By Eric Le Roy
Content 18+ I remember working in a pub in Crawley, near Gatwick airport in London. Many years ago. I was by then probably in my early 30s. Yet, as they say, ‘everybody gets old, but you can stay immature forever.’ That would have been me back then.
I had lived in Bath during the 1970s, returned to the US to do a Master’s degree at the University of Florida, then got nostalgic for my old life in England. I knew a woman I had met at Bath University who had been working for British Airlines for a long time and had bought a house close by the airport. She now had an administrative job. I contacted her, suggested a future life together, and she invited me to stay with her.
I knew immediately it wouldn’t work. No sooner had we arrived at the front door of the small but tidy and potentially cozy house she had recently bought than she announced, “I have purchased some dead animal if you are hungry.” That’s when I knew she had become a vegetarian.
I have learned to stay away from vegetarians, especially women. There are two main reasons for this: (1) they adopt a tone of moral (I guess) superiority over beef-eating, blood-slavering, molar-and-bicuspid ripping heathens who haven’t passed beyond the stage of pagan orgies and human sacrifice; and (2) they never shut up about it. They always try to make you feel guilty.
I have found that there are many one-trick ponies in this world. By this I mean people whose entire identity seems to fall under the heading of a ‘single story’. If they are Black, everything they do or say seems connected to that. Some seem obsessed with it. Gays never stop talking about being gay. Feminists inevitably steer the conversation to the abusive behavior of men. And the vegetarians I have known always talk disparagingly about my appetite for dead animals. They are especially fond of pointing out what they see as my hypocrisy: “If you love animals so much, why do you eat them?”
If I stay in any kind of relationship with people like this for more than a few meetings, the subject always comes up. And if I object or try to defend myself, well then, I am being ‘defensive’. I feel like a sitting duck for anyone with a cultural, race, or gender-based grievance because it is automatically assumed that I am immune to all the bad acts and put-downs that are part of their daily diet.
Anybody who reads this might say on the subject of race, gay and lesbian, and feminism: “Yes, but these people are all oppressed and marginalized. They have no choice but to think about their race or gender because they are subject to discrimination, whereas you (meaning me) are not.” And it is true that I don’t get up everyday and start thinking about being white, straight, and how likely I am to get sexually assaulted on my way to the bus stop. However, in my meanderings about the planet – and taking into account what I have observed – I really think that we are inclined to “see what we want to see and disregard the rest” – as Simon and Garfunkel sang in their great song “The Boxer.”
If you think of yourself as a victim – if you define yourself that way – then before long you begin to see ghosts in your closet and hitchhikers along the road at night, whether they are there or not.
Another thing that I have discovered is that if you know what a person thinks about one thing, some public issue, for instance – like abortion, capital punishment, deportation of illegal immigrants – you can pretty much guess what they think about everything else. I mean, when was the last time you ‘engaged’ with someone who is an advocate of Veganism but who also believes that they should bring back the electric chair and turn criminals into bacon on national TV at halftime of the Super Bowl? Or one who enjoys attending rainbow parades but on the side keeps a cherished collection of military interrogation methods?
No. Most people – rely on it – vote a straight ticket. There is no conflict within them that allows for something to be right and wrong at the same time. It’s all one way traffic. And as for my eating dead animals, I would offer this feeble excuse: Anything I can directly defend, I will. If I can do nothing, I block it out of my mind.
I have seen how pigs and chickens are crammed into crates and cages where they can barely breathe and sent to the slaughter. I have seen the terrified expressions on the faces of the pigs and piglets, and I have wished with all my heart that I could take a gun and liquidate every human being in the building. I have seen my own mortality in pigs’ terror, and if I thought and thought and thought about it, I would go insane. I want to murder the humans and set the animals free. But then…. that very night I sit down with other people and feast on chicken wings and pork chops for dinner.
I feel helpless but I also feel hungry. I hate my unwillingness to be a martyr for what I believe in. So I say, cravenly: “They are all going to be killed anyway. There is nothing I can do to stop it.” Then I pick up a fork.
And to make a big deal out of protesting seems like grandstanding. But it eats at my conscience. Who am I? – I ask myself. Or, maybe more apt: What am I?
Anyway, I was working in the pub one evening in Crawley when one of the barmaids and I got to talking about literature, and I mentioned that I was writing a novel. (Probably the same one I had been working on since I was a toddler.)
“What’s it about?” she asked.
I have always felt at a loss when asked something like this. Now I could say that it’s because my characters and their conflicts are so fucking complex that it is impossible to explain in one evening. Or week. But really – and somehow I guess most writers are like this: it’s because, having written it (or tried to), I have nothing left in the tank to inspire me to go through it all again and attempt to make sense of it to someone whose question may have been sincere, but who more than likely was just trying to be polite – and if you really launch into a detailed elucidation of all the nuances you have shoe-horned into your work, you see this subtly woebegone “Oh, shit, why did I ask?” look creep across their faces. And who can blame them?
So to cut it short, I said, “I dunno. I guess it’s about a guy trying to find himself.”
Big mistake. With cutting British insight, she replied, wearily, “You Americans are always trying to find yourselves.”
I kind of laughed it off (“Yep, that’s us”), but it stayed with me, and, obviously, it still hasn’t left. That’s because she spoke the truth, albeit in a way that was a tad belittling and a wee bit condescending. We Americans are always ‘trying to find ourselves’. But I guess that’s why Brits have gap years. Maybe military service is supposed to help with ‘finding’ oneself. Even rehabs, detention centers and jails. Pilgrimages to holy cities and meditation treks into the mountains. Yeah, we are all trying to find ourselves, although the majority of the world just finds itself in a trick of shit that doesn’t leave much time for navel gazing.
And let’s just be honest. Many young people whose parents have the money to cover their prodigal son’s or daughter’s ‘growing pains’ are nothing but a bunch a of lazy, self appeasing, selfish, ego-driven, complacent, horny, unfocused fuckers who need a kick in the ass more than they need a gap year. Well, that’s how I was.
But one must find oneself.
I have allowed bitter mirth to slide into this article because, well, because I have become a sickening, cynical jokester in my declining years. But, putting the weak comedy routine aside, ‘finding oneself’ is a serious and necessary business in life. And in this sense, race, gender, what you ‘identify’ as, and how toxic people like me supposedly are – present me with nothing that I cannot talk back to. And why is that?
Well, you see, I can play the Old Age Card. That’s right: Ageism. I am a victim of it. It assaults me every day. And its essential meanness and cruelty is camouflaged by the soft skill with which it is applied: neglect. It’s like if you wind up in a nursing home, the staff can beat the hell out of you or they can just stop feeding and cleaning you. Either way, it’s part of the Elimination Game. Everybody who was once robust in their youth, found desirable by love objects, and for whom life was a panacea of options – anyone who has seen those taken-for-granted gifts fade away – is aware of the process. If you look in the mirror you shouldn’t be surprised if nothing looks back at you.
People lose interest in you while pretending not to. They are too polite, a sure sign that they consider you irrelevant.They offer you their seat on the bus as if you were about to collapse when in fact you are hopping from one leg to the other trying to control a raging hard-on. Or, as you are deep into some explanation or expression of an opinion (however, clear-sighted and on target), they make an excuse and move away.
Probably, the most excruciating twist of the knife occurs when women look past you or through you like you’re not there. Or, catching sight of your eyes resting on them for a moment, they get this irritated look like a mosquito just landed on their brow, as if you were some kind of Peeping Tom or Sick Voyeur, and they quickly look away, wiping their eyeballs clean of the bacteria of your brief admiring stare. Fear of contagion, I guess. And you realize that you have ceased being a man and turned into a potential viral infection.
You speak of the hypocrisy of a meat-eater who professes a love for animals? What about the sheer phoniness of those who categorize you and try to put you out to pasture because of your age, even when you show that you can outwork them and produce better results? That doesn’t matter. “You try to fool us into thinking you are still young enough to run with the pack. But we know better. We see the rope-like veins in your ancient hands, and we can smell old age in your sweater. Go now, please. Go from us.”
Youth is a country club of imperious exclusivity; yet, it is also – and this can never be denied – a wonderful vineyard where beauty meets beauty, and where people beyond the ordinary imagination have mutual orgasms that even Olympian gods would be jealous of. It’s true. It’s a shuddering fact, and the earth trembles beneath me at the thought of them. Was I like that once? It seems I was. Not among the best and most gorgeous of course. They fucked in the palace; I fucked at the Budget Motel. My everlasting satisfaction comes from the fact that my strumpets felt just as good as their courtesans and goddesses, maybe even better.
But then, one day, like a creeping cancer, one is Old – or the world declares you old. Old love objects turn to stone, and you get the feeling that everybody is secretly laughing at you. Back in the day, love would turn to hate, and then hate could turn back into love. But either way, it was a maelstrom of passion.
Indifference is the vulture that eats the guts and eyes out of both. When you understand that, short of committing mass murder (which you are too tired to do or even think about as more than a fantasy), nobody is really paying attention anymore, a combination of rage and despair grows within you, like a malignancy suddenly spreading into an army in your arteries, your brain, and your spirit. You understand the pained bewilderment of the dog abandoned by the side of the road by a family he once thought he belonged to.
And then you understand the way the herd sacrifices its old and helpless members to the wolfpack. At first, it may be hard to understand as the wolves close in that they are only doing what comes naturally and you shouldn’t blame them; your enemies are those who abandoned you, and it occurs to you that they never were friends at all. They ran with you, they were part of a passing parade; they were false, and only the wolves are real.
The wolves are honest as they grin at you. The herd tramples away in the distance.
This is why I still eat meat. I play a double role: I am meat for others too. And I know that when the wolves come, I will find myself at last. I will call out to them as they encircle me, their fur-coated bodies rigid with silvery expectation and their eyes beautiful like primordial marbles of fire. On their behalf I will experience the momentary insanity of death, the shrugging away of bones and the ever-closing eyelid of the eternal as I offer my life, my breath. I will become the meat that is eaten; I will yield myself up as a brief repast for the truly needy. That will be my apology to the animals.
The herd-people will say, “Well, he got old and died.” As if I was a tire that lost air and lay flat on the asphalt. As though I never lived.
But the wolves of death are different; in fact, they are more like life than life itself. They rip me into ecstasy and fill their wild stomachs with all that I ever was. They bark and howl.
They make me young again because they consume me as if I were something fresh and much to be desired.
