print previewback MATTHEW GAVIN FRANK
Making Weight of the Okie Sirloin
Uncle was a wrestler in Stillwater, slept in silver plastic suits to sweat out the weight, always made 103. He was the smallest on the team but had the largest appetite. He talks now, on the couch—his initials finger-inked in the dust on the windowpane, hovering over his head like some ambitious mountaineer of a caption—of driving with his father pre-sunrise across the panhandle to Goodwell for the meets, the talk radio station droning meditatively about the Sooners—our adopted nickname, purloined from the “illegal” white land-grabbers who stole the choicest parcels from the “legal” white land-grabbers who stole them from the Creek and the Seminole—or droning about Will Rogers, or interviewing a medical research technician at Oral Roberts University who, as Uncle—young and exhausted and starving in the passenger seat and filling a Styrofoam cup with his spit, emptying it out the window, and filling it again: anything to make weight—imagines her juggling scalpels and biohazard bags filled with untold excised horrors, declared, “This is the only Christian medical school in the nation and I wanted to be trained with the Christian perspective, not a more secular perspective,” to which his father, driving, Uncle assures me, now old and fat and sneezing cherries of blood into a peach Puffs Plus, his window initials dusted over, replied, “Does that mean she aced Laying on of Hands 101?” or droning on about oil dropping to ten bucks a barrel, and skyrocketing unemployment, and all manners of starvation, before segueing into Albert E. Brumley’s “I’ll Fly Away,” (He was from Spiro, boy, Uncle says now as a point of pride, so much lovely gospel leaking from a town that once based its notions of prosperity on the number of cotton gins it possessed—one in 1901, a whopping three in 1910 . . . ) and Uncle, just a skinny boy known for his ribs, clavicles, “backbones like a winged monkey” (so he self-identifies), downturned his spit cup for the fourth time as they passed through regions known as the Cimarron Strip and No Man’s Land, something cracking open in Uncle’s belly as they crossed the 100th Meridian—a malign ignition toward adulthood perhaps, or some notion of adulthood as dreamt during a night of plastic shuffling against other plastic, the sweat in his ears drowning out all heartbeat, blood flow—or perhaps it was only such a hunger, the sort that would inspire Uncle, after weighing-in, after a fat man in cutoffs and a Stetson inked 103 onto Uncle’s boy-shoulder in black grease marker, telling him, “A wink of an eye or a handshake is the cattleman’s word,” or telling him, “You’ve got to keep your eye on the bottom line,” or telling him, “Things go in a boom-bust cycle here,” or telling him nothing, to flee with his father into downtown Goodwell, to pass the No Man’s Land Museum and its pioneer relics and its gift shop peddling books called Angels in the Dust and Keeping It Together, to pass the site where, so many years later, two Union Pacific trains would collide head-on, before bursting into flames, the diesel-fueled fireball welding the locomotives together, scalp-to-scalp, in some unholy surgery, as employees leapt like sparks from the cars, to stop at a restaurant called the Rodeo for breakfast, to order, after all that sweat, spit, illusion of fever and implosion and winning wrestling moves called high crotches and fireman’s carries and double-leg takedowns and throws and inside cradles, the Rodeo’s famed 4x4x4x4—that is: 4 eggs, 4 pancakes, 4 strips of bacon, and 4 slices of what Uncle now calls, his eyes bloodshot, his index finger tracing new identities onto the air, the couch cushions complaining, the best fucking Okie Sirloin in No Man’s Land, and he closes his eyes, and the couch cushions shut up, and he’s making weight again, and here, in his filthy one-bedroom, all reward hisses its flavor, as if slow-cooked, as if made with all long-gone love.
~
The Okie Sirloin is, of course, derogatory, and is, of course, smoked and barbecued bologna, and is, of course, derived from the famed mortadella sausage of Bologna, Italy, itself named for the mortar in which the pork and lard are pulverized until married, a tool which is itself, of course, derived from the Latin mortui or mortem, or dead or death, the mortar being the place where things go to die, the sausage itself named for the subsequent corpse that we now eat, as Uncle once did, voraciously and plentifully beside our buttermilks and over-easies.
~
Too easy: jokes about the mouth and Oral Roberts. Harder: picking the dust from our bologna, the lard from our earth.
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Here, we whip the pork fat before folding it into the meat. This allows us, when engaging all manners of death, the illusion of clouds, some cumulous paradise around which entire curricula are developed at the “only Christian medical school in the nation.”
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Fuck the cathedrals, Uncle says, here, to eat our barbecued bologna is to be closer to God.
~
According to the Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, the term Okie “became derogatory in the 1930s when massive migration westward occurred. ‘Okie’ usually described ‘white’ migratory agriculture workers; ‘Okie’ was never, or at least rarely used, about African American migrants during the Great Depression. Most migrant agricultural workers, or ‘Okies,’ were white and traveled westward from the midwestern drought and cotton-growing states.” During the Dust Bowl, when many Oklahomans fled even further west in search of a better life, California responded, in 1937, by passing an “‘Anti-Okie Law,’ making it a misdemeanor to ‘bring or assist in bringing’ any indigent person into that state.” Uncle runs his good hand over his shoulder, feels for his old weight there. Try as we might, he says, there are some things we can never dignify, not even with all that smoke.
~
According to Jane and Michael Stern, in The Lexicon of Real American Food, Okie Sirloin “is a full cylinder of bologna that smokes low and slow in the pit until the outside is a beautiful dark bronze and the inside still weeps garlicky juices,” and Uncle wants to know what this has to do with indigence, or the Cherokees, or the sort of state that today prides itself on the high percentage of resident Native Americans—the highest in the U.S!—when that population is 4.6%.
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The Sterns persist: “barbecued bologna is almost always sopped with tangy red sauce,” and Uncle sits up suddenly, as if waking from a plastic dream, and assesses himself, searching in vain for his beautiful bronze, for the source of his tangy weeping. All he finds are cylinders.
~
Pit cooking allows us the illusion of resurrection, a return to this world a little crispier and rendered of our fat.
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If the pit, Uncle says, then no grave, and if the mortar, it’s just the pig that dies, and there are no sarcophagi in the sort of paradise that hides itself, like the head of one train in the head of another, in our bologna.
~
His ears are cauliflower, his heart mortadella. If he had a ceiling fan, it would be groaning.
~
The clock on the wall above the apartment’s filthiest window shuns the ticking, instead says, dust-dust-dust, marking time with the earth’s smallest pieces, its shed weight, its sweat and spit. Where the fuck’s the mortar, Uncle says, I can’t see the mortar, and we don’t know if he’s planning to cook for himself for the first time since Aunt died, or if he’s saying that, in approaching the coffin, we are less and less indigent, and migration can mean something else entirely.
~
Uncle searches the amoebas on his ceiling for some sort of answer, transcribes a grocery list like a joke. We all know he will not be buying these items. We all know that we can’t stay here forever, unless we keep paying. Three floors below us, someone chars their bologna over redbud wood and the skinny bones of the scissor-tailed flycatcher, whose own sternum resembles the spider.
~
Look there: in Oklahoma City, in 1932—the air going thick and brown, the children slaughtering rabbits for supper—Carl Magee invents the parking meter. Look there: an infant chokes on her own blood, or a filthy moth, or both, her grandmother crying muddy tears, spitting muddy spit. We now have to pay to abandon our cars, feed our nickels into the machine and twist. This, the Oklahoma Historical Society says, “is a modern solution to a modern vexation, parking congestion,” and we all feel something tighten in our chests, growing the sorts of narratives that we’ll never fully dislodge.
~
At Uncle’s feet, the Tegenaria atrica dust spider builds a web in the lint between his toes. Unlike us, it knows little of its own name, how it’s meant to recall the dark, feral recesses of the heart.
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When we say recess, Uncle thinks we’re saying abscess. Regardless, a spider is making a home of him, documenting his weight and the weight of the things it must kill to sustain itself.
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Somewhere in there, the language of the living pig has been transcribed. And, here, the planet speaks in dust, its mother tongue.
~
Darwin, perhaps, on the high school dance floor where Uncle and Aunt first kissed: Her breath webbed itself dendritically, in a circular direction over my throat, as if needing to catch anyone, cutting its losses. I close my eyes and don’t reach for her hand. She will remember me then, years earlier—decades—and will think of rose dresses with puffed shoulders, of memory blimped with its own fat, and of lipstick.
~
Instead of cucumbers, we put cooled slices of derogatory bologna over our eyes and sleep and dream of leaner times, which we’ve since buried beneath decades of the fattiest of the sausages.
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We’re in the middle of the country. A way station, intermediate and smoky and maybe a little disastrous. Of course, Uncle says, we were the first state to charge for limbo.
~
With Magee’s idea and crude model, Oklahoma State University’s engineering department sponsored a parking meter design competition, offering $160 to the winner. The students’ designs all proved insufficient, so they took the contest to greater Stillwater. A professor and his former student created the guts, and a local plumber built the shell. The first meter was named Black Maria, after, according to local lore, Maria Lee, a “large and fearsome” African-American woman who ran an Oklahoma City boarding house, and who helped the police with their “more difficult prisoners.” The prototype was manufactured by the MacNick Company of Tulsa, who previously made only timing devices used to explode nitroglycerine in oil wells. (The then-president of the company went on the record, calling the parking meters, “neat”). When the first Black Maria went up on July 16th at the corner of Robinson and First, Oklahomans were outraged, calling the device un-American, and the protests were so violent they received national attention, the side effect of which resulted in parking meters spreading throughout the country with the dust. Soon, en masse, we started paying money to stop moving. Two years later, Magee was arrested for manslaughter, and we began saving our nickels by eating more fat than meat, by keeping on, staying mobile, even though we are tired.
~
We feed our meters. Uncle says, while we’re doing this, if there ain’t something in your mouth, you’re being inefficient.
~
We want Uncle to call bullshit after he says, if we pay for something, we treasure it more, but he doesn’t. Says Oklahoma City psychologist Mary Pepping, “[Oklahoma] has a very high-caliber group. I was stuck by the fact that so many cities have Indian names. It was amazing to see an eighty-year-old man with long hair and young children in costume. Their ethnic pride is neat.” Here, we know Uncle would say something if his mouth wasn’t full of bologna. Either the spider is dead, or lying in wait.
~
Here, the pig looks to resurrect itself from the casing, the embalming by its own fat, the char, the weeping of garlicky juices. Uncle can’t see out the window, but the sky is gathering electricity. It may take this sort of lightning, or a bolt at least as powerful . . .
~
We use the word spam like we use the word bologna, both of which originated as delivery systems of meat to the poor—meat coupled with the corresponding animal’s less desirable parts: humble, dubious, junk meat, our mouths the mailboxes, the stunned-dumb slots. Ask Oral, Uncle, Maria: we have always been full of it.
~
The psychology of neat: in the article, “Neatness a Sign of Godliness—or Compulsion?” clinical psychologist Amie Ragan (pronounced Ragin’) says, “[Neatness is] a problem when your need for constant order causes you extreme distress,” though psychotherapist Tom Corboy (pronounced Core Boy) believes, “anxiety has evolutionary value,” and Uncle can’t tell if he’s speaking of the anxiety of Pepping’s long-haired geezer, or dressed-up kids, or the pigs who wept at the slaughter, or the Okies who stopped moving and therefore stopped being Okies, or the first person to slip a nickel into a meter and buy just enough time to stop and stand still and breathe, or the mortar that grinds all of this shit together into the sort of paste that just will not die, that will charge us its fee, Uncle says, in extremity, for-fucking-ever.
~
Oral Roberts mapped onto Whitman and incanted, as if, through Uncle’s bologna breath: There is something of the mouth that calls to the pigs in the uniform of sleep as a bird collecting the weight of a flock, an ant who, when threatened with a fall, discovers that it can spin a web like a spider.
~
In all communion here is a strain of distress. It’s hard to tell, though, if it’s extreme, or not.
~
The laying on of hands is a practice both symbolic and formal. Here, even foundations are ephemeral, and mean something else.
~
Okie Sirloin communes with the pigs of our state, and therefore, everything the pig ate. There, in its stomach, dust, a handful of nickels, a message in a bottle written from one migrant worker to another, and the body of water it had to cross to get to Oklahoma. Uncle’s final love letter mailed to a hospital . . .
~
We can now eat our junk sausage in No Man’s Land, together . . .
~
Bologna is nonsense, bologna is bullshit, bologna is frustrating and funny. The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing depended on the detonation of nitroglycerin, and of laughing gas.
~
Of course: Spiro, Oklahoma is famous for the Spiro Mounds, a Pre-Columbian Caddoan Mississippian archeological site, the principal portion of which is called the Great Mortuary. In the 1930s, looters raided the burial ground and sold the human remains to local collectors, most of which remain lost in the living rooms of their descendants. Among the carvings the looters left behind: the Birdman engraved on a conch shell, the Great Serpent engraved on a gorget, and the Spider with pinwheeling viscera engraved on polished stone. Uncle looks to his plate, the leavings of barbecued bologna. There is nothing left that can still be called an artifact.
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Bologna is plastic.
~
We cook and cook against poverty, as the wind outside, like the bologna, goes great and cylindrical, and entire. Tomorrow, The New York Times will use words like vast and debris-clogged and reduced and twisted metal and fallen beams and fused and funnel and prayer. One interviewee will lift briefly from the earth before dropping into a ditch and use the word weightless, and Uncle will say nothing of the body encased and floating in plastic, of a dream of the cold tips of grease markers, of permanence. He will laugh, and then he will not.
~
The singlet, the headgear, the kneepads. How the things meant to protect us are the things, here, that pin us, pin us down.
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The old joke: what happens when the flycatcher catches no flies, but the spider? Uncle says that the fact that there is no punchline is the point. He says he dreamt we walked together through the destruction, unwrapping bologna lunches from greasy parchment. He says he dreamt this a long time ago, but says nothing of birthright, of how much we have to pay for access to our own tragedies.
~
Our jokes are proof, Uncle says. Like the swan, the flycatcher goes on, but is now tainted. There, through the window above the bookshelf, the coffin. There in the pond, the outlet the pig has been looking for. I don’t know if Uncle’s thinking of marriage, or food, or both, or neither. Trains, maybe. Or their engines. Death does not make us innocent, he says finally, We are a species of records.
