Don't Get Too Comfortable (5 page)

The crew toasts one another and the models on a day's work well done. The mariachi plays. Alejandra calls over to him and makes a request. She laughs a little as she says the name of the song, half joking. Even though she asks him in Spanish, the ironic, camp lilt in her voice is unmistakable. He begins to sing. It is a sweetly traditional tune, a song a mother might teach her child. As he begins, Alejandra and Vanessa laugh and exclaim in mock-sentimentality. But they cannot sustain the joke, and soon they just sit and listen, eyes cast down, with faint smiles on their faces.

This is my classic trajectory: the midafternoon freak-out followed by that evening's outflowing of fine feeling, brought on by a number of factors: relief at my impending departure, a drop in temperature, and the very tangible perquisites heaped upon me—good food, alcohol, and the general deference accorded an American journalist abroad. I have been having a little
sesión privada
of my own. My version of the extended cock tease is that throughout my short stay on Cayo Espanto I have been affecting either a wide-eyed, disingenuous unfamiliarity with luxury, or, alternately, claiming outrage at the social inequities of the place. Whenever Obed has asked me if I'd like something, I have responded with a scandalized, “Oh golly, no! Thank you so much, though,” horrified that he might think I would want anything, only to have him then bring me the drink, the chair, the umbrella anyway, and then I, uttering a sheepish and humiliated “thank you,” drink, sit, take the shade. Every single time. I am suffused with well-being and just as quickly sickened with myself. Mine are the tears of the Walrus, bemoaning the wholesale carnage of his little oyster friends as he scoops another bivalve into his voracious, sucking maw.

THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON
, back at the San Pedro airport, I wait to board the small eight-seat plane—a boxy little number with some unsettling rusty spots, and the completely terrifying airline logo on its tail fin of a man (our pilot?) flat-out asleep under a palm tree with his hat over his eyes. I watch the baggage handler as he stuffs our luggage into the bottom of the fuselage. A leathery man in his fifties, he wears a tight, faded yellow T-shirt with Daffy Duck on it. Daffy is staggering, his drunken path indicated by a dashed, serpentine line. Beside him are the words “I was Loony as a Toon at Samantha's Bat Mitzvah.”

It would be nice to think that this T-shirt was his from the start, that he
was
at Samantha's bat mitzvah, sharing in her family's joy as she came into Jewish womanhood, and came away with this souvenir of his time there. But, much like the consoling fiction of a private island where three beautiful goddesses wait, trembling and naked beneath the mosquito netting for someone,
anyone,
to come and satisfy their burning, unquenchable desire, I kind of doubt it.

WILDMAN

A
flower grows in Brooklyn. The tiny chamomile blossom has pushed its way through a crack in the gray pavement. Before I can come up with a hackneyed metaphor for its patient and valiant struggle toward the light, “Wildman” Steve Brill—edible-plant expert, vegan cookbook author, and “New York's best-known naturalist”—bends down and summarily picks the small domed bud to point out to us the plant's physical characteristics. Advantage asphalt.

This mini-lecture seems more a gentle attempt to sell us the small magnifying loupes Brill has available for $10 than to impart any truly useful botanical knowledge. The real information will come once we walk through the gates of Prospect Park, Brooklyn's 526-acre wilderness. There, we will learn all about how to identify and forage our own wild edibles.

Left with some time to kill as our group assembles, Brill entertains our youngest member, two-year-old Adeline, with “Pop Goes the Weasel,” played by clapping his cupped hands in front of his open mouth. By changing the shape of his lips, he is able to create a surprisingly supple instrument that can play an impressive range of notes. The whole range of notes, in fact. Brill does not stint on the length of his version. As he moves out of the minor-key bridge back to the initial verse, Addie's attention has shifted. Then again, so has Brill's. His clap-mouth has put him into a minor fugue state. With his eyes now focused upward with an expression both dreamy and vacant, he appears almost saintlike. Or would, if not for his Intrepid Explorer drag of wicker pith helmet and cargo pants.

One of our group, a teacher from upstate New York, addresses Brill as “Wildman,” with the respectful deference of an acolyte and no trace of irony. Brill, in turn, sees nothing odd in the honorific. This man is waiting for a fellow teacher, a cybernetic pen pal from an online Christian prayer forum. They have chosen this expedition for their first face-to-face meeting. It's unclear if it's a date or not, although she'd be well served if it wasn't because, unbidden, he tells us, “I had a friend in college who caught an albino squirrel, and mistreated it so badly that the animal eventually retaliated, and bit him really, really deep right here,” he says, indicating the fleshy pad at the base of his thumb. “The squirrel wouldn't let go until my friend broke its neck.” There is no way to tell what this man thinks about his anecdote. His tone is almost completely uninflected, holding neither outrage nor humor.

Also in our search party is a venture capitalist who runs a nonprofit theater program for inner city youth in Newark. He has completed numerous wilderness survival courses. There is a Deborah Harry type, her hair bleached to the color and consistency of dry straw, her eyelids shaded with pink to offset her pink rhinestone cat's-eye glasses. She is here as part of her day job, which is assisting in cooking classes at New York's Natural Gourmet Cookery School. With her is her boyfriend from Mexico, whose head is wrapped in an American eagle scarf and whose T-shirt reads “Gateways of Annihilation.” Just twelve people out for a Sunday afternoon of diversion in a lovely city park. We're almost a Seurat painting.

We have followed the instructions we got from Brill when we signed up, and have arrived with packed lunches, plastic bags for our eventual hauls of free comestibles (as well as air-permeable paper sacks for any mushrooms we might harvest), scissors for snipping, and small garden spades for digging. We have read and signed the consent form absolving Brill of any liability should we become sick, injured, or die outright from anything we might mistakenly eat, and now we are ready. “Walk this way!” Brill cries, and he's off, John Cleesing across Grand Army Plaza and into the park.

We take leave of the path almost immediately, scrambling up a hill to find our first edible, hedge mustard, a ground cover which grows plentifully and has been alleged to inhibit both ovarian and prostate cancers. I eat some. It tastes . . . green. One of the overriding flavors of the day will be chlorophyll.

Brill is a combination of great knowledgeability and relentless borscht belt schtickiness. Identifying a sample as having a tooth-edged leaf, he drops it with an exaggerated gesture and yells at the plant, “Stop biting me!” We are advised not to spill the seeds of our garlic mustard: “Particularly if you're Catholic, you should never spill your seeds.”

Prospect Park is vast. A once carefully controlled design by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted that was meant to serve as a benevolent antidote to the rough justice of “real” nature, it has grown during its century-plus life and now contains a variety of terrains and mini-ecosystems. In a formal English garden, we eat dainty violet leaves. Moving farther into a forested area, we munch on the parsley-tasting leaves of the goutweed, named not for the disease but for a bastardization of “goat,” its primary consumer. Coincidentally, chickweed, which we sample next—and which tastes of corncobs but curiously not of corn—is also named for the animal that historically liked it best. By now, we are fully enclosed in wooded underbrush. We pass by many men, alone and in pairs, who don't appear supremely enchanted by our presence—a coed dozen, including two toddlers, led by a chattering guide dressed like Dr. Livingston. Brill, for his part, seems oblivious to this, and to the obvious grass stains on the knees of the men who walk by. It's in his own best interest to live and let live. The parks department unofficially condones what Brill does, although individual rangers may not, so we are advised to be discreet in our locustlike behavior. Every one of us here is up to something a little shady, which is as it should be. Brill began the tour by telling us that flowers were once thought to have no purpose greater than pleasing the human eye. It wasn't until experiments in pollination during the Renaissance that people realized to their puritanical horror that even the loveliest of blooms were nothing more than sex organs. In Catholic Europe, people burned Carl Linnaeus's books as corrupting filth. (To give them their due, much like the East German paranoid who is convinced that he is under surveillance by his neighbors, they kind of had a point: Linneaus
was
a bit of a sexual obsessive, vaginally fixated, pushing his penchant so far as to name an entire genus of plants
Clitoria.
) So who can blame the human fauna in this Brooklyn cruising ground for pulsing in concert with all this throbbing flora around us? It seems we can even hear it coming up through the ground itself, a muffled cellophane crackle underfoot. O, how the heart leaps when the condom wrappers are in bloom once more!

GIVEN THEIR EXPENSIVE
gourmet pedigree, the hit-or-miss nature of their growth, and the fact that they are the plant world's closest thing in flavor and texture to meat, mushrooms are the big-ticket items of any wild edible foraging. We hit paydirt when we come upon some wine-cap
Stropharia.
Apparently they are delicious. Brill tells us he has made a big model of one out of clay. In fact, Brill has painted, photographed, or sculpted almost every wild mushroom there is. On his website there is a photo of him entitled “Wildman Devours Yellow Morel Sculpture.” The larger-than-life-sized replica of the torpedo-shaped fruiting body is poised at Brill's happy, open mouth, his face a display of high exuberance. It is, as Freud might say, an interesting photo. Throw another Linnaeus book on the fire, boys.

But we must be careful. The mycological kingdom abounds with treachery and deceit. Many harmless, yummy fungi have sinister false cognates—evil twins that look almost exactly the same but for some small, critical difference, much like the world of soap operas. Eat one and it will shut your liver down before you've gotten through a forkful of that omelet. I am suddenly less than certain that I have picked wine-caps and not the slender-stemmed poisonous mushrooms that were growing nearby that Brill warned us about. I give mine away to Deborah Harry, who seems only too happy to have them.

In fact, my bag is notably less full than my cohorts'. In the mere seconds between the time Brill identifies a plant and I bend down to pick some for myself, I get confused. Tops of plants can be different in form from their lower growth. Mature plants can look nothing like their juvenile selves. Even the same plant can go from edible in one form to toxic in another. And frankly, all the plants just look like leaves to me. What had initially seemed a bounteous windfall, free for the taking and free of consequence, becomes fraught with peril in short order. Pokeweed, for example, requires three separate boilings to rid it of its toxins. Brill, a vegan since 1990, has the religion and uses superlatives freely, but about pokeweed's flavor he is unstinting. Again, I give mine away. I forget how many times I have to boil it as soon as the words leave his mouth. And it seems like an awful lot of work for a potentially lethal meal.

Wildman reassures me. “Except for getting killed or sick, I've made all the foraging mistakes you can.” I can't imagine what other foraging mistakes he's talking about aside from those two, and I don't know that I will be so lucky as to avoid either of them. There have always been the necessary casualties in our species' evolutionary march toward progress: the curious fool who stands out in the field to watch the electrical storm; the Neanderthal with the head cold who cannot smell enough to know that he has just eaten a very bad mussel; or, in my case, the recreational scrounger who, like the most primitive of creatures, is completely drawn in by the lovely butter-bloomed lesser celandine bush. I just want to dive in and suck the saffron-colored sap that flows from its cut stems. I want to eat all its inviting yellowness. Brill stops me. “It's like my ex-girlfriend,” he cracks. “Beautiful but deadly!”

WE STOP FOR
lunch under the canopy of a large spreading tree. Softball games and Ultimate Frisbee are being played out on the huge lawn. In the distance, a procession of children with large white paper crane puppets on long sticks makes its way along the crest of a hill with a strangely funereal grace. Brill gives us all a taste of his garlic mustard pesto and vegan redbud ice cream. Others have brought similarly painstakingly prepared food; there is more than one sprouted wheatberry salad in the bunch. Deborah Harry is justifiably proud of her strawberry-rhubarb agar-agar mousse. I figure it's probably best not to offer either my roast beef sandwich or Mint Milanos around for tastes. I ask Brill to tell me about himself.

He starts at the very beginning. “I'm fifty-four years old. Born on March 10, the same as Bix Beiderbecke.” I'm a fan of the jazz trumpeter and I tell Brill so. He immediately clap-mouths both “In a Mist” and “Mississippi Mud” from start to finish. I eat my sandwich throughout this floor show.

Brill's present career began in 1986, when he was apprehended for eating a dandelion in New York's Central Park. The media attention paid to his misdemeanor was huge—he was on
David Letterman
and interviewed by Dan Rather for the evening news.

“I used to think that the most exciting thing that would ever happen to me in Central Park was getting arrested, but five years ago, I was leading a singles' group and met a woman who was even wilder than I am.” (Brill is an eccentric, of that there is no doubt. And for all I know, his body underneath what looks to be a flame-retardant wardrobe might be covered in urban primitive tattoos and perforated with all manner of piercings, but outwardly, unless “wild” became synonymous with “Chess Club” when I wasn't paying attention, it is not the word that springs to mind when looking at him.) “We married last June . . .” he says, and claps out Mendelssohn's wedding march. “And this coming December . . .” He launches into “Rock-a-Bye Baby.”

With a child on the way, Brill will have to work even harder and he is already a very busy man. He barely gets a day off during the ten months of the year the weather permits him to lead these walking tours. It's not clear what kind of a living Brill makes, but it can't be a lot. The fee today is less than $20 a person. Prior to his current career, Brill had tried to make a go of it as a vegan caterer. Before that, his ambition was to be, you guessed it, a chessmaster. At least his present job provides him with most of his food so he can use his earnings for other necessities.

The conclusion of the tour is signaled with the flourish of the Merry Melodies theme (in clap-mouth, of course) and a friendly “B-dee, B-dee, B-dee, That's All Folks!” He takes a moment to say good-bye to each of us and also manages to sell one of his books.

“Who should I sign it to? It's more valuable if I sign it,” he says.

“Sign it ‘To the plant world,'” says the young venture capitalist.

Brill does, and hands it over. The failure in logic in this exchange is not so much that the plant world, although living, is categorically incapable of appreciating an inscribed first edition but that even if it could, the plant world might not take too kindly to the volume in question,
The Wild Vegetarian Cookbook.

LATER THAT NIGHT
, I stand over my sink eating my salad of hedge mustard, goutweed, peppercress, and chickweed. Brill advised us to eat small amounts of anything we pick the first time out. He wasn't kidding. This is a very small but formidable bowl of food. Commercial plants are bred to be bigger and heavier. They contain more water while wild edibles contain more nutrients. I get fuller much faster than normal. There is almost too much flavor here, and a tongue-swelling rawness. It's not unpleasant, but there is a tenacity to these greens. It takes some major mastication to tear through them.

At first blush it had seemed puzzling, inconceivable almost, that the bushes of the park weren't overrun with people harvesting all of these marvelous free eats. But Brill's tour ultimately proves the opposite point. Even here we remain subordinate to the caprice of nature. At a Japanese knotweed plant, Brill finds only two eight-inch-long edible stalks left to feed twelve of us. Its season is almost over. It's wonderfully lemony, and I'm even a little full at this point, having sampled cattails, poor man's pepper, and field pennycress, but I need no clearer explication than this, standing here chewing on my meager ration no bigger than a cocktail gherkin, to see why our ancestors decided to give this up and begin growing their food.