I don’t like fancy food anymore. If the truth be known, I never did, but when I was younger I pretended that I liked it so nobody would think I was a misfit. I don’t care what anybody thinks anymore.
I ate at Maxim’s in Paris once. It took four guys to hand out the dessert—strawberries and cream. One guy held the bucket of strawberries, another held the dish of cream, and a third dipped the strawberries and the cream onto my plate. The fourth guy played the violin. You could buy a late-model used car, fully equipped, for what that meal cost, and yet it wouldn’t touch what I can get at my mother’s house for free.
This book was not designed to be a culinary guide, but because I consider myself an expert on eating (I took it up as a very young child), I’m going to offer you the benefit of my years of experience. I would ask you to clip these guidelines and attach them to your refrigerator door, but with the price of books today, maybe you should just turn down the ear of the page so whenever you’re hungry or need advice about eating, you can turn to this spot readily.
GRIZZARD’S GUIDE FOR EATERS
1. Never eat barbecue in a place that also sells Dover Sole. Neither dish will be any good.
2. Never eat any place where they mark the restroom doors in any fashion but “Men” and “Women” or “Ladies” and “Gentlemen.” Especially do not eat in a restaurant that specializes in seafood and marks its restroom doors “Buoys” and “Gulls,” because they have been too busy thinking up cutsie names for the restroom doors to really pay attention to the food.
3. Never eat in a restaurant where nobody speaks or understands English. You might get boiled horse or roasted dog if you’re not careful.
4. As per our recent discussion, avoid any place that offers French fries and then serves you those with crinkles in them. Any place that doesn’t have the decency to serve its customers hand-cut French fries doesn’t really give a damn if the rest of its food is fresh and tasty, either.
5. Never eat anything that resembles a house plant, like asparagus, broccoli, or Brussels sprouts.
6. Never eat soup with chunks moving around in the bowl when you aren’t stirring it.
7. Avoid “broasted” chicken. Chicken is supposed to be fried to a heavy crisp on the outside, and anybody who tries to cook it any other way is again toying with God’s Master Plan.
8. Don’t go into French restaurants. They charge you extra for drowning the food in all sorts of sauces. If the food was good to begin with, why would they need to put sauce on it?
9. If the waitresses are skinny, go somewhere else. If they won’t eat the food, why should you?
10. Never eat in a restaurant where the maitre d’ is a cop.
No. 10 deserves some further embellishment. I checked into a hotel late one Sunday evening. The hotel restaurant had been closed for hours, so I asked the lady behind the counter where I might get something to eat.
“How hungry are you?” she asked.
“I could eat the bellman’s hat,” I answered.
“In that case, you could walk across the street to The Cave.”
“Is the food good?” I inquired.
“Let me put it this way,” the woman answered. “Stephen King is thinking of basing his next novel on their menu, but you said you were hungry.”
The Cave was located in the basement of an apartment building. I opened the door and the first person I saw was a policeman.
“How many?” he asked.
“One,” I said.
“Are you a member?” continued the policeman.
“Of what, Officer?” I asked.
“This is a private club,” I was told.
I knew all about private clubs. Private clubs are an ingenious way to get around a lot of sticky rules about selling booze after hours. The policeman explained that I could join The Cave for a dollar and have all the rights and privileges of other club members, such as being able to drink until four in the morning.
Such a deal. I paid my dollar and the policeman handed me a membership card. Then he took me to my table in a cozy little corner near the bandstand. As I was being seated, the thought occurred to me, Why is there a policeman here?
“I hope you won’t take this the wrong way,” I said to the policeman, “but are you expecting trouble here?”
“About twice a week,” he answered, “somebody tries to cut the cook.”
I considered going back to the hotel and munching on some of the plants in the lobby, but the waitress had already arrived and handed me the menu. It was printed on an airsickness bag.
There is another rule to follow when you’re eating in a place where the food is obviously of questionable quality: Order as simply as possible. As a matter of fact, that’s probably a good rule to follow anytime you’re eating out. I never order anything I can’t pronounce.
“I’ll have a steak,” I said to the waitress, figuring that it’s difficult for anybody to louse up a steak.
I waited for the waitress, who probably hadn’t been nearly as ugly ten years and fifty pounds ago, to ask me how I wanted my steak cooked, but she didn’t, so I said, “... and I would like it cooked medium well.”
“Folks in hell would like some ice water, too, honey,” she answered.
“I can’t get my steak cooked medium well?”
“Depends on how sober the cook is,” she said.
As I waited for my meal and silently prayed for at least some semblance of sobriety in the cook, I surveyed the scene around me. There were all sorts of individuals at the bar, including a very fat woman dressed in an extremely tight pair of red pants that had the words “Roll Tide,” the University of Alabama war cry, written down each leg. I made a mental note to speak to the club officers about a stricter dress code for the members.
There also were several couples shuffling around the dance floor as the band blasted away. Bands that play in such places are always loud, because they follow an old musical adage: If you’re going to sound terrible, do so as loudly as possible. Bands in such places always play the same songs, too, and they’re songs that I hate. These include “Proud Mary,” “Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog,” “Tie a Yellow Ribbon,” and “Feelings.”
The band was butchering “Proud Mary” when the waitress returned with my steak. It may have been a good steak at some point in its existence, but when it reached me it resembled a shingle. I reached for my knife. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the policeman move his hand toward his gun.
“I’m just going to try to cut my steak,” I said. I honestly had no desire to tangle with the cook. Anybody who would do what he had done to my steak obviously was not the sort of person you’d want to face with a knife.
I had a difficult time cutting the steak. In fact, I couldn’t. Finally, I asked the waitress for a couple of packages of crackers and attempted to fill up on them.
As I left, the fat girl in the tight pants winked at me.
“Roll Tide,” I said, trying to be nice to a fellow member. I said the wrong thing. The band had just cranked up on “Feelings.”
“How ’bout a slow dance, Sweetie?” said the fat girl as she moved toward me. I hid behind the policeman, who convinced her not to drag me to the dance floor as she obviously intended to do.
I thanked the policeman, gave him my membership card back, and made myself a promise never again to go out of town when I’m hungry. If the food don’t get you, a fat girl might.
* * *
It’s odd how time and circumstances change the taste buds. I travel a great deal these days. Therefore, I eat a lot of airline food and hotel food (which we eventually will get around to passing laws against). But all the while, I find myself craving the food my mother reared me on. I find myself even craving turnip greens, which is a fairly complicated story with a happy ending.
I hated turnip greens when I was a child, but they were a staple for the family. My grandfather grew them in his garden and used to make me help pick them, which was like making the guest of honor at a hanging help bui
ld the gallows.
In the first place, turnip greens emit a foul aroma when they’re cooking. And they do not look appetizing. As a matter of fact, they look like something that grows on top of a pond. And the very words turnip and greens are a turn-off to the appetite as well. Turnip sounds like something they would find growing on your pancreas.
“Am I going to make it, doctor?”
“Removing a pancreatic turnip is a serious matter, but we’ll do everything we can.”
Greens. That sounds like something to do with loose bowels.
“Sarah just hasn’t been herself lately.”
“What’s her problem?”
“Got a bad case of the greens. She’s been afraid to leave the house for three days.”
Now that I’m older and forced to eat modern foods, however, I enjoy the occasional turnip greens that I get. My Aunt Jessie makes them for me when I visit her. Recently, Aunt Jessie had a sort of family reunion at her house, and she cooked a huge pot of turnip greens. As I was saying how tasty they were, Aunt Jessie’s daughter, cousin Glenda, spoke up and said turnip greens are sort of how she came to meet her new husband. I enjoy a good love story, so I asked her to explain.
“Well,” she said, “I was working at a Hardee’s and Owen was working at a gas station next door. One day, I stopped to fill up my tank and he came out to wait on me.
“While the gas was pumping, we started talking and I casually asked him how he was getting along. He said everything was fine, except that somebody had given him a mess of turnip greens and he didn’t have a pot to cook them in.
“I said, ‘Well, I’ve got a pot if you’ve got the greens,’ and next thing you know, we got married.”
You’ll never find that moving a love story in True Romance. And isn’t there a country music song in all this somewhere? We could call it, “You’re the Greens in My Pot of Love.”
* * *
Just one more note about food (which should lead me nicely into the next chapter). One of the worst things that has happened to food in the past ten years is the microwave oven. I have one in my kitchen, but it came with the house.
I worry about food that has been prepared in a microwave oven. What is a “microwave” in the first place? Does it have to do with radiation? Whenever I eat something that has been cooked in a microwave, I feel like I should be wearing a lead vest instead of a napkin at the neck.
And why do restaurants that use microwave ovens put a sign on the door that says, “Warning: Microwave Oven in Use”? Somebody told me that if you have a pacemaker in your heart and you stand around a microwave oven, the rays or waves or whatever is inside one of those ovens can throw your pacemaker out of kilter. If a microwave oven can do something like that, what else can it do? My car occasionally won’t start in the morning, usually after I’ve cooked some bacon in my microwave oven. You figure it out.
And you’ve heard that rumor about the woman who gave her cat a bath and then put him in her microwave to dry him, haven’t you? Besides, if God really intended for us to have microwave ovens, why did He give us Ol’ Diz charcoal?
Questions like that are always popping up these days. It’s the price we pay for living in a world of modern technology. And just to be on the safe side, if I was a cat, I’d stay the hell out of the kitchen. Now, if everyone will kindly climb aboard the turnip truck to the next chapter, we will continue this discussion of modernity.
14
Somebody Pull the Plug on Modernity
I WAS VISITING the folks at home, and my stepfather walked outside to hang the week’s wash on the clothesline. I went along for some fresh air.
The winds of early March flapped the sheets and pillowcases and the freshly-washed underwear. Both the sight and the sound were comforting, even reassuring. One of the things that’s wrong with our society today, I thought as I watched my stepfather, is that most people are too pretentious to hang their underwear out to dry on a clothesline that any passerby can see.
Today, people prefer to dry their underwear inside their houses in a gadget called a dryer, which spins the clothes in vicious cycles, pumping electrically-heated air to them. As the clothes tumble, odd sounds come from the machine, and when they’re finally dry, the machine stops automatically and gives out a signal that it desires to be unloaded.
But why would anybody want to be summoned by a machine?
Clothes dried outside by the sun and the wind and without buzzers (in Smith Barney parlance, the “old-fashioned way”) have a certain feel to them. Underwear dried outside, for instance, is less likely to cause itching and, because of the natural freshness, it may not even ride up quite as readily. There’s also a wonderful smell to naturally-dried clothes — the smell of the building warmth of early morning.
Maybe one reason people are more grumpy these days is that their underwear smells like coils and filters instead of like fresh sunshine. And it also rides up more aggressively, and we all know that nothing saps a person’s friendliness and comfort quicker than underwear creeping into certain crevices.
Just think about a society that didn’t mind hanging out its underwear for the world to see: It was a society that accepted the cards it was holding, a society that said, “My privacy is dear, but my refusal to bow to pretense is to be cherished even more.” Or, put more simply, it was a society that said, “I’ll hang my drawers on the line if I want to, and if mine happen to be more holey than thou’s, so be it.”
I wouldn’t want to leave the impression that I spent an inordinate amount of my childhood staring at other folks’ underwear on their clotheslines. I will admit, however, that there was occasional good sport to be had on wash day.
Miss Nellie Bascomb hung her clothes on a line in her easily accessible back yard. She wore those pink bloomers that struck just below the knee and had legs large enough for a fully-grown man to crawl through. When Miss Nellie hung out her entire compliment of bloomers, they looked like flags flapping on a mainsail.
Prissy Betty Ann Hillback, who played piano and sang solos at funerals (and who, you will remember, saved Donnelle Spinks from homosexuality), lived near Miss Nellie. One evening, a commando team of pimply-faced young men, who shall remain nameless, sneaked into Miss Nellie’s back yard and took her bloomers off the line.
The raiders then slipped into Betty Ann Hillback’s back yard and took her cute little step-ins, with the days of the week embroidered upon them, off the Hillbacks’ clothesline and replaced them with Miss Nellie’s pinks. The next morning, when Betty Ann’s mother sent her out to bring in the clothes, the perpetrators of this foul deed strolled up to Betty Ann and made all sorts of hooting remarks, such as, “Hey, Betty Ann, how about loaning us a pair of your bloomers? We need a tent for a camping trip.”
Betty Ann turned pinker than Miss Nellie’s underpants and ran into the house. The Hillbacks, incidentally, were the first family in my hometown to buy an electric clothes dryer.
* * *
Please understand that I’m not indiscriminately opposed to modernity. Some modern inventions and conveniences, I fully condone. Here are a few:
—AIR CONDITIONING: There is absolutely no reason to sweat anymore, unless you absolutely want to, which I don’t.
—AUTOMATIC TRANSMISSION: I still don’t know where reverse is on a straight stick, and remember what an awful time you had with the clutch when you were stuck on a hill in traffic?
—AUTOMATIC ICE-MAKERS: Thank you, whoever invented the automatic ice-maker, for delivering me from those ice trays that froze harder than Chinese arithmetic. The lever always bent when I tried to pry open the ice.
—AUTOMATIC COFFEE-MAKERS: They would be even more automatic if somebody would think of a way to make the thing remember to go out and buy the coffee, too, but you can’t have everything.
—HAAGEN-DAZS ICE CREAM: I know this doesn’t exactly fit here, but I love Haagen-Dazs ice cream.
—TWENTY-FOUR-HOUR AUTOMATIC BANK TELLERS: Three times a week, I run out of cash at precise
ly 11:30 p.m.
—BIC PENS: You lose one, so what? For a pittance, you can buy another.
—SCREW-OFF TOPS ON BEER BOTTLES: You never have to worry about keeping a church key handy again.
—OVERSIZED TENNIS RACQUETS: You don’t have to bend over as much to hit the ball anymore. Bending over is something I hate about tennis.
—ELECTRIC POPCORN POPPERS: Remember when you had to shake the pot to get the kernels to pop?
—ROACH MOTELS: They don’t smell up the house like Black Flag used to and they’re quite effective against roaches. I checked my Roach Motel recently and found a dozen dead roaches inside, including three in the lounge and one out by the pool.
—VIDEO CASSETTE RECORDERS: This certainly is a wonderful modern invention. You can tape television programs and watch them later, and you can rent movies and watch them in your very own home. Unfortunately, I have had a video cassette recorder for four years and I still haven’t figured out how to work it. I’m waiting for a fully automatic one that you don’t have to monkey with and that will mail off for X-rated movies on its own.
—THE THERMOS BOTTLE: A truly amazing invention. In the summertime, I put iced tea in my thermos bottle. Thirty minutes later, I pour out the iced tea and it’s still cold. In the wintertime, I put hot coffee in my thermos and thirty minutes later, I pour it out and it’s still hot. In the immortal words of my boyhood friend and idol, Weyman C. Wannamaker, Jr., “How do it know?”
—REMOTE CONTROL FOR TELEVISION: This invention has changed my life. Before, when I watched television, I had to sit through all those commercials because I didn’t feel like getting up and switching channels. With my remote control, I can change channels any time I want without having to leave my chair.
Do you realize what this means? I haven’t had to watch a Drano commercial — the one that shows the inside of that pipe with all the hair and various other sorts of goo inside it — in years. I also haven’t had to watch any commercials advertising feminine hygiene spray or mini-pads. (Has Cathy Rigby reached menopause yet? I certainly hope so.)
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