Deer oh Deer

Deer oh Deer

Ugh.  Again?

            Bad decisions . . . bad decisions. . . .

            Not terrible bad, just . . . one too many margaritas . . . stayed out one hour too late. . . .

            And there’s that feeling, in the pit of my stomach, like we went to bed mad. 

            I make a pot of coffee, pour myself a cup to drink while getting ready, and pour the rest into one of my thermoses.  Then I make another pot, fill a second thermos, and leave the rest for Frank.  I’m not fucking around today. 

            I had such grand plans for this morning, too.  I was gonna make a big pot of oatmeal, and clean up the mess that’s been laying around since Thursday. . . .

            I don’t normally shower before going into the shop, but today I need it.  And maybe, just maybe, my body will be able to hold onto some of that cleanliness until the end of my shift, because I have two weddings to attend tonight. 

            So of course there’s no hot water.

            Not how I wanted to start this day. 

            My car says I have about 30 miles until my tank is empty.  I’ll make it to the shop easily, but the first wedding is out in O’Fallon, so I’ll need to stop before then. 

            High of 47 today; it’s been such a warm fall that this is the coldest day we’ve had so far.  It’ll be even colder in the shop; they don’t like to turn on the heat or the air because they’re cheap.  My number one priority today is keep myself warm.  If I can keep myself warm, my hands will be warm.  If my hands are warm, they’ll work better, and I won’t cut myself like I did last weekend.  Although last weekend . . . was a little different.

            Last weekend I got to cut up this guy! 

            Frank shot his very first deer, and when the guys at deer camp asked him where he was taking it to be processed, he said, “I’m taking it to my girlfriend.”

            His buddies scoffed, “Your girlfriend doesn’t want that.”

            “No, she really does,” he assured them.

            Saturday night I went out and told all my friends, “Frank shot a deer today; I get to butcher it tomorrow!”  And kept saying it . . . until 4am.  Because shenanigans. 

            Why do I only ever seem to have that kind of energy when I’m “single” for the weekend? 

            So I slept most of Sunday.  Frank got back at about 3:30, and I went over there to start working on the deer.  I forgot to bring gloves, because shenanigans.  Oh well; it wasn’t a particularly cold day.

            It took us.  Six.  Hours.  To process the whole thing.  (Not including an hour break for dinner—Frank sous vided the tenderloins.)

            Not because it’s big, or a lot of meat.  We did the entire process from start to finish, short of actually grinding the grind. 

            Skinning was easy but probably took over an hour.  Frank hung the deer by the neck rather than the Achilles, so it was a little different for me.  I used the knife that he got me to replace the one I lost in Alaska.  It’s a Kershaw “Gentleman’s knife” for delicate work.  The handle is well-weighted, and fits in my palm easily.  He got a hell of a deal on it because the printing of the word “Patented” on the blade is a little off. 

            As I flick the spring-assist blade open, a memory flashes through my mind and I shout, “Oh my god I mangled The Knife Thrower’s hand last night!”

            “What?” 

            I explain.  Last night after the first bar closed at 1am, we went downtown to a 3am bar, where I noticed some fringe sticking out of his shirt near the collar.  Ever the helpful friend, I took my knife out and began trimming it away.  In confusion (and I’m sure not at all influenced by any of the drinks we’d had over the course of the evening), he grabbed it and sliced his thumb open.  “He thought it was scissors.  Why would I have scissors??”  It’s like he doesn’t even know me anymore.

            I didn’t realize that Frank didn’t know how to skin an animal, so I showed him how.  He’d seen the guys at deer camp do it where you just skin a little bit of it, and then just rip the hide off using sheer force.  That’s one way to do it, if you don’t want to preserve the hide . . . but skinning’s not hard if you have patience and a good knife.  I taught him the patient way. 

            Later on when he showed the hide to his boss (who lives on a lot of acreage and hunts often), he commented, “That’s impressive; she must really know what she’s doing!”

            Um . . . yeah. 

            “Can we wash him off?” I ask.  There’s a lot of hair and dirt and leaves on the skinless buck. 

            “The hose doesn’t come back this far.  I can dump a bucket of water over him?”

            “Yeah let’s do that.”

            Normally at this point, the skinned deer carcass would go hang in the cooler for a day or two, to let the meat firm up for easy processing.  We, however, don’t have the facilities in which to do something like that, and the weather has been too warm to just leave the carcass hanging out in Frank’s garage.  Plus . . . ew garage meat. 

            I use the boning knife that Corey gave me to quarter it.  We do the backstraps first, following along the spine and then down the ribs on each side; once they’re exposed you can pretty much just pull them out with your hands.  And now I realize that dumping a bucket of water over the carcass was a horrible idea, because now I’m standing in pools of mud trying to do this, and the meat is no cleaner.

            “Should I do the back legs next?” I wonder aloud.

            “You want to keep them on so he doesn’t spin?” Frank suggests.

            Oh yeah, he’s got him tied up so that the back hooves just touch the ground, anchoring the carcass.  Good thinking, Frank!

            So I do the front legs next.  They’re not held on with anything; you literally just cut at the muscle seam and pull it back and it will separate itself. 

            Then back legs, which I had a little trouble with, but didn’t lose too much meat.  I found the hip socket easily on the inside, but then had a tough time finding where to cut the butt off at the back.  I tried to use the spot where the backstrap ended, and basically just kept slicing until it came free. 

            I saw a video of how to get the neck meat off all in one piece, and I want a goddamn neck roast, so that’s the last thing I go after.  I slice vertically up the front of the throat, cut away the sides, and basically just peel it off all the way around. 

“Oop, that’s the windpipe,” I say when I hit the ribbed white tube with my blade.  Frank is watching, and I smack it with the flat side of the blade so he can hear the hollow sound, then run the back side of the blade up and down it so he can hear the ribbing. 

“That’s weird,” he says.

“Not it’s not; it’s the same thing we have.  Run your hand up and down your throat and you can feel it!”

Frank shrugs, “Adams apple.”

Oh. 

It’s now dark outside, so we take all the meat into the dining room to continue working on it.  I brought over saran wrap and freezer bags to pack the meat in.  Frank shows me the poor-man’s vacu-seal:  a stock pot of water will push most of the air out of a bag for easy freezer packing. 

I do the easy stuff first:  cut the loins/backstraps into steaks, after trimming and prettying them up.  The neck roast can just be packed right up once the silver skin is removed.  Everything has to be washed after it’s trimmed, because there’s still a lot of hair, dirt, and leaves on the meat.  Unfortunately that means the plastic wrap doesn’t stick to it very well.  It’s cheap plastic wrap anyways.

Okay, now the fun part:  the back legs have several roasts in them.  I hold my knife over the leg, pointing the tip downwards. 

“You see that white line?” I ask Frank. 

He nods. 

“That’s a seam; that’s what’s holding the muscles together.  All I have to do, is run my knife along it, and everything is exposed.”  I stick the tip of my knife into the white—just the tip—and run it along the line.  The leg opens itself up, folding away to either side.  Then I’m able to find the interior seams and separate them with my fingers.  The first leg takes a little longer, but the second leg goes quickly.

“That’s it?  That’s all butchering is?” Frank asks, aghast.

“That’s all butchering is,” I smile and shrug.

“Well then why does everyone make it seem so complicated?” he demands.

“Who?  Who makes it seem complicated?”

“The guys at deer camp.”

“So . . . people who aren’t butchers . . . think butchering is complicated.”

We break for dinner and watch part of an episode of “Westworld.”  I tell Frank to pause it once we’re done eating because I want to get this deer done. 

The front legs seem to take forever.  They’re skinny, I only manage a couple small roasts off of each; then I just scrape as much meat off of them as I can.  The meat is getting warm and my knife is getting dull.  This makes the meat much harder to work with, and I cut my hands several times.  It also means that both of the knives I’ve used today are going to need a good sharping after this. 

And my shoulder is killing me. 

Back in August I sprained my foot (no break, thank goodness), so I was only doing upper body workouts.  Well guess what happened?  I hurt my shoulder, so then I couldn’t do any workouts.  I got a second MRI within two weeks of the first one (my health insurance is amazing, I will never quit my day job), which revealed that I had torn my labrum.  The foot healed up just fine, but I’ve been rehabbing this shoulder since early September.  It’s taking so long that the S-word is being tossed around again. 

Now that Frank has discovered the “mystery” of the white muscles seams, he is having fun cutting and tearing every single seam apart, and trimming up the smaller pieces—which I am eternally grateful for, because it’s tedious work, and last night’s shenanigans are taking their toll on me. 

Finally, everything is wrapped and bagged except for a pile of grind and a pile for stew meat/jerky.  I offer to get Frank a tub of Burt’s jerky rub, but he declines, saying that Burt’s stuff is too salty. 

We bag and freeze the rest of the meat without washing it. 

“Please remember to wash it before you cook it,” I remind him. 

I ice my shoulder while watching the rest of the “Westworld” episode we started.  Then we bed down and slip into a “deep, dreamless slumber. . . .”

*                      *                      *

The Saturday before Thanksgiving is my first day at the shop this holiday season, and I feel like I missed all the action.  Most of the turkeys are already sold.  Plenty are floating in brine in the cooler—some are even being picked up today.  The floor is slick with turkey goo; there are sopping wet towels strewn about, “soaking” it up. 

Tommy has filet orders waiting for me on the cutting board.  He bends over and arranges the mats for me to stand on so I don’t hurt my back. 

Of course when I show up at 9am, not much has been done front of house (dishes, getting the case up, knives clean and ready to use for the day), so I get it all caught up before starting on orders.  And of course, my shoulder starts hurting after only an hour of work.  I don’t cut any extra filets; I can’t put any of mine in the case just yet because there are several of Tommy’s in there right now from yesterday.  If I put mine in there next to his, it just makes them look even sloppier and no one will buy them. 

“I don’t know that we’re gonna have that much for you to do because Thanksgiving’s just not a big filet holiday, you know?” Grace says to me while I’m washing dishes.

I know that she can’t hear me anyways, but nonetheless I turn the water up and lean in close to Tommy to ask, “She knows that I can do more than just filets, right?”

“Yeah she knows,” he responds, questioningly.

I elaborate, “I can come in for more than just ‘filet holidays.’”

“We’ll get you some more hours.  Gus is gonna be working with his dad a lot this season, so we’ll have hours for you.”  Gus’ dad builds houses, and pays better than the shop does. 

Kyle and John both bought motorcycles since I last saw them, and they show me pictures like proud papas.  They both got little black cruisers:  one’s a Yamaha, one’s a Honda; both are 250cc.  I’m surprised; mine’s bigger. 

Gus is a little jealous.  “My first bike is gonna be a Harley, and it’s gonna be huge; like six-hundred.”

“Good luck with that; the smallest Harley’s an eight-eighty-three,” I reply.  He’s so pretty.

Poor Gus, when I show him pictures of Frank’s deer, he gets even more jealous because he doesn’t have time to hunt this year. 

A customer comes in and asks for oxtails; almost in unison, Kyle, John, and Gus all start to tell him that we don’t have any.

I cut them short, “They’re in the middle freezer at the very bottom.”  Come on guys, I haven’t even worked here for months! 

Another customer comes in asking for prosciutto.  Again the guys all shake their heads and offer apologies.

“Try Salume Beddu,” I say.

“What?”

I spell it out for the customer.  “It’s down Hampton; they do amazing charcuterie.  It’s a little pricey, but it’s really good.”  And I assume if you’re shopping here you have a fat bank roll to drop on meat. 

“I’ve never heard of that place,” Gus says when the customer leaves.

“It’s a pretty cool place; they do these ‘Porkshops,’ where you pay them two hundred dollars and they show you how to break down half a pig, then turn it into sausage and cure it, and then you get to take the whole thing home!”  I’m pretty sure that I’ve mentioned all this before and he just forgot.

“I wish I know how to butcher a whole pig,” Gus says morosely.  It’s just sad to hear someone who works at a meat shop say that.  I swear, he’s like a frickin’ Snuffleupagus today!

While I’m trying to cut some new filets, Tommy tells me a story.

“John was in the voting booth . . . and, and, he took a selfie, of him voting for Hillary . . . and then he accidentally voted for her and he had to ask for a new ballot.”

I choke on my own breath.  I don’t argue politics.  I’m a terrible debater—even though my mind is stuffed full of facts, I just can’t articulate them under pressure.

All I can manage is, “You know that’s illegal in the state of Missouri, right?  Taking selfies in a polling place.”  Okay so technically it’s not illegal, but it’s not really legal either; and technically it only specifically applies to selfies with your ballot in view (which is exactly what John was doing).  But since it’s a grey area—since it’s not legal, you could still be arrested for it. 

Frank told me why it’s outlawed in many places:  politicians used to bribe voters with a bottle of whiskey, if the voters brought in proof that they’d voted for that politician (that proof being a photo of them with their completed ballot). 

Gus and I get started talking about “Westworld”; he is apparently fascinated with AI, and all the recent advancements.  He describes it as “mind-blowing.”

Then he switches back into Eeyore mode:  “Yeah, but . . . science is kinda fucked for the next few years.”

“Well that’s what happens when you elect a theocrat for a vice president.”  Oh my god I should really just shut my mouth. 

“What’s a theocrat?” he asks.

“Rule by religion,” I respond. 

He nods thoughtfully and walks away.

I sigh with relief. 

Gus also tells me about his dream to get his scuba certification and scuba dive the Great Barrier Reef. 

“But . . . it’ll probably never happen now.  It’s all starting to fall apart.” 

“Then you better get that certification while you can,” I encourage him. 

Today is a weird day; Tommy leaves before lunch because he hasn’t had a day off in three weeks (yet they still won’t call me), and Nicole shows up just after 9am.  Throughout the day I listen to her tell no less than six customers about how she got scammed on match.com. 

“I met this nice guy . . . he seemed totally normal . . . we talked for weeks, and then out of the blue he asks me for an iPad.  I called him out on it, I said ‘You’re just one of those scammers!’  Then you know what he did?  He had the nerve to text me and say, ‘Now do you believe that I’m a real person?’  Can you believe that!” 

The guys have all taken bets on how many times she’s going to repeat her story today.

Eventually—when no customers are around—she tells it directly to me.  I respond by sharing a few of my online dating tales.  The guys all roll their eyes and scoff and walk away, because naturally they’ll never have to resort to online dating.  But then, of course, they all wander back again because despite their macho talk, they are curious. 

Something I noticed when I was on PlentyOfFish:  there’s a three paragraph template that guys use for their profile description.  I saw it on multiple guys’ profiles, just copied and pasted.  The worst was when I came across a guy I knew (and had a long-time secret crush on) who had it on his profile.  (Crush instantly dissolved.) 

Suddenly all the guys want to know what was written in this template.  Well sorry boys, I didn’t memorize it. 

Then I tell her a story that I think might cheer her up, even though it’s kind of horrible.  A friend of mine received a text from a guy she went out with one time like four years ago.  Only problem is, he thought he was texting someone else—someone who lives in Miami.  He was feeling her out to see if he could crash at her place a few months from now, when his best friend is getting married down there. 

She played him for a damn fool.  She started laying it on thick, calling him Sweetie and Babe and Handsome and talking about how much she misses him . . . and of course he can stay with her! 

I don’t know what will come of this.  My friend says that he should go to Miami for his friend’s wedding, not to bang some chick.  Fair.  And he’s some sort of medical professional who can afford to play tennis for two hours every morning, so it’s not like he won’t be able to afford a place to stay once he gets down there and learns that he’s been duped.  This is the kind of shit that you laugh at when you see it on TV, but when someone does it in real life and real people are affected by it . . . somehow it loses some of the humor. 

And on that note, I need to run out to my car and bring in the dress I’m wearing tonight.  I left it out there because I didn’t want it to smell like meat, but now I need to bring it in so that it can warm up.

We have a rush, and suddenly all of the guys are gone.  It’s just Nicole, me, and Oliver—the sixteen-year-old who gets more hours than I do.  I ask him where they all went. 

“They said they were going out to Gus’ car.  I think we should make them mop the floors since we’re doing all this work and they’re gone.”

He offers this suggestion to them when they get back.  The older boys just laugh.  They’re in the back room and think that no one can hear them.  Gus claps him on the shoulder and says, “Hey, we had a whole bottle of whiskey to finish, okay?”

God fucking damnit.  When Tommy is the example set for you, this is what you get.  Twenty-one-year-olds drunk on the job.  In a fucking meat shop.  If any of them come anywhere near my knives, I’ll have their guts for garters.  

“Why did you bring a change of clothes?” John asks.

I answer, “Because I have two weddings to go to tonight.” 

Frank’s meeting me here between 5:15 and 5:30.  The shop will be closed, so I need to remind him to text me when he gets here.  Maybe I can just meet him out in the parking lot. . . .

My hair looks like goddamn scarecrow straw; it did not want to curl today.  It doesn’t look good down, it doesn’t look good up; so I do a half up/half down kind of thing that still looks scarecrow as fuck.  My legs are dry and ashy and pale and I did not bring any lotion or leggings to help the situation.  At least I brought my makeup.

When I’m done getting ready, John is hovering around in the back room and says, “Ooh I wanna see your wedding dress!” 

That was an odd choice of words.  “It’s not my wedding,” I laugh.

“I like how you can go from meat shop to wedding so fast,” he observes.

“Thanks.  Yes.  Very versatile,” I stammer. 

The other guys don’t say anything. 

While I’m trying to get my bulky meat clothes and shoes to fit into the bag my dress was in, John yells from the front of the shop, “Your best man is here!” 

He thinks he’s so funny.

Apparently he knocked on the front door and Nicole didn’t recognize him.  She thought he just wanted some meat.  When she asked what she could get for him he said, “My girlfriend would be nice.”

We may have missed the ceremonies for both weddings, but we missed none of the dancing.