Anna Mockler: One Big Barbeque and Then It's Over

Anna Mockler – One Big Barbeque and Then It’s Over

Published in Wreckage of Reason: An Anthology of Contemporary Xxperimental Prose by Women Writers, edited by Nava Renek (Spuyten Duyvil, 2008):

From the cast-iron letterpress of lemon-mouth contrarians, plucking upside down and backwards letters from Yankee job cases with long vegan fingers -

48-point woodblock Bembo cap O cap N cap E; en-quad; screamer, first line - centered on one hundred ivory linen-laid deckle-edge

to the duct-taped Multilith 1250 offset presses with the T-51 heads -

cap B cap I cap G, en space, screamer, second line - run the Pantone 146 in the head, 500 coated stock plus twenty-five overage and keep that powder dusting the feeder

to the 4-color 11-by-17 Chandler & Prices workhorsing away from the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters

cap B cap A cap R cap B you hear me you clean that platen before you ink up, that gold ink needs to pop I say pop off the poster

to the 1200 by 1200 dot matrix color printers of drive-by strip malls that trumpet 500 business cards While You Wait

cap E cap C cap U cap E, en space, screamer, third line - Bodoni small caps with 120% character expansion

and the radio

Folks there’s been nothing like it and if the organizers have their way there won’t BE nothing like it not never again it’s the One ...

and the TV spots

We interrupt our regular programming for a Public Service Announcement - your local location of the One Big ...

and the full page ads in newspapers circulars pennysavers in-house organs and yearbooks, and the inserts in yellow pages feed catalogs seed catalogs bow and arrow deerhunt magazines and those devoted to wrestlers too and so forth

You Won’t Want to Miss This One: the One Big ...

and the billboards, still effective in their target demographic which needs all the saturation possible, frankly, because this one needs a lot of selling

BARBECUE – In letters of red fire writhing on matte ebony 60 by 100 foot in the middle of wheatfields cornfields hayfields or crap land left vacant that yanked drivers’s heads upwards from the unending long double yellow line, some faded in the sun but anyhow

One Big Barbecue

Well that first part was okay, who doesn’t want to tuck into a plate or five of free barbecue - that was the word over fences at streetcorners bars by the frozen foods right in front of God and creamed corn and everybody

It was the second part as had everybody going some but wotthehell it was free, wadnit? excepting ranchers stockyards shippers slaughterers and packers who needed the sell, it was the sell as’d either convince them of the event’s ineffable Rightness (not likely) or put them firm and true in the querulous but powerless minority (possible) and that was the aim of the sell, to gentle them over the second part

And Then It’s Over

that was the second part

One Big Barbecue And Then It’s Over

and the sell rolled over the airwaves grainfields highways parking lots

Enough beef for every man woman and child across the forty-eight continental states of the US of A for every man woman and child yes indeed to eat their fill and lie down on their backs and kick their heels in the air while specially trained rotating teams of chefs sear and sizzle chops and ribs and every last part of every last beef in the US of A, bull heifer and calf will sizzle and sear on backyard grills and fifty-gallon drums set plunk down in the middle of blocks closed to through traffic and parking lots dotted with yellow ribbons and folding tables covered with oilcloth with commemorative condiment sets and there’ll be cruets made of beef hooves for every family to take home and mount on their mantelpiece mid their mementos while they rub their full past-full bellies chock-full of beef sizzled and seared in barbecue pits dug in rest areas along insterstates and everywheres at the one same time the one big barbecue: one hundred percent no strings attached absolutely free

Think they won’t flock to it? Course they’ll flock to it. There gonna be traffic in places there never was traffic on their way to the One Big Barbecue oh yes

Government’s smart on this one, sure enough, picking the hungry people to do the policing, flying them round in helicopters over the grazing acres of the West, shouting down the pilot’s headphones There’s a herd there hiding back of the cottonwoods all zealous and even trying to pick off the dairy cattle which was sacrosanct, no finger laid on a least hair of a dairy cow and a few bulls got to have a few bulls - have to hand it to the Government on this one - so there’s dairy for the next generation but most of the hungry sprung from cities where the fine distinctions between Guernsey and Charolais was, let us say, imperfectly understood and they’d holler Right down there driver next to that big red house - that’s a barn, the copter pilots’d say, a Barn! and those are Dairy cattle D-A-I-R-Y which the hungry just shrugged off, there being no need to learn the difference at this late date and rough to compute anyhow from two thousand foot up in the air and a rocketing and a bucketing Look along that stream there’s a half-dozen and the copter pilots’d shrug and steer and herd those steers toward the holding pens

Every pen designed to the specifications of the autistic genius who knew what’d keep cattle calm at close quarters of the holding pens and down the narrow aisles to the trucks that’d haul them to the slaughterhouses and even inside the slaughterhouses there was for the last time attention paid to keeping the cattle calm – never been nothing on this scale before and never would be again, the owners told the slaughterers, bought special T-shirts that said “I Survived the One Big Barbecue” in all the colors of the rainbow and every one of them extra-large as one neck after another was raised gentle and stroked gentle and sliced gentle with a sharp sharp blade

hardly felt a thing

as they was yanked to hooks once the life was gone from them and the hooks overhead moving the beeves on down the line to the butchers

which any community as submitted a petition with greater than two thousand verifiable addresses was eligible to slaughter their own at a ratio of one beef to every 50 persons so there was small kosher and small halal slaughterhouses, sheds really, but the proper chanting and ritual went down as satisfied the petitioners, the Government pulled out every last sensitive stop on this one

even the enviromennaliss coulden complain you know? after all those years of screaming how the cattle was destroying the riparian ecosystems of the American West and how the land was stretched way Way past its grazing capacity with all them beeves running round on it with their sharp ungulate hooves trampling and muddling and shitting till the methane in the bottomlands was like to turn a small child blue in the face, after all those years of hollering about topsoil rinsing off the cornfields that was destined for the beeves and the topsoil rinsing off the hayfields that was destined for the beeves, after all those years of protecting railroad right-of-ways as native grass easements well now they couldn’t, don’t you see, turn round and protest that beeves was getting their necks cut

and don’t you doubt for a minute that the pork and poultry people was rubbing their hands and drawing up plans for new stys and coops you can take that one to the bank

an unlikely alliance but the Government held it together, the hungry and the Greenpeacers and the small livestock raisers, the Government counted on the greedy bellies of the US of A to gorge till every last beef was bones and fat till the fat was carted off for soap and the bones was carted off for gelatin and glue and even the innards was boiled down for consomme, Lord they was eating consomme in every bistro and diner of this great nation for months to come after the One Big Barbecue, the Government counted on the US bellies stretching to capacity and going past that and they was right to count on our greed, say it with pride we don’t push back from the table while there’s food still on it nosir

special trains and buses and caravans carried any leftovers

schools let out and banks closed and the post office quit delivering mail in fact the entire country ground to a halt till the last beef was eaten down to the last marrow sucked down to the last eye popped into the last foreign-born mouth

not to mention the yard sales that surrounded the Barbecues and again you have to hand it to the Government as provided tables labels markers all free for the taking so people could unload reload swap dicker bargain barter and court - there’s no counting the number of marriages sprung from the Big Barbecue - till every last Seal-A-Meal had found its natural home

and the Salvation Army come through after and sifted the leftover piles - the coordination was tremendous, the Government didn’t fool around with no military contractors on this one nosir they handed the coordination over to experienced bake-salers and such, mamas with hips that was used to yes-ma’am and wouldn’t take no lip from no one, took those women and hooked them up with light-shunning internet geeks which made a combo you couldn’t beat it with a stick - and it was they summoned the Salvation to come the next day and haul off whatever was worth a plugged nickel

but that’s getting ahead of the story

which was the one big story in the lower 48 for several weeks there in the summer, the recipe sections alone, romping in the knowledge that they’d soon be pulped seeing as how publishing companies wasn’t going to waste money printing beef recipes when in the time soon to come there wouldn’t be hardly any beef to kill and cut and wrap and cook, no more than the bull calves dropped by the Jersey Guernseys Holsteins from Vermont to Santa Fe and those would be few enough, surely

and in the intellectual organs of this great nation a fervent of editorials lauding the regionalism that rose from the Big Barbecue so that, as they said, “the seeming homogeneity of this nation is ripped as if a veil and the underlying loyalty to place revealed” a lot of long words to say that each Barbecue was a local barbecue

with parades in New Orleans leading to barbecue pits under live oaks and special sauces and cooking methods and peppers and file

in Phoenix every chop covered in three concentric pineapple rings and the committee as decided that inspecting every pit for same

in New York City chefs working right there in Union Square by the Greenmarket on medallions in pomegranate reductions

in San Francisco the stir-frys in woks big as VW bugs

in California scientists standing by to ascertain the beef was 120% safe

in Savannah, Georgia the Spanish moss swaying in the gentle breeze while ladies shuffled to and fro serving the menfolk in their gray uniforms with the yellow sashes and the underprivileged too of course but those last not with their own hands and the sauce there too a secret

in Lincoln, Nebraska whole beeves laid on beds of corn and covered with blankets of husks

in Boston the beef cut into frugal strips and quick-seared but flying off the grills in the same ratio of pounds per person as anywhere else till every throat was parched as a Colorado riverbed

when they paused and looked round and took a breath and strove with themselves and took another bite

washed down by vats of lemonade cider spring water, garnished with the herbs and fruits of the field, covered by blessing palms and canvas tents and striped awnings and oak leaves quivering on old cracked limbs, grilled over charcoal mesquite driftwood infra-red propane and even a solar oven here and there

and chewed and swallowed, some burped, some fanned themselves with flyers, wiped the children’s greasy faces with dirty paper towels, looked at the meat still uneaten and now the brass bands and string quartets kicked in, spurring flagging appetites to take another bite to remember the starving Armenians Europeans Africans the starving people from elsewhere not here not in the US of A there wasn’t any starving

not on the day of the One Big Barbecue, that was for certain

the music jigging jolting their stomachs to prepare for another bite and another and

another

and another

till by coaxing and shaming and banking always on the lovely innocent greed that makes this country what it is, and never disappointed in banking on it, the piles of beef became piles of bone and fat and gristle and innards that a civilized nation could push to the edge of the plate and scorn and what is this country if not a civilized one?

nobody at the Barbecue could answer that one in the negative which might be in part imputed to their being gorged past bearing which both science and the Bible will tell you puts a bit of a damper on critical thought in fact heads were nodding from the Gulf Stream waters to the New York island

but it was warm enough that everybody could sleep in tents they could and that’s just what they did - again you have to hand it to the Government, their preparation for the Barbecue was just outstanding, nothing to do with upcoming elections whatsoever, doubtless - rolled into huge tents and laid themselves down on cots air mattresses futons foam pads straw mats and closed their eyes and commenced to snoring

at which signal the SWAT teams moved in - ample portions having been set aside for them in microwavable disposable packets - and torched the piles of bones etc. and paper plates towels tablecloths etc.

using military secrets to turn those putrescible heaps into smoldering ash at a touch

which they then vitrified into building blocks light as pumice solid as concrete an expensive process developed by enviromennaliss in their think tanks but hang the expense when it was imperative that there be no evidence whatsoever when the sleepers in the tents awoke

who when they woke saw nothing but stacks of pale grey blocks two foot square with a sign on each saying “Government Property: Do Not Touch” so of course - and the Government had planned for this, they was hugging themselves as they watched on remote video as they tucked down their microwavable portions of filet mignon - soon as the sleepers woke stretched looked round saw there was no one from the Government in sight of course they snuck a block or three in the back of their pickups car trunks carriages bicycle racks and took them on home

saving the Government a pretty penny in disposal costs

where they lay round patting their bellies popping antacids groaning some waiting mostly

till the beef - how to say it politely - till the food worked its way out of their systems

and it was over.

In the arid West the grasses undiscouraged by 150 years of being nibbled down to the ground pushed new blades into the sun, streams eddied round piles of cowshit washing them grain by grain away, pushed trampled banks crumb by crumb into slopes that a grass could sprout from and then shrubs and then trees all of it slowly, and fields that had been pushed into corn were allowed to relax in soy and alfalfa, and fields that had been into hay were allowed to bloom wild with deep roots that brought up the old stored good in the soil, and slaughterhouses began to decompose and stockyards began to decompose and feedlots began to decompose as it began to sink in that it was over.

The Government set up support groups of and for the slaughterers and meat processors and stockyard workers and such so they could tell their stories over and over to the few people who’d want to hear them till their stories was told for the last time and they too raised their heads and looked round at the wide world for a new line of work because after all this is a country of change eternal.

Outside those specialties that most people never think on the people of the US of A moved on, it’s our nature to move on, we don’t reckon much to the past, the people walked out of their houses trailers apartment buildings etc. once the beef was worked out of their systems and went to fastfood like always but ate chicken or soy burgers and went to restaurants the same as they had but ate pork or stir-fry tofu and shopped for groceries just like they’d done since time began but bought fish or lamb or duck and took it home and cooked it

chatting over the phone or fence about the change they said there was One Big Barbecue and Now It’s Over.

And buffalo roamed on the short-grass prairie it was not a pipe dream they were there shaking their shaggy heads

And larks rose up from the prairie and bobwhites sang from wildrose thickets

And fish came back to the rivers and the streams

And salamanders slithered in the cool mud of kettle ponds for no practical purpose

And dragonflies darted over clear water and laid their eggs on reeds along the edges

And no Brazilian trees were toppled to make pasture for McDonald beeves

And the worn earth went about repairing itself now that trompling chewing weight was lifted from it

And the ozone layer’s holes began very slowly to repair themselves now that farting shitting weight of methane was gone

And songs were made of the vanished beeves and protests were voiced about the rich getting all the beef calves dropped by the dairy cattle and each graduate was given one ten-ounce steak at Commencement and eventually grandparents put their grandchildren on their knees and told them that once there was One Big Barbecue and Now It Was Over.

While coming home to NYC from Seattle in 2002 with my new husband in a way overloaded car that groaned up the Rockies through streams trampled to graygreen mud, I passed the 40 mph time with performance art: enough with half-measures! One Big Barbecue ... And Then It’s Over.~Anna Mockler