A Thanksgiving memory

Republished from Kentucky Lantern

Frankfort’s small army of state workers, fresh from four days off for Thanksgiving on Dec. 1, 1997, slipped from their cars in normal morning sun and almost as one looked to the sky with twisted, stricken faces.

The Capitol Annex parking lot seemed misted with some indelible flesh-rot that despised humankind. It wasn’t just a smell but a Presence. It sucked life from you; your soul departed and you knew it would not return. Your eyes glazed toward opaque. You could not breathe but for shallow, burning gasps that presaged death rattle.

Of all possible causes, you wouldn’t at this moment imagine a turkey.

Yet. Over there, 30 feet yonder, a maintenance lad in a white haz-mat suit with a stout black bag and a muscular garbage picker crept toward a thing on the Annex lawn. It looked like a yellowed stew of plastic and flesh. It seemed to glow and quiver. Some brave parking-lot sufferer managed to croak out toward the creeping lad, “Dear God, son … What … Why?”

“Some a-hole threw a turkey on the lawn,” the lad said, in a voice that echoed death. It was a sentence as final and direct as, “They launched the nuclear missiles.”

When he’d kissed his wife goodbye that morning, the young man had no clue what this day would bring. He was about to be a hero. He retrieved the turkey. He lost his sense of smell. “Like starin’ at the Sun and goin’ blind,” he told the Workers Comp Board weeks later, I heard. It was a metaphor nailed down tight.

So this is a story I’ve been badgered to tell since then. It started when Rep. Jim Callahan of Southgate gave me a Thanksgiving turkey.

Jim was House Democratic Caucus chairman. In the happy event he liked you, you could have no finer friend in the stinging spin-drift of the Kentucky legislature. If he didn’t, he was one of the few people who could and would get you fired. A man to be trusted and feared. A perfect politician.

I had just lately and reluctantly been put in charge of the Legislative Research Commission’s Public Information Office, a communications shop whose future was in doubt because of some early Republican restiveness. They didn’t find the office deferential enough. It likely wasn’t.

I made it my strategic purpose in life to become indispensable to Jim, so he (and the House Dems, then lazy with a comfortable majority) would protect me against the new restive Republican hordes. I succeeded with Jim, the caucus obeyed his instructions re: me, and in late 1997 Jim started rewarding me for my many good works with appreciated tokens like holiday meats.

The day before this particular Thanksgiving — five days before the maintenance lad’s heroics — Jim’s lanky assistant presented me with my first turkey, laid the sweaty sucker on my desk, bagged in plastic, pristine, frozen and promptly forgotten.

Forgotten, that is to say, in my windowless, steam-heated office, 80 degrees at least, with four black holidays awaiting it and a billion turkey-flesh bacteria awakening to yawn, scratch themselves, and eat.

Flash forward: 9:27 p.m., Payton Residence, Louisville. Sat. Nov. 29.

Quick scene:

“Aw, MAN! NO!”

“What?”

“I forgot the damn TURKEY!”

“What turkey?”

“The one Jim C. gave me three days ago that’s sitting on my desk like a bomb about to explode, if it hasn’t already! I have to get it.’

(Indistinct squabbling).

Even quicker scene:

“You’re not driving a hundred miles round-trip to Frankfort in the dead of night to retrieve a turkey that’s wrapped in plastic and perfectly fine. No.”

Note to young husbands: There are many days coming in your marriage when you simply look at your wife’s slant eyes and surrender. I surrendered. Fifty miles east, the turkey-flesh bacteria ate and ate.

The rest of the weekend was like waiting for biopsy results. Monday morning I drove to work early, dreading what I’d find, hoping against hope the turkey hadn’t exploded but otherwise wanting to get things cleaned up and tended to as best I could before anyone else arrived. Pretty sure I was first in the parking lot slammed by the Presence, the living thing I’d birthed.

But hope withstood its first assault. As a Frankfort native, I was accustomed to its distilleries, specifically the smell of its distilleries burning mash. The signature smell of the Kentucky River valley. In many ways, Frankfort is a smell. It’s not necessarily a good smell; many find it rank. But all share in it. Every redneck boy, every doctor’s son, every lawyer’s daughter and governor’s privileged kid walks out on fall mornings into its egalitarian embrace. It is hillbilly Marxism: Share the stink.

So for no more than half a second I thought/hoped this stink might be mash. For the second half-second I thought, “Whew, did they throw some rotting sheep cadavers into the mash vats this morning?” Then of course I knew: Turkey. Hissing from my office. Into the Annex HVAC system. Leaking out the old building’s windows. Filling the river valley. Soon to make me the laughing stock of Frankfort. Republicans would say this proved my liberalism.

I try to be relatively accurate in memoirish accounts like this (facts are critically important until they interfere with a good laugh). So I’ll admit the next half hour is a blur that resists disinterment.

The grotesque bird was still on my desk, its plastic bag ripped open by the force of its eruption. I recall an echoey dripping sound onto the floor, a yellowish oozing slime, thick like molasses, that seemed alive itself (remember, it teemed with a billion chomping necrobiomes). It looked like some bad special-effects alien from the first season of Star Trek in 1966.

I cannot remember how I managed to scoop up the carcass itself, make some quick impossible decision about disposing of it, and rush it down the still-deserted Annex hall to the bronze entry doors, where I flung it mightily onto the front lawn and the Presence began spreading in earnest, as did its legend.

At some point the heroic haz-mat kid was called, he gave the remains their final scoop, yet the smell snaked through the Capitol campus (HVAC circulation and filters are eternal, and the river valley itself a thermal trap). Many workers went home for an extra day or two of Thanksgiving celebration. Every sentence at home began “You won’t believe…”

Me, I suffered the derision I deserved, and have at least once a year for 27 years been hectored into telling “Scott’s Turkey Story” to wildly laughing, knee-slapping audiences. I’ve hated it every time, knowing they’re not exactly laughing with me, and sworn for many years I’d “write it up” and just hand the sucker out at every such request.

So now I’ve done that. Here you are. Don’t ask again.

But.

Coda: There is more to the story, and it’s good, but it doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to a fellow Capitol staffer who worked a mysterious deskless job for people who seemed powerful. His name recalls that of a major world capital. He would “borrow” your desk without asking if he needed one. Jim Callahan gave him a turkey every year too.

This is a grand fellow, as all in politics must be, but a bit absent-minded, as most in politics are. To his credit though, and unlike me, he miraculously got his gifted bird to his car that afternoon. Threw it in the trunk. Promptly forgot it.

A week or so later, troubled by some mystery problem with the car — couldn’t quite put his finger on it, snap, snap! — he dropped it off at the repair shop.

From memory:

FRANKFORT STATE JOURNAL

Police Reports 12/8/97

Police responded at 8:19 a.m. to call from Willie and Joe’s Auto Service on East Main of a suspected dead body, decomposed in trunk of customer’s vehicle. Officers opened trunk, discovered turkey.

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