Lunch With 'Food Bully' Jim Harrison

Poet and writer Jim Harrison died a year ago this month at the age of 79; and Peter Nowogrodzki talked to the “food bully” ("first coined by master eater Orson Welles, his culinary sensei") last Valentine's Day about eating, metaphysics, the souls of dogs, and more. His piece, up at Lit Hub, is a no-brainer read for Friday. An excerpt follows:

“A Really Big Lunch” is now the title essay of a new, posthumous collection, which debuts on March 24, two days before the one year anniversary of Harrison’s death. It includes 275 pages of his fringier food writing—poems and essays from lesser-known, alternative venues like Mike Golden’s Smoke Signals, Kermit Lynch’s Wine Merchant, and Ondaatje’s Brick, plus an introduction by Mario Batali.

And while a meditation on gluttony might at first seem a little tone deaf, there’s much more to the book than its author’s enormous appetite—just as there was more to Harrison than his appetite, and more to his appetite than mere indulgence.

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“This is the bar with my people,” Harrison said, gesturing his giant, callused hand—basically a paw—towards a sign that read WAGON WHEEL SALOON. It was by far the busiest establishment among the handful of shops on the bordertown’s main drag, where, he explained with an obsessive attention to the details of his purview, “they used to have cattle in corrals to ship out on the train.”

In younger author photos, he had the athletic build and Midwestern grace of a Ditka linebacker, often sporting a dark mustache and always a cigarette below it. One memorable image captures a confident young sportsman in overalls, arms spread out as though crucified between the haunch and withers of a large brown mare. By contrast, the man I had followed through the bar and into the open air cantina out back looked like a mythical creature you’d find guarding a bridge in Narnia or throwing back grog at a tavern in Middle-earth. He moved as if underwater, slow and wise and obviously old, with the long white beard of an Old Testament patriarch, wispy gray hair, and the kind of smokey eyes that swallow light, like little ghosts below what could only be called owlish eyebrows.

But none of this is what I or anyone else new to the Wagon Wheel that afternoon would have noticed about Harrison—rather, it was his ass. His mobility had been severely compromised several years prior in a spinal surgery that “wasn’t entirely successful,” which rendered him less than 100% for so long that his handicap had become a new normal. Consequently, he was in constant pain, especially when moving. And today, when he did move, his gray elastic shorts sagged lower and lower down around his atrophied quads revealing his pale crack and butt cheeks, a spectacle that was clearly nothing new for the locals, who treated him as one of their own because he was.

“Jim, how you doing,” a guy called over to our table.

“C-minus,” Harrison, still standing, shouted back. “I rate myself for people,” he explained. He was down a full point from 2013, when he reported “about a B-minus” to Jeff Baker of the Portland Oregonian.

I asked if he was ever an “A”?

Keep reading "How to Eat a Really Big Lunch With Jim Harrison" at Lit Hub.