Excerpt: Jane

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"Meat is the Message."

I wrote these words just over a year ago, sitting right here in my tenement apartment in the East Village of New York City in the middle of the worst snowstorm of the season, or maybe it was the century - on TV, everything's got to be the worst of something, and after a while you stop paying attention. Especially that year. It was January 1991, the first month of the first year of the last decade of the millennium. President Bush had just launched Desert Storm, the most massive air bombardment and land offensive since World War II. The boiler in my building had blown, my apartment was freezing, and I couldn't complain to the landlord because my rent was overdue. I had just defaulted to a vegetarian diet of cabbage and rice because I couldn't find a job. Politics and weather aside, the rest was fine. I mean, I was doing the starving artist thing on purpose: I wanted to be a documentary filmmaker, but who could find work in a climate like this?

When the phone rang at two in the morning, I didn't bother to answer. It was unlikely to be a job offer at that hour, and I had just gotten into bed and was lying there, rigid, trying to relax against the icy sheets long enough to fall asleep. I didn't want to lose what little body heat I'd already invested, so I let the answering machine pick up - isn't that what they are for? But then I recognized the voice. It was Kato, my old boss at the TV production company in Tokyo where I had gotten my first job, translating English soundbites into pithy Japanese subtitles. Now, he said, he had a new program and could use my help. I threw back the covers and dived for the receiver. After a brief conversation, we hung up. I wrapped myself in blankets, huddled over my computer keyboard, and, blowing on my fingers to keep them warm, wrote the following:

My American Wife!

Meat is the Message. Each weekly half-hour episode of My American Wife! Must culminate in the celebration of a featured meat, climaxing in its glorious consumption. It's the meat (not the Mrs.) who's the star of our show! Of course, the "Wife of the Week" is important too. She must be attractive, appetizing, and all-American. She is the Meat Made Manifest: ample, robust yet never tough nor hard to digest. Through her, Japanese house- wives will feel the hearty sense of warmth, of comfort, of hearth and home - the traditional family values symbolized by red meat in rural America.

I sat back and read it with some satisfaction. It was a pitch for Kato's new program, a more or less faithful translation of the Japanese text that he had dictated to me over the phone - well, maybe not so faithful; maybe a little excessive, in fact. But I liked it. It would do. I faxed it off to Tokyo and crawled back into bed. As I lay there, shivering, wondering about the new show, I had no way of realizing that what I'd just written would turn out to be some of my most lucrative prose - it would land me a job and keep me both meat-fed and employed for over a year.

My Year of Meats. It changed my life. You know when that happens – when something rocks your world, and nothing is ever the same after?