As regular readers of this Web log know, my brother Rob Roy and his son Jason have, for a number of months, been visiting me on Saturday mornings. The ostensible purpose of those visits is instruction of young Jason in the culinary arts and sciences, of which I am reasonably acquainted, having attended L’Ecole du Cordon Bleu and obtained Le Grand Diplôme. I did that solely because I love good food and wished to learn how to properly appreciate it, mind you, not because I wanted to spend eighteen hours a day standing on my feet for the rest of my life, cultivating a set of varicose veins that look like a vineyard map of Bordeaux while sweating my butt off creating gustatory pearls to cast before thieving investment bankers, pretentious medical doctors, graft-sucking politicians, whore-mongering gangsters, imbecilic federal bureaucrats with government-issued credit cards or other such pathetic, despicable swine. No, the real purpose of our Saturday morning soirée, of course, is to allow my beloved little brother to and his clever, handsome son to develop a similarly sophisticated notion of cuisine, and, more importantly, to eat some meat once in a while, since, as real tomcollinsblog fans know all too well, beautiful Katje, Rob Roy’s wife, is a total New Age basket case who cooks strictly vegan, every day, every week and every month, year after year.
Not that eating vegan once in a while is bad for you. On the contrary, eating vegan a few times every month is excellent for your health, and my files are stuffed with tasty, satisfying vegan recipes, which I prepare and serve as side dishes all the time. The indisputable fact remains, however, that men need meat. “Need,” actually, is a bit weak, to tell the truth – men crave meat, they desire it, and do so on a par with sex itself, I kid you not. I would go even farther: men lust for meat, they dream about it, and do so as often (if not more often) than they dream about sex. To eat meat is to be a man, and all men know that, even the ones who never touch the stuff. Okay, point taken – that means I’m saying millions upon millions of Hindu males, for example, aren’t really men, and that’s not very nice is it? Well, consider this, Dear Reader – it’s been five thousand years over there in the Cradle of Civilization and what have we got? Nine out of ten Indian guys are still squatting around the water pipe in their freakin’ BVD’s, aren’t they? Now, I ask you – could a low-protein diet have anything to do with that? Only a complete idiot would dare blame it all on the hashish.
My speculations on dietary protein (and smoking hashish) notwithstanding, I absolutely guarantee that Jason’s weekly cooking lessons are a definite high point in their schedules. Rob Roy always makes sure to bring some expensive (if not necessarily impressive) wines to show his appreciation, and Jason has even taken, albeit recently, to bringing additional recipes and their ingredients. Today, he brought everything necessary to make a dessert of hazelnut mousse, and, if I do say so myself, he followed my instructions to the letter and the result was excellent. On the whole, it’s completely splendid, really.
Today’s entrée was veal cheeks. Inexperienced gourmets are prone to misunderstand veal cheeks, but having been entranced, at the tender age of eleven, by the texture of chow foon noodles, I find veal cheeks Bolognese simply exquisite. And so did everybody else. That included Jason’s girlfriend, Paisley, who knows a good repast when she sees it, and one of her brothers (it’s a large family, apparently), an intense and rather reserved gentleman in his early thirties named Serge.
He’s a biologist, and after lunch, while everyone lazed about the house, he took a place on a sun chair next to the jacuzzi on my deck, where I laid back, strawberry-banana daiquiri (with all fresh fruit, hand made Turbinado simple syrup, and 15 year old añejo rum) at the ready.
“Mr. Collins,” he opened, with that tone of voice that told me, in no uncertain terms, he desperately wanted my advice, while also realizing that he could not possibly afford to pay for it, “could I ask you about something?”
“Sure,” I replied, realizing that Paisley is the most sensible girlfriend Jason has ever had and that giving Paisley’s brother my services for free would therefore probably be worth it, “what can I do for you?”
“Well,” he began, somewhat uncertainly, “I’ve been doing research with mind control.”
“Mind control?” I put down my drink and scrutinized him carefully.
“Oh, I know what you’re thinking,” he quickly clarified. “That is, uh, no, please rest assured that I don’t really know what you’re thinking, but the research I do isn’t like that – which is to say, it’s not like what I presume you’re thinking. It’s strictly legitimate, publishable, peer-reviewed scientific research. We’re working on fruit flies.”
“Sure,” I shot back, figuring that leading him on wouldn’t hurt, “tell me about it.”
“Okay.” Serge fortified himself with a a swig of Victory Prima Pils and wet his lips with his tongue in preparation for what I anticipated would be one of those typically long and potentially impenetrable expositions so dreadfully characteristic of scientists. “My colleagues and I study the fruit fly in order to understand the genetic basis of behavior. In my team’s latest series of experiments, we determined that there are about two thousand cells in the fruit fly brain that direct the animals’ sexual behavior patterns. Then, we developed a mutated fruit fly gene that directly affected target cell expression in the animal. The result was female fruit flies that could be conditioned to respond to the same mating stimulus as male fruit flies and subsequently display male fruit fly mating behaviors.”
“Fascinating.” I took another pull from my daiquiri. “Seems to me I read about that recently in Cell.”
“You subscribe?” Serge was obviously surprised.
“Sure,” I explained, “I am, among other things, a biochemist, you know. Not that there’s any serious money in science, especially research, unless, of course, you can manage to sell your ideas to Uncle Sam.”
“Oh yeah,” Serge agreed, taking another swig of beer, “tell me about it. But, like you said,” he continued, “I figure if I could sell some aspect of my research to the federal government, they’d fund me until I was ready to retire.”
“Good thinking,” I admitted. “Get some pin head in the federal government convinced you’re the next Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller or Wernher von Braun, and they’ll keep you up to your neck in hard-earned taxpayer dollars for decades. So what’s your pitch?”
“Pitch?”
“Yeah, you know,” I pressed on, eyeing him carefully for signs of comprehension, “your elevator speech.”
“Elevator speech?”
“What I’m asking for,” I carefully explained, “is a short, all-English, five hundred-word vocabulary, no math, no technical background, no-brains-required description of something – a new, heinous and horrible weapon for the United States of America to terrorize the rest of the world with, a new panacea for moronic economic problems like one-hundred-seventeen dollar-a-barrel oil, a new solution to some bleeding heart, horse hockey public policy issue like global warming, a new consumer technology that plugs into the Internet, or a shout-it-from-the-rooftops bang-up new gadget. That sort of thing. Get it?”
“I do,” Serge murmured, obviously composing his thoughts along those lines. Several minutes passed, the two of us basking in the sun, Serge thinking intently about science, economics, gadgets, weapons, public policy, government funding and pitching fruit fly research in elevators, and me thinking about… ah, yeah – let’s just say I was thinking about my girlfriend Cerise and leave it at that. At last, Serge spoke.
“Mr. Collins?”
“Yeah?”
“I think I have it.”
“Shoot.”
“I can make any female human being display male mating behavior.”
“You mean, on the basis of your research, you could, given, say, another ten years and a billion dollars,” I asked, only slightly incredulous, “come up with some sort of gene modification, delivered, oh, let’s push the envelope just a bit and say, by a modified version of an otherwise harmless virus compatible with human physiology…”
Serge, who, at that moment had been poising his beer bottle high over his head, chugging its dregs, suddenly spit fine, dry, micro-brew golden Pilsner all over himself, me and my deck, then shouted “Oh, my God! Yes! That’s it!”
“Right,” I concurred. “And thereby permanently turn human females into rock hard butch, snatch-hungry, iron-knuckled, man-pegging bull dyke lesbians?”
“Yes!”
“Leather fetish? Can you do leather fetish?”
“For an extra twenty or thirty million, probably, yeah, we could! It would be mostly the same kind of extensions to the expressor-promoter cascades. Maybe it would take some additional RNA work, but once we have the central codon sequences defined…”
“S&M?”
“Yeah, yeah, we could do that.”
“B&D?”
“Sure.”
“LS/MFT?”
“Uh… if you could maybe explain what that is, I bet it’s feasible.”
“Later, perhaps,” I demurred.
“So, what do you think?”
“I think,” I advised, “that you have a concept that you could sell to the Executive Branch, no matter which of the three serious and viable presidential candidates wins the upcoming election; and furthermore, I would strongly advise you against trying to market it to the current Administration.”
“Why?”
“Their time frame is too short to see anything in it for themselves. However, if, say, John McCain is elected President in November, you can pitch the idea to his administration as a way to make sure women are actually tough enough to serve alongside men in front line combat. McCain is totally queer for war – his entire family is. There’s no other way to put it, for at least six generations, the McCains have never met a military conflict they didn’t like. Plus, he’s a completely old fashioned, male chauvinist, troglodyte Neanderthal kind of guy, and he’ll buy that whole angle of ‘making women tough enough to serve alongside men under fire’ quicker than a shanty Irish pimp throws his hookers down on their backs for a barrel of whiskey.”
“Okay,” Serge nodded vigorously, smiling with anticipation, visions of a huge, shiny and lavishly equipped new laboratory dancing in his head. “What if Obama wins?”
“Barack Obama’s administration would be a considerably different sell for your concept,” I told him with certainty, “because Obama’s not queer for war. No, in his case, it’s espionage. That’s what Barack Obama is queer for.”
“Espionage?”
“Yeah – Obama’s drop-dead queer for totally far-fetched, Ian Fleming pervitin-and-absinthe fantasy absurdly improbable James Bond style espionage, just like Jack Kennedy was. You see, back in the day, while you were spanking the monkey, thinking about this or that tart you saw on the Playboy channel, Barack Obama, being in obvious possession of an utterly narcissistic personality, was plucking his magic twanger and fantasizing about being JFK. So, Barack’s a natural sucker for something like, say, using your research to create a covert man-killer Mata Hari cadre for the CIA to use against the Russians and the Chinese.”
“You think so?”
“I know so – the average Russki or Chink is putty in the hands of a domineering woman. Not that such a clandestine force wouldn’t be useful against members of other cultures – although counter-terrorism potential might be limited in places like Pakistan, where those cretins get recruited. But the jihadis still got to get off the farm sometime to attack the infidels, don’t they? Well, then, how you gonna keep them down on the wadi after they’ve seen Amsterdam? And all Obama’s CIA would need is a half dozen of those Medusas stationed in Bruges or someplace like that, close by and nicely concealed with some appropriate covers.”
“’Operation Medusa,’” Serge whispered reverentially. “This is amazing. I’ve spent months… no, years – trying to figure out how to turn my fruit fly research into big money government grants, and in minutes, talking to someone like you, all the answers are just lying there, like a frog on dissection table.”
“Yep,” I modestly admitted, “you’re absolutely correct. That’s my job.”
“It must be amazing,” Serge ventured, “to do that for a living.”
“It sure as hell beats working,” I confessed.
“Only one more thing, then – ” Serge stated in a matter-of-fact tone, “what if Hillary Clinton wins?”
“Serge, old boy,” I assured him, “if Hillary Clinton becomes the next President of the United States, you are going to be absolutely golden!”
“Really?”
“No doubt about it.”
“Well, then, please, tell me,” Serge stammered, stumbling over his words a bit, caught, as he was, in a tempest of excitement, “how should I pitch the idea to Hillary Clinton?”
“It’s a cinch,” I admonished him as I drained my daiquiri, “just tell her you can custom design her entire second term Cabinet.”