Up in Smoke
Up in Smoke We all mark the arrival of spring in our own ways. For me, the season has officially sprung when the cherry blossoms bloom, George Will writes his first-of-the-year baseball column...
...The possibilities were endless...
...My neighbor's devotion to the Weber grill, qua Weber grill, was deep and undying...
...The coals themselves are dusty and . . . well, they're very black, and so are your hands after you handle them...
...It would mean variety—rich sauces, inventive toppings, stir-fried vegetables and other delicately prepared side dishes...
...A new grill would mean I could prepare lavish meals...
...And his wife worked for the EPA...
...But my labor is leavened with fancies of meals to come: burgers and ribs and luscious steaks, smoky and juicy and flecked with chunks of unhygienic crud because I never clean the grill properly...
...Spring has sprung...
...It would mean a cornucopia of nature's fruits and meats...
...It would mean a happy, satisfied family...
...He taught me, for example, how to sprinkle dampened wood chips on the coals to produce maximum smoke...
...But he moved away...
...And now I do too...
...Barbecuing is the main reason I moved our family from a city apartment to a house in the suburbs...
...Sunlight filtered through the green traces of trees, and birds flitted from limb to limb...
...Get out here...
...He got me to buy a stovepipe cylinder for the coals, which hastens the burning...
...It was open to a page covered with pictures of happy yuppies cooing with self-satisfaction, looking as though they'd just looted the Ralph Lauren warehouse...
...I shouted to my son...
...This grill was more than a grill...
...This thing is filthy...
...And marinades...
...Hey...
...This is a matter of some seriousness with me, though one filled with pleasant anticipation, too...
...My God—a wok...
...The grill itself is difficult to keep in fighting trim and, as noted, absolutely impossible to get my son to clean...
...The large amount of time it takes to prepare the grill and the coals and the woodchips, which I once enjoyed because it pleasantly lengthened the cocktail hour, now merely tries my patience because I'm trying to cut back on gin...
...The other day my wife, sensing my change of heart, dropped one of her mail-order catalogues in my lap...
...It transcended grill-ness...
...For me, the season has officially sprung when the cherry blossoms bloom, George Will writes his first-of-the-year baseball column (like the cherry blossoms, he burst forth early this year), and I decide, on some happy, unexpected afternoon, to lift the door of my spooky garage and wheel out my Weber grill...
...And over the two springs since his departure my own attachment to the Weber— which was, like his, cultish in intensity—has slackened a good deal...
...He ignored me and I grabbed the scrub brush to continue my rite of spring...
...My pulse quickened...
...he even drew me a diagram to demonstrate the aerodynamic principles involved...
...The city's rotting schools, crushing taxes, and general seediness also had something to do with it...
...There was nothing he couldn't make a Weber do except sit, fetch, and roll over, and like the pudgy master in Kung Fu, he passed on many of his secrets to me...
...But cooking on an open grill, generating enormous clouds of atmospheric particulates for the sake of dinner, seemed to me an essential manifestation of the freedom that is our birthright as Americans, and my neighbors were furious when I would do this in my apartment...
...more work for me...
...I snapped the catalogue shut and went out to the backyard...
...The Weber stood with its dome off, half-clean, just as I'd left it...
...My heart never fails to leap up when I haul the Weber into the backyard, raise the black dome, survey the accumulated spiderwebs and leaves and muck of its winter hibernation, and yell to my son that he really should do something worthwhile for once in his miserable life and get out here and clean the damn grill...
...It had twin rangetop burners, a rotisserie, a built-in smoker system, a double boiler...
...Andrew Ferguson...
...My neighbor knew marinades...
...An uncomfortable truth has slowly dawned: Charcoal grills are terrifically inconvenient...
...And there in the center of the page was the object of their cooing: the largest gas grill I've ever seen...
...He always ignores me, of course—he's only seven—so I clean it myself, with grim purposeful-ness...
...you could hear the steaks sizzle and hiss...
...I looked closer...
...He was a Democrat, which meant that he grilled only fish and vegetables, but he knew his way around a Weber, and he instilled in me what pompous actors—which is to say, actors—call a sense of craft...
...He despised gas grills...
...It would mean...
...I'm exaggerating only a little...
...The picture was pornographic in its detail...
...From him I learned to test wind direction before lighting the fire, to optimize the flow of air through the Weber's bottom vents...
...In my new neighborhood, by contrast, I at once found a kindred spirit in the fellow next door...
Vol. 3 • April 1998 • No. 31
