Ground Beef Ashtray

How sculpting an ashtray from ground beef satisfied a need for unsanctioned belief.

In high school my best friend and I were line cooks at a fast-food chain in our hometown. One time we made an ashtray out of ground beef by pressing several uncooked hamburger patties into an ashtray shape and searing it on the grill.

When the ashtray was cooked enough to hold its form, we submerged it in the deep-fryers for a long time, stacking a second fry basket on top of the basket it was in to keep it from floating around in the grease or losing its shape as it hardened.

Our goal was to carbonize the ground beef to the point that it wouldn’t continue to “cook” when we put out our cigarettes in it, and so it wouldn’t just rot when we left it out in the back room of the restaurant where we were not allowed to smoke but did anyway.

We could’ve ashed in cups, on the floor, in the toilet, in any of the many sinks, or outside, but flicking the ashes in these locations would have done nothing to satisfy the deeper psychological need we had to feel creatively powerful and culturally unique. To feel that, we had to do something more drastic. We had to forge an unhygienic abomination by misusing the industrial procedures and equipment to which we were economically bound. And once we had filled it full of ashes, we had to worship it.

Did the meat ashtray smell nasty?

Yes.

It would not be an understatement to say that it reeked of incinerated flesh. And burning tar. And desiccated cigarette husks. And, after the meat began to rot, like rotting meat. Again, however, for my best friend and I, the stench was a feature, not a bug. The more extraordinary the putridity, the more we wanted to protect it. The more hideous the idol grew, the bigger the god it represented became.

Within a week or two, my best friend and I stopped using the hamburger ashtray as a receptacle for our cigarette ashes — even to us it had become too disgusting to continue fulfilling its utilitarian purpose. Nevertheless, we had no interest in destroying our priceless sculpture. You would have sooner seen a pair Quakers cast a Bible into a bonfire, or a pair of cinephiles razor blade the original celluloid reel of Citizen Kane.

We decided to preserve our creation, our obelisk, our ghoulish Grail in the closest thing to a holy tabernacle we had: the walk-in freezer.

We put it in a styrofoam box and wrapped that in a paper bag branded with the logo of the fast-food franchise we worked at, then we stowed it in the farthest corner of the walk-in, behind the oldest box of frozen patties, to conceal it from the managers, which there was always a revolving door of, since the position was so stressful, due in part to the necessity of dealing with long-term employees like my best friend and I, whose experience, while it made us valuable, came with a sense of entitlement that made us difficult to corral. 

We’d bring the ashtray out when training new cooks, ashing in it with them as a sort of initiation. If they recoiled, we knew their tenure as our comrades in the kitchen would probably be short-lived. If they were amazed or showed any sign of interest or respect, we knew we could work with them just fine.

Eventually an assistant manager found the meat ashtray during a deep cleaning that the franchise head office had required of our store. Luckily, it was a cool manager who had the cultural sensitivity to talk to us about it before doing anything reactionary like throwing it away.  

My best friend and I smoked a cigarette with her — we’ll call her Jennifer — and Jennifer laughed so hard at the very nature of the object that she cried while smoking and delicately ashing into it.

We thought she was going to let us keep it, but she wouldn’t. After wiping her eyes, Jennifer got all serious and said we had to throw it away.

I respected her decision, seeing things from her point of view, but my best friend was angry. It was the first time we’d ever really disagreed on anything in the kitchen. Looking back, I feel some embarrassment that I so readily sided with Jennifer over my best friend, as if I had a corporate heart with a natural instinct to sympathize with management over labor. It was my best friend, not I, who was the true artist.

We patched up our differences, however, when we gave the meat ashtray an elaborate pagan burial. Instead of just tossing it into the big green dumpster with the regular trash, we put it in the smaller, squatter cast-iron oubliette that we called the “grease bin,” and which it was illegal to put anything other than used liquid grease into. Because the grease bin was only supposed to admit liquid grease, it had a grate along the top that would catch all the chunks of fries and other grizzled nuggets of carbonized breading that sank to the bottom of the fryers over time. You had to pump out the fryers periodically and carry the used oil to this tiny weird special receptacle.

But we wanted the meat ashtray to enter the grease bin because we thought it deserved something more than being thrown away like common trash, so after opening the little door-guard that protected the grate, we set the meat ashtray on the grate and then stomped it through with our work shoes, cracking it to pieces and listening as each piece of igneous beef plinked into the sea of grease within.

After we forced the last piece through, I gave the meat ashtray a little eulogy. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but it went something like: “For a meat ashtray to be born at all is a terrible miracle. For it to live a full life, inspiring revulsion and fear and tears of joy, is another terrible miracle. For it to be put down by its own makers in its prime, a third terrible miracle…”

I wanted to say more but I didn’t know how to say it. I supposed I wanted to tell my best friend I loved him with all of my heart, and the meat ashtray symbolized perfectly why.

The two of us just stared down at the grate through which we had forced our creation. Eventually my best friend simply nodded and said, “It’s Valhalla for it.” Then he kicked the grease bin hard with his heel, and the lid clapped down over the grate with a moist, unsatisfying clang.