You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
The Grill.
I’ll buy the chicken and brats,” my buddy says. “You cook em.”
“Deal”
And so begins a cooking fiasco that is one part nightmare, one part I love Lucy episode. But instead of shoving candy into my mouth, I’m stacking burning meat on top of itself like a leaning tower of poultry.
I can’t cook. But I CAN grill.
To me, a grill is like a sports car. It has it’s on temperament, it’s own attitude.
When you are behind the wheel of a fine tuned machine, everything happens automatically, instinctively.
You drive by feel, you sense when to accelerate in and out of a corner.
The same can be said for a grill. The back left has a dead spot. Burner 2 is a blast furnace. Better put the meat a 1/4 inch this way.
But get behind the wheel of a grill you’ve never driven before and watch out. It’s like getting into a Porsche for the first time and not knowing where first gear is.
A man needs to understand his machine. Whether it comes with a spatula or a Recaro Racing Seat.
I pull the chickens out of the plastic bag of marinade. The breasts and thighs are saturated with a sweet nectar of sauce. It smells like the Fourth of July.
I use over sized tongs and put each piece on the grill. I feel the heat emanating from the burners. The chickens sizzle that sound of satisfaction.
I smile. Now we’re ready for a good burn.
I listen to the hiss of the gas pouring out of the burner. Sounds good, I think to myself.
I set the knobs to medium and lay the chickens neatly side by side. They are stacked in formation like an Atlanta highway at rush hour. I place the sausage on the grill to the right. They squeal as they lie down on the rapidly heating metallic grate.
There’s a crackle of satisfaction as marinade and chicken and brat meet flame.
I close the grill top and take a swig of my beer.
“Well Whiskey,” I say to my buddy’s 125 dinosaur sized dog. “Time for some cooking.”
I look into the darkness. The skies are wet with perspiration. You can tell that any moment, the clouds are going to open up and cry.
I look through the window into the house. Everyone is laughing and sipping cocktails. I see strawberries with cheese and pretzels on the counter. There’s a pitcher of margaritas and chocolate chip muffins. I can’t hear what they are saying but they appear to be having fun. It’s like watching a movie with the sound down.
I am tempted to run inside and jump into a conversation. But the deal is, I am the cook.
So here I am on the porch, like Julia Childs in the stockade. I am a culinary prisoner in solitary confinement. My sentence? To watch chicken carcasses smolder, to watch my friends laugh, to watch a big mastodon dog eye me suspiciously.
I pull open the grill top and a puff of smoke billows into the atmosphere. The air is growing thick and moist like a used gym towel.
The fire is even, and under control. I turn the meat as rain drop plops down on the top of the steaming hot grill.
Splat. Splat. Splat. The steam explodes off the piping hot metal.
I close the lid. “Keep an eye on that girl,” I say patting Whiskey on the head.
I open the door and join the group for a moment.
There is music and laughter. The kitchen is full of life. Most of all it is surprisingly free of rain.
“Is it raining outside?” my friend asks noticing my dripping hair and dotted shirt.
“Starting to,” I say.
I excuse myself to use the restroom.
I reemerge a few minutes later, reentering the kitchen.
The mood is fun. There is song and appetizers and a cross word puzzle of conversations going on. As is so often the case, a 3,000 square foot home is condensed down to a kitchen where 6 adults choose to cram themselves into.
I check my watch. I’ve been away from my duty for about 3 minutes.
I wonder if I have time for one quick story.
Just then, I cock my head to the side and gaze out the window. That’s when I see a golden orange glow. Like Hiroshima exploding over the horizon, my pupils melt into concern.
Oh crap.
I rush to the door. The grill is on fire.
It looks like a 5 alarm blaze at the Nakasome Tower in Die Hard. Brilliant flames are escaping like a jail break from Alcatraz.
I rush to the grill. Rain is now coming down steadily. I reach through the flames consuming the handle and jerk open the lid.
Whoosh.
Flames jump 3 feet. My eye brows singe and I feel the furnace like mushroom cloud expand into the darkness around me.
The meat is buried in a layer of rolling orange and red. Each piece of meet is ignited like a Molotov cocktail of flesh.
I reach for the gas nobs. They are hot to the touch. How did armageddon find its way to my cooking area, I wonder while I quickly turn the knobs.
I wait for the fire to subside. it doesn’t.
The flames continue spewing out of the grill, feeding off the meat and a layer of viscous goo stuck to the bottom of the grill.
I rush back into the house with a look of panic in my eyes.
I’m wet. I’m frazzled. In my mind I’m juggling cats who are juggling chain saws that are attached to hand grenades.
For some reason, practically nobody takes notice.
The patio is awash in a fiery glow as if Beelzebub himself is outside punching souls and in the kitchen, the talk is of astrology.
I have no time to ponder Jupiter’s gravitational attraction to Mars.
I grab the platter and rush back out like a cat burglar.
The fire is raging, consuming not only meet but metal.
I begin plucking flaming chickens from the grill. They are burning like marshmallows coming out of a camp fire. I quickly begin blowing on 1/2 pound chunks of flaming meat.
The chickens are black and nuclear hot. They look like tiny meat capsules reentering the Earth’s atmosphere.
One after another I drop the charcoal chunks of meat onto the platter. The flames are still pouring across the grill.
Though the gas is off, the fire remains intense. I look into the brilliant dancing beast and see a layer of gooey residual meat drippings that is feeding the monster with a sweet sticky accelerant.
Frightened meat still on the grill, toward the rear, is screaming for rescue.
I thrust my hand into the disaster.
My arm begins burning. I can feel my hairs singeing.
Christ, how did this go so bad so fast I think to myself. What started as a bar-b-que has degenerated into a car wreck of epic proportions.
Was the chicken belted in? Were the brats insured.
OMG!
Burned and anxious, I remove the remaining meat from the grill. The platter is too large to place on the side board attached to the flaming grill, so I place it on the ground.
I stare into the flames that continue to churn like a scene out of Back Draft.
I blow on the undulating inferno, hoping this will extinguish the greasy forest fire before me.
Nothing. It hisses, smiling an undulating sneer.
I rush back into the house.
I’m frazzled. I’m wet. I’m singed. I feel uncomfortable like a child who has done something bad and I just need to confess to someone.
My buddy charged me with the duty of cooking the meal.
“Hey you cook, OK?”
How F-in hard is that?
Apparently it’s become like a calculus problem after 8 tequila shots.
I feel like I have let everyone down. All I can think of is charred pieces of chicken, ripe with pink salmonella inside, and charred like burnt bark on the outside.
What do I even say?
“ah excuse me. Dinner is on fire?”
Or.
“I’d enjoy those strawberries people, cause that’s all the food you all are getting.”
My friend notices my consternation.
“What’s wrong?”
“Kind of having an issue out there.”
I’m embarrassed to say more. I’m not sure, but I think I am suddenly confronted by some sort of primal manhood issue.
Me man. Fire good. Stay in Cave.
My friend escorts me outside. The grill is still fuming angry goo fueled orange heat.
“What the ….”
I can’t believe what I’m seeing. The cook out has just gone from fiery bad, to carnivorously hungry worse.
That’s when I see 125 pounds of dog standing over the platter sitting on the ground. Juicy, half charred chunks of meat, being tongued by a gigantic dinosaur dog. Her nose is flared, her eyes wide with the dog thought “How did I get so damn lucky?”
Whiskey is hunkering over the charred meat like a predatory jackal.
I watch as she begins licking the sausage in the platter.
OH NO. Did I really leave a platter of uncooked meat on the ground near this K-9 brontosaurus. With the nuclear holocaust raging around me, I forgot the first rule of bar-b-que: Keep dogs from eating the food!
“Whiskey, get away from there,” I shout.
Whiskey licks her lips and moves away.
Had this been 1,000,000 B.C. she would have turned on me, saber tooth fangs ready to kill.
But ions of domestication makes her realize she is entitled to dry dog food and nothing more and she puts her tail between her legs and moves to the corner.
I pick up the platter. There are some dog hairs on the brats, but all the meat is accounted for.
How did this cook out turn into a Darwinian experiment?
My friend looks at my arm.
“Your hair is all singed.”
I look down and there’s a burnt residue on my forearm.
This is crazy.
A few minutes pass and the goo on the grill bottom finally burns itself out.
The rain is coming down. I am wet. I am burned. I am exhausted and in desperate need of a beer. This was suppose to be fun, not an episode of Man vs Nature.
I restart the grill and set the burners to low.
Like the sports car, I have taken that test drive and hit the wall. I am more astute, more prepared, more ready to cook without losing the rear end. I now understand my grill’s limitations, I now know its hot spots, it’s imperfections.
I place the chickens back in place. They immediately begin to sizzle. I keep the top open. My eyes are trained on the sizzling hunks of meat. Like a sentry on guard duty, I will not desert my post this time.
The rain is beating down upon me, but I stand my ground. Tongs in hand, at the ready, grill top open, flames under control, I am ready for anything.
This has suddenly become a Seal Team 6 mission and I am under Presidential orders to cook the damn chickens and get them safely into the kitchen.
I stare into the slow burn. I see the juices dripping delicately down into the pit. I am nervous that meat juice will somehow reconstitute another volcanic over flow.
I turn the meat often, like a human rotisserie. I want to limit the exposure to the all ready charred surface and try and heat the chickens from the inside out.
Whiskey licks her primordial chops, wishing I would go take another pee.
Ten minutes pass, the rain is pouring, the steam is pounding off the grill. I wonder if the chickens are cooked, will everyone immediately begin projectile vomiting from chicken so badly cooked, I might be arrested.
I wonder if the rain will affect the taste. I kind of care, I kind of don’t.
I’m mostly thinking about researching the number for the poison control center, just in case.
I load the meat onto the platter and bring it into the kitchen where the frivolity is in full display.
“Is it raining out there?” some one says oblivious to what has been happening for the last 30 minutes.
My hair is wet, my shoulders saturated. I am F-in burned for God’s Sakes.
Is it raining. Go F yourself!!!!
“Ah yeah, a little bit,” I chuckle.
And with that, the platter is on the counter. I let go of it, divorcing myself from all responsibility of what might happen next.
Like Seal Team 6, my mission is over. I get no credit no blame. I simply disappear into the ether.
I imagine Ebola and trichinosis and botchalism creeping around the platter’s periphery.
I sense monkeys at the zoo throwing their own excrement against the glass, asking me to lead them against humanity. Wait, that’s another story for another time…..
anyway…
As people move to the platter of what actually appears to be a well prepared meal, I think that I have been to the brink of a CDC disaster. I battled the demon without a respirator or blast shield.
I am tired, wet and the hair on my arm smells like burnt rope. Isn’t that the sign of every successful bar b que?
I back away from the platter of potential death and wait.
People load up plates. I watch as they cut into the charred chicken that suddenly doesn’t look so 3rd degree. I watch knives cut into the white breast and the juices flow and the meat appears white and most of all; free of disease.
Could it be? After this culinary injustice, it all worked out in the end?
I watch a woman push a chunk of chicken into her mouth and begin chewing.
I look for signs of dissatisfaction. I wait for sounds of nauseousness or symptoms of salmonella poisoning.
Chew. Chew. Chew. Swallow.
A smile.
“Delicious,” someone says.
“It’s perfect,” someone else adds.
My friend eye balls me and laughs.
If only they knew. I was like a Julia Childs smoke jumper battling a grease fire and a mastodon of predatory influences.
As I chomped down on a sausage, wondering if this is the one that Whiskey had tongued, I think about my fiery test drive racing down a chicken coated mountain that tried to wreck me, burn me, poison me.
Instead I triumphed, a little wetter, a little singed, but all in all successful.
Julia Childs would be proud.
Life’s Crazy™