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I cook dinner
Friday, September 3 1999
Somehow I'd bucked an emerging trend and arranged with Kim not to go out for dinner this Friday night. But for me to make this arrangement I had to develop a suitable dinner alternative. And so for once in our relationship, I actually offered to cook dinner. I even invited Eric the Web Developer to join us.
At around the time of the weekly motivational ritual known as "Energy," Eric was busy making last-ditch changes to the site before an impending weeks-long code freeze while I was fleeing the sales floor and moving my workstation back into the room with all the other programmers of the product team. When we were done with our final Friday tasks, Eric and I slipped out and went over to the nearby Food 4 Less for dinner provisions.
Food 4 Less is perhaps the most singularly customer-hostile supermarket chain in the world. It's built on the "warehouse über-supermarket" model, with everything displayed in the original bulk shipping containers. But the aisles are designed not unlike the chutes of cattle slaughterhouses, complete with big sterile-white iron gates. Indeed, many of the overweight customers walk with a waddle reminiscent of fattened steers. Thus the shopping experience in Food 4 Less has a patronizingly inevitable feel, like being propelled through a machine designed to efficiently extract money from our wallets. I hate having to walk a quarter mile of maze in order to get to the other side of a rack of products, especially when I know that this is not the result of incompetent floor design, when I realize there's some sort of underlying logic to the arrangement. To make matters worse, the damn ATM card reader couldn't make sense of my Bank of America card and I had to use Eric's.
Back home, Kim was delighted to see I was actually carrying through on my promise. We sat around drinking beers for awhile, but then I got off my ass and launched myself solo into cooking. On our suggestion, Eric (who is anything but shy) went next door to invite Lisa over.
So there I was, boiling a big pot of water, stir-frying a skillet of mushrooms, and pulling shells off a pile of hapless pre-cooked shrimp. Kim and Lisa were amazed by the fact that I seemed to know what I was doing, that I (for example) knew enough to pour a little oil in the pasta water. Neither of them had ever seen me cook anything, and they'd simply assumed I didn't know how to. The fact is, of course, that I do know how to cook, but I hate applying myself to making art that vanishes immediately, leaving nothing but dishes in need of washing. For me, food is mostly about eating. By the time I'm hungry enough to eat something, I certainly don't have any time for elaborate preparation.
In the opinion of all present, the meal (pasta with a red sauce of shrimp, mushrooms and green peppers) turned out well.
Beyond the food, of course, we had all the usual elements of ambiance: candles, wine, etc. Through the window it must have looked like some sort of romantic dinner, enough to cause concern to our neighbor Jason, the navy surfer dude from Malibu. Navy guys, as we were discovering, look out for one another. In this case, Jason seems to feel that he is personally responsible for seeing to it that Lisa doesn't stray from her relationship with her boyfriend Andy, who is off earning money in Las Vegas. Tonight Jason seemed to be working under the mistaken notion that something was brewing between Lisa and Eric. When, for example, he saw them coming back from a beer run he said simply "Hell No!" Then, during dinner, Jason kept showing up, standing in the doorway and rudely asking for Lisa to come talk to him while a few of his extraneous Navy buddies climbed around on the window outside, looking in and grunting like orangutans. We didn't know it at the time, but at least some of their apelike behaviour was the result of a bottle of tequila they'd split.
In addition to the tequila-impaired Navy guys, others came and went through the evening. There was this new girl, yet another friend from Wisconsin, who has moved in with Lisa (and actually shares her bed in that cramped one bedroom apartment where Kim and I used to reside). The two will be splitting the rent in Andy's absence.
At a certain point in the evening my colleague Al made his triumphant arrival, followed shortly by his former neighbor Jeremy (who also happens to be one of Lisa's friends from Wisconsin) and a rag-tag entourage of male Wisconsin friends toting a 12 pack of Miller Genuine Draft. I was working on my latest painting intermittently in the midst of all this socializing, so of course I also found myself fending off people wanting to discuss what various parts of the composition "represents." Jeremy seemed particularly compelled by the painting; it launched him into an odd speach in which he proclaimed that San Diego would be the trade & cultural hub of the future, fed by Mexican maquiladora plants and Japanese trade. Jeremy went on to conclude that Ocean Beach would be the heart of a new artistic renaissance equivalent to similar such epochs in the lives of Venice and Harlem. Though he wasn't really making much sense with his bizarre Ocean Beach patriotism, I was forced to conclude that every time I talk to Jeremy I discover he's just a little smarter than I thought the time before.
The funniest irony of the evening was when Sophie decided to climb into one of the Wisconsin guy's laps and it turned out that he was actually a mail man (with, incidentally, a pierced septum). If Sophie had known, she surely would have growled at the very least. But she hadn't even barked on his beer-toting arrival!
This particular contingent of Wisconsinites were from such a backwoods corner of Wisconsin that I actually thought the mail man dude was from Ireland. He spoke with what to my ear sounded like a brogue. But after he insisted it was just his Canadian/Wisconsin accent I realized he was right.
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