Manhood

When I was 14 years old, one night my Dad made me go to bed at 7:30 and told me that the next morning I would start on the path to manhood.

The next morning, he woke me up at 4:30 am, told me to put on jeans and a sweatshirt, and dropped me off in a field with 15 other confused teenagers.

For the next two weeks, we detasseled corn for $1.50 an hour. It was my first job. It was over before I had time to ponder any existential questions about the meaning of work, over before the repetition of waking up at the crack of dawn could start eating away at my soul. These lessons would come later. The detasseling season is a thankfully short one.

Corn is itchy, and in the morning very wet with dew. You walk down endless rows of corn pulling tassels from the corn stalks and dropping them to the ground. After your clothes become drenched, you ride in the back of a pickup to the next field. If you're a pitifully thin Curt Jimenez, you shiver, and close your eyes, and dream of a future filled with fast cars and baseball. Miles away from the endless rows of corn tassels, and the supervisors telling you to work faster and don't miss any damn stalks, you worthless pieces of excrement.

I laugh now, because I thought of this first job the other day, and thought of how I never asked why. Why detassel corn? What is it all about? I guess I never really knew until I looked up the answer just now. It's about hybridization, if you want to know the truth.

On my second day on the job, I asked the supervisor if they needed any extra help. I told him that Tony wasn't as worthless as I was, that he would probably be the best worker he'd ever had. Tony rode his bike over to our house the next morning and we rode out to the fields.

He was a damn good worker. The bosses let him alone, which meant something. He was quiet, but everyone was quiet. We were young and cold and tired.

"Mr. Jimenez," Tony told my dad on the ride home, "that's the most ridiculous thing I've ever been a part of." He didn't come back.

When I bought a brand new baseball mitt with my summer earnings, I was disappointed when Tony proved to still be a much better fielder than me with his old hand-me-down glove that was barely holding itself together. "Good thing you worked so hard for that new glove, Curt!" he said, after I made a particularly egregious error. "It looks real pretty on you!"

In honor of these odd memories, I bought some sweet corn this morning from a local farmers market, and roasted it with some jalapenos. I shaved the kernels off the cob and threw them in the food processor. I threw in a lot of black pepper. I made Roasted Corn and Jalapeno Butter.

It was spicy. It burned the tip of my tongue, the roof of my mouth, the back of my throat. It was forgivingly sweet, though, too, and it was the perfect butter for today. A good way to get your day going. With some pain.