Home Cooking

Sound And Vision

Mother says be careful

Don't stay out too long

Don't do things you shouldn't

Miss me when I'm gone -- Joe Walsh

I was maybe 10 or 11 years old, riding my bike home down our street one evening. It was late in the fall, not quite winter yet. The air was crisp, and the wind was making my nose run as I rode along. I had been at a friend’s house a couple of streets over, playing after school, and I was supposed to be home by dinner, which was usually around 6:15 or so. I wasn’t late yet, but it was going to be close. Thinking of that, I sped up my pedaling a bit.

Even though it was early evening, it was already dark out. I could see the light coming out of neighbors’ windows as I went down the street. They were probably already sitting down to eat, some of them. I sped up a bit more. Most of the houses had porch lights on already, and they twinkled in my eyes. The same wind that had caused my nose to run was making my eyes water a little bit, as well. It was cool out, almost cold. I zipped my windbreaker all the way up under my chin, and leaned way down into the handlebars; not so much to reduce wind resistance as to try and stay out of it altogether, or at least as much as I could.

“I wonder what’s for dinner?” I thought. “Am I late?”

As I leaned in even further and pedaled through the big curve around the Gibson’s house on the corner, three houses down from my own, I suddenly, instantly knew. Dinner was halupki; and yes, I was late. Dammit!

My mom only made halupki every once in awhile; but when she did, you could smell it halfway down the street. Halupki is cabbage rolls, basically. Pigs in a blanket. My mother would brown ground pork and beef and onions and seasoning in bacon drippings in a heavy skillet, and steam a head of cabbage in water and tomato juice in a large stock pot. Then she would peel off the cabbage leaves and stuff them with the meat mixture, and put a couple dozen of the rolls back into the pot with more bacon drippings and onions and tomatoes, and a bunch of sauerkraut. Then she would let it all cook together for awhile. My mother’s mother, my maternal grandmother, was born in Austria-Hungary but was ethnic Czech, and my modern-ish 1960s mom would occasionally revert back to her roots and cook up a huge pot of this Eastern European soul food for us for dinner. She almost always did this in the fall or winter, which is when I suspect she got most nostalgic for the home of her youth (western Pennsylvania.)

Usually, I’m not that big a fan of cabbage or it’s derivatives. Broccoli, cauliflower, crap like that -- you can keep it. I have not yet evolved to the point I can eat something that smells (to me) like garbage, no matter how good it might be for me.

But, given that, I liked halupki all right. They way my mom made it, it was just good; I can't explain it. And I don’t know how it evolved, but in our family it was the custom to scoop a couple of those cabbage rolls out of the big aluminum pot with a ladle, along with some tomato-cabbage juice and a clump of sauerkraut, and then dump it all on top of a mound of mashed potatos you’d arranged on your plate previously. Mmmmmm. . . Czech comfort food. 'Gut bombs', my father called them, meanwhile piling three or four on his plate.

It was a good idea to not have much on one’s agenda for the rest of the evening after a dinner like that. One wasn’t going to be very ambulatory. About as ambitious as I normally got was to sprawl out on the olive green shag carpet in our den, in front of the big Magnavox console TV set. I would get a few hours of recovery time there, before having to go upstairs and take a bath and go to bed; and eventually go to sleep. . . sometimes to horrendous dreams.

-------------

Happy Mother's Day to all the mothers.

Here, and not here.


Inca F.P.

**********

A Glimpse Of Light

Lost In Austin

I was sitting in the Liberty Lunch, pretty fucked up already, nursing a squat 12oz. bottle of Red Stripe beer that was rapidly getting tepid. I didn’t even like Red Stripe, but I was drinking one. The bottle was sweating, and every time I grabbed it I could feel the beer inside getting warmer. It was humid as hell.

Back then, Liberty Lunch had no roof on it, and as I stretched out at the table, trying to un-kink some of the muscles in my back and legs, I found myself gazing up at the firmament, spread out above me like a big black tarpaulin with a bunch of little holes poked in it, letting light through. That in turn reminded me of an old Bruce Cockburn lyric about kicking the darkness “‘til it bleeds daylight.” I was very much in the darkness then, figuratively and literally; but to that point I hadn’t been doing much kicking. In truth, at times I felt as if I were sinking fast, like a stone.

As a distraction from my thoughts, I turned and watched two lesbians do the bump and grind with each other on the dance floor, just off to my right. They were moving to the music of the local reggae band up on stage, who were doing a lame cover of “Get Up, Stand Up”. I had been mesmerized by the band for awhile; mainly by the lead singer, who was about 5’ 7” and had long, unkempt white-boy dreadlocks down to his knees, almost. As he sang he prowled the small stage, swinging his hair around for effect. It was interesting for about five minutes.

Anyway, these girls dancing next to me were real lesbians, not the kind one saw in R-rated movies, all soft and pretty and desirable. Like a lot of guys, I found those sort of cinematic depictions of otherwise normal hetero girls suddenly overtaken with the compulsion to do each other to be pleasantly compelling, in their way. But these girls weren’t anything like those. Nope. These were the real thing, going at it in earnest; and I realized that – up close like that – lesbian sex was the opposite of titillating to me. I eventually had to look away.

I left the bar pretty soon after that, stumbling down West 2nd Street into the darkness, without much of an idea of where to go or what to do next. It would be a couple more years before I did get some kind of idea about that, but that is not really the point. The thing is, I learned something that night; or had something re-enforced I knew already. That is, sometimes things that look real good from a distance or from an obscured or distorted viewpoint, don’t look so great when you see them clearly and up close. Myself, I had been following a dream I had for years, a dream of living high and wild and more-or-less outside the rules. It was really a dream of being free, or at least what my idea of free was at the time. I had taken just about every wrong turn one could take in pursuit of my dream, and now here I was. This is what my dream had led me to. . . being high and stupid drunk on a dark street in Austin, with no place I really wanted to go, nothing I really wanted to do, no one I could go see and tell my troubles to.

I think it was around then that it occurred to me, I might want to start thinking about having a different kind of dream.

**********

Blind Luck

You Get What You Need

One time, a well-meaning if presumptuous friend-of-a-friend set me up on a blind date with some girl she knew. I was a still a happy, free-range bachelor back then, and I was extremely dubious about being ‘set up’ at all, I only finally agreed to it because we would be double-dating with some other friends, who were ‘connected’ and were going to get us into an exclusive political get-together thing I couldn’t have got into otherwise – I didn’t have the right sort of bonafides to get invited to that little soirée on my own. I was at the time a sort of a neophyte political operative, which is another story. I guessed my date would be homely, and/or painfully shy and introspective – that was my low opinion of blind dates – but taking her out would be my ticket into this political thing, something of a coup for me at the time. So I said OK.

I picked the girl up at her place and was pleased to see she was actually quite pretty; and on the way to the event, making small talk in the car, I gathered she was not a shrinking violet, either. Well, I figured, if nothing else I could take care of my business at the party – I touched the envelope full of cash in my inside coat pocket – and then we could just drink and talk and enjoy the evening, maybe even hit it off.

The party was a barbecue-and-beer bash, a fundraiser deal where slumming rich Republicans (and a few turncoat Demos) dressed down and acted like members of the proletariat, or tried to. . . meanwhile, deals were being made all over the place. ‘Handshake’ deals, you know? Fists full of dollars. There were several other guys in the room in the same profession I was, more or less; they were balling the jack, button-holing politicians, glad-handing judges and civil administrators, and greasing the palms of local power brokers and decision makers, county commissioners and members of the zoning board and the like. Some of those guys moved about the room with ease, they did this stuff all the time. But I was still fairly new at it, and this was a high stakes deal to me. I had $40,000 in cash in an envelope, with specific instructions on what I was to do with it. Gosh. Jefferson County politics, at least in those days. . . anyway, after an hour or so of watching and maneuvering for a position in these machinations, I got hungry and went over to sample some of the catered beef brisket and spare ribs and sausage, being served out of fancy silver steamware by guys in toques and white coats; I noticed my date was drinking beer and in an animated conversation with a few people she apparently knew. After I had disbursed the cash and otherwise had taken care of what I had gone to the party to do, the whole get-together seemed stupid and boring; a bunch of people I wouldn’t have spent five minutes with otherwise, half-lit and prattling on about their golf game or their mistress or the new addition to the mansion-ette. So my date and I decided to get out of there and retire to a little bar she knew about, a dive in a shopping strip off of the Interstate. She said it was dark, served cheap drinks, and had a decent live band. That was all I needed to hear.

When we got to the place we ran into some mutual friends right away, and settled down at a table and started ordering rounds of drinks. I was thinking my blind date was turning out a lot better than I had expected. She was getting a little loud, and tipsy, but in a good way – funny and endearing instead of irritating and obnoxious. The cover band was playing contemporary stuff, and they were okay, not great; every once in awhile they would mix in something danceable. We were having fun, I was laughing at and with my date, and somewhere in there I noticed I was beginning to get a little bombed, myself. I had been talking to another friend for a few minutes when I heard a commotion over up in front of the dance floor, and we turned around in time to see my date get up on the stage with the bar band, crawling up the riser in her heels and evening dress.

Someone had handed her a pair of maracas, those painted Mexican gourd things with seeds in them, and my date was dancing around on the stage, shaking her maracas, while the band played some song. It was pretty funny, not a bad performance at all. It got a great response from the audience.

By the way, this girl was reasonably well-endowed you could call it, and after that night, “shaking her maracas” became a euphemism among the smart set (okay, among me and my dumbass friends) for a woman with nice breasts on semi-display. Of course it did. “She’s really shaking her maracas tonight, man.” In fact, ‘maracas’ was eventually added to the long lexicon of terms we used to identify parts of the female anatomy. “Lisa’s got some chop (a nice ass), man.” “Yeah, but did you see the maracas on her friend?”

By the time we left the bar, both my date and I were pretty fucking wasted, and silly-happy. She was starting to say some crazy shit, though, just drunken stream-of-unconsciousness stuff, and I figured it was time to take her home. It was when we were sitting at a stoplight on Dowlen Road - the ‘main drag’ at the time - that she decided to roll down all the windows and open the moon roof of my Camaro and start singing The Cars “Dangerous Type” at the top of her vocal range, um, lungs. The song must have come on the radio, I don’t know. Anyway, it caused a bit of a stir there at the light, because even at 2:30 in the morning there were a lot of cars at the intersection, enjoying my girl’s musical talents. Several followed us for awhile down the road after the light changed, honking and weaving around in my rear view mirror.

“She’s a lot like you, the dangerous type. . . “

Depending on the situation, an outburst like that one (and/or the maraca incident) could have been really off-putting, a deal-breaker. Speaking generally, I tend to admire reticence in drunks. But my date’s antics only made me like her more, I noticed. In fact, by that late hour, and several sheets to the wind, I realized I was starting to like her a lot – very, very much. She must have liked me, too. When we got to her townhouse, we went straight upstairs.

I am not proud of everything I did in my youth. I don’t know how many nights ended up with me in some advanced state of intoxication, driving home some girl even drunker than I was. A fair amount of them, though; and a few times I even found myself waking up the next morning in some bed somewhere, trying to figure out where the fuck I was and what-all had happened the night before.

One thing that made this time different was the girl woke up when I did, the both of us all tangled up in the sheets and each other; and instead of an intense desire to flee, I realized I wanted to stay and lay there with her for awhile.

So I did, for quite awhile actually. There was not a lot of conversation. The silence was not uncomfortable, however. People worry about what to talk about with someone new, but being able to be with someone in a comfortable silence, just laying together there with our thoughts and without the need to pointlessly verbalize, I took that for a good sign. We had already established a level of unspoken communication, a closeness, maybe a trust even, that usually only comes after a time, if at all. Thinking about that gave me a warm feeling. Laying together there, me staring intently at the painted texture on the drywall ceiling; I thought maybe I had stumbled onto something.

I looked over at this pretty girl, who was looking back at me. She propped herself up on an elbow, smiled at me, and told me that she was going to marry me.

And she did.

**********