![Adolf Kusy Meats in New York City’s Gansevoort Meatpacking District, where much of the story takes place. Photo used with permission of photographer Gregoire Alessandrini.](https://oilonwaterpress.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2024/06/Meat-MKT-600.jpg)
“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
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, transgendered 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.
Gansevoort Meat Packing District, 1983
/// Pig Knuckles, Knee Pads, and Abandoned Cars
New Yorkers
/// Settling in
/// Good Samaritan
/// Area
/// Junkyard Dog Curl
The Great Stakeout
/// Day 1
/// Day 2
/// Day 3
/// Day 4
/// Day 5
Making the East Village Yuppie Safe
Horseshoes and Hand Grenades
Dust-up in the Hamptons
Scare #1
A Year in the Wilderness, 1985
/// Christmas
/// Deep South
/// Writer
/// Moving Company Job
/// Choppy Waters
/// Scare #2
Old Meat, Fall, 1985
/// Another F*ck Up in the F*ck Up Factory
/// Strangers
/// Wedding
/// Sanctum
On the Road between Saint-Hippolyte-du-Fort and Ganges, France
Divvying Up
Epilogue, October, 2013
THE HEART IS MEAT
Author: Michael Backus
ISBN: 978-1-915316-33-2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-915316-34-9 (ebk)
Street date: 6 Feb 2025
Category: Travel, Literary Memoir
Size: 216mm x 140mm
Pages: 182pp
![Heart Is Meat Tattoo](https://oilonwaterpress.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2024/06/Heart-Is-Meat-Title-Illustration-Colour-400.png)