Eating Crow (11 page)

D
ick “Crawfish” Anheiser, who earned his name as a young man working the shrimp boats out of Freeport, Texas, first told his mama he would eventually be a millionaire when he was twelve years old.

“An’ I’ll be doin’ it the decent way,” he told Dolores Anheiser, “sellin’ decent stuff to decent folk.”

In 1948, on a trip to San Bernardino, California, where he hoped to establish himself in the burgeoning car wash business, he stopped at a roadside restaurant for a hamburger. It was run by two brothers called Maurice and Richard McDonald and appeared to be turning a brisk trade. His experience of the McDonald brothers’ new Speedee Service System, a production line for hamburgers, convinced him that his business ambitions were misplaced. He telephoned his younger brother Jimmy back in Texas, told him that he was going into the restaurant business, and offered him a job. Reckoning that McDonald’s was already well positioned to dominate the West Coast, the Anheiser brothers made for Raleigh, North Carolina, where in 1949 they opened their first branch of Dick’s Dogs, a roadside restaurant specializing in extralong hot dogs dressed with chili sauce or mustard, fried onions or Dick’s famous hot cheese sauce.

The business was a great success, and by the late 1980s, a mixture of franchising and company-funded expansion had created an empire of 2,237 restaurants in forty-eight states of the Union. Crawfish Anheiser was a very wealthy man and he had become so decently, just as he had promised his mama. Then, one February morning in 1989, his clean record was put in jeopardy. A manicurist called Rosalie Romaro sustained second-degree burns in a branch of Dick’s Dogs in Gallup, New Mexico, when an egg-yolk yellow fountain of cheese sauce, overheated by a machine fault, squirted out of a Big Dog Number One onto her bare thigh. She spent three days in the hospital and felt unable to wear split-thigh skirts ever again because of the unsightly scarring. As is the custom, Romaro sued Dick’s Dogs.

The tort came at a difficult time for Crawfish Anheiser. He was in the advanced stages of a deal with the Cheezey Pizza Corporation of Oregon which would enable him to slip quietly into retirement, his fortune intact. CPC, which controlled around a third of the Dick’s Dogs stock, suggested that their lawyers handle the Romaro situation given their experience in the area. (They had recently settled a case in which a nine-year-old boy had sustained burns to his knees when the bottom fell out of a Cheezey Pizza box while he was watching television.) At first Crawfish agreed. “Ask me ’bout hot dogs and I’ll tell you all there is to know,” he told his brother Jimmy. “But I leave the big words to the professionals.”

A month later the lawyers reported back. They had secured what they believed to be an advantageous deal. Romaro had agreed to accept an out-of-court settlement of $10 million, in return for which Dick’s Dogs would in no way admit liability or be called upon to express regret.

Crawfish was appalled. Ten million dollars seemed an awful lot of money for one squirt of Dick’s famous cheese sauce. “Have you tried sayin’ sorry?” he asked his lawyers. “Isn’t that the least this lady deserves?” The men in suits almost fell off their chairs. If Crawfish Anheiser apologized, then the company would be left open to countless other claims, they said. The cost could be astronomical. Crawfish demurred. “I promised my late mama I’d be decent,” he said, “an’ I shall.” CPC were furious and pulled out of the takeover deal for fear of future liabilities. They sold all their Dick’s Dogs stock, thus forcing the price down, which made a huge dent in the old man’s paper fortune. Still, he kept his word.

In September of 1990, nineteen months after the injury, Crawfish Anheiser met Rosalie Romaro at her mobile home in the desert just outside Gallup. He apologized profusely for all the pain and discomfort she had been caused. According to a report which subsequently appeared in the
Gallup Independent
, the old man even wept upon seeing the scar and said, “Oh my, the terrible things my dog done to your pretty skin.”

Romaro was so moved by his gesture that she agreed to settle the case in return for just $500,000, a statement of apology, and a personal signed photograph of Crawfish, which she kept by her bed.

Although there were subsequently a number of other claims against the company, the damages paid out by Dick’s Dogs over a ten-year period never amounted to more than $3 million. Each time, Crawfish made the apology himself. He was forced to remain as chairman of the company for a few years more, but that meant he was able to ride out the recession of the early 1990s. When he did eventually find a buyer—the Tastee Taco Corporation of Nevada—they paid almost double the amount CPC had been prepared to pay just six years before.

“It just shows,” Crawfish Anheiser said at his retirement party, “that sayin’ sorry really does bring its own rewards.”

The Romaro case would probably have remained an obscure footnote in New Mexican legal history were it not for a student at Columbia University Law School called Karen Stewart, whose uncle was an attorney in San Jose. One Thanksgiving he mentioned the Crawfish Apology to his niece, just after she had poured gravy on his arm by mistake. Stewart was so intrigued that she made it and other similar apologies the subject of her graduate thesis. An exhaustive search produced just enough examples of corporate apologies and their outcomes to enable her to conclude that the minimum cost-benefit of the apologetic approach to civil actions (as against paying out while denying any liability and not saying sorry) was twenty-three percent to the defendant. Sadly for Stewart, the legal profession was unimpressed by her hard work and she ended up as a divorce lawyer in Cleveland.

The lack of interest was not surprising. There are only two types of lawyer in the field of civil claims: those representing plaintiffs, who are paid a significant proportion of the final sum secured, and those representing defendants, who dream, at some point, of representing plaintiffs, which is where the big money is. Neither group was interested in research that would reduce the size of the ultimate payout. The academic journals, knowing their readership well, thus declined to publish the paper.

Only one person showed any interest: Stewart’s supervising professor, Thomas Schenke, an expert in international law. His had not been a sparkling career. If Schenke were to be remembered at all, it was as the author of a deathly tome on the problems of multilingual tribunals and the complexities of interpreting legal jargon from one language to another in real time. Behind his back his colleagues joked that the book was a more interesting read in Dutch than English, as long as you understood no Dutch.

But Schenke had one ace up his sleeve. For a decade, since the end of the Cold War, he had been working on what he originally called his theory of event overload. While Francis Fukuyama was wowing the media with his notion that the fall of the Berlin Wall meant a victory for liberal democracy and the end of history—that future events would now be dominated by little more than spats over who would get to stage the next Olympics and whether any French pop music was worth listening to—Schenke had concluded exactly the opposite: that Soviet rule had been a massive scab, which, now wrenched off, would lead to a raging gush of bad blood. He came to believe, correctly, that an enormous number of newly exposed and ancient unrighted wrongs would clog up the processes of international politics, with injured parties constantly bringing their antique wounds to the negotiating table. Furthermore, an ever more globalized world would lead to an acceleration in the number and depth of new grievances. Schenke pointed out that while the eleventh century had produced only two events of any note—the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 and the taking of Jerusalem by the Crusaders in 1099—the last decade of the twentieth century had alone produced dozens on a similar scale from the Balkans to West Africa, from East Timor to the Arabian Gulf. Each of these in turn had its roots in a set of unsettled grievances. Unless something was done to lighten the planet’s historical ballast, the future would be a more chaotic and dangerous place in which to live.

Schenke had identified the disease, but until Stewart’s paper landed on his desk, he could offer no cure. The model of corporate apology provided the solution. Surely the principles could apply just as easily to nation-states, which were increasingly being called upon to make financial amends for the sins of their forefathers. Wars demanded reparations. The excesses of colonialism required compensation. Could not an apology, earnestly and sincerely given, reduce the size of these monumental payouts? He first raised the thought in an article for Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on
Foreign Relations
, in which he shamelessly appropriated Stewart’s research as his own, an act of plagiarism for which he later had to apologize. Schenke’s apology was apparently so impressive that Stewart settled her claim against her former professor for no more than a fifty-dollar Borders voucher and a new copy of a Webster’s English dictionary. Curiously, the offense, which in most circumstances would have been enough to end an academic career, served to inflate Schenke’s reputation. A rare and impressive link was made between the man and the theory he propounded; he had, by his own flawed actions, proved that it had potential.

The Schenke Doctrine was already the talk of international diplomatic circles when his book,
Grievance Settlement Within a Global Context
, was published a year later. Diplomats and politicians liked the sound of Penitential Engagement. They wanted the chance to show that they cared. Schenke’s argument that the apology could only be taken as genuine if it was completely separated from the size of any compensation payments eventually made also appealed. It made mollification the primary responsibility, from which all others flowed. Now their job was to make sure everybody felt okay about themselves. When one critic argued that the Schenke Doctrine was “merely an attempt to bring the values of Oprah and Ricki Lake to the negotiating table,” the professor was defiant. “Perhaps we could all learn a little more from daytime TV,” he said.

In the closing chapters of his book he proposed the foundation of an Office of Apology under the auspices of the United Nations. In Appendix 1, he published the six guiding laws under which all international apologies should be offered:

Appendix 1:

Professor Thomas Schenke's Six Laws of Grievance Settlement Within a Global Framework

1. Never apologize for anything for which you are not sorry.
   
2. Never apologize for anything for which you are not responsible.
   
3. Only apologize to those who have suffered the hurt (see point
   i
   below), or their legitimate heirs.
   
4. Never link the wording of an apology to the shape, scale, or form of any settlement that may follow (see point
   iv
   below).
   
5. Never blame others.
   
6. There is no statute of limitations on a hurt.
   

Schedule of sublaws, definitions, and impicatory conditions

• i)
  Hurt
  —the term, recognized in international law, for any physical, mental, or moral injury to a person or peoples.
  
• ii)
  Self-definition
  —a hurt is defined as such by those who allege they have suffered the injury (be it physical or mental).
  
• iii)
  Self-direction
  —any people or peoples who have declared themselves a victim of a hurt have the moral right to appoint their representative or representatives, without interference from any outside body.
  
• iv) No apologee may define or assume, from the shape, form, or scale of the apology they have received, the shape, form, or scale of any settlement that may follow.
  

Appendix 2 described the Schenke scale that Will Masters had told me about. It laid out a complex mathematical formula which had been used to calculate the size of reparation and compensation payments that would be made where no apology had been offered for a hurt. Most of these amounts ran to billions of dollars. Alongside them, as a comparison, was the expected figure if an apology had been offered, still using Stewart’s original twenty-three percent figure as a baseline. The gap between the two numbers was described as the Schenke scale differential, of which I would be due point zero zero one percent. I understood that Appendix 2 was no more than an academic exercise; that it was an attempt by the professor to attach some hard numbers to his lofty theories. I already recognized that some apologies might be refused and that others might have no effect whatsoever on the size of the eventual payouts. Still, even with my tenuous grasp on mathematics I could see what all this meant. Most of the Schenke scale differentials amounted to billions of dollars, of which I was being offered a thousandth. This was serious money. For being an emotional mess. For being in touch with the real me. For doing the very thing that had been giving me so much pleasure.

I put the book down and looked over at the two fatly packed suitcases, standing sentry by the living room door, which had been there waiting for me when I got home. I looked at the sudden gaps on the living room shelves, the signs of disengagement from a previous life. It was just as Stephen Forster had said. I had an awful lot to think about.

T
he old Manjari wasn’t going to do it tonight. I needed substantial comfort food, a dish that would fully engage me. Naturally, being British, this meant cooking something Italian.

I heated a little olive oil in a heavy-bottomed iron skillet and, when the first wisps of smoke escaped the surface, sprinkled the pan with flakes of dried chili that fizzed and bubbled in the liquid. I imagined my father standing behind me, watching me as I cooked, as he had done so many times. I could feel the sound of his voice in my chest, a deep and sonorous echo from the past.

“Step back, little one, or the fumes from the chili will choke you.”

I turned away from the skillet for a moment. “I know, Dad. I’ve done this before.”

“Everything takes practice, Marcel.”

“So you always told me.”

“And I’m telling you again.”

“Pancetta now?”

“Yes, now.”

I dropped the fingertip-sized chunks of smoky bacon, with their lush, marshmallow white ribbons of fat, into the pan and spread them around with a wooden spoon. They turned in on themselves as the heat sucked the moisture from the fat and began to brown. On a chopping board I crushed a clove of garlic with the flat of my knife and then I chopped it up.

“Not too soon with the garlic.”

“I know, Dad. I’m just getting it ready.”

“It will scotch if you put it in too soon.”

“I said I’m only getting it ready. And the word’s ‘scorch.’”

“Such a big boy now. He knows so much. What wine are you using?”

“An Australian sauvignon blanc.”

“Australian? Things so bad you couldn’t afford French?”

“You get more for your money with Australian.”

“So spend more money and get French.”

“Dad, things have changed a lot since you were about. Australia makes great wines.”

“If you say so. If you say so. Now with the garlic, Marcel. Now!”

“Don’t bark. I’m onto it.”

I gave the fragments of garlic only thirty seconds in the bubbling oil before adding a third of the bottle of wine, scraping away at the caramelized lumps of bacon and chili on the base of the pan as the liquor went in. I put down the bottle and tipped the spitting, boiling pan of liquid up a few degrees to gain more purchase on a few particularly sticky lumps of pork. Suddenly a sheet of flame, tinged blue at the edges, leapt from the skillet.

“It’s on fire, Dad, it’s on fire!”

“Calmness, little one. The flame is your friend. It is just the alcohol burning away. Let it do its job … there, it has gone.”

“Thanks, Dad. It’s good to have you here.” I threw some coils of butter yellow tagliatelle into a pan of bubbling water.

“What is the fish you bought?”

“Clams. Lovely big ones.”

“Good. You spent money.”

“With seafood anything else is a false economy. Unlike with the wine.”

“Marcel, I believe you on the wine.”

I tipped the shellfish into the skillet, where they tumbled and rolled against each other like so many rounded pebbles in the surf. Immediately they began to open. I shoved a saucepan lid over the top, so that they would steam.

“Now we wait.”

“Yes, Marcel. But there’s time to chop the parsley and the … what are you doing?”

“Grating a little Parmigiano.”

“Parmesan? With shellfish?”

“They work brilliantly together. The Parmesan is a natural source of monosodium glutamate which emphasizes the meatiness of the seafood.”

“What is this monosodium gluty—”

“Glutamate, Dad. It’s a flavor enhancer. A manufactured form is used in Chinese cooking, and with seafood it—”

“Stop, stop. My head is spinning with all this … this … chemistry. When did cooking become such a science? Have I been gone so long?”

“Yes, you have. You’ve been gone far too long.”

It was time. I drained the pasta, retaining just a little of the starchy cooking liquid for the serving dish to keep the ribbons of tagliatelle moving. Then I poured the entire contents of the skillet—crisp shards of pancetta, clams, and the dense, rust-colored cooking liquor—over it all. Next, the green flakes of parsley and the shavings of cheese. Carefully I began to turn the ingredients together so that the pasta became coated with the sauce and the shells became caked with the cheese and over everything were the little flakes of chili that I had started out with.

“It looks beautiful, little one.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

“You haven’t forgotten what I taught you, then.”

“How could I forget?”

I lifted a shell and sucked the soft little mollusk from its hiding place. It tasted of the sea and of the cheese and the wine and at the end came the sudden lift of chili heat.

“It’s good?”

“Very good.” I spooled a few ribbons of pasta onto my fork. “I wish you were able to try this. You’d have liked it very much.” For a minute or two I simply ate, enjoying the all-consuming physicality of the process: the lift and suck of the clams, the spool of the tagliatelle, the slurp of the rich, rounded liquor. I wiped my hands on a paper towel and drank a little of the grassy wine.

“What am I going to do, Dad? Am I going to New York?”

“You’re asking a dead man?”

“Who else do I have to ask?”

“You can’t talk to your … what is her name?”

“Lynne.”

“Lynne. Lynne I think I would have liked. A sensible girl. You can’t ask your Lynne?”

“She’s the one I want to ask. She’s my best friend. I always talk this stuff over with Lynne. But …”

“If you do go it will be the end?”

“Yeah. She’s hardly a disinterested party. Anyway I think it may already be the end. Things haven’t been good lately.”

“No?”

“She thinks I’ve lost it.”

“Have you?”

“I don’t know. I was offered a quarter of a million dollars a year today just to carry on doing what I’ve been doing. And millions of people appear to be obsessed by a video of me that’s flying around the Net. So it can’t be all that bad.”

“It sounds good to me.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

“Sometimes, Marcel, you just have to move on. It happens to us all. It happened to me when I left my family. Now maybe it is happening to you.”

“Do you think so?” I heard the delicate rattle of keys in the front door. “Do you think so, Dad?” But he was gone, and there standing in the living room doorway was Lynne. She looked down sheepishly at her suitcases by the door, as if she had not expected me to come home before she had removed them, and then back up at me apologetically. Her eyes were bloodshot, and her hair fell in tangled folds that were even more unkempt than usual, as though she had been burying her hands in them.

She said, “I didn’t know when you’d be back.”

“Are you hungry? There’s enough here. I could put some in a bowl and—”

“No. It’s okay. I’ve already …” She waved in the direction of the front door, as if there were a table just out of view beyond it. She walked over to a desk and picked up a couple of books, studiously checking the covers before holding them to herself in a way that immediately reminded me of Jennie; not the confident, self-possessed version I had met today, but the more delicate creature from years ago, cowed by the world.

We both opened our mouths to speak at the same time and then shut up.

“You first,” she said.

“No, you.”

She nibbled her bottom lip. “I’m moving out. I think it’s for the best, just until—”

“Where are you going?”

“I’m, er, staying with Luke. Your brother said I could crash at his place until I find somewhere—”

“You don’t have to.”

“No, Marc. I do. We’re not … we’re just
not
, are we?”

“No, I mean you don’t have to because I’m not going to be here. I’ve been offered a job.”

“Oh?”

“The United Nations.”

She tipped her head to one side and fixed me with a look I had seen many times before, the one that, with a sweet, mocking intensity, said: Just what kind of fool are you? For a moment it cut through the embarrassment and the fury which were weighing her down. I told her about the job, about the terms, about the things I was being asked to do. When I was done she stared at me silently for a moment.

“So you’re going to teach the world to eat humble pie?” she said eventually.

“Well, I’ll be based in New York so I suppose I’ll be teaching the world to eat
crow.”

“Do you know any good recipes for crow?”

I laughed. It was a nice feeling. “Apparently I do. I’m told it’s why they want me for the job. I make the best crow pie east of Long Island.”

“First catch your crow—”

“Exactly. First catch your crow.”

She looked around herself, as though the room were suddenly unfamiliar. Until that point I think she had understood why she was bailing out on me. I had disappeared off down my own tight emotional rat hole, and it was a gap into which she was unable to follow. But now this job offer suggested something else. Apparently I hadn’t turned into some maladjusted clown. There was meaning here, a pattern that was to take me on an adventure.

“I was emailed that video of you apologizing to Jennie Sampson this afternoon.”

“Oh.”

She raised her eyebrows as if to say, Yes indeed: Oh!

She said, “I thought it was rather touching, actually.”

“Really?”

“In a buttock-clenchingly embarrassing way.”

“It does have a high buttock-clench quotient, doesn’t it? Still, that’s what they want to pay me for.”

She attempted a smile and said, “I’m pleased for you, Marc, really—”

“The thing is, I won’t need the flat because I won’t be living here, and you don’t really want to stay at Luke’s. He was never the tidiest of boys. Have you looked under his fridge? There are life-forms growing under there. Whole families of microbacteria. There’s more culture under Luke’s fridge than there is on his bookshelves. Seriously, he’s—”

She allowed herself a full grin. “Stop it, Marc. When are you going?”

I shrugged. “Soon, I think. They want me in New York as soon as possible, so …”

Lynne played with the keys that she still held in her free hand. “Look, maybe I’ll just hang on to these and come back when you’ve gone.”

“You don’t have to go at all.”

“I think I do, honey. It’s better this way. Give you some space. Give both of us some space.” And then: “I’m pleased for you. It’s a good thing, this, I’m sure.”

“We’re
a good thing.”

Suddenly she looked unbearably sad. I wanted to reach across and embrace her, but the distance between us was too great. “Will you come and see me in the States? Maybe I could cook you one of my special crow pies.”

“I’d like that,” she said, but from the droop of her shoulders and the way she turned her gaze from me to the books she was holding, it was obvious Lynne did not like the idea at all.

Too often we only identify the crucial points in our lives in retrospect. At the time we are too absorbed in the fetid detail of the moment to spot where it is leading us. But not this time. I was experiencing one of my dad’s deafening moments. If my life could be understood as a meal of many courses (and let’s be honest, much of it actually was), then I had finished the starters and I was limbering up for the main event. So far, of course, I had made a stinking mess of it. I had spilled the wine. I had dropped my cutlery on the floor and sprayed the fine white linen with sauce. I had even spat out some of my food because I didn’t like the taste of it.

But it doesn’t matter because, look, here come the waiters. They are scraping away the debris with their little horn and steel blades, pulled with studied grace from the hidden pockets of their white aprons. They are laying new tablecloths, arranging new cutlery, placing before me great domed wine glasses, newly polished to a sparkle. There are more dishes to come, more flavors to try, and this time I will not spill or spit or drop or splash. I will not push the plate away from me, the food only half eaten. I am ready for everything they are preparing to serve me. Be in no doubt; it will all be fine.