Happy Birthday, Rocco

Rocco would have been eighty years old in a few days. It is hard for me to imagine what my friend would be like now or even what he'd look like because we were both so young when we met. It all happened so many years ago. . . . But Rocco had a profound effect on my life.

Last year my book Charity Case and Other Stories was published (Exeter Press, Boston, 2011). One of those stories was "Rocco." It was the most difficult one to write. I have received more mail about it than about any other story in the book. Last winter I was invited by a literary group to a talk about and read something from the book. I chose the Rocco story. My wife, Joan, suggested I read another story. I wanted to read Rocco. She was right; I was wrong. I'll never make that mistake again. I could barely get through it before my voice cracked and my eyes filled with tears. Somehow, I managed to finish the last two paragraphs in a voice that did not sound at all like my own...

Horsemeat

My doctor at Mass General Hospital (who treats me for one of my many health problems) recently told me that a blood test revealed very low iron. She advised me to make an appointment with my PCP (primary care physician) who would “treat” my iron deficiency. I like, respect, and obey her despite the fact that she is just about half my age, and all of my children are older than she is. I got over age and gender issues long ago when I realized what a great doctor she is. This is a young woman who was born to be a physician. But—you knew there was a “but” coming—I know what my primary care physician would do if I went to him. He, too, is a very fine doctor who would order more blood tests and possibly other kinds of tests, and in the end I would wind up taking more pills (I already take too many for a variety of conditions). I am tired of taking tests. So I decided against running to my PCP right away. Instead, I would try to raise my iron level on my own.

I read a lot of the literature on iron and discovered that good sources were green, leafy vegetables; legumes; iron-fortified bread and certain cereals; red meat; beef, calf, and chicken liver (my source specified “cooked liver”—how else could you eat it?); prunes and prune juice; and blackstrap molasses if you have some around. Also oysters.

The problem with some of those foods is that they have unpleasant or even harmful side effects for a man my age. For example, red meat is not good for my cholesterol, for which I’ve taken a pill each day for the past twenty-five years and just hope it does not rot out my liver. Beans can have an unpleasant effect on digestion as can prunes and prune juice. Then there are the oysters, and we all know the effect oysters have on men . . . and some recent research says perhaps on women, too.

Reading further, I discovered that horsemeat is a wonderful source of iron and it is low in fat—a lot lower than beef. However, I also discovered that horsemeat is not sold in the United States for human consumption. I checked in my Stop & Shop, Shaw’s, and Market Basket, and called around to butcher shops in all sorts of neighborhoods. Some were nice to me when they said they did not carry horsemeat. Others just hung up. One can buy oxtail, brains, and pig’s feet, but not horsemeat.  

I was a kid during WWII, but I remember meat rationing and some talk of feeding Americans horsemeat. People were outraged and disgusted at the thought. They even suspected certain butchers of mixing horsemeat in with chopped beef.  

In a way, this aversion to horsemeat is understandable because most Americans don’t see cows, pigs, or lambs, but many have come in contact with horses through books, movies, songs, and even mythology. When I was growing up, horses pulled carts of fruits, vegetables, ice, coal, and even garbage in certain neighborhoods. Media has certainly played a big part in giving the horse a special place in the American animal kingdom. Just think back to Black Beauty; Flicka from the movie My Friend Flicka; The Pie from National Velvet; Rocinante from Don Quixote; Silver, the Lone Ranger’s horse; unicorns; Pegasus, the mythological winged horse; the centaur, the fierce-looking half-man, half-horse of fable; Gene Autry’s horse, Champion; Trigger, Roy Rogers’s horse; Tonto’s Scout; Mr. Ed, television’s talking horse; the songs “Back in the Saddle Again” and “The Old Gray Mare”; and Zorro’s Tornado. There were even the mythological Mares of Diomedes, which fed on human flesh. Currently, there is the book, stage play, and movie War Horse.

So, one can understand why most Americans cannot bring themselves to eat horseflesh. Not so, however, in other countries including France and Germany, where people love horsemeat. But Europe was a long way for me to go to get a low-fat, iron-building meal.

Then I remembered the Harvard Faculty Club story told to me about twenty years ago by a man who was manager of the Club for twenty-five years. His name was Charles Coulson. Horsemeat had been on the menu of the Faculty Club for more than a hundred years. Not much of it was sold, but the faculty would not allow him to take it off the menu. He would buy ten pounds a month, and most months he would throw away ten pounds. Occasionally, they would get an order for a horsemeat steak, and his chef would have to disguise the meat’s bluish cast with a dark-brown gravy and try to get away with cooking it well done. He said one old professor, a Nobel Prize–winner, would order it every two or three months along with another entrée. He would never eat the horsemeat: He just wanted to make sure it remained on the menu and that members and club staff knew he was the one who ate it.

One day Mr. Coulson received a letter from the Midwestern meat packer that delivered it to the back door of the Faculty Club every month, advising him that they could no longer deliver the horsemeat to the Club because the eighteen-wheeler trucks could not negotiate the narrow streets of Cambridge. The letter also informed him that the minimum order was being changed from ten pounds to twenty-five pounds, and if he wanted to get his horsemeat each month, he would have to arrange for pickup of the twenty-five pound package at an unloading platform in Chelsea, Massachusetts. Coulson told his bosses at the Harvard Faculty Club that it looked to him as though they could finally take horsemeat off the menu. He told them it did not sell and the old professor had recently died. They told him to go over and pick up the package at the appointed time and place each month.

After a few months of picking up the horsemeat, Coulson got to know the truck driver and asked what else was in that big truck. He was told it was all horsemeat—thousands of pounds of it. Coulson then casually asked who his customers were for all that horsemeat. The driver replied, “Mr. Coulson, I have three customers for all that horsemeat in the Boston area—the dog track, the zoo, and the Harvard Faculty Club.”

I remembered that story and also that the Faculty Club finally gave up serving horsemeat, I believe in the mid-eighties. So even if I wanted to, I could not get a horsemeat steak there. Even if they still had it, they don’t let just any Tom, Dick, or Harry into the Faculty Club. And I certainly was not going to travel to France or Germany for a horsemeat sandwich or a horsemeat hot dog.

So I continued to eat my liver whenever I could get it, ate red meat (cholesterol, be damned) more often than usual, more beans, prune juice, iron-fortified bread and cereal, and even more raw oysters.

God knows what all that did to all my other “numbers,” but my iron level rolled back from the red line to normal, and I did it without having to see my PCP.