On cannibalism

an interlude

When I was 20, I got a job in the deli at a chain grocery store. At the time I was quite ill, which made the physically demanding work all the more difficult. But even if I’d been in the pink of health, it would still have been, hands-down, the worst job I’ve ever had.

As a poor young person with a disabling chronic illness, my self-esteem was at something close to an all-time low, and yet even I was shocked by how we were treated by the people in charge. Our team of almost exclusively cis women, most of them Latina and/or Indigenous, was treated with sadistic contempt by everyone in management and a lot of our customers, too (I was only vaguely aware that this treatment was also racialized, and that mine was surely better than most of my coworkers’ by dint of my whiteness). I had not yet quite grasped that anyone willing to hire someone like me—mentally and physically unwell, so stupid from psych drugs and fatigue that learning new skills was like pulling healthy teeth—had low standards for employee respectability and even lower standards for employee treatment. Like all service workers, we were overworked, underpaid, and constantly undermined by clock-watching, penny-pinching, top-skimming bosses and middle-management, our free moments and minor reprieves surveilled with vindictive suspicion. (It’s no coincidence that one of my strongest memories from this hazy time was reading Nickel & Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich, a book that truly changed my life.)

One of my awful responsibilities in that deli was making rotisserie chickens, the kind grocery stores sell in black plastic dishes with cardboard wings. Back then, they cost like $6, a whole entire bird roasted to white-breasted perfection, easy to impulse-grab as you were on your way to the register.

First, I would haul a stack of oily cardboard boxes out of the walk-in fridge. These contained the slightly thawed chicken carcasses. One chicken at a time, I would unpack, gut, and rack them, my white hands turning pink and burning with cold as I pulled out bloated organs and shoved in spears of steel, sometimes painfully stabbing my own hand with the blunt tip in the process. Then I “spiced” the chickens with a pre-fab chemical powder. Then I shoved the metallic racks of still-mostly-frozen chickens into the rotisserie oven, where I would monitor and rotate the chickens until they were cooked. Even though the process and ingredients were disgusting, the chickens still smelled good when they were done, and I often wished I could justify buying myself one. I don’t know that I ever did, though sometimes I could steal a day-old if they weren’t checking bags at the end of my shift.

To move the chickens around and then remove them from the oven, we needed to wear a pair of reinforced oven gloves, only the gloves—and there was only one pair—were so old and filthy, slicked in chicken slime and powdered chemical, and soaked with sweat and grime, that they gave everyone who wore them a rash. Despite our complaints, management would not replace the gloves, and as the bowels of the rotisserie oven reached upwards of 350 degrees, using them was not optional. Occasionally there were boxes of plastic disposable gloves around that you could wear between your skin and the interior of the oven gloves, but that couldn’t be counted on. (If you needed supplies that could be found elsewhere in the store, like steel wool or soap, you would have to literally go and steal them; we did not have permission to stock ourselves with the materials we needed to do our jobs inside the store. I learned how to steal from grocery stores in order to do my job at a grocery store).

The rash would come and go, sometimes appearing immediately after wearing the gloves, sometimes seemingly at random. Mine manifested as tiny pus-filled bumps, juicy as chilblains. They weren’t painful, but itchy and unsightly. I popped them to stay awake during classes. Inside them was a fluid not unlike the chicken slime: clear and slightly viscous. It’s been over a decade since I worked at that deli, but I still get them, every once in a while, when I’m stressed out or underslept. It sounds dramatic but it’s true. I suppose I could ask a doctor about it, but I probably won’t.

There was so much about that job that still angers me, like being punished for taking water breaks (illegal), being ordered to stock expired food for customers to purchase (illegal), or not being protected from the men who came to hurt us, from randos looking for a power trip to, once, an ex-boyfriend that was stalking one of my coworkers, who couldn’t get a restraining order despite his repeated threats to kill her (illegal. Did I mention this was a union job?).

But something about the gloves made me so furious—like how much could new ones possibly cost? They were already making us do unpaid overtime anyway, adding up to probably 5 or 6 hours a week. I would have gladly put in another few hours if it meant not being eaten alive for the sake of some fucking rotisserie chickens.

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As someone with an autoimmune disease, being eaten alive has great metaphorical potency for me. Not only am I being eaten, but I am eating myself, an unwilling ouroboros gnawing at my own flesh from the inside out. Even when I am more or less asymptomatic, as sometimes happens, I know that inside me bad things are happening, an embodied corollary to my Christian upbringing, wherein the sinner’s body is both empty and rotten, a permanent receptacle for Christ’s blood and meat and essence. Just as the autoimmune diseased is constantly eating at oneself, so is the sinner in constant need of Christ’s nutritious forgiveness, as the Hillsong praise tunes I was raised on remind us.

It occurred to me the other day that when I wrote about vampirism as a binary-busting, third-rail sexuality, I missed an opportunity to talk about another ambiguously violent approach to intimacy (or as I’ve called them before, adaptive intimacies). Over the past month or two, Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Lecter has been much on my mind since viewing, to my intense and obsessive delight, Manhunter (1986), which marks the first film appearance of the good doctor.

I read Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal as a tween, and while I don’t remember either particularly very well except for Hannibal’s origin story plus a few passages about transsexualism (👀), I developed a deep and confusing crush on Dr. Lecter as he was on the page. When he and Clarice Starling run away together at the end of Hannibal, I was surprised but very gratified by the turn of events, which made sense to me. Apex predator Lecter’s erotic appeal was obvious, even at that age. Clinical, ostensibly unfeeling sadists remain a type of mine, on some level fitting into the mold that Anthony Hopkins left behind (though Brian Cox and Mads Mikkelson have both since informed the figure to great effect. If you haven’t seen Manhunter, get thee to a streaming service!).

As I said on Twitter a while back, the appeal of the sadist is simple: They're someone who is genuinely interested in you, which is very rare indeed. When was the last time you had someone’s undivided attention (have you ever watched the proverbial cat stalk the proverbial mouse, pupils trebling in size while her body remains perfectly still)? You’re not the only one to have found the Dating Experience, and interaction among a sea of traumatized, codependent, and capitalism-fatigued humans in general, to be exhausting and demoralizing. The pretense of predator/prey is to distracted Tinder date as artisanal meal is to factory farm fuel. Why be processed on an impersonal machine, fodder first for robots and then consumers, when you could be a delicacy, lovingly slaughtered, prepared, plated, and served, then enjoyed with good wine and thoughtful conversation?

I realize that this metaphor for the hard and scary work of intimacy is stretched out across the literal bodies of the billions of animals inhumanely slaughtered for human consumption. I realize also that Lectermania—inextricable, at this point, from Harris’ legacy of transmisogyny—is a quite popular way to dissociate both from the ambient fears of a culture wherein violence against feminized people is utterly normalized and also from the pressure of having to make choices in a milieu where most of the good ones are unavailable to us. Dr. Lecter also exists in a queer popular subculture where we’re still arguing about top shortages, bottoms’ responsibilities, and need to dehumanize both the people we fuck as well as the people we are fucked by. Please extend me your grace.

In any case, intimacy, as I said, is hard and scary work, especially when it’s the kind that doesn’t come prefabricated, with blueprints and road signs and slots dictating what goes where. Normalcy is at least simpler: The machine is known. The fantasy of Dr. Lecter—a rebuttal of masculine heterosexual intimacy, with its fixation on an essentialized version of sex and not much else—is as common as it is delicious. The people who purchased the rotisserie chickens I was exploited for were not, for most part, all that better off than I or my coworkers were, whereas erudite and cultured Dr. Lecter disrupts mechanized desire and satisfaction, while also following it to its logical conclusion. Plus, he has the élan of the ruling class. A thinking pervert’s bodice-ripper! And what’s the different between me and long pig, really? Not much, at least in the eyes of the state and the boss. You’re only accounting for levels of disposability, plus or minus garnish.

The vampire ruptures sex, standing in for SM as a liminal space between sex and non sex. Harris’ cannibal (and there is surely a conversation to be had here about the colonialist, racialized cannibal, one that I would love to read about but cannot speak to) ruptures intimacy. In Manhunter, the film’s primary serial killer, Francis Dolarhyde, terrified of his perceived queerness, nevertheless can’t stop himself from kiss/biting one of his male victims to death; later, in bed with the sleeping woman he has suddenly developed feelings for, we feel the ache of his need as he pulls her hand over his mouth and gazes, emptily, at the ceiling. It is disturbingly easy for me to feel a complicitous compassion for these white men who torture and murder other people, mostly women, when in fact they are the least human of all, if we’re to judge them by their ability to exercise (and not simply experience) empathy.

But the thing about Lecter, especially Cox’s turn (“Lecktor”), is that he isn’t cold at all. He is certainly inscrutable, and often frightening, but he is warm as blood. He is humanized by his desire, rarefied as it may be, and by his vulnerabilities, difficult as they are to sense, parse, and predict. Forced to choose between the machine, and its bloodless representatives, his depraved intimacy is by comparison humane, romantic, and animal. Would you rather be langue d'agneau or fucking rotisserie chicken?

David tweets at @k8bushofficial.