A/2C Hunter S. Thompson 23 Aug 57 1. A/2C Hunters. Thompson

Transcription

llU'l A@Q 8.VI� 11 Vi It§
AU IP!@VBIN@ @ IHHJND CCMMb\i\UJ
UNITED STATES AIR FORCE
!;Un Ah fil®rui ias@, frhvhh1
ADDl!IElilll llll!!i>&.Y
Avvoo,
Base Staff Personnel Officer
Personnel Report: A/2C Hunter S. Thompson
23 Aug 57
1. A/2C Hunters. Thompson, AF 15546879, has worked in the Internal
Information Section, OIS, for nearly one year. During this time he has done
some outstandi�g sports writing, but ignored APGC-OIS policy,
2. Airman Thompson possesses outstanding talent in writing. He has
imagination, good use of English, and can express his thoughts in a manner
that makes interesting reading.
3, However, in spite of frequent counseling with explanation of
for the conservative policy on an AF Base newspaper, Airman Thompson
consistently written controversial material and leans so strongly to
editorializing that it was necessary to require that all his writing
thoroughly edited before release.
the reasons
has
critical
be
4, The first article that called attention to the writing noted above
was a story very critical of Base Special Services. Others that were gtopped
before they were printed were pieces that severely criticized Arthur Godfrey
and Ted Williams that Airman Thompson extracted from national media releases
and added his flair for the inuendo and exaggeration.
5. This Airman has indicated poor judgement from other standpoints by
releasing Air Force information to the Playground News himself, with no con
sideration for other papers in the area, or the fact that only official releases,
carefully censored by competent OIS staff members, are allowed.
6. In summary, this Airman, although talented, will not be guided by
policy or personal advice and guidance. Sometimes his rebel and superior
attitude seems to rub off on other airmen staff members. He has little
consideration for military bearing or dress and seems to dislike the service
and want out as soon as possible.
7. Consequently, it is requested that Airman Thompson be assigned to
other duties immediately, and it is recommended that he be earnestly
considered under the early release program.
B, It is also requested that Airman Thompson be officially advised that
he. is to do no writing of any kind for internal or external publication unless
such writing is edited by the OIS staff, and that he is not to accept outside
employment with any of the local media.
W.S. EVANS, Colonel, USAF
Chief, Office of Information
Services
Document 1: "Personnel Report, Hunter S. Thompson"
1. What is the purpose of this document?
2.
How is this document organized?
3.
Please comment on the style of the document. What do you notice about the language? Do
the language and the organization help the document fulfill its purpose? How?
NEWS RELE E
AUi Pl!IH)VUNG @f!@UND COMMAND
EGLON AUi F@IICI IASi!, Fl!.@IU@.A
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EGLIN AFB, FLORIDA-(Mov8)-S/Sgt. Manmountain Dense, a novice Air Policeman, w�s
severely injured here today, when a wine bottle e�loded inside the 'AP gatehouse
at the west entrance to the base. Dense was incoherent for several hours after the
disaster, but managed to make a statement which led investigators to believe the
bottle was hurled from a speeding car which approached the gatehouse on the wrong
side of the road, coming from the general direction of the SEPERATION CENTER.
Further investigation revealed that, only minutes before the incident at the
gatehouse,.a reportedly "fanatical" airman had received his separation papers and
was rumored to have set out i� the direction of the ga�ehouse at a high spead in a
muffler-less car with no brakes. An immediate search was begUn for Huntef
s.
Thompson, one-time sports editor of the base newspaper and wisll-kru»m "fflOralG
problem". Thompson was known to have a sometimes over-powering affinity for wina
and was described by a recent arrival in the base sanatorium as "just the type
of bastard who would do a thing like that".
An apparently uncontrolable iconociast, Thompson w&e discharged tod&y after one
of the most hectic and unusual Air Force careers in recent histol?f. According to
Captain Munnington Thurd, who was relieved of his duties as base classification
officer yesterday and admitted to the neuropsychological section of the base hos
pital, Thompson was "totally unclassifianble" and "ons of the momt saY&ga and
unnatural airmen I've ever come up against."
"I'll never understand how he got this discharge", Thur& went on to smy. "I
almost had a stroke yesterday when I heard he was being given m'I honcrmbls
discharge. It's terrifying-simply terrifying."
And.then Thurd siank into a deleriwn.
-30-
Document 2: "News Release, Air Proving Ground Command, Elgin AFB, Florida"
Note: This document was ghost-written by Hunter S. Thompson, who is the subject of the Personnel
Report (Document 1).
1.
What is the purpose of this document?
2.
How is this document organized?
3. Please comment on the style of the document. What do you notice about the language? Do
the language and the organization help the document fulfill its purpose? How?
4.
Does the fact that the document was written by Hunter S. Thompson-subject of Documents
1 & 2-have any influence on your reading of this document? Stated another way, how does
Thompson effectively comment on his own discharge? Discuss this at some length.
Quest lov eon How Hip-Hop Fai l ed Black America-- Vulture
5/26/2016
\'ULTURE
,eA�G:. .lm,��
vulture.com
April 22, 2014 11 :45 a.m.
When the People Cheer: How Hip-Hop Failed
Black America
By Questlove
Photo: Maya Robinson and Photo by Getty
This is the first in a weekly series of six essays looking at hip-hop's recent past, thinking about its
distant past, and wondering about the possibility of a future. Read the second one here
(hUp://www.vullure.com/2014/04/q11estlove-011-money:jay-z-how-hip-hop:fai/ed-black
amel'ica-part-2.html), the third one here (http://www.v11lture.com/2014/o5/questlove-hip
hopfailed-black-america-pari'-8-black-loses-cool.html), and the fourth one here
(http://www.vulture.com/2014/05/questlove-lww-hip-hop-has-become-the-new-disco.html)
There are three famous quotes that haunt me and guide me though my days. The first is from
John Bradford, the 16th-century English reformer. In prison for inciting a mob, Bradford saw a
parade of prisoners on their way to being executed and said, "There but for the grace of God go
I." (Actually, he said "There but for the grace of God goes John Bradford," but the switch to the
pronoun makes it work for the rest of us.) The second comes from Albert Einstein, who
disparagingly referred to quantum entanglement as "spooky action at a distance." And for the
third, I go to Ice Cube, the chief lyricist of N.W.A., who delivered this manifesto in "Gangsta
Gangsta" back in 1988: "Life ain't nothing but bitches and money."
Those three ideas may seem distant from one another, but if you set them up and draw lines
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Questlove on How Hip-Hop Failed Black America -- Vulture
between them, that's triangulation. Bradford's idea, of course, is about providence, about luck
and gratitude: You only have your life because you don't have someone else's. At the simplest level,
I think about that often. I could be where others are, and by extension, they could be where I am.
You don't want to be insensible to that. You don't want to be an ingrate. (By the by, Bradford's
quote has come to be used to celebrate good fortune - when people say it, they're comforting
themselves with the fact that things could be worse - but in fact, his own good fortune lasted
only a few years before he was burned at the stake.)
Einstein was talking about physics, of course, but to me, he's talking about something closer to
home - the way that other people affect you, the way that your life is entangled in theirs whether
or not there's a clear line of connection. Just because something is happening to a street kid in
Seattle or a small-time outlaw in Pittsburgh doesn't mean that it's not also happening, in some
sense, to you. Human civilization is founded on a social contract, but all too often that gets
reduced to a kind of charity: Help those who are less fortunate, think of those who are different.
But there's a subtler form of contract, which is the connection between us all.
And then there's Ice Cube, who seems to be talking about life's basic appetites - what's under the
lid of the id - but is in fact proposing a world where that social contract is destroyed, where
everyone aspires to improve themselves and only themselves, thoughts of others be damned.
What kind of world does that create?
Those three ideas, Bradford's and Einstein's and Cube's, define the three sides of a triangle, and
I'm standing in it with pieces of each man: Bradford's rueful contemplation, Einstein's hair, Ice
Cube's desires. Can the three roads meet without being trivial? This essay, and the ones that
follow it, will attempt to find out. I'm going to do things a little differently, with some madness in
my method. I may not refer back to these three thinkers and these three thoughts, but they're
always there, hovering, as I think through what a generation of hip-hop has wrought. And I'm not
going to handle the argument in a straight line. But don't wonder too much when it wanders. 111
get back on track.
*
I want to start with a statement: Hip-hop has taken over black music. At some level, this is a
complex argument, with many outer rings, but it has a simple, indisputable core. Look at the
music charts, or think of as many pop artists as you can, and see how many of the black ones
aren't part of hip-hop. There aren't many hip-hop performers at the top of the charts lately: You
have perennial winners like Jay Z, Kanye West, and Drake, along with newcomers like Kendrick
Lamar, and that's about it. Among women, it's a little bit more complicated, but only a little bit.
The two biggest stars, Beyonce and Rihanna, are considered pop (or is that pop-soul), but what
does that mean anymore? In their case, it means that they're offering a variation on hip-hop
that's reinforced by their associations with the genre's biggest stars: Beyonce with Jay Z, of
course, and Rihanna with everyone from Drake to A$AP Rocky to Eminem.
It wasn't always that way. Back in the late 'Sos, when I graduated high school, you could count
the number of black musical artists that weren't in hip-hop on two hands - maybe. You had
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folksingers like Tracy Chapman, rock bands like Living Colour, pop acts like Lionel Richie, many
kinds of soul singers - and that doesn't even contend with megastars like Michael Jackson and
Prince, who thwarted any easy categorization. Hip-hop was plenty present - in 1989 alone, you
had De La Soul and the Geto Boys and EPMD and Boogie Down Productions and Ice-T and Queen
Latifah - but it was just a piece of the pie. In the time since, hip-hop has made like the Exxon
Valdez (another 1989 release): It spilled and spread.
So what if hip-hop, which was once a form of upstart black-folk music, came to dominate the
modern world? Isn't that a good thing? It seems strange for an artist working in the genre to be
complaining, and maybe I'm not exactly complaining. Maybe I'm taking a measure of my good
fortune. Maybe. Or maybe it's a little more complicated than that. Maybe domination isn't quite a
victory. Maybe everpresence isn't quite a virtue.
Twenty years ago, when my father first heard about my hip-hop career, he was skeptical. He
didn't know where it was all headed. In his mind, a drummer had a real job, like working as
music director for Anita Baker. But if I'm going to marvel at the way that hip-hop overcame his
skepticism and became synonymous with our broader black American culture, I'm going to have
to be clear with myself that marvel is probably the wrong word. Black culture, which has a long
tradition of struggling against (and at the same time, working in close collaboration with) the
dominant white culture, has rounded the corner of the 21st century with what looks in one sense
like an unequivocal victory. Young America now embraces hip-hop as the signal pop-music genre
of its time. So why does that victory feel strange: not exactly hollow, but a little haunted?
I have wondered about this for years, and worried about it for just as many years. It's kept me up
at night or kept me distracted during the day. And after looking far and wide, I keep coming back
to the same answer, which is this: The reason is simple. The reason is plain. Once hip-hop culture
is ubiquitous, it is also invisible. Once it's everywhere, it is nowhere. What once offered resistance
to mainstream culture (it was part of the larger tapestry, spooky-action style, but it pulled at the
fabric) is now an integral part of the sullen dominant. Not to mention the obvious backlash
conspiracy paranoia: Once all of black music is associated with hip-hop, then Those Who Wish to
Squelch need only squelch one genre to effectively silence an entire cultural movement.
And that's what it's become: an entire cultural movement, packed into one hyphenated adjective.
These days, nearly anything fashioned or put forth by black people gets referred to as "hip-hop,"
even when the description is a poor or pointless fit. "Hip-hop fashion" makes a little sense, but
even that is confusing: Does it refer to fashions popularized by hip-hop musicians, like my Lego
heart pin, or to fashions that participate in the same vague cool that defines hip-hop music?
Others make a whole lot of nonsense: "Hip-hop food"? "Hip-hop politics"? "Hip-hop intellectual"?
And there's even "hip-hop architecture." What the hell is that? A house you build with a Hammer?
This doesn't happen with other genres. There's no folk-music food or New Wave fashion, once you
get past food for thought and skinny ties. There's no junkanoo architecture. The closest thing to a
musical style that does double-duty as an overarching aesthetic is punk, and that doesn't have the
same strict racial coding. On the one hand, you can point to this as proof of hip-hop's success.
The concept travels. But where has it traveled? The danger is that it has drifted into oblivion. The
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music originally evolved to paint portraits of real people and handle real problems at close range
- social contract, anyone? - but these days, hip-hop mainly rearranges symbolic freight on the
black starliner. Containers on the container ship are taken from here to there - and never mind
the fact that they may be empty containers. Keep on pushin' and all that, but what are you
pushing against? As it has become the field rather than the object, hip-hop has lost some of its
pertinent sting. And then there's the question of where hip-hop has arrived commercially, or how
fast it's departing. The music industry in general is sliding, and hip-hop is sliding maybe faster
than that. The largest earners earn large, but not at the rate they once did. And everyone beneath
that upper level is fading fast.
The other day, we ran into an old man who is also an old fan. He loves the Roots and what we do.
Someone mentioned the changing nature of the pop-culture game, and it made him nostalgic for
the soul music of his youth. "It11 be back," he said. "Things go in cycles." But do they? If you really
track the ways that music has changed over the past 200 years, the only thing that goes in cycles
is old men talking about how things go in cycles. History is more interested in getting its nut off.
There are patterns, of course, boom and bust and ways in which certain resources are exhausted.
There are foundational truths that are stitched into the human DNA But the art forms used to
express those truths change without recurring. They go away and don't come back. When hip-hop
doesn't occupy an interesting place on the pop-culture terrain, when it is much of the terrain and
loses interest even in itself, then what?
Back to John Bradford for a moment: I'm lucky to be here. That goes without saying, but I1l say
it. Still, as the Roots round into our third decade, we shoulder a strange burden, which is that
people expect us to be both meaningful and popular. We expect that. But those things don't
necessarily work together, especially in the hip-hop world of today. The winners, the top dogs,
make art mostly about their own victories and the victory of their genre, but that triumphalist
pose leaves little room for anything else. Meaninglessness takes hold because meaninglessness is
addictive. People who want to challenge this theory point to Kendrick Lamar, and the way that his
music, at least so far, has some sense of the social contract, some sense of character. But is he
just the exception that proves the rule? Time will tell. Time is always telling. Time never stops
telling.
© 2016, New York Media LLC. View all trademarks
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Document 3: Questlove, "When the People Cheer: How Hip-Hop Failed Black America"
1. What is the purpose of the article?
2. What is Questlove's thesis in the article? Find the sentence that you think best summarizes
the essay's argument and write it below, then explain why you think that this is the thesis
of the article.
3. In the space below, state the three quotations from John Bradford, Albert Einstein, and Ice
Cube that Questlove references throughout the article.
4.
Discuss the use of these quotations to functionally organize the essay. How does Questlove
employ them throughout the article?
5. Comment on the article's basic argument. Do you agree or disagree with Questlove's
assessment of hip-hop? Make an argument using at least three pieces of evidence from the
article.
Hateful Things
Sei Shonagon
0
O R RY T O L E A V E , but one's visitor keeps
chattering away. If it is someone of no importance, one can get rid
of him by saying, "You must tell me all about it next time"; but, should it
be the sort of visitor whose presence
commands one's best behaviour, the
·
situation is hateful indeed.
One finds that a hair has· got caught in the stone on which one is rub
bing one's inkstick, or again that gravel is lodged in the inkstick, making a
nasty, grating sound.
Someone has suddenly fallen ill and one summons the exorcist. Since he
is not at home, one has to send messengers to look for him. After' one has
had a long fretful wait, the exorcist finally arrives, and with a sigh of relief
one asks him to start his incantations. But perhaps he has been exorcizing
too many evil spirits recently; for hardly has he installed himself and be
gun praying when his voice becomes drowsy. Oh, how hateful!
A· man who has nothing in particular to recommend him discusses all
sorts of subjects at random as though he knew everything.
An elderly person warms the palms of his hands over a brazier and
stretches out the wrinkles. No young man would dream of behaving in ·
such a fashion; old people can really be quite shameless: I have se'en some .
dreary old creatures actually resting their feet on the brazier and rubbing·
them against the edge while they speak. These are the kind of people who
in visiting someone's house first use their fans to wipe away the dust from
the mat and, when they finally sit on it, ·cannot stay still but. are forever
spreading out the front of their hunting· costume or even tucking it up
under their knees. One might suppose that such behaviour was restricted
to people of humble station; but I have observed it in quite well-bred
people, including a Senior Secretary of the Fifth Rank in the ':Ministry of
Ceremonial and a former Governor of Suruga.
I hate the sight of men in their cups who shout, poke their fingers in
their mouths, stroke their beards, . and pass on the wine to their neigh
bours with great cries of "Have some more! Drink up!" They tremble, ·
shake their heads, twist their faces, and gesticulate like children who are
singing, "We're off to see the Governor." I have seen really well-bred
people behave like this and I find it most distasteful.
To envy others and to complain about one's own lot; to speak badly
about people; to be inquisitive about the most trivial matters and to resent
NE IS IN A H
and abuse people for not telling one, or, if one does manage to worm out
some facts, to inform everyone in the most detailed fashion as if one had
known all from the beginning-oh, how hateful!
One is just about to be told some interesting piece of news when a baby
·. starts crying.
A flight of crows . circle about with loud caws..
An admirer has come on a clandestine visit; but a dog catches sight of
· him and starts barking. One feels like killing the beast.
. One has been foolish enough to invite a man to spend the night in an
i.· unsuitable place-and then he starts snoring.
··
A gentleman has visited one secretly. Though he is wearing a tall, lac�
quered hat, he nevertheless wants no one to see him. He is so flurried, in
fact, that upon leaving he bangs into·something with his hat. Most hateful!
is annoying too when he lifts up the Iyo blind that hangs at the entrance
.of the room, then lets it fall with a great rattle. If it is a head-blind, things
• are still worse, for being more solid it makes a terrible noise when it is
. dropped. There is no excuse for such carelessness. Even a head-blind does
not make any noise if one lifts it up gently on entering and leaving the
room; the same applies to sliding-doors. If one's· movements are rough,
. even a paper door will bend and resonate when opened; but, if one lifts
..... :the door a little while pushing it, there need be no soun& ..
tf( . .'- One has gone to bed and is about to doze off when a mosquito appears,
i(tannouncing himself in a reedy voice. One can actually feel the wind made
W>by his wings and, slight though it is, one finds it hateful in the extreme.
\•\ A carriage passes with a nasty, creaking noise. Annoying to think that
}jfhe · passengers may not even. be aware of this! If I am travelling in some
;{pne's carriage and I hear it creaking, I dislike not only the noise. but also
fthe. owner of the carriage.
t\J%ne is in the middle of a story when someone butts in and tries to show
fSihat he is the only clever person in the room. Such a petson is hateful, and
s\§Q,' indeed, is anyone, child or adult, who tries to push himself forward.
�:/,,-,: One is telling a story about old times when someone breaks in with a
l·i�ttle detail that he happens to know, implying that· · ·one's own version is
�5- 1yipaccurate-disgusting behaviour! · ··
W;,/} .Very hateful is a mouse that scurries all over the place. ·\
,01E?J Some children have called at one's house. One makes-·a great fuss of
"\.ihem and gives them toys to play with. The children become accustomed
tffothis treatment and start to come regularly, forcing their way into one's
ff�rier rooms and scattering one's furni�hings and possessions. Hateful!
F:}>A · certain gentleman whom one does _not want to see visits one at home
}§r in the Palace, and one pretends to be asleep. But a maid comes to tell
)'f�ne and shakes one awake, with a look on her face that .says, "What a
t6�1eepyhead! " Very hateful.
·· · A· newcomer pushes ahead of the other members in a group; with a
knowing look, this person. starts laying down the law and forcing advice
upon everyone-most hateful.
A man with whom one is having an affair keeps. singing the praises of
some woman he used to know. Even if it is a thing of the past, this can be
very annoying. How much more so if he is still seeing the woman! (Yet
sometimes I find that it is not as unpleasant as all that.)
A person who recites a spell himself after sneezing. In fact I detest
anyone who sneezes, except the master of the house.
Fleas, too, are very hateful. When they dance about under someone's
clothes, they really seem to be lifting them up.
The sound of dogs when they bark for a long time in chorus is ominous
and hateful.
I cannot stand people who leave without closing the panel behind them.
How I detest the husbands of nurse-maids! It is not so bad ifthe child
in the maid's charge is. a girl, because then the man will keep his distance.
But, if it is a boy, he will behave as though he were the father. Never
letting the boy out of his sight, he insists on managing everything. He
·regards the other attendants in the house as less than human, and, if
anyone tries· to scold the child, he slanders him to the master. Despite this
disgraceful behaviour, no one dare accuse the husband; so he strides
about the house with a proud, self-important look, giving all the orders.
I hate people whose letters show that they lack respect for worldly
civilities, whether by discourtesy in the phrasing or by extreme politeness
to someone who does not deserve it. This sort of thing is, of course, most
odious if the letter is for one.self, but it is bad enough even if it is addressed to someone else.
As a matter of fact, most people are too casual, not only in their letters
but in their direct conversation. Sometimes I am quite disgusted at noting
how little decorum people observe when talking to each other. It is partic
ularly unpleasant to hear some foolish man or · woman omit the proper
marks of respect when addressing a person of quality; and, when servants
. fail to use honorific forms of speech in referring to their- masters, it is very
bad indeed. No kss odious, however, arethose masters who, in addressing
their servants, use such phrases as "When you were good enough to do
such-and-such" or "As you so kindly remarked.". No doubt there are
some masters who, in describing their own actions to a servant, say, "I
presumed to do so-and-soF'
Sometimes a person who is utterly devoid of charm will try to create a
good impression by using very elegant language; yet he only succeeds in
being ridiculous. No doubt he believes this refined language to be just
what the occasion demands, but, when it goes so far that ,everyone bursts
out laughing, surely something must be wrong.
It is most improper to address high-ranking courtiers, Imperial Advis-
h
S.
C
ers, and the like simply by using their names without any titles or marks ot
respect; but such mistakes are fortunately rare.
If one ·refers to the maid who is in attendance on some lady-in-waiting
as "Madam" or "that lady," she wiU be surprised, delighted, and lavish in
her praise.
When speaking to young noblemen and courtiers of high rank, one
should always (unless Their Majesties are present) refer to them by their
official posts. Incidentally, I have been very shocked to hear important
people use the word "I" while conversing in Their Majesties' presence.
· Such a breach of etiquette is really distressing, and I fail to see why people
· cannot avoid it. ·
A man who has nothing in particular to recommend him but who
speaks in an affected tone and poses as being elegant.
An inkstone with such a hard, smooth sqrface that the stick glides over
· it without leaving any deposit of ink.
· Ladies-in-waiting who want to know everything that is going on.
· Sometimes one greatly dislikes a person for no particular reason-and
then that person goes and does something hateful.
A gentleman who travels alone in his carriage to see a procession or
some other spectacle. What sort of a man is he? Even though he may not
· be a person of the greatest quality, surely he should have taken along a
few of the many young men who are anxious to see the sights. But no,
there he sits by himself (one can see his silhouette through the blinds),
with a proud look on his face, keeping all his impressions to himself.
: A lover who is leaving at dawn announces that he has to find his fan
and his paper. "I know I put them somewhere last night," he says. Since it
is pitch dark, he gropes about the room, bumping into the furniture and
muttering, "Strange! Where on earth can they be?" Finally he discovers
the objects. He thrusts the paper into the breast of his robe with a great
rustling sound; then he snaps open his fan and busily fans away with it.
Only now is he ready to take his leave. What charmless behaviour! "Hate
ful" is an understatement.
Equally disagreeable is the man who, when leaving in the middle of the
night, takes care to fasten the cord of his headdress. This is quite unneces
sary; he could perfectly well put it gently on his head without tying the
cord. And why must he spend time adjusting his cloak or hunting cos
tume? Does he really think someone may see him �t this time of night and
criticize him for not being impeccably dressec:l? .
A good lover will behave as elegantly at dawn as at any other time. He
drags himself out of bed with a look of dismay on his face. The lady urges
him on: "Come, my friend, it's getting light. You don't want anyone to
. find you here." He giyes a deep sigh, as if to say that the night has not
···-been nearly long enough and that it is agony to leave. Once up, he does
not instantly pull on his. trousers. Instead he comes close to the lady and
whispers whatever was left unsaid during the night. Even when he is
dressed, he still lingers, vaguely pretending to be fastening his sash.
Presently he raises the lattice, and the two lovers stand together by the
side door while he tells her how he dreads the corning day, which will
keep them apart; then he slips away. The lady watches him go, and this
moment of parting will remain among her most charming memories.
Indeed, one's attachment to a man depends largely on the elegance of
his leave-taking. When he jumps out of bed, scurries about the room,
tightly fastens his trouser-sash, rolls up the sleeves of his Court cloak,
over-robe, or hunting costume, stuffs his belongings into the breast of his
roh.e and then briskly secures the outer sash-one really begins to hate
him.
-Translated by Ivan Morris
Document 4: Sei Shonagon, "Hateful Things"
1. What is the purpose of the essay?
2. Discuss the organization of the essay. How are the paragraphs built? What do you notice
about them?
3. How do the tone, structure, and content of the essay's concluding paragraphs differ from the rest of it?
Describe.
4. Comment on the conclusion of the essay. How do these differences in tone, structure, and
content relate to the essay's overall meaning? State your opinion and discuss at some length.
The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll
WRITTEN BY: BOB DYLAN
William Zantzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll
With a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger
At a Baltimore hotel society gath'rin'
And the cops were called in and his weapon took from him
As they rode him in custody down to the station
And booked William Zantzinger for first-degree murder
But you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears
Take the rag away from your face
Now ain't the time for your tears
William Zantzinger, who at twenty-four years
Owns a tobacco farm of six hundred acres
With rich wealthy parents who provide and protect him
And high office relations in the politics of Maryland
Reacted to his deed with a shrug of his shoulders
And swear words and sneering, and his tongue it was snarling
In a matter of minutes on bail was out walking
Hattie Carroll was a maid of the kitchen
She was fifty-one years old and gave birth to ten children
Who carried the dishes and took out the garbage
And never sat once at the head of the table
And didn't even talk to the people at the table
Who just cleaned up all the food from the table
And emptied the ashtrays on a whole other level
Got killed by a blow, lay slain by a cane
That sailed through the air and came down through the room
Doomed and determined to destroy all the gentle
And she never done nothing to William Zantzinger
In the courtroom of honor, the judge pounded his gavel
To show that all's equal and that the courts are on the level
And that the strings in the books ain't pulled and persuaded
And that even the nobles get properly handled
Once that the cops have chased after and caught 'em
And that the ladder of law has no top and no bottom
Stared at the person who killed for no reason
Who just happened to be feelin' that way without wamin'
And he spoke through his cloak, most deep and distinguished
And handed out strongly, for penalty and repentance
William Zantzinger with a six-month sentence
Oh, but you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears
Bury the rag deep in your face
For now's the time for your tears
Document 5: Bob Dylan, "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll"
1.
Make a list of five facts that you know for sure about the song (e.g., Bob Dylan wrote it, it
rhymes, it tells a story):
2. What is the purpose of the song? How do you know?
3.
In some detail, describe Dylan's characterization of Hattie Carroll & William Zantzinger.
4. What is the poem's attitude toward justice? How do you know? Write a brief answer using
evidence from the poem.
Save paper and follow @newyorker on Twitter
DEPT. OF ANNOTATION
JANUARY 26, 2009 ISSUE
A LONESOME DEATH
BY DAVID SIMON
I
n February of 1963, twenty-four-year-old
William Zantzinger, armed with a toy carnival
cane and wrecked on whiskey, made a spectacle of
himself at the Spinsters' Ball at the Emerson Hotel
in Baltimore. He was a drunken country mouse in
the big city, at a time when the notion of racial
equality had barely shown itself in the neighborhood
of his father's tobacco farm. When the hotel's black waitstaff was slow to serve
Zantzinger another drink, he yelled racial epithets at Hattie Carroll, a barmaid and a
fifty-one-year-old mother of eleven, and he rapped her on the shoulder with his cane.
She became upset, then collapsed and died of a stroke.
Bob Dylan read about the case in the newspaper. He wrote the magnificent "Lonesome
Death of Hattie Carroll" with the paper splayed on the table of a Seventh Avenue
luncheonette. Zantzinger was then and forever after a master villain.
Twenty-five years later, I tried to interview him for a newspaper story. He was working in
a real-estate office (there was an equal-housing sticker on the door), and I found
Zantzinger a disappointing lump of a man, with small dark eyes and black hair thinning
from behind. T he eyes followed me angrily as I offered up my two-sides-to-every-story
patter, trying to get him to talk.
"There was a girl come down here from Baltimore five years ago," he said."I didn't talk to
her. And one before that. I got nothing to say."
I tried trashing Dylan: "That son of a bitch libelled you. You could've sued his ass for
what he did." Zantzinger smiled."We were gonna sue him big time. Scared that boy
good!" he said."The song was a lie. Just a damned lie."
He enjoyed talking about how his lawyer had fired shots across Dylan's bow. Columbia
Records was on the receiving end as well, Zantzinger said, adding that he dropped the
idea of a lawsuit because, after being convicted of manslaughter and assault, he'd seen
enough of courtrooms and controversy.
By then, too, there was little left of Zantzinger's reputation. But even a dispassionate
reading of the facts of the case leads one to conclude that Dylan took great liberties.
Hattie Carroll was not"slain by a cane" that was"doomed and determined to destroy all
the gentle," as Dylan wrote. No physical injury was done to her, nor was there any
evidence to suggest lethal intent. The medical examiner's report-citing Carroll's
enlarged heart and severe hypertension-attributed her death as much to Zantzinger's
verbal abuse as to the tap of his cane. Nor did Zantzinger have "high office relations in
the politics of Maryland" to influence the case, as Dylan implied.
Zantzinger ran through all of this. He knew the song and its equivocations. He knew
precisely the historical role to which it had consigned him.
"He did some good stuff, I guess," he said of Dylan."The blowing-with-the-wind song,
that one? But I'm probably not gonna be the best judge. I mean, for me, he's not much of
.
a smger."
I told Zantzinger about a note I had found in the old homicide file: "Attached is
'correspondence from . . . a folksinger in New York who seeks information about the
aforementioned case, which was investigated by your agency." But Dylan's letter wasn't
attached-snatched, perhaps, as a souvenir, from the police files. But the cover sheet,
dated months after the release of"Hattie Carroll,"was telling. Dylan was apparently
writing too late to improve his song's accuracy; his letter was the reaction of a worried
young man.
Zantzinger enjoyed that immensely. I told him that the Carroll children would not talk.
He acknowledged that he had paid them money in an out-of-court settlement.
"I know that I caused that woman's death," he said."I'm responsible. Me talking does
nothing for that woman or her family. Just put this in your article: I admire and respect
the Carroll family for their decision not to talk publicly. Like them, I think the best thing
to do is let it rest."W hen I got up to go, he extended his hand, and I took it. He stayed in
his chair, and I saw myself out.
Picasso said that art is the lie that shows us the truth, and that's how Dylan and his
ballad should probably be judged. But to hold that standard to W illiam Zantzinger, the
man, who died earlier this month, at the age of sixty-nine, seems too crude a measure. In
1963, he was sentenced to six months in jail for Hattie Carroll's death, on the same day
as the March on Washington.
Zantzinger lived long enough to see Martin Luther King,Jr., honored with a national
holiday and to know that this week Barack Obama would be inaugurated as President.
We can imagine him galled at this outcome, a small-minded racist rightly defined by his
ugliest moment. Perhaps that's him, or perhaps he was more than that. At any rate, he
knew his part and he played it to the end. +
DAVID SIMON
Document 6. David Simon, "A Lonesome Death"
1.
What is the purpose of this article? How do you know?
2.
How does the William Zantzinger of Dylan's song compare to the William Zantzinger of
Simon's article? Explain with evidence.
3. The article contends that Dylan took liberties with the truth when describing the case of
Hattie Carroll and William Zantzinger. What were some of the ways he "bent the truth"?
4. After reading the song and the article, do you think that it's appropriate for an artist to
fictionalize the truth in ways such as these? Why or why not? Feel free to quote directly from
the article.
Save paper and follow @newyorker on Twitter
A REPORTER AT LARGE
DECEMBER 8, 2014 ISSUE
THE RIDE OF THEIR LIVES
Children preparefor the world's most dangerous organized sport.
BY BURKHARD BILGER
Calf riders wait in the arena alley on the last day ofthe
Youth Bull Riders World Finals, in Abilene, Texas.
Rodeo bull riders learn as children by riding sheep,
calves, and steers. Many ride theirfirst bull before their
teens.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY JONNO RAHMAN
R
odeo bulls, like the boys who dream of riding
them, are unpredictable creatures. They can
start out shy and skittish, then suddenly turn ornery.
They'll lie down in the chute one day and try to gore you the next. The most dangerous
bull ever ridden, by some accounts, began as a scrawny yellow calf in 1988. Half
Charolais and half Brahman, he was still long and bony at age three, but liable to turn fat
and ungainly if his breeding held true. His owner, Phil Sumner, named him J31-he
wasn't sure the bull would live long enough to earn a real name. Sumner took him to a
few scrubgrass rodeos in northern Oklahoma, but didn't see much fight in him. "I was
thinking, Dude, you're going to have to step up your game plan or you're going to be
going to McDonald's," Sumner told me.
Then one Sunday afternoon at a small arena outside of Okeene, Oklahoma, something in
the bull snapped. The kid who was riding him got his hand caught in his rope. He was
flopping around on J31's back, trying to dismount, when the bull suddenly went crazy
beneath him. He leaped up and spun around, bucked forward and kicked back, his legs so
high behind him that he almost flipped end over end. By the time the boy pulled free, the
bull had nearly gone over the fence. "It just freaked him out," Sumner said.
Animals, as a rule, don't like to have other animals on their backs. They find it strange
and distressing-an attack or a violation, an act of dominance. This hasn't kept us from
trying to ride them, of course. Horse, mule, donkey, camel, llama, yak, and elephant-the
bigger the animal, the more likely we are to climb on top of it. People have sat on
ostriches, orcas, alligators, and water buffalo, straddled giant tortoises, and set toddlers on
St: Bernards. Their mounts may try to shake them off at first, but the contest is an
unequal one, and they tend to knuckle under eventually. Some even learn to like it.
Not rodeo bulls. Their brains aren't wired for submission. They not only refuse to be
ridden; they find ever more inventive ways to cast people off. Watching old videos ofJ31,
you can see him learn as he goes. At first, he just charges around the ring and jumps up
and down. But the older he gets the crueller and less predictable he becomes. He spins
one way, then the other, charges forward, and jerks to the side. His front and back ends
start to uncouple, jackhammering the ground independently. His spine twists and rolls,
leaving the rider with no balancing point, no center of gravity. By the age of five, he
weighs nearly two thousand pounds and is built like a clenched fist: all hoof and horn
and fast-twitch muscle. Sumner eventually sold him to another rancher, Sammy
Andrews, figuring that he was too much bull for the local rodeo circuit. It was Andrews
who gave him a name to match his reputation: Bodacious.
"He was like a monster once he matured,"TuffHedeman, a four-time world champion,
told me. "Even the good guys were super scared of him. You'd see world champions ride
him for a jump or two and then get off." In 1993, at a rodeo in Long Beach, California,
Hedeman drew Bodacious for what some consider the greatest ride in history-a near
perfect exhibition of balance and anticipation. Two years later, the bull got his revenge. At
the world championships in Las Vegas that August, Hedeman was leading the standings
by what proved to be an insurmountable three hundred points when he drew Bodacious
again. This time, a split second after leaving the chute, the bull bucked forward with all
his might. Hedeman did what riders are supposed to do: he leaned high over the bull's
shoulders and flung his arm back as a counterbalance. But just as he came forward,
Bodacious threw his head back-smashing it square into Hedeman's face. Hedeman
stayed on somehow, his hand twisted in the rope, only to get head-butted again, thrown
into the air, and bounced off the bull's back like a rag doll.
The ride broke every bone in Hedeman's face below the eyes. It took thirteen and a half
hours of reconstructive surgery and five titanium plates to repair the damage, and
Hedeman's sense of smell and taste never returned. "I told my buddy afterward, I must
have broke my jaw, because when I bite down my teeth don't come together," he recalled.
"People were looking at me and then turning their eyes away or putting their hands over
their faces. I thought, I must look like Frankenstein or something."
Seven weeks later, when a rider named Scott Breding drew Bodacious at the National
Finals Rodeo, he elected to wear a hockey mask for protection. It didn't help. In less than
four seconds, the bull had knocked Breding offwith the same move, fracturing his left
eye socket. The next day, Sammy Andrews retired Bodacious from competition. "I didn't
want to be the guy who let him kill someone," he told me.
T
he boys at the Camp of Champions couldn't wait to get on a bull like that. How
else would they be world champions one day? Bull riding is a collaborative sport
a pairs competition in which one partner tries to kill the other, like an ice dance with an
axe murderer. If a rider manages to hang on for eight seconds, he'll earn up to fifty points
for his own form and fifty for the bull's. The meaner the animal the better the score.
"Ooh, I really want to ride 44!"Wacey Schalla told his friends Trigger Hargrove and Jet
Erickson one morning. He jumped up and down on the catwalk along the arena, and
pointed at a bony brown calf in the chute below. "I hear that sucker's rank!"
Wacey,Trigger, and Jet were eight years old. The tops of their heads barely cleared my
waist, yet they already had the rangy look of seasoned riders. They wore saddleman jeans
and paisley Western shirts, tooled leather boots and straw cowboy hats, oversized to fend
off the broiling June sun.Wacey was the smallest of the three and the most intensely
focussed. His eyes would turn to slits above his freckled cheeks as he visualized his next
ride. Trigger was taller and leaner, with a natural swagger-he was an excellent roper as
well as rider. Jet was the shyest and the most delicately built.W hile Trigger kept up a
running monologue-"That 36 nearly yanked my arm off! But then the next one didn't
hardly buck at all"-Jet slumped against the rails, adrift in his own thoughts. "He's kind
of a floater," his father, Everett, told me. "But when he scoots up on that calf and it takes
off, his body takes over and he just rides." He laughed. "It kind of reminds you of the
legends of the past, watching them kids."
In the past two decades, selective breeding has made
rodeo bulls more dangerous and valuable than ever
before. The best ones cost ha!fa million dollars and their
semen canfetch thousands.
Almost every weekend, the three boys would ride
against one another at some small-town rodeo in
Oklahoma. The previous Saturday, it had been Elk City, with Wacey coming in first,
Trigger second, and Jet third. But the order could easily have been shuffied. "It's just back
and forth with those three,"Trigger's grandfather, Eddie, told me. "They're the fiercest
competitors and the best of friends." All three were the sons of professional rodeo riders.
They'd gone from bouncing around on sheep at the age of three or four-"mutton
busting," it was called-to riding calves at six and now the occasional steer. In two or
three years, they'd get on their first bulls. Their winnings came mostly in the form of
engraved belt buckles and prize saddles-"I've got a bunch more in my closet
somewhere,"Wacey told me, when he showed me a few buckles at his house-as well as
small cash purses. But they'd grow more substantial soon enough. Caden Bunch, one of
the eleven-year-olds at the camp, had made more than a hundred thousand dollars.
The Camp of Champions was a final tuneup for the biggest rodeo of their lives: the
Youth Bull Riders World Finals. The event would draw the top fifty riders from six age
groups to Abilene, Texas, in July. It would feature rougher stock than most of them were
used to riding, so they wanted all the help they could get. The camp, founded by a bull
rider turned cowboy preacher named Andy Taylor, was a combination rodeo school and
revival meeting. The first half of the week had been devoted to girls' events-barrel
racing, goat tying, and breakaway roping-and the second half to boys' events: calf
roping, bull riding, and bronco busting. The camp was held on the grounds of the Trinity
Fellowship, a budding megachurch in Sayre, Oklahoma, on the short-grass prairie just
east of the Texas Panhandle. There were livestock pens and dusty red arenas to one side
and a striped tent to the other, where the campers met for church services every morning
and evening. "You know what's cool, boys?"Ted Nuce, one of the trainers and a former
world-champion bull rider, told them. "Riding bulls is a Jesus trap. You guys are going to
pray because you want to. You need some protection out there."
Earlier that day, the boys had been to the first of the morning services. These had a
comforting sameness to them. The house band, led by a local bulldozer operator and his
sons, would play some Southern-flavored Christian rock. Andy Taylor would drawl a few
lines of Scripture, then some retired bull riders would come up to testify. These were
small, wiry, tightly wound men-"the bantam roosters of the rodeo world," one calf roper
called them-accustomed to keeping their pain to themselves. They'd talk, haltingly,
about the injuries that had laid them low at the height of their careers, and how little
they knew about earning a living in the real world. How they'd succumbed to drink and
drugs, disloyalty and meanness before the Lord pulled them through. "Some of my
family members just abandoned me," a young, bespectacled bull rider named Matt Austin
confessed. "I was broken. But I'm here to tell you that God will never leave you."
I couldn't tell how deeply this registered with the eight-year-olds. Riding calves is less
life-threatening than riding bulls, and Wacey and his friends seemed to think they were
immortal anyhow. They were by turns the best-behaved boys I'd ever met-they
addressed adults as sir and Ma' am, took off their hats in church, and lowered their eyes
and mumbled "Excuse me" when they bumped into you-and the rowdiest, the least
domesticated. "They make me proud," their counsellor, Keith Hutton, told me on my
first night at camp. He was about to say more when a chorus of screams and shouts
erupted from the bunkhouse below, in the church basement. "He's bleeding!" a high voice
was squealing. "There's blood everywhere!" Hutton sighed and blew out his cheeks. He
waited a moment for the noise to subside, then lurched up from the couch and trudged
downstairs.
Reports on the incident would remain muddled and contradictory. As far as Hutton
could tell, Wacey was jumped by another boy after beating him in a game of H-0-R-S
E. Trigger waded in to defend him, and in the ensuing fracas the assailant fell and
smacked his head, opening up a gash. "It was kind of a freaky deal," Hutton told me the
next morning. "It looked like his head had fallen off, there was so much blood." By then,
in any case, the boys were all friends again, monkeying around in the breakfast line while
Trigger practiced his roping tricks. A little blood, they knew, came with the territory.
Trigger's uncle had torn off a thumb roping steers, and Jet's father had snapped the Cl
vertebra in his neck when a bull named Stoney tossed him on his head. He spent the
next six months immobilized in a halo, not sure if he could ever get on a bull again. "We
know it's dangerous," he told me. "But there's more glory in it than injuries, I'll promise
you that. And the pain always goes away. Sometimes you just have to wait longer than
others."
W
hen breakfast was over, Hutton corralled the boys into a little trailer hitched to
a golf cart and hauled them over to the arena. (He was legally blind, so he
couldn t drive a van.) "The Calf-Rider Express is pullin' out!" he shouted, then turned and
fixed them with a baleful glare. "Hey! I don't need to hear a bunch of yellin'! We had
enough of that foolishness last night. And don't go jumpin' off the trailer! That freaks me
out." Bald and gap-toothed, with bright, bewildered eyes, Hutton grew up an Army brat
in England. He got deported for selling black-market cigarettes, and spent the next few
decades smoking weed and paying rent, as he put it, until he found Jesus. "This hot
blonde was on me to come to church," he said. "I thought she might give me a little, but I
ended up crying out thirty years of being pissed. I've been clean ever since."When he
wasn't volunteering at the church, Hutton worked as a roofer, a substitute teacher, and a
drug counsellor. It sometimes seemed like he'd treated someone in almost every family in
his town.
Western Oklahoma is a tough place to live in the best of times. The soil is poor and full
of gypsum and clay. The winds can rise to catastrophe out of a clear blue sky. In the right
light, there's a kind of grandeur to its vast, featureless sweep, where every truck stop and
water tower can take on totemic power. But any sense of self-importance has long since
been wrung from the local population. People age quickly here. The young men with hips
cocked and thumbs hooked through belt loops turn into swaybacked old ranchers soon
enough, beer guts tucked into embroidered shirts. The girls in ponytails and rhinestones
weather into creased, careworn women. They know that the eyes of the world are
focussed elsewhere-on Texas, perhaps-and do their best to get on with it.
Early that morning, a towering thunderhead had rumbled in from the east, stripping
branches from the cottonwoods and flooding the streets of Oklahoma City. But the sky
blew clear within minutes, leaving only muddy ruts behind. "They're saying that this is
going to be the next Mojave Desert if we don't have a weather change," Hutton said. "It's
been going on for ten or twelve years now."The fracking industry had brought new jobs
to the area-Elk City was growing fast-but without water the boom might not last
long. And what with the low minimum wage and the high teen-pregnancy rate,
methamphetamines and prescription-drug addiction, life was lived ever closer to the
bone. Around here, the notion of childhood as a safe, protected place-a benign bubble
-seemed like poor training for life. Religion and rodeo made more sense.
Rodeo campfeatures calfroping and bronco bustingfar boys;far girls, there's barrel racing, goat
tying, and breakaway roping.
When the eight-year-olds had arrived at the arena
and put on their helmets and protective vests, one of
the trainers gathered them around him in a circle.
"We don't do this for the money," he told them. "We
do this because the very first time we got on a bull
the first time we got bucked off and hit the ground
and got up-right there we knew that this is what
we were meant to be doing." He cast his eyes around
the circle, peering hard at each one of them. "God
has a, plan for you being here," he said. "What you
learn in bull riding you're going to be able to apply to
everyday life. When life gives you a storm, you can
sit back and let it toss you wherever it wants to toss
you, or you can have the confidence to know that
God created you to be a winner, and to have honor and glory."
The boys didn't need convincing. A bucking calf seemed like the ultimate amusement
park ride to them-a bumper car and extreme coaster rolled into one. When they weren't
in line for another ride, they were practicing their moves on the Mighty Bucky: a padded
barrel perched on a steel pivot and springs. I never saw a serious injury among the eight
year-olds, but plenty of boys were bawling by the time they picked themselves up off the
ground. Yet they couldn't wait for the next round. The teen-agers, if anything, were even
more eager. Nearly every ride left one of them hobbling to the gate, clutching an arm or
leg. I saw one boy's cheek split open by a bull's horn and another boy dragged across the
ground like tin cans behind a bumper, then stomped on for good measure. Both were
back on another bull the same day.
I thought about a playground near my house in Brooklyn, in Park Slope. A couple of
years ago, it was beautifully renovated by the city, with a rock-lined stream meandering
through it and an old-fashioned pump that children could crank to set the water flowing.
The stream was the delight of the neighborhood for a while, thronged with kids
splashing through the shallows and floating sticks down the current. Yet some parents
were appalled. The rocks were a menace, they declared. The edges were too sharp, the
surfaces too slippery. A child could fall and crack her skull. "I actually kept tapping them
to check if they were really rocks," one commenter wrote on the Park Slope Parents Web
site. "It seemed odd to me to have big rocks in a playground."Within two weeks, a
stonemason had been brought in to grind the edges down. The protests continued. One
mother called a personal-injury lawyer about forcing the city to remove the rocks.
Another suggested that something be done to "soften'' them. "I am actually dreading the
summer because of those rocks," still another complained.
The parents at the camp flipped this attitude on its head. They valued courage over
caution, grit over sensitivity. They revelled in the raw physicality of boys. The mothers sat
in the bleachers taking videos and hollering advice-"Wyatt, just ride the way Daddy
taught you!"The fathers straddled the chute, leaning over their sons to cinch the rope
and shove the calf into position: ''Are you ready?""Yes, sir!""You've got to take the fight
.
· "When the gate blew open, t hey 1eaped up on
· l""V
to h1m.""'T.
.res, sir.
.1ou' ve got to want 1t.
the rail and watched their sons with clenched fists and narrowed eyes. They weren't stage
parents, for the most part. They just took following your bliss to its logical extreme. "I'd
let my kid do whatever he has a passion for," one mother told me, "even if he wanted to
be a piano player."
ti
ow dangerous is bull riding? The best numbers come from a sports epidemiologist
named Dale Butterwick. In 2006, when he was at the University of Calgary,
utterwick set up a registry of rodeo injuries and spent three years filling it with data
from rodeo medics and riders' self-reports. Between 1989 and 2009, he found, twenty
one contestants had died in the United States and Canada. Sixteen were bull riders,
including one twelve-year-old boy. Another twenty-eight sustained "life-changing"
injuries.
Butterwick's study didn't track the riders' less grievous accidents-the breaks, tears,
gashes, dislocations, concussions, and contusions that can occur on almost any ride. But,
according to a twenty-five-year study that used data from the Professional Rodeo
Cowboys Association, injuries tend to cluster in four areas: the head and face (sixteen per
cent), the neck and back (fifteen per cent), the knees (twelve per cent), and the shoulders
(twelve per cent). "It's not ifyou're gonna get hurt; it's when," some of the parents at the
camp acknowledged. Others downplayed the risk, saying they'd rather have one bull try
to kill them than eleven football players. Yet bull riders are ten times more likely than
football players to be seriously injured. Theirs is the most dangerous organized sport in
the world.
Butterwick's data ended with an alarming spike: in the last two years of the study, the
rate of catastrophic injury was more than double that of the twenty-year average. This
came as no surprise to Cody Custer, the senior trainer at the camp. "The quality of the
stock just keeps getting better," he told me. "When we were riding, you might go to ten
rodeos and maybe get one bull that bucked really hard. Now, out of a herd of thirty,
twenty-two will be buckers. It's an epidemic, really."
Custer's son Brett was a sixteen-year-old bull rider at the camp. He was a little stud,
Custer said. "But all it takes is one time to break an egg in there-or kill a kid or paralyze
him."The Camp of Champions played it safe by rodeo standards. The boys had to wear
helmets and vests, the trainers stressed caution, the livestock were somewhat less than
homicidal. But at the Youth World Finals all bets would be off: the previous year, among
the oldest contestants, three out of four had been bucked off.
When Custer was born, in 1965,rodeo still seemed an extension of ordinary cowboying.
He joined his first roundup at the age of four,on his family's ranch south of the Grand
Canyon,and spent much of his youth riding bareback.He learned to loosen his hips and
shift his weight,to roll with every pitch and yaw.He learned to ride with his feet,
clamping them tight to an animal's sides and reacting to the slightest twitch.He learned
to use every inch and ounce of his lariat-thin frame,sitting tall to increase his leverage
and send pressure down his legs.By the age of fourteen, he'd ridden some twenty-five
hundred steer.These were castrated animals,not nearly as strong and wild as an uncut
bull,which was just what he needed."Most of them just went straight up and down," he
told me."But my confidence got sky high and so did my skills."
In his twenty years on the circuit,Custer had his share of injuries: a collapsed lung,
several broken ribs,and a broken jaw that had to be wired shut for five weeks. He had
major surgeries on both shoulders and one of his knees and suffered a string of severe
concussions,the worst of which knocked him out for more than half an hour.Yet he
counts himself lucky.Custer won a world championship in 1992,was elected to the
Professional Bull Riders Ring of Honor in 2003,and was still walking when he retired,
that same year."I got away pretty good,all things considered," he told me."You probably
won't be hearing about twenty-year bull-riding careers anymore."
g
odacious changed the way rodeo animals are bred. Before him,most bulls were a
dubious commodity-worth more for beef than for bucking cowboys. A rancher
m g t get a hundred dollars every time his bull was ridden,twice that much at big events.
The riders made the real money-they were the ones that people came to see.Bodacious
changed that equation.People who'd never heard of Tuff Hedeman knew the name of the
bull who'd "rearranged his face," as Hedeman's wife later put it.After Bodacious was
retired,he toured the country like a war hero,appearing in GQ and Penthouse, making
personal appearances at restaurants,casinos,and car dealerships."It was unreal," Sammy
Andrews told me."I thought we'd sell two or three T-shirts. But we had tour buses
coming around to see him."There were Bodacious coffee mugs,belt buckles,jewelry
lines,and condoms."If a Brahman bull ever were a superstar,then Bodacious just might
be," the band Primus sang."He's a cream-colored,beefy-brawn,full-fledged,four-footed
bovine celebrity."
Wacey Schaf/a (left) and]et Erickson practice on an oil
barrel bull. Withfewer andfewer ordinary animals to
practice on, the learning curve gets steeper every year.
It wasn't long before breeders found that they didn't
really need riders to make money.As Bodacious's
brand of notoriety spread to other bulls-Wolfman,Dillinger,Asteroid,Bushwacker
ranchers began to earn more from selling sperm,swag,and licensing agreements than
they did from rodeos. At events called futurities, the bulls could now compete directly
against one another, carrying dummy cowboys on their backs while judges rated their
bucking ability. The top bull could earn a quarter of a million dollars at a single event,
and as the purses grew so did the sport's attention to genetics. Ranchers once content to
breed any bull that leaped around now turned to outcrossing and in-vitro fertilization to
select specific behaviors: the dropkick, the side spin, the twisting belly roll. The result was
a succession of ever more powerful, more athletic, more murderous bulls. The only
question was who could ride them.
When Custer won his world championship, in 1992, he rode more than three-quarters of
the bulls he drew. Last year's world champion rode just hal£ The change has been
especially hard on young riders. Their learning curve gets steeper every year, and there are
fewer and fewer ordinary animals for them to practice on. "These kids that are eleven,
twelve, thirteen years old-they're getting on bulls that we never saw until we were pros,"
Custer told me. "It's like a phenomenal little football player being put in with a bunch of
college kids who want to knock his head off."
Custer is a hard man to rile up. The dashing young cowboy from the old videos now
wears tinted glasses and button-down shirts and ends every conversation with "God
bless." But when he talks about rodeo politics you can see the old bull rider in him. Four
years ago, when his son was still in junior high, Custer sent a letter to the National High
School Rodeo Association asking for steers to be used rather than bulls for the smaller
contestants. A number of retired rodeo stars co-signed the proposal, but the request was
ignored. "The guys who are raising the bulls, most of them have dollar signs in their
eyes," Custer told me. "Their interest is not in that little boy. Their interest is in the bull."
A
couple of weeks before the Youth World Finals, I went to visitDillon Page, the co
owner ofD&H Cattle Company, in south-central Oklahoma. Page's family has
raising livestock in the bottomland along the Washita River for three generations.
W hen he bought his first set of bucking bulls, thirty years ago, there were a few dozen
rodeo stock contractors in the country. Now there are close to a thousand. For the past
few years, Page has managed the ranch with his son HoytDillon, at one point winning
the Professional Bull Riders Stock Contractor of the Year award for six years running.
H.D., as his son is known, runs the breeding operation and shuttles the bulls to rodeos,
whileDillon directs the day-to-day workings of the ranch. On the morning I visited, he'd
been up since seven, haying the fields.
"We've got some bulls acting like queers back there," he told me as we walked toward his
truck to begin the morning feeding. "Seems to happen every time you get a weather
change. A couple of bulls start ridin' each other, then they go to fightin', and it just turns
into a blasted mess. That's how you end up with a lot of your cripples." Page, who is
sixty-three, has the crouched, sinewy build and the flinty manner of an old deputy sheriff
in a Western. He holds the small of his back as he walks and rubs his neck, which is
deeply creased and baked red by the sun. As he muttered instructions to the cowboys on
his property, a gold tooth flashed from time to time in his upper jaw.
Some five hundred bulls were scattered across the ranch's fifteen hundred acres. Tawny,
black, mottled, white-rodeo bulls are almost always mutts-they grazed under
spreading pecans, in thirteen pastures separated by tall steel fences. The best of them
could go for half a million dollars in their prime, but the ranch made even more by
selling half-interests in calves. An investor might pay twenty-five thousand for a yearling,
cover all its expenses and entry fees, then split the winnings with Page and his son. If all
went well, the bull would get sent to thirty-five or forty rodeos a year, earning five to ten
thousand in fees and up to a hundred thousand in futurities and other winnings. After
eight or nine years, he'd be retired, then used to sire calves for another decade or more. A
single straw of champion semen could go for upward of five thousand dollars.
When we reached the first pasture, Page jumped out of the truck to open the gate and
drove over to a row of galvanized troughs. He put the truck in neutral to set it rolling
slowly beside them and flipped a toggle beneath the steering wheel. This triggered an
auger in back to release the feed-a mixture of cracked corn, cottonseed, soybean hulls,
and dried distiller's grain. As it poured down the length of the troughs, Page jumped out
of the cab again and ran back to pull some hay from the truck bed. He scattered it
around the troughs, ran back to the cab, climbed in, and drove to the next gate, then
started the process all over. At one point, a big white bull came shouldering toward him,
testicles hanging nearly to the ground. Page shouted and waved his arms. When that
didn't work, he bent down and picked up a dirt clod and pelted him with it. The bull
stood his ground and gave a deep grunt, then shook his horns and clattered off. "You just
hope they don't decide to run over you," Page said when he got back in.
Before he bred bulls, Page tried his hand at riding them for a few years. He was never
good enough to make a career of it, he told me, but he got off easy where injuries were
concerned-just a few broken bones and a ruptured spleen. Although there was that one
ride, when he was seventeen or eighteen-the one that left him with three ribs broken
off into his lower belly. "I was pissin' and shittin' blood for four days," he said. "I don't
know if it was my bladder or my kidneys, but something wasn't right in there."The pain
got so bad that he had a friend haul him to the emergency room in Ardmore. But the
doctors kept him waiting for four or five hours, so he went back home. Two weeks later,
the bleeding finally stopped. "I guess it wasn't life-threatening," he said.
I asked him how he would have fared on bulls like the ones he breeds now, and he
laughed. "Oh, not very well, I guess. I rode some pretty good ones in my day-one of'em,
J's Pet, hadn't been rode in five years. I thought I'd done a pretty good deal. But he
couldn't even hold a light to some of these things that we buck today."
B
ucking bulls are like human athletes: every generation has a few that are
unaccountably great. The Peyton Mannings and LeBron Jameses can't really be
reproduced or used to gauge the average level of play. It's when you look down the bench
that you start to see a pattern. "Take Stone Sober over there," Page said. He pointed to a
red bull pacing inside a trailer next to the pasture, soon to be taken to a rodeo. He was
built like a middleweight wrestler, with bunched shoulders and thick veins ridging his
muscles. "We'd rather have him a little bigger," he said. "He's probably thirteen hundred,
fourteen hundred pounds-his mama was little bitty. But he can jump as high as this
fence with somebody on it. He can turn back and spin and go the other way, and he has a
lot of kick and a great big belly roll. Shucks, there ain't no telling what he's gonna do. I
don't think he knows hissel£" In the past three years, Stone Sober had bucked off twenty
two out of twenty-three riders, most of them in under four seconds.
]adeyn Lara (left) and Shayne Spain after completing
the third round ofmutton busting. Spainfinished third
over all,· Larafinished eighth. They have becomefriends
through competing together.
An animal like that is a freak of nature, Page said. It's
a petri dish full of exotic mutations-of tics and phobias, spastic nerves and explosive
rages, carefully culled and combined. The sperm from a champion sire is usually collected
off-site, mixed with eggs from a proven dam, and transplanted into a rancher's cows. It
doesn't always work. Genetic recombination is a crapshoot, and the outcome depends as
much on psychology as on physiology. "Confidence plays a big part in it," H. D. Page told
me later, on the phone. "If a bull gets rode every time he pokes his head out the gate, he'll
either quit buckin' or change his buckin' pattern to win. Some of them just figure it's not
worth the effort, and some of them learn to enjoy their jobs. They get addicted to the
adrenaline."
The result can be as unhealthy for the bull as for the rider. When a two-thousand-pound
animal leaps six feet in the air and hammers down on his back legs, things can go wrong:
joints pop, tendons snap, backs get thrown out of kilter. One of the pastures on the Pages'
ranch was full of hobbled old gladiators, kept around for semen or sentiment. "This one
here broke his leg at the finals," Page said, pulling up next to a white-headed bull with a
black eye patch. "Hard Twisted. Won a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars as a
two-year-old, but you can't set a broke leg. See how crooked it is?" He let the truck idle a
little farther, then pointed to a big brown bull stepping gingerly beside the fence. "His
leg? He broke it so bad that it drawed up. It don't even touch the ground." He shook his
head. "I shoulda done killed him. They make the best hamburger meat there is-well
muscled and lean. Ain't nobody that'll have better hamburger meat. But sometimes you
get to thinkin' too much and you keep 'em around when you shouldn't."
I asked Page if he ever wonders if things have gone too far. His son tried to ride
Bodacious three times, yet here they are trying to make bulls even meaner. Is there a limit
to how dangerous a bull can or should be? "I hope not," he said. "Because I intend on
making one that's a whole lot ranker than we've had before." He smirked. "You know the
bad thing? We can't breed cowboys. If you could figure out how to get a set of women
and three or four sires that had all that heart and the other ingredients that it takes, then
you could match the sires and the dams up like we do the bulls. Then maybe we'd have a
great bull rider."
In the meantime, there's only one alternative: start them young.
I
he Taylor County Expo Center, in Abilene, must have looked like the Taj Mahal to
Wacey and his friends. They'd been to a lot of rodeos by then-dusty little arenas
at t e edge of town, with a rickety concession stand on one side and some bleachers on
the other-but never one like this. The parking lot was as big as an airport, with what
looked like a giant spaceship in the middle. It had a hallway inside that went clear
around it, filled with folks selling cowboy hats and rifle cases, saddle soap, tooth guards,
rope rosin, and T-shirts that said things like "Mama Tried" and "The Hurrier I Go, the
Behinder I Get."W hen you walked down the tunnel and out into the arena, the seats
went up and up on every side. The roof looked like it was five stories high. The floor was
covered in a maze of pens and chutes full of livestock, with cowboys hanging off all the
rails. There was even air-conditioning-at a rodeo! Imagine that.
The World Finals are really six separate competitions, each for a different age group and
animal. The four-to-six-year-olds ride sheep, the seven- and eight-year-olds are on
calves, the nine-to-eleven-year-olds on steers, and the rest on increasingly fearsome bulls.
Each contestant rides once a day for three days, earning up to a hundred points per ride
from the four judges stationed around the arena. On the fourth day, the top fifteen
scorers out of the fifty in each group compete for their division championship. There are
cash prizes for the highest scores every day and a big pot at the end for each champion
more than sixty thousand dollars altogether.
''A lot of this event is about the luck of the draw," Curtis Spain, one of the event's
organizers, told me. The best buckers earn the best scores for their riders, but they're also
the most likely to toss a rider off. "We call that thinning the herd." Back home in Forney,
Texas, Spain had his own rodeo arena as well as a mechanical bull. His son Mason was
one of the top eleven-year-olds in the finals, and his daughter Shayne, age seven, was an
excellent mutton buster-one of only two girls in the finals. Girls could qualify for the
older age groups as well, but most dropped out before that-often at their parents'
urging. "The world's most dangerous sport is not something you really want to let your
little girl do," her father told me. "This is Shayne's farewell tour."
The first round was rough on Spain's kids, as it was on the boys from Oklahoma. All of
them rode well but drew sluggish animals, earning mediocre scores. Trigger was the
exception. He drew one of the feistiest calves in the pen-a big black Holstein-but got
bucked off right before the buzzer. "He came out and took two big blows and then
started lopin' ,"Trigger told me the next morning. "The second blow put me over on the
side, and it's really hard to stay on when he's lopin' and bouncin' like that."I told him that
I was sure he'd do better this time, but he didn't look convinced. "Hopefully,"he said,
picking at his chaps.
"The Star-Spangled Banner"was blaring over the loudspeakers by then-a taped version
by LeAnn Rimes, sounding like a country girl who'd just walked out on her worthless
lover. Over by the chutes, the mutton busters were getting ready to start the second
round. Shayne Spain leaned against a rail and glanced up at Jadeyn Lara, the only other
girl in the finals. Shayne was a year older and half a head taller, with a gap in her front
teeth. Her stringy blond hair fell loose across her shirt-her brother's, which she'd worn
for good luck.Jadeyn had on a pink vest that said "Ridin' Dirty"and pink chaps stitched
with dollar signs-her nickname wasJ. Money. She'd positioned herself at the highest
point in the arena, on a platform above the center chute, and was kneeling there with her
head lifted high, like the figurehead on a ship's prow. She and Shayne had both
dominated their local rodeo circuits-Shayne in north-central Texas andJadeyn in the
southeast-and both wanted badly to be the first girl to win the finals. "The boys hate it,"
Curtis Spain told me. "They hate losing to a girl. But little girls develop faster than little
boys, and Shayne is fearless, man. She likes rubbing their noses in it."
Sheep aren't all that into bucking. Truth be told, they don't like to run that much, either.
It takes a sharp spur and a clanging cowbell to get most of them moving, and even then
they're a pretty smooth, well-cushioned ride. Still, the mutton busters found ways to fall
off. Some lost their grip on the wool and keeled over sideways. Others held on tight and
pulled their mounts down on top of them. One or two hit the arena wall and got peeled
off, or flipped head over heels when their sheep came to a dead stop. Shayne andJadeyn
both managed to hang on, but Shayne got the better draw. Her sheep had been sheared
recently, so it was harder to hold but also faster and jumpier. She scored a sixty-four, for
fifth place over all.Jadeyn started off well, or at least upright, then slowly began to tip
over. By the time the buzzer sounded, she was hanging off her sheep at three o'clock, yet
she never fell: fifty-four points-enough for eighteenth place.
Ajunior bull rider loaded in the bucking chute in the
final moments before a ride. Contestants at the Youth
Bull Riders World Finals range in agefromfour to
nineteen.
By the time the calf riders' turn came, the crowd was getting giddy. "Sweet Child O'
Mine"was playing on the P.A., with a ragged chorus of bleats and bellows behind it. As
the contestants lined up, the m.c. introduced each one with a verbal drumroll: age, home
town, championships, and sponsors. Tiger Mart, B&B Towing, Pop's Honey Fried
Chicken. A lot of the boys already had stage names: Dusty Rhodes, Colt Christie, Fate
Snyder, Tater Tot Wilcox. Their parents knew that rodeo is one part extreme sport, one
part show business. Some of the riders looked as gaudy as rodeo clowns in their
embroidered shirts and lizard-skin boots, crested Roman helmets, and vests that read
"Cowkids for Christ."But it was up to the calves to make them look good.
Wacey drew a big white Holstein with mean-looking eye patches. The calf looked
promising at first, but proved to be a halfhearted bucker. It was all Wacey could do to
score sixty points, leaving him in thirteenth place-just enough to make the
championship round, if he rode well the next day.Jet drew one of the rankest calves in
Abilene: a twisting, half-spinning specimen who'd bucked off his rider the day before. For
a second or two,Jet looked loose and in control. Then he leaned a touch too far forward,
the calf changed directions and kicked up its back legs, and just like that the boy was
tumbling through the air. A few minutes later, Trigger met the same fate. He came out
looking stiff and off center, got thrown to one side, and bounced offjust before the
buzzer. Both boys got up crying but dried their tears by the time they reached the gate.
They would not qualify for the final round.
"He hit the ground trying,"Jet's father told me afterward. "That calf would dang sure
have been hard for any kid to ride."Trigger's dad was less philosophical. "He's in a
slump,"he said. "First time I've seen it in his life. It's just really frustrating-he's got so
much natural talent. W hen he's locked in, he can't be beat, but he's been riding like an
average kid. Those first two calves, he could ride those with his eyes closed."
T
he next morning, before the national anthem, one of the event directors made his
way to the microphone. A tall, barrel-chested Texan named Danny Malone, he
worked as a lineman northwest of Fort Worth and had a sixteen-year-old boy in the
Open Bull competition. It had been brought to his attention, he announced, that some
parents had been acting inappropriately-using foul language and "whuppin' on'' boys
who'd been bucked off. "Well, I'm here to tell you that that will not be tolerated,"he said.
"It's the reason we have U.S. Marshals and Texas Rangers here. If you are caught, you will
be asked to leave this property and you will not be allowed back." He paused, then added,
almost beseechingly, "Guys, come on! They're young and they're trying their best. If
they're not-hey, we don't know what's going on in their heads. Maybe they're just
having an off day. Now, I know I'm not their parent. I can't tell you what to do with your
kids in private. But if I see you whuppin' on them I will not tolerate it. And, yes, I know
who you are."
Most parents at the World Finals weren't used to seeing their kids bucked off, much less
three out of four times. At one point, I watched one of the fourteen-year-olds leave the
arena after getting thrown off his second bull. He sat down, took off his helmet, and
smashed it into his forehead. Then he did it again, methodically, five times in a row.
"That's gotta hurt," someone next to me said. It was the first time I'd heard that at a
rodeo. W hen I asked Malone for a rundown of the week's injuries, he mentioned "the
usual bumps and bruises"-rodeo-speak for everything from deep lacerations to hobbling
hematomas. Then he went on to list a dislocated hip, a fractured eye socket, and a stock
contractor whose incisors had been knocked in by a swinging gate. "We had to put his
teeth in saline and send him to the trauma center," Malone said..
Malone's son Austen was one of the best riders in Abilene, as well as one of the most
injury-prone. A lanky, sweet-faced kid with long curly blond hair, he'd had several
concussions, broken arms, and a dislocated neck. He'd shattered his right leg so badly
that the tibia and the fibula were snapped off completely, the foot turned around
backward. The previous year, Austen had spent a week in the hospital after a bull jumped
on his chest. Yet he'd come back to win the World Finals. "I worry about it. I do," his
father told me. "We discuss it all the time. If something serious happens in the arena and
God calls his number-if a fatality happens to my son bull riding-it'll be a struggle. I'm
not going to lie to you. But I' ll know that my son will be at peace. That he died happy
and enjoying what he was doing."
A few minutes later, the mutton busters came out to kick off the third round. Shayne was
just seven points out of the lead, but her father didn't have much faith in the sheep she'd
drawn: its last rider had scored only fifty-four points. Shayne's only hope was to spur it
out of its torpor, working its sides with both heels, though she'd have a harder time
keeping her balance. "I told her to let fly the leg," Curtis said. "Just let fly. Get all the
points you can."The tactic worked. The sheep pelted across the arena with sudden vigor,
the girl kept her seat, and the ride earned sixty-two points. "You know what they say," the
m.c. shouted. "Sometimes the best cowboy for the job is a cowgirl!" Shayne was now in
third place for the championship round. Even better, she'd outscored her rival, Jadeyn,
who hadn't been as lucky in her draw and was stuck back in eighth. "We're making our
way up!" Curtis told me. "We're like a shark, circling, circling, looking for a chance."
Wacey was in a tougher spot, twenty-one points out of first. He needed both a great ride
and some help from the leaders to win. W hen I found him on the catwalk, waiting for
his third ride, his brow was furrowed and his eyes fierce with concentration. "Just
thinking about the business of what I've got to do," he said. At his parents' ranch, in
Eakly, Oklahoma, he'd spent hours watching bull-riding videos to perfect his form. He'd
been working on keeping his free hand high to help control his upper body, and his other
hand pulled tight against the rope. When the calf kicked up, he needed to lean forward
off its haunches, and when it broke to the side, he had to keep his butt down, centered
and correct. "Riding bulls is such a mind game," his father, Luke, told me. "You can buck
yourself offjust as easily as anything. But he's a little young for that. The truth is he's on
top of his game."
Earlier that morning, the third-round draw had been posted on the wall of the tunnel to
the arena. Luke peered at it for a second, then nodded with a tight grin. For once, Wacey
had a bucker. Calf No. 99992 had tossed his rider on the first day and hadn't been ridden
the second, so he'd be fresh. "That's good," Luke said. "He can score some points on that
one after those sorry calves he's had." His wife, Nikki, wasn't so sure. She'd seen what
happened to Jet and Trigger. "I was kind of hoping for something a little more average,"
she said, her face pale and drawn behind her shades. Wacey, though, had no doubts: he
wanted that cal£
Afarmer champion who is angry about the breeding of
fiercer andfiercer bulls says, "You probably won't be
hearing about twenty-year bull-riding careers anymore."
Riders know that injury is a matter ofwhen, not if.
W hen his turn finally came, he punched his helmet
and climbed into the chute. He clamped his legs around the calf 's bony, squirming back,
rubbed some rosin into his rope, and wrapped it tight around his fist. "Ride him like a
champ, Wace!" Jet yelled, from the catwalk above him. Trigger was there, too, grinning
down at him. Then the gate flew open and the calf charged out, leaping and flexing
across the arena like a steel spring shot from an old tractor. He twisted one way and the
other, jackknifed in the air and rolled his belly, but could not get the rider off. Wacey
matched him rhythm for rhythm, free arm waving and heels flying, spurring him on even
harder. W hen the buzzer sounded and he'd tumbled to his feet, he gave one of the
bullfighters a high five and ran off. A little later, the m.c. announced the judges' tally: 74.5
-the highest score for a calf rider all week.
Wacey would go on to win the round and finish the rodeo in style, riding his last calf
cleanly for a sixty-two. It wasn't quite enough to win the championship: his calf was
game but underpowered, and he finished third. But his record from the previous round
would stand. Shayne ended on an even better note, winning the last round. She finished
third in her group as well. She and Wacey each earned a little more than a thousand
dollars for their efforts-enough to cover their families' costs and perhaps a dinner at
Applebee's on the way home. By the time the judges had cut their checks and passed
them out in the hall, the Expo Center was nearly empty, its booths packed up and the
parking lot deserted. The other parents had headed home hours ago. Their boys had a
long road ahead of them, and it would soon be past their bedtime.
W
atching the medics put away their ice packs and syringes, painkillers and rolls of
bandages, I thought about the last time Tuff Hedeman drew Bodacious. It was
December of 1995, just seven weeks after the bull had nearly killed him. Hedeman had
lost twenty-five pounds and his body was still healing, but he'd managed to qualify for
the National Finals Rodeo anyway. Like Cody Custer and Lane Frost-the hero of the
movie " 8 Seconds," who was killed by a bull named Takin' Care of Business in 1989Hedeman belonged to a generation of riders who prided themselves on never backing
down. "They just had something the guys don't have today,"Dillon Page told me. "They
were raised up in the country and they got on bulls to win."Yet when Hedeman drew
Bodacious again, in the sixth round of the finals, he knew what he had to do.
"I thought at first that I might have done something wrong the last time,"he told me.
"But when I watched a video of the ride, the fact is that I was in perfect position for a
bull of that calibre with that bucking pattern.There was nothing I could do. If I'd tried to
lean back to avoid his head, I would have been stretched out vertically, and when his back
legs hit the ground the force of the downdraft would have jerked me off. That's why most
people really feared him. He was a great bull, but he got to the point where you could
ride him correctly and still nearly get killed."And so, when Hedeman's turn came to ride
that night at the National Finals Rodeo, he climbed into the chute and onto Bodacious's
back. But when the gate swung open, Hedeman let the bull charge through without him.
Then he tipped his hat to him and left the arena.Three rounds later, Scott Breding put
on his hockey mask and gave Bodacious his final ride.
Hedeman wouldn't trade his bull-riding experiences for anything.The closest he's come
to that feeling has been flying in an F-16 fighter jet. "It's just this explosion of
adrenaline," he told me. "It's indescribable." Still, when one of his sons started to get
interested in the sport a few years ago, Hedeman took him into his trophy room and
showed him some pictures of the guys he used to ride with. "I told him, 'Just look at
them. Those are the best guys that rode every year.'Then I pointed at a few and said, 'I
watched this guy die, this guy die, and this guy die.This guy's in a wheelchair and this
guy's in a wheelchair.' For me, ninety per cent of it was good. I never had a life
threatening injury. But the last thing I would ever want my son to do is ride bulls. It's
.
msane. "
His son never did take up bull riding, but for other boys Hedeman's story was just the
sort of cautionary tale that hooked them on the sport for life. At the Camp of
Champions,I'd watched a succession of stiff-backed and patched-together men walk up
to the microphone and, as the Oklahoma sun flamed and guttered on the horizon, do
their best to warn the boys about what lay ahead-what a brutal, debilitating world this
could be. Yet the result was only to earn more converts. "Blessed be the Lord, oh, my
soul,"as the cowboy preachers sang. "For I am fearfully and wonderfully made."
On the last afternoon, a cattle trough was hauled under the tent and twenty or thirty
boys lined up to be baptized in it. Andy Taylor had asked the campers if any of them
were ready to be born again, and Trigger,Jet, and Wacey all raised their hands. W hen the
time came, though, only Trigger and Wacey went down easily.Jet, stripped to his swim
trunks, climbed in willingly enough but then seemed to change his mind. He pushed his
feet up against the end of the trough and gripped the rim tight with his hands. For just a
moment, he hung there like a spider perched above a water glass. Then one of the church
elders cradled his head and slowly, quiveringly,Jet let himself go under. +
Burkhard Bilger published his first piece in The New Yorker in 2000
and became a staff writer the following year.
Document 7: Burkhard Bilger, "The Ride of Their Lives"
1.
What is the purpose of the essay?
2. What is Bilger's thesis in the article? Find the sentence that you think best summarizes the
essay's argument, then explain your reasoning.
3. How is the essay organized? Briefly outline the parts of the essay.
4. How does the author use techniques of fiction and storytelling to advance the article?
5. How does science create ethical concerns around bull riding? Explain and evaluate.
6.
After reading the essay, what is your opinion of Youth Bull Riding? Should parents allow their
children to participate in it? Why or why not? Explain using plenty of evidence from the text.
'
·. ',,'.·\;·:/
yeat;s
t last
festival, some 25,000 pounds of fresh-caught lobster was consumed
af;ter preparation in the World's Largest Lobster Cooker; aboard the Lobster Float.
Consider the Lobster
For 56 years, the Maine Lobster Festival has been drawing crowds with
the promise of sun, fun, and fine food. One visitor would argue that the
celebration involves a whole lot more sv DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
T
HE ENORMOUS, PUNGENT; AND EXTREMELY well
Lee Ann Womack and Orleans, annual Maine Sea Goddess ·411111
marketed Maine Lobster :Festival is held every beauty pageant, Saturday's big parade, Sumlay's William G.
late J\lly in the state's midcoast region, meaning Atwood Memorial Crate Race, annual Amateur Cooking
.
the western
side . of Penobscot Bay, the nerve Competition, carnival rides and midway attractions and food
stem of Maine's lobster industry. What's called booths, and the MLF's Main Eating Tent, where something
the midcoast runs from Owl's Head and Thomaston in the over 25,000 pounds of fresh-caught Maine lobster is con
south to Belfast in the north. (Actually, it might extend all sumed after preparation in the World's Largest Lobster
the way up to Bucksport, but we were never able to get farther Cooker near the grounds' north entrance. Also available are
north than Belfast 011 Route l, whose summertntffic is, as you lobster rolls, lobster turnovers, lobster sautc, Down East lnbcan imagine, unimaginable.) The region's two main commu ster salad, lobster bisque, lobster ravioli, and deep-fried
nities are Camden, with its very old money and yachty harbor lobster dumplings. Lobster Them1idor .is obtainable at a sit
and five-star restaurants and phenomenal B&Bs, and Rock down restaurant called The Black Pearl on Harbor Park's
land, a serious old fishing town that hosts the Festival every northwest wharf. A large all-pine booth sponsored by the
summer in historic Harbor Par�,. right along the water.1
Maine Lobster Promotion Council has free pamphlets \Vith
Tourism and lobster are the· midcoast region's two main recipes, eating tips, and Lobster Fun Facts. The winner of
industries, and they're both warm-weather enterprises, and Friday's Amateur Cooking Competition prepares Saffron
the Maine Lobster Festival represents less an intersection of Lobster Ramekins, the recipe for which is available for puh·
the industries than a deliberate collision,joyful and lucrative lie downloading atwww.mainelobsterfestival.com. There are
and loud. The assigned subject of this article is the 56th An lobster T-shirts and lobster bobblehead dolls and inflatable
nual MLF, July 30 to August 3, 2003. whose official theme lobster pool toys and clamp-on lobster hats with big scarlet
was "Lighthouses, Laughter, and Lobster." Total paid atten claws that wobble on springs. Your a.�signed correspondent
dance
was over 80,000, due partly to a national CNN spot in saw it all, accompanied by one girlfriend and both his own
t
J tne during which a Senior Editor of a certain other epicure parents-··-·one ofwhich parents was actually born and raised in
an magazine hailed the MLF as one of the best food..the1ned Maine, albeit in the extreme northern inland part, which is pofostivuh; in !he world. 2003 Festival highlights: concerts by tato country and a world away from the tour.istic midcoast.2
1 There's il comprehensive native apothegm: "Camden by the sea, Rockland by the smell."
2 N.B. All personalty c:onnected parties have made it clear from the start that they do not want to be talked about in this article.
so
GOURMET
AUGUST 2004
F'IELDNOTES
F
everyone knows what a lob .
ster is. As usual, though, there's much mme to know than
most of us care about..··-it 's all a matter of what your in
terests are. Taxonomically speaking, a lobster is a marine crus
tacean of the family Homaridae, characterized by five pairs of
jointed legs, the first pair tem1inating in large pincerish claws
used for subduing prey. Like many other species of benthic
carnivore, lobsters are both hunters and scavengers. They
have stalked eyes. gills on their legs, and antennae. There are
dozens of different kinds worldwide, ohvhich the relevant
species here is the Maine lobster, flomarus america1111s. The
name "lobster'' comes from the Old English loppestre, which
is thougllt to be a corrupt form of the Latin word for locust
combined with the Old English loppe, which meant spider.
Moreover, a crustacean is an aquatic arthropod ofthe class
Crustacea, which comprises crabs, shrimp, barnacles, lob
sters, and freshwater crayfish. All this is right there in the
encyclopedia. And an arthropod is an invertebrate member
of the phylum Arthropoda. which phylum covers insects,
:spiders, crustaceans, and centipedes/millipedes, all ofwhose
main commonality, besides the absence of a centralized
hrahHpine assembly, is a chitinous exoskeleton composed
of segments, to which appendages are articulated in pairs.
The point is that lobsters are basically giant sea·fosects.3
Like most arthropods, they date from the Jurassic period,
biologically so much older than mammalia that they might as
well be from another planet. And they are......particularly in
their natural brown-green state, brandishing their claws like
weapons and with thick antennae awhip·-not nice to look at.
OR PRACTICAL PURPOSES,
away as California, in demand only because it was cheap and
high in protein, basically chewable fuel.
Now, of course, lobster is posh, a delicacy, only a step or
two down from caviar. The meat is richer and more substan
tial than most fish, its taste subtle compared to the marine
gaminess of mussels and clams. In the U.S. pop-food
imagination, lobster is now the seafood analog to steak, with
which it's so often twinned as Surf'n' Turfon the really ex...
pensive part of the chain steak house menu.
In fact, one obvious project <>f the MLF. and of its om
nipresently sponsorial Maine Lobster Promotion Council, is
to counter the idea that lobster is unusually luxe or rich or un
healthy or expensive, suitable only for effete palates or the
occasi<mal blow-the-diet treat. It is emphasized over and
over in presentations and pamphlets at the festival that Maine
lobster meat has fewer calories, less cholesterol, and less sat
urated fat than chicken.s And in the Main Eating Tent, you
can get a "quarter" (industry shorthand for a 1 !4-pound lob ..
ster), a 4-ounce cup of melted butter, a bag of chips, and a
soft roll w/ butter ..pat foraround $12.00, which is only slight
ly more expensive than supper at McDonald's.
B
E APPRISED, though, that the Main Eating Tent's sup
pers come in Styrofoam trays, and the soft drinks are
iceless and t1at, and the coffee is conveuience ..store
coffee in yet more Styrofoam, and the utensils are plastic
(there are none of the special long skinny forks for pushing
out the tail meat. though a few savvy dinel'S bring their own).
Nor do they give you near enough napkins, considering how
lJp until sornetin1e in the 1800s, lobster ,vas literally lo,v-class
food, eaten only by the poor a:nd institutionalized.
And it's true that they are garbagemen of the sea, eaters of
dead stuff.4 although they'll also eat some live shellfish, cer..
tain kinds of injured fish. and sometimes each other.
But they are themselves good eating. Or so we think now.
Up until sometime in the 1800s, though, lobster was literally
low-class food, eaten only by the poor and institutionalized.
Even in t11c harsh penal environment of early America, some
colonies had laws against feeding lobsters to inmates more
than once a week because it was thought to be cruel and un
usual, like making people eat rats. One reason for their low
status was how plentiful lobsters were in old New England.
"Unbelievable abundance" is how one source describes the
situation, including accounts of Plymouth pilgrims wading
out and capturing all they wanted by hand, and of early
Boston's seashore being littered with lobsters after hard
storms-these latter were treated as a smelly nuisance and
ground up for fertilizer. There is also the fact that premodern
lobster was often cooked dead and then preserved, usually
packed in salt or crude hermetic containers. Maine's earliest
lobster industry was based around a dozen such seaside can··
neries in the 1840s, from which lobster was shipped as far
messy lobster is to eat, especially when you're squeezed
onto
benches alongside children of various ages and vastly
f
di ferent levels of finc·motor development-..-not to mention
the people who've somehow smuggled in their own beer in
enonnous aisle-,blocking coolers, or who all of a sudden pro
duce their own plastic tablecloths and try to spread them over
large portions of tables to try to reserve them (the tables) for
their little groups. And so on. Any one example is no more
than a petty inconvenience, of course, but the MLF turns out
to be full of irksome little downers like this-·. ·sce for instance
the Main Stage's headliner shows, where it turns out that you
have to pay $20 extra for a folding chair if you want to sit
down; or the North Tent's mad scramble for the NyQuil-cup
size samples of finalists' entries handed out after the Cook
ing Competition; or the muclHoute<I Maine Sea Goddess
pageant finals, which turn out to be excruciatingly long and
to consist mainly of endless thanks and tributes to local
sponsors. What the Maine Lobster Festival really is is a mid .
level county fair with a culinary hook, and in this respect it's
not unlike Tidewater crab festivals, Midwest corn festivals,
Texas chili festivals, etc., and shares with these venues the
3 Midcoasters' native term for a lobster is, in fact, "bug.'' as in "Come around on Sunday and we'll cook up some bugs."
4 Factoid: Lobster traps are usually baited with dead herring.
5 Of course, the common practice of dipping the lobster meat in melted butter torpedoes all these happy fat.specs, which none of the Council's promotional stuff
ever mentions, any more than potato-industry PR talks about sour cream and bacon bits.
AUGUST 2004
55
FIELD NOTES
core paradox of all teeming commercial demotic events: It's
not for everyone. 6 Nothing against the aforementioned cu,..
phoric Senior Editor, but I 'd be surprised ifshe'd spent much
time here in Harbor Park. watching people slap canal-zone
mosquitoes as they cat deep--fried Twinkies and watch Pro
fessor Paddywhack, on six--foot stilts in a raincoat w ith plas
tic lobsters protruding from all directions on springs, terrify
their children.
L
08ST£R IS ESSENTIALLY a summer food. This is because
we now prefer our lobsters fresh, which means they
have to be recently caught, which for both tactical and
economic reasons takes place at depths of less than 25 fath
oms. Lobsters tend to be hungriest and most active (i.e., most
trappable) at summer water temperatures of45- -50"F. In the
autumn, some Maine lobsters migrate out into deeper water,
either for warmth or to avoid the heavy waves that pound
New England's coast all winter. Some burrow into the bot
tom. They might hibernate; nobody's sure. Summer is also
lobsters' molting season· ····spccifically early-· to mid-July.
Chitinous arthropods grow by molting, rather the way peo
ple have to buy bigger clothes as they age and gain weight.
Since lobsters can Ii ve to be over l 00, they can also get to be
quite large, as in 20 pounds or more though truly senior
lobsters arc rnre now, because New England's waters are so
heavily trapped.7 Anyway, hence the culinary distinction
between hard·· and soft-shdl lobsters. the latter sometimes
a .k.a. shedders. A soft-shell lobster is one that has recently
molted. In m idcoast restaurants, the summer menu often of.
t.'
l
· ..·
·t·.•l1.(.•·.\\t. ·, ·.1.··(:�<,. j. .;lI.-.><"S <J.,l(..>1·1�-. . 1-, <=-:../v···e.�,1·1. -l,-)(·�)t]-1,=-;1�
.. ... . '-.�.. ·•l,· c.) 1-11;.:.:
\./.r1t··'
. ..1<->-11
. � . . . . ·1· 1·�· ,··L\.s
-� t1·.1-..>J.....><l.. b,.,' 0<:l.. .. ·tr).. .·1-.->n\.. (.•:1,.J. 1·,·,rt'., ,vv..J!l·. ..1e·. .. r.1 ,1c·
):-1 1 ·>11t 1· 1·· 1· 1-1 t..l..1c) l<c·�·t· t· :lc).
� . 'l, r
c·-J,"t'"11
·,(>. <)l-)·
. . «V·/.1<,.
. ..)1. ·1.s..
.\j ( �· , 8
.
11
l.1·:rt
C ... ,L1-·1,:
. . .\...,, ..·1 <·..,·l..·>f.;-t·"1··
, ,. l., . .1· s
,. �-
./'\.
catch a 1ablemate right in the eye. !fit's winter or you're buy
ing lobster someplace far from New England, on the other
hand. you can almost bet that the lobster is a hard-shell,
which for obvious reasons travel better.
As an a la carte entree, lobster can be baked, broiled.
steamed, grilled, sauteed, stir-fried, or microwaved. The
most common method. though, is boiling. If you're someone
who enjoys having lobster at home. this is probably the way
you do it, since boiling is so easy. You need a large kettle w/
cover. which you fill about half foll with water ( the standard
advice is that you want 2.5 quarts of water per lobster). Sea
water is optimal, or you can add two tbsp salt per <1uart from
the tap. It also helps to know how much your lobsters weigh.
You get the water boiling, put in the lobsters one at a time,
cover the kettle, and brin g it back up to a boil. Then you bank
the heat and let the kettle simmer······ten minutes for ihe first
pound of lobster, then three minutes for each pound alter
that. (This is assuming you·ve got hard-shell lobsters. which,
again, ifyou don't l ive between Boston mid Halifax. is prob
ably what you've got. For shedders, you 're supposed to sub··
tract three m inutes from the total.) The reason the kettle's
lobsters turn scarlet is that boiling somehow suppresses
every pigment in their chitin but one. Ifyou want an easy test
of whether the lobsters arc done, you try pulling on one nf
their antennae-·-if it comes out of the head with minimal
e ffort, you're ready to eat
A detail so obvious that most recipes don't even bother to
mention it is that each lobster is supposed to be alive when
you put it in the kettle. This is part of lobster's modem ap·
./l..
.
. .
fors both kinds, with shcdders being slightly cheaper even
though they're easier to dismantle and the meat is allegedly
sweeter. The reason for the discount is that a 1110Iting lol)ster
uses a layer of seawater for insulation while its new shell is
hardening, so there's slightly less actual meat when you
crack open a shedder, plus a redolent gout of water that gets
all over everything and can sometimes jet out lemonlike and
.
. .
.. .. . . . . .. .. .
..
,, . . .
,,
..- •
peal : It's the freshest food there is. There's no decomposi·
tion between harvestin g and eating. And not only do lobsters
require no cleaning or dressing or plucking { though the me·
chanics of actually eating them a rc a different matter), but
they're relatively easy for vendors to keep alive. They come
up alive in the traps, are placed in containers ofseawater, and
can, so long as the water's aerated and the animals' claws arc
6 !n truth. ihere's a great deal to be said about the differences between woikin?;·class Rockland and the heavily populist flavor of its festival veisus comfortable
and elitist Camden with its expensive view and shop, given entirely over to $200 sweaters and great mws of Victorian homes converted to uoscale B&Bs. And
about these differences as two sides of the great coin that is U .S. tourism . Vr;ry little of which will besaid here., except lo amplify the above--mentioned paradox
and to reveal your assigned correspondent's own preferences, I conte.ss that I have never understood why so many people's idea of a fun vacation is to don flip
flops and sunglasses and crawl through maddening trn!HG lo loud ho! crowded tourist ventres in order to sample a "local flavor" that is by definition ruined by
the presence of tourists. This may {as my festival companions keep pointing out) all be a matter of pe1sonality and hardwired taste: The fact that l just do 1wt
like tourist venues means that l'II never understand their appeal and so arn probably no! the one lo talk about it (the supposed ap!)€al). But, sine,, this note win
almost surely not st1rvive magaz.ine"edi!ing anyway. here goes:
As I see it, it probably really i;good fort he soul to b11a tourist. even if it's only once in a while. Not.good for tile soul ina reJresllingor enlivening way. though,
but rather in a grim. steely-eyed, Jet's-!oo}i"llonestly-at-the-!acts-·<1nd-find-some-·way-to·deril-with·1hem way. My personal experience has nol been that travel
ing around !he country is brnadeningor relaxing. or that radic-01 changes in place and context have a salutiry effect, but rather that intranational tourism is rad
ically constricting, and humbling in the hardest w,1y-hos!ile to my fantasy of being a real individual, of living somehow outside and above it an. (Coming up is
the part that my companions find especially unh,,ppy and repelkinl, a sure way to spoi! the fun of vacation travel:) lo be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a
pure late-date American: alien, ignorant. p;eecty for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit I! is to spoil. by way of sheer
ontology, the very unspoiletlne,syou are !here to eiperience, !t is to impose yourself on places that. in all noneconornic ways would be better, realer. without you.
lt is. in lines and gridlock and transaction after tramaction, t,1 confrnn! a dimension of yourself that is as inesc,1pable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become
economically significant but existentially loath:,orne, ,m insect on a dead thing.
7 Datum: In a goodye,ir, ihe U. 5. industry produces around 80 million pounds of lobster. and M,iine accounts for more than half that total.
56
tl O IJ fH l !:: T
AUGUST 2004
FIELONOTES
pegged or banded to keep them from tearing one another up
under the stresses ofcaptivity,8 survive right up until they're
boiled. Most of us have been in supermarkets or restaurants
that feature tanks o f live lobster, from which you can pick out
your supper while it watches you point. And part <Jfthe over
all spectacle ofthe M.a ine Lobster Festival is that you can see
actual lobstermen 's vessels docking at the wharves along the
northeast grounds and unloading freshly caught product,
which is transferred by hand or cart l 00 yards to the great
clear tanks stacked up around the Festival's cooker--which
is, as mentioned, billed as the World's Largest Lobster
Cooker and can process over I 00 lobsters at a time for the
Main Eating Tent.
S
O THEN HERE ts A QUESTION that's
all but unavoidable
at the World's Largest Lobster Cooker, and may arise
in kitchens across the U.S.: ls it all right to boil a sen
tient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure? A related
set of concerns: Is the previous question irksomely PC or
sentimental? What docs "all right" eve11 mean in this con
text? ls it all just a matter of individual choice?
As you may or may not know, a certain well-known group
called People for the Ethical Treatment of A nimals thinks that
the morality oflobster-boiiing is not just a matter ofindividual
conscience. In fact, one of the very first things we hear about
the M LF ... we l L to set the scene: We' re coming in by cab from
the almost indescribably odd and rustic Knox County Airport9
very late on the night before the Festival opens, sharing the cab
with a wealthy political consultant who lives on Vinalhaven
lsland in the bay half the year (he's headed forthe island fcny
in Rockland). The consultant and cabdriver are responding to
informal journalistic probes about how people who live in the
midcoast region actually view the MLF, as in is the Festival
just a big-dollar tourist thing or is it something local residents
look forward to attending, take genuine civic pride. in, etc. The
cabdtiver·· ·who's in his seventies, one ofapparcntly a whole
platoon of retirees the cab company puts on to help with the
summer rush, and wears a U.S...ffag lapel pin, and drives in
what can only be called a very deliberate way · · ·assures us that
locals do endorse and enjoy the MLF, although he himself
hasn ·1 gone in years. and now come to think ofit no one he and
his wife know has, either. However, the demilocal consul
tant's been to recent Festivals a couple times (one gets the im
pression it was at h is w ife's behest), of which his most vivid
impression was that ''you have to line up for an ungodly Jong
time to get your lobsters, and meanwhile there are all these
CX····t1ower children coming up and down along the line hand
ing out pamphlets that say the lobsters die in terrible pain and
you shouldn't cat them."
And it turns ont that the post-hippies of the consultant's
recollection were activists from PETA. There were no PETA
people in obvious view at the 2003 MLF,10 but they've been
conspicuous at many of the recent Festivals. Since at least the
mid-1 990s, articles in everything from The Camden Herald
to The New York Times have describe<l PETA urging boycotts
of the MLF, often deploying celebrity spokespeople like
Mary Tyler Moore for open letters and ads saying stuff like
"Lobsters are extraordinarily sensitive" and ''To me, eating a
lobster is out orthe question." More concrete is the oral testi
mony of Dick, our florid and extremely gregarious rentaI-car
guy, to the effect that PET A's been around so much in recent
years that a kind ofbrittlely tolerant homeostasis now obtains
between the activists and the Festival's locals, e.g.: "We had
some incidents a couple years ago. One lady took most ofher
clothes off and painted herself like a lobster, almost got her
self arrested. But for the most part they're let alone. [Rapid
series of small ambiguous laughs, which with Dick happens a
lot.J They do their thing and we do our thing.'·
This whole interchange takes place on Route I . 30 July.
during a four-mile. 50.. minute ride from the airportll to the
dealership to sign car·-rental papers. Several irreproducible
segues down the road from the PET A anecdotes, Dick·· · ·
whose son-in-law happens to be u professional lobsterman
and one of the Main Eating Tenr s regular suppliers-
articulates what he and h is family feel is the crucial mitigat··
ing factor in the whole mornlity·of.boiling-lobsters- alive
issue: "There's a part of the brain in people and animals that
lets us feel pain, and lobsters' brains don't have this part."
Besides the fact that it's incorrect in about 1 1 differen t
ways, the main reason Dick's statement .is interesti ng is that
its thesis is more or Jess echoed by the Festival's own pro
nouncement on lobsters and pain, which is part ofa Test Your
8 N,8. Similar reasoning underlies the practice of whal.'s termed "debeaking" broHer chickens and brood hens in modern factoty farms. Maximum commercial
€Hiciency rnquire; that enmmous poultry populations be confined in unnaturally dose quarters, under which conditions many birds go craz:.J and per.k one an·
other to death. As a purely observational side-note, be apprised that debeaking is usually an au!ornated proceslS and that the chickens receive no anesthetic. It's
not clear to me whether most GO!IHMH reader$ know flbou! debeaking. or about related practices like dehorning cattle in connnercial feedlots, croppiflg swine'$
tails in factory hog farms to keep psychotirn!ly bored neighbors from chewing them oH. and so forth. It so happens that your assigned correspondent knew al
most nothing ,,bout standard meat-industry operations before starting work on this article.
9 The terminal used to be somebody's hnuse, for example, ancl the lost-luggagi;..reporting room was clearly once a pantry.
10 It turned out that one Mr. William R. Riv,,s-n1vas, a high-ranking PETA official out of the group's Virginia headquarters, was indeed there this year, albeit solo,
working the Festival's main and side entrances on Saturday, August 2, handing out pamphlets and adhesive stickers emblazoned with "Being 8oi!ed Hutts,"
which is the !agline in nwst cl PETA's published material about lobster. I learned thal he'd been there only later, when speaking with Mr. Riva�·Rivas on the
phone. I'm nn! sure how we mis,,ed seeing him in situ ,it tho Festival. and J can't see much to do except apologize for the oversight-although it'salso I rue that
Saturday was thn day of the big MLF parade through Rockland, which basic iournalistic responsibility seernerJ to require going to (and which, with all due re
spect. mean! that Saturday was maybe not the best day for PETA to work the Harllor Park grounds, e.specia!!y if it was going to l:le just orm person for one day,
since a lol of diehard Mlf partisans W'He o!1-sl!e watching the parade (which, again wi!h no offense intended, was in truth kind of cheesy and boring, consis!··
ing mostly of slow homemade floats and various rnidcoast people waving at oneano!her, and with an extremely annoying man dressed as. Blackbeard ranging up
and down the length of the crowd saying "Arrr·· over and over and brandisl1ing a plastic sword at people, etc.; plus it. rained)).
11 The short versiun regarding why wr; were back at the airport after already arriving the previous night involves lost luggage and a miscommunication about
wlleie and what the local National Car Rental franchise waS-······Oick came, out p(irsonolly to the airport and got us, out of no evident motive but kindness. (He also
h'l!ked nonstop the entire way, witl1 a veiy distinctive speaking style that can be describe.d only as manically !aconic; the truth is that I now know more about this
man than I do about sorrui members of my own tamily.)
60
AUGUST 2004
F'IELDNOTES
Lobster IQ quiz that appears in the 2003 MLF program cour
tesy of the M.aine Lobster Promotion Council; "The nervous
system ofa lobster is very si,nple, and is in fact most similar
to the nervous system of the grasshopper. It is decentralized
with no brain. There is no cerebral cortex, which in humans is
the area ofthe brain that gives the experience of pain."
Though it sounds more sophisticated, a lot ofthe neurolo
gy in this latter claim is still either false or fuzzy. The human
cerebral cortex is the brain-part that deals with h igher facul
ties like reason, metaphysical self-awareness, language, etc.
Pain reception .is known to be part of a much older and more
primitive system o f nociceptors and prostaglandins that arc
managed by the brain stem and thalamus.12 On the other
hand, it is true that the cerebral cortex is involved in what's
variously called suffering, distress, or the emotional experi
ence of pai ll···· i.e., experiencing painful stimuli as unplem,··
ant, very unpleasant, unbearable, and so on.
B
£FORE WE GO ANY FURTHER, let's acknowledge that the
questions of whether and how different kinds of ani
mals foci pain, and of whether and why it might bejus.
ti liable to inllictpt1in on them i n order to eat them, turn out to
be extremely complex and difficult. A nd comparative neu
roanatomy is only part of the problem. Since pain is a totally
subjective mental experience, we do not have direct access
to anyone or anything's pain but our own; and even just the
principles by which we can infer that others experience pain
and have a legitimate interest in not feeling pain involve
hard-core philosophy---·metaphysics, epistemology, value
theory, ethics. The fact that even the most highly evolved
nonhuman mammals can't use language to communicate
with us about their subjective mental experience is only the
first layer of additional complication in trying to extend our
reasoning about pain and morality to animals. And every
thing gets progressively more abstract and convolved as we
move farther and farther out from the h ighcHype mammals
into cattle and swine and dogs and eats and rodents, and then
birds and fish, and finally invertebrates like lobsters.
The more important point here, though. is that the whole
animal-eruelty ..and..eating issue is not_just complex, it's also
uncomfortable. It is. at any rate, uncomfortable for me, and
forjust about everyone J know who enjoys a variety of foods
and yet does not want to see herself as cruel or unfeeling. As
far as I can tell, my own main way of dealing with this con-
tlict has been to avoid thinking about the whole unpleasant
thing. I should add that it appears to me unlikely that many
readers of GOURMET wish to think hard about it, either, or to
be queried about the morality of their eating habits in the
pages of a culinary monthly. Since, however, the assigned
subject of this article is what it was like to attend the 2003
MLF, and thus to spend several days in the midst of a great
mass of Americans all eating lobster, and thus to be more or
less impelled to think hard about lobster and the experience
ofbuying and eating lobster, it turns ont that there is no hon
est way to avoid certain moral questions.
There are several reasons for this. For one thing, it's not
just that lobsters get boiled alive, it's that you do it yourself-·
or at least it's done specifically for you, on--site.13 As
mentioned, the World's Largest Lobster Cooker, which is
highlighted as an attraction in the Festival's program, is right
out there on the M LF 's nmih grounds for everyone to see. Try
to imagine a Nebraska Beef Festiva!l4 at which part of the
festivities is watching trucks pull up and the live cattle get
driven down the ramp and slaughtered right there on the
World's Largest Killing Floor or something-there's no way.
The intimacy of the whole thing is maximized at home,
which of course is where most lobster gets prepared and eaten
(although note already the semiconscious euphemism "pre
pared," which in the case oflobsters really means killing them
right there in our kitchens). The basic scenario is that we come
in from the store and make our little preparations like getting
the kettle filled and boiling, and then we Ii ft the lobsters out
of the bag or whatever retail container they came home in ...
whereupon some uncomfortable things stati to happen. How
ever stuporous the lobster is from the trip home, for instance,
it tends to come alarmingly to lifo when placed in boiling water.
lfyou're tilting it from a container into the steaming kettle, the
lobster will sometimes try to cling to the container's sides or
even to hook its claws overthe kettle's rim like a person trying
to keep from going over the edge ofa roof. And worse is when
the lobs1er's fully immersed. Even if you cover the kettle and
ntm mvay, you can usually hear the cover rattling and clanking
as the lobster tries to push it ofI Or the creature's claws scrap·
ing the sides of the kettle as it thrashes around. The lobster,
in other words, behaves very much as you or I would behave if
we were plunged into boiling water (with the obvious excep·
tion ofscreaming).15 A blunter way to say this is that the lob
ster acts.as if it's in terrible pain, causing some cooks to leave
12 To elaborate by way of example: The common experience of accidentally touching a ho! stove and yanking your hand back before you're even aware that any
thing's going on is explained by the filct that many of the processes by which we detect and avoid painful stimuli do not involve the cortex. In thecas,1 of the hand
and stove. the brain is bypaSSBd altogether; ell the important neuroc.hemica! action takes place in the spine.
l3 Morality.wise, let's concede that this cuts both ways. lobster-eating is at least not abetted by the system of corporate factor/ Farms that produces most beet.
pork, and chicken. Bec.ause, if nothing else, of the way they're marketed and packaged for sale, we cat these latter meats without having to consider that they
were once conscious, sentient creatums to whom horrible things were done. (N.B. PETA distributes a certain video---the title of which is being omitted as part
of the elaborate editorial wmprom1se by which this note appears at all-in which you can see just about everything meat-related you don't want to see or think
about. (N.B.2 No! that PETA's any sort ot font of unspun truth. Uke many partisans in complex moral disputes, the PETA pt'OPle are fanatics, and a lot of their
1het.01ic seems simplistic ,ind :,elf-righteous. Personally, though, I have to say that I found this unnamed video both credible and deeply upsetting.))
t4 1s it significant that "Jobst.er," "fish," and "chicken" are our culture's words for both the animal and the meat, whereas most mammals seem to require eu
pl1emi�rns like "beef" and "pork" \hat help us separate the meat we eat from the living creature the meal once was? Is this evidence that some \<.ind of deep un·
ease abnot eating higher ,1nima!s 1s endemic enough to show up in English usage, but that the unease diminishes aswe move out of the mammalian order? (And
is ··1amb"i"larnb" the counterexample that sinks the whole theo,y, or are there special, biblico-historical reasons for that equivalmce?)
1 5 There's a relevant populist myth aboutthe high-·pitched whistling sound that sometimes issues from a pot of boiling lobster. The sound is really vented steam
from the !ayer of seawater between !he lobster's flesh and its carapace (this is why shedders whistle more than hard-shells), but the pop version has it that the
sound is the lobster's rabbitlike death scream. Lobsters communicate via pheromones in their urine antl don't have anything close to the vocal equipment for
screaming. but \h(i myth's very persistent--which might, once again, point to a low-level cultural unease about the boiling thing.
62
A U G U S T 2 004
the kitchen altogether and to take one of those little light
weight plastic oven timers with them into another room and
wait unti I the whole process is over.
There happen to be two main criteria that most ethicists
agree on for determining whether a living creantre has the
capacity to suffer and so has genuine interests that i.t may or
may not be our moral duty to consider.JG One is how much of
the neurological hardware required for pain-experience the
animal comes equipped with··· · ·nociceptors, prostaglandins,
neuronal opioid receptors, etc. The other criterion is whether
the animal demonstrates behavior associated with pain. And it
takes a lot ofintellectual gymnastics and behaviorist hairsplit
ting not to see struggling, thrashing, and lid-clattering as just
such pain-behavior. According to marine zoologists, it usual
ly takes lobsters between 35 and 45 seconds to die in boiling
water. (No source I could find talked about how long it takes
them to die in superheated steam; one rather hopes it's faster.)
There are, of course, other fairly common ways to ki!I
your lobster on-site and so achieve maximum freshness.
Some cooks' practice is to drive a sharp heavy knife point
first into a spot just above the midpoint between the lobster's
eyestalks (more or less where the Third Eye is inhuman fore
heads}. This is alleged either to kill the lobster instantly or to
render it insensate-and is said at least to eliminate the cow
ardice involved in throwing a creature into boiling water and
then fleeing the room. As far as l can tell from talking to pro
ponents of the knife-in-the-head method, the idea is that it's
more violent but ultimately more merciful, plus that u will
ingness to exert personal agency and accept responsibility
even w<>rsefcrueler ways people prepare lobster. Time .. thrifty
cooks sometimes microwave them alive (usually after poking
several extra vent holes in the carapace, which is a prec.iution
most shellfish-microwavers learn about the hard way). Live
dismemberment, on the otl1er hand, is big in Europe; Some
chefs cut the lobster in halfbefore cooking; others like to tear
off the claws and tail and toss 011ly these parts in the pot.
And there's more unhappy news respecting sufforing
criterion number one. Lobsters don't have much in the way
of eyesight or hearing, but they d<> have an exquisite tactile
sense, one facilitated by hundreds of thousands of tiny hairs
that protrude through their carapace. "Thus,'' in the words of
T.M. Prudden's industry classic About Lobstff, "it is that al ..
though encased in what seems a solid, impenetrable armor,
the lobster can receive stimuli and impressions from without
as readily as ifit possessed a soft and delicate skin." And lob
sters do have nociceptors,17 as well as invertebrate versions
ofthe prostaglandins and major neurntransmitters via which
our own brains register pain.
Lobsters do not, on the other hand, appear to have the
equipment for making or absorbing natural <>pioids like en··
dorphins and enkephalins, which are what m<>re advanced
nervous systems use to try to handle intense pain. From this
fact, though, one could conclude either that lobsters are
maybe even morti vulnerable to pain, since they lack mam
malian nervous systems' built-in analgesia, or, instead. that
the absence of natural opioids implies an absence of the real
ly intense pain..sensations that natural opioids are designed
to mitigate. I for one can detect a marked upswing in mood as
Sorne cooks take one of those little lightweight plastic oven tin1ers
with then1 into another roorn and ,vait till the ,vhole process is over.
for stabbing the lobster's head honors the lobster somehow
and entitles one to eat it. (There's often a vague sort ofNative
American spirituality-of-the-hunt flavor to pro ..knife argu
ments.) But the problem with the knife method is basic biol··
ogy: Lobsters' 1tervous systems operate off not one hut
several ganglia, a.k.a. nerve bundles, which are sort <>fwired
in series and distributed all along the lobster's underside,
from stem to stern. And disabling only the frontal ganglion
does not normally result in quick death or unconsciousness.
Another alternative is to put the lobster in cold salt water and
then very slowly bring it up to a full boil. Cooks who advo..
cate this method are going mostly on the analogy to a frog,
which can supposedly be kept fro111 jump.ing ()tit.of a boiling
pot by heating the water incrementally. In order to save a lot
of research-summarizing, l.'ll simply assure you that the
analogy between frogs and lobsters turns out not to hold.
Ultimately, the only certain virtues of the home-lobotomy
and slow-heating methods are comparative, because there are
I contemplate this latter possibility: It could be thnt their luck
ofendorphin/enkephalin hardware means that lobsters' raw
subjective experience of pain is so radically different from
mammals' that it may not even deserve the tenn pain. Per
haps lobsters are more like those frontal-lobotomy patients
one reads about who report experiencing pain in a totally dif
ferent way than you and !. These patients evidently do feel
physical pain, neurologically speaking, hut don't dislike it, ....
though neither do they like it; it's more that they feel it but
d<>n 't feel anything about it.. ·the point being that the pain is
not distressing to them or something they want to get away
from. Maybe lobsters, who are also without frontal lobes,
are detached from the ncurnfogicaJ . registration-of-injmy-or
hazard we call pain in just the same way. There is, after all, a
difference between (l) pain as a purely neurological event,
and (2) actual suffering, which seems crucially to involve an
emotional comp<>nent, an awareness of pain as unpleasant, as
something to fear/dislike/want to avoid.
16 "Interests" basically means strong and legitimate preferences, which obviously require some degree of consciousness, responsiveness to stimuli. etc. See,
for instance, the utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer, whose 1974 Animal Liberation is more or less the bible ot the modern a11imai-rights movement: "It would
be nonsense to say that it was not in the interests of a stone to he kicked along the road by a schoolboy. A stone does not have interests because it cannot svffer.
Nothing that we can do to it could possibly make any difference to its welfare. A mouse, on the other hand, does have an interest in not being kicked along the
road, because itwill suffer ii it is."
17 This is the neurological term for special pain receptors that are {according to Jane A. Smith and Kenneth M. Boyd's Lives in the Balance) "sensitive to po
tentially damaging extremes of temperature, to mechanical forces, and to chemical svbslances which are released when body tissues are damaged."
AUGUST
2004
GOURMET
63
FIELDNOTES
Still, after all the abstract intellection, there remain the facts
of the frantically clanking lid, the pathetic clinging to the edge
of the pot. Standing at the stove, it is hard to deny in any mean
ingful way that this is a living creature experiencing pain and
wishing to avoid/escape the painful experience. To my lay
mind, the lobster's behavior in the kettle appears to be the ex
pression of a preference; and it may well be that an ability to
form preferences is the decisive criterion for real suffering. ts
The logic of this (preference� suffering) relation may be easi
est to see in the negative case. If you cut certain kinds of wo1ms
in half, the halves will often keep crawling around and going
about their venniform business as if nothing had happened.
When we assert, based on their post-op behavior, that these
worms appear not to be suffering, what we're really saying is
that there's no sign that the worms know anything bad has hap
pened or wouldprefer not to have gotten cut in half.
Lobsters, however, are known to exhibit preferences. Ex
periments have shown that they can detect changes of only a
degree or two in water temperature; one reason for their com
plex migratory cycles (which can often cover 100-plus miles
a year) is to pursue the temperatures they like best.ts And, as
mentioned, they're bottom-dwellers and do not like bright
light: If a tank of food lobsters is out in the sunlight or a
store's fluorescence, the lobsters will always congregate in
whatever part is darkest. Fairly solitary in the ocean, they
also clearly dislike the crowding that's part of their captivity
in tanks, since (as also mentioned) one reason why lobsters'
claws are banded on capture is to keep them from attacking
one another under the stress of close-quarter storage.
I
N ANY EVENT, at the Festival, standing by the bubbling
tanks outside the World's Largest Lobster Cooker, watch
ing the fresh-caught lobsters pile over one another, wave
their hobbled claws impotently, huddle in the rear corners, or
scrabble frantically back from the glass as you approach, it is
difficult not to sense that they're unhappy, or frightened, even
if it's some rudimentary version of these feelings ... and,
again, why does rudimentariness even enter into it? Why is a
primitive, inarticulate form of suffering less urgent or uncom
fortable for the person who's helping to inflict it by paying for
the food it results in? I'm not ttying to give you a PETA-like
screed here-at least I don't think so. I'm trying, rather, to
work out and articulate some of the troubling questions that
arise amid all the laughter and saltation and community pride
of the Maine Lobster Festival. The truth is that if you, the Fes-
tival attendee, pennit yourself to think that lobsters can suffer
and would rather not, the MLF can begin to take on aspects of
something like a Roman circus or medieval torture-fest.
Does that comparison seem a bit much? If so, exactly why?
Or what about this one: Is it not possible that future generations
will regard our own present agribusiness and eating practices
in much the same way we now view Nero's entertainments
or Aztec sacrifices? My own immediate reaction is that such
a comparison is hysterical, extreme-and yet the reason it
seems extreme to me appears to be that I believe animals are
less morally important than human beings;2° and when it
comes to defending such a belief, even to myself, I have to
acknowledge that (a) I have an obvious selfish interest in this
belief, since I like to eat certain kinds of animals and want to
be able to keep doing it, and (b) I have not succeeded in work
ing out any sort of personal ethical system in which the belief
is truly defensible instead of just selfishly convenient.
Given this article's venue and my own lack of culinary so
phistication, I'm curious about whether the reader can identi
fy with any of these reactions and acknowledgments and
discomforts. I am also concerned not to come off as shrill or
preachy when what I really am is confused. Given the (possi
ble) moral status and (very possible) physical suffering of the
animals involved, what ethical convictions do gourmets
evolve that allow them not just to eat but to savor and enjoy
flesh-based viands (since of course refined enjoyment, rather
than just ingestion, is the whole point of gastronomy)? And
for those gourmets who'll have no truck with convictions or
rationales and who regard stufflike the previous paragraph as
just so much pointless navel-gazing, what makes it feel okay,
inside, to dismiss the whole issue out of hand? That is, is their
refusal to think about any of this the product of actual
thought, or is it just that they don't want to think about it? Do
they ever think about their reluctance to think about it? After
all, isn't being extra aware and attentive and thoughtful about
one's food and its overall context part of what distinguishes
a real gourmet? Or is all the gourmet's extra attention and
sensibility just supposed to be aesthetic, gustatory?
These last couple queries, though, while sincere, obvious
ly involve much larger and more abstract questions about the
connections (if any) between aesthetics and morality, and
these questions lead straightaway into such deep and treach
erous waters that it's probably best to stop the public discus
sion right here. There are limits to what even interested
persons can ask of each other.@
18 "Preference" is maybe roughly synonymous with "interest," but it is a better term for our purposes because it's less abstractly philosophical-"preference"
seems more personal, and it's the whole idea of a living creature's personal experience that's at issue.
19 Of course, the most common sort of counterargument here would begin by objecting that "like best" is really just a metaphor, and a misleadingly anthropomorphic one at that. The counterarguer would posit that the lobster seeks to maintain a certain optimal ambient temperature out of nothing but unconscious instinct (with a similar explanation for the low-light affinities about to be mentioned in the main text). The thrust of such a counterargument will be that the
lobster's thrashings and clankings in the kettle express not unpreferred pain but involuntary reflexes, like your leg shooting out when the doctor hits your knee.
Be advised that there are professional scientists, including many researchers who use animals in experiments, who hold to the view that nonhuman creatures
have no real feelings at all, only "behaviors." Be further advised that this view has a long history that goes all the way back to Descartes, although its modern
support comes mostly from behaviorist psychology.
' To these what-look-like-pain-are-really-only-reflexes counterarguments, however, there happen to be all sorts of scientific and pro-animal-rights counter
counterarguments. And then further attempted rebuttals and redirects, and so on. Suffice to say that both the scientific and the philosophical arguments on ei
ther side of the animal-suffering issue are involved, abstruse, technical, often informed by self-interest or ideology, and in the end so totally inconclusive that
as a practical matter, in the kitchen or restaurant, it all still seems to come down to individual conscience, going with (no pun) your gut.
20 Meaning a tot less important, apparently, since the moral comparison here is not the value of one human's life vs. the value of one animal's life, but rather the
value of one animal's life vs. the value of one human's taste for a particular kind of protein. Even the most diehard carniphile will acknowledge that it's possible
to live and eat well without consuming animals.
64
GOURMET
AUGUST 2004
.1
, :I
Document 8: David Foster Wallace, "Consider the Lobster"
1.
What is the purpose of the essay? How do you know?
2.
How is the essay organized? If you could break it into parts, how would you label them?
3.
Comment on Wallace's use of footnotes. What are the footnotes for, and how do they
advance the purpose of essay?
4. Wallace uses a lot of big words--no doubt you've looked up a few of them by now. Does
his vocabulary improve the essay or detract from it? Explain your reasoning.
5. What is your opinion on Wallace's argument? Articulate yourself here, using plenty of
evidence from the text.
Toni Cade Bambara
Gorilla, My Love
(UNITED STATF.S)
That was the year H1mca B11hha changed his name. Not a change np, hnt u
change back, since Jefferson Winston Vale was the name in the first place.
Which was news to me ca11se he'd heen my H11nca Buhba my whole lifetime,
since I couldn't manage Uncle to save my life. So for as I was eoncemecl it was
a change completely to somethin sounclin very µ;eographical weatherlike to
me, like somethin you'd find in a almanac.·. Or somethin vo11'd run across when
you sittin in the n;1vigator seat with a wet thumh on tl;e map crinkly in your
lap. watchin the roads and signs so when Granddaddy Vale say "Which way,
Scout," you got sense enough to say take the next exit or take a left or what
ever it is. Not that Scout's my name. Just the name Gnmddaddy call whoever
sittin in the navigator seat. Whieh is nsuall}' me c.·ause I don't feature sittin in
the back with the pecans. Now, yon figure pecaus all tight to be sittin ,vith. If
you thinks so, that's your business. But they dusty sometime and make you
cough. And they got a way of slidin around and dippin down sudden, like
maybe a rat in the buckets. So if you scary like me. you sleep with the lights on
and blame it on Baby Jason and, so as not to waste good elechic, you study the
maps. And that's how come I'm in tlw navigator seat most times and get to he
called Scout.
So Hunca Bubba in the_ back with the 1wc,ms and Bahy Jason, and he in
f
love. An<l we got to hear all this stuf ahont this woman he in love with and all.
Which really ain't enough to keep the mind alive, though Baby Jm;on got no
better sense than to give his undividecl attention and keep grahbin at the
photograph which is just a picture� of some skinny woman in a countrified
dress with her hand shot np to her face lik<� she sha111t• fore cameras. But
there's a movie hm1se in the hackgrouml which I ,Lx ahout. Cause I am a movie
freak from way hack, even though it do get 11w in tro11hlt· so111eti111e.
Like when me and Biµ; Brood and Bahy Jason was 011 om own last Easter
and couldn't go to the Dorset c1111se we'd seen all tlw Thret� Stooges tht•y was.
And the RKO Hamilton was dosed read}fog up for the Easter Pageant that
night. And the \Vc�st End, the Regun and the S1mst•t was too far. less we had
grownups with 11s which we didn't. So \\'t' walk up Amsterdam Avemtt> to the
Washington and Gmilla, !l'l!J Love playin. tht>y say, whidt snit me just fine,
Gori/Ill,
M.v Lo11e
I
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Bra111h ;11111 lwr l'ri1 ·111b l'.tll Tl111111lnli1111s. Sl i t' d11 1101 pla�. Sli1• do 1101 s1111lt·.
So \\1· ,11111 ll)l ,111d \lalcl r 1111' sh 11pli• ass pil'l11 n•.
\\'l111·l r h 11111 ,11 sir11pl1· .is ii i, ,t11pid. ( a11,,• I n·ali1.1 • tl,at J11st ,1l io11I a11,
l1rnh i11 111\ l'.1111ih h l11'lln tlra11 tl i i\ god 1111•, al\\ a,, lalk111 al in1 1t. \h dad1 h
\\rn;ldllt 'il,111,l li1r 11olu>lh ln•alill .Ill\ ol' 11., tl r at \\;l\. \h lllilllla ,p1·t·iall:. ·\11d
I l'.111111,1 \1'1' ii"'"'· Bi_� B11111d 11p 1111·1'1 ' 011 till' l'l'oss lalki11 lin11t Foq.?;h 1 • tl11•111
I >ad1h 1·.111"· 1111·, d111r't k111 1\\' \I l1 al 1111•, d1 1i11. .\11d 111, \la11 1a ,m ( ; I '! or1 do\\ 1 1
l'n1111 llll'n' \ 1111 l;iv, fool \\ l1ald1a 1l,i11l, tl,h L,. plmti11 1t-'.J .-\111 1 IH\ Dad1 h :1 ·1li 11
lo ( ;,:111ddad 1 h In g<'I 111111 a l,1tld,·r (',111:0.(' Bi� Brood al 'li11 tl11 · rooL Ids 111otl11 •r
,id1• ol tlll' L1111ih ,lio\\ i11 r q>. \11d 111, 111.1111.1 and l1t•r ,isl1•r Dais:, j11111pi11 011
ll1l'III 1\0111.tm l>l'.tli11 1111'11 1 \\lll1 ll1t·, prn·kl'll11u1k'i, ,\1111 1111111 ':t B11lilm 1t•lli11
1111•111 lolk, Oil tlw, k111 ·1•\ ti,,·, l idlt•r gl'I 11111 tl11· \\ a� a11d go gl'I so1111· ll l'lp or
1111•, �on, 111 �I'! lr.11llpl1·d 011 .\11 1 1 < :ra11dd.ul1 h \',tit· s,I\ i11 I .1·m 1 · tlll' 1,0\
.iln111' ii lltal 'i \\ lmt lw \\.1111, lo do ,dtl1 Iris lili• \\ t' airi'I e;ol 11oll r i11 to sm alio11t
0
60
TONICADEBAMBARA
it. Then Aunt Daisy givin him a taste of that pocketbook, fussin hont what a
damn fool old man Granddaddy is. Then everybody jmnpin in his chest like
the time Uncle Clayton went in the army and come hack with only one leg and
Gnmcklackly say somethin .stupid about that's life. Aud by this time Big Brood
off the ('fOSS and in the park pinyin hamlhall or sk11lly or somethin. And the
family in the kitchen thro\\in di.shes at eac:h other, scn•mnin hont if you hadn't
done· this I wouldn't had to do that. And me in the parlor trying to de'> 1ny arith
metic vellin Shut it off.
\.\ll;ich is what I was yt•llin all hy myself which make me a sittin target for
Th11nderb11ns. But when I yell We want our mom�y hack, that gets c\'cryhody
in choms. And the movie windin np with this hea\'enly cloud music and the
smart-ass np there in his hole in the wall tums up the sound again to drown us
out. Then there conws Bugs Bunny which we already .seen so we know we
been had. No )!;orilla my nnthin. And Big Brood .say Awwww sht-eet, w<-' goiu
to see the manager aml get onr money hack. And I know from this we hn.si
nes.s. So I bmsh the potato chips out of my hair which is wlwrt"' Baby Jason like
to put em, ancl I march myself up the aisle to deal with the managn who is a
crook in the first place for lyin ont there sayin Gmilla. My Looe pinyin. And I
never did like the man cause he oily and pasty at the same time like the had
)!;UY in the serial, the one that got a hideout behind a pnsh-lmtton hookc:ase
and play "Moonlight Sonata.. with glows on. I knock on the door and I am fo
rions. And I am alone, too. Cause Big Brood suddenly got to go so had even
though my mama told ns bout )!;oin in them nasty hathroo111s. Ami I hear him
sigh like he dis)!;nsted when he get to the door a11cl set• only a little kid them.
An<l now I'm really f111io11s cause I get so tired grow1111ps messin over kids just
cause thev little ancl can't takti em to court. What is it, he say to me like I lost
my mitte;,s or wet on myself or am .somebody's retarded chil�I. vVlwn i11 reality
I am the smartest kid P.S. I 8fi ever had iu its whole lifetime and von ean ,LX
anybody. Even them teachers that don't like me cause I won't 'sing them
Southern son)!;s or hack off when they tell me my questions are ont of' order.
And cause my Mama coml' np there in a minute when them teachers shut
playin the dozt�ns hehind colored folks. She stalk in with her hat pulled clown
had and that P ersian lamh coat drapt•d hack over one hip on ac.·c.·01111t of' she
got her fist phmtcd there so she can talk that talk which gets 11s all hnmotizecl,
and tPadier he comi11 1111do11e cause she know this conic.I bl' her joh and lwr
hehind canst• Mama got pnll with tlw Board and had hy lwr own s�lf anyhow.
So I kick the door open wider and just walk right hy him and sit down and
tell the 111a11 ahont himself and that I want my money hack aml that gm•s for
Bahy Jason and Big Brood too. And he still trying to shullle me ont tlw door
e\'ell though I'm sittin which shows him for the fool ht> is. Just like them t(-'ach
<·rs do fore they realizt' Mama like a stone on that .spot and ain't hackin np. So
he ai11't gettin np off the money. So I was forc:<�d to k•avt•, takin the matches
from nnc.ler his ashtrnv. and St't a fire under the c:amly stand, which dost•d the
raggedy ole Washingt<m down li.>I' a week. My Dad;ly hac.l the suspet't it was
111e canse Big Brood got a hig 111011th. But I <"'xplaiued right quick what the
whole thin)!; was about aml I figured it was t'\'en-steven. Cause if yo11 say Go-
Gorilla.
My love I
61
rilla, My Love, you suppose to mean it. Just like wlwn yon say yon goin to give
me a party on my bitthday. you gotta mean it. And if yon say me and Baby Ja
son can go South pecan ha11lin with Grandclaclcly Vale, yon better not he
comin up with no stuff about the weather look uncertain or did yon mop the
bathroom or any other t1icldfied h11siness. I mean even g,mgsters in the
mmies say My word is my bond. So don't nohody get away with nothin for as
I'm conc(�111ed. So Daddy put his helt ha('k on. Cause that's the way I was
raised. Like my Mmna say in one of them sitnatious when I won't hack clown,
Okay Bnclhircl, yon right. Your point is well-taken. Not that Badbird my nam<\
just what she say when she tired arguin and know I'm right. And Aunt Jo, who
is the hardest head in the family and worse even than Aunt Daisy, she sav, Yon
absolutely tight Miss Muffin, ,�•hich also ain't my real name !mt.the mm�e she
gave me one time when l got some medicine shot in my behind and w011kln't
get np off her pillows for nothin. And even Granddaddy Vale-who got no
memory to speak of, so sometime you can just plain lie to him, if you want to
be like that-he sav, Well if that's what I said, then that's it. But this name
business was clifler:nt they said. It wasn't like H11nca Bnhha had gone hack on
his word or anything. Just that he was thinkin bout gettin married und was usin
his real name now. Which ain't the wav I saw it ,lt all.
So there I am in the navigator seat: And l tum to him an<l jnst plain ole itx
him. l 111ea11 I come tight on out with it. No sense goin all around that ham the
old folks talk ahout. And like my manta say, Hazel-which is my real name and
what she remembers to call 111e when she bein se1io11s-when yo11 got some
thin mt your 111i11d, speak up and let the chips fall where they may. And ii' any
hody don't like it, tell em to come see your mama. Ami Daddy look up from
the papc>r and say. You hear your mama good. Hazel. And tell em to come see
me first. Like that. That's how I was raised.
So I turn clear round in the navigator seat and say, "Look here, H 11nca
Bnbha or Jefferson Windsong Val<· or whatt•vcr yom name is, you gonna nnmy
this girl?"
"Sun• am," he say, all g1fos.
And I say. "Memher that time you was hahy-sittiu me when wt• lived at
four-o-nine and there was this hig snow and Mama and Daddy got held np i11
the cmtllh)' so you had to stay fr>r two days?"
And he say, "Sure do."
"Well. Yo;, remember how yon told me I was the, cutest thing that ever
walked the earth?"
"Oh, you \\'f:'l'(• real ente when yon wert• little," lw say. which is suppose to
he fi11111y. I am not la11ghin.
"\Vl�II. Yon re111ember what vo11 said?"
And Grancldacldy Vale s<p1h;·tin over the wheel anti ,t-.;in Which way. Scout.
Bnt Scout is busy and don't care if wt• all get lost fi>r days.
"\Vatcha mean. Peaches?"
"My name is Hazel. Ami what I niea11 is you said �-011 ,wre goin); to IIHlfl�'
me when I grew up. You were going to wait. Tliat:� what I mt'illl, my th�m· Un
de Jefferson." Ami he clou't say nuthin. Just look at uw real strange like h<-'
62
TONI CADE BAMBARA
m·n-r saw 11w hdim� in Iii<.•. Likt·' l1t• lost in some wdrcl town hi tilt' 111iddlt• of
night ancl lookin for directions ancl there·s 110 011e to ask. Likt• it was rm• that
messt•d up the maps and tunwd tlw road posts ro1111cl. "\\'<'II, yo11 said it, didn't
you?" And Bahr Jason lookin ha<.'k am! l'mth lih· wt• pinyin pi11v;-p1111g. Only I
ain't pla�·i11. 1'111 l111rtin and I ca11 ll('ar that I m11 scn•m11i11. And Cramhhuldy
\'ak• rn111nhli11 how\\'(' IIP\cr g011n,1 gd to wh1•n• \\'t' goin if I don't turn aro1111d
a11d takl:' 111y llil\'iWttor joli S< •t'iollS.
"W1•ll, li,r t·ryi11 out lo11d, I laz1•l. �rnt Just a littl1• girl. :\11d I was .inst tl•asi11."
.. · Aml I was j 11st t!'asin.' " I sav baek j 11st how lw said it so h, • eai I I u •ar what
a lt·tTihll' thi11µ;· it is. Tht•11 I do;,·t Sil)' ·1111thin. And Ill' don't sa�· 1111tlii11. And
Baby Jason do11't say 1111thi11 nohow. ThP11 Granddmld�, Val<• spt·ak 11p... Look
lll'rt', Prt•tfo11s, it \\'as 1l1111L·a B11hha what told you tllt'111 things. This ltt•r<\ J1·t'
fr·rso11 \\'inston \ 'al1·... And I I1111ca Buhim sa\',
Tit at was srnm·.
. "Tlrat :s right.
hodv l'ISt'. rm a II('\\' SOllll'l,ody."
..:'(011 a lyi11 dawg." I say. wlu•11 I 111Pa11t to sav trt•,u:h(•rons dog. hut just
couldn't J.!;<-'t hole! ol' tht• word. It slippt'd away fro111 till'. And I'm 1·1:ing and
ernmpli11 down i11 tll<' s1•at and just do11't ean·. Ami C:nuuldadd�, say to hush
and stt•ps mt tlw �as. Arni 1'111 losi11 111� h1•m'ins and don't 1•,·1•11 know wh(•n• to
look on tlll' 111ap ea11s1· I t'tlll't s1•1• for c1:·i11. Ami Bah�· Jason 1·1:·i11 too. Ca11Sl'
hl' is 111�' blood hrotl11·'l' and 1111dl'rsta11ds that wt• 11111st stkk togt•I IH'r or lw for.
('\t•r lost. what with �row1111ps pla�ill d1an)!;<·-11p and turnin you rouml 1•,·1·1y
which Wll\'. so had. t\11(1 do11't ('\('II Sil\. the,·. SOIT\'.
.
Document 9: Toni Cade Bambara, "Gorilla, My Love"
1. What is Hazel's purpose in telling the story? How do you know?
2. How is the story organized? Describe the Hazel's train of thought and selection of events as
plainly as you can.
3. Why do you think it's organized this way? How does this way of organizing the narrative serve
the story's purpose?
4. Toni Cade Bambara elects to have Hazel narrate the story in the "vernacular"-the language
common to her time, place, and culture. How does this decision relate to the overall intention
of the story?
5. Do you think that Toni Cade Bambara has the same intention in writing the story as Hazel has
in telling it? Why or why not? Stated another way: what is Bambara's purpose in writing the
story? Make a claim and prove it using plenty of evidence from the text.

A/2C Hunter S. Thompson 23 Aug 57 1. A/2C Hunters. Thompson

Transcription

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