Fresh Meat

Kansas City, MO

This is a city of meat. "Have a steak," I'm told whenever I come here; "Have a steak?" I'm asked whenever I get home. And jazz: the city is famous for its jazz, something I once referred to as "the tofu of music." The last time I was here, some coworkers and I dined at The Majestic, which apparently has both good steak and good jazz, and we were seated at the table closest to the stage. My coworkers ate steak, and I ate chicken. A pianist and a stand-up-bass player entertained us with jazz. I had chicken again this trip, but not at The Majestic. Nothing bovine-like for me, even in this trip when we have lunch in a place adjacent to what were once expansive stockyards from which the occasional steer was culled and then served at the very table we gathered around for an hour or so. Fresh meat everywhere.

Enough of what I ate. Who cares, really? I don't even care.

Trains, jazz, mutual funds, meat, the Missouri River, the Hall (as in Hallmark) family.... St. Patrick's day, rainy and cold: the Power and Light District was full of drunk young people, and I felt both old and boring as I worked my way through the rain and the drunks. I stayed in the downtown Marriott, which, as in my previous visits, was filled with young military recruits destined for one service or another. A couple of years ago as I was pedaling hamster-like on one of the stationary bikes in the hotel's gym, one young army recruit asked me if I was headed into the service, as well. I told him I'd done my time decades earlier.

"Why'd you sign up?" I asked.

"The education," he said.

I said, "There are other ways to get an education." But I thought this: You are young and stupid. There is no sane reason for you to go into the army, no sane reason for your probable deployment to Iraq.

On this trip, I encounter a group of drunk and soon-to-be-drunker navy boys who are lugging several full ice chests into the elevator I had, for a few moments, treated as my own. I know they are navy because they have "U.S. Navy" on their shirts. I watch them an think: Fresh meat everywhere.

"I'm not drunk, but he is," one says to me while pointing to his friend.

His friend says, "I think it's safe to say that we're all drunk."

When we reach the lobby, they lug their ice chests out. "You should get some marines to carry those," I say, but they either don't think it's funny, or they don't get my point. Pick one....

I am on the 18th floor. Many years ago Kominski and I spent a quartet of nights in Chicago's Hotel 71, and we were treated to a corner room that had many windows. Our room overlooked the Chicago River and Marina City. The rock band Wilco's CD Yankee Hotel Foxtrot * had just been released. We kept the drapes open all night, something I've pretty much always done when staying in hotel rooms where nobody can walk by and peek into my room. In Kansas City during this stay, I do the same thing; red from Crown Plaza, blue and white from AT & T, green from Holiday Inn fill the room all night.

That's all--the tofu of writing.

* Yankee, Hotel, Foxtrot: If you were talking over a radio on the military, those are the words you would use for Y-H-F.