I realize that this is a really
dangerous trade I’ve taken up, and I’m not just referring to the minute cuts I constantly
have on my hands from all the knifework—though I have gotten myself pretty good
a time or two. I have several scars up
my forearms from getting burned by my oven at home . . . I get hot ash in my eyes
from lighting the smoker at the shop . . . the oil from peppers gets into the
pores in your hands if you don’t wear gloves while chopping them . . . onions
sting your eyes with tears . . . on a stovetop there is spice; there is flame;
there is fire. And the array of implements
one can use to manipulate food runs a gamut bizarre enough to make a professional
dominatrix jealous.
For
a year and a half I wanted to look into an apprenticeship with a meat shop, but
every time I walked into my butcher shop—which was also a popular deli and
market—I became self-conscious and couldn’t work up the courage to ask. I would walk up to the counter, gaze
wide-eyed into the face of a real butcher, open my mouth, stammer, and all that
would come out was, “Three pounds of ground chuck, please.”
Then
my boyfriend at the time, David, found out that he was in a band with the
owner’s son and all I’d have to do is mention David’s name at the counter, and
I’d be golden. I was also admonished
“never call it butchery; it’s meat-cutting.”
During
the time when I was trying to work up the courage to do this, David left me,
and my world was thrown off its axis. My
already-struggling confidence suffered a huge hit, and I spiraled downward into
a crippling six-month long depression. I
could no longer set foot in my usual butcher shop for the memories it
conjured. In fact, I couldn’t go
anywhere, see anyone, or do anything without being painfully reminded of
David. During our time together, our
lives had fused; he’d touched every aspect of my existence—my home, my family,
my friends—and now that “touch” became a contamination, a poison that
infiltrated everywhere. When I looked
around me, I saw only “us,” everything was “ours,” there was no “me” to be
found.
My
weekly form of therapy became wrenching on my motorcycle with my neighbor Mike,
who oddly enough happens to be an old friend of David’s. It was early March, and since we live in
Irish neighborhood of St. Louis, we were both talking about our preparations
for this year’s St. Patrick’s Day parade and festivities. Every year Mike cooks a mountain of corned
beef and pulled pork, and he told me about the shop he’s ordered his meat from
for years. The next time I needed meat,
I decided to check the place out. As
soon as I set foot inside, I knew it was perfect: family owned, been around over half a
century, small, quiet, wood paneling everywhere—and no deli, no market, just
meat and the accoutrements with which to cook it. That day I left them my card and they said
they’d contact me. They never did.
A
few weeks passed, my depression worsened, then it came my turn to host my Bunco
group. I wanted to make shredded beef in
the crock pot with a root beer barbecue sauce, so I ventured to the shop
again. I mentioned how I’d left my card
there, they recognized me, and we chatted a bit:
“So
. . . you want a job?”
“No,
I have a job.”
“.
. . You want money?”
“Typically
people pay for education, but in an apprenticeship you trade work for knowledge.”
“You
just . . . you just wanna learn?”
“Yeah.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-eight.”
“Come
in on Sunday; we open at 11.”
That
Sunday I walked in to find only Tommy, the head butcher there.
He
looked at me and said, “You can’t be here; you gotta go.”
I
asked why.
He
said he didn’t know where the owner was, couldn’t get him on the phone, and
didn’t know what was going on, but he couldn’t work the whole shop by himself
and train me at the same time, so I had to go.
He
said to call in the middle of the week if I wanted to try again the next
weekend.
Knowing
what I now know, I probably could have stuck around for half an hour and
everyone else would have shown up; the guys occasionally sleep through their
alarms. Maybe Tommy was testing me,
seeing if I was serious about wanting to be there.
Nevertheless,
next Sunday at 11am I was there and ready to go. Once again it was just Tommy when I got
there, but Max soon showed up. Tommy
told me to follow Max around, that he’d show me some cool stuff. And he did; we smoked
13 racks of ribs, a ton of chicken wings, and I learned how to use a cryovac
sealer to package the homemade bratwurst (I felt so much like an Iron
Chef). I learned that you are pretty
much constantly washing blood and raw meat off of trays, tubs, blades, boards,
and your hands; beef scraps go in the grinder for chuck, pork scraps get made
into sausage. They send out to have
their knives professionally sharpened. I
had no idea that professional knife sharpers still existed. The shop has two sets of knives, and at any
time one set is at the sharper’s. Oh,
and the Dick Machine: the sausage
stuffer is called the Dick Machine, not because of the obvious euphemism, but
because that’s the brand name, printed in bold black letters across the front
of it—DICK. That day earned me a rack of
ribs, a marinated chicken breast, and ribeye that was too small to go in the
case but I thought was too big to be ground up for chuck.
I haven’t had a job where I had to stand
all day in four years, so by the end of the day I was exhausted. Exhausted, but grinning ear to ear; I was
finally doing something I’d wanted to do for a long time, and I did it on my
own—I didn’t have to drop anyone’s name or get in on anyone else’s merit. And when I looked around, I didn’t see any
“us” or “ours” . . . I didn’t see anyone else, but me. This place was the only
thing in my life completely isolated from the venomous taint of old memories;
this place was the only thing in my life that was purely, unequivocally
me. The shop turned out to be not just
something that I wanted, not just something that I liked, not just a source of
knowledge, knives, and meat; it turned out to be something that I needed—to
this day it is my sanctuary.
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