My Year of Meats by Ruth L. Ozeki Read Free Book Online Page A

the synergy.
    It’s good to unbalance these agency guys right from the get-go, and renaming them is an effective way to start. Ueno was a large, soft-bodied man, with smooth, damp skin and a stunningly profound halitosis, indicative of serious digestive problems, which rose, vaporlike, from the twists of his bowels. He had gone to a Christian college and been a member of the English Speaking Society, where he studied the language assiduously in order to explain to Americans why the Japanese were unique. He had one weakness, which I happened to know all about, having done my part on previous shoots to both cultivate and exploit it: he loved big-breasted American women. Strapping Texas strippers were a very effective tool in the unbalancing of John Wayno.
    So I assigned my flight attendant to him with specific instructions to “get Wayno wasted.” The two of them toured all the strip joints in Austin that night, and accordingly, on the first day of the shoot, John was still drunk and docile. We were shooting a square dance scene; the girls were wearing short, frilly dresses that looked like inverted chrysanthemums, and John sat quietly on a sandbag in a corner of the set where he could look up their skirts as they sashayed by. We finished Day One on schedule.
    That night, though, he resisted our combined efforts at temptation and got a good night’s sleep. Day Two was a nightmare. It was the most important day, ten hours of tabletop, and we were shooting the Presentation of the Meat. To stay on schedule, we needed to get two shots: the Sizzle Cut, a big fat slab of raw steak hitting the griddle; and the Presentation, the same steak on a platter, perfectly seared and carved to reveal a moist and tender pink interior.
    John hated everything. The choice of plates was inadequate. The vegetable accessories were unappetizing. The meat was dull and lifeless. He complained about the marbling and fussed with the hues, peering over the shoulder of the food stylist as she labored with her little camel-hair brushes to achieve just the right blush of pink. Eighteen hours later he was still unsatisfied with the Sizzle, then the meat wranglers ran out of glycerin to make the beef glisten and the American crew walked. I found him all by himself on the empty set, leaning over a platter of steak, breathing on the lettuce and morosely tweaking a pea. John Wayno had a dark and lonely side to his personality.
    Of course, when he saw the dailies, everything was gorgeous, and he was as pleased as if he’d shot every plump and juicy frame himself.
    That night we all went club hopping. Between the whiskey and the lap dancing and the warm sense of a job well done, old John Wayno was in heaven. The young Texas beauties were breaking his heart. He wept freely as one—her name was Dawn—straddled his tenderloin and offered up her round rump for his inspection. When she pivoted to face him, the tears in his eyes rolled down his mottled checks and splashed the pert pink tips of her nipples.
    “Japanese girl not like this,” he cried out mournfully. “Scrawny, you know? Not happy-go-lucky.”
    Dawn winced at the warmth of his carrion breath. She lifted her ample tit to her mouth and licked off his tear, then scampered away with a hundred dollars of our production budget tucked inside her G-string.
    John sighed mightily and wiped his eyes with his neatly pressed handkerchief. You could tell that his wife back in Tokyo had packed his bags. He looked around the room with great longing. His eyes came to rest on me.
    “You, Takagi, are good example of hybrid vigor, you know?”
    “No.” I was sitting in the corner, minding my own business, making mental notes for a fax I was going to write later on that night. I didn’t think I needed to be drawn into this conversation.
    “Yes.” John Wayno surveyed me critically. He reached across the table and took my jaw in his hand, turning my head from side to side. I held my breath. I fully expected him to pry