The First Time I Fell in Love
I was probably about three years old, bundled up for the Appalachian winter in a poofy red jacket without a hat, holding a severed deer’s head with attached hide, and wearing a shit-eating grin from ear to ear as I cheesed for the photo. While my grandfather never worked a day in the meat-cutting industry, he was a skilled butcher. People brought him deer to skin, quarter, and cut. I was introduced to the art of meat-cutting at a young age. I “helped” Paw-Paw skin out a button buck on that chilly December afternoon with snow peppering the ground and a fog of breath exhaling from my lungs. Looking back, it was all the makings of a serial killer documentary. I can see it now. “He always had a taste for death.” But it was just a normal and accepted thing in my family, save for my father who didn’t inherit the hunting gene. Sometimes things skip a generation.
After skinning and quartering the deer, my grandfather took the round, shoulders, and backstrap into the kitchen. We sat at the bar and he gave me a knife, instructing me to cut away the fat and silverskin. He didn’t know to identify it as “silverskin” but knew enough to tell me “cut off all that white stuff. It makes the meat tough.” For hours we whittled away at the meat until it was all cut into 3/4” steaks and packaged in freezer bags. I was stronger then than I was a year prior, when I caught my first fish. I had carried it around all day and bragged to everyone about my catch but cried when my father cut the head off of the long-dead fish and gutted it for the frying pan.
“Put it back!” I screamed at him.
“It doesn’t work that way, Josh.”
That was an early introduction to life. There are things you do that you can never take back, words spoken you can never again swallow; you can never take back the smooth slice of a scimitar or the squeeze of a trigger. You don’t get to measure twice and cut once like my Uncle Wayne did in carpentry. In the world of meat, hunting, and death, you need to be sure of yourself before you go ahead. Throw the fish back if you can’t stomach cutting off its head. Don’t stare at a deer through a scope if you’re unsure of pulling the trigger. And don’t make the cut if you don’t have the proper angle.
But a year older, at the ancient age of three, I was a seasoned veteran. I watched my grandfather kill a rabbit with a pellet gun and saw it twitching on the ground. “When shooting at a long range,” my grandfather told me, “shoot high because the bullet will drop.” This skinning and butchering deer was my new “thing.” Whenever someone brought my grandfather a deer, I was there to help. Little did I know this would pave the way for my future career. There was just something poetic, an art, in taking something dead and breathing in new life with the slow motions of a steel blade. I was in love. My grandfather was an artist and each slice of the knife was like watching Picasso paint—something unsightly and grotesque, something needing a deeper appreciation and understanding. Blood and flesh was his canvas, from which he carved these finely cut steaks that melted in your mouth coated in buttermilk and flour and pan-fried to a golden brown.
I came to meat-cutting as a profession by dumb luck 22 years later. Working as the Frozen Food Manager, I smoked cigarettes with the Market Manager at my store. We shared stories of how much we drank the previous night and shot the shit. One day, he told me he was short-staffed. His guy got caught eating the throw-away Lunchables by the district Loss Prevention Manager and was summarily fired.
“I’ve been butchering deer my whole life.” I told him. “I don’t know much about beef and pork but it should be about the same. I hate frozen food. I want to make some money.”
That five-minute conversation over two cigarettes and tales of the beer we drank the night before shaped the next eleven years of my career. At first I was immediately accepted as the new meat-cutter apprentice. But my store manager didn’t like me. My disdain for being placed in Frozen Food reflected with my work ethic. I never wanted to be there and proved it. I came to work hungover and hours late. My store manager waited an entire year before I turned myself around and actually started doing a decent job that he called me to the office.
“Josh, I’m going to train you as a meat-cutter. I know you’re in school. I ran a market and got my degree. I expect you to do the same. Bust your ass and don’t let me down!”
The next day I was transferred to a different store and began my three months of training. My old Assistant Store Manager worked at that store, so I sought him out on my first day. I didn’t know how to clock-in. He was drunk and on drugs, slurring his words. But I finally got clocked-in and started my new adventure.
The guy who was to train me was also from West Virginia. His grandfather knew of my family. “They’re all up around Charleston.” My grandfather was very highly regarded as a painter back in the day and shared our family name around the whole of southern, West Virginia. My trainer welcomed me with open arms as another West Virginia transplant. The other guys were not so forgiving. I remember my first day. David introduced me to Freddy.
“This is Josh. We’re training him to cut meat.”
“You got to be fucking kidding me! Fuck!”
Nice to meet you too, Freddy.
The last one to meet was Paul. Paul came in drunk and laughed “so I’m the only one you haven’t met? Then continued to laugh without another word and walked away. Everyone had warned me about Paul—a loner with bad mental health and a bad drinking habit. Steer clear!
The first thing they gave me to cut was a chuck roll into roasts. Dave, my trainer, decided to go to lunch. “What do you want Josh to do after he gets done cutting the chuck?” Paul asked.
“Hell, he’ll still be cutting it when I get back.”
I was.
A few weeks went by and everyone suddenly liked me. Even Freddy.
“I’ve never seen anyone pick this up the way you have.”
“I butchered deer from the time I was three.” I told him.
My first Market Manager asked me “do you have any aspirations of becoming a Market Manager?”
“No.” I replied. “I don’t want to do this for the rest of my life. I’m in school. I want to do something with Political Science or writing.”
He was hurt.
Little did I know it would turn into a life-long career. I loved it. I had done a number of gigs for money. I worked landscaping and even took horticulture classes. At one point I wanted to open up my own landscaping business and be my own boss. I worked as a photographer for Dixie Stampede, made saltwater taffy, fried chicken for Chick-fil-a. Roasted chicken at Boston Market. Cleaned out dog kennels. Published stories for a quick buck. Worked for the now defunct K-mart as a Supervisor. But nothing that I truly loved.
The second I graduated from training, I bought as many books on meat-cutting as I could find. I wanted to one up my boss. The guy who trained me became my Market Manager. Sometimes I got him on his misidentifying the cap of a top sirloin as a “tri-tip.” No sir, the tri-tip is from the bottom sirloin. That cap is the coulotte steak! We stopped cutting petite sirloins per company standards in favor of the way I cut them. They sold better. This was my way, being a college dropout, to make good money for myself. And I put my all into it. I carried a knife case around with me like a young lawyer carries a brief case. Proud and arrogant. I moved up to Assistant-Market Manger a year after I finished training.
Our shrink was low, our sales were high, and it was just me and the bossman cutting meat. I learned how to cut fast and hard. My boss was lazy. I would cut beef and pork while he spent the entirety of his 8-10 hour shift working a float of lunchmeat. He quit and moved to Ohio. I was left running the market with 1.5 years of experience as a meat-cutter. My help was unreliable. And after months of running the joint, they brought in a guy with decades of experience as a Market Manger. I wasn’t bitter or hurt. I liked Butch. He ran his own butcher business until the market went to the side of chain stores and he lost everything and had to go work for the corporations. He liked to drink as much as me. We got along. When we had a new cutter come in who didn’t like me, he had him transferred to a different store. He didn’t like the way I cut petite sirloins, because they weren’t the company standard. He threw a fit. My boss told him “this is the way we do it here.”
As many wrong turns as I’ve made over the years, meat-cutting has always been there for me. I hit my head and wasn’t right for a while. After I recovered, I found a job cutting meat at Food Lion. I quit the week before they switched to pre-packaged products. They offered me the market. “You don’t just want to be a meat-cutter forever. THINK! You don’t have to make cube steak anymore!”
“I like making cube steak. I like cutting meat. I don’t want to give up my trade.”
I left and went to a company that did things the old-school way. I learned to cut shoulder clods, neckbones, pig feet, hog maws, bone-in chucks. I already knew how to cut a full-cut round but they ran them through the saw while I was taught that a meat-cutter was made by his ability to slice through a full-cut round with a scimitar. You make an even cut, and you’re a made-man.
I was the last of the old-school, being introduced to what the old-school hadn’t taught me. I hadn’t been accustomed to a boneless blade on a band-saw so I just wowed the Meat Specialist with how much beef I had on backup with cutting by hand. “Son! We have this boneless blade. Don’t be afraid to use it!” I cut even more when I became acquainted with the boneless blade. So much so I became careless. I cut myself on the saw.
I went back to work the next day. I had a splint on my finger so I couldn’t cut on the saw. I cut everything by hand with a swollen and sore finger. A true meat-cutter doesn’t miss work for their own mistakes. By day two I removed the splint and cut on the saw. I was just more careful.
I have been in love with a number of women in my life, but only truly once. That’s how I feel about cutting meat. A one true love. You can be hurt by an action, a word, a phrase, a person, or an event; but you still go back to it because it feels like home, like the one connection you have to this world, like the taste of your mother’s meatloaf, like your first cigarette, or the first time you tried cocaine, your first drink; it is warmth and bliss and fucking goddamn rainbows and hard truths that taste like sweet candy. It is your first orgasm, your first buzz, the lap dance at a strip club, and your first deer all wrapped into one.
I have found the love of my life. In each setting, in each environment, she is new and exciting. Never a dull moment. She is as old as the love I fell into and new as each passing breath. She is the high school sweetheart and the girl I picked up from the bar. For richer or poorer. I can cut neckbones or I can cut crown roasts. She never gets old.
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