open areas

Meal time here is whenever you are hungry. There’s no busy time, no mad rush at the local eateries. Seven in the morning is just as crowded as seven at night and at both times you’ll find people drinking beer and eating tapas. 

There’s this place across the street from the hotel. I forget the name. We just call it “our place.” We ate many an olive there last year it and it was the first place we hit up this visit. 

We take a seat outside at 7:30 in the morning, order two beers and an American sort of breakfast. 

A few dudes with skateboards take the table next to us. They are older guys, probably skaters from back in the day when skateboarding was a crime. 

The one dude starts talking to us because Barcelonians on a whole are super friendly.

“Good morning!’

We say good morning back and he immediately starts chatting with us. We get to the “Where are you from?” portion of the conversation.

“New York,” Todd says, because we always say New York instead of Long Island. 

“Oh! I lived there for a while!” Dude is excited now. “I lived on Long Island as an exchange student.”

I laugh. I tell him that’s where we are from. He asks about the town where he lived, how they made out in the hurricane. Not so great, I tell him. 

He talks in halting English about his time in America. He lived in Tennessee for a bit after Long Island, went back to his home in the Canary Islands then came to Barcelona to stay.

“I fell in love with this city,” he tells us. 

“Yea, me too.”

The dude and Todd exchange tattoo compliments and the dude writes down an address where we can get tattoos if we want while we’re here.

Then he offers us cocaine. He’s the third person to make such an offer since we’ve been here.

We politely turn him down, he shakes our hands and he skates off with his friend. 

Barcelona. Hell of a place.

Later in the afternoon we go back to our place. We need something to hold us over until dinner at nine. It’s three in the afternoon. We order olives, potatoes with hot sauce, another kind of potatoes and something called Moorish meat. No idea what kind of meat it is and I don’t want to know. It was good. That’s all we need to know. 

A couple sits next to us. They order whiskey.

That’s how they order it. “Bring us some whiskey.”  It’s the same way we order beer. There is no “What’s on tap?” You say “I’ll have a beer” and they say “Small, medium or large?”

We eat our olives, potatoes and Moorish meat stuff until we’re full. That’s the magic of tapas. Everything is a small serving. Small plates. Yet when you’re done you feel as full as if you’ve had a huge meal.

Could be all those medium sized beers, too.

The couple next to us is arguing. I pick up a few words here and there. Something about a girl and cocaine.

Hell of a place, Barcelona.

dinner stories #12: for the birds

“What do you want to do for dinner?”
“I don’t know, what do you want to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Ok. How about the dumpster?”
“Ugh. We went to the dumpster twice last week.”
“The beach?”
“Eh, too far.”
“Fine, what about the McDonald’s parking lot?”
“You know I’m watching my weight!”
“Well, you’re shooting down all my ideas. You come up with something.”
“I heard the new sushi place throws fish scraps out the back door.”
“That place got terrible reviews on Yelp.”
“We can go to the park and see what the kids left.”
“I’m so sick of gluten free, peanut free, fat free snacks.”
“Ain’t like it used to be.”
“Nope.” 
“Oh, I know, I saw a dead raccoon on Front Street this morning…”
“Ew. I don’t want leftovers.”
“Fine.”
“Fine.”
“Dumpster?”
“I guess.” 

[dinner stories]

dinner story #11

“I want Italian food.” We were taking my daughter and a friend visiting from Colorado out to dinner.

I rattled off the names of about ten nearby Italian places, because Long Island has a zoning law that requires there to be an Italian restaurant/pizza place every 500 feet.

“Too greasy.”
“I don’t like their pasta.”
“Bad service.”

She’s not a picky eater so much as a picky diner.

“Well, I’m hungry enough to punch a baby right now,” I say, and I herd everyone into the car because there are more Italian restaurants than babies nearby. We’ll just drive. Eventually we’ll hit one Natalie doesn’t hate.

“What about that one we went to for your ex brother-in-law’s birthday?” Todd asks and we spend ten minutes talking shit on my ex brother-in-law while we drive to this place. I kind of remember the food being decent. 

We’re seated at a small table directly next to another couple while there are other bigger table surrounded by no one.

If you’ve read any of my dinner stories before, you know this is a bad thing. But we’re hungry. Starving. So we just sit and deal with it.

The waitress comes over to take our drink orders.

“What kind of beer do you have?”

She hesitates. Looks to the sky as if waiting for an answer from God. God whispers in her ear. She nods, recites:

“Bud, Bud Light, Heineken, Blue Moon.”

Airplane beer.

We order two Blue moons. The busboy brings them over with glasses. We pour. The beer is sort of warm. 

Eventually our waitress saunters over to take our order.

Todd and Mae are going to split a pizza. Todd orders. “The large pie with olives and red and green peppers.” Simple, right? Natalie orders chicken parm because Natalie always orders chicken parm in an Italian restaurant. I order a personal deep dish pizza with pepperoni and black olives even though ordering a deep dish pizza in New York is a crime against humanity. I ask for a side salad to go with it.

Todd tells the waitress his beer is warm.

“Oh. So…you don’t want it?”

There’s our first clue this dinner isn’t going to be a winner.

She takes the beer. Comes back with another. Asks Todd to feel the bottle to make sure it’s cold because I guess lost her sense of touch back in the Waitress Wars of 1988, and I’m only guessing 1988 because of her hair. It’s got a very Knot’s Landing feel to it. I’m surprised she’s not wearing shoulder pads.

She leaves, comes back five minutes later.

“So, that pizza with the pepperoni and olives?”
“Yes?”
“You want the pepperoni and olives on the whole pizza?” 
“Well….yeah.”

I’m assuming if people want a topping on half a pizza they usually request it that way. If you don’t request half it means whole, right? Is this just me?

She leaves, returns five minutes later.

“So…that pizza with the green and red peppers and the olives. Did you want those toppings on the whole pizza? Or did you want to split them up? Or just have them on half?”
“Uh…yea. The whole pizza please.”

Again, when you ask for a pizza with peppers and olives, you automatically assume the the “on the whole damn thing” is implied because you did not say “on half,” right? Right.

Ten minutes later, she brings Natalie’s chicken parm out.

“I’m sorry sweetie, but your chicken parm was ready before your salad so I brought that out first.”

In what alternate reality is a hot dinner ready before a side salad? I’m incredulous at this point so I just look up at the waitress and say “Really? REALLY?”

Natalie gives me the look. The one that says “Don’t fuck with the people who are preparing your food.” But honestly, I was a waitress and restaurant manager for many years and never once did I do anything to someone’s food no matter how much they annoyed me. Also, I’m in the right here. HOW IS A CHICKEN PARM DINNER READY BEFORE A SIDE SALAD? HOW?

Natalie pushes her chicken to the side because she doesn’t want to eat before us.

Ten minutes later, the waitress comes by with Natalie’s salad. Three minutes later she comes back with the dressing for Natalie’s salad.

“Excuse me,” I say to the waitress. “But you really brought out her dinner kind of early.”
“Well, it was ready.”
“Yea, but it was ready a long time ago and we still haven’t gotten our food yet.”
She looks at me blankly.

“I don’t want to eat without them,” Natalie explains.
“Oh, you want to eat together?” 

She really said that. Really.

I look at her the way you look at a person you suspect might be from another planet.

“Generally, people like to eat together when they go out.”

I get the look from everyone. Because by this time I’m hungry and angry and sort of flabbergasted.

Natalie asks “Can you take this back to the kitchen and keep it warm?”
“Oh, you want it to go?”

I glare at her. “Why would she want it to go? She is asking you to keep it warm until our food comes out because you brought her food out about half an hour before ours is apparently ready.”

The look from everyone else. Sorry. But Jesus Christ on a pogo stick, this is starting to look like an episode of Candid Camera.

“Is everything ok?” the waitress asks warily.

OF COURSE IT’S NOT OK. NO. IT’S NOT OK AT ALL. YOU HAVE FUCKED UP EVERYTHING THAT IS POSSIBLE TO FUCK UP AND I’M PRETTY SURE YOU ARE EITHER MISSING VITAL PARTS OF YOUR BRAIN OR YOU ARE PLAYING A JOKE ON US but of course I don’t say any of that even though it’s on the tip of my tongue which is fine because Todd looks her in the eye and says,

“This is kind of a train wreck.”

She blinks.

“Geez. I feeling like I’m on the grilling station.”

I assume she means she feels like we are grilling her, detective wise, and not grilling her, chicken wise.

I sigh. I’m in the acceptance stage of this meal. And all at once, we just feel sorry for her.

“Listen,” Todd says. “We’re ok. We just want our food.”
“I feel like I messed up.”
I hold my tongue.
“No, you’re fine,” he says because she looks like she’s about to cry and nobody wants to be that guy who browbeat a waitress into crying. “You’re fine. Everything’s ok. We’re just having some fun here.”

She looks relieved. “Can I get you anything else?”  Well, our food would be nice. 

“Can I just get an iced tea, please?” Because I don’t know what else to say at this point.

She takes Natalie’s chicken. Brings me an iced tea. Eventually our pizza comes out. Natalie has to wait for her chicken. I never get my salad. I don’t even care.

We eat and the pizza kind of sucks but we are laughing so hard about the whole thing we don’t care. We just make fun of the waitress and make fun of the food and we laugh at the expense of the restaurant though later I realize it’s at our expense because we’re the ones who paid sixty bucks for the worst service ever and mediocre food.

I’m not a “complain to the manager” type of person and I already met my “complain to the manager” quota for this year when I did so at the diner earlier in the week when the waiter looked down my shirt and said “Good thing you can’t read my mind.” This was before his expletive filled phone conversation and the arm sweep of condiments off a table. But that’s another story.

So we don’t complain. We still leave the 20% because I have a feeling the waitress doesn’t get very big tips and there comes a point where you just hope someone’s having a really bad day and isn’t as stupid as they seemed. Plus, we laughed. A lot.

But in true internet asshole fashion, I have the last laugh to myself. Because, Yelp.

[previous dinner stories]

It always is, though.

It’s always the right time for conversation.

We sit and eat and talk and eat and drink and talk and talk. 

I look at other couples not talking, just eating, looking at the ten thousand televisions hanging from the ceiling, looking at their phones, one even reading a book.

When do you become a couple that has nothing to say?

Always talk. Always converse. Even if it’s the weather.

“It’s going to be 108 in Dallas this week.”

He leaves for Dallas  tomorrow afternoon.

“Well that sucks,” I say. 

Sucks more that he won’t be around for a couple of days. I miss the conversation when he’s gone. 

I’ve been part of a couple that doesn’t talk. It doesn’t happen overnight. It happens gradually. It’s not that you run out of things to say, it’s that you have no interest in saying in them. Or listening to them. So you sit with your elbows on the table staring at your food, willing the waitress to bring the check because the conversation that isn’t happening is the one you should be having.

I always talk now. I always listen. It doesn’t matter what. We just talk. There’s always conversation.

Eat. Talk. Drink. Talk. Talk.

“What was your day like?”
“Well there was this guy who had hair that looked like a cross between a hedgehog and a mullet. He was looking for his probation officer.”

A good conversation is like reading Wiki; you start with one thing, end up on another thing so far off track from the first they have no relation and then an hour’s gone and you don’t remember where the conversation started. Mullets, Iron Maiden, kittens on album covers, Olympic divers, Arizona, birthday plans, hey, here’s the waitress with the check.

“Ready to head home?”
“Let’s finish our beers.”

More conversation because it is always time for conversation and the conversation we’re having is the one we should always be having. The one that has no silence behind it, the one that lingers, the one that ends in a laugh, the one that has no hidden meanings or forced niceties. The one where you keep it going long after dinner is done, long after you’re home, long after you’re together for years and you marvel that you still haven’t run out of things to talk about.

“My flight leaves at five tomorrow.”

When I miss him - and I always do - I miss the meandering conversations. 

Talk is important. It doesn’t have to be important talk. It can be mullets and Iron Maiden. It can be the weather. 

It’s always the right time for conversation. 

Even when your steak sauce tries to tell you different.

dinner stories 1-9

#8

As always, we start off headed for one place and end up at another.

Today our intention was a chain Mexican restaurant in Hicksville - yes, there’s a town called Hicksville - because I wanted their avocado fries and I knew they’d have the Euro game on the tv. 

We drove into the clouds. They were low and bright white and fluffed out like they all just had perms. When the clouds are that low and the sky that blue it always feels like I’m driving straight into them, like if I drove fast enough my car would become airborne, the road would disappear beneath us and we’d soar into the sky, a Magic School Bus without the teacher. Or the valuable lessons. 

My enjoyment of the flying car scenario playing out in my head was cut short by the constant changing of songs. There’d be a two second snippet, my brain would process what song it was - and I shuffle so much I know the beginning to every song on my iPod, even those “what the fuck is that” songs that came with compilations - and the song would change.

“You need to fix this thing.”

It’s the same conversation we have every time we get in my car. The last time I emptied and reloaded my iPod was the last time we flew and I just jammed a thousand or so songs into that I thought would lull me into a false sense of security as we flew way too many miles above the planet. I never put the rest of my favorites in there, never loaded up all my  good punk rock and metal or anything but those same 1,000 songs we have listened to the beginnings of over and over.

“I know. I know. Just find something.”

He woke up in a Mötley Crüe mood, I woke up in a Manchester Orchestra mood and never the two shall meet. 

We settle, as always, for the first thing that shows up from The Bends.

We get to this chain restaurant which is either called On the Border or Over the Border or Run From the Border. When I say chain, I mean big ass chain, because Todd went to one of these in South Korea. It was the closest thing to home, I guess. When in another country, eat what you know. Especially if you got food poisoning the last time you were in that country. 

“It wasn’t food poisoning,” he says. “I think it was the raw hamburger.”
“Or, you know, that sea slug you ate.”
“It wasn’t a sea slug.”
“Semantics.”

Anyway, we walk into the restaurant and I see trouble right away because all the booths are taken and the tables are set up in such a way that you’re practically giving a lap dance to the stranger at the next table.

“Can we get a booth?”
“Sorry, there are no booths.”

Todd looks over to a whole section of booths that sit empty and lonely, just waiting for someone to slide into them and order avocado fries. The hostess notices and says “Sorry, that section is only open for dinner.”

We look at each other but I already know what we’re going to do. I can’t sit in the middle of a restaurant at a table and I can’t sit squished next to another couple. It’s my claustrophobia and my reverse claustrophobia come into play at once. Also, my desire to not listen to other people chew while I eat.

Of course we leave. I don’t think we’ve ever gone out for lunch on a Saturday without leaving at least one restaurant before we find somewhere to eat.  As a former restaurant manager, I am fully aware we are a hostess’s worst nightmare. I feel bad about it, but not bad enough to stay.

We end up once again all the way back in our town, at the local Mexican joint. We like it there. I don’t know why we don’t just go there first. Maybe because they don’t have avocado fries. But they do have guacamole made at the table and owners and waiters that know us and greet us with handshakes and hugs. 

The wife portion of the husband/wife team that own the place seats us. We haven’t seen her in a while and now I can see why. She’s pregnant. Hugely pregnant. Like, about to burst pregnant. 

“Hey!” Todd says. “You’re pregnant again! How’d that happen?” Because he says stuff like that and gets away with it. It’s part of his boyish charm. I’m told.

Everyone at the bar watching the Spain/France game laughs. 

“Want me to explain it to you?” I ask. Only the wife laughs. It’s a tired “get this baby out of me because it’s 100 degrees outside and I am tired of carrying this human being inside me” laugh. 

She tells us to sit anywhere we’d like. We choose a nice, secluded corner table by the window. There’s no view of the game but I want the view of those awesome clouds instead. She gets us our beers. The guacamole maker comes over and he knows just how we like it. When I order my steak tacos, the wife doesn’t ask how I like the steak because she knows how I like it.

They don’t have avocado fries, but I didn’t need them. This is what I needed.

And on the ride home, as we listen to “Just” again, I remember I also need to fix up my iPod. Maybe put some Crüe on it.

[dinner stories]

“Table for seven please. Two adults, five kids.”

The youngest of the “kids” is 18, but they all wanted crayons and placemats so, five kids.

Who knew all these years later it would still be crayons that would keep them happy in a restaurant? And who knew all these years later they’d still be talking about Rugrats and Power Rangers. Granted, this time they were talking about some creepy ass theory that Chuckie and Lil and Phil were all figments of Angelica’s imagination, brought on by some kind of traumatic disorder but still, crayons and Rugrats. And soccer.

“They almost lost to a country I never even heard of.”
“I don’t think it’s a country. It’s like, a resort.”

It’s magical how everything gets quiet as soon as the food comes out. Until someone starts talking again.  

“Have you ever been to Smokin’ Al’s?”
“I used to work there.”
“Do you know Al?”
“Yea.”
“Is he smokin’?”
“He’s an asshole.”
“Asshole Al.”
“That would make such a better name. Asshole Al’s Barbecue.”
“Asshole Al’s: Eat and then get the fuck out.”

We weren’t at Asshole Al’s. We are some other chain restaurant called Dave’s. Dick Dave. Dirtbag Dave. Whatever. Dave’s brisket burgers are ok, so we’ll give him a pass. 

Some guy in a PETA t-shirt was sitting a few tables away. Dirtbag Dave’s BBQ’s mascot is a cartoon pig; a smiling pig who is evidently pleased you are about to eat his compatriots. Not exactly PETA friendly. Maybe he was having a salad. Still, that smiling pig had to make him feel somewhat guilty. Or nervous. Smiling pigs enticing one to eat pigs always makes me nervous. It’s like you’re in a surreal version of Hostel where Porky Pig is making big bucks by luring his friends and family into a slaughterhouse.

These are the things I think about while eating a brisket burger. It doesn’t stop me from eating it, though. I say a silent thanks to the cow who perished so I could enjoy this offering from Dumb Dave.

“I don’t even know what animal brisket comes from.”
“You’re Jewish and you don’t know what brisket is?”
“Well, my mom made it on Passover so I guess it’s not pork.”

The conversation turned back to Angelica, then to some “lost” episode of Spongebob where Squidward commits suicide.

Sometimes the conversation lingers too long, you know?

We should listen to Asshole Al and just eat and get the fuck out.

But where’s the fun in that? 

IHOP. The breakfast of champions.

Champions of what, I don’t know.

I always spell it iHop on first try. 

We’re seated at a huge table, just the two of at this table that could fit ten. Maybe we look like we’re going to order a lot of food. Maybe it’s because we both picked up our free copies of the Long Island Press at the door and the hostess thinks we need room to spread out and read while we don’t talk to each other.

But we talk. We make fun of the people in the Long Island Power Listing because that’s what we do.

“He looks constipated.”
“Interesting, because he runs a compost company.”

We note that Tracy Morgan is playing at the local comedy club and then that Matthew Sweet is playing somewhere in the city.

“Great, I can go and stay for the two songs I like.”
“Or we can go see Tracy Morgan.”
“You’ll be in San Diego then.”
“I will?”
“I know your schedule better than you. You should totally hire me to be your secretary.”
“I have a secretary.”
“But she doesn’t have sex with you.”
“Well….”
“Don’t finish that thought.”

There’s a table behind us. About ten people at the table, including a few children, one of whom is singing the alphabet very slowly from beginning to end in a constant loop, like a deranged episode of Sesame Street where Ernie an Bert have done quaaludes and are listening to 45rpm records on 33rpm. 

“Aaaaaaa bbbbb cccccc dddddd eeeeeeeee” on the “E” her voice drops even lower and I have a flashback to some Grateful Dead concert acid trip where I thought Jerry Garcia was a bear coming after me. Turns out he was just singing a slowed down version Uncle John’s Band. But I never stopped seeing him as a hungry bear after that. A hungry, stoned bear.

At the table of the singing child are two white men, a Filipino lady, two dark skinned children, two women speaking Spanish and an African American woman who is completely astounded that nobody in her party remembers the cartoon Jem. They’re having a grand old breakfast time when the waitress - an older woman with a high pitched, quivering voice that sounds like caffeine and craziness - checks on their table.

“I have to ask,” she says, and I know what’s coming. I can see it on her face. In her eyes. I cringe before she even says the words. “What’s going on here?”

The white guy with the singing kid in his lap rolls his eyes like he’s been here before but answers her like her rude curiosity is new to him.

“What do you mean?”

You can tell he knows what she means.

“Well, you’re all so different. You know?” She emphasizes different like it’s incredulous even in this day and age that people of different races would have breakfast together. “Are you…related?” 

Her unapologetic bewilderment is both horrifying and amusing.

“Uh, this is my brother. And this is my girlfriend. And this is my brother’s wife, her sister and her sister’s best friend. And my nieces.” He answers her like one would answer an adult who just asked why water is wet. Like he’s answered it before. 

“This is so interesting!” The waitress with the least self awareness ever laughs at whatever joke is playing in her head. 

It’s really not that interesting. It’s not that interesting that a family would go out to breakfast together. That one of them was talking about Jem makes it just semi-interesting, in a “let’s listen to other people’s conversations about things we’ve probably talked about in the past” way. 

The waitress finally stops talking, drops the check on the table of diversity and leaves. The young man sighs. The little girl on his lap sings “xxxxxx yyyyyyy zzzzzzzzzzz,” takes a deep breath and starts again on A. 

A man at another table barks at the waitress to bring more whipped cream and butter.

We go back to reading the Long Island Press together.

Our food comes. I got a 480 calorie meal of fake eggs, turkey bacon and whole wheat pancakes. I proceed to pour five thousand grams of sugar in the form of boysenberry syrup all over the pancakes and make a mental note to stay at the gym a little longer later. 

“Hey, Louie Anderson is playing at Governer’s next month.”
“Let’s not and say we did.”
“Let’s not and say we didn’t.”

welcome to the jungle

Sometimes you just want fried pickles and beer. Maybe some bbq chicken.

But this isn’t Memphis. I can’t get barbecue served to me on a paper plate while I’m sitting at a picnic table like I’m in someone’s backyard and not a restaurant. I can’t go to a place where the smell of barbecue sticks to your clothes for hours after you’ve left the place. 

I’m in the suburbs. We built the suburbs on chain restaurants. We turned the suburbs into a jungle where the trees are TGI Friday’s and Chili’s and Applebee’s and the lions and tigers are gargantuan SUVs built to climb mountains. But they’re aren’t any mountains around here. Just a flat jungle of pre-fabricated food, oversized cars and neon signs, signs  that are beckoning in the same way the sad lights of off-strip Vegas are; “Cash For Gold” and “Liquor!” and “For Lease” give this neon jungle a vibe that you’re walking through a place civilization forgot. Or, civilization as we know it ruined.

But fried pickles and beer.

When in the jungle, act like the natives.

It’s 7:10 pm and we’re just being seated. We have a hockey game to watch at 8:00. I don’t want to watch it here, even though there are no less than 50 tv sets hanging from the wall, few of them tuned in to some pre-game stuff but most of them showing baseball or some kind of car racing. The place is packed; we had to wait twenty minutes for a table and normally we don’t wait for anything in this jungle because there’s alway another tree to swing to that has no waiting. But I wanted those damn pickles. So we waited. We waited outside with that antiquated beeper in our hands and while I was waiting for it to buzz me the message that our table was ready, we watched the habitants of this jungle.

“Did he just say ‘where have you been, bitch?’ to that girl?”

There’s a dangerously overweight man in an ill-fitting collared shirt smoking a cigarette. A young girl, most likely his daughter, is approaching him. She stops in her tracks as he stares at her.

“No. No way did he say that.”

But the girl starts crying, whips out her cell phone and cries into it to someone. She turns away, starts walking back to her car.

“Where are you going, Eileen?” the man asks in a way that says he’s pretty disinterested in the answer. He stubs his cigarette out on the brick wall of the restaurant. “I’m going home,” she sobs. He opens the door, doesn’t look back at her while mumbling “Don’t be like that, Eileen.” But Eileen is being like that. She still crying into her phone as she gets back into her car.

Prey. Killer. Jungle.

So 7:10, at our table, ordering fried pickles and a 22 oz. Blue Moon. We both order some kind of chicken. They call it barbecue chicken but it’s not like any barbecue chicken we really want. We tell the waitress we’re in a rush and she says “Everyone’s in a rush tonight! Must be the hockey game!” and maybe it is or maybe they just want to get in and out of this place as fast as possible because the barely legal teen waitresses in their micro shorts are doing a line dance, whooping and clapping and spinning along to some country song I never heard of and never want to hear again and really, it’s kind of uncomfortable.

My daughter used to work here. Maybe two, three years ago. We came here a lot then because it’s always fun to have your daughter wait on you. 

“The service here is terrible,” I’d tell her.
“That’s because everyone who works here is perpetually stoned.”

I’m guessing from the looks on the faces of the plodding busboys that’s still true.

The fried pickles come out and three or four of them placate me. I’m good for another year or so before I get a craving for this basket of grease. I ask the waitress to take them away. The chicken comes out. I eat, try to have some dinner conversation but it mostly consists of “What? What did you say?” because the music is too loud and the tables are too close together and the conversation from the table of ladies next to us who all belong to what must be the LET’S EAT EVERYTHING ON THE MENU club is making it difficult to carry on any conversation longer than “I hope the Kings win tonight” because all I can hear is “If  we each order a different thing, we can all switch plates and taste everything. OH MY GOD YEA WE WILL DO THE SAME WITH DESSERT!” 

The dancing girls are back. The busboy with the dead eyes takes our plates off the table. The perky waitress brings our check. 7:43. We’re done. We’re out.

We go outside and Eileen is out there again, still crying into her phone. The parking lot is a maze of Lincoln Navigators and Ford F150s, monstrous animals that dwarf my little Mazda so it’s hard to find. I eye the strip mall across the street. Tattoos. Pawn Shop. Chinese Food. For Rent. Cash for Gold.

I hear the roar of hungry animals on the turnpike. I see the buzzing neon signs, the rows and rows of stores and restaurants all offering the same variations of different things. For a moment I’m lost in a place that’s my home but has become so unfamiliar to me. I don’t know how to navigate through this treeless forest of despair anymore.

We get home, turn on the hockey game. By the third period the fried pickles and beer have become sticks poking the bear of my acid reflux. The Kings are losing. I hear sirens and racing engines off in the distance. 

You’re in the jungle, baby. You’re gonna die.

[dinner stories]

dog days

A couple of nights a week we go out to dinner. I cook the rest of the nights. I mean, I cook. I’m a good cook. I can get home from work at 6:15 and have an amazing, nutritious, spontaneous meal on the table by seven. Todd is often awed by my ability to throw together a gourmet meal in the blink of an eye. We’re talking Iron Chef levels of awesome here.

But every once in a while, there’s a night like this. A night when a day has sucked the life out of me. A night when I’m too exhausted to cook, but want so badly to be in my pajamas and on the couch that I don’t want to go out to eat and when I don’t want to wait an hour for some shitty Italian restaurant to deliver overcooked pizza to my house. 

A night when I throw some hot dogs on a plate and present it apologetically - sometimes tearfully - to my family.

“It was a bad day….”
“It’s ok…”
“I’m so tired….”
“I don’t mind hot dogs.”
“I don’t even have any sauerkraut.”
“Relax. It’s fine.”
“THEY AREN’T EVEN REAL HOT DOGS. THEY’RE TURKEY DOGS.”
“Oh god, you’re going to cry, aren’t you?”

I sob over the sweet potatoes fries I took out of the oven too early because I just don’t want to wait for them to finish cooking. I want dinner to be over. I salt the fries with my tears. Let my family taste my sorrow. I AM MARTYR, HEAR ME ROAR.

I apologize while we’re eating, looking upon the turkey dogs and soggy fries as if I’ve committed atrocities upon my loved ones. 

Everyone ignores me at that point. They eat their dinner. No one damns the dinner, but no one praises it, either. I mean, it’s fucking hot dogs. What’s to say? “Gee, that’s some fine meat-by products and nitrates you served tonight, dear. Great job!”

Maybe the hot dogs are a cry for help. Maybe I just want someone to say “Wow, you must have had a really bad day to serve us this shit. Do you want to talk about it?” Instead I half listen to a conversation about Nicki Minaj’s beef with a radio station and I’m all “OH SURE, NICKI MINAJ HAD A BAD DAY SO LET’S FEEL SORRY FOR HER BUT I BET SHE DIDNT SERVE ANYONE HOT DOGS FOR DINNER TONIGHT.”

All I’m saying is, if you ever ask me what’s for dinner and I say “hot dogs” you’d probably do yourself a favor by avoiding any further conversation with me. 

Tonight on Iron Chef, the secret ingredient is……tears!

[dinner stories]