My Appetite

When I was 22, I got deeply into burgers. I couldn’t tell you why. I just know that I fell in love with the classic American hamburger. I tried every variety, I went to a hundred restaurants, I spent more money than I should’ve. Do I regret it? Absolutely not. Was it always easy? That’s harder to say. This word gets used a lot, and often pretty carelessly, but when I say it was a passion, I really do mean it was a passion. Some people get into sports, some people get into drugs, some people get into poetry and are never heard from again. But for me, for a while there, it was burgers and nothing else.

For example: I once drove from DC to Atlantic City in the pelting rain just to get a burger. I’d been told of a place on the Boardwalk called Rico’s where the patties were unbeatable: flavorful, charred, a little tender, not too big. So, on a Friday afternoon, just as soon as work was over or maybe not even completely over, I got on 95 and headed north. I sped the entire way and arrived before sunset, I parked in the lot of a Trump hotel and lied to the valet about being a customer, and with my jacket raised high like a tent over my head, I bolted. I’d thought that given the rain the Boardwalk would be deserted, but it was filled with school groups and tourists. The waves were crashing on the beach and everyone was saying cheese. For a while I walked around in circles, trying to find the place and also to get my bearings, because I had never been to Atlantic City before, nor had I been to New Jersey. It all seemed pretty interesting. But then I found Rico’s. There was a long line out the door, and everyone standing in it had an umbrella except for me. I felt like an idiot. I said it out loud.

I feel like an idiot.

There are few words more endearing, more communicable across languages, than “I feel like an idiot.” Immediately the person in front of me included me under her umbrella. The person three spots up even offered me their parka.

So kind of you, I said. But thank you, I’m fine, it’s what I get for craving a burger.

It’s worth it, someone said.

The fucking best, someone else said.

I hope so, I said.

We all hoped so. If we hadn’t all driven three-and-a-half hours to get there—though who’s to say?—we were nevertheless all of us standing outside in the rain, killing time on an otherwise empty Friday evening, waiting for a hunk of meat and bread worth three times as much as the federal minimum wage.

About the eventual burger, what can I tell you? I might as well describe a single grain of salt. I don’t know what you like, how you like, if you like. I’ll say that the Jersey burger was like new music from your favorite artist. At first you can’t help but compare it to everything that’s come before. You think, Alright, okay, not so very good. But then as you listen, slowly it becomes undeniable. It becomes the only rhythm you actually want to hear. There’s a savoring. There’s a bliss. You’re reminded of how little you understand about yourself. You’re reminded of the vastness of the gulf that exists between what you claim to want and what it is you actually want. Because suddenly it’s over. And you can’t have it back. Or you can, of course you can, you can “have it your way.” But it’s never quite the same.

They weren’t all Jersey burgers; it wasn’t all fun and games and camaraderie in the rain. In fact it was a pretty vicious life. Not only because it depended upon the slaughter of hundreds and hundreds of cows, who are, after all, just another set of beings, with senses, and attachments, and a bellowing aversion to pain. But there were elements of social cruelty in the air as well, and soon my passion would lead me, perhaps inevitably, into an ancient form of struggle.

The change began innocently. As I visited (and revisited) some of the famous burger joints around the Northeast of the US, it happened that I began to notice a handful of familiar faces, customers I’d see again and again. Would it surprise you to learn that these repeat customers were almost always men? Men who came alone? Men who might have arrived wearing a sandwich board that read i am a heterosexual in gigantic block letters? Men who, more precisely, might have wanted to wear a sandwich board that read i am emphatically not a homosexual in gigantic block letters? There was a certain expression fixed on all their faces, a cool mask of disdain in which suspicion and aggression fed off each other. Don’t get too close to me, the look said, as they ate their massive burgers at their lonely little tables. I bite; I chomp.

I found myself drawn to these men. So much so that I felt compelled to approach them, one after the other. At the time, I couldn’t have explained why. I had been dating women only, all my (young) life. Women seemed to like me; I seemed to like them. If I loved the way they moved, really what I loved was the way certain women inhabited their bodies, as if freely, loosely, with a touch of arrogance, a sense of irony. But men were something else. Men annoyed the shit out of me. Most of them seemed like goons. But then I couldn’t deny that most of my closest friends were dudes, boyish ones like me w/beards and occasional glasses. Maybe I thought I was surrounded by too many doofuses my own age; maybe I told myself that I was in search of an older male “mentor,” someone suitably manly. But I wouldn’t have been able to elaborate. In fact, I would have changed the subject—say, to the latest burger I’d had. This was also how I entered into conversations with these strangers.

I’d say, didn’t I see you at such and such Restaurant? Isn’t your picture on the wall at Somebody’s Grill?

Maybe? they’d say. I don’t know, who cares, who’s asking?

These men will start talking just as soon as they know you’re not a threat. The problem is, they see threats everywhere, they live in a state of threat. So a conversation with them becomes a kind of striptease. You’re continually undressing yourself, disarming yourself for them. I remember this one guy, Hank Livings. He’d ask me a question and sort of chew it over with his burger, careful not to display either satisfaction or its opposite, careful to stay neutral, stay tough, even as he kept probing me for more.

You like the work you do?

Not really, I said.

(He chewed.)

I type up what my bosses say and enter it into a computer.

(He chewed.)

A robot could do it better, I said. In fact I don’t know why they don’t just hire one. Maybe it’s too expensive.

Or maybe they’re fucking stupid.

Could be, Hank.

So what’s your situation?

Situation?

Yeah you live alone or with a girl or what.

There are these things called roommates, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of them.

How many you got?

Four.

That’s way too many.

I don’t think so.

Four roommates?

Yeah.

That’s way too many, he said. What do you all do with each other? What do you even say?

We just kind of sit there, I don’t know. Sometimes we drink on the weekends.

Do any drugs?

Sometimes.

Like what?

I don’t want to tell you.

Why not?

I don’t know. Because it feels like bragging or something.

I’m not a cop.

I didn’t say you were.

. . . you think I could be a cop?

Yeah sure, why not.

As we were walking out of the restaurant together, Hank happened to let slip that he knew a guy who was married to his grill.

That’d be me in five seconds if I could afford it, I said. And if I knew how to cook. Which I don’t.

I don’t think you understand, Hank said. Suddenly he stopped walking. What I mean is, the man is married. To his grill.

In the setting sun, our shadows were enormous, and I struggled to see his face.

Right, I said. I heard you the first time.

No, no, Hank said. It’s not that he’s “married.” It’s not a figure of speech.

I’m talking about a husband. You know, man and wife?

He began to crudely pantomime a ring slipping up and down his index finger. It was a long, skinny finger and the nail was broken.

You’re fucking with me, I said.

If you don’t believe me, he said, then how about you join us? A group of us gather on Sundays around his grill. He lives in Yonkers. Name is Izzy. I can give you his address.

I don’t know, I said.

You won’t have a better burger, he said, gripping my shoulder.

Really?

On your life.

Later, one of my roommates would ask me what had possessed me to accept this man’s invitation. Why did I say “yes” to a four-and-a-half-hour drive to Yonkers? Why did I say “yes” to spending an entire Sunday with a group of strange men? I didn’t have a good answer. Ever since I’d fallen in love with burgers, my finances had become a mess, I’d lost touch with vegetarian friends, and I’d grown soft around the middle, despite my skinniness. But the belly I was developing felt less like a paunch than a pouch for a joey; I felt as though I were nurturing something, carrying something along. Was it folly? Compulsion? Or was this craving for burgers truly one of the great passions of my life? But then how could something as ordinary and silly as a burger be worthy of the name “passion”? Unless questions of relative worthiness—judgments—have no bearing on the realm of desire. Because didn’t any passion, high or low, depend upon an appetite for risk? The risk of time wasted; the risk of a misplaced investment of meaning; the risk of an embarrassing misallocation of weight? Maybe I hoped to find answers to these questions in Yonkers. Maybe I knew that what awaited me was not a burger, but a reckoning. Because when Sunday rolled around, I found myself in the weeds outside a dilapidated Victorian, a triple-decker with peeling robin’s egg paint and crimson trim. This was 409 Oslo Street. This was apparently the right address.

Some kind of disaster had befallen the porch. It no longer met the ground but hovered just above it. One of its railings had swung off completely, two of its spindles were sticking crazily out of a shrub. It wasn’t a pretty picture, but then I had woken up at dawn, I had come all this way, was I really going to turn back now? I stepped up onto the porch and rang the little bell. No answer. I rapped on the door twice. Nothing. Then I realized the door was open so I let myself in.

Dark stairway, dark foyer.

Hello? I called out.

Voices could be heard, men’s voices in the distance, a chorus of firm opinions, no laughter whatsoever. Slowly, I walked down the dark corridor, holding my little six-pack of beer out in front of me, as if it might protect me from something, a bullet, evil spirits, the ogre that stood between me and the best burger of my life. In the distance was a sliding door, on the other side of which I could see some men huddled around something. Maybe they’re hanging out by the grill, I thought, as I pulled open the slider.

I found myself on a staircase overlooking a well-kept little suburban backyard. There were lawn chairs, beds of petunias, some plastic kids’ toys. Off to the side was a charcoal grill, but its lid was closed, and no one was standing near it. Instead, they were gathered around a large mud slick in the center of the yard, watching two men struggling with all their might to pound each other into the earth.

Whose mud is this? I think this is my mud!

This can’t be your mud, I was born in this mud!

The wrestlers were shoeless, shirtless, brawny, clumsy. Mud coated their bare chests and made masks of their faces, mud smeared back their hair into glistening kippas. Their rolled-up jeans had turned into the skimpiest of coverings, denim clung to their asses and the lumps between their legs. They grappled and fell and struggled and fell again, driving each other down with elbows and knees. From around them came murmuring, whistles, cat-calls, commentary. Most of the onlookers were themselves covered in mud, and some had clearly just been in the ring. Others wore plain collared shirts, khakis, sensible shoes, and they didn’t seem to mind the occasional spatter. Everyone was drinking beer and everyone was placing bets.

You made it, said someone, who must have been Hank.

I thought you said this was a cookout.

It’s a gathering, he said. The winner gets Israel’s burger. The rest of us get to watch ’em eat it. Tell him, Iz.

Our host was an enormous man wearing a suit of mud. He reached for my hand, and tentatively I took it.

I love to cook, Israel said. But I don’t do it for free.

In my time on this planet, I’ve met a handful of people who can, without a demonstration, or even so much as a word, inspire a radiant and unwavering belief in the existence of their particular magic. Israel was one of those guys. I knew this as soon as I shook his hand. I knew that any burger he would make would defeat all comparisons. When he released me, when his hand let me go, I felt like I could cry, so close and far was I from genuine inspiration.

I didn’t bring the right clothes, I said. I didn’t know what this was.

Come as you are, someone said.

You want the real beef? someone said. You’re gonna have to wrestle for it.

Wrestle I did. I sat down on the steps and unlaced my shoes, took off my ankle socks, rolled up my jeans. They watched me undress, this group of stocky middle-aged men, these husbands who’d left their wedding rings in a cup on the stairs. When I took off my shirt, I could feel their eyes running over me, their attention like heat on my skin. It was a heat that wasn’t warmth, had nothing to do with warmth, there was no light in it whatsoever, only force and intent.

You’re here for the burger, I thought. Remember that.

I happened to notice a guy around my age near the back of the crowd. Something about the way he was looking at me, it seemed different from the other men. But I couldn’t stop to think about it, things were moving too fast, now Hank was telling me that it was time to get ready.

What’s “ready?” I asked.

At that moment, one of them, someone who was not muddied, an older man who had kept himself perfectly, terribly clean, came up with a big bucket of mud, and leered as he hurled it at me.

It was warmer than I would’ve imagined, and the smell wasn’t awful, but it blinded me temporarily, and some of it got in my mouth. As I worked to clear the mud out of my eyes, I could hear the men laughing and placing bets.

I put five on Stretch, no more, no less.

Five would be generous.

What’s he, 160?

Striking resemblance to my niece.

Don’t count him out, Lonnie.

Like the size of my foot.

Now, now, I heard Hank say. He drove up from DC for this.

Is that right?

Must be desperate for the meat.

And you thought we’d give you the best, served up on a silver plate?

Enough, I said.

Less out of mercy than out of a desire to wound the new kid’s pride, they matched me up against the smallest of them, a plaintiff ’s attorney named Horst. He had sallow rings beneath his eyes and no discernible chin.

You recognize this face? he said, shaking my hand before the fight.

Should I?

You can find me on billboards all along the Taconic, he said. Try filing a medical malpractice suit in this state, my friend. See if my name doesn’t open some doors.

We took our places, assumed our positions. I took what I thought was a neutral stance—or at least, it seemed neutral to me. But the way I held myself seemed to give Horst and all the other men a big laugh.

What is this, Horst said, fashion week?

I said nothing. I just looked at Israel and tried to think of the meal that was waiting for me if I could stay focused. Although I was new to the mysterious world of backyard mud-sport, I’d wrestled for three years in high school, where my long, thin frame had made me an anomaly among the short guys in my weight class. What I lacked in pure strength, I made up for with footwork and reach. A knee injury took me out my senior year, but by then I’d earned some notoriety, as well as a nickname, El Greco.

Go easy on me, I said. I’ve never wrestled before.

At first, we circled each other. The mud squelched beneath our feet, we watched each other’s eyes. He was grinning, sneering, talking shit about my body. I wasn’t listening. I was hungry. When at last he came at me, I side-stepped him, then I rammed him, driving him into the ground with all the force that I had. He rolled out under me, the wily little man. But then I fell down on top of him, really I tripped, it wasn’t graceful but it did the job. Once I had the upper hand, nothing, no one, was going to push me away.

5-4-3-2. . . .

They had to admit that I had won. But no one seemed to want to grant me that.

How many people do we have in this bracket, again? asked Israel, scratching his chin with a pair of tongs. Are we an even number?

It’s definitely odd, said Horst, snapping his towel in my direction.

For unclear reasons it was decided that I needed to go back into the ring as soon as possible, and to face a man twice my age and size.

Look at his eyes get all big! said my next challenger, Jeb, who wasted no time in telling me that he worked in law enforcement. These deltoids, they’re real, I can assure you of that, boyo.

With Jeb there was no preamble. As soon as Israel put his lips to the whistle, he hurled straight toward me and threw me to the ground, but he fell forward as a result of his momentum, and I rolled out from under him and took a hold of his legs. They were big legs, hairless, tan, shapely, and I found myself admiring them even in the midst of the pushing and falling and scrambling around. What would they look like in heels? I wondered, quickly ducking the thought. My lunch, I reminded myself, pouncing on Jeb after he slipped and fell again. My lunch, my lunch. I put him in a cradle.

After two consecutive wins, I’d earned myself a little break, if not their respect.

How’d I do? I asked Hank, as I walked toward the beer cooler.

We all get lucky sometimes, was all he said, before walking away to join a group of other men. They were looking in my direction, smirking and snorting, and as Hank fell in with them, I could see him shake his head and flush.

And so I found myself drinking alone at the edge of the crowd. Wind teased my hair, zinged my bare skin. For a while, I tried to do an impression of a man who’s indifferent to his own exclusion. But then I don’t think that that man really exists. As a boy I’d learned to keep myself from crying in front of men like my father by tightening up my abdomen, as if readying for a punch. This also helped with the actual punches I took at school. We are never as far away from the cafeteria as we like to think. Maybe Hank was being cold to me because he had been betting on me to lose; maybe he had already lost some small amount of money on me. But then how much could it really be? And why were none of them, none of them, talking to me?

The man wrestling at that moment was the same one who had been eyeing me earlier, the one apart from the others. I overheard his name: Esteban. He was big, though not particularly brawny; he was quiet, but not with a seething rage; his legs seemed to weigh heavily on him, as if too much for one man.

There’s a Krispy Kreme up the street, said his opponent. But you know that, right, Esteban? You must be on a first-name basis with everybody there.

Esteban looked at the man like you’d look at an old computer: annoyed but basically forgiving, used to a hard time. But when at last he pounced on him, it was with a ferocious speed, snapping down on his partner with limbs, legs, force.

Watching Esteban wrestle, I felt a strong urge for another beer. Getting nervous, boss? Horst said as I reached into the cooler.

Is there a problem? I said.

I don’t think so! Why? Do you have a problem?

Right at that moment, Israel came back out of the house. In one hand he held a pair of salt shakers, and in the other he held a paper bag on which was scribbled the word beef.

No, I said. Everything’s cool.

You don’t need to know how to wrestle to know how to wrestle. The nelson, the arm bar, the takedown: this is our patrimony. To be socialized as a male is to live in a form of headlock, from which some of us—most of us—never escape. Thus, Jeb begat Joseph begat R.J. begat Omar. I brought them all down, my brothers. This was a Madness tournament: single-elimination, as in basketball, as in life.

Esteban, on the other hand. Esteban, Esteban. He was on the far side of the bracket, just out of my reach. From the sidelines I watched him drub one challenger after another, conking them out with his beer belly, his arm flab, his notoriously fat ass. It seemed obvious to me, if to nobody else, that he was gaining from every insult they were throwing at him. They mistook his silence for shame, not seeing how the mud they flung at him clung to him, stuck to him, hardened into a filthy suit of armor. Maybe he sensed that I knew this; maybe he saw me as a threat.

At one point, late in the afternoon, I thought about approaching him. We were the outliers at either end of a closed circle of buddies, and I was dying to know if he felt as out of place here as I did. But when I risked a glance over at him, I found him drilling me with a hard, curious look, as if I were a bird that wouldn’t take the hint and shoo, as if he half-wanted to hear me sing. I attempted a smile, a nod. His nipples kept staring at me even after he looked away.

Both of us made it to our respective semifinals, against all odds. Everyone was losing money on us. A couple of guys would start booing whenever either of us entered the ring. It didn’t seem to faze him. I watched him make a meal out of a meteorologist from New York 1.

Fuck, I said out loud, as he pinned him to the ground.

When it was my turn to wrestle, like a kid I found myself imitating him, found myself slowing down, operating with a weight I didn’t really possess, as if I too could draw power from rejecting these men, rejecting their taunts and stupid aggressions.

No, I said to Hank, who was refusing to concede. You lost.

Rematch! he kept saying, as if it were the only word he knew.

But then all heads turned at the sound of meat sizzling.

You boys better start the Finals, Israel called. Or this thing will get burned. The day was almost finished, everything was turning blue. I remember fumes rising off the grill, smells of mesquite and fire, paprika and blood. It was me versus him, it had come down to us. My feet were like cold slabs. Knots of pain ran up and down my body. We were circling each other, stalking. Nobody said a word. When a plane flew overhead, nosing upward from Newark, we seemed to hear its turbines whirling, its passenger trays rattling as it slipped into the clouds. He seemed so different to me up close. There was a gorgeous asymmetry to the freckles on his face. His eyes were deep-set and alert, covered by long lashes, lashes which seemed to bite at me, warning me, his whole expression was like a warning. What was he trying to say to me? Was it a trap, or should I listen? I could feel the crowd watching us. I was close enough to smell him, the sweetness of his sweat, dank and alcoholic and reeking of a man.

Come at me, he said. Come at me if you want.

And I realized that I wanted to. I wanted to hurl myself at his body. And the burger. I was aching for it. I knew it would be delicious. It was going to make it all worth it, the barbs of these assholes, their coldness, their contempt for my faggotry, if that’s what it was, maybe, faggotry, could it be, yes. They did everything but say it. In fact they were crueler not to have said it: faggot. Say it again: faggot. Say it.

Well, Esteban said. He was fullness, soft and dire, and I’d never see him again, this man who after pounding me wouldn’t deign to shake my hand, just another trapped boy chasing whatever. Beef. What are you waiting for?

I could feel a longing in my neck, a longing like Texas. Cut it open, I felt like saying, or maybe I said it aloud. Take out your carving knife and cut in like a partner. Take me to the next place. I’m already there.