You cook it yourself

[gurdonark]

Last night I did not have to work too late, so we decided to go down into downtown Dallas to the Butcher Shop restaurant in the West End. The West End Marketplace opened in the mid 1980s. It's one of those prepackaged "activity centers", a building full of knick knacks, cafes, arcade games and the like, aimed at 20somethings and tourists, surrounded by older buildings converted into restaurants and bars. Lots of cities have tried some version of the West End Marketplace--I believe the West End was modeled on a once successful but ultimately failed thing in Atlanta called Atlanta Underground. The West End has been a huge success, not "hip" exactly, but entirely inoffensive, and, I must admit, fun in a kitschy, time killing way.

The Butcher Shop is one of those places where one cooks one's own steak. There's huge open pit barbecue fires, one chooses the size of one's steak from a menu filled with steaks of obscene weights, and then one is taken to a huge freezer case to pick just the right steak. I share the common vanity of all non-vegetarians that, given open flame, I can make the perfect steak, so places like this interest me.

This was not the first time we'd been to this restaurant.
In 1988, I'd been in the Butcher Shop on a Friday night, having dinner with a co-worker who always chose at dinner to put his tie off its normal kind of lapel place and move it out of harm's way in restaurants by tossing it around his neck like a scarf. The Butcher Shop was one of those places that 20something and 30something professional singles went to eat, the people that at that time everyone called "yuppies". Because Dallas is always a bit vivid, this meant kids dressed in rather old-fashioned chic nightclub attire and in Italian-cut business suits. Trust me, 1988 was a world away from today. Dallas was in the waning moments of an economic boom, folks with money "hung out" at expensive restaurants and fancy clubs, where singles who sold commercial real estate by day connected with a sort of wild abandon among electronic dance tunes, and folks with cool hung out in a warehouse district called Deep Ellum where the best music on earth was played by indie bands from Austin and Dallas seven nights a week in the most incredible set of clubs ever invented. It was a heady time indeed, a time when AIDs was barely more than a rumour, a time when the world wide web did not exist, when jobs and money seemed plentiful, and a time when the Bush in government actually made sense sometimes. I am not really at home in a world of young urban professionals and material success, or even in the much more appealing world of two bit clubs where alternative bands will blast one away with incredible tunes all night long, but I followed my usual credo that it's okay for an earnest person to be slightly out of place wherever he goes, and I lived as gracefully as one with metaphorically too many thumbs, too many thoughts and short, unmanageable hair can in such circles.

The steak place in 1988 was crowded with people cooking their steaks, and all abuzz with the youth and adventure of the moment. I was sitting in a table by the window, with my co worker, exulting about my plane ride from Los Angeles the previous evening. I was telling him about how delighted I was to meet this woman on the plane. Suddenly, I looked up, across the crowded room of hip businesspeople, and there she was. The woman I'm now married to was, by chance, also at the steak place. It seemed like Fate, Destiny, or just another day in the charmed Dallas of 1988.

She was standing at the grill, cooking her steak. She's a bit pink-complected, so the radiating heat from the massive grill (which had one of those fume vacuum things on top) was turning her face a very pleasant red. Let's omit the fact that she had a date, because although I was introduced to him, he really proved to be a minor character in this story. I went up and said "hi", and I could see her sheer delight that we had run into each other that evening. We didn't say much, we went our own way, and I saw her from afar a time or two more that July evening in the West End area, where, as is still usual, soul cover bands gave free outdoor concerts to the folks around.

Within a week, we were dating, and in less than two years we were married. So our trip last night to the Butcher Shop was more than a noble quest to fire up steaks. This was a "place" for us.

When we arrived in the restaurant last night, the ambience had changed from fourteen years ago. Gone was the sense that this was a place in which one discussed a big business deal. Gone was the sense that 20somethings and 30somethings were stopping in for a swinging steak prior to hitting a Euro-disco and trying to make a love connection. Gone was bleach blonde hair, and Italian suits, and high heels, and very yellow ties, and make-up meticulously applied to achieve the look of a fashion magazine. Gone were pinpoint oxford button down shirts worn with jeans. Gone was the sound of endless clinking of Dos Equis and Corona beer, as in that pre-micro-brewery era the Mexican beers somehow defined everyone's moments. Gone was the sense of "I'm a success, I'm with it, and I can cook a steak. I believe all these things died when the entire savings and loan industry collapsed at once, and all the financial services professionals in Dallas, a big "money moving" town, found themselves either unemployed or indicted.

Now the Butcher Shop is a quiet, simple affair. Most people opt to have the chefs cook their steaks, although one grill is still set aside for we troglodytes who still want to cook our own steaks. The place is warm and friendly and familiar and quiet and dark and nice. The place was like two people who met in the blur of excitement, and now have settled into something entirely comfortable, and intensely sustaining.
We explained to the waitress our sentimental little story, and she told us that the West End had changed. It is still fun, but it's no longer a place where singles party so much. It's a much more sedate affair.

We chose steaks, headed to the grill, got a little instruction from a man who, it turned out, was working there back in 1988, and then we cooked our steaks. I had not put Worcestershire sauce on a steak in decades, and it's just such a silly thing to do, so I drenched my steak in Worcestershire sauce, which, for some reason, suddenly seems to me to be something Pappy, my father's late father, would have done. Our steaks turned out grand, the ambience was quiet and pleasant, and, unlike 20something days, when we would have done a little nightlife after dinner, we instead drove home and made an early evening of it.

I don't always feel mentally different from that man at 28 who met his future wife on a plane and then saw her at a steak place as if Zeus himself had placed her there. My body once in a while sends me postcards that I'm older,
although I try to be just as active now as I was then. The circumstances of my life, though, have entirely changed, and I could barely imagine not being married to my wife. If our world now involves much more cable television in our tract home, and much less nightlife, that's okay. We still know how to stand at an open grill, and cook a steak, and discuss how odd it is the Cranberries had so many hits, and yet the Sundays, such a worthy band, had so few. We might have had that talk in 1988. We had that talk last night. We'll have that talk, if God wills, in 2018. It really doesn't matter how updated the floor coverings were in the Butcher Shop. It matters that we can talk, and dream and exist every day. We're aiming for well done.

Comments

[burninggirl.livejournal.com]

What a wonderful story. I like it when you reminisce in your journal. That last paragraph, especially, has such an air of perfect contentment. And in my opinion, the Sundays and the Cranberries are both great bands. (Incidentally, in 1988 I was seven years old and living in Germany, and it feels a lifetime away in both space and time.)

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

I was just saying to my wife last night that I have such an utter crush on Delores O'Riordan, and yet it is a crush not based at all on physical attraction, a desire to meet her, or anything but that she is so earnest and has such fun songs. The couple who are the Sundays intrigue me--record an album, disappear for years, pop up again--I've always wondered whether they work "day jobs" or whether being part time pop stars can be that remunerative. The first two Sundays albums really were so important to my friends and I. We listened them, and Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures and REM and 10,000 Maniacs and in my case, now forgotten bands with names like the dB's, Guadalcanal Diary, and the True Believers.

I see already that my post has some rosy-water-colored memories, because by 1988, the AIDs crisis was probably already on peoples' minds, and the first hints of the coming 1990 recession may have been in the wind. But my memory keeps that time as so different from now.

I love that on LJ, we are the "same age", really, but when we compare notes, we are actually decades apart. I never lived overseas, and did not go to Germany until I was 30something, so I guess you've had the more exciting life!

I am always intrigued by how pop culture passes.
One of my LJ friends put a brief tribute up to
an American footballer who just died, but the fellow retired the year she was born! How did his legend transmit down? I'll never forget the first time I met a woman who had never_heard_ of Bob Dylan. My goodness!

[burninggirl.livejournal.com]

I love that on LJ, we are the "same age", really, but when we compare notes, we are actually decades apart.

I've always found that fascinating about LJ, and especially when "talking" with you. Maybe that's why I always enjoy stories about your past, because often they took place before I was even born, which seems so incongruous but also so interesting.

The first album I ever bought, when I was thirteen, was the Cranberries' "Everybody else is doing it...so why can't we?", and I still just love it. Unfortunately each album they made was a little less entralling than the one before - I didn't even bother to buy their latest (5th) album - but that particular album has always bee a special one for me. I discovered the Sundays a few years later, in my first year of uni. I have yet to explore all of their music, but I started with "Static & Silence" and thought it was wonderful. I remember playing it on a constant loop for weeks on end.

As for the woman who'd never heard of Bob Dylan, well, that's almost beyond belief. How old was she? I can't imagine living a Dylanless existence, especially as so many of his lyrics have made it into the language as common phrases. I saw him in concert when I was seventeen and it was such a thrill. That sounds like something someone of my parents' generation would say, but it was actually 1998! I love the fact that he's still around and touring the world. Now if only Paul Simon would make it down here, my [musical] life would be complete... : )

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

There was a year or two in which "Reading, Writing and Arithmetic" seemed to me to soundtrack my existence. I think I own that fifth Cranberries album, but there's something about a pop band in the first flush of jangly catchiness. I hate to be age-ist, but it's so hard to be naive enough to do a perfect pop album after 30. By the time one hits 31, then one is filled with notions of product and industry jargon and failed dreams and broken hearts.
I love that notion which pops up a lot in French writers' work that the innocence of a child is the most elusive and desirable thing.

Speaking of children, the girl was 18, and she lived in the world of 1984. She dated a friend of mine, but it was so breath-taking to meet a college-age girl in that fairly Dylan-recent era, and find that she had no conception of how he was.

I got to grow up during a really fun run in music.
In college, Brian Eno's Before and After Science, as well as a now-obscure band called Be Bop Deluxe, shared the turntable with Bowie. In law school, my friends and I listened to tons of U2 and REM and Joy Division and we went to see Echo and the Bunnymen and to watch Natalie Merchant complain about the clove cigarette smoke a few times a year. There were great unsung bands, Guadalcanal Diary and the dBs and the True Believers and Edie Brickell's band, and a folk singer who sang like an angel called Sara Hickman and a world of pre-grunge rockers. What fun!

I miss those club-music days sometimes. But I'm not sure I could stay awake! We went to hear a guitarist at folk dealie last Saturday, and I was a zombie all Sunday!


complain about the clove cigarette smoke

[sushimonkey.livejournal.com]

and "Blind" was my soundtrack for quite a long time. That album is still one of my top ten all time most important personal albums...i listend the hell out of it in college so whenever I hear it again it flashes me back in time....i LOVE LOVE LOVE The Sundays!!

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

I LOVE LOVE LOVE the Sundays, too :). I'm always impressed, as well, by how successful they are at maintaining their privacy. Their stuff sounds so good even years later. They were too popular to quite call them an overlooked band, but I am surprised they weren't even bigger than they are.

[marstokyo.livejournal.com]

What a beautiful story!

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

Thank ye kindly :)

Re:

[marstokyo.livejournal.com]

It reminds me somewhat of Jon and myself in our *dating* phase. Sometimes you just *know it*, eh?

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's it exactly. It's that "just know it" feeling. I meet couples who do well who grew into it altogether, like two trees somewhat inadvertently growing together, but I'm rather glad that my wife and I got to "just know it".

Heidi will be delighted

[kenmora.livejournal.com]

I emailed Heidi the link to this post, she'll love it as I did.

I could not have been more mystified by how "easy" it all was when we found each other. My dreams were sending me signals right from the start, and I looked at Heidi as if she were a wonder, a truly new thing under the sun. Until then I couldn't fathom why people got married. I'd smerk when people would say "you just haven't met the right person yet." Score one for popular wisdom.

How sad for people who don't know this most wonderful of life's happy gifts.

Re: Heidi will be delighted

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

I think that the sense that things are inevitable definitely helps in rough times, to keep focus, and in good times, because one just feels so fortunate!
I know that not every couple is based on "knowing", but it was nice for me to have it happen that way.

[asphalteden.livejournal.com]

I was twelve or thirteen those years. I seem to have horrible memories about how garish and awful the late eighties were, but I think it's more a reflection of my early teen years than the actual time period itself. Or is it?

I loved reading about you and your wife's romance. I am always charmed by real people connecting on such levels. It's so much more interesting to me than movies, TV, novels, where the situation seems so forced or contrived. I seem to recall you meeting her on a plane?

You've almost compelled me to write an entry about Bianca and me.

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

You write such nice entries, I will greedily read each of them, regardless of topic.

ode to your wife

[(Anonymous)]

Heidi here. As you know, I've long been offended that you did not adequately, in my eyes, refer to and include your wife in your entries. I deem this entry to more than adequately tribute the very well done thing you two have and the fates that brought you together. Just so all you LJ folks out there are clear - fascinating, articulate, intelligent as Gurdonark is, his wife is up to every bit of it.

Re: ode to your wife

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

Hi Heidi!

I have never seen a basis for offense, but I am always glad when offense is dissipated. Actually, the request for relative anonymity came from my wife, who is much more than fascinating, articulate and intelligent than I am.

Thanks for commenting.