Back in 2000 I had a little tiny website and I wrote this piece about Thanksgiving. Over the years, I’ve discovered that I really don’t like the taste of turkey, so my current position is “anything but.” However, it’s still a funny topic, so here y’go, friends.

Way out there at the end of this week looms one of the ugliest things in the world: leftovers. Luckily, I shan’t be the one to eat them. It’s not that I have anything against the remainders of the Thanksgiving feast (yes, my non-US friends, tomorrow is Thanksgiving here in the still-headless United States), it’s simply that I have too many memories of the perpetual turkey.

I like turkey the first time around, but once it’s been recycled into 23 turkey sandwiches, turkey soup, turkey divan, turkey hash, turkey pot pie, turkey cobbler, and turkey a la mode, I’m starting to resent its presence, like a lazy guest who simply won’t pack up and move to a hotel. Despite its annoying habit of hanging about, I feel a fond nostalgia for the old bird. Many strange moments in my life have been punctuated with turkey.

One year, the 50-pound me devoured a two-pound drumstick with much defensive snarling because it was the first solid food I’d been able to swallow in a week. As a teenager, I once punctuated a tirade of my mother’s by spewing turkey soup across the dining room. She should have removed the bones…. A garlic-stuffed turkey drove away the rats living in the basement, but the guests loved it. Of course, they may have loved it more for its effect on the rats…. A turkey cooked in a bag flopped into a compromising position on the carving tray and was immediately christened “slut bird.”

That was an interesting bird…. It was the first turkey my college roommate and I had ever attempted on our own. First came the negotiation….

“How big a turkey should we get?”

“Well, not too big: the oven’s not that large.”

“I think the oven’s just fine.” Roomate opens door, sticks her head and shoulders inside. “See?”

“Well, we know the turkey can’t be much larger than your head, then. At least we have something to measure against.”

“Oh, ha-ha.”

We did look rather silly in the frozen food aisle comparing turkeys to our heads. We finally figured out how much the turkey should weigh by calling the turkey hotline and asking them what they thought we should do.

“How big is your head?” the operator asked rather incredulously.

“Uhmmm…. kind of head-sized, I guess.”

“Plus shoulders.”

So, with head and shoulders, we got a 23-pound turkey. This may have been a mistake.

Then came the preparation.

The operator at the turkey hotline suggested cooking the turkey in a roasting bag at a low heat for a long time.

But the turkey didn’t want to thaw.

We stuffed it in the bag and into the flimsy disposable roaster anyway and shoved it into the amazing shrinking oven, which suddenly was a tight fit for the soon-to-be main course. I’d still swear that turkey was only about twice the size of my roommate’s head…. Her head must be bigger than I realized.

Exhausted, we went to bed on Wednesday night, assuming that the turkey would be happily roasting away while we slept.

And it did. It thawed at an amazing pace and began to produce turkey juice…

which overflowed the bag…

and the roaster…

and spilled onto the oven floor…

and caught on fire…

and woke us up when the smoke alarm began to scream at seven in the morning.

My roommate’s boyfriend leapt out of bed to defend us from the evil, burning turkey juice, and ran into the kitchen, terrorizing the cats, who were wandering around wondering what that delicious smell was….

Snatching open the oven door, the Boyfriend was visciously gassed by the burning turkey juice. Holding his breath, he grabbed the potholders and tried to remove the turkey from the oven.

Now, this was one of those above-the-stove type of ovens, so he had to pull the boiling turkey out through the flames at face-height and lower it carefully to the range top.

The evil turkey spat bubbling hot turkey juice on his arms and tried desperately to launch itself out of the flimsy disposable roasting pan. But the Boyfriend was made of stern stuff and, despite these assaults, the world’s most evil turkey was wrestled to the range top, bubbling furiously and overflowing the viscous juice everywhere.

Hot turkey juice dribbled onto the stove and onto the floor. Hungry cats darted forward to lap up the steaming stuff as the Boyfriend did a dance of burned-footed fury to the sink.

“Damn this turkey! It’s a good thing we’re going to eat it, or I’d have to kill it!”

Carefully, we women stuck our heads around the corner of the kitchen doorway and stayed far away, until the fire was put out with baking soda. My roommate dragged the Boyfriend off to the bathroom to tend the burns while I mopped up juice and chased cats. Then mopped up the cats.

Then we carefully removed most of the juice with one of those leaky and ridiculous sucking-up tubes with the yellow bulb on the end, folded the now-ripped bag over the turkey and shoved it and its
treacherous pan back into the oven.

Amazingly, we managed to prepare all the rest of the food for the feast, in spite of the glowering presence of the world’s most evil turkey. It was going to be quite a feed.

The guests arrived bearing a ham and three side dishes as well as one box and two bottles of wine and two six-packs of beer. The Roomate and I fell on the alcohol gratefully, despite the fact it was only 1 o’clock in the afternoon when it arrived.

And when we presented the turkey to my roommate’s father for carving, it flopped down, spreading its legs in the most wanton and outrageous fashion and slumped there like Theda Bara doing her vampish best.

He took one look and threw the sharp and sparkling knife down in disgust. “I can’t carve that! Just look at it! The meat is falling right off the bones!”

My roommate and I just laughed, kept our comments behind our teeth, hoisted our wine glasses, and went outside, leaving “slut-bird” to the un-tender mercies of two forks and a butter knife.

At least we didn’t have to watch the undressing of the dressing.

And had our revenge by eating the evil bird while sitting on the terrace of our Long Beach apartment, overlooking the ocean on a balmy Southern California Thanksgiving day, drinking wine and making jokes and laughing at the adventures of “slut-bird.”

Man, we must have been drunk.