turkey day

Turkey day always brings back memories for people, usually of their loved ones and the fun times they’ve had. My most memorable Thanksgiving is the time I tried to cook a turkey.

NOTE: This is only slightly more memorable than the Thanksgiving I spent with Neil Donahue. A bunch of people were supposed to come for dinner but only two showed up, and they left right after dinner. Somehow we ended up with 7 pies. At the end of the evening, and after one or two bottles of wine, Neil proposed we have a pie throwing contest. We went out to my back alley, and both picked up a pie, and I launched my pie as hard as I could down the alley. Then Neil threw his pie at me. There were five more pies. I think it’s only fair to say I won contest since Neil cheated.

So, one evening I was at Eva (aka Evil, aka my younger, prettier, smarter sister) and Dan Bachenheimer’s house, and I proposed that I would cook Thanksgiving dinner. Again, there was a bottle of wine involved. Anyone who has been around me for any length of time knows I can’t cook, even when I’m really trying. Eva and Dan agreed to let me cook the dinner. I had three weeks until Thanksgiving.

It didn’t occur to me until I was reading an article on NPR two days before Thanksgiving that I had to “prepare” for the dinner. I had planned to go to the grocery Thanksgiving morning, cook up the turkey and whatever else, and then be well on my way to a glass of port by 5 PM (Dan has great taste in port).

But the article on NPR said that people were already cooking! And stores were selling out of turkeys! In a panic I went to the grocery after I got off work and waited in the longest line ever. I got one of the last turkeys and, deciding that the grocery was too crazy, decided I would buy the rest of the stuff I would need later, especially since I hadn’t gotten around to even figuring out what that other “stuff” was. As I waited in line I started eliminating things from our dinner. No one really likes pie I decided, especially since they are so hard to carry around a grocery store. I could get mashed potatoes from my favorite bar in Old Town Alexandria, where the bartender Billy made Eva hot fudge sundaes with tons of whip cream. And instead of cranberry sauce we could just drink some cranberry juice. Sweet potatoes were not a favorite of mine so they didn’t make the cut. Green beans we could do, and I figured I could get a woman that I worked with who liked to cook to make those for me.

With the dinner menu settled I checked out with my turkey and got it home. It was trussed up in the back like some kind of kidnap victim, so I decided to cut the thread thing that was holding the poor turkey’s legs together. As the legs oozed apart I noticed something sticking out of the turkey’s ass. While I don’t make a habit of looking at turkey asses, this was a pretty large, cavernous ass. It was definitely the dream for a German pornographer who would be interested for some nefarious reasons not worth mentioning here. Anyway, the thing sticking out was shiny, perhaps metal.

Visions of apples with razor blades suddenly filled my mind. Maybe some psycho maniac had decided to try to kill people by filling their Thanksgiving feasts with deadly metal. Congratulating myself on my skills of observation, I put on a pair of work gloves, strapped on my head lamp, got a pair of pliers, and began trying to extract the implement before someone was maimed.

The object in question turned out to be a temperature gauge of sorts. Having once had a bad experience with spaghetti sauce where the masher of the sauce had broken off and ended up in my jar, causing the sauce to be full of metal shavings (I ate it anyway), I realized some turkey factory worker must have been asleep on the job and allowed this tool to remain in situ through the packaging process. But then I realized removing the temperature gauge had also dislodged a net bag, much like the bags they put lemons in. Wondering if perhaps my turkey had been mistaken for a chicken, and if this was perhaps the way they made lemon chicken, I yanked on the top of the mesh and pulled the bag out. Inside, to my horror, was, instead of lemons, what appeared to be maybe a heart, some dark brown gelatinous substance that could have been a liver, and, I wish I was making this up, a neck. Some sicko had cut off my turkey’s head, and shoved it up my turkey’s ass.

I carefully packed all the bits up and returned the turkey to the store from which I purchased it. The customer service rep sent me back to the meat counter. She was barely containing her laughter. Suspecting that I had become the butt of some sadistic grocery store joke, I marched up to the meat counter, plopped the now quite warm and therefore pliable turkey on the counter, where it began to settle like a melting cheese ball.

I explained to the guy that I had found some stuff in my turkey, shoved into the nether region as if the turkey’s ass were some kind of pocket, that the store was lucky I found these parts before I cooked the turkey, that I didn’t expect my turkey to be like some kind of cracker jack box but with BAD surprises inside, and that I wanted a new turkey. The guy looked at me for an uncomfortable amount of time, and finally said the only turkeys they had were the ones that had stuff in them and that people liked having the stuff, and I therefore could not have a turkey without stuff in it, so I could either eat the turkey I had or maybe become a vegetarian. This is a polite summary of what he said. I left the turkey on the counter, did not have my money returned, and never shopped at that store again.

Luckily Dan had the foresight to order Thanksgiving dinner a week before my rather disappointing foray into holiday cooking, so we did end up having a nice meal after all. I even helped prepare dinner by cleaning the gutters on their house and opening alcoholic beverages for people. I also found out from Dan that they really do put stuff inside the turkey and that people use this stuff for cooking. Whenever people tell me how barbaric other countries that I have visited are, I think of that turkey neck and smile to myself. If only they knew what the US is capable of.