Nice Dinner. Nice Restaurant. Good Service.

The Special This Evening is Waterboarding

Found myself at a dinner with a friend of mine and some of her coworkers.

At one point, apropos of nothing, my friend turns to me and says:

"You're a republican, right?"

I fell off of my chair and was unable to see or taste for several minutes. When I recovered, still in shock, I told her that I "was the most liberal creature she'd ever encountered. I would," I said, "grant trees the right to vote and animals representation in congress. "

she laughed. I continued, feeling on a hot streak.

"I want the government to pay for breast implants and for Obama to swear an oath on a gay baby."

This, it developed, was not the crowd for this sort of thing.

All of my friend's coworkers, I would soon discover, were of the 'double Guantanamo and put the environmentalists there' persuasion. The evening continued in a predictable fashion.

I wish I had been cool about the whole thing - aloof, suave, confident in the resounding victory of my ideology. I wish I'd weathered the "Obama won because the people are so uninformed and it's only a popularity contest," and the "Bush made us safer than we were eight years ago," and "torture is a subjective thing," and, worst of all, the "double standard of the media and the way they reported about Palin" with more aplomb.

As it was, it was all I could do to reassure them all that the coming socialist utopia would have a place for them, too.

Someone at the table eventually was successful in steering the topic to the Superbowl, and I admired them for it. Me, I was itching for a fight and would have liked nothing better than to get to gloat about the potential supreme court appointees. I had already suffered through being told that I only believed what I did because I was clearly a defense attorney (I'm not) and that I didn't understand America as I came from L.A., which was nearly Mexico anyway (that's stupid). I had a hardon to yack about the end of the war in Iraq and Planned Parenthood and the Kyoto treaty and all the other bugaboos of the conservative heart, but I ended up discussing whether or not Kurt Warner would make the hall of fame. (I argued yes, but that he didn't really deserve it. This was only vaguely controversial).

In the end, a man at the end of the table bought drinks for everyone. Everyone, that is, except for me.

I absorb your catcalls. I'll settle for winning the culture wars.

My Father at Christmastide

He watches The Gilmore Girls. He Tivos The Hills. During the whole of Christmas afternoon he sat contentedly in front of the fire, watching lifetime original movies on his 50 inch TV screen while Tim and I stood nervously nearby, hoping to catch the first snore of his inevitable nap so that we could connect the Xbox and chainsaw some aliens.

He knows no sin greater than to serve salad at the same time as the main course. He has left a trail of bloodied and broken waiters and waitresses behind him in his never ending quest to rid the world of this most heinous of wrongs. Once he flatly refused to eat (or pay for) a large porterhouse steak that was brought to him whilst he was still eating his salad. He insisted, loudly, that the waitress must throw away the steak he had been brought and have another prepared for him to be ready after he had finished his lettuce. And woe be unto him who should suggest that he 'calm down' or that it is 'no big deal.' The road to disinheritance is paved with such blasphemies. At Red Lobster the other night (yes, I know), he turned heads when he almost launched into a scathing rebuke of our Croatian waiter for bringing the salads at the same time as out order of coconut shrimp. Only some fast conversational footwork to get him reminiscing about a particular black bean soup he used to get for lunch twenty years ago saved the evening.

While watching a football game on television, he saw a player who had just barely missed an interception clap his hands once, forcefully, in frustration. Apparently never having seen humans behave, my father insisted that someone explain to him why the player in question would clap about missing an interception. Was he happy? What's wrong with him? It was explained to my father that a clap of the type he witnessed was a common way to vent the feeling of 'almost, damn!' and that people did this all the time, ourselves included.

He refused to accept this. He insisted that he had never seen anyone do that ever and that we must be wrong.

But he works really hard to put together a nice Christmas every year. He puts up a ridiculously tall tree (mostly to satisfy my sister's arboreal penis envy) and is willing, bless his heart, to watch the same insipid films every single year just to soak it all in. And all he asks for in return is at least one gift which contains something black and leather.

Oh yeah, he seems to have some kind of poorly developed leather fetish, as well.

Hard to Swallow

Got to talking about how, when we were in school, Nathan and I used to eat lunch together. He would eat a sandwich or something with maybe chips or a piece of fruit. Sometimes I guess he’d have a cookie or a cupcake. It used to drive me nuts because he didn’t drink while he ate. He would eat all sorts of foods and take no fluids for the whole hour. I would remark on it pretty much every day.

"How come you never drink anything?" I’d ask.

"I don’t need it" he’d reply.

I thought that was just bizarre. I used to bring people around to watch him eat things without drinking anything: Bags of peanut butter; chocolate bars; sawdust on dry toast.

My mom once told me how, when she was a girl, her parents used to take her over to have dinner at some friend’s house once in a while and no one was allowed to drink at the table in their house. They’d sit there, the whole family, eating chicken or something, and no one was allowed to have a drink.

There weren’t even glasses on the table.

I imagined it as just this long, wheezy, coughy, sticky-mouthed torture hour. I asked my mom why they weren’t allowed to drink and my mom said she thought it had something to do with the parent’s thinking the kids would fill up on liquids and then not eat their dinner.

I’ve never heard of that in people, but once I read how dolphins, because they don’t drink and get all their moisture from the food they eat, can’t distinguish between the sensations of thirst and hunger. So, sometimes, in captivity, they’ll spray a hose into the dolphin’s mouth and it won’t eat for a day or two because it thinks it is full. But I understand the dolphin’s point of view.

Hose water just tastes better.

Cancun: A Difficult Dinner

Dinner last night began in the same way it so often does - with me feigning indignation for comedic effect.

My mother had ordered a bottle of pinot grigio for herself and, after receiving it and tasting it, declared that it was pretty good. My father asked to see the bottle and when he took it from my mother I leaned over Chiara to have a look at it myself.

The first thing I noticed was that it was not, strictly speaking, a pinot grigio at all, but rather a blend of chardonnay and pinot grapes. I slammed my fist down onto the table in mock disgust and cried out “A blend!? Mother, how could you!?”

I then asked my father where the wine was from. He read the back of the bottle and informed me it was from Vera Cruz. Again I slammed my fist down on the table, rattling the flatware.

“Vera Cruz!?” I shouted in faux consternation.

“What’s wrong with you?” my father asked me.

“Nothing,” I replied quietly. “I’m feigning indignation.”

“Why?”

“For comedic effect.”

Stare. Silence.

Later, while discussing the adoption of Children, Tim impressed upon me the importance of a child having a cool name.

“Like Kobe or LeBron?” I asked. “Yeah,” said Tim.

I offered to call an adopted son LeJeff or LeKobe. Somehow or other this led to a more earnest discussion of potential baby names. Jennifer volunteered that she and Tim had already selected baby names for their theoretical children. The top boy name? Finnegan.

I said I thought it was a terrible name with a great nickname: Finn.

My dad said it was a terrible name because it was Irish.

This, as you might have expected, was the screeching turntable of the evening and rather upset my sister. It also rather perplexed the rest of us.

We pursued the topic with abandon.

Turns out my father believes that an Irish name dooms a child to a life of prejudicial treatment because, and i quote:

“Everyone knows that the Irish are a bunch of drunks and criminals” and “No one would ever think an Irish name was anything but low-class.”

It should be noted, for the record, that mine is, of course, an (ethnically) Irish family. Indeed, my father's actual surname is O'Brien.

We tried to explain to my father (over Jennifer’s mild protestations) how dashedly pretentious and upper-crusty a name like Finnegan actually was, but he wouldn’t have it. Instead he insisted over and over again that we must be incredibly ignorant if we didn’t know what people thought about "the Irish."

Tim asked him if he still called it a paddy wagon.

You can guess how this all went over.

Later, my sister offered up the middle ground (and perfectly true) position that words and names change their meaning with time and use. She mentioned the etymological history of her own name ‘Jennifer’ and how it came originally from ‘Guinevere’ who, according to my sister, was a slut.

This really caught in my father’s craw for some reason.

“How was Guinevere a slut!?” he demanded in far too loud a voice.

“Uh, because she slept with someone who wasn’t her husband!” my sister replied, pitched over the table and pointing a fork at my father.

“A knight!” he replied, red in the face, bubbling with anger. “You can’t be a slut for sleeping with a knight of the Round Table!”

“Of course you can! Especially if you are married to King Arthur!”

Here I tossed in that maybe she felt neglected because he was always off somewhere with Merlin, playing cards and whatnot. Tim smirked and, looking down, stirred the food on his plate in ever-tighter circles.

From here things got progressively more ridiculous until, almost as if the weight of the conversation caused itself to collapse, the whole thing just fizzled away leaving little more than a smell of burnt ozone and a cloud of steam.

We ate more or less silently for the remainder of the meal.

Cancun: My Father's Jokes Go Unappreciated

At dinner last night, Tim and my father and I all ordered Margaritas.

I opted for the Cadillac with Don Julio reposado tequila. Those other two got the house.

Good luck explaining to them about the bottle of Pancho Villa-wouldn’t-piss-in-it tequila they ordered. Anyway.

The waiter brings the drinks: Pinot Grigio for my mother. Coke for my sister. Coke for Chiara. Then he places my drink in front of me and announces it (as it deserved):

“the Cadillac, Señor.”

When he goes to place my father’s leper of a margarita before him, my father chimes in loudly:

“Ford!”

The waiter pauses in mid-action, the watery concoction disguised as a margarita suspended mere inches from the tabletop. He looks at my father.

“Ford!” my father again cries out, beaming at the poor waiter.

We all sit still as statues, confused or petrified; no one has the foggiest idea what we should be doing.

“Chevy!” my father yells.

By now, people at other tables - human resource managers in town for conventions, families of Iowans just vomited forth from cruise ships, chain-smoking New Yorkers happy to have someone other than the waitstaff to sneer at - are all pausing in their conversations, forks arrested halfway to mouths, to stare at our table.

And still the waiter holds that drink above the table in front of my father, perplexed.

And still my father beams his toothy smile.

“Cadillac.” says my father, gesturing at my margarita.

“Chevy! Ford!” he exclaims, pointing at his, still hovering before him in the waiter's hand.

With a sigh of either final comprehension or relief, the waiter chuckles briefly if unconvincingly and quietly and places the margarita in front of my father and then hands the other to Tim.

I take a deep breath and resolve to eat quickly.

The Would-Be Sultan, Subverted

I once went to a rib joint with my friend Joe. We were waited on by a stunning brunette who seemed to be flirting with both of us rather brazenly.

When she brought our dinners to us, she offered us bibs with a wry grin and a tuneful laugh. Joe and I exchanged glances and almost with one voice said to the girl “Yeah, sure. Why not?”

It seemed a charming sort of a lark - an opportunity to demonstrate how game and secure we were and what keen, ironic senses of humor we possessed. Our confidence and joie de vivre would communicate amply what giving and lyrical lovers we would make, surely.

She offered to tie the bibs on for us. As she came around behind me I arched my eyebrow at Joe and gave him a lopsided smile, full of significance.

Having an attractive woman gird a bib onto you in a restaurant is a heady experience. More than any other service of modern life save perhaps the massage, it suggests a kind of opulent servitude. In the moment, it felt like nothing so much as having a harem girl in a diaphanous gown feed me grapes, or fan me with a palm frond, or fill my goblet with wine from a bejeweled decanter.

The dance of the seven veils bibs.

In short, I felt important and powerful.

But when she had secured the bib and moved from behind my chair in order to repeat the task for Joe, a curious transformation of my mood transpired.

I felt stupid.

It was more than that, though; in the split instant of time between the bib being placed around my neck and the waitress removing her hands from my person, I underwent a profound reversal of emotion. I went from feeling regal and pampered, to feeling emasculated and childish.

I was, after all, just fitted with a device designed to catch foodstuff that fell from my mouth accidentally as I ate.

The experience of having that girl tie the thing around me was exciting. The experience of wearing it in front of her was painfully embarrassing.

As I watched the waitress tie on Joe’s bib, I saw in his eyes the same sudden swelling of potency and then, as she completed the operation, the same deflation in his demeanor. The girl left us to our meal and Joe and I stared silently at one another for a long, awkward moment before removing our bibs.

The girl never said anything or gave any sign that she noticed or cared that we had cast our bibs aside. She continued in her flirtatious vein and was attentive in all the usual waitress ways, but Joe and I hadn’t the anima left for any flirting in return. At least the act of eating ribs was still masculine and primal. It was likely that fact alone that salvaged whatever could have been salvaged.

Oh, and neither of us dropped any food onto our shirts. We aren't animals.

The Jennifer Dispatches: My Father versus Cheese and Bread

My sister relates a story of my father on Superbowl Sunday:

Halftime. The family sits around a coffee table laden with snackfoods and appetizers. My father voices a complaint:

“Next time, we should really make some plans for dinner and not just snack. We should have some protein for dinner. I’m tired of having Cheese and Bread all the time. We should have gotten those ribs at the supermarket.”

My sister responds: “We weren’t going to just snack for dinner. Mom ordered a pizza.”

“More Cheese and Bread! Why would I want more Cheese and Bread?!” cries my father.

“Well then why don’t you go to the supermarket and buy those ribs?” asks my sister, foolishly.

“I don’t want to go all the way out to the store to buy the ribs! I just don’t want to eat any more Cheese and Bread! All we ever eat is Cheese and Bread since you came here! This must be your doing!”

“Are you talking about the hors d’oeuvres? There isn’t even that much Cheese and Bread,” says my sister.

This is the last straw apparently. My father leaps from the sofa and hunches himself over the coffee table. Extending one of his stubby index fingers he points violently at a bowl of French onion dip and its companion plate of Ruffles brand potato chips.

“Cheese and Bread!” he exclaims

He jabs his finger at a pate.

“Cheese and Bread!”

He, predictably, stabs his thick digit into the wedge of jarlsberg.

“Cheese and Bread!!”

Even the bowl of sweet pickles is not immune from his wrath.

“Cheese and Bread!”

He punches with his finger at a bowl of Cheetos. He’s almost perspiring with the force of his hate.

“Cheese and Bread!!”

The twin bowl, filled with Fritos.

“Corn Chips! Just like Pizza!!”

My sister, always the glutton for paternal punishment, interrupts my father’s reverie of rage.

“How are corn chips just like pizza?” she asks.

“Shut up!” responds my father, “I’m speaking to your mother!”

My sister announces that she is going to go work on her art history paper. She goes to her room and does so. Later, when the pizza arrives, she leaves her room to find my father, perched stone-faced and alone at the dining room table eating the enormous porterhouse steak and gargantuan baked potato that my mother prepared for him.

My sister went into the living room and finished the game - and the pizza - with my mother.

To an Anonymous Punk, My Rebuttal

The other day, in the parking lot of a bookstore, I strolled by a small group of militant old-school punks drinking on the hood of an old beater. These guys were classic. Mohawks, studded leather, overweight girlfriends.

I wanted to walk as near to them as possible as I passed them on the way back to my car because I wanted to communicate to them (my blazer and flip-flops aside) that, in some cosmic sense, I was one of them.

Or anyway, I wanted them to know that I sympathized with them enough to not avoid them outright. I tried to emit early Ramones vibes at them as I strolled by plucking the price sticker from my book of Sontag essays.

The lead punk, his primacy evidenced both by his size and his possession of the plastic jug of vodka, greeted me with a “hey, man!” and I returned it with vigor.

“Isn’t this a magnificent evening?” he offered up lankily.

I replied that it was, but beginning to question my wisdom in instigating the exchange, I veered slightly and made for my car as casually but as quickly as I could.

The punk had a parting query for me and I’ve thought of it intermittently since:

“Don’t you wish everything was free?” he asked me in his hale timbre.

When I climbed into my car (a convertible), I took especial care to turn down the volume on the Belle and Sebastian song then playing on my stereo; I didn’t want to offend or rile the punks.

I muttered something supportive to them and drove away.

Afterward, I made for the dinner party I was attending that night at the Hometown Buffet.

I'll let that sink in.

The terrors were legion.

The place shared a wall with the 99cent store. Pay at the door and then take as much food as you like.

Lemme give you the tour: Here’s eggs. Here’s pot roast. Here’s spaghetti with ketchup. Here’s a vegetable - no, wait, that’s a chicken finger.

At one point a woman (one hopes) in a large bee costume sat down next to me and gave me a sweaty hug. The pilling felt of the costume’s gloves was used to caress my cheek. The black tights of the outfit had pooled around her ankles and spilled over the oversized sneakers. The smell was reminiscent of nothing so much as the ancient t-shirt I once discovered under a seat cushion on a houseboat.

Point is, I desperately wanted to be somewhere expensive as all sin. I think that punk had the wrong of it; I don’t want everything to be free, I just want to always have enough money to dine at an establishment where I can eat food that hasn’t been sitting under a lightbulb for a week and a half and takes less than an hour to chew.

But you can’t say that kind of thing to a punk, not when you have a haircut like I have.

Park City: My Father and the Steak Diane

One of the things you do when visiting the family for the Christmas holiday is to bring your family out into public so that you can feel embarrassed not just at home, but in a variety of places.

While dining the other night at a restaurant in Park City, my father spotted Steak Diane on the menu. Like a bite of Proust’s madeleine, this sent him into a kind of reverie.

“It was while your mother and I were living in Northridge,” it began.

“We were driving to Sequoia or somewhere. Anyway, we were near Modesto or Fresno and we were hungry.”

“We were driving through this small town at night, and on either side of us there were scores of car dealerships - and I mean fancy car dealerships - Lincoln, Cadillac, Oldsmobile . . .”

(Chuckles from my sister and I. My father oblivious.)

“We followed the road until we found a little restaurant and stopped for dinner. We both ordered the Steak Diane. Maybe that was the first time I ever had it. The waiter brought it to the table on a cart and it was served flambé. He rolled up the sleeves of his tuxedo jacket and cut our steak right there at the table. It was decadent and it was just delicious. I always remember that.”

Later, after Tim and Chiara had been convinced (how?) by this story to order the Steak Diane, my father lamented the inferiority of the Steak Diane served to them - which did not come flambé.

“This just isn’t Steak Diane,” he said with a shake of his head.