their bellies with anything at all. Such is a mocking promise aimed to impale that of the Fronte dell’Uomo Qualunque (Alliance of the Everyman) who promised they would provide “a chicken on every plate.” The Americans amongst us may recognize this as a post-pot reference to the delusional Depression-era political slogan associated with Herbert Hoover, but get this: it’s originally attributed to France’s Henry IV. Suck it, slogans! Though deliberately derivative, Tedeschi’s rallying cry went to truly absurd heights, marking what has been called the first satirical Italian party and perhaps the very origin of “anti-politics” in the modern age: a chicken, be it plated or potted, was one thing. A bistecca per person, per day, was another entirely.
As a moderately impoverished person, I find this funny. Of the truly iconic, highly desireable Florentine dishes — ribollita (vegetable “minestrone” repurposed as a sort of stew with stale bread), lampredotto (the boiled fourth stomach, or “rennet-bag,” of the cow), or crostini made with fegatini (effectively an extremely fatty chopped liver) — the royal bistecca doesn’t seem to fit. For a cuisine definitively, proudly, humble, the bistecca is very much not that. It’s an odd contradiction, extremely Florentine without even being Italian: though the meat itself originates from a strain of flesh stripped from the Tuscan/Umbrian/Lazian Chianina cow — the beefiest, hulkiest in the world — the name bistecca is doubtlessly derived from the language in which this essay is written, namely English. Historians such as Pellegrino Artusi and Jeff Wikipedia trace the name and culinary convention to the British Knights, who so enjoyed the roasted cows consumed in Florence for the Feast of San Lorenzo on August 10th that they would then clamor for da BEEFSTEAK whenever they would return to town. Then, of course, this might all be utterly false.
The Beef was always a symbol for me, a ritual. I’d save up my money and quit my job and spend a month or two in Italy living like a piece of shit, a welcome change from California, where I was also living like a piece of shit. I’d come to Florence and drop mega-florin on a kilo of bistecca, a bottle and a half of chianti, and, to grace the bowels, a side salad. I would eat the cow flesh as raw as my post-meal posterior would get from overwiping, and I would masticate and swallow until my facial capillaries were popping with cow’s blood. A week spent on bread and wine, a night like an Edwardian king, and then death. It is the best steak in the world. It is worth it.
In the year of 2019 I had but one of The Beef. With friends visiting, we convened at a steakhaus called Trattoria dall’Oste, a place known as much for their bus banners as for having launched a plate of their PR Beef into space At this meal, there was me and there were two of the aforementioned friends, one of whom was a vegetarian. I showed up serious coupons, and was countered with an asking price of seventy euro. For a beefslice.
Not only was it stringy and overcooked and foul of taste, relying on ramekins of sauce, but it gave me diarrhea. It gave me explosive, devastating diarrhea for 24 hours. Dear reader, it was bad, this diarrhea: my o-ring was twitchy and bloodied and I couldn’t sleep one bit. Were there a button that could eliminated this local chain of “chianinerie” in a type of explosion that caused no human injuries and reassigned all employees jobs they enjoyed, which is to say any other job at all, I would press it twice.
Perseus: the last meal before the 2020 Lockdown. Our academic institution had compelled us to our home countries, and most were heeding this demand; I was not, and together we had one last lunch by which we could destroy ourselves the old fashioned way. There at Perseus they give you jugs of plush wine, and you pay as you drink, which is a good idea. There at Perseus, the server is perhaps the owner, and he is scary and sarcastic and very proud of the menu. Rightfully so. I order rigatoni with lampredotto, perhaps, on the side, and the man dumps a heavy platter at the center of the table. The steak is butterflied against the grain, with the bone jutting out as if it had been used to kill itself on the way from the kitchen.
This is buttered sashimi. They don’t use sauce, they don’t need sauce, they don’t want sauce, just a T-Bone, thick as a foot, cured briefly in salt and served with fat-ass pepper berries cracked and wading in grease like a fat Roman in a hot spring. The Beef is not springy like normal meat might be, gushing instead like a porn star at first bite, a warm, oleaginous watermelon. The fat smells like the grass the cow had been eating. The fat is crisped and melts like marrow and slips silently into the guts. You dig your fingernail into the ass-crack of the bone and fish out the most tender guppy of flesh along the vertical grain and then you eat it with your mouth. There is not a quantity of this food that would be enough; you would keep eating it like a dog, like a Jewish dog eating a cow’s carcass lacking the trigger of temperance.
This was my last meal and after that it was just pandemic.
As an illegal expatriate amidst a lockdown, you don’t have much of anything but the subsidized housing hosting your head, let alone a regional speciality to stuff in it. A middle-class, moving haggis, you fill yourself with oats and cabbage and bloat in the sun. You take your daily walk, pointless and brisk and heaving humid under COVID cover, a daily walk tweaked by the same interval in the interest of passing time and staying sane. You are not sane..
A new path takes you up a hill behind your subsidized home. You have not had a bistecca in a year, and yet you remain alive. By kismet, you pass the home of Corrado Tedeschi. This man has been rotting in the ground for fifty years, and so you do not knock. You think of his promise to Beef his compatriots out of their desperation by way of Beef, a dish dipped in irony.
You wonder, am I so desperate? Would I ever indulge in this ruddy turfish once again, or had we entered a new era where the promise of such, at least for the unspectacular among us, was wholly humorous?
You wrap your hands around the wrought iron gate and stare flatly into the eyes of a goat belonging to the Tedeschi estate. He has nothing to offer you, and you have but the same for him.
The Memory of the Beef was burning a tiny jewel into the lining of your stomach and this, the end of the known universe, offered no hope of hamburger, let alone beacon of bistecca. You have no choice but to walk back home, shaving a bit of white winter truffle into your bitter black mouth, fungus within fungus.
The world would continue. You would be born again a vegetarian, and from your wobbling podium, you would wryly promise to all a porcino in every pot. No one having heeded your cry, you vomit, and you turn gainfully into the furniture.
