Editor's Note: This is part one of an essay by Shepherd food writer Todd Lazarski. To read part two here, part three here, part four here and part five here.
“Please let me go ‘round again.”
—John Prine
I thought the apocalypse would be more exciting. Some kind of heaven-sent fireball, a mushroom cloud of malaise, Mad Max dune buggies. In this far off light I’d always pictured myself bearded, barricaded, adroitly philosophical, suddenly quite adept at swinging a sort of spiked bat or other homemade zombie stopper.
Instead, so far, some five weeks in, nobody I know has gotten sick. Nobody in my orbit has died. Even being accosted by our neighborhood Jehovah’s Witness on the street, being told of end times and other corporeal human collapses I couldn’t stand or fully hear—being as they were, uttered by a man six feet away, while a two-year-old pent-up from quarantine perched on my shoulders and periodically bonked my head urging movement—took place from a mindful, strangely respectable social distance.
Mostly these days just find me as an iPhone-glued glut of dissociated dread. A musty sack of torpor filling out ironically-named Champion jogging pants and a Totino’s-stained hoodie crowned by a hastily shaved head. What I’m currently reminded of, for some reason, from somewhere deep within the lizard brain that was weaned on world-end movies, is Deep Impact, and the way it all ends for Tea Leoni’s character: in front of a beloved beach house, with brave acceptance, facing truth and demise in the form of an imminent asteroid death, with her—father, maybe? (This recall may be way off, as I only saw the movie once, maybe 20 years ago).
Regardless, this is how I view my resignation when being generous: a soft, somber, single tear strong-willed nod and jutted-chin acquiescence. I’ve had my restaurant meals, if they never come again. I’ve had too many, at too many bars. I’ve lived. So, here I am, at the freezer again, my own beloved beach house, mustering strength, wondering how much Ben and Jerry’s will pass before life maybe resembles normal again, or else until I see St. Pete, or St. Paul, or whichever is the one at the gates. Measuring the days till Quetzalcoatl in pints of Chunky Monkey. Wondering if I’ll ever again eat Cherry Garcia as a little reward, for a jog and some push ups maybe, instead of a desperate substitute for therapy.
My biggest preoccupation is really Instacart deliveries, and the thought of them, the threat of them, where we let the bags sit on the porch like sentinels with tales from the front lines, or like badges of middle class virus-avoidance privilege. We hope the wind cleans off the Corona, I suppose, and then we let the same bags sit inside, eyeing our wares cautiously, suspiciously by the door, weighing the three articles advising cleansing groceries is unnecessary versus the one—always from Medium—that states everything inside a grocery store will likely give you the plague.
Then, between the subsequent wiping—of course—and the beginning to plan six days out for the next Instacart delivery, and then the moisturizing of hands out of necessity from washing hands far too much, there has been such a background din of quiet second-coming contemplation. With little to do but wipe the door handle again, with the closest social contact being yet another episode of “Cheers,” there’s been too much time to think on all this, on all that went, all that was snuffed by a brutal harsh Monday morning reminder—all our kicks, our joys, our dinner plans and drink diversions, all that was maybe never really deserved in the first place.
The Last Normal Weekend
For one or another—or none at all—reason that I choose to not consider too closely, the last normal weekend in contemporary American existence was a big one. A Friday night trip to Enlightened Brewing to check out Derek Pritzl and the Gamble was a promising prospect, sure. They had recently introduced me to, made me fall deeply in love with, play over and over again, John Prine’s “Speed of the Sound of Loneliness.”
Still, as things were, it was largely run-of-the-mill in those distant days of social possibility. Just line up one of a few willing babysitters, jot on the calendar absent-mindedly, leave it peppered, like always, with the growing-old adult notion of if I feel like it. The self-importance of a modern American. The expectation, the world owing me it’s pearls and it’s oysters and it’s microbrewed Pale Ales, for some reason. There for taking, when we wished. It’s like we were all “Mad Men” men, coming home from work where you expect your dinner to be waiting, your children cleaned and polite. You did a little bit of work and now you are owed something, the other half of your existence, calm and orderly and “here are your slippers, dear.”
Now there is no choosing or taking or rewarding yourself with a night out, or rewarding yourself with a night in. It’s simply like our parents have given us an indefinite timeout, with more whiskey, yes, but also more, much more, morbidity. And also our parents are not coming to our room, eventually, to tell us it will all be OK. Rather, now, they might come, and stand on the sidewalk, while we stand on the front porch awkwardly, not knowing what to do with our hands, with no Easter hugs even considered, and mom might leave sugar cookies in a bag on the sidewalk, as if we were in prison, and she was the jailer that had to slide our sustenance gruel through a slot in the door.
Only her said bag came with a real wonder: do we have to disinfect that now? I ran into a friend at Enlightened, then another, then a friend of a friend, and then a work friend—hugs for all the normal tangly tendrils of an adequate social life, amplified by guitars and rollicking songs of regret and craft suds and jocular end-of-week revelry. The band was twangy and driving and jostly, and I wanted it to be louder. Actually my spoiled fragile ego knew I deserved it to be louder. Meanwhile I talked importantly about basketball and somebody told me about their trip to New Orleans. “I’ll be there in a month,” I said. Like an ignoramus, like tempting fate, like I was one of the kids on the playground in Sarah Connor’s nuclear apocalypse nightmare in Terminator 2. There was no Purell in sight, in mind.
Later, at the Newport, the bartender handed me a beer list, and I didn’t even note that, or contemplate my mortality on the fact, he wasn’t wearing latex gloves. I leaned close, doing the thing you have to do at crowded bars where you wedge between two seated patrons, brush one or both, amplify your voice to the hunched-forward Sam Malone, spittle and open mouths and casual “excuse me, I’m sorry, man” contact with strangers not an issue or thought. The bummer about the NBA that night was that the Bucks were losing to the Lakers. The saddest part about John Prine was the line: “How can a love that'll last forever, get left so far behind?” What would any of us say had some punk in an orange vest barged in to tell us all—in five days the entirety of the NBA machinery would be suddenly halted, a broom handle stuck in the grinding gears? That I would have no chance at seeing live music again, for the foreseeable future? And that, weeks later, due to the same crippling circumstances, John Prine would be dead?
Taking that Last Chance
The next night, somehow, as if acting on some last-chance latent level, I found myself barreling south for a Saturday night in Chicago. I rode a crowded Amtrak. I held the steel handle up the steps, followed along close in line, plopped unworriedly right on the worn blue cloth seat, I ordered a Lyft, I closed a packed bar with out-of-town big-city tenacity. Old friends shared birthday cake in a corner. I flushed a toilet, maybe didn’t wash my hands for a full 20 seconds, poked at the jukebox, clinked glasses, performed once-normal finger and hand functions that would now cause me to douse both extremities to the elbow in alcohol and ask for a light.
My buddy and I kept drinking like we were Goodfellas, bound shortly for a stint in the can, which, in hindsight, we sort of were. Then we ordered another Lyft back to his place, like signing the tab on the last real Saturday night. Sunday was disarmingly sunny, soft, pleasant, the kind of warm early spring sliver that catches you off balance, leaves you without the right clothes or your sunglasses. So we sat inside, at the bar at a place called the Moonlighter, where we nursed hangovers with micheladas and shared fiery chicken wings and sloppily severed a grease-dripping American-cheesed burger and shoved it down our gaping gullets and licked fingers and laughed at the bartender’s Nascar sweatshirt, bitched about his lassitude.
It was still a day where you could like a bartender or not like a bartender, and you didn’t have to wonder if all bartenders had simply vanished, poof, gone on the wind, Leftovers-style. You could do your drinking business and move on to the next one. Which we did, literally, deciding on pizza and homebrews at a spot called Bungalow that takes—that took—itself probably a bit too seriously. We’ve often fallen into this habit of double lunching, not so much because we are slobs, fat and greedy and gluttonous. And not as some kind of intuitive acknowledgment that we were approaching end times. It also wasn’t just a love of time together, collapsing the 100 miles that separates our lives with a collective unspoken vow of ceaseless Epicureanism.
Well, maybe exactly because of all those reasons. Either way we ate, glad they take, took, themselves so seriously with each bite, with each sip. And I got a pie to go, tucking it under my arm through Union Station, cradling it like a toddler’s favorite stuffed dinosaur on my ride home nap, a last pepperoni and sausaged vestige from the world of living, togetherness, an experience slice from before we began to view each other as potentially poisonous flowers.
My Last Meal?
My final restaurant meal was the day after, at Copper Kitchen, my neighborhood greasy spoon of fluffy omelets and watery coffee that you can never get half down before a refill magically appears. A welcoming diner with video poker, and some staff that still eye me a bit questioningly because I’ve only been coming here for two years, and not 30, like most patrons always around me. By now though, with some work, our regular waitress is beginning to know the score, my daughter and I having seemingly earned the corner booth I always steer her toward.
I grab the highchair myself, never need a menu, she orders her own “Mickey Mouse pancakes, please” in an impossibly tiny voice. In many ways, actually, it feels small town-worn, lived-in, like a John Prine song. A surreal slowdown, a place with a cook with a “short order face.” A spot of warm plates and unjudging respite. “If I came home, would you let me in? Fry me some pork chops and forgive my sin?” Our daddy-daughter day this early March Monday was flowing in a far more friendly manner though: another successful trip to the Domes behind us, we had full-stomach cold afternoon warm bed naps ahead. I wanted to tell her some news I was suppressing too, having just briefly talked to my wife on the phone about her recent brief phone call with the doctor. The info was just beginning to gel and bacon-grease coagulate down around my ham and cheese omelet and double-buttered rye.
“You’re going to have a sister,” I almost said. Instead I let her eat more bacon, I let the waitress squeeze her arm affectionately as she poured me yet more benign coffee that I would sip and sip until it was time to leave. I didn’t say anything. It wasn’t time yet. But maybe I missed the time. How could I have known, that now, weeks later, Copper Kitchen and restaurants like it, all restaurants, are in real danger of never fully opening again? How was I to know that soon there would be no business anywhere for good news?
Editor's Note: This is part one of an essay by Shepherd food writer Todd Lazarski. To read part two here, part three here, part four here and part five here.
