The Many Writings of

You can thank my buddy Dr. Bob for reminding me that it is high time for a written contribution to the site. It’s not that I haven’t been writing lately- I’ve been writing quite a bit, compiling a snarling pack of short stories that will become a people-friendly book before too long. That’s where my writing efforts have been going.

Writing, or at least the thinking portion of it, as opposed to the actual putting words on paper, puts me in an existential pickle these days. My thoroughly aggravating short-term prescience nags me to write out my feelings and forecasts about our current geopolitical landscape. But, I say to myself, there are a few people out there, a nominal fraction of whom work for the media but haven’t whored themselves out, who are saying what I feel, and doing at least as good a job, if not better. So why add to the growing pile of anger and frustration flowing like a great river of sewage through our sharply polarized country? Good question. And one for which I haven’t an answer.

I don’t seem capable of generating my usual screed these days. It feels gratuitous. Last week, after hearing that one of my neighbor’s kids committed suicide at the mall, I sat down and deliberately worked on a story that made me laugh in the telling of it.

So am I a total wuss or a nascent healer? In the face of tsunami and Iraq and the abhorrent stench of corruption at home and friends dying or being killed or killing themselves, why am I writing funny things? And not only why, but how is it that I am doing this? It could be some deeply ingrained defense mechanism – head for the humor when things look bleak. Maybe laughter is the cure for a woefully unhappy planet.

An aside: There’s this thing I’ve discovered about creative energy, having been given only a finite amount of it: There’s only so much to go around.

Another aside – relevant to a degree, but the writer is incapable of finding a graceful segue, hence the rather arch artifice: I became very involved in finally letting go of my recording project, at last having it cease to be the wallpaper of my life. But there were a load of little details to be dealt with, and I began to understand why so many artists go through all the trouble of making a recording, and then hand it over to a record label for two fictional cents on the evasive dollar. They save themselves a lot of bother. Eventually all the little details did get taken care of and I did finally let it go so I could turn my attention to other things.

One of the amusing aspects of finally releasing my idiosyncratic labor to the public has been the wide range of reactions to it, which have ranged from ‘wow’, ‘sweet’, ‘haunting’, ‘awesome’, and ‘I love this record!’ to ‘it’s really awful’. I’d probably consider the whole thing a dismal failure if nobody hated it. I would take that as an indication that I hadn’t gone far enough afield.

Big thanks to those of you who did take a gamble on it and haven’t asked for your money back. Big question: Are your stereos still working? Are your woofers still woofing? If not, I’m sorry.

All that having been said, here’s a new story from my wacky life. I hope you enjoy it.

Los Angeles – before the freeways metastasized, when the air sparkled every day, and the San Fernando Valley was cloaked in the heady fragrance of sprawling orange groves – was a great place to grow up, if you didn’t have to eat at our house.

Back then, when my brother Michael and I were tots, mom was working long hours in her studio, stumping for local politicians, teaching art, and raising two little boys who incidentally and inconveniently needed regular nourishment.

To this day, the sentimental cliché ‘just like Mom used to make’ turns my guts to acid. As adults, when Mike and I had a few precious hours together, usually spent in the safety of a diner, we would hesitantly recall the culinary atrocities that trashed our young palates and scarred our adult psyches; the charred, maimed fish sticks, the black-on-the-outside-frozen-on-the inside, flattened-with-a-ball-peen hammer hamburger patties, and many other tragically mutilated and unidentifiable dishes that beggared description and discouraged inquiry. Those fearsome plats du jour left us with deeper damage than smoldering heartburn and perpetual flatulence. Mom’s relationship to our kitchen and all that issued from it was, to say the least, adversarial.

Please understand that I am very proud of my mother. She is a brilliant artist at the zenith of a long and prolific career. She loves to create enduring statements in stone and bronze. Cooking, as an art form, has always been beneath her consideration because the results are too ephemeral. Her feeling about food preparation is that ten minutes should suffice to cook anything.

Every meal in our childhood home carried its own unique gastronomic stigma, but we ate. We ate because we loved our mom and because we were very, very hungry.

Breakfast usually meant eggs. Mom had a vendetta against them, the cause of which we never knew. Whatever it was, she was without mercy, the Taras Bulba of the breakfast nook, vulcanizing every egg she touched. Nasty crunchy pieces of shell, cleverly concealed like little claymore mines and invariably ending up on my plate, made breakfast a futile test of vigilance and later, a futile challenge to digestion. On the occasional non-egg days we fared no better. Under mom’s pestilential touch, hot cereal became farina croquets, and toast was put to the stake.

Five days a week, lunch meant a soggy, malodorous brown sack. The coatrooms where we stored our lunches were airless cubbies in un-air conditioned bungalows, where the temperature often exceeded the scorching outdoors. On those days, our lunches advertised their evil presence long before the lunch bell rang. One simmering SoCal day, the miasmic reek of our midday meal goaded our teacher into ordering us to take our little brown bags and leave them on the steps outside the stifling classroom until lunchtime. Our classmates taunted us when the bell rang, making us sit off by ourselves and giving us a very wide berth. The alienation by our peers was almost as tough to take as the gastronomic insults that emerged, oozing inedible malevolence, from our disintegrating paper bags.

Mom assumed that her progeny shared her love of putrid liverwurst sandwiches, unidentifiable lunch meat, and unrefrigerated sardines, although in an occasional act of mercy, she would dole out the thirty-five cents that would admit us into the haven of the school cafeteria, where we were allowed to sit and eat with our more fortunate friends.

Dinner was inevitably a sort of perverse pinnacle of culinary violence, executed with blinding speed and detached surgical precision. Knowing what horrors lay in store, Mike and I would launch a preemptive whining and pleading campaign that we forever hoped would lead to the temporary safe haven of a diner. We had been to a few of those places, and we loved them with the passion a drowning man has for oxygen. Compared to our home fare, diners were temples of gastronomic enlightenment. Failing, as we usually did, to convince mom that we deserved a break from her sadistic regimen, we would then try for a reprieve in the form of TV dinners, which to us were the nectar of the gods, and at least stood a marginal chance of getting from freezer to table unscorched. But that was hardly a sure thing, making them a poor second choice.

The dinner hour would come and go unnoticed by mom, who was invariably deep in creative fugue in her studio out in the weedy backyard. Our blood sugar would plummet, and Mike and I would get cranky and pick fights with each other. Our screaming was mom’s cue that it was time to submit to the onerous task of feeding her brood. She would erupt from her studio, saturated with paint and linseed oil or shrouded in a choking haze of plaster dust, her eyes rimmed with white where her goggles had been, and streak into the kitchen. Sometimes she washed her hands. The clank of frozen minute steaks hitting a red-hot pan from a height of two feet was like the tolling of a dismal, tinny bell, alerting us that the fastest awful dinner in LA was scant minutes away.

A kitchen filled with thick, greasy smoke was mom’s cue to flip the minute steaks. She took the term ‘minute steak’ quite literally. When the house billowed with smoke a second time, they were done. Mike and I shared a patronizing chuckle when Cajun ‘pan-blackened’ fish became a food fad. Mom invented the technique. We had grown up on pan-blackened everything. When I visit home, I do the cooking. During one infamous visit, however, mom got the drop on us and cooked a family dinner. We had usually managed to avert such calamity with disingenuous tactics like offering to prepare favorite dishes too elaborate and time-consuming for her to tackle. That, however, became a tenuous ploy once she acquired both a food processor and a microwave. In her hands, those timesaving appliances became satanic devices with which, she delightedly discovered, she could exterminate ingredients and incinerate dishes in a mere fraction of the time it used to take her.

On this grim evening, however, the house began to fill with the clanking of kitchenware and throat-constricting aromas, foreboding portents of the ordeal to come. Like doomed men watching their gallows being built, we watched the clock tick inexorably toward the dreaded dinner hour that, alas, finally arrived.

There we all were – the folks, the sons, the pets - all seated around or under the table. Out came the first course. Mom was grinning triumphantly, a very bad sign. The steaming, mounded thing on the platter she carried didn’t resemble anything edible. It couldn’t be identified by aroma or surface texture. It was a dark, bilious green, and it wobbled slightly. “Green Soufflé!” mom crowed.

Exchanging covert, nervous glances across the table, Mike and I were borne instantly and terrifyingly back to the Lucullan inferno of our childhood. We knew with terrible, bitter certainty that gastric destruction was only a few bites away. We helped ourselves, surreptitiously passing most of our portions to the unfortunate dogs lying trustingly at our feet.

After the wreckage of the Green Soufflé had been cleared, we said silent ave’s to all the minor kitchen deities for the short but merciful lull in hostilities before the main attack. Mike thoughtfully turned up the stereo so that the background music covered the ominous rumblings that had already begun around the table. I made sure that mom was in the kitchen so she wouldn’t see me gargling my wine to purge my mouth of the persistent acrid aftertaste. Under the table, the dogs were making low, moaning noises.

Mom then emerged from the kitchen and presented her piece de flatulence. “Ratatouille with spaghetti!” she trilled. “And,” she added, gazing lovingly at me, “you taught me this one!”

I felt the guilty color rise in my face. It was true that I had given her a recipe for ratatouille as a misguided gesture of filial devotion. I never thought she’d actually attempt it. The recipe specifically demanded hours of careful and constant stirring to achieve the proper taste and smooth consistency, a factor that I had sincerely believed would prevent her from ever trying to make it. What sat before us was not the lovely silky blend that following the recipe would have yielded. Instead, what shimmered before us was large inedible gobbets of wilted, partially cooked eggplant swimming in a watery emulsion flecked with scorched herbs and bits of canned tomato.

The pasta hiding under this grim farce reflected another of mom’s culinary convictions: that large amounts of pasta should be cooked in absolutely minimal amounts of water. This process invariably produced huge lumps of gluey, congealed spaghetti with the occasional free-floating strand. Now, I had never encouraged her to combine her glutinous pasta with anything, ever, but she happily insisted that I was the creator of this particular mess. Mike glared and kicked me under the table, hard.

At least there was bread on the table. The puffy, robust loaf was fresh from the market and had been spared the immolation that mom called ‘warming.’ It vanished in under a minute, all of us ravenously tearing off large hunks like a family of starving hyenas going at a freshly downed zebra.

Seeing that her main course was getting the cold shoulder, mom gamely smiled and said, “Great! We’ll have lots of leftovers!” That earned my shins a second round of bruises. Even the dogs had stopped begging, having moved off to the living room, where they lay on their backs, bellies distended and legs in the air, panting and farting.

After the bread was gone, and no one was touching the frightening entrée, it was time for dessert. We were hoping, of course, for something store-bought. A simple fruit sorbet made with corn syrup, fructose, artificial color and flavor would have made the perfect denouement to the gastronomic terrorism, but mom had other plans. Dessert was to consist of coffee and not one, but two tragedies de maison. The coffee was terrific. Mom always made good strong fresh coffee. Since she drank about sixteen cups a day, it was the one thing she took some care with in the kitchen.

“Friendly Fruit!” she cried, “and Frozen Grapes!” The short-lived euphoria produced by the coffee quickly evaporated. Friendly Fruit is nothing of the sort. Mom claims that she got the recipe from one of her well-meaning friends. I’d like to know which one. What appears as a simple mélange of overstewed fruit is really a wicked concoction of heavily macerated and fermented gorp that makes you feel as though you had both an intestinal balloonoplasty and a severe attack of appendicitis about five minutes after ingestion. Frozen Grapes are simply that – frozen grapes. Trying to eat them is like trying to eat icy, tasteless marbles that make your fillings ache.

When there was nothing but dregs left in the coffee pot, and the reek of fermented, rotting fruit had given everyone a slight headache, the meal was over. Mike and I excused ourselves and sidled quietly to the front door, muttering something about having to check out Mike’s car. We slid into the bucket seats of his coupe and took off. Without a word exchanged between us, we both knew for a certainty our destination: a diner.

No description of a repast is complete without recipes, and while I wouldn’t recommend that you ever attempt to replicate these, you might try, in your mind’s mouth, to imagine them.

Green Soufflé
Batons de Poisson au Secours (Pan Black-and-Bluefish)
Ratatouille with Spaghetti Clumps
Friendly Fruit

Green Souffle
Serves 6, unfortunately

Combine all ingredients in a food processor. Blend fine, approximately 12 minutes. If too dry, add corn oil until consistency is mud-like. Form into a mound on an ungreased 12x18 baking sheet and bake for 1 hour at 450 degrees. Serve immediately, accompanied by large glasses of water followed by antacids.

Batons de Poisson au Secours (Pan Black-and-Bluefish)
Serves 4 hapless diners.

This is essentially a simple dish. The trick lies in the timing of the preparation and having the sauté pan at precisely the correct heat. A gas range is preferable, but the technique can be mastered on an electric stovetop.

Before removing the fish sticks from the freezer, place the sauté pan on the largest burner on the stove and turn the flame on high. A thin, unevenly heating pan is best. Have a cup of coffee as the pan turns dark red. Just before the handle is about to melt, pull the fish sticks out of the freezer and throw (do not place) them directly into the pan. Cover immediately and have another cup of coffee. When you have finished the cup, carefully remove the cover from the sauté pan, scrape the fish sticks off the pan and turn them. Replace the cover and have another cup of coffee. After finishing the coffee, carefully wash and dry the cup and replace it in your dish rack. Remove the cover from the sauté pan. With the flame still on high, squeeze the lemon halves over the fish sticks, making sure to include the seeds. When done properly, the fish sticks should be covered with a fine black ash and also be partially frozen in the center. Serve with overcooked rice and wilted salad.

Ratatouille with Spaghetti Clumps
Serves 6 victims

Combine all ingredients except the spaghetti in a large ceramic bowl and microwave on highest setting for ten minutes. Set aside and keep warm. If you don’t have a microwave, put all ingredients into a large saucepan, set over a low flame, cover and sweat for 20 minutes.

In a 1 qt. saucepan bring 2 cups of water to a rolling boil. Break the dry spaghetti in half and force it all into the saucepan. Do not stir. Boil for fifteen to twenty minutes or until pasta is set. Drain the pasta, place on a warm platter, dump the ratatouille over the pasta and serve with plenty of fresh bread. You’ll need it.

Friendly Fruit
Serves too many

Combine all ingredients in a large glass jar with a screw-on lid. Stir until sugar is dissolved. Cover and let the mixture sit in a warm place for a minimum of two weeks. Important: remove the lid every two days in order to allow gasses resulting from fermentation to escape. If you omit this step the jar will explode, and you will be scraping Friendly Fruit and glass shards out of your cabinetry for months. When the mixture smells like a compost heap, it is ready to serve. Garnish with Frozen Grapes or serve over tofutti.