Hibachi Night at Hal and Mals

I had a drink last night. I don’t get to have as many as I used to, maybe one or two a month, for health reasons, you understand. My doctor tells me that my organs, my liver, my kidneys, spleen, stomach, and such are all every bit as old as I am, and I have to act accordingly.

“What is it you’re tryin’ to tell me, Doc?” I asked.

I’ve known my doctor for quite a bit longer than he’s been a doctor, and he’s known me for quite a bit longer than I could legally take a drink, so we’ve come to a sort of friendly stalemate on the issue. I’ll behave for the most part.

A few months ago, I passed the point where every morning that I woke up alive was a day longer than my father ever got to spend on earth. That’s a very sobering proposition. In some ways, I figure I’m on borrowed time. In every way, I’m spending days I wish I could have shared with him. Should I ever get to the point where I’m spending a day more on earth than my Grandfather ever could, then maybe I’ll rethink my restrictions on smoking and drinking and chasing the wrong women—there’s a lot of them.

There was a time in my life when I’d ask Keogh to mix me drinks according to their color and drink them one after another. In this way, I could test the upper limits of my consumption and make an aesthetic statement at the same time. Eventually, I realized that most of these were girl drinks, and I should move on to the things that grown men drank. That means Vodka, Whisky, Bourbon, and Tekillya.

I used to listen to Phil Hendrie on the radio. He told me that if I drank good tequila, I didn’t need to mix it with anything—I didn’t even need ice. Before that, I didn’t even know there was such a thing as “good” tequila. There is, and quite a lot of it, actually. Don Julio 1942 is pretty special, but it’s a hundred fifty bucks a bottle.

I used to watch Cotton and Johnny Gore to see what kind of drink they made and for whom. Famous bartenders make drinks for famous people. They’re worth watching.

Johny Gore told me that Eudora Welty liked bourbon. She particularly liked Makers Mark, with a little branch water and some ice. Miss Eudora was pretty particular about whose invitations she accepted. For the most part, she’d rather spend time with her own tribe of young artists and writers, many of which weren’t really welcome at other parties owing to their life choices. Let me rephrase that. She befriended people who chose to live life as they were, no matter what the rest of the world thought.

For writers of her generation, drinking far too much was part of the process, but she always remained a lady about it. She managed to live quietly and boldly. Not everybody gets to do that.

Writers drink because we look still, but our minds are a tempest. I’ve heard a number of young writing teachers preach against consumption. They’re probably right. The older writing teachers were usually too fucked up to talk down about any sort of chemical enhancement.

I like to watch people. In my mind, I’m taking in the words they say, the moves they make, and the clothes they wear and begin blending it in with the words in my head. It’s sort of like making a loaf of bread. You fold the ingredients in, then kneed and kneed and kneed until it’s ready to go in the oven.

When I was young, there came a time when Brum Day, Rowan Taylor, and I were all womanless at the same time. They were toward the end of their career with the fairer sex; I was just beginning mine.

Amerigo, an Italian restaurant on the road to the Pearl River Reservoir, was a staple among a certain strata in Mississippi. Since a man eating alone at home is sad and pathetic, there were more than a few nights when I would go to sit at the bar and have supper at Amerigo and see Rowan and Brum there, doing the same thing. Sometimes I brought a book. Most of the time, I just watched the people.

Besides nutrition and libation, my unspoken purpose was to try and seduce pretty much the entire female staff at Amerigo. I won’t comment on my success rate except to say it was somewhere between one and a hundred. If you were in the market for intelligent, single, young women, that was a pretty good place to start.

I don’t think Brum or Rowan were interested in chasing waitresses, hostesses, or bartenders. Still, at that time in our history, every woman of substance came through the doors at Amerigo, so there’s a pretty good chance they were doing exactly the same thing I was doing, just on a different level. I was in the bush leagues; they were in the show.

It’s not that we ever planned to meet like that. It was simply a matter of three fellas getting supper at about the same time at the supper gettin’ place. That they served cocktails was a bonus. During some of these excursions, they introduced me to The Famous Grouse, a mid-priced, blended Scotch Whiskey, which is actually bottled in Scotland.

“Mid-Priced” is a phrase that covers a lot of ground regarding whiskey. Twelve-year-old Famous Grouse can run you between three and four hundred dollars a bottle. A bottle of the basic black label runs about forty bucks. You have to ask if they have it. A lot of older places in Jackson have it because Rowan, Brum, and their friends used to eat out a lot.

Had you asked them, Rowan and Brum would have both said they had no desire for love and no one would ever capture their heart. Don’t ever say that. They both died touching the hands of a woman they loved more than anything. Those bachelor suppers at Amerigo were among the last they ever had.

I don’t know how Brum met the love of his life. I know what she looked like, though, so that probably solves the mystery. Rowan was a hard guy to get to know. You could tell, just from his eyes, that his mind sailed deep waters. Rowan met his match when he took an enrichment course at Millsaps College from a woman who came here to study Eudora Welty. The one thing no man can ever escape from is a woman who knows a hell of a lot about something you really care about. Intellectually, Suzanne was his superior, but not so far ahead of him that they couldn’t find common ground, and in the years after his marriage ended and most of his best friends died, she became his beacon and his hearth. She was his one great love.

Damien Cavicchi puts on an event meal at Hal & Mal’s several times a month. He married one of my theater kids, so he automatically became somebody I watched out for. I probably would have, anyway. There was a time when Jackson had an awful lot of cooks but not so many chefs. We had Bobby G, who was something of a trip, Nick Apostle, and Chef Monte, but not many more. In Damien’s generation, there are six or seven guys, just here in Jackson, who are truly remarkable.

Hal and Mal’s is sort of a cultural nexus in Mississippi. It has two historical site placards—not many places can say that. Built over a hundred years ago by a railroad out of New Orleans, it was the principal debarkation point for freight coming either south from New Orleans or North from Chicago. For a while, after the railroad went out of business, it became a central distribution point for fruits and vegetables in central Mississippi. After that, some guys bought it when The Lamar Disco was torn down.

When they went tits up, the White Brothers bought it with the intention of using its warren of rooms and cubby holes as a sort of musical center for the Capitol of Mississippi. From the beginning, their purpose was to share food and music, not just as a gimmick to make money but as a means of sharing and cultivating culture.

Part of our purpose in life is to transmit culture from one person to the next, parent to child, lover to lover. It might be our only purpose besides filling the ocean with plastic.

We have a few ways to communicate culture between us. Religion and politics are important. They transmit the values and decisions we think are important from person to person. Art, literature, and music all play an important role in transmitting what membership in this tribe means. Food, though, is perhaps the most important. Food is what your mother gives you after she takes you off the nipple. Food is what you share with the one you love. Food is how we celebrate holidays, anniversaries, weddings, birthdays, and funerals. We break bread and share wine to remember the life of Jesus, who some people believe is God himself.

Damien ordered this gigantic paella pan and burner from Spain. By gigantic, I mean you could cook a calf and a few vegetables on it. Besides Paella, he also cooks hibachi on it. Hibachi is an Americanized version of Japanese street food. Street food is what people eat when they’re not trying to impress anybody. The most important street food in Mississippi is probably Hot Tamales and Boiled Peanuts.

Damien crafts food the way an artist would. Instead of pigment or clay, he uses smell, texture, salt, savory, sweet, heat, and temperature to create an experience that shares an idea. Like music and dance, food is a temporal experience. Our brains recognize the impermanent nature of temporal things like food, making their memories that much more important.

While he was cooking, we discussed how the toasted sesame seeds and the sesame oil created a remarkable savory smell that was really very different from what you get with more European cooking. The crowd waiting for food was considerably larger than the one before it. His ideas are gaining momentum.

Just as he was about to serve, I saw Olga Abramovich come and hug his neck. I texted his wife about what a good sign it was when other, pretty important, restauranteurs came to your culinary event. I later learned it was Olga’s birthday, and her friends celebrated it at Hal and Mal’s, listening to the Cat Daddy’s play da blues.

I met Olga and Yuri Abramovich when I had an office downtown. Fresh off the boat from Russia, they bought a gas station that served food on Jefferson Street, about a block from the Woodrow Wilson Bridge. They have books about Mississippi gas stations that serve food. I never realized it was something unusual. Gas stations that serve meat-and-three, fried chicken, or barbeque are pretty much ubiquitous in Mississippi. I don’t know why the rest of the world fell behind us on this clearly benevolent idea.

I had a little business around the corner. I actually liked my little company, but as my marriage fell to pieces, my mother and my brother started dying, and then the economic collapse, I just lost all interest in things in this world. A few years later, it burned to the ground.

Olga and Yuri opened a restaurant in Flowood. My wife loved it, and I did, too. I would have gone without her if I thought I could get away with it. Flowood decided they had an issue with Olga’s corking policy, so she told them to fuck off and moved to Jackson.

Olga’s Fine Dining was a fixture in central Mississippi for a while, with Olga running front-of-house and Yuri in the kitchen. From there, Olga took a job at the Jackson Country Club. To go from an escape from Russia to the heart of the Jackson Country Club gives you an idea of what’s still possible in Mississippi. She wasn’t born here, but she’s now a touchstone of our culture. That’s the way we roll.

Damien usually makes way too much food for these events, but the list of attendees grows every time they do it, so that may not always be the case. I watched the crowd go through the line. People kept asking if I needed help making a plate. It takes people a while to understand that, for the most part, I like to watch life happen—and when I watch life happen, I’m writing.

Once everyone else had been served, I made a plate piled high with pork belly, fried rice, fried noodles, vegetables, and shrimp—all the flavors of Japan mixed with all the flavors of Mississippi. Songs from Stevie Wonder’s “Songs in the Key of Life” album played on the speaker.

It’s a little weird thinking that I’ll probably never be drunk again. I’m really not supposed to. When it comes down to it, I probably spent more than my share of drunken nights years ago. If I never do that again, I won’t feel cheated. I’ve been there, and I honestly remember much of it.

It’s important to stay a part of the world. There was a time when I didn’t think so. Life only happens when you are in the act of transmitting culture from one person to another. Everything else is just heartbeats and breathing. I’ll never have a drink with Rowan or Brum again. Neither Spud nor Keogh will get me drunk again. That’s ok. I’ll have my one drink and remember other days while the new days grow and percolate on the giant paella pan of life in Mississippi.