Cleaving (9 page)

My brother, when he was eleven or so, had a baby iguana for a pet, whom he'd named Geraldo. One night we had been out, for
dinner or something, and when we got back to the house he went to his room. The rest of us were still in the kitchen when
he came running out, sobbing. "Geraldo is dead!"

In fact the poor thing was gray and cold but still, barely, alive. My mother took it into her cupped hands, blew onto it,
trying to keep it warm, help it breathe. The creature would turn briefly green again, would seem to get better, but it couldn't
last more than a few seconds without Mom's warm breath on it. I remember that moment more vividly than almost any other moment
in my childhood. Our entire family gathered, crying, trying to summon enough breath to keep this animal alive. That's what
my heart feels like. Like a goddamned lizard, upon whom entirely ineffective CPR is being performed.

At first I think I've been the one to do the ripping. I've made a decision. Painful, but clean. And there is a little consolation
in the action of it. It takes me a while of picking off the bloody bits that remain to realize that I'm not the tearer, but
the thing that's been torn away. And I pick and I pick and I pick at these connecting shreds that cling to me. They catch
in my craw unexpectedly. A trip to the dentist can do it. (Always obsessed with his teeth, D, a winking Woody Allenish mannerism
that irritated and amused me in equal measure.) A store window. (Zales. A kiss we once shared on the sidewalk in front of
the store, impassioned enough to inspire the salesman inside to come out and encourage us to do a bit of impulse shopping.)
A once-admired sweater or lingerie set. (Snapping on my bra in the morning, I flash on his eyes as he stands behind me in
a hotel bathroom, his hands on my hips, eyeing me in the mirror: "That just hits you in all the right places, doesn't it?")
Team America,
of course. So what I thought at first would be clean and final is endlessly prolonged. The city is his body now, all those
corners and bars and restaurants and uninspired blocks that inspire such specific wants in me. He's been part of my muscle
and bone, one of the joints that I cling to, for two years--give or take a decade--and now he's gone. And I text and write and
make phone calls that go unanswered. I pick and I pick and I pick.

There's no such thing as perfectly clean. Not really.

W
HEN MY BROTHER
and I were both in high school--this would be my senior year, his freshman--someone in the family obtained one of those Magnetic
Poetry boxes. You know, those Lucite boxes with all the tiny refrigerator magnets with words printed on them, which you can
put together in different ways. My brother, who never showed much inclination toward writing in any other context, turned
out to be the Refrigerator Magnet Poetry King. Over the next several years, every time I came home from college, I would immediately
read the refrigerator for new masterpieces. (To this day they remain, in the garage, where our old refrigerator was banished
to when Mom bought her sexier stainless-steel model.) His lines could be witty and pithy and absurd (
Who put the knife in bed, man?
is one of my favorites), but perhaps his best one was this:

I wanted a life of

Blue skies shining

Diamonds and lusty

Spring shadows.

I have an apparatus

To produce sausage

J
UAN IS
teaching me how to make the Italian sweets. We're together in the small room at the back of the shop, hardly more than a
pantry-cum-broom-closet, that is Juan's domain. The meat grinder, a stainless-steel contraption about five feet tall, dominates
the room. The meat goes into the big bin on top, the bottom of which slants toward one end. Inside that is a hole not unlike
a sink disposal, which houses the grinding apparatus. Below, on one side of the machine, is an opening over which Juan has
fitted a metal plate dotted with holes, like a large shower drain. He and I are both standing on coolers on either side of
the receptacle, up to our elbows in meat. Meat and ice. The meat is in chunks, perhaps five inches long by three inches wide,
emptied from huge Cryovac bags marked "Pork Trim" that we toted in from the cooler. The ice is from a machine pushed into
a corner of the kitchen. I'm not sure what the reason is for the ice, but it must be mixed in thoroughly.

I
HAVE
terrible circulation. It's one of those little niggling health things that has bugged me my whole life. When I was in high
school, a bunch of us used to go to a place out near Wimberley, Texas, called the Blue Hole. As I remember, it was on private
land, but whoever owned it had set up a slightly shabby park, with outhouses and rope swings over the river. The water wasn't
exactly
blue
--Texas water, in general, tends more to the green--but it was as cold as all get-out, something to do with springs in the riverbed.
I remember one specific time when my friend Paul suggested a trip, a little earlier in the year than was customary. It was
March, I believe, which in Texas is an extremely tempting month--sunny days, cool evenings, bluebonnets. It's one of the best
months Texas has to offer, actually, and how many places on the planet can say that March is a highlight? But in truth, even
in Texas March is really too early for swimming in frigid spring water. We went anyway; we swung into the breathtaking water
with manly fortitude, we splashed around and cursed and showed off like the kids we were, and then I got out... and I was blue.
I mean
blue
. Not pale, not waxen.
Blue
. Like, as Paul said at the time, "comic-book-villain blue."

T
HE MEAT
and ice mixture is ten times colder than the Blue Hole. I'm sure this could be proven scientifically, but lacking the necessary
instruments and travel stipend I will rely instead upon the aqua shade my hands are turning.

"How on earth do you do this?" I ask Juan.

He just shrugs. "Yeah, it's cold, right? Put your hands under warm water."

Well, that's a good idea.

Except,
Jesus
, that hurts. Christ. Feels like my hands are going to fall off. Once the initial burning wears off, though, my hands are
at least working again. I don a pair of gloves and go back to work. Juan is now grinding the meat. This is the easy part.
He pushes a big button, and the meat starts going down the grinder, spilling out through the plate below into a white plastic
lugger set on top of a third cooler. It snakes out in pink coils that make me think of some macabre child's toy--Sweeney Todd's
Play-Doh Barbershop
^(r)
. I return to my place atop the cooler and nudge the meat down toward the grinding apparatus--rather gingerly, because it turns
out I have a bit of a phobia about all things that grind, fantasize about fingers caught up and drawn bloodily in.

So I'm a little wimpy in my efforts toward getting all the meat down there, but down it all goes, eventually, into the grinder's
gullet.

Once the meat has finished slithering out, Juan pushes the button again to stop the machine, then shoulders the lugger of
meat--seventy-five pounds of it--and dumps it right back into the grinder's metal bin. I add another couple of scoops of ice
and stir it around while he switches out the plate at the grinder's mouth with another just like it, but with holes about
half as wide in diameter, then pushes the big button again. And again we push the meat through, grinding it finer, and then
one more time, using a plate with smaller holes still. Then once more the meat goes into the grinder's bin. This time I add
to it the spice mix Juan measured out before we got started: a two-gallon container full of fennel, sage, garlic, salt, onion
powder, basil, parsley, and white pepper. Burying my arms deep again, I churn the pork, now a sticky puree, until the spices
are evenly blended in. Meanwhile, Juan is replacing the latest metal plate with a spigot, perhaps seven inches long, wider
at the base than at the end. When he sits on the cooler in front of it, with the lugger in front of him between his spread
legs, the spigot points squarely at his collarbone.

From a plastic Tupperware container, he lifts from milky water a length of pork middles, a category of sausage casings, which
of course are just meticulously cleaned intestines. "Middles" are, obviously, the middle section of the intestines. Casings
are also made, for larger sausages like those big dried salamis, out of lower intestines of pig or lamb or steer. These are
called "bungs," which is a little lacking in euphemism for my taste.

Juan finds the end of the casing and blows lightly across it, as you'd blow on a bag off the roll in the supermarket produce
section to get it open. The casing is several feet long, thin and pale, translucent. Once he can hold it open with two fingers,
Juan bunches it onto the spigot, up to the base, with a quick back-and-forth motion that is embarrassingly recognizable.

(Jessica recently said, "Men always make the best sausage makers. They've all been practicing the necessary motions since
they were twelve years old." And I, still so vulnerable, my skin as thin as some amphibian hatchling, had another of those
flashes that come so often now, to a lazy afternoon interregnum:
"So if you define adolescent hell as the period between the moment you realize exactly what it is you want to be doing"--his
mouth moving unhurriedly down my flank toward what he wants to be doing--"and the moment you first have the opportunity to
do it, I was in hell for five long years. Being ten
sucked.
I managed to keep myself entertained, of course..."
)

I shake the memory loose as Juan finishes getting the next casing on and pushes the grinder's button. Meat starts shooting
down through the spigot's end, filling the casing, the whole length of sausage spilling in a thick coil down into the lugger,
helped along by another back-and-forth motion of Juan's, opposite the first, that encourages the casing off the spigot and,
stuffed with meat, into the bin. Juan is an expert sausage stuffer, and so he knows, just by eyeing the rate at which the
folds of the casing he's crumpled onto the base of the spigot unfurl, when to stop the grinder. Still, inevitably, after the
last of the casing comes off and falls, a final burst of pink pork ooze spurts out of the spigot, which Juan catches in cupped
hands and dumps back into the top of the grinder before he slides another casing on to start the process again.

Okay, it's true that since we broke it off I've had D, and sex, on the brain a lot, so maybe I'm more inclined to read into
stuff. But surely it's not just me, right? "Wow. That's--"

Juan just grins and nods. "Yeah, I know."

Well, glad I'm not the only one.

"You should make blood sausage some time."

"Blood sausage? You do that?"

"Only once or twice. My mother told me how to do it, last time I was home. I'll show you sometime. With the blood filling
especially, the casings look, I don't know, veiny and..." He makes a gesture, holding his thumbs and forefingers into an O of
expansive girth while blowing out his cheeks.

"Okay, okay. Enough!"

I have no problem with sausage making, don't care about snouts and lips and assholes. (Though I know Fleisher's puts nothing
in its sausage but good clean meat and fat.) But at this moment, I think I'll never be able to eat sausage ever again, no
matter how delicious, without feeling in some little part of me that I'd rather be engaging in one way or another with D's
penis. I know, that is so terribly crude that I, not exactly a prim person, cringe to write it. But then, that's making sausage.

Once Juan has turned the seventy-five pounds of pork into a great looping bin full of sweet Italian sausage, he puts it in
the back cooler to rest. Later we will twist the filled casings into four-inch links. But first we take a break to warm our
hands on some coffee mugs.

We lean up against the shelves in the kitchen, shaking out our numb fingers and listening to Juan's mix CD, a combination
of Latino pop and Nashville country. Dolly Parton's "Little Sparrow" is playing. We're not saying anything. Juan and I tend
to talk in bursts, just small stuff mostly. We'll talk music. As a Texan living in New York, I have relatively few opportunities
to discuss country music with anyone outside of my immediate family. Or I'll ask him to sniff a burst Cryovac bag for his
opinion on whether the meat in it has gone bad.

(Juan has the most trusted nose in the shop, which is a dubious honor, since it means he's the one people come to holding
out a thawed turkey by splayed legs, saying, "Smell this." Perhaps associated with that, he's also the best taster around.
Every day Fleisher's serves a soup of the day, and Jessica and Juan share responsibility for making it. Once Jessica was pulling
together a beef stew, sort of making it up as she went along, and something was definitely missing. She and I both tasted
and discussed, suggesting this or that ingredient to add that extra needed punch. Then we called in Juan. He took one spoonful,
literally said "Aha!" with a finger in the air, and proceeded to boil a small pot of water, drop four dried guajillos into
it, then immediately drain them, pound the softened peppers to paste in a mortar, and stir it into the vat of soup. The result
was smoky, spicy perfection.)