"36 Hours in the SPAM® Museum," Graham Marema

Today on Midwest Weird: “36 Hours in the SPAM® Museum” by Graham Marema.

Graham Marema is a writer from East Tennessee who received her MFA at the University of Wyoming with a concurrent degree in Environment & Natural Resources. She is an activist, traveler, and musician. Her work has appeared in the American Literary Review, Litro Magazine, and 3Elements Review.

Like the story? Listen to an interview with Graham!

Midwest Weird is an audio literary magazine from Broads and Books Productions. We’re the home of weird fiction and nonfiction by Midwestern writers.

Submit your own work to Midwest Weird at www.midwestweird.com!

Episode Transcript:

This is Midwest Weird, an audio literary magazine from Broads and Books Productions.

We’re the home of weird fiction and nonfiction by Midwestern writers.

Today’s episode: A short story by Graham Marema, titled “36 Hours in the SPAM® Museum.” Read by the author.

If you’re cruising down I-90 through the Driftless Region and find yourself hankering for a stop somewhere on your way from Madison to Sioux Falls, or vice versa, it’s likely you’ll pass the exit for Austin, Minnesota. At first glance, it might seem like there isn’t much to this unassuming town of 25,000 people, other than two artificial lakes and one county fair, but if you’re adventurous enough to take that exit ramp anyway, head up Main Street, and before you know it, you’ll find yourself standing before a life-sized bronze man walking two life-sized bronze pigs beneath a can’t-miss-it sign declaring in bright yellow letters: SPAM® MUSEUM.

Locals say this bronze man is Jay Hormel himself, the man/myth/legend credited with inventing the iconic salted pork product. The names of the bronze pigs are unknown.

I recommend getting there the minute the doors open.

Itinerary

Friday

10:00am  

Admission to the SPAM® Museum is free of charge ($0). In fact, the sweet dimpled girl with gray eyes at the front desk will give you two free SPAM® stickers ($0 and $0), so by the time you step beneath the giant, glowing SPAM® can that serves as the centerpiece to this one-of-a-kind roadside attraction, you’ll be richer than when you walked in.

I suggest new visitors take a moment to orient themselves. Not because of the sensory overload – though it’s true that there are many neon lights, giant screens showing slabs of meat that lie on their sides in sultry positions, and a conveyer belt of empty SPAM® cans running overhead at all times. I make this recommendation because there are many rooms and pathways in the SPAM® Museum, and it’s easy to get lost.

10:11am

Start in the gift shop. It may sound backwards, but with the bewildering wonders waiting within the Museum itself, you’ll want to get your shopping out of the way. Snag a SPAM® Bucket Hat for your Uncle Terry ($23) and a banjo made from an empty SPAM® can for your cousin Betty ($64). Throw in a SPAM®-themed 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle for yourself ($22), just for kicks. And don’t forget the essential souvenir: SPAM® ($4/can).

Don’t worry about carrying your purchases into the Museum. “I’ll watch them for you,” the sweet dimpled girl will offer.   

11:45am

I always tell first-time visitors to skip the flashy stuff and head straight to the historical posters. You’ve collected your souvenirs for loved ones; now load up on fun facts. Like did you know that SPAM® became popular during WWII because it was easy to ship off with soldiers, earning it fun nicknames like “ham that didn’t pass its physical” and “meatloaf without basic training”? Or that someone won a hundred bucks to name Jay Hormel’s creation in a contest, but only a handful of people know what the name actually means? Although it’s widely believed that the name is actually just a portmanteau of “spiced” and “ham”?

Spiced? you may think. What’s spiced about SPAM®? Maybe the “s” stands for salty, or splendid, or salivatory? Maybe it stands for a word you’ve never heard of?

Stop getting distracted. Questions like that can steer you off track.

1:45pm

Measure yourself in cans of SPAM® at the “How many SPAM® cans tall are you?” measuring stick (23.5 SPAM® cans). Count the number of different flavors of SPAM® there are on the SPAM® flavor wall (18 flavors). Time yourself at the “You ‘Can!’ Make SPAM®” packing station, where you hit the green button, stuff a pink plushy into a can, lid it, cook it, label it, box it, and cry, “DONE!” (68 seconds). Look around to find someone you can brag to. Realize you don’t see anyone else in the entire Museum. Realize you haven’t seen anyone at all since you left the gift shop. 

4:45 pm

They’ll be closing soon, so start looking for the exit. If you’d like to stay in town for dinner, you could head over to Kenny’s Oak Grill for a SPAM® De’ Melt, a grilled cheese stuffed with SPAM®, cheese, bacon, and sour cream ($9.89).

But once you start searching for the exit, you might just find yourself wandering through the Museum’s iconic “SPAM® Around the World” exhibit instead, where only a few steps will take you from the Philippines to England to South Korea to Hawaii to, if you get turned around once or twice, back to the Philippines. You’ll learn how SPAM® is enjoyed in forty countries around the world, with deliciously fun facts from each one, like did you know that you can measure the border between Mexico and the US in SPAM® cans (30,903,840 cans!)?

“Hello?” you may holler the fifth time you appear at the Philippines enclave, where you can play an interactive CD-ROM game to create a SPAM®-branded van and drive it around the country shooting meat at passersby. “Hello?!”

Midnight

When you’ve wandered so long that your feet ache and the backs of your eyelids burn, find a place to rest. Anywhere, here is fine, Hawaii, the floor painted to resemble the beach, the walls adorned with photos of SPAM® wrapped in seaweed. It may take you a while to fall asleep, and you may tremble. You have no blanket. You may hear strange noises overhead. That’s normal. You may drift in and out of a restless doze, may open one eye in the early morning hours and see the SPAM® on the walls writhing, rolling like flexed muscles, performing intricate pax de deus with the seaweed. This may, you remind yourself, be only a dream.

Saturday

7:43am

Wake in Hawaii. Your back will be stiff, but your body will be warm. There is a blanket thrown over you. It is decorated with a cartoonish map of Austin, Minnesota. It’s time to get up. The Museum will be opening again in a few short hours.

8:15am

For a filling breakfast, head to the interactive virtual cookbooks section. Here you will learn that SPAM® can be eaten for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Feel your mouth salivate as you paw through glowing recipes for SPAM®  Wontons, Maple & Brown Sugar SPAM® Ice Cream, Inside Out SPAMTastic™ Musubi, and Spiced Dutch Baby Pancake with SPAM® Figgy Pudding & Cranberry Butter. You have no way to make these recipes. You are hungry and dehydrated.

10:00am

Admission is now open for a new wave of eager guests. Wait hopefully for a sign to blink on, a person in a uniform to appear, anyone, to lead you by hand back to the entrance, which has eluded you now for many hours. Wait a while longer, standing on the edge between Hawaii and South Korea.

You will soon feel as though someone is watching you. Turn around quickly. It is only the rattling of SPAM®.

11:12am

Sometimes, existence in the SPAM® Museum will be very sad. Like when you spend too long watching the fourteen-minute loop video of soldiers receiving black and white cans of SPAM® on the front lines. It will make you cry, depleting the salt reserves of your body to dangerous levels. They just want some easy protein, you will wail inside yourself. They just want to make it home.

2:33pm

Sometimes, existence in the SPAM® Museum isn’t so bad, really. You will find yourself in the “Kids ‘Can!’ Play” area, which is sort of this weird miniature village tucked into the corner behind the SPAM® measuring stick. You can pretend to shop for fresh vegetables at the fake farmer’s market, so you can take them home to your fake wife in the fake house, whose kitchen is just big enough for you to crawl into. She will be preparing you a feast of SPAMBurgers™ and fries, wearing her hair up in that twisted bun you like. You will sit at the kitchen counter, hunched in a child’s size chair, lean your forehead against her stomach and breathe in her meaty smell. “How was work?” she’ll ask you, and “Oh, fine,” you’ll reply, even though it wasn’t, and she’ll sigh that sigh and say, “I know that tone,” and you’ll say, “What tone? I didn’t even say anything, Jesus,” and she’ll say, “I wish you wouldn’t talk like that, I wish you’d quit that job if you hate it so much, I wish you and I could go to that old hotel and fuck like we used to,” and you’ll say, “I’m sorry,” and she’ll say, “I’m sorry too,” and your chest will hurt and you’ll hold her tighter, listening to her heartbeat through her belly, and you’ll think it might be possible, you and her, to get out there and find that old hotel and find the people you used to be, and you and your fake wife will look out the window together at the little garden you planted a long time ago when the fake kids were young, and then you’ll notice someone’s watching you through that window, a real someone, with real, gray eyes, watching through the glassless slats, real eyes that blink, once, twice, and you’ll rush out of the fake house and into the fake farmer’s market, knocking over the fake food stand, scattering plastic fruit across the grass-colored carpeting. But by then the eyes will be gone, and the only real person you’ve seen in twenty-five hours gone with them. To make matters worse, when you return home, the house will be just a fake house again, your fake wife gone without leaving you any food.

4:03pm

Sometimes, existence in the SPAM® Museum will be very dull, so dull that you will reread the informational plaques on Austin, Minnesota, four, five, fifteen times, and you will memorize and shout facts about Austin, Minnesota, scream them over the rattle of overhead cans, down the Museum’s dim and empty corridors, as if you’re teaching essential lessons to someone who is just around the corner. “Austin is sometimes called SPAM® Town USA,” you will bellow. “It has a comprehensive cancer research institution founded by the Hormel corporation. Have you heard about its nature center? Has anyone ever shown you the secret spots to go swimming in its beautiful, manmade lakes?”

 7:00pm

Nap in the SPAM® Shack, at the plastic feet of a giant, grinning SPAM® can figure, waving gloved hands at someone who isn’t there. Dream of I-90, of your car parked somewhere, of a space whose meter has run out.

7:58pm

Wake to real gray eyes watching you over real dimples.

Grasp her wrist.

“Blegh!” the girl will screech. “Let go of me!”

Sit up. It will be the same girl from before, the one with sweet dimples, the one who gave you free stickers ($0 and $0) at the front desk. She will be surrounded by your gift shop purchases: the SPAM® Bucket Hat for your Uncle Terry ($23), the banjo made from an empty SPAM® can for your cousin Betty ($64), the SPAM®-themed 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle for yourself ($22), just for kicks, and the single can of SPAM® ($4/can).

Release the wrist. Go for the SPAM®. How long has it been since you’ve eaten?

The dimpled girl will rub her wrist. “Yeesh,” she will say. “I came to give you your stuff. You looked so sad. And I brought you some of these too.”

She will produce an orange tray with cubes of SPAM® skewered on toothpicks. The sight of these will make drool eek from both corners of your mouth. “They’re our SPAMplers™,” she will say. “We pass them out at events.”

You will weep a little. She will pretend not to notice. The meat will replenish your sodium levels, depleted by your tears. A single slab of “spiced ham” has one-third of your recommended daily sodium intake.

Tell her: “I can’t find an exit.” Say: “I really should get back on the road, as soon as possible.” Beg: “I’m starving for something green,” and: “Please, you have to help me.”

The girl will say: “Come with me.”

8:15pm

Follow the girl to a giant blue wall painted with an “I” and a heart and a can of SPAM®. Do what the girl says; read the wall out loud: I – heart – SPAM®.

“Did you know that Austin is a city of 25,000 people?” the girl will ask you (yes, I told you that already). “And did you know that 1,800 of those people work for Hormel, the makers of SPAM®?” (This will be news to you too, but you will be too hungry to care). “Did you know that someone once got married here, a couple named Henry and Lucy Hatmaker?” (No). “Did you know that, as a SPAMbassador™, I got to attend the nuptials?” (Eat another SPAMpler™).

“You can see why you’d want to be married in a place like this, can’t you?” the girl will prod. “Can’t you see why in 2015, Austin was named one of the Top 10 Affordable Small Towns Where You’d Actually Want to Live? It’s a place of community, possibility. A place you can hold onto.”

Don’t get swept up in her speech. It’s a marketing script written by the Hormel corporation.

The girl will switch tactics. “Do you know why they call this part of Minnesota the Driftless Region?” she’ll ask.

Imagine the word driftless as a pink plushy you can shove into a can, lid, label, and box. Time how long it takes.

“It’s because the glaciers never drifted through here,” the girl will tell you. “Because, during the last ice age, this area never experienced glacial erosion. A huge chunk of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Illinois, all got overlooked when the glaciers were moving in. Glaciers flatten land like an ironing board. But here, the land never got flattened. It’s all wrinkly and steep. It’s defined by its unevenness. Do you know what happens in a place like that?”

Stop listening to her. You’re listening to me, remember? Besides, you already know this. Didn’t you take eighth grade geography? Don’t you already know what happens in a place like that, to people like you?

9:06pm

“Haven’t you been drifting across the prairie all your life?” the girl will ask you as you help her pick up the spilled plastic vegetables in the “You ‘Can!’ Play” playground. She will pile them neatly in a basket and give each apple a pat as if it’s a child she’s sending off to school. “Wouldn’t it be nice to stop blowing across those plains, to end up in a place like this, wouldn’t you like to get caught in the folds of somewhere and hold on?”

Tell her to shut up. Stick your fingers in your ears and hum. Why are you looking in the window of the little house? Your wife will not smile at you from the kitchen with a platter of SPAMBurgers™. Your wife is long gone, and the kids, and the garden, and the hotel from many years ago. Or was the hotel fake after all, and the wife, and the kids? Or have you just forgotten? Can you remember how long you’ve been here?

9:33pm  

“What if you stayed here a while?” the girl will ask, as you watch her design a SPAM®-themed van on a CD-ROM computer game in the Philippines. “What if you mailed all those gifts to your family and just stayed here with me?”

9:46pm

Follow the girl to the exit. She will have to lead you there eventually. Someone has to watch the front desk, so no one steals the free stickers. Stand at the glass double doors and look out into the parking lot, and there you will see the back of Jay Hormel’s bronze head and the gleaming rumps of the pigs. From here, it will seem they stare down Main Street toward I-90, accusatory. Though they are made of metal, you will see the man’s clothes shudder in the wind.

Ignore the girl. Follow me into the parking lot. Meet me by the pigs.

Ignore her, I said. Ignore her.

9:59pm

Fine, stay here, see if I care. You know what will happen. I shouldn’t have to tell you.

Stay here and sleep in Hawaii, beneath the girl’s blanket, dancing with spiced ham and seaweed, singing love songs on SPAM® can banjos, for years and years, as long as you like, until the next glaciers move through North America in flattening sheets, to squash Minnesota beneath the pressure of centuries into a land that is blank and sheer and pocketless. Like Nebraska. Or certain parts of Michigan. Or other places that you’ve never been, because they have no exit ramps to get there.

Graham Marema is a writer from East Tennessee who received her MFA at the University of Wyoming with a concurrent degree in Environment & Natural Resources. She is an activist, traveler, and musician. Her work has appeared in the American Literary Review, Litro Magazine, and 3Elements Review.

Watch for an upcoming bonus episode where we chat with Graham about this story, writing, latest obsessions, and more.

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