Hunger Strike
6.8.19
A year ago today, an amusement park shut down. Some unpronounceable town in France. Something about missing breakfast. A wearied heart had been broken and suddenly the world was short one of its idols. One of those instances where something that shouldn’t come as a surprise at all still hits like a magnitude eight earthquake. June 8th, 2018. Tony tapped out.
I woke up to my tinny cell alarm that day for work, per usual. While most mornings the only missed anythings on my phone are eBay alerts and FedLoan threats, I had five or six texts. As insult to injury, the first I read was from the on again off again at the time, a dramatic caution: “You’re gonna wake up to some bad news.”
Can anyone really, in actuality, impact the lives of people they’ve never met? Does anything we say or do or make or leave behind last forever? Is one particular life ever more significant than another? Who fucking knows. I only know why I loved the gangly cook turned iconoclast. So this is personal.
As some might recall, a tragic rash had already begun to spread across the country. It left you wondering where in the ever-loving fuck everyone learned to tie a noose all of a sudden. Did I miss a TED Talk? Robin Williams, Chester Bennington, Stevie Ryan, Kate Spade, Chris Cornell. A string of star suicides would have been dismal enough, but the common denominator made for a particularly eerie trend. Immediately, a certain episode in which he jokingly hung himself inside a jail cell flashed to the forefront. Less hilarious now.
I don’t remember the first time I heard his name or saw his face, he was just kind of…gradually around. I know it was my early college years when “No Reservations” was a thing, evidenced by a handful of images in the cobwebby corners of my medial temporal lobe. One of which being he and another dude inside a restaurant, eating “the best sandwich in America.” A sandwich I was able to shovel down after my Frontier flight was delayed in Chicago, about a decade later. Oh god, the eyeball. The raw, unseasoned, still bloody seal eyeball he graciously ate on the kitchen floor with that Inuit family. His Brussels sprouts.
The taste that has always and will forever remind me is Vietnamese coffee. He raved about the way they prepare it, and I am impressionable. I am also aware of the fact that my single-serving, instant packets imported at my local Asian supermarket might not be a hundo comparable, but still. I once brought them with me to a cabin in the woods outside Portland, Oregon years ago. Even after all the noises and sights and scents and flavors and feels of that extended and at times tumultuous trip, it’s the sound of his deep, kind of phlegmy voice that cuts through whenever I drink it. For whatever reason.
No one in my extended family had ever been to a foreign country. Unless you count my grandfather’s service in Korea. Or more ridiculous still – Canada. We were unknowingly approaching the cusp of the Great Recession, and I was busy taking in all that fabulous Florida has to offer. For my short but meaningful Miami stint at FIU for Katrina and all her friends, it was café con leche, a car robbery, and sidewalk iguanas that would’ve made Dante shit himself. Remember when he downed one? In “A Cook’s Tour” he wrote that it looked like he was eating at gunpoint. I’d have opted for the lead.
Then it was a semester back at my hometown community college. Let the punishment fit the crime. My family and friends probably figured it was a combination of the hurricanes and the crime that drove me home early, but truth be told I think it was one perfectly harmless interaction with a professor that irrationally ran me out of town. I was in the middle of painting a background on a canvas, trying to subtly represent lady lips via fall leaves, and as the old British wanker leaned over to check on my progress, within an inch of my ear, he says, “Ahhh, yes, the female organ.” Nope. As the pendulum then swung to the opposite side, one of my all-time favorite professors taught an Asian studies course. While discussing woodblock painting, he asked us who some of our favorite artists were. As I was eating mushrooms quite regularly at the time, I raised my hand and said Frank Frazetta. He was silent for a moment, then said, “You’re an odd young woman.” I loved him, too.
From Tarpon it was up to the brilliant beaches of Jacksonville for a couple years at UNF, then back to tit sweat Tampa for the homestretch at USF. Many journeys throughout and soon after, to sentimental St. Augustine most frequently, Orlando, Savannah, Atlanta, Seattle, LA, Buffalo, NOLA, Denver, Coeur d’Alene, Albany, Wilmington, Arlington, Daytona, Vegas. The totality of my travels as a child were family road trips up and down the east coast to Annapolis, where the Amish markets are some of the best eating you’ll find anywhere. While the July/August heat oft muddied these adventures (one visit I ran inside my uncle’s house and ralphed no sooner than we’d first pulled up), there are of course some worthwhile recollections. Lincoln’s blood-stained pillow, obviously. Subways. Massive firework displays. Sitting behind Bill Clinton’s press secretary at a baseball game. He never minced words when it came to the Clintons.
One of the food-related experiences with which I most closely related was that very first taste of extremely fresh seafood. His oysters across the pond as a youngin’, mine scallops in the Gulf as a twenty-somethin’. Only seconds dead and oh so savory. There is a real connection, a highly-human involvement, when the gap in time is that narrow. It wasn’t until 2016 when I finally hopped the pond myself and had my first soupe froide. And my first foie gras. On a canal in Amsterdam, with an old friend and a snarky French waitress, and a stranger’s words emboldening my palate. Lying in bunkbeds amid sixteen snoring strangers in dark, sweaty hostels, going the wrong way on trains with no English signage to be found, sprinting across dilapidated tarmacs, smelling crack for the first time, seagulls the size of pterodactyls, and a stranger’s contagious courage.
While yes, the man was an attractive human being, as any of your girl/gay friends will tell you, those are never my dreams. They’re dadly, professorly dreams. For better or worse, this makes sense. For those of us who can only rarely afford to learn the big lessons firsthand, vicarious adventures can be legit. They are legit when the adventurer is wise but curious. Honest but humble. Tough as nails but empathetic as all get out. I am an anxious person. Whether it’s a job, a relationship, any creative endeavor, there is always an underlying degree of doubt that I’m doing the right thing, if I’m doing the thing right at that. The only times I am ever completely free of this albatross is when I am traveling. This is neither a new nor a debatable notion; Google Gloria Steinem or Mark Twain quotes and stop wasting my goddamn time. Inserting yourself, respectfully and open-mindedly, into cultures and landscapes that derail your train of thought, that twist your face into masks you have never worn, that leave you wet with tears and snot, smelling of sundried carcasses, that make your tongue feel like a bright orange flame - it betters you. Snakes who’ve shed dead skin slither farther and faster.
For me, this month also marks a year-long joyride on the struggle bus. Twelve months laid off in a mass reduction after six years working graveyard, evenings, and weekends. Twelve months a temp for various, colorless institutions. And isn’t everything temp? Not so much planes, trains, and automobiles as buses, walking, and Uber pooling these days. But today it reminds me of what it is we’re doing here. Licking caviar off of nipples, tobacco coffee custard, burgers in the sand. While the cobra heart’s still beating.
