All Faculty Excerpts

The Heart is Meat: An 80s Memoir

This is an excerpt from Michael Backus's forthcoming memoir The Heart is Meat.

Dumping my dead grandmother’s 1968 Chevy Caprice across the street from where I work has been one of those mistakes that compounds by the minute. It’s still fucking there, two weeks later. On Day 4 I saluted it and said out loud, “Hello, old friend, damn good to see you,” but that now seems a mawkish bit of bravado, an attempt to deny what I could see was happening. Whatever warm feelings I’ve had for this vehicle— when I think of my grandmother driving, it is always in this car—I really need the city to come and get it. In the meantime, I avoid looking at it, keeping my eyes forward when it’s in my line of sight, the way one might when naked in front of the mirror where no good can come from looking directly.

A second problem, equally open-ended and more abstract in its way is the presumed presence of Jimmy the FDA Meat Inspector who will, if the rumors are correct, show at some point today expecting a complete and fawning apology from me over something that was, to my mind, his fault.

Tex’s first words to me this morning were, “Got your knee pads, Chub?” and it’s true some (metaphorical) cock sucking is in my future. When is not clear. Jimmy is a meat inspector, he shows when he shows, which might be in five minutes or five days. Adolf Kusy and Company is not a house that sees inspectors regularly. We cut no meat; everything comes to us already boxed. And Red (real name Jonny) from far New Jersey (in the market, there’s a Jersey City Johnny and a Staten Island John) who runs our house has just sent me to Pork Packers up on 9th Avenue for two boxes of pig knuckles, which is no one’s idea of fun.

In my defense, leaving the Caprice there made some sense. The market is dead past 2 p.m. and people dumped cars in and around 13th and Washington all the time. And the city tows fast, except as it turns out when it does not. It’s now 13 days later and it’s still sitting there, which might be okay too except the doors are gone, all the wheels, the hood, the trunk lid, the left side rocker panel, the windshield. Half the engine is missing, all eight piston cylinders are open to the air and full of (what I hope is) rainwater. There is an entire toilet bowl, seat and all, in the front seat, and bedding in the back, suggesting someone is sleeping in it at night. It sits at a canted angle because whoever took the front left tire set the nub on a wooden pallet and the other three sit on the concrete of the sidewalk, resting like a deposed king in a fairy tale reduced to wearing the barest of rags and begging for scraps.

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Reprinted with permission from Oil on Water Press. You can learn more about Michael and his work here.