I Don't Know, I Don't Know

Don't count on luck.  I've been lucky in some things, far more than normal, but unlucky in others, far worse than I deserve.  Does it even out?  It seems like there should be some balance in the cosmos, something like the black and white circle that stands for the yin and yang of things.  But I don't know.  Maybe it evens out over generations rather than individuals.  Nature doesn't seem to have much fondness for the individual.  And as far as I can tell, it hasn't much fondness at all.

The weather has turned lovely here, earlier than I predicted (so I don't trust it), but wonderful nonetheless.  We ate lunch on my brick veranda yesterday in the lovely air and sparkling light, the table covered by a beautiful blue cloth--I thought of Tuscany.  "Why haven't you bought a grill yet," my friend asked me, her son chiming in.  I haven't though I keep saying I will.  I used to cook on the grill every night until it fell apart.  That was two years ago.  I have natural gas that runs from underground lines, the endless supply, but to buy a grill that will connect is very expensive compared to the ones I can get with the propane tanks. Perhaps four times the cost.  But it doesn't make sense to me to have the propane when the lines are already connected for the other, so I wait and wait and wait, making no decisions.  My indecisiveness meter is on ten.

Under pressure yesterday, I decided on a stop gap measure and headed off to the local UglyMart to buy a hibachi.  No luck there, so I bought a cheap-ass table top grill.  That is what it said on the box.

"Cheap-Ass Table Top Grill."  Almost.  Assembly required.

So I gave it to the ten year old to put together.  He's a wizard with Leggos which have cost thousands of dollars over the years, so I thought to put all that training to good use.

When his mother brought the assembled grill over (she said it had taken her son ten minutes), she put it on the big wrought iron table on the deck, the one with the big glass top that I've told you about long ago (I think), the one that is forty-two inches in diameter and one inch thick, the one that weighs a hundred pounds that slipped from my grip as I prepared for Hurricane Floyd, the one that crushed the bones in my right big toe into a jigsaw puzzle so that it blew up like a busted plum, the one I couldn't walk on when my wife came back from her business trip to tell me she wasn't happy, then that she wanted a divorce, the one that lay in my garage where it had fallen for years, the one that haunted my nightmares.  That one.

I went to Whole Foods and bought three lovely steaks and brought them home to cook on my newly assembled grill.  This will work fine, I thought, I haven't used charcoal in a hundred years, remembering that it really tasted better than cooking with gas.  I lined the bottom of the grill with pieces of the paper bag in which I'd brought the groceries home and set the charcoals on them.  And within minutes I had a nice flame.  "I should have done this a long time ago," I told myself, happy, feeling manly.  Men, meat and fire.  That's it.

And so I went into the kitchen to prepare the rest of the meal waiting for the charcoals to die down to a beautiful red glow.

Pop/Crash/Bang!

I looked up and out the window.  The grill was upside down on the deck, burning coals all around.  What happened I wondered, looking for the malevolent being who had done this.  But it wasn't a being at all.  The monstrous glass had broken, just shattered from the heat, I guess.  Really?  I couldn't have imagined it.  The friggin' package said "Cheap-Ass Table Top Grill" almost.  At least it said "Table Top."

What to do?  Salvage what I could.  I righted the grill, got a big spatula, and began shoveling coals back into it.  If nothing else, I'd cook the meat.  But the whole time, I was feeling weird.  The monstrous glass table top had broken.  I was feeling a thousand emotions and couldn't really sort them out.  I remembered my ex-wife and the girl who came after.  I remembered all the pain of every kind, and then the deep, long melancholy that ensued.  And somehow, I guess, I was bound to that table top that had punished me.  I'd kept the goddamned thing and had eventually made it serve me again.  Now. . . I don't know.  It felt unlucky.

The thing to do was have a whiskey, I thought, and get the meat on.  And I did, but to no use, for the coals were no longer hot enough to cook.  I left the meat on for awhile, but it just looked unappealingly gray.  Shit.  I decided to put fresh coals on top of the others that were still producing heat.  I would start over.  It was already late.  Maybe we could start the salads.  But the damn coals weren't firing up.  I needed lighter fluid, gasoline, something.  All I had was alcohol.  Alcohol burns, right?  I poured it on the coals.  It worked about as well as water.

As I was mucking about in wet ashes (I'd poured water on the deck to make certain I didn't have another disaster) and broken glass and gray meat, my neighbor and his girlfriend walked up.  Talk talk.  And as we did, the flames began.  Good, I thought.  We will eat.

By the time they left, the flames were dying, but all the coals had not flamed.  Some were black, some gray, but there were enough red ones, I thought, to cook with.  I lay the gray meat on the grill hoping for something good.

Inside, my friend had set up trays in front of the television that the ten year old had commandeered.  I thought we'd eat at the table, but I was really too weary now to object.  And so we ate our salads to some nerve-jarring t.v. show with five minutes of horrid commercials for every five minutes of show.

"I think the steaks are ready," I said hopefully.  When I took them off the grill, they looked O.K.  Maybe they would be good after all.  They had been expensive.

They weren't.   They tasted of unspent lighter fluid and perhaps just a little of rubbing alcohol, too.  And they were tough.  Perhaps graying them before had not helped.

As we sat in front of the television watching commercials aimed at ten year olds, we gnawed our way through the horrible meat.  What had dinner cost me, I wondered.  Two hundred?  Three hundred dollars.  And now I would have to buy a real grill.  More hundreds of dollars yet.

This morning, I looked over the shards of last night's disaster.  It felt like  reading tea leaves.  Burn marks covered the deck that was smeared by a sooty ash.  The table top shattered into pieces.  I try to think of it as a just reward, of course, but I can't quite.  We have shared disaster like Ahab and Moby Dick.  Something has ended.  And I'm feeling uneasy, for I don't know what.  All there is now is the waiting to see.  I don't know.  I don't know.