Blood Lines
Memoir by Brian Kaufman
Growing up, as I did, in the 1960s I thought it was normal for every family to have a main course of “meat” at every lunch and dinner. We did. But then again, I was the son of a butcher.
Every summer, instead of visiting relatives or going off to camp, I went to work at the family business: restaurant meat supply. And in Grade 11, I came to learn that I was referred to by some as LM & his MT—Little Man and His Meat Truck—as I tooled around the hood in the company delivery truck, Arctic Meats emblazoned across the side panel, our logo of a smiling “Eskimo” artily tilted off to the right, both mitted hands held high.
We were late; I should say, I was late. I was tired, maybe hungover. I didn’t want to get out of bed. I was sixteen and sick of working every day of my summer holiday. I was resisting, but my dad didn’t give in easily. Every few minutes there’d be a thump-thump on my bedroom door and a gentle entreaty to “get a move on.” I finally succumbed, pulled my clothes on, stumbled to the kitchen for toast and eggs and then we were off, out the front door, heading for the truck.
I saw it before he did; from the top of the steps, over his head to the emblazoned message scrawled on the unwashed side panel of the van: DEATH LIES BEYOND THIS TRUCK!
Until that moment, I had never thought of the reality of what our family “business” was. Yes, it was “food supply,”—meat for restaurants, cafés, diners: burgers, steaks, ground beef, bacon, chops, sausages, roasts, every cut of steak—T-bone, porterhouse, rib-eye, wing, New York strips, flank. But it was also the end of the processing line that started on the killing floor of the slaughterhouse and ended with the delivery van, with me usually at the wheel—death distribution to the end user, the hungry consumer staring at their naked lunch. The old man didn’t flinch or pause, just hustled around the back of the vehicle and over to the driver’s side, oblivious to the howl of protest smeared across our van.
I was stunned.
And I was a lot of other things too, a lot of things all at once: ashamed, embarrassed, guilty. I wanted to scrub the words away before getting in the truck. I couldn’t stand the thought of us driving down the street with this condemnation slashed across our property for all to see—the neighbours, strangers waiting for the bus or walking to work, my friends— we’d been branded, stigmatized, labelled, judged, and it was impossible to deny, as if we were walking down the street in blood-spattered aprons, the words said it all: killers.
Our first shop was on The Drive, just south of Charles Street, where the Santa Barbara Market now stands. The store was a mix of general dry goods and a fresh meat counter. My father had been a salesman for Burns Foods for years (taking Top Salesman for Western Canada at his peak), then turned his study to portion cutting and soon went into business for himself. In the back of the store there was what one might expect to find: extra stock, boxes of canned goods, wrapping paper, shipping boxes, cleaning supplies, but also the little mystery—a ladder to a loft, a few two- by-fours nailed across a couple of studs. There was nothing I liked better as a boy of five or six than to climb this ladder to the small landing and hang around up there. It was like an indoor tree fort. This tiny loft was full of boxes, mostly file boxes of receipts, invoices, etcetera, records for income tax stuff, but there was also a heavy-duty cardboard box, about a foot square and a foot high that was full of locks—padlocks—and, beside it, another smaller box that was filled with keys. I would sit for hours, trying each key in a lock until I found a match. It felt like magic—nope, nope, nope—click! Bingo! Why was there a box full of locks there? My father wasn’t a locksmith, he was a butcher. And why a box of locks without their matching keys? A game of madness? Or a surefire way to keep a six-year-old out of your hair for hours when you had work to do?
I never did find out.
One dark evening in October, the building caught fire and my family’s foray into running a supermarket with fresh meat supply came to an abrupt end. Gone was the stock, the inventory, and the mysterious box of locks.
The fire did, however, provide my parents with an opportunity to reflect on their life course. And for some reason, they decided to get out of retail and go into wholesale restaurant supply, and the operation moved to a below-street-level occupancy under what was for years, Stella’s, and is now BierCraft at the corner of William and Commercial, just down the alley from Britannia Secondary. Across the street in Grandview Park, “greasers,” Italian toughs would swing on the chin-up bars and rings, packs of smokes rolled up in the sleeves of their blazing white t-shirts, their oiled pompadour and ducktail hair-dos flopping slick and shiny on their faces only to be gently swooped up when their pointed black shoes dropped to the ground, grinding the grit of the sandy pavement. A young eight-year-old me watched close by as if these George Chakiris look-alikes had stepped right out of West Side Story. Sharks? Jets? Definitely Sharks. And sharks like blood.
Meat is blood and blood is meat. If you work in the meat industry, blood is always with you. It’s on your clothes, it’s under your nails, it’s in your hair. And the cleaning of a meat processing area is all about blood removal. It covers the cutting blocks in dried layers, it drips and splashes to the floor, it glues and dries itself to every cutting utensil. Packing areas get trails of red from the dripping meat as it travels to cutting or wrapping areas. Cleaning must be thorough and regular. It cannot be intermittent; it can’t wait a day or two, for the flies do not wait. They are drawn by the scent of blood and seem to be able to detect it from miles away. If a door or window gets left open for a minute they suddenly appear, drawn by the tinny, aromatic presence of blood; they zoom in, drift past like bumblebees, huge bluebottle flies lusting for the protein, wanting to drink deep and fulfill their cycle from egg to larva to pupa to full-grown Protophormia terraenovae so they can lay their eggs in the crevice of some bloodied box or waxed wrapping paper that will yield a bounty of milky white, writhing maggots reeking of putrescence in a matter of days. There is really no way to describe the stench of uncovering a colony of thriving maggots—though I have not smelled a rotting human corpse, I imagine this foul waft to be along that range on the olfactory scales.
Subsequently, there is a lot of scraping, wiping, cleaning, and disinfecting. It is a constant routine. The cutting blocks are attacked with large, stiff-wired brushes—both hands on the brush, motioning back and forth, like removing a thin veneer of skin, the dried blood and oil and fat scrape away until you hit a surface of fresh wood. The scales: washed and dried. Slicers must be dismantled and washed; the band saw (used for cutting any frozen products or through large sections of bone, as when sectioning up a side of beef) must also be scrubbed down, inside and out. Inside, where the blade spins, a fine dust-like residue from the pass of the blade through bone and frozen meat collects at the base of the saw. A sawdust-like cone pile builds and, as it thaws and warms, becomes the perfect spot for laying eggs. If you forget to clean it for a day or two, you get a grim reminder why you ought not to forget. And the floor—the entire floor—must be scraped with a long-handled scraper, much like a sponge mop, but with a blunted blade edge designed to scrape up any squashed pieces of fat, spilled ground round, grease, dried meat scraps etc., then mopped with a disinfecting, bleachy wash. Things are now ready for the next day.
Most of our suppliers were local—Burns Foods, Canada Packers, Swifts, but when we needed lamb it came frozen from a supplier in New Zealand, and that meant a trip to Vancouver Cold Storage down on Alexander Street in what was then referred to as Japantown. I liked going there, it was an old part of town that I was unfamiliar with, it had a mystery that floated about it like a mist, like fog from the docks. I would back the truck into the loading bay and jump up onto the platform of the shipping/receiving area and wait. I don’t know how they knew when I was there—there was no bell, intercom button to push—but I would stand around only for a minute or two before a vacuum-like sounding, sliding door would open, like the doors on Star Trek, and a cloud of frozen air, like a blast of dry ice would roll across the loading dock, and out of this cloud would walk Zombie Man. At least that’s what I called him (in my head, not to his face) because there was never a word from him, he was always speechless. He was cloaked in a thick rubber raincoat, worn over top of a thick Nordic sweater; on his hands were equally thick rubber mitts and on his head a dark blue, heavy winter toque with long earflaps. Every time I saw him there would be a rivulet of frozen snot from his nose to the top of his lip, his face always a frostbitten red. He would take the order form from me, glance at it, then turn around and disappear back through the air-lock doors and into an arctic world where polar bears and icebergs would not be out of place. As I waited, I’d watch the seagulls soar and screech over the buildings toward the waterfront.
Zombie Man would soon return with a few cases of frozen legs of lamb—and I mean frozen. The deep-freeze so intense that the boxes would bounce and slide like blocks of ice when I tossed them into the back of the van. When they are loose in a box they rattle together like baseball bats. I sign for the goods and I’m gone, down off the dock, glancing back one last time to see Zombie Man’s back as he shuffles back to the sliding entranceway of his deep-freeze ice world.
LM & HIS MT
They are one or two grades behind me. One is blonde, slim; the other two are brunettes, slim, too. They stand in a tight circle and talk, usually on the parking lot side of the school—smoke, talk, glance, lean in and whisper as I walk by.
Flirtatious? Yes. Mysterious? Yes. And sometimes when I drove past them, into the parking lot of the community centre to go skating, or swimming, or to Friday night dances—I would see them and see that giggle, lean, whisper—until one afternoon, as the rugby team hollered and slammed away at each other, and I drove slowly into the parking lot, window down, right past them, I heard—“JULIE! IT’S HIM! IT’S LM & HIS MT!” Followed by squeals and slaps on the shoulders. Little Man and His Meat Truck. Funny.
BRINE DAY
Thursday was “Brine Day.” We sold about three hundred pounds of cured, “kosher-style” corned beef every week, and the majority of that went to two or three downtown diners. Fifty to seventy-five pounds a day. That’s a lot of pickled brisket, a lot of stacked-high corned beef sandwiches. And since the briskets needed two weeks to cure, we had to stay on top of things lest we run short and lose our customers. The brisket would arrive in huge Burns Foods boxes, about three feet long, eighteen inches across, and about a foot high. They were bound by two nylon bands, cinched tight, and still the boxes sagged and drooped in the middle making it a struggle for the delivery guy to make it from the back of his truck up the loading ramp and into our receiving area. Even though the drivers lugged sides of beef and boxes often dripping blood, they wore long white cotton smock coats similar to what your GP strides around in. (What is it with white coats and professions that deal with blood and other bodily fluids?)
The brine barrels were the big, wooden, fifty-gallon wine-type casks and we had three of them and they had to be moved in rotation: the freshest, newest, just-pickled batch would shift into spot #1; the previous #1 became position #2 (had been in the brine for about a week); the previous #2 spot was now ready and shifted to the #3 spot, the barrel that orders would be drawn from. Each of these barrels held about two hundred pounds of pickled brisket.
On Brine Day—not Brian Day—as was so often joked, it meant that it was time for Brian to learn the fine art of pickling beef brisket—as if it were some rite of passage in the family meat business that I had yet to complete. Sadly, I must report, I never did complete this particular rite of passage. At sixteen or seventeen it just seemed completely disgusting and distasteful. Here’s why: the technique of pickling the briskets involves a barrel of brine, a hydraulic pump, a long rubber hose feeding a long needle shaft—sort of like a meat thermometer, but thicker, longer and aerated along both sides of the shaft—that gets inserted length-wise into the brisket. Then, by squeezing the handle at the end of the needle, the brine is pumped into the meat. It takes several insertions to distribute brine evenly through the thickest parts of the brisket. Inevitably, a good bit of brine gets squirted about when pulling the needle out and inserting it into the next spot. The apparel of the pickler consisted of an ankle-length, heavy rubber raincoat, eyeglasses or goggles (to protect one’s eyes from errant squirts of spicy brine!), rubber gloves and rubber boots. Not quite the out- fit of a sixteen-year-old wannabe hipster!
Then the daily “fishing” for brisket. Into the walk-in cooler that was kept at a constant thirty- four degrees Fahrenheit equipped with a meat hoisting hook—kinda like the hook at the end of Captain Hook’s stump—attached to a two-inch diameter oak dowel handle. If the barrel was fully stocked it was a cakewalk—just easy pickin’s off the top layer. As the week wore on, the level dropped and you had to “fish” for brisket you knew were there beneath the surface but out of sight in the dark, murky, purplish brine. And it was cold! Sometimes up to one’s elbow, fishing around as the slabs slid and bobbed, trying to hook a bloated brisket. It was more like trying to snag a large carp in a swirling tub. Bone-achingly cold, and when the hooking and snagging was successful out would come the pickled, slightly slimy brisket, flopping from the hook into a plastic-lined carton like an engorged, freshly excised human liver. Five or six into the box, then tie up the plastic bag to prevent leakage of excess brine, seal the box up with brown butcher’s tape, and you were on your way. Hundreds of high-stacked, thinly sliced corned beef and pastrami sandwiches waiting to be served warm with mustard and a thick slice of dill pickle on top!
BURNS PLANT
When I was just a kid, maybe six or seven, my dad would take me on runs to the Burns plant on Powell Street. It used to stand down near the Rogers Sugar refinery, along the industrial wasteland north of the Powell Street railway yards. I loved going on these jaunts to pick up some emergency item, some irregular request that had popped up and we’d forgotten to order. We’d hop in the Econoline and I’d sit centre on the engine cover, where it was warm—no seat belt or even a thought of seat belts back then. My dad would work the gears, “three on the tree,” shifting away as we drifted down Rupert to Kingsway, then west to Victoria, coasting it around the corner, down past Hendry Park to Commercial Drive and on past the Grandview Cut, then the slow, stop-and-go along the Drive, jaywalkers scooting into traffic all along the section from First Avenue to Venables—as they still do today—then curve along past East Georgia, Adanac, Pender to Hastings, and on past the notoriously rumoured “bad area” of Franklin and Pandora Streets. Now we hit Powell with its smells of . . . what? Rendering? Chicken slaughter? Fish plants? The noise of railcars being shunted in the transfer yard, squealing and squeaking . . . and bumpity-bump over the tracks and to guarded yards, security gates swinging open, window down and a nod or a “Hey, Harry . . .” as we passed . . . the Dickensian, soot-covered sugar refinery looming to the west, just outside of our windshield . . . and I try to imagine what goes on there, what gaunt, grey-skinned workers shuffle through the sugar-dust filled air, what conveyor belt system moves their white gold from area to area, all hidden behind those impenetrably grimy windows . . . and off to my right the Alberta Wheat Pool towers—concrete pillars soaring up to meet the pigeon grey sky . . . and we move down the entrance road toward the plant. I am overwhelmed with anxiousness and I love it, this feeling of accessing secured places secreted away on the waterfront, and I have the key, the password, the in, and the in is my dad, and in this moment of flooding boyhood joy I also feel intense love for my father. . . does he know it?
We get out of the van and head up the short flight of wooden steps, four or five that lead to the loading dock and into the warehouse area.
And there, just at the entrance, is the huge ammonia tank, like an upended humpback whale—black, but the top quarter is coated in thick ice, like white lava working its way down the length of the tank. And I can smell the ammonia (is it hissing, puffing gas at us?) and my dad directs me around and away—C’mon, don’t stand there! And there is noise—not loud, distinct, singular noise but an amalgam of industrial strains: refrigeration fans, whining generators, pulleys and gears whirring, squealing. Hums from indefinable sources. Now we’re in the plant, fabled in my mind: the killing floor, the stun guns, the place where the rumoured “crazed bull” had fled after its executioner missed his mark, only grazing the skull of the beast with his sledgehammer, sending an enraged and roaring bull for the nearest window through which to crash—go to the light!—and then the ethereal drop of a full storey, crashing to the dock below, only to rise and move away—away, away—from the carnage, the madness, the moaning and lowing and crying of its mates—run!
And like the bull, I ran. I knew I could not follow in the steps of my father, could not carry the blood of slaughter on my hands for my entire life. He found a way to feed his family, keep them clothed and cared for, and that is the first responsibility of any parent. We rarely wanted for anything. And I learned many things about running a small business from all those summers spent working at the shop. Osmosis . . . it has served me well. LM and his MT have travelled far . . . and I continue to wiggle keys into mystery locks in the hopes of unlocking secrets . . . »