Louise Erdrich–“The Butcher’s Wife” (New Yorker, October 15,2001)
February 12, 2021 by Paul Debraski
SOUNDTRACK:GORILLA BISCUITS-Start Today (1989).
In a post from a couple of days ago, Rebecca Kushner mentions a bunch of punk bands that she either knew or hung out with. I was amazed at how many of them I’d heard of but didn’t really know. So this seemed like a good opportunity to go punk surfing.
Of all of the bands that Kushner mentions, Gorilla Biscuits were the only one that I knew pretty well. I seem to recall a gimmick of this CD was that here were 99 tracks on it–possibly the first CD to have maxed out the track numbers?
Gorilla Biscuits released an EP and this album and then they broke up–although they do still tour and play a lot of punk festivals. Start Today is considered one of the great albums from the New York hardcore punk scene.
It’s a pretty classic hardcore record, with almost all of the songs two minutes or less. That’s fourteen songs in 24 minutes. And there’s some great lyrics in these songs too.
“Degradation” was a pretty straightforward attack on the Nazi skinheads infiltrating the punk scene.
True, they’re always at our shows
It doesn’t mean we fit in with their hatred and racism shit
They ruin our name, you know what I mean
Racial supremacists, they degrade our scene
You know you can kiss my ass before I read you ‘zine
There’s no good side to this white power scene
Kids beat down for standing up
Your turn will come because we’ve all had enough
But the album also plays around with expectations a bit. The album opens with a 20 second horn fanfare. Despite the brevity of the songs, many of them stick in some (short, simple, melodic) guitar solos.
Plus, the title song “Start Today” has a cool heavy breakdown in the middle that tacks on a harmonica solo (!). “Competition” includes a bit of whistling, too.
The album has two bonus tracks “Sitting around At Home” which is a Buzzcocks cover. The vocals are very different on this one. So much that I’d have guessed it was a different singer.
[READ: February 10, 2021] “The Butcher’s Wife”
This story is about the daughter of drunken Polish man who lived on a farm in Minnesota.
Roy Watzka loved his wife with all of his heart. She died when their daughter Delpine was very young, and Roy fell apart. He devoted more of his love to photoshop his deceased wife than his daughter. Despite Prohibition, Roy found ways to drink and he drank a lot.
Delphine tried to get away–she went to secretarial school. But as her father’s health began to fail, she returned home to care for him.
When she went into town to get some food, she entered the meat market and met Eva Waldvogel.
Eva sensed a kindred spirit in Delphine and invited her behind the counter to taste the lard that she had prepared. Eva’s husband had been trained as master butcher in Germany and he had a special process to render his fat. As they spoke Delphine mentioned her father and Eva knew of him (everyone did).
Soon enough Delphine was working in the shop.
Eva treated her like a sister. Eva’s husband Fidelis was a tougher person. He could haul hundred pound slabs of beef. He was abrupt and barely spoke to Delphine. She decided she would avoid him as much as she could while working in his shop.
One of the regular customers; was Fidelis’ sister Tante. Tante took things from the store without paying. She had given Fidelis the money for the store and although she had been paid back, she still felt owed. Eva had two boys and they did not like Tante
The story talks about the extreme weather of Minnesota in 1936–the freezing winter and subsequent scorching summer. But the worst thing of that year was that Eva found that she had cancer.
The fact that she even admitted she didn’t feel good showed how bad things were–she hated a whiner after all.
Cancer treatment in 1936 were quite different. The first treatment consisted of inserting into her uterus several hollow metal bombs containing radium. The next involved inserting heated needles into the tumor
The biggest surprise cam when Roy learned of Eva’s condition. Because even though he was the town drunk and everyone knew him as such, he was a good person underneath and no one disliked him. He came to visit Eva every day and plied her with story and fter story-stories that Delphine had never heard.
As the pain grew worse, the doctor gave Delphine morphine to administer to Eva. She was excellent at it despite her dislike of needles. But one day the morphine went missing. It occurred to Delphine that Tante might have taken it away. Tante did. She felt that her sister in law was becoming addicted to the morphine and was a disgrace on her family name.
She had dumped the morphine down the sink.
It was a holiday–how would she ever get more for her friend who was in agony? Would you believe that Roy has a trick up his sleeve to come to the rescue?
