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

Sloan asleep, sprawled across the bed; he was an exquisite corpse. The crew was in the parking lot, silently loading the equipment into the van. We drove through the deep-blue, shadowy dawn to shoot the sun rising over the Nebraska dunes. Throughout the long day I thought about Sloan incessantly. He had insinuated himself under my skin. Whenever I could, I would disengage from the scene at hand, and my mind would retract like an oyster to its shell, to worry this newfound nacreous pebble. When we got back to the motel later that day, he was gone. He had chartered a flight from the municipal airport and disappeared as abruptly as he’d come. The room had been cleaned, sheets changed, bed made. I thought perhaps he might have left a note on the night table, or perhaps in my suitcase, or on the bathroom mirror. Perhaps a message at the front desk. But he hadn’t. I went to bed. Lay there and waited. By the time he called, I was dead asleep.
    “You’re not here,” I told him groggily.
    “No. That’s right. I’m here.” His voice was low, a rough whisper. Suddenly I was wide awake.
    “Oh, Weren’t you just here?” A deep, sleep-induced indifference was the effect I was after, but my heart was in my throat and pounding.
    “Yes. I was there last night.”
    “Oh.” I yawned. “I don’t believe you.”
    “No?” I could hear him smile.
    “No. Because I don’t think you exist. Good night.”
    “That’s too bad. It’s sad that I leave such a transient impression. I will try to fix that. Let’s see, Bloom on Saturday, isn’t it? Just south of Dodge City?”
    “How’d you know that?”
    “Called your office. Told them I was the Kansas Film Commissioner, calling to complain that you hadn’t submitted your location permits. They faxed me your itinerary for the rest of the month.”
    I liked him. He produced records in New York, scored films in L.A., and his band, based in Chicago, played a dark, demented brand of postmodern jazz that was popular in Tokyo and Berlin. He was always flying across the country, so it was relatively easy for him to touch down for a night or two.
    I worried about the crew at first. The ex—flight attendant knew right from the start, but I bought him off by approving his phone sex. He smirked a lot, but he kept quiet. The directors from Japan changed from week to week, so they would never catch on. Suzuki and Oh were the problem, but somehow they never seemed to notice that the film commissioners from Kansas and Utah looked the same as the one from Nebraska, and Sloan changed his shirt and the shape of his tie on a state-by-state basis. I kept waiting for the boys to raise their eyes, to recognize his face, but they never did. Maybe they were just too drunk, or Sloan was too tall, or maybe it was that all Americans looked the same, so why bother? More likely, they just didn’t care.
    Sloan regarded these trips as opportunities for sex and sociological surveys. So did I, but that was my job. The sociology part, I mean. It’s not easy to find My American Wife and you have to initiate a broad base of inquiry. First we’d look for an area with distinctive geographical features and scenic appeal and then we’d undertake a survey : chambers of commerce, churches, PTAs,agricultural extension offices. The researchers would sit in the New York office, phoning these bastions of small-town culture; what I learned is that there’s precious little culture left, and what’s managed to survive is mostly of the “Ye Olde” variety.
    Main Street is dead, which is no news to the families whose families ran family businesses on Main Street. When I returned from Japan and visited Quam, I found that all the local businesses from my childhood had been extirpated by Wal-Mart. If there is one single symbol for the demise of regional American culture, it is this superstore prototype, a huge capitalist 3 boot that stomped the moms and pops, like soft, damp worms, to death. Don’t get me wrong. I love