Every year, our street hosts a neighbourhood barbeque. We close off the cul-de-sac end of the street—down by the Jeffries—and set up two or three big grills for the meat. There’s a clown and games and face-painting for the kids, and there’s beer and fifty-fifty draws and Alice Kramden’s craft table for the grown-ups. At the very top of the street, before you go down into the cul-de-sac, we set up a pair of big outdoor speakers and we blast oldies music into the cool evening air. Later on, when things get dark, we light a bunch of fireworks and give the kids sparklers, and they buzz around the street pretending they’re fireflies. By then, all the grownups have drunk enough beer and mojitos that the fireworks look twice as brilliant as they did the year before and people who wouldn’t look sideways at you in the full light of day are hugging you and slapping you on the back and reminiscing about the good old days and even—in one or two surprising instances—wiping a tear from the corner of a wistful eye.
I was kind of hoping Lenny and Laverne would come back for this year’s party. Until a few weeks ago, Lenny and Laverne were my next door neighbours on the cul-de-sac side of my house. Then, without warning, they moved away. I never did get the full story. Even at that, I probably know more than I should. In a bold moment, I mentioned it to Squiggy who was Lenny’s neighbour on the other side. Squiggy was supervising the grills because he had scored a gross of ground chuck which his wife, Shirley, had hand-rolled into oversized hamburger patties. As Squiggy slapped an oozing slab of meat onto my bun, he said, “Yeah, dunno where Lenny’d be. But you know Lenny. Always somethin’ eatin’ away at ‘im.” I moved on to the condiments while Squiggy served the woman in line behind me, Dr. Tyson-Holyfield, Ph.D, the women’s studies professor who hooked on weekends to pay for her quarterly junket to the Riviera.
I thought about what Squiggy said, and he was dead right. Sometimes Lenny let things get to him in ways that were unhealthy. I’ll never forget that evening when I stumbled on my son, James, sitting at our computer laughing away to himself. Whenever we hear that kind of laughter, Monica and I worry that James has found a new porn site, but in this case that wasn’t it at all. James had found www.lennyssmellymeatsite.com. At some point, Squiggy must have done something to piss off Lenny. According to the web site, Squiggy had the nasty habit of operating his weed whacker while under the influence (WWWUI), and more than once he had inflicted life-threatening injuries on poor Lenny’s prize-winning rose bushes. In frustration, Lenny cast about for a way to punish his next door neighbour. The answer came to him—so the web site claimed—as he was sitting down to a 16 oz. sirloin at Smitty’s Giant Steak House. Why not drop a raw flank steak between the slats in Squiggy’s deck, then track the steak’s decomposition online? He could post daily updates about discolouration and maggots. If he was lucky, he might even capture video of Squiggy standing on his deck sniffing, then calling inside to Shirley to ask if she smelled anything funny. Lenny had posted everything online—from buying the meat, to rigging up his webcam, to the arrival of maggots. Lenny didn’t post Squiggy’s name, but I could tell it was Squiggy’s place by the hose rack beside the deck; Squiggy always left his garden hose in a heap because he was too hammered to wind it up in a proper roll.
The next morning, I had stomped over to Lenny’s house and barged in on him while he was working his way through a big package of back bacon that he’d bought from Wal-Fart. He asked if I wanted any, but I shook my head. I was furious and hadn’t felt like eating any breakfast. All I wanted to do was to say my piece. I smile now as I think of how passionate I’d been. I’d planted my feet on the linoleum and squared my shoulders and stared Lenny straight in the eyes and I told him I’d found his web site and I thought he was an idiot. It was cruel to stink up Squiggy’s deck. They were supposed to be best friends. If they couldn’t make it work, what hope was there for the rest of us? I remember now the look of sorrow that had passed across Lenny’s face. He agreed that it wasn’t the most neighbourly thing he’d ever done and promised to go next door and make things right just as soon as he’d finished his sausages.
It was turning into a lovely evening. The day had been a scorcher, but cooler air was moving through, and smoke from Squiggy’s grill was keeping the mosquitoes at a safe distance. Monica bought a necklace from Alice Kramden’s jewelry table and the two of them were having a friendly debate about whether or not the CAS would take away your kids if you hog tied them while you took a nap in the afternoon. Meanwhile, James and Jessica (not hog tied) were playing well past their bed time in one of those inflatable jumping castles down on the Jeffries’ front lawn. I did my best to watch the two of them, but the women’s studies professor who hooked on weekends was quizzing me about Ricardo Pimento, who lived two doors down. Ricardo was a hard luck case. Just to look at them, you’d think the Pimentos had it all—new house, new car, new boobs. You’d think Ricardo was a man at the top of his game, the pinnacle of his career, the height of success. And yet for all the trappings, Ricardo had grown sullen. A gloom had settled over his house. I could be outside mowing my lawn, whistling in the sunshine, and there he’d be with his umbrella open, standing to his ankles in mud puddles. As you’d expect in such a case, Ricardo lost most of his friends, he lost his job, and his wife started an affair with Dr. Tyson-Holyfield (the husband), the professor of social psychology who had written a book about the mating rituals of guinea fowl. Me and some of the other boys on the block took Ricardo out for drinks and tried to talk some sense into him. We suggested he start an affair of his own, kind of even the score. We suggested he have an affair with Tyson-Holyfield’s wife, the women’s studies professor who hooked on weekends, but that only got him moaning worse than ever. “How’s that supposed to even the score?” he asked. “My wife’s gettin’ hers for free and I’d have to pay.” The man had a point, so we all drank in silence and Ricardo got more and more despondent. Then, last month, he hit bottom and decided to end it all. His wife, Olive, found him in the garage, sitting in his new car, with one end of the vacuum cleaner hose duct taped to the tail pipe and the other end stuck through the rear window. There was a problem though: his new car was a Toyota Prius. The twit had tried to give himself carbon monoxide poisoning in hybrid car. Every time the CO levels rose, the engine shut off. He woke up to the sound of his wife screaming at him, calling him a fucking idiot, and ordering him never again to set foot in the house. Since then, he’d been camping out in the ravine, living off the plates of leftovers that me and some of the other boys took turns setting out on our back porches. We felt an obligation; it could’ve happened to any one of us.
Mrs. Dr. Tyson-Holyfield, Ph.D, listened sympathetically as I gave her the low-down on Ricardo Pimento, though I left out the part about how me and the boys had suggested Ricardo have an affair with her. She said she hadn’t realized how bad things had gotten for Ricardo. I tore another chunk from my hamburger. Damn, but this was good meat! I held the burger high overhead with my right hand and pointed at it with my left hand and shouted to Squiggy. But just then the speakers started blaring the purple people eater song and there was a flare from the grill, so Squiggy couldn’t hear my compliment.
I sidled up to Squiggy and helped him flip burgers and warm buns. He held a flipper in his right hand and a Corona in his left hand. There were two empty bottles on the ground between the grills, but he insisted that most of the beer had ended up on the burgers for extra flavour. He wore one of those stupid chef hats flopped over to one side of his head and he wore one of those stupid chef aprons draped over his neck and hanging loose down the front with stupid writing on it (“How would you like me to do your wiener?”) and an obscene drawing down around the crotch. He opened his throat and emptied the third bottle, then asked if I’d go crack him open another cold one, which I did, which he took from me, which he held like a celebrity with a wireless mic.
By then I’d put back a couple beers too. What with the music and the chatter and the kids laughing and screaming and crying all at once the way kids do when they’re tired, what with all that noise, my head started to spin. I got bold: “Uh, Squiggy, I never did hear why Lenny and Laverne sold the place. I mean—”
Squiggy slammed down the lid of the grill and it made a sound like a shotgun in duck season.
“I know you guys had a falling out …” Come to think of it, I couldn’t remember anything about Lenny after that chat we’d had in his kitchen. He’d eaten the last bits of his breakfast sausage, wiped his face clean with a paper cocktail napkin, and excused himself to go next door. That was it. That was the last time I saw the man.
“Lenny never handled conflict well.”
“But geez, Squiggy, you kept getting drunk and weed-whacking his roses.”
“I was NEVER DRUNK.” Still holding the Corona, he thumped a finger against my chest. Twice. NEVER. DRUNK.
“Sure, Squiggy.”
“He had no right.”
“Okay. Putting meat under your deck was immature.”
“Immature? Immature?” He belched. “It was vin— vin— It was vinDICKtive. He was a Dick. With a capital “D” and an “ick.” Know what I’m sayin’?”
“Sure, Squiggy, it was a dumb thing to do. But you two go way back.”
Squiggy opened the grill again and shoveled burgers onto buns.
“So, Squiggy, why’d they sell?”
“Like I said: Lenny never handled conflict well.”
“So you two have an argument?”
“You might say that.”
“You two have a fight?”
Squiggy tightened the grip on his Corona. I could tell I was hitting a raw spot because the veins in his neck were bulging and his face was turning a pinky shade like the insides of a half-cooked burger.
“Geez, can’t you leave it alone?”
The way he stood there, with his Corona in one hand and flipper in the other hand, he looked like a French aristocrat preparing for a duel. I was afraid he might parry and thrust with the flipper, then beat me over the head with the bottle. But his demeanor suddenly changed. The music had gotten soft—one of those Joni Mitchell songs about how she could eat a case of you—and the angry look vanished from Squiggy’s face. In the time it takes to twist off a bottle cap, he had morphed into a blubbering drunk. He collapsed onto the curb, fetal, arms wrapped around his legs and crying into his knees.
“I’m sorry, Lenny,” he cried. “I didn’t mean to.”
I wasn’t sure what to do. Part of me felt I should stay by the grill so none of the burgers got overcooked, but another part of me—okay, I admit it—I felt awkward watching a grown man cry like that. It was unnatural. Dr. Tyson-Holyfield, Ph.D solved my dilemma. She sat on the curb beside him, and in her own maternal whorish way, she put an arm around him and said: “Of course you didn’t, dear.”
People were lined up waiting for the next round of burgers, and as I served them, a few nodded towards Squiggy on the curb behind me and wondered what was wrong with him. I shrugged and smiled and mumbled something about having “a few too many” and dumped a juicy patty onto each of their buns. After I’d doled out that round of burgers, I sat on the other side of Squiggy. Dr. Tyson-Holyfield stood to straighten out her skirt and, stepping to the garbage can, tossed her plate along with a half-eaten burger. Squiggy’s eyes flared and he leapt to his feet.
“What did you do?” His nose had been running and he wiped it on his sleeve.
“Pardon me?” You could tell that Dr. Tyson-Holyfield, Ph.D was offended by Squiggy’s demanding tone.
“I said: ‘What did you do?'”
“I’m full. I threw out the rest of my burger.”
“Don’t you know? There are starving people, like, everywhere. Don’t you know?”
“Yes, of course I know.”
“Don’t talk to me like I’m an idiot.”
“You’re not an idiot.”
“You were talking to me like I’m an idiot.”
“But you’re not an idiot.”
“Don’t you know?”
“About the starving people?”
“Yeah, about the starving people.” Squiggy held the flipper high over his head. “Didn’t your mother ever tell you?”
“I guess not.”
“See? You see?” Squiggy looked at me while pointing to the woman. It was almost as if he was a teacher. He was treating me like his pupil, and using the professor as his object lesson. “That’s just the problem with parents these days. Never teaching their kids the important stuff.” And looking again at Dr. Tyson-Holyfield, Ph.D: “So your mother never told you to eat everything on your plate?”
The woman shook her head. From the look in her eyes, it was hard to tell whether she was angry or afraid.
“You mean she never said: ‘Squiggy, you eat up all your food; there are starving people in Africa, you know’?” He stopped to see if she would say anything, but she just stood there glaring at him. “Huh. And there you go, throwing out a perfectly good burger. You fucking bitch.”
Squiggy lunged at the woman. With his left arm, he pinned her against the inside of his thigh and with his right arm, he brought down the flipper: three sound thwacks to her bottom. “NEVER. WASTE. MEAT.” Before he could land a fourth stroke, I grabbed his arm and pried the flipper from his greasy fingers. I can’t be sure, but with skirts wrenched one way and another, I’m almost prepared to swear under oath that the professor was wearing a merry widow underneath.
We were lucky. Most of the action happened behind the grills near an empty porto-potti, so hardly anybody witnessed the scene. I shooed Squiggy up the hill to his house and told him to cool off. I was stunned at how calm Dr. Tyson-Holyfield, Ph.D was. She straightened her skirts and fixed her hair and mumbled something about how most men had to pay for that privilege.
As for me, I threw the last of the meat on the grill and found myself thinking what a shame it was that Lenny and Laverne couldn’t make it to our barbeque. These were the best damn burgers we’d ever had.