My Meat-Making Days

—Dan Corrigan, “Eddie Potomac,” from the Ballroom Portraits, Rhinelander, Wisconsin. 1978.

I worked side-by-side with this guy for seven years. Shooter Devaney. He’d been a hotshot basketball player back in high school, but something went wrong somewhere along the line, just like something went wrong for so many of the guys I grew up with, myself included.

Shooter was always flinching. Looking through our old high school yearbook not long ago I noticed that he was even flinching in his class picture, so the seeds of the thing were apparently there all along. It was like the camera was a blow, like he couldn’t handle posterity or whatever it was.

I’ve survived a few things, he’d say to me. Don’t think I haven’t. You know my wife? She’s likely at home right this moment dancing alone to records in our living room. When people ask her what she does she can’t just say she’s a housewife. No, she claims she’s a retired cheerleader. What woman in this town isn’t?

Some people I’ve learned don’t need some anonymous tragedy to put a spook in their blood; they’re just born with some creeping thing that won’t leave them alone.

My teeth are giving me fits, Scooter would say. My whole life I’ve never had a comfortable mouth. Or: I have no intention of ever getting on an airplane. That just ain’t my place, the sky.

Scooter couldn’t sleep. He’d talk about that. He once asked me, Do you remember that big cage ball they used to bring out in gym class to roll right over everyone? That just did not seem like the correct proportions for any kind of a ball. I used to have nightmares about that thing.

We were taking apart animals for a living back in those days, breaking them down into meat. There were billboards around our town that read, “Meat is Community.” It was bloody, stinking work, but the damn thing about it was you wouldn’t find a single vegetarian in the entire plant.

I don’t know why this should occur to me just now. I suppose because it was such a long time ago, and seems even longer than it could conceivably have been, like I’ve been transported to where I am now from another planet. Sometimes when my head gets tangled up I can actually convince myself that such a thing is possible.