The Heart Is Meat: An 80s Memoir

by Michael Backus

Overview

In the early 80s, New York City’s Gansevoort Meatpacking District, a small irregular patch of the West Village, was a wild confluence of meat market workers, gay men hitting The Mineshaft or The Anvil, trans prostitutes, homeless huddled around burn barrels, New Jersey mafiosos, veterans of three wars, heroes of the French Resistance, and Holocaust survivors. Michael Backus was newly arrived to the city when he began working at Adolf Kusy Meats in 1982, a young man fresh out of college who had never imagined himself in any city, much less New York. But he was going to be a fiction writer and while ignorant of what that might actually entail, understood that writers lived in New York.

Into the mix came his college sweetheart Maya, seduced, like Michael, by the glamour and excitement of the East Village, its fashion model roommates, conceptual art openings, dance clubs, and junkies lined up outside bombed out buildings. Their intensity would lead only to ruin.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781915316332
Publisher:	Oil on Water Press
Publication date:	06/01/2025
Pages:	182
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Michael Backus is the author of the novel The Vanishing Point and the memoir The Heart is Meat: An 80s Memoir. He lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Editorial Reviews

"A mad and painfully genuine ride through a legendary slice of New York during its craziest era. Michael Buckus was there, and you can feel it in every sentence." -Thomas Dyja, author of New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation

"At times raw, at times tender, and very well done — Michael Backus’s self-portrait of the artist as a strung-out young meat market worker in the throes of a volatile love affair, vividly evokes the carnival seaminess and romance of pre-gentrified downtown New York." —Philip Gourevitch, author of We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families

From the Publisher

2025-03-22
A Midwestern transplant’s life in early 1980s New York City is reinvigorated in this memoir.

Through an unfolding series of raw moods and memories, author Backus transports himself back to 1983, when, as a young man out of college, he’d just arrived in Manhattan from Indiana, driving his dead grandmother’s 1968 Chevy Caprice to work at a pork-packing company with dreams of becoming a writer. His mundane work of meat processing is made entertaining courtesy of a dramatically animated crew of Vietnam veterans and local aggressive bruisers with names like Big Ed, Dinky Peter, Manny the Spic, Jersey City Johnny, and “pre-Vietnam era” Gummy. Also keeping him afloat and awake are afternoons fueled by a carefully calibrated combination of speed and heroin, though the speed made him “aggressive and profane and prone to street incidents with strangers.” Together with his exasperatingly tolerant girlfriend, Maya, in their East Village apartment with four cats, he works days and parties nightly, stumbling home dodging junkies and homeless encampments and fending off campy, brazen sex workers. Across random adventures with friends, family, colorful inner-city dwellers, and new job opportunities, the memoir reads like transgressive fiction as Backus dizzyingly re-creates scene after scene of pure 1980s Manhattan, immersing the reader into a forgotten early-AIDS era in New York history filled with music, queer leather biker bars, bathroom-stall meth snorting, sweaty disco dance floors, and conceptual art shows. The author concludes two years later, in 1985, when AIDS has begun ravaging the queer community and his relationship is dissolving. A bittersweet epilogue written in 2013 catches up with his former co-workers and reflects on the dwindling vitality evident across the Big Apple. Using a cleverly depicted, vivid blend of atmosphere and attitude, Backus reaches back decades to a twitchy era of drug-soaked reality to deliver a uniquely raw, significant slice of life in exacting detail.

A fond remembrance of an author’s gritty history.

Kirkus Reviews