The Hottest Days in August
Words by Joshua Carlucci / Photos by Robert Jordan Finney
San Joaquin Valley, California, 2005
It looked like blood.
Curdling, stewing, bubbling blood — A bucket’s worth, a sour pot of it, torrenting plumes over the old gas range. The smell was acidic and not beautiful. But the complexity of it fascinated me so I kept inhaling it, obsessively yet shamefully so. I got up on the stool and put my face in the steam.
She had her work cut out for her; the harvest was good this year.
My great grandmother’s name was Rose and she tended a thicket of those selfsame flowers in her yard, the same way she tended the blood-red pot of tomatoes stewing into sauce each week of summer, the way she tended to me: patiently, with care. Even as I drew red blood from skinned knees, even as I got into the old Cutty Sark collecting dust behind the bar, even as I bemoaned her black and white stories on the tube while I waited for my mother to finish her second shift of the day at the Mexican joint across town. She waited and stirred and cooked and cooked and cooked.
We didn’t have much in the Valley but what we did have we had plenty of. Water from the canals, except in the drought years. Almonds in late autumn, citrus in the winter, asparagus and garlic in the spring. Melons and stone fruit came round in the early summer months, tomatoes in the second half that bled all the way into cotton season in October. That’s when you started seeing the trucks rolling down the highway. That was the best time of year.
My uncle and godfather hauled tomatoes for a living. He worked his ass off his whole life to get a Peterbilt 589 with our last name painted on the doors. He was the closest thing I had to a father growing up: Unemotional but generous, gruff but kind when deserved, stern but fair. He stepped in for my mother when I stepped out of line, which was often and never hesitated to give me hell for lying or mouthing off. He insisted I be a man of my word, even in my single digits. He rarely hugged me, preferring to teach me how to shake hands like a man. His grip was unflinchingly powerful and crushing throughout my childhood and I worked and worked at trying to match it, my smooth knuckles folding like cardboard beneath the calluses of his palm ‘til I got to my late teens. My way of trying to say thank you when he brought us tomatoes.
My mother and I ate their blood-red guts with salt and olive oil and their juices streamed down our fingers, making tributaries at our wrists. They were big things—oblong and fat, asymmetrical—with a microscopic dust coating their smooth sunset skin, their vinecaps green like money. They smelled like roses and made the back of my tongue swell with saliva like rare steak. In the bone-dry winters we cracked jars of my great grandmother’s tomato sauce and brought them back to life—pasta water and spaghetti—on the gas range that helped heat the house. Those tomatoes gave us spirit in the months and years when everything else—landlords, work, death and its actors—wanted to snatch it from us. Those tomatoes gave us pride in being Californian even when the rest of the state had long forgotten us. Those tomatoes gave us shelter.
New Orleans, Louisiana, 2019
Two years after my great-grandmother died I found myself in New Orleans looking for God in all the wrong places. Running. Somewhere between a kaleidoscope of coke and booze I found a woman who wanted me to live and wouldn’t let me push her away. She was Italian, too, but not with the “-American” attached to the end. I made what was as close to my great-grandmother’s sauce as I could remember but with short ribs. I sat her at my shitty kitchen table and served her rigatoni with it. She told me it was good, but not Italian-Italian, and we argued about it. And then I knew I loved her. I told her so and she said it back. We were both looking for home.
She was tough on me all the ways I was soft, soft on me all the ways I was rough. In the pot and in my head, I was doing too much. She knew it all along. She loved me patiently while I figured it out myself. While I busted my ass learning to cook. Learning to love her the right way. Learning to love myself. All from the people in a city who loved me in spite of myself.
One day, after a good, shit-kicking service, the chef I worked for put a Creole tomato—grown in the South Louisiana alluvium, rich from Mississippi River water—in my mouth for the first time. A fat wheel slice with spokes like Cadillac rims. Just Maldon salt and olive oil. Suddenly, I was back in California, shaking my uncle’s hand too damn tight, eating too damn fast at my mother’s dinner table, making my great grandmother’s heart work too damn hard.
I bought a box from the purveyor and brought them home to her. We cut them in hunks and ate them with stracciatella di bufala. Didn’t talk much—just laughed. Laughed so hard we buckled over the sink, licking the seedy tomato blood and salty cream streaming down our fingers like pink gold.
On the hottest days in August the hurricane rains were thick in the air. Hot and thick like blood. The water was up to the gills of the cars in the street, but we were way up here. I looked up at the sky and put my face in the steam.
I had my work cut out for me; the harvest was good this year.
Joshua Carlucci is a writer from Los Banos, California. He worked in restaurants for 10 years, cutting his teeth in kitchens across the United States. His work, which has appeared and is forthcoming in Gravy, Southern Living, Eating Well, Redivider, Edible, The Daily Memphian, and others, is concerned with the tendrils of the food and folks in all facets of unbridled life.