The First Steak of the Rest of My Life: Nonfiction (excerpt) by Nate McCarthy

The First Steak of the Rest of My Life

by Nate McCarthy

It was Dave who finally got me to eat meat again after sixteen years of being a vegetarian. I watched him from the living room as he lit the barbecue in the backyard; I was drowsing in the soporific warmth of the gas heater, stretched right out on the thick rug that his mother had begun to make while she was pregnant with him. I was too weak to hold my thoughts with me on the floor so I let them float up with the heat and disintegrate. I loved the rug and I loved the heater. That was about all I could manage.

It was my ninth week on the elimination diet, a stringent diagnostic regimen developed by immunologists, and I was wild with hunger. I’d been severely unwell for a few years, and the doctors had very little to suggest apart from the elimination diet and paperwork for a disabled parking sticker. The sticker had helped. Perhaps the diet would too.

The elimination diet is an agonising staircase for the chronically ill to climb. It is meant to bring to light any food intolerance that could be causing a patient’s symptoms. It means, often under medical supervision, dragging yourself up floor after floor of food groups, week after week. First comes food that contains the lowest level of triggers, then the next, and the next. Pears at the bottom, pineapples at the top.

You could only progress through the stages when your symptoms improved. Mine never did. I was stuck on the lowest landing, down in the culinary dark, unable to eat a single meal that had not been prepared at home from the complicated advice book filled with tables and lists. I could not have bread, milk, or gluten. If I went out, weak as I was, there was no sustenance I could easily grab, not a hunk of bread, not an apple (I could only eat peeled pears of a certain variety). The diet was proving to be unlivable without meat.

I had scrambled for months, with the help of my mum and my best friend, to make nutritious meals out of a dismal list of ingredients (choko gourds, mung-bean sprouts, cashews, potatoes, and sugar were among the more exciting). Had I eaten meat, this would not have been so confounding: the mung beans and the choko would have made an austere side to a nice lamb cutlet, a small concession in a healthy and rounded meal. But as a vegetarian I was in real trouble. And by now I was on my knees, all but eliminated myself.

Dave had taken to making me toffee and honeycomb to get calories into me, and I carried them in a little tupperware if I went far from home. My mouth was pocked with sores from eating so much sugar.

I was bound more than ever by the constraints of my illness. I was weaker, and I had a tyrannical diet to follow, which meant I couldn’t share food with anyone or have a coffee out. There was no joy in food, no distraction in snacking, no idle nibbling in search of pleasure, and no happy eating to mark the milestones of the day. There was my sickness and there was flavourless choko and cabbage for dinner. I was wasting away, willing to cross lines.

Surrender had been a long time coming. Across from the bedroom window of my share-house, the oak trees in the park had taken and dropped their autumn colour three times since I’d become ill. I’d watched their slow changes from my bed, buoyed in spirit by the flush of their new growth but unchanged myself, every detail of my life still shaped by a body that pushed itself to the forefront of my experience and sat there, broken, blocking out almost everything else. In those oak-tree years I’d venture out when I could, often to lug groceries home from the shop, or to sit in the park, or see a friend and then crumble back into bed, feverish and spent, like an ancient thing. And then I would rest until I had the strength to cook or to heat up food delivered to me by friends and family.

With no known cure and not many prospects, I sought solitude and quiet in the countryside, a self-made sanitorium. A car full of books, no internet, no phone signal. I rented a room for a couple of months in a beautiful small town, hours from Sydney, to lie beside streams and float in the river that cut through the village, to sit at dusk where the houses stopped and the paddocks began, where the fireflies bobbed and bats flew down the valley in great plumes.

I had eaten fresh greens and eggs from the community garden on the hill and slept to the sound of frogs at night. And oh, the places I napped! I rarely went anywhere without a rug and pillow, and went to ground in the most beautiful spots: by rainforest streams, on quiet beaches by driftwood fires, between the beds of untamed vegetable gardens, and by sagging fences laden with fragrant vines. I slugged down paracetamol by the town river and watched rain fall silent as snow on hot summer nights, heard owls while I lay stuck somewhere. And after years of the same view from my Sydney house, I was relieved to at least be in a new bedroom if I couldn’t leave my bed. My new house was a new world with a view of the valley hills, sitting on a road which ran through paddocks where gentle-eyed beef cattle gathered at sunset.

It was up in that town, during my rural retreat, that a friend and I had talked about eating meat as we lay in the shallows of the river at dusk on a hot evening, stray cows bellowing from time to time from the paddocks behind the ancient camphor laurels.

“At this stage, Nate,” she said, lying on her belly, “even a committed Buddhist might consider they need to eat meat.”

I listened, heavy in the water. A mullet broke the surface of the river and splashed back down. “I know. Maybe one day,” I said.

If the elimination diet had not been beginning to starve me, I would have let that idea float off forever downstream into a hazy future which didn’t much bear thinking about anyway. I certainly had strong ideas about the ethics of eating meat, but what I felt most immediately was a filthy horror about having dead flesh in my mouth.

Meat had become disgusting to me the moment I was directed to cut open a thawed and bloated rat in biology class and dig around in its stink for its heart and brain. I didn’t care for my ham sandwich after that. Shortly after the dissection, I watched Babe, a film about a piglet who narrowly avoids being slaughtered, and that was it for me. There was no sense of giving anything up, abstaining, wistfully foregoing a steaming breast of roast chicken, or covetously eyeing crackling rashers of bacon. In the blink of my teenage eye, meat became awful and people had no business turning creatures into it, of reducing animals with lidded eyes and quivering snouts and complicated biological functions to a meal to be eaten once and then forever over.

I quietened down as I got out of high school and didn’t give it too much thought. Yet I retained a gentle sense of uncertainty about my meat-eating friends: how did a person’s kindness and generosity fit together with their eating of animals, of working with meat in the kitchen as if it were no more than citrus fruit, cocoa, or figs?

I folded my hands on my chest and lay like a corpse in the lamplight as Dave closed the lid of the barbecue, leaving it to heat up, and came back inside to prepare the vegetables. We would be having New York steaks (sirloin) with mashed potatoes, broccolini, asparagus, and button mushrooms.

Dave and I have known each other our whole lives, or at least since we were able to eat solids. And that’s really when it all begins, isn’t it? When you learn to taste, to begin to be able to recall what it was that you so loved, to understand the things you want, and to share them at the end of the day. Little Dave lived six doors down from me, and we’ve rubbed off on each other so much that people who have met us as adults have sometimes been taken aback. When my friends first encountered Dave, many idiosyncrasies that they had thought of as mine – a gesture, a turn of phrase, or the way I got dressed up – turned out to be just as much the singularities of the soft-spoken bearded man I introduced them to.

There had been a flow between us over decades that we hadn’t noticed until we were saturated. A sharing of aesthetics, of habits, of history. Our finger and toe joints swell arthritically in the same places because we both began cracking them on the long car ride south to my family beach holiday when we were little. Later, by the time we were old enough to drive ourselves around, still cracking our knuckles, Dave liked my barber, so we got our hair cut the same way for a long time. He altered our jean hems to make them slimmer at the ankles and shopped for me when he had time to browse opp shops; it didn’t so much matter if he found anything for himself as long as he found something right for someone, often me.

To read the rest of the essay, purchase SAND Issue 17.