Serve Screaming
By WOLF MANKOWITZ IHAVE this dying friend who has devoted his 'life to experimenting on his stomach with what is nowadays known as good food. Often I've tried to explain to him that the only reason for eating is to provide energy with which to make enough money in order to go on eating. Being a poet, this friend maintains that there are more delicate pleasures to be torn from meat and potatoes than that. The result is that he is dying—a cold wind blows round his heart and he has brain fever due to being so original. " Added to which;" he whines, " my nerves are shot to pieces by having to witness endlessly the agony of the eaten world."
" I am devoted to those delicious shrimp-fleas found only at Porto Lousi and known to the natives as scamperini. If only it wasn't necessary to torture the succulent little creatures in order to give them the proper flavour." Tears spring to his eyes. " Why must I care? ' he cries. ".My soul and my stomach are in perpetual torment."
I agree with him. Some of the most painful evenings in my life have been spent with this tortured artist of the intestine. He is a pedant in sea-food, and not only selects his own lobsters, but insists on boiling them personally.
I shall never forget the innocent joy with which he mysteri- ously bid me visit his kitchen-apartment one night for a special treat. " I have had flown to me from the Kalahari desert," he whispered, " a special delicacy of the bushmen. These long white grubs of the deadly Chokka moth have been care- fully prised out of the bark of the flowering Kukka tree. I will cast them on to hot stones and serve them screaming in a delicious white sauce which, incidentally, is a detergent of remarkable power." His eyes had the strange light which characterises the poet, the lover, and the gourmet. Suddenly all the happiness drained out of his face. " If only," he whispered hoarsely, " if only I wasn't so terribly sensitive." " Look, Fred," I told him, " you've got to turn in this rich living. It's no good to you. You need the temperament of a McCarthy to be able to actually enjoy this kind of business. You have the stomach, kid, but you have to face it, the spirit is still too humane." " True," he said, " terribly, terribly true. You know, some- times I have actually left a little of my mess of lampreys simply because the dear little things looked up at me with such appeal in their eyes. I have wept, dear fellow," he said, " at the terrible carnage, the unspeakable cruelty of distilling delight from a goose which, tortured to the point cf insanity; could not possibly understand how much I relish its delicious enlarged liver." He turned his pathetic face towards me. " Dear boy," he croaked, " do not remind me of the adorable turtles slaughtered that my stomach might live." I did my best to comfort him. I could see that the end was not far off. " Look, Fred," I said, " don't distress your- self. You have eaten yourself into a mortal condition of gluttony, and very soon you will die in an apoplectic fit. Do not trouble your conscience now over the unhappy creatures you have consumed screaming through, all these years of unrestrained indulgence. I have a vision of you passing through countless future lives, and there you will have every chance to make good." . Then I described to him how he would enjoy being a goose, and later a turtle, and ye( again an oyster, and in another life still one of those succulent shrimp-fleas which in Porto Lousi the natives call scamperini.
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