Wings: Fortsetzung
But let’s get back to the chicken wings, the apogee (were she to know of it) of my wife’s moral disapproval of the man she, in a long-ago fit of passion, romance and thin air, married. The chickens, as we all know, are tortured– raised and injected with hormones and antibiotics in cages so cramped and tiny it is all they can do to keep breathing until they have fattened sufficiently to have their heads severed from their bodies by the automated chicken guillotine and then passed on to Frank Purdue. The barbecue sauce, of course, is replete with MSG and high-fructose corn syrups of various sorts, the oil is a repository of rancid trans fats, and the Seven Eleven itself pays its largely Latino employees the measly minimum wage of $6.80 an hour, health insurance and sick leave not included.
I have always loved chicken wings, whatever which way they are served. As the son of a New Jersey immigrant chicken farmer, I had a predilection for chicken to begin with, and the wings– with their luscious emoluments of deep fried skin and their tender meat that literally fell from the bone– were, to me (along with the bony neck) the most delectable part. And there’s something about the way the Seven Eleven does them– whether you choose the hot wings, the deep fried, or the plain– that seems to satisfy all my gustatory cravings. They are, all forms of righteousness be damned, just plain fucking good.
There are, of course, other politically and hygienically incorrect foods I love as well– bagels with cream cheese, Little Caesar’s five-dollar pepperoni pizza, deep fried Latino chalupas, whole garlic and fresh herb roasted chickens from Kroger’s, Sabrett’s kosher hotdogs from the corners of New York. barbecued spare ribs from the Great Wall Chinese take-out down the street in Hanover. Grease calls me to the things of this world, you might say. As to all things taken in through the mouth, I sin, therefore I am.
Nor is it a simple fate to be the moral lackey in the house of righteousness. My next wife, I have sworn to myself on numerous occasions, will not be nearly so good. She will be a fellow-sinner, someone worthy of my companionship. She will stain the sheets after lovemaking with her greasy fingers and she will fill our cupboards with products made with palm oil imported from Borneo and Sumatra, where the orangutans are gazing up at the sky, wondering what became of their habitat.
I am a lover of primates, by the way, a man who has written about the preservation of tropical rainforests and the survival of the great apes. My next wife, no doubt, will love monkeys and other animals as well. She and I will go birdwatching together in the early mornings, just before a round of golf. Then we will have bacon-wrapped scallops for lunch. She will be good… but– please, please dear God!!– not that good. We will fuck and laugh our way into a habitable purgatory.
When I was a undergraduate student at Cornell, studying philosophy and psychology, my undergraduate honors thesis was entitled Hypocrisy as Aphrodisiac: The Allure of Mixed Feelings. In it, I argued, among other things, that cognitive consistency, the desire to resolve any form of internal dissonance, was a disruptive force in our everyday lives, as well as a significant diminisher of erotic satisfaction. My extensive research into the psychological and philosophical roots of hypocrisy revealed to me that, rather than being a source of confusion and self-loathing, hypocrisy was an evolved strategy that fostered self-regulation and adaptiveness to the realities of the outer world.
Many of our greatest writers and philosophers, I am well aware, violently disagree. „The only vice that cannot be forgiven,“ wrote the great essayist William Hazlitt, „is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy.“
„Only crime and the criminal, it is true,“ added that grouchy inventor of the banality of evil, Hannah Arendt, „confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.”
Nonetheless, it is the poets– such as the great French bard Baudelaire– with whom I side. Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat, he wrote, in his gorgeous native tongue, Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère! Hypocrite reader– fellow creature– my brother!
Being good, I observed from a very early age, was an honorable and worthwhile goal… but pleasure, I long ago decided, was better. A world composed only of the virtuous and the good would be a boring, monotone place indeed. As my college roommate Siegfried– whom we referred to as Mortkowitz the Lech– so eloquently put it: Pleasure is the only justice.
So, sometimes, when I bite into those barbecued wings of mine, I can almost hear the chickens screaming. I feel for them, I really do. Theirs is not an easy life, nor a merciful death. And if I am rotten to the core, so be it. But then there’s always another voice, crying out even more eloquently: These are delicious. These are really, really delicious. And wishing me well.