As regular readers of this Web log know, today was Thanksgiving, and therefore my friend Cerise and I arrived in the early afternoon at my sister Rose’s lovely suburban home to partake of the traditional festivities and feast. Regular readers also know that, due to the subprime mortgage market implosion, for the last few months Rose and her husband Hank’s family have been sharing that house with Hank’s brother’s family. Well, if Thanksgiving is about anything, it’s about family, and no doubt there was plenty of that at Rose’s place today. My younger brother Rob Roy, his wife Katje and their son Jason were there, too, of course, and tables were set up all over – in the dining room, the den, the kitchen breakfast area and the living room. Rose was alternating between the agony of preparing Thanksgiving dinner for such a huge crowd and the ecstasy of succeeding at it marvelously.
Although Katje is a vegan, she is fond enough of Rose to have helped the lady of the house and her other sister-in-law with the vegetables anyway, while Cerise volunteered her services out of her desire to obtain Rose’s approval. And no sooner did Jason arrive than he teamed up with Hank Jr. to lead the combined throngs of Hank’s and his brother’s children in some exercise calculated to whet their appetites for dinner and strategically tucker them out for afterward. So within a half hour, the kitchen was filled with women cooking, the backyard was filled with kids playing, and the deck was filled with men drinking beer and teenage boys drinking Coke. In short, despite my family’s numerous eccentricities, and the obvious pressures created by such crowding, the whole thing was shaping up to be straight out of Ward Cleaver’s playbook. Then Hitchenson came over from next door.
Hitchenson’s Acting Deputy Under Assistant Administrator for Information Technology Policy at the General Services Administration. I knew him both through Hank, since’s he’s Hank’s next door neighbor, and also by reputation. Hitchenson’s the sort of Lincoln log that readily floats to the top of the sewer foam in Washington’s bureaucracy, the type who promotes cretins who laugh at his jokes and sees to it that anyone displaying competence exceeding his own is quickly eliminated by any means necessary. He is the kind of guy who needs his ego stroked, whether on the job or off. And since his wife is, to put it mildly, totally a word that rhymes with “witch,” on weekends and holidays he often turns to his neighbors to satisfy his insatiable urge for self-validation.
It was hardly a surprise, then, when after less than three minutes of small talk, Hitchenson proudly mentioned, in as off-handed a tone as he could possibly manage, “We’re going to dunk a thirty pound turducken in a deep-fat Cajun turkey fryer about ten minutes from now.”
As anybody who is familiar with the effects of testosterone in the human male knows, exposure to the triple stimulus challenge embodied in “turducken,” “deep fat,” and “Cajun turkey fryer” results in strong and rapidly manifested social aggregation reactions. And so it was, in a trice, that Hank, Hank’s brother, Rob Roy, Jason, Hank Jr. and I were standing around Hitchenson’s deep-fat Cajun turkey fryer, gazing down into a boiling cylinder of oil heated in excess of three hundred degrees. Standing there with us were Hitchenson’s adult son, Hitchenson’s older and younger brothers, two of Hitchenson’s brothers-in-law and three of Hitchenson’s male cousins, all of whom are also in the Civil Service, thanks to Hitchenson’s willingness and ability to wire job announcements so the “right candidate” always ends up on the public payroll. They all started out at the GSA, where Hitchenson works, and then most of them transferred to other agencies. Like Hitchenson himself, and, indeed, like about ninety percent of the federal employees in the United States Civil Service, none of these guys has any genuine competency in the things they were hired to do – that’s not necessary, since members of the Civil Service can always arrange to get contractors to do their jobs for them. What they did have was the connections to get a Civil Service job in the first place. After all, it’s not like spending four hours filling out a federal job application is anything but a complete waste of time if you don’t, and, for the vast majority of applicants, the Civil Service employment process is just an elaborate sham – the requisite window dressing for a tawdry business. I doubt there’s a single, solitary advertised Civil Service job above GS-9 that hasn’t already really gone to someone like the members of Hitchenson’s gang. Those jobs just get publicly announced and advertised because there’s a legal requirement to do so, that’s all.
Take Hitchenson himself, for example. He got into the Civil Service because his buddy from the Navy was there already and wired up a position for him. And his buddy from the Navy had a brother who was in the Army who wired up a position for him, and so forth. This all started right after World War II, when the Government began giving veteran applicants a huge preference that basically trumped anything else a non-veteran applicant might bring to a position in the Civil Service. In the 1960’s and 1970’s, the principle got extended so that women, minorities and disabled persons got additional, cumulative extra credit in lieu of competency for a Civil Service position. So a female Pacific Islander veteran in a wheelchair need only show up, and she’s an automatic GS-11 – not to worry, they’ll find something for her to do. After which, she can work her way up to a GS-13 and start putting together wired job announcements for her friends and relatives who don’t know how to do anything in particular, but would like a job where that doesn’t matter, like in the Civil Service. These days, all that stuff has evolved into a tradition, one which is observed, of course, only if you know somebody. And Hitchenson’s entire career is based on just that – knowing the right people. Actually, the right people for successful practice of federal corruption are about the only things he knows.
“I had the turducken flown in from Texas to Dulles, packed over dry ice,” Hitchenson informed us, “it’s waiting in the fridge right now.”
“I’ve heard that it’s not a good idea,” I advised him, “to transfer a turkey right out of a cold refrigerator into hot fat. There could be ice crystals under the skin.”
“So what are you saying?” Hitchenson took a deep swig of beer.
“That the turkey carcass, or, in this case, the turducken,” I explained, “should be taken out of the refrigerator and allowed to warm up to a surface temperature of at least forty-five degrees prior to cooking. That’s if the meat was shipped fresh, of course. If it was shipped frozen, then it should be allowed to thaw completely in a refrigerator for at least forty-eight hours, then removed to warm outside the refrigerator for at least one hour prior to dunking it in boiling oil. When did your turducken arrive?”
“Yesterday,” Hitchenson replied, “about five in the afternoon.”
“Fresh or frozen?”
“Why, fresh, of course,” Hitchenson declared, glancing around at his guests and neighbors. “I’d never order frozen just to save money on shipping.” Hitchenson glared pointedly at me. “And furthermore, I don’t appreciate that implication,” he snapped.
“No offense intended,” I assured him, “I was just concerned about whether your turducken is, in fact, ready for deep frying.”
“There’s no time for all that crap you’re talking about,” Hitchenson huffed, “and it’s unnecessary anyhow! Just look at all that heat;” he continued, gesturing at the boiling oil, “there’s no way anything’s going to stay cold once it hits that deep fat!”
“The point,” I clarified, “isn’t that the meat won’t get hot, it’s a question of heat transfer…”
“There’s nothing to worry about,” Hitchenson interrupted, now clearly irritated. “This fryer is UL approved.”
“I’m pretty sure there’s no such thing as an Underwriters Laboratories approved deep fat turkey fryer,” I stated skeptically, taking a sip of beer and pondering the roaring gas flame under the cylindrical cauldron. “Seems to me I’ve heard that UL put out a press release saying they would never approve such a contraption.”
“Well,” Hitchenson huffed, “that’s what the guy who sold it to me said, anyway.”
“Where’d you buy it?” Hank’s brother was curious, sure, but also excited. Obviously, he thought that an open flame, gas heated deep fryer full of boiling oil was just the thing to have around a house with about a dozen kids under fourteen in it.
“Off a truck,” Hitchenson confided with a wink, “in Alexandria. I was just walking down Lee Street towards King, and this guy comes up to me. Opened the back of the truck and we started to deal. Talked him down from three hundred to a hundred forty, and got him to throw in that loader tripod over there, plus this ceramic insulating pad it’s sitting on, so the heat won’t scorch the deck.”
Hitchenson’s fellow bureaucrats looked around, nodding approvingly, while I scrutinized the insulating pad.
“That’s not made of asbestos, is it?”
“Of course not!” Hitchenson gave me short, reproving stare. “You’re Collins, aren’t you? I’ve heard about you.” Hitchenson laughed, glancing around at his cronies, who immediately took up the chorus like a tree full of crows. “You consultants! I get plenty of that kind of stuff at work – guys like you telling me what can and can’t be done – always talking about constraints, assumptions, limitations, salient issues, blah, blah, blah, all that kind of noise, when anybody can see all you need is JDT… ‘Just Do It,’ that’s all. When I say ‘Just do it; do it in ninety days, and failure is not a option,’ you ought to see those contractors jump! And by God, things get done, too! Big things! Important things! General Services Administration Information Technology things!”
“No doubt,” I agreed as diplomatically as possible, “But you know, that turducken’s got no bones in it,” I persisted, “and it’s packed solid, which means that it will displace considerably more oil when you lower it in than a plain old turkey would. Did you run a test with water first to make sure that there’s adequate clearance on the sides and to calculate how much oil to put in so as to allow adequate head space after the meat is fully submerged?”
Hitchenson’s hackles leapt up about ten feet in the air. “Are you saying I don’t know what I’m doing?”
“No, no, not by any means. I was just inquiring about your methods.”
“Methods? I’ll show you methods! Check this out!” Hitchenson jibed back as he strode imperiously into his kitchen, opening the refrigerator and withdrawing a huge platter decked with a stone cold thirty pound turducken, “How about that? Collins isn’t just a expert on policy, science, technology, information architecture and international finance, now he’s also an expert on Cajun cooking!”
Hitchenson’s peanut gallery gave him another round of guffaws and watched with transfixed fascination as he attempted to thrust a huge stainless steel skewer through the turducken, which presented an unexpectedly large amount of resistance for what was allegedly a boneless ball of fresh meats, ground sausage and corn bread dressing sewn together with butcher’s thread.
“Just a minute,” Hitchenson announced, nodding confidently, “I know what to do.” We all stood there on the deck, staring at the turducken with that quarter inch metal skewer stuck about a third of the way into it, until Hitchenson returned, brandishing a five pound, single-handed sledge hammer, with which he proceeded to pound the metal skewer the rest of the way through the turducken, securing the protruding end as it emerged with a large metal disk set in place on the skewer with a wing-nut. “Must have picked up a little frost in the fridge,” he offered by way of explanation as he tightened the wing-nut down.
Then Hitchenson attached a ring at the top end of the skewer to a clip dangling from a stout chain suspended from an arm mounted on a steel tripod. “What we do,” he explained to his spectators, “is turn this crank here until the turducken is positioned exactly over the deep fat. Then we turn this second crank to lower the turducken down into the boiling oil.”
Hitchenson turned to look at me, his face filled with implied challenge. “Completely fool proof. And just wait until you taste it,” he continued, smiling smugly at his next door neighbors. “We’ll be sure to send some over so you can experience the difference for yourself. I think it would be a crying shame if this… contractor here didn’t get a taste of some real Thanksgiving dinner tonight!” Hitchenson’s cheering section let loose with a huge response to that one. It sounded like the laugh track from a prime time sitcom out there on that deck. As the assembled civil servants hooted at this scum-of-the-earth contractor in their midst, Hank and his brother averted their eyes from me, but at least Rob Roy and Jason didn’t – they folded their arms across their chests instead, and gave Hitchenson some genuine Italian-American “Stugots, paisan” looks.
Right on cue, Rose, her sister-in-law, Katje, and Cerise appeared at the back door, yelling words to the effect that dinner was ready, get your beer-swilling masculine butts over here right now, and so forth. Appetites teased into a fever pitch by the sight of deep fat and turducken, Hank and his brother, in particular, were more than a bit chagrined to learn that the siren call of Thanksgiving dinner, voiced by those four sweet sirens, had been, well, nothing but a sirens’ song, calculated to get the men folk a safe distance away from an impending turducken drop. The kids, who had also heard the women announcing dinner, milled about inside, confused, some demanding to know that if dinner really isn’t ready now, then when will it be ready, and how come you said it was ready if it isn’t, really?
In the midst of this, Hank Jr. sullenly announced, in that case, he might as well go back outside, take down the hose, stow it in the garage for the winter and then go under the deck and turn off the water so the pipes don’t freeze. To that, Rose sighed a great motherly sigh, telling her first-born “Fine! As I remember, I told you to do that three weeks ago. I’m so glad you finally found time in your busy schedule for it!”
Hank Jr., shrugging his best teenage male shrug, ambled out the onto the deck, then, as I watched, nonplussed, turned the water spigot on full blast, aimed the hose onto the garage roof and yelled “Mom! Call 911! The Hitchenson’s deck is on fire!”
Rose did nothing of the sort, however, since Hank Jr.’s conflagration proclamation sent every child between five and sixteen running outside again to watch, which, in turn, necessitated both Rose and her sister-in-law running out after them, yelling that they should get back inside before somebody gets grounded, but good, and don’t talk back, this is serious.
Hank reacted pretty quickly to his son’s alarm, too, rushing out on the deck, where he found Hank Jr., still stoically wetting down the garage roof. As regular readers of the Web log know, of course, Hank Jr. just very recently got his own private bedroom again, by virtue of his artistic talents, and that new bedroom of his is located in a dormer constructed over the garage. So Hank Jr. was just making sure that Hitchenson’s evident lack of culinary acumen didn’t set fire to the garage, because that would force him to move back into the main part of Rose and Hank’s house, which, as I have mentioned before, is stuffed to the rafters with bunk beds full of his younger brothers, sisters and cousins.
Hank didn’t see things that way, indignantly demanding “What the hell are you doing?” Not that Hank Jr. got a chance to state his case before his father grabbed the hose and trained its stream over the fence, right onto the Soaring Pillar of Flaming Turducken.
Again, as regular readers know, Hank’s prone to the occasional brain blip. And, as it has by now no doubt occurred to many readers of the Web log, regular or not, it was a large and nasty grease fire that Hank was hosing down with water. Rose, on the other hand, is a pretty smart person by anybody’s measure, and it was a matter of mere seconds before she saw what her husband was doing and started screaming at him to stop, for God’s sake, before you spread it all over and burn the Hitchensons’ house down!
By now, this was most assuredly one of those situations where everything seems to be happening in slow motion. It could not have been more than another one or two seconds before I was out on the deck watching all this, and turned my gaze away from Rose screaming at Hank to see Rob Roy and Jason, bearing ABC fire extinguishers from Hank’s garage, leaping over the fence into the Hitchenson’s back yard.
Hank Jr. and Jason are both motor heads, and they’ve worked on their rides in Hank’s garage plenty of times. So it makes sense that Jason knew exactly where Hank stored the two high-capacity fire extinguishers Rose insisted he keep in the garage. But I must admit, it was flat-out astounding how fast my little brother and his kid moved, getting those damn things out and putting them where they were needed – which wasn’t Hitchenson’s flaming deck, by the way.
No, the Thanksgiving Deck of Fire, though quite the potential YouTube video at that point, some thirty or forty seconds after the Big Turducken Drop, was playing a definite second fiddle to the Amazing Flaming Hitchensons, who were running around their back yard, looking for all the world like those stunt people in cheesy action movies who prance around in fireproof suits covered with ignited rubber cement. Only in this situation, the stars of the show were doing their own stunts, and without the fireproof suits. I watched as Rob Roy and Jason chased after them with the fire extinguishers in slow motion, yelling “Stop! Drop! Roll!” at the top of their lungs, to no avail.
I could have told my brother and his son that – there’s no way a panicked federal bureaucrat will listen to anything anyone else says, even if listening to them would save some of the countless lives federal bureaucrats are supposedly responsible for occasionally; or even if listening would save that particular stupid, useless parasite’s life. Not that most federal bureaucrats are worth saving, anyway, but you hate to see something so pathetic happening, you can’t bear to see living things burn, even if it’s just a pile of leeches roasting in a puddle of surplus napalm.
About then, Hank shot past me with the ABC fire extinguisher from the kitchen, bound across the fence to his neighbor’s flaming deck as Rose screamed at him some more about the fire being too big for that thing, and so forth.
Then Hitchenson, with Jason in hot pursuit, jumped into the deep end of his swimming pool. This being November, however, it was empty, and Katje howled like a mother wolf watching her pup confronting a bear when Jason kept right on running and jumped in, too. A tense second elapsed, then a huge cloud of white signaled that Jason had finally run down his quarry and extinguished him.
By then, Rob Roy had caught up with three more Flaming Hitchensons, but only after kicking them over so they’d stop running. Jason nailed three more, who were down at his end of the yard, by climbing out of the empty pool and then kicking them in, one by one. Doing that set his shoe on fire and exhausted his extinguisher, but in about a minute, the civil servant mélange flambé was blown out and ready to serve to the EMTs.
Hank and Rob Roy did what they could with what they had on that deck, but, as Rose kept pointing out, at around ninety decibels, those fire extinguishers were just too small to make much of a dent. When the last puffs finally issued from their nozzles, the din from Rose and Katje yelling at their men to drop those suckers and get the hell out of there nearly drowned out the sound of approaching fire engines and emergency medical vans.
It was only then that I looked around to see that Hank Jr. had calmly resumed hosing down his bedroom roof. Hank gave him a look as he walked past him into the house, but it was pretty obvious that Hank had no idea whether to scold his son for being indifferent to the fruits of Hitchenson’s Folly or compliment him for being so damn sensible about protecting his own interests.
Once the guys were out of Hitchenson’s back yard, it was only a matter of a few more seconds before the women all started screaming at the kids to get back in the house again. That proved to be very difficult indeed, what with a huge light show and sound effects extravaganza being delivered and displayed for all the world to see next door. So Rose, her sister-in-law, Katje and, eventually, even Cerise solved the problem by physically taking hold of the children and marching them, tears, whines, heartfelt protests and all, out of the back yard and inside, where they were unceremoniously placed at their dinner seats and instructed to stay put upon pain of the worst legally permissible punishments that alpha female Rose could think up. This worked, too – kids do what Rose says – her kids, other people’s kids, kids that have never seen her before in their entire lives; take it from me, Rose’s kid brother, you do what Rose says. Which, considering all the children packed Hank’s house these days, is, in my opinion, a very, very good thing.
I know that not every family Thanksgiving dinner is perfect – I’ve attended quite a few I’d rather forget, and I bet there are lots of other people who have, too. But the one we had today at Hank and Rose’s was pretty close to perfect, no doubt about it. Nobody brought up politics, religion, sex or old family animosities or grudges. Nobody got so angry they had to leave the table before the meal was done. Nobody complained about the food, not even clever, snarky remarks; nobody ripped on anyone else for eating too much or their figure or musculature, or being a vegetarian or not. No insults at all, actually, veiled or overt. Nobody started arguments about money. Nobody made jokes at someone else’s expense, or rehashed embarrassing stories about other people who happened to be there. Nobody tried to put anybody else down, bum them out, play one-upsmanship with them, or remind everyone present of the many imperfections we, as members of a family, share. Nobody bragged, nobody crawled, nobody felt a need to apologize to everybody or anyone in particular. Yet it was about as engrossing, enthralling, dramatic and gripping as anything could be without those elements, so familiar to us, so common in, say, your average Pinter play. Because all we did was talk about the Astounding Turducken Fiasco, the Great Flaming Deck, those Amazing Pyrotechnic Hitchensons, Intrepid Rob Roy, Brave Hank, Incredibly Courageous Jason and the Famous Traveling County Fire and Rescue Department Show.
Even the children were nearly perfect – no fights, no crying, no tantrums, no acting out. Oh no, quite the contrary. They jabbered about what had happened with an enthusiasm even we adults and a couple of adrenaline soaked late state teenagers could hardly match, eagerly snarfing their meat, squash, gravy, stuffing and cranberry sauce, so excited by the day’s events that their slices of Rose’s pumpkin pie and cups of cocoa at the end tasted for all the world like ambrosia – and off to bed they went, all smiles, to sleep like precious angels.
And when that was accomplished, and I broke out the fine potables – Red Bull and Sobe A/R for Hank Jr. and Jason, Macallan 18 and Dom Perignon for those over twenty-one – the unbelievably copacetic mood continued for the duration. After about half an hour of cozy conversation, Katje’s ears perked up. “There’s something out back,” she declared confidently.
Katje’s like that – she knows about things. So we all quietly walked out on the deck to see what it was she had heard. Over at the Hitchenson’s, everything was dark and quiet. The deck and the rear half of the house lay smoldering, and the air was rich with a burned wood smell.
Katje peered into Hank’s back yard and pointed – there, we all could see it, the glowing eyes of a coyote. Soon, another pair appeared, then a multitude. It was a whole coyote family: Mr. and Mrs. Coyote, two juveniles and a gaggle of youngsters ranging in size from terrier to border collie. They all sat down on the back yard lawn, watching us watching them.
Then Mr. Coyote trotted off, sliding into Hitchenson’s back yard through a little trench the coyotes had dug under the fence. In a few moments, he was back, dragging an incinerated, charred, dirt-encrusted turducken, which he deposited on the lawn in front of his family group for us to admire.
After a moment, the coyotes fell in on that thing, which, I noticed as they worked on it, still had that quarter inch metal skewer driven through it; and which, I also noticed, after the coyotes had torn away the blackened surface and gnawed off the raw meat underneath, was still frozen solid in the middle. We all gaped at the spectacle as the coyotes ate their fill, rolling on their backs and lolling their tongues out at us when they were satiated.
That frozen part in the middle didn’t suit the coyotes too well, I suppose, because once they got to it, they stopped eating. After a few minutes of mutual grooming and frolic, then, they ambled off, only to be replaced almost immediately by a large family of raccoons, who, from the looks of it, relish frozen turducken as a rare delicacy.
After about an hour, the raccoons, as well as the remainder of the turducken, were gone. As the last critter disappeared into the bushes, we all just sat there in silence, attempting to wring some meaning from the events of this highly eventful Thanksgiving.
“You know,” Hank finally mused, “we have a lot to be thankful for today. But there’s two things in particular that I am extremely thankful for today – first, there’s my family.”
Everybody smiled as Hank gazed around at us all. How true. How thankful everyone there was for their family. And how thankful I was, indeed, that Hank had inadvertently included Cerise.
“And secondly,” Hank solemnly proclaimed as he killed his fourth glass of champagne, “I am so unbelievably thankful that I’m not in the Civil Service.”