Nervous Laughter
A Conversation with Martheaus Perkins
“To the Honorable Judge Donovan and Parole Board” belongs to a larger lineage of incisive writing by Martheaus Perkins, much of which I’ve had the pleasure to hear firsthand. Most often this was sanctioned within the walls of the department kitchen where we, as graduate students, would lounge between classes or share work. The first thing I ever heard him read was a poem wherein the speaker brings a white girl with a fat ass home for Thanksgiving. I vaguely remember Martheaus prompting the crowd, evoking, perhaps unknowingly, Elaine Stritch with her famous deadpan command in “The Ladies Who Lunch”: everybody laugh.
Everyone laughed. It’s hard not to when you encounter his work, whether or not that’s what he intended. In fact—as we discuss in this interview—it rarely is. Martheaus belongs to an increasingly rare category of writers who approach the underbellies of both the world and themselves with a finely-sharpened scalpel.
It was a joy to talk with Martheaus virtually about his recent story, but also about soul food, Black culture, incarceration in America, and chasing down the stories that scare you most.
Jessika Bouvier: I would love to hear more about how these two ideas came together: food trucks combined with death row. It’s also technically an epistolary, to throw in a third leg.
Martheaus Perkins: This piece came through doom scrolling. I was watching short-form videos and saw someone making a tier list of serial killers' last meals. Of course, I felt offended because the algorithm got me—this is what this guy is interested in. It immediately felt so dark and funny to see a video in which someone is scrolling through little pictures of serial killers' faces and ranking them as ‘S tier’ or ‘B tier’ based on whatever they chose for their last meal. Image-wise, what I'm looking at, removed of context, is pretty light and happy, this [content creator] all happy-go-lucky in front of food. The sort of unspoken preamble to this food on display being the story of how these serial killers mutilated or killed their victims. I just thought it was such a weird mix, and I wanted to write into that.
Eventually the writing lended itself to finding as many weird mixes as possible. For instance, the story talks about racial politics, which is a subject that I try to pay close attention to, and how it connects with food. From my perspective, Black culture’s connection to food is one that's very filled with joy and happiness and a sense of nostalgia for home. I wanted to see how many—sorry to use a pun—weird flavors I could find when it came to kind of mixing these things. Mostly, I was trying to be guided by whatever sparked my curiosity. Food trucks seemed like such an interesting thing to own. I couldn't imagine what the day in the life of someone who operated a food truck would be. The story gave me an opportunity to have that vantage point for a little bit, even if it's a particular kind of food truck that I don't think exists. I couldn't imagine what it would be like to not just prepare food for criminals, but criminals who are notorious for committing heinous acts, and traveling to do so. The idea of: today I'm gonna wake up, I'm gonna go to a prison, and I'm gonna make chicken sandwiches, or: I'm gonna make chili cheesesteaks for someone who I know killed children. I was interested in the kind of mindsets this occupation would require.
JB: I definitely saw those influences at play. I do agree there's a lot of pop-cultural fascination around last meals—there's a whole talk show based around what celebrities’ last meals would be, which feels gimmicky at the surface-level, in that you have to isolate the idea from the circumstances it was originally born of.
Going off what you were saying about Blackness and the inextricable relationship with food, it's obviously also a huge part of the piece. The lens through which we see it is so interesting because the narrator—I suppose it's up for interpretation, but it certainly seemed to me like he's robbed of that relationship in a huge way, because the only proxy he has to that intersection [of Black culture and food] is the cookbook his late mother leaves behind. All the meals that he is told to care about, is told to cook, and the way in which he's told to do it are all filtered through the lens of his white father. I’d love to hear more about how you thought about this dynamic.
MP: I'll say I’m so proud of my people for how consistent we are with naming things. Soul food is such a poetic and deep concept name. I think of what it means to have cooking that can somehow express, traverse, communicate . . . Soul food is a great example of that premise. It's such a multidimensional idea.
When I'm in a room with chitlins and collard greens and a plateful of ham hocks, I'm not eating at all, but I'm still at least happy, you know? The feeling, the steam, the smell, the environment is so homeful to me. Trying to jam that into a place within our country we would rather not look at, literally a place that we have been so uninterested in, these people who we’ve excised from society, from existing—what would it mean to bring soul food to the carceral state, or to death row, which is even more bleak and low in light?
The father makes this food, but ostensibly lacks a connection to soul food. And his son, by extension, is the same. Their connection was severed [when their wife/mother died]. They’re trying to replicate this food without the historical weight by way of a recipe book, which also seems like part fiction, right? As a Black person, even though I wrote the story, it seems to me far-fetched that a white guy and his son, who's only ever been raised by him, can manage to make such authentic soul food. That kind of questions what we mean by ‘authentic’ within that scenario.
JB: There was tension also for me in the mother character. Her legacy is parsed through the cookbook, which is the lens through which we view soul food in this piece. Even though we don't necessarily know why, the father and son are able to infuse enough ‘soul’ into the food, based on her recipes alone, that the Regulars, who they view as lesser-than passerby, are able to feel that love communicated despite the father and son’s dissociation from its origins. It was so interesting to read how the mother character is iconized and romanticized and, as a result, lost. There’s this wonderful line where the narrator says: “I wish I loved her more, but I hardly recall her voice. I only have what Daddy told me about her.” His memories are supplanted by the memories of his father, which get funneled through the cookbook itself. The Regulars are able to ‘feel’ the soul of the mother character even as her husband and son become increasingly separate from her.
MP: Storytelling is scary as hell because, you know, I'm stumbling into things listening to you that I hadn't even thought about. They seem intentional, but really weren't. For instance, the story is told through a very biased narrator. The other large part of the story is the father, who's usually on the proverbial screen. Neither are trustable; they’re both unreliable narrators. I don't think I did this intentionally, but what we're discussing with regard to nostalgia and the fact that these characters consider their cooking helpful and good and soulful . . . it could very well just be their bias. After the father sells the restaurant [Melting Pot] and they set out on the food truck, the quality of the food falters. It could be trumped up from their perspective, because the food is not just representing this large political aim to them, but it's also representing the only thing that they have left from a wife or a mother. I didn't really intend that, but, I don't know, it's interesting that there is a reading of the story where the food doesn't need to be that good, right? The food doesn't need to be this extravagant, beautiful, magical kind of thing. These feelings could just be projected on the food because of how resonant it has been for those two characters.
I will say that within this question is a kind of mini question that I had while writing, which is: How can we make soul food travel? Is it possible? Soul food has history, going back to the very early histories of African Americans within this country, making food, and poor people, too, and people of color, making food from non-desirable cuts of meat, out of scarcity. So, when determining authenticity, does that mean getting as close as we can get to those original recipes? Well, no, that doesn't seem to be the case. There's been innovations on it. Is it just being cooked by a Black hand? That doesn't seem to be the case either. It seems like you can put white people in a soul food restaurant and have authentic soul food. Is it who’s eating it? For example, can you have soul food prepared for people on Wall Street? If it’s prepared for them, and they’re the ones occupying the room, then you could argue the ‘soul’ has been lost. I don't know where that question of authenticity goes, or what the answer is. Ostensibly it's a cultural question, so it's not just me as one person to answer.
JB: I agree with you, it’s a poignant question. It’s interesting that you're bringing up the receiver in that instance. I hadn't even thought about that. Imagining a room full of Wall Streeters eating yams and mac and cheese—that brings up a lot of cognitive dissonance for me.
On a more technical level, I wanted to ask about how you approached the food writing in this piece. Growing up white in the South, I grew up with proximity to soul food. I ate a lot of it, my family cooks a lot of it, but some of these recipes I'd never heard of. Some felt distinctly 70s. Were you consulting blogs or old cookbooks, or are these just recipes you're familiar with?
MP: I tried to divide the way I wrote about food along the lines of what they are serving to those who are on death row, and what the characters serve to themselves or to Regulars. I wanted that divide to be based on fact. The meals within the narrative being eaten by people who have real names, who really did walk amongst us, are accurate: John Wayne Gacy, Eileen Wuornos, and the others mentioned. All those meals were real. In fact, the only times they aren’t completely real are when I had to omit some foods because the sentences were getting too long. I was like, well, I guess I don't need to add that he had both Mountain Dew and tea. I'll just put that he had tea.
The food that the Regulars eat, and what the father and the son cook in-scene—I wanted those pieces to be larger-than-life. I wanted their food to err closer to fiction, because the story then became about the blend between actual facts (the serial killers’ meals), and a more fictive, imaginative eating. But the funny thing is I think they kind of met in the middle because of how ostentatious these food orders were on death row.
As far as where I found the recipes, I have some old cookbooks, and my university archives old cookbooks as well. I would look through the table of contents—I wasn't in the kitchen experimenting or anything—and stop over what sounded interesting to my ear, what would make a sentence pop. There were moments where I looked into recipes that acted as pastiches of the 70s or the 80s as a way to tell time within the story.
One of the reasons why fidelity to the death row orders was so interesting, as you alluded to earlier, is because of this interest in the meals. I think there’s a little bit of the true crime microcosmos at play here, in that we impose upon these details all kinds of meaning and storytelling as a way to make sense of people, or gain some insight. In other words, we're trying to read these people's orders as a way to add to their mythology. But it's a weird place to add mythology, right? It's one thing to investigate what these people did for a living to survive, but does knowing that John Wayne Gacy liked fried chicken really add anything to the mythology, or help us better understand his motives? He owned several KFC franchises, he was a wealthy man, and that might help us understand how he was able to get away with his crimes more so than what he ate on his last day.
I didn't feel the need to add fiction to the death row orders because I thought they were so resonant within themselves. One of the most resonant last meal requests is from Eileen Wuornos. There is a long history of how elaborate these orders can get, but she declined a last meal and ordered only a cup of black coffee. This is a cold hard fact, but we can impose so much on it. Was it a fuck you? Was it because Eileen Wuornos didn’t trust the people making the food? Was it just because it’s what she did for every day of her life and she was trying to find some normalcy on her final day? This kind of projection is one of the dangers of the true crime genre. I have no idea [why she ordered this], and I will never have any idea, and that’s why this mythology keeps us, because these questions have no exits.
JB: This is why I’m so resistant to the true crime genre. They’re not on my algorithm, but I know the content farm, as it were, transforms these, like, legacy murderers who were executed, or people who evaded arrest, into vehicles of storytelling. I don’t know if it’s a way of establishing some connection to humanity, which in itself feels like an oxymoron, considering the people they killed and their methods of doing so. I was trying to think of other examples of culture where we do this, and, weirdly, thought of world-class athletes. Societally, we study their routines, their eating habits, their superstitions, as if replicating them or analyzing them somehow reveals a sliver of the baser self we don't have access to otherwise, or helps us evoke them.
All that to say, I was interested in the story's playfulness and whimsy when it came to the food writing, and all the questions it brings up about how we interact with other peoples’ tastes.
MP: Yeah, and how we try to make food more than it is, maybe. In a way that’s what the last meal feels like. It’s a sort of image or metaphor from the state. Like, why the last meal? It doesn’t quite make sense. You eat your last meal, then a couple of hours before the food digests, you’re killed. It's symbolic of, ideally, a humanity on the part of the state. It’s a courtesy. To me, these symbols strip away the more practical aspects of food, which is either for substance or for cultural exchange. Instead it brings it into this strange metaphorical space where food doesn't feel authentic.
For instance, when I was writing it, I didn't feel hungry. I was writing about food in a wholly symbolic way, instead of a way that I would typically want to write about food, tethered to cultural exchange or making it sound appetizing.
JB: What you're saying about the death row meal being a symbol of the state highlights another irony; the only semi-equivalent I can think of are state-funded soup kitchens. They’re often literal symbols of state charity, yet they’re given access to the worst quality foods. They almost never have access to fresh produce. They do the best they can to serve as many people as possible in their communities. We haven't settled on what the definition of soul food is in this conversation, but if the broader definition is any food that seeks to nourish, from the heart or from the soul—to juxtapose that with the opulence of a last meal . . . Like you said, what is the function of that? It does feel indicative of what the state's real thought on human life is.
MP: Yes, yes. Around 27 states have the death penalty, and there's different variations of how a death row last meal would be conducted. I think 12 of the 27 no longer do the last meal. So even if we track it symbolically, the courtesies that the state offers to death row inmates are diminishing.
Actually, this made me think of something that I'm kind of scared the story perpetuates. If I was confronted by the story, something I would bring up to the author (as if he weren’t me) is that I would hate to represent death row as always in conjunction with serial killers and nasty murderers, because there are many death row inmates who are posthumously exonerated. I was wary of writing an instance of giving a meal to someone who is then posthumously exonerated. What would happen if the state acknowledged they killed a man who didn’t deserve to die, and the only “comfort” was, well, at least his last meal was KFC. I don’t know what that would have done to the story.
Personally, as someone who doesn't believe in the death penalty, the symbolic nature of the death row meal is perfectly incoherent, because I think the practice [of state-sanctioned execution] is incoherent. We certainly get it wrong enough. Someone in Texas can be killed for a crime that, in California, they wouldn’t die for. It's so strange, and even this small kindness [of the last meal] is slowly going away.
Within the story, there’s this character—well, he’s a real person, his last name is Brewer. He and another man dragged a man named James Byrd Jr. to death in Jasper, Texas. I knew this story before I started researching for this piece because my hometown of Center, Texas is about 20 minutes away from Jasper. This particular man, Brewer, ordered this extremely extensive meal. To give it an image, he ordered the amount of food that a small restaurant would need in a day. He didn't eat a bite. He said he wasn't really hungry. His symbolic return to the symbolic gesture of the state, right? Fuck you.
Now, of course, I think Brewer is an asshole, but it's interesting that because of his action, he actually led to Texas abandoning the last meal offer. This was in 2011. The state was finally confronted by this negotiation of practical expense, of labor and material spent on someone who, in a few hours, was going to die, and the symbolic nature of the last meal was revealed to be pretty useless. How the state interacts with this very small thing gives us insight into how the carceral system interacts with human beings, and how it really is a place of horror and confusion, if anything.
JB: I'm glad you called attention to the fact that, even when we're casually talking about it in this instance, I have the tendency to only refer to the most infamous among death row inmates, which I’ve heard reflected in common parlance. Many inmates get exonerated posthumously, as you’ve mentioned, or, increasingly, and as the story references, there are huge social media campaigns one or two weeks out from an inmates’ execution date calling for their exoneration. Sometimes they're successful, and sometimes they're not, but it begs the question of: Where was this support beforehand? What took so long for this person’s forthcoming death to matter to other people? I think you do allude to these complications in the story, but I'm glad that you took time to talk more about it here, to call out how tempting it is to reduce death row inmates to their most infamous, when that's not the case.
To make a hard pivot: I'm curious if you find the process of writing fiction very different from writing poetry. You're obviously a very successful poet and essayist.
MP: A lot of ink has been spilled on the genre delineations.They're interesting debates. To be honest with you, when I'm sitting in front of the thing that I write with (either my journal or a computer), what it feels like to write poetry versus fiction versus nonfiction are very minor, if at all, differences within me. Ultimately, I am looking at a sentence, and I'm trying to make the sentence interesting. The same is true of image.
For me, genres are communal agreements, or communal acceptances, or historical understandings of the tradition at hand. It doesn't necessarily feel different to write a poem versus a story, besides length and the amount of time spent, but it feels very different to engage the work within a group. When I bring fiction to fiction writers, they ask me different questions than when I bring poetry to poets. Poets don't, for instance, always ask me to clarify. When a prose writer doesn't like something, but they're trying to be kind, they'll say, maybe you should write more of this, because it's a neutral comment, like, oh, I just want more. It's a safe thing to say. But poets might say the opposite; poets might want less.
Fiction is the scariest one for me because of that communal aspect, actually. The larger cultural concerns of people who read fiction are perhaps more tuned into ways of critique that get pretty dangerous as a writer. Within this story, for instance, the main character is gay. I haven't been gay a day in my life. In that way fiction is a lie. We tell kids not to lie, and so it feels wrong. I don't know if in 10 years I will be able to look back at that decision to puppet a sexuality that I don't inhabit and agree with it. I tried to be authentic and receiving, and I tried to not write with a gaze that was interested in harmful aspects of representation. I tried to present it with love. Most people in fiction aren't who they're writing. If they were, then ideally they would be writing nonfiction. But it's still really scary to make those leaps.
I'm also dealing with people's lives. I can imagine being a victim of one of these serial killers, or a family member of one, and reading this story and going, well, that's in poor taste. And I think that's fine, I’m glad these kinds of debates can be had.
JB: I hear what you're saying. I don't know if this brings you any consolation, but fiction writers are always asking other fiction writers about this exact issue, or at least I am, which is: I am so afraid that this story element will be revealed as fraudulent only because it does not serve its function. The fiction writers most often taught—I don't know if they’re the best of us, or the worst of us, or maybe just the most accoladed—are very utilitarian. What doesn’t serve the story gets stripped.
MP: Yeah, yeah, that’s a good way to put it.
JB: In process, or in workshops, whatever it is that’s sticking out, other fiction writers will attack it. I’m speaking of my kin, obviously, but I know how scary it can be to experience within a community setting. The defense of this practice is usually something like, well fiction is made up, so there should be a level of detachment. But of course that’s almost never true. Just because it’s made up doesn’t make it not-real.
MP: Going back to your central question, maybe one of the few things that feels different about the genres is this idea of what it feels to say or make a statement. Within nonfiction essays, and—at least with me—poetry, it feels like I have a hold on the voice of the speaker because they are a lot closer to me. Whereas in fiction, because the characters are so far away, I'm much more likely to make accidental statements because the voice is slippery.
One quick example. When I was rereading this piece, I realized that there is a potential critique that is fair to make. The story could perpetuate this idea of, well, you need a woman's touch in the household. Where they went wrong was a man tried to raise a boy all on his own. Maybe if mom was there, it would’ve worked out. This is a philosophy people have, and so that's a potential reading. Now, that was not my intention, and I hope it doesn't harm people who are involved—single fathers who have been ostracized or critiqued for not, quote-unquote, bringing a woman's touch. I was trying to tell a story about this particular kind of man. But because the story doesn't have counterpoints for this single father, it might be making that accidental statement that I never wanted to make. I find these little accidents in fiction all the time.
JB: Yeah, and there's no guarantee that even with the tightest grip it will go according to plan. The way a story is read is completely up to the audience.
MP: Very true, very true.
JB: This gets even more terrifying when you're trying to write about political ideas, or crafting intentionally unlikable people. There is always concern of a reader taking the piece as an endorsement of the behavior.
MP: Yes, yes, that's right. This idea of, oh, the author seemed to really like writing that. They could have gotten out of that scene much quicker. They must like that character and what they have to say. Again, the mythologizing. It’s everywhere.
JB: Exactly. Why do we do this?!
Okay, last question. I know you to be very funny in real life and in your writing. Is humor the threshold from which you approach storytelling? Or are you incorporating it as a craft choice?
MP: That's a really kind question. I think laughter is very important. I’ll say this: When I am uncomfortable, my body giggles. It has gotten me into so much trouble in my life. I really don't know how to fix it. It’s showing up in my work because I’m often trying to write about things that make me uncomfortable, or things that are hard to look at. For whatever reason, this leads to those kinds of involuntary moments in which we have laughter.
I don't actually think I'm funny on the page. Almost every single time I'm being complimented for being funny, there was no place where I had that intention. I do appreciate sometimes that maybe when people are saying, I think you're a funny writer, that I've imparted that same little trick of the body in which we're laughing because there's no place else for the feelings to go.