Today I witnessed God. Not the Jesus on the tired, listing billboard with its rusted iron roots…read morepulled up by the prevalent wind scouring this dusty patch of North Texas but from this innocuous, humble piece of chopped brisket before me that has just changed my reality in a way that will never change back.
I am on one of those once-in-a-lifetime walkabouts with my daughter as we hop from asphalt lily pad to lily pad in her beat-up RAV 4, journeying ever Eastward from the gently lapping waves of Santa Barbara to Miami's Solla Salew shores where she will matriculate for her marine mammal masters (The Tripple M they call it in various job posting and loan application sites). Its been triple digit Temperatures for the last 20 hours of driving. A tour of hades realm. I will remember the specific moment today when my wonderful, non-red-meat-eating daughter, in an enduring act of kindness suggested that we go to a bar-b-que during our brief run through the Texas pan-handle as recompense for going to visit her friend in OKC rather than run the southern grill gauntlet through Dallas.
I pressed the yelp button and we went down the Amarillo rabbit hole...across some train tracks, around the aforementioned canted "Jesus is here" billboard (but before the better tended "Jesus is Coming" promissory), past two cows too hot to stand, down a lane next to an grain silo, stood a sign. It stated simply but profoundly, "Beer Open" Surviving the sweep of ages, what more is there really in life? Beer? Check. Open? Always on so many levels.
As my eyes wandered over to the more traditional homage to this establishment's Nome de guere- "Pork n' Things". I was able to surmise the primary offerings from the initial noun but I was intrigued by the 'n' things' and what they might entail (or perhaps entrail). Girding our loins, we crossed the heavenly air conditioned threshold.
Suffice to say, God had not yet made his/her/their/them/they appearance and it wasn't until after we ordered our sweet tea/lemonade that I made the decision that changed my life. I asked for some of the brisket (my choice was chopped) and some of the ribs I saw walking out the door with a Harley driver into the teeth of that Texas summer furnace heat. We sat idly, my daughter pondering her phone and striking up a conversation with a shy, angelic little girl who had bravely helped her mom set the table for us and shared her Lilo and stich drawing. It was at this moment that my world tilted. I figured that I would go for the brisket first as an appetizer to the main course of ribs. They had chopped it finely and I sporked half of it into my mouth. Epiphany. So many images colliding at once, each visually shouting over the other to be heard... To be RECOGNIZED. I remember a childhood national geographic where the Eskimo dad offered the still pumping seal heart to his son as he bit down and the blood flowed. I thought of Jody Foster trans-warping to another dimension mumbling "I didn't know! I didn't know! at the grandeur of the cosmos. I thought of the show 'Chopped' where they lectured recalcitrant chefs on not just making a meal but rather transforming it...elevating it to some other plane of being. That first bite punched though my mortal coil like a coherent beam of light from a collapsing neutron star raising my orbit to a plane of being I did not know existed. Stripping away layers of civilization, I felt primal and powerful. Like Dungeon Crawler Carl, I had been converted...elevated to something greater than my constituent bits. Part dire wolf, part berserker, part 90th level undead necromancing mage. The fat and smoked meat sat in my mouth, my brain shutting down my throat muscles not wanting this oral carnality to end.
Imagine stripping away every vestige of civilization, de-evolving a million years when survival and procreation were equal partners in a race to the future. My body was humming and I felt alive in a way that I had not since that weekend in Tiajuana with those carny workers. I had a brief moment of panic that my newfound vigor would cause me to spontaneously combust or that this magical alchemy would somehow bind with the brisket and miraculously impregnate a wandering waitress out of sheer will...like the reproductive equivalent of magnetic induction such was the primordial essence of that single bite.
But I digress.
Suffice to say, I am a California lifer. I can tell you what cheese is on a charcuterie board and whether the uni is fresh but I don't have sufficient reference for what is considered presentable bar-b-que. My data set is certainly sparse but in my humble, untrained opinion, if you need a reference point...a place to start your own bar-b-que walkabout, Amarillo's Pork n' Things is a guiding star to what brisket and pork ribs can be in the hands of a master truly anointed, perhaps divinely, in their craft.
