8) Eat Food Club

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Sally

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Sally imagined the Eat Food Club as a nighttime thing: dinners in a dark dining room; maybe even candle lit. Something like that for sure. All the same, here she was in the daytime outside a fast-food restaurant that had been out of business for about ten years, sitting on an orange plastic bench next to a crusty piece of equipment they were trashing. There are long-gone soldiers and non-military personnel who probably give this place about as much thought as anything else about their days here when the camp was an Army supply depot, but they would probably remember this expensive shack as the most civilian thing. (‘Are there any “Would you like fries with that” places in prisons anywhere? Did the Nikkei have burgers and shakes out there in the desert in 1942?’)

There have been a few times when Jack reluctantly worked very short stints in the foodservice industry. I had heard him say something once about a “bunch of brats making mud pies under fluorescent lights,” instead of “…out in the backyard.” Now everybody was working with flashlights and portable lights on long extension cords, besides whatever daylight made it into the deepest recesses of the place. The big windows in what had been the public areas took in a lot of sun. A little of that sunlight made it to where some of them were working all the way in the back.

Sally had been starting to think out loud at Davie and I; what it might be like doing “sumptuous” lunches and breakfasts in this sadly hard-edged, cheap remnant of the wrong kind of restaurant. She was wondering about sunny mornings and brunches, and what to do about covering the windows, depending.

All the clocks had been set back an hour for daylight savings time the night before. She was ambivalent about the extra hour that the sun was lingering in the west from where we sat looking out over a couple of football fields worth of mostly-dead lawn, looking at the sky and at a shadow back from under her hand she was holding out over the ground beside her. Davie said he was thinking of golf there; about having the huge green/brown rectangle roughed out into a fairway. The image he was talking-up had a random edge of trees and tall grass; some bunkers and water hazards. Sally was thinking about it as a somewhat smaller area full of vegetables and small farm animals. When he said something about trees, she asked him where he might have seen any olives nearby. We all agreed that there were plenty of them, left over from abandoned orchards. Sally made it clear that she thought it would be appropriate to add more right here.

I had come up from along the side of the building while they were getting ready for the others to find a point to take a break. Sally and Davie were setting out some drinks and bread, cheese and fruit on one of the leftover toy table-and-umbrella things on a concrete slab out in front of the glass-and-aluminum facade. Davie had been too eager with a load of plates and I had grabbed one, before he might have dropped it. There wasn’t much shade, but the temperature was down in the mid sixties.

The last thing before lunch had been to drag the old deep-fat fryer outside to be picked up, along with the rendering tank full of waste fat that was long past rancid. Both of these smelled sweet, but not real pungent out in the open air. The congealed brown-and-gold coating on the fryer was getting shiny. The rendering tank was still around back.

We could hear and almost see Bobby, Michael, Jack and some others piling up the last of the day’s debris in front of the main counter, just inside the front doors. It had been hours of ripping out wiring and tubing: flexible electrical conduits; plastic lines for liquids with visible reinforcing mesh; lots of data cables. Everybody had been using screwdrivers, claw hammers and small crowbars to rip it all out from under counters, from under work tables and from behind partitions. Now it was in a dusty mound where people used to stand in line for burgers and fries.

The next stage would be to unbolt any other equipment that Sally wanted to do without — most of it only remotely related to food. Bobby had suggested that this loopy debris should be out where the people who would be coming to buy the used hardware could sort through it for salvage. That might save some of it from the dump. Sally and Davie had dragged the fryer out early, to be ready for an appointment with a rendering company driver. The plywood it was resting on had left a trail of wood fibers, scraped off by the edges of the reddish tile squares that covered the floor everywhere.

Nina came out from where she had been taking a break in the old office. She laid an old food-industry magazine on the table. It was open to a page with an advertisement for Yard Long Eggs. This seemed to be a tubular system for cooking them so that each slice had the perfect proportion of white and yoke for nice salads. While I glanced down at this, she said to Sally, “It’ll be Thanksgiving in a few weeks. What do you think about growing some turkeys?”

Sally was wondering, “Yeah. I’m mostly thinking about eggs and milk from, like, goats and chickens, but who’s gonna want to kill any animals for meat?” Her mind jumped to something else. “Did you know that one of the first things the pilgrims did when they got off the boat at Plymouth Rock was steal some corn that some Indians had stashed?” — then back: “How long does it take to grow a turkey anyway?”

Nina said, “Goat eggs? Listen, wouldn’t they have been a little desperate. And there was always a chance they could work things out later,”

Sally was not so sure. “We know how all that worked out.”

“Yeah, somebody neglected to check with who’s who.”

“Who’s whom,” said Jack.

“Whose is whom’s,” Nina rejoined.

Davie tossed in, “Whom’s on first?” which punctured the rhetoric side of the joke.

So then Nina got back to the subject. “Jack constantly needs to prove how bad he is and Davie’s really into that food group,” meaning the animals, “so let’s get them to mind the ‘processing.’ We’ll have to look up the life-cycles for farm animals. Keyword: ‘husbandry’ or whatever. Plenty of people will have lots to say on that.”

Sally turned to Davie. “It’s all about grass, son. You want to keep nature’s solar panels going on poultry poop? Hitting a ball with a stick is a lot more fun when the grass is short enough to find the ball you hit.”

“And what other manure shit?” Davie wanted to know, adding, “We’re going to need a couple of really really sharp axes.”

Jack came to the table, having overheard. “And a tree stump and a way to make lots of beer.”

Nina said, “Men, beer and axes. Classic tragedy.”

Sally said, “Ooo. Sounds like fun.”

The  rendering company tank-truck arrived, but I couldn’t see how they would be able to haul away the old storage thing out back, let alone the fryer. There was already a container just like the one here, on a lift attached to the truck. I mentioned this to Nina and she took it up with the driver as he was backing out.  She came back and told us, “He doesn’t know anything about the plan we had with them.”

The driver got out and came over to examine the fryer. “I would have brought a trailer…” he said, obviously wanting to spare us the details. “They gonna tear this place down or just gut it?”

Sally pushed the hair off of her forehead with the back of her hand, shading her eyes, and said, “No. We just have a different kind of food in mind.”

The driver had a derisive smile for that. “I’ve never seen a place without waste fat. You gonna try to sell all fat-free food here?”

Sally told him, “No. Just not the kind you’d be interested in.”

He left us to work it all out later. There was a lull. The conversation wasn’t going to resume, if it had to be about that. I asked Sally why we we had been talking about golf. “Have I been missing something since I’ve been back? Was this the popular pastime for you guys while I was gone?”

“It’s something Jack and Davie go off and do every once in a while,” she said. “Davie is into it and Jack goes along to give him a hard time. I’ve been out to this driving range with them a couple of times. Some of the people there actually try to get Jack to take it seriously.” She looked at him and he made and awkward double-handed gripping pantomine. “You want to torture these guys, tie them to a chair and make them watch Jack’s swing. It’s, like, blasphemous. Hands all wrong. Stance all wrong. They’re going to be all ‘follow-through’ and ‘eye-on-the-ball’ and one guy just had to step in to give Jack a few pointers and Jack tells him, ‘I’m here to hit a ball with a stick. I don’t care how it happens. Whatever happens to the ball after that is fine with me,’ and whacks at the nearest one before they can get totally out of the way.”

I asked her what the income-opps situation was there.

“There was one guy in a uniform,” she said. “I think some of these people make their own, but Bobby told me how that whole part of the opps system works. There’s some backroom stuff. Lots of people here have drifted in and out of all that. But, you know, I’m sure most of the driving-range people are just getting free buckets of balls, at best.”

I said, “Not by nabbing Davie or Jack…”

“No. They could see that Davie was with Jack and well…”

I glanced at Davie to check with him. No comment. I said, “Jack would have plenty of opps repellant going.”

“Oh yeah. Davie too, more-or-less involuntarily,” she said.

“And yet, of course, Davie wants to do the right thing…”

He sat silently, making it an open dare for us to pretend he wasn’t there. Jack stood by making imaginary swings.

The rest of the demolition crew joined us. Davie got up and came back with a folding lawn chair, while Nina was saying, “I think Davie imagines what it would be like if we could be all about golf and yet still be his friends. He won’t leave the grounds without Jack as the guide, and who knows if he would alienate the people out there any less if Jack wasn’t with him.”

“That’s our Davie,” I said.

Sally interrupted, “…sitting in the common, watching tournaments on the big screen, for hours,” as she watched Davie carefully move something on his plate.

I could picture Davie caddying for his grandfather-dad, back when there was a whole set of regular business models going for all that. I could hear some “good old days” chat that Davie would have for that part of the big “before.” I was happy enough that he didn’t seem to feel that this was the time to cheer us with all that.

At about this point, I asked whose idea it had been to turn the swimming pool into a fishpond.

Nina said, “It’s funny how that happened. It wasn’t anybody’s idea, initially. We just took over when some guys didn’t want to play with it anymore.”

I asked, “Somebody had the idea before you guys? Were they playing at anything in particular?”

She laughed. “Nothing very original. Something that was supposed to lead to swimming, somehow.”

“I guess novelty isn’t always going to demand a lot of thought. We can all hope to get lucky sometimes,” I said.

“Well, they didn’t wise-up along the way. After a while it wasn’t fun anymore. So, they walked away from it while we sat by watching.”

“And laughing,” said Bobby.

Nina frowned at this. “Real rude-boys. I think that’s when it wasn’t fun for them anymore.”

“No,” said Jack, waving off what they were saying with the palms of both hands. “It was the smell.”

Nina said, “Yeah, they were gonna tough that out at first, but it got out of hand.” She saw that I wanted more info. “They seemed to have the idea that if they got enough water in there, that would take care of the problem.”

Bobby said, “Which, as it turns out, was not the case.”

Nina went on. “Once they got the firehose out there, they had about an hour of semi-nastiness that they could just about ignore.”

I said, “Firehose…” — looking for more on this from either of them.

Nina said, “Yeah. See, at first all they had was this little garden hose that only put out enough water to puddle around the debris.”

“…of unknown origin,” Bobby added.

“Any dead animals?” I asked, half seriously.

Bobby said, “Who can say?”

I tried to run through the situation in my head. “I would have thought somebody might have already swept it out for skateboarding.”

Bobby was quick to correct my assumption about what they were dealing with. “Not that kind of pool. Diving pool. Steep sides. Not very rounded at the bottom. You’d just crash into the walls, unless you came at a close angle.

I walked around the site later on in the evening. At that stage it was a luscious-looking pond with all the greenery et cetera that you would find in the decorative ones for a backyard, except that it was huge, squared-off; neatly surrounded with a sturdy sidewalk and a couple of blank acres that I pictured as neatly trimmed grass, way back when. You could see where the divingboard tower had been — a concrete slab of its own, with a pattern of sawed-off bolts still showing. I could just make out some submerged planter structures and a few of the fish in the shining dark-green water.

Bobby went on, “Part of one end is about a foot deeper than the rest though. That’s where most of the crap was.”

I was a little incredulous. “But how fast is anything like that going to ferment?”

“You’d be surprised,” he said. “It was one of the hottest days of the year. About a hundred and ten, if you can trust the thermometers.”

“Which, of course, is what inspired the ‘project’ in the first place,” said Nina. “You can imagine what they’re thinking. They’ve got a pool. All they need is water. They’re gonna know that pools need the whole set-up for maintenance, but…”

“Later than sooner,” said Bobby.

I said, “No sense in letting long-term problems spoil the fun.”

There was more discussion of the immediate reality that the weather contributed to the event. Bobby had another technical detail about it. “The cement was so hot on the sides and the walkway that a lot of the water that hit it actually evaporated immediately.”

Nina added, “So, after an hour or so with the puny output from that tap, with the garden hose, it was less than a foot deep and they gave up.”

“Nobody could stand it out there anymore, if there wasn’t any swimming immanent. Hottest part of the day, by then,” said Sally.

“But you guys were just starting to get amused,” I suggested.

Jack said, “We don’t ask for these rivalries,” which seemed uncharacteristically defensive, coming from him.

Sally said, “By the time they found the firehose, hours later, and dragged it out there…”

Then Nina: “Not quite all the way, so there was a real nice arc to it.”

And Sally again: “It was getting dark and the day was almost cooling down, but when we all went back out for a minute to see what would happen with the big hose, the smell from the puddle was formidable.”

I was told that these guys had found a way into an unused building. I could almost imagine them setting it on fire and playing firemen instead. This part of my report would probably go into any study on “unsupervised activity” being conducted by my handlers.

Nina said, “When we finally heard them splashing around, we figured it might be safe to get back out there and check it out. There wasn’t much smell until they got out  and sat on the edge and started drying off.” She made a face about this and waited for everybody to agree. “The next day though, it was ranker than ever. Totally out of the question. They bullied one guy into jumping in and that was it,” she said, and laughed.” They left him there. We hosed him down, just to make him feel better.”

Bobby said, “Within a few days there were signs of life and a little iridescence on the surface.”

I suggested, “And yet those were the more suitable origins.”

Sally took this up. “I had heard about some bomb-crater fish ponds where the water was awful for a while, until the plant-life came in. And these people had always been growing fish in ponds. When the carpet-bombing B-52s were gone, they had vast sources of protein.”

“Vietnam?” I asked.

Bobby  said, “As it turned out, when we did the research.”

I wanted more substantiation. “Haven’t I heard that fish-farming creates its own toxicity problems?”

Bobby had info for that. “Salmon farming does. That was all about commercializing a scarce popular commodity. But tilapia works different and still tastes good too.”

Sally added, “And you work it into a whole system. You have to cycle the water in and out and run it through irrigation for stuff that’s planted in raised beds and tubs where you have composted soil and then the runoff has nutrients for the fish or what’s in the water with the fish. What they’re eating.” She waited for me to parse this. “It’s all about getting the proportions right. We put Bobby on working out what gets measured, and spreadsheets to follow.”

Bobby pretended to tip a hat to her.

“Would you ever be able to make it a pool to swim in?” I asked.

“Tricky,” said Bobby. “If you could get the things living in it down to a minimum. Just enough to keep each other’s populations under control. But you’d probably need something the size of a small lake and it wouldn’t produce much food or do all the things you need with the irrigation water.” He expanded on the implications for what they were intending. “Whatever you want to do with any one component changes what you have to do with all the others and how you loop all the interrelated cycles. It’s actually not much more work than what those guys were doing, though, once you get it figured and set up.” Then, by way of getting back to my question, “It would depend on how much actual swimming you wanted room for.”

I thought about all the small construction that might be involved — a different kind of effort than that day’s work — but I didn’t ask.

Sally made the whole idea a little more immediate. “It’s not like you have to assign somebody to clean the pool. You’re farming the loops. A swimming pool is mostly about death. This is about keeping things alive.”

“Until you want to eat them,” I suggested.

“Which is the loop about keeping us alive,” she said, to nudge all this back to the idea of sustainability — but then she had a laugh about that too. “The original thing those guys were doing would have been a good plan, if you needed lots of algae and mosquitos.”

I sang, “‘Let’s make the water turn black.’”

That got Nina’s attention. “What?” she asked, coming back from some private thought.

I said, “It’s an old Zappa/Mothers tune.”

“Oh.”

Having hopefully reassured them that I wasn’t intent on any mischief, I asked, “So what’s the plan going forward?”

“A feast,” said Sally. “Anybody here can come. We — I — want people to take responsibility for a dish or a course. We could have dinners with themes and different groups of people would cook up each course based on whatever.” Then she added with a smile, glancing around, particularly at Jack, “There’s been talk of digging a pit and roasting a piglet. I suggested we get a whole pile of stuffed Pooh characters and roast the whole thing. I can’t imagine being any less interested in eating that than eating burnt dirt, ashes and pork-flesh.”

“But you don’t want to enforce a vegetarian regimen on this ‘enterprise,’” I said.

“No. I’m not that way. I can see how animals have to be part of this whole thing. I just don’t want to eat any of them, myself. If other people can limit themselves to meat as a side dish, the system will benefit from having animals in the mix and they’ll be eating healthy enough.”

I suggested, “An underground immolation ritual might be the kind of spectacle that would bring out the crowds.” It was my duty to invoke some consideration of the general population.

Sally had a dark look for her next thought. “Yeah, I don’t think anybody is going to show up but us.” She was looking a little weary. “And y’know, Davie is gonna take that real hard,” she said, giving him a sorry smile.

Davie still had no comment. I told her I could see how that might be the case, but I didn’t say how I would be there on the occasion to keep my handlers informed on the proceedings. George would be able to see how all this met his ‘topian expectations. It would be that much more data about people here getting things done for their own sake — part of his pet “disinterest model.”

It seemed like some friendly irony might be okay. “Whadda ya think, Davie? Should I keep this all under wraps ‘til you start having to turn people away?”

Davie put his hands on the arms of his chair, elbows out, as if he was about to stand. He put his most earnest face forward as though he was about to adjourn a meeting where his proposals had gone unacknowledged, yet accepted without challenge, and said, “We shall see what we shall see.”

He was ready for the groaning and snickers, but didn’t have a smile of his own for us.