Remembering Meat

I recall the texture of gristle. The nubs of white fat in the ground-up mash of hamburgers. The pulled-fat feel of striations in steak. The soft middle whites of otherwise crispy bacon. I remember my revulsion.

“Eat your steak,” my mother would tell me. “Gordon, tell her to eat her steak,” she commanded my father.

“Eat your steak,” my father would tell me.

Tears would drip from my eyes.

“I can’t,” I’d whine, a child shackled to a butcher-block kitchen table by a hunk of cartilage.

“Gordon,” my mother would say.

My struggle felt Greek in proportions. I would plead with my eyes with one of our two dogs: Please, Ellie. Please come let me pet your head and give me something to do other than not eat this meat.

“Leave the dog alone,” my mother would say.

Twenty years after I ingested my last meat on purpose (a hot dog at summer camp; a hippie/arts project founded in the 1940s as a war-effort farm and cannery), I can watch a man rip apart pork ribs with his teeth and be fine. Until I hear him crunch it.

That’s what happened last night, and that’s when I spoke out loud about how clearly I remember meat. It was the sound of gnashing in his mouth that flooded my brain with meat memories, and also memories of anger, yelling, suburban doom and desolation.

“I can’t crunch bones with my teeth quietly,” he said.

“That was the best sentence anyone’s said to me all week,” I said, going on to suggest ways to muffle the sounds of his chewing: Stuff cotton wool in his gums. Line his mouth with soundproofing of some kind.

Chew more quietly.

"No," he said.

~

Stay tuned for the next chapter of “Remembering Meat,” in which a little girl cries more and a grown woman examines “the yank of meat away from bone.” There may also be violence. And possibly fish.