A Bad Night From Arbee's
No. There is no misspelling here. I meant to say it exactly as I wrote it. Arbee's, which is not the Arby's we are all familiar with famous for their delicious roast beef sandwiches and even more delicious Horsey Sauce.
I will be getting to that. Just bear with me for a moment if you will be so kind as to allow me to proceed.
Some years ago my wife and I were friends with Kacha and Felix who lived in Racine, Wisconsin. Kacha was an interesting woman from Serbia who was a good friend, but also a very demanding woman who was sometimes not much fun to be around.
For me. My wife and her got along rather swell.
Felix was, to put it lightly, a really fun guy to be around. But I thought I was an alcoholic before I met him. Holy Jesus could that guy drink. My liver had pains just mentioning his name.
It is worth mentioning that despite all this, Felix and I always had a great time together, and there was never a dull moment. He was actually a lot of fun—although things could sometimes get rather interesting as the night progressed. For obvious reasons which I feel need no further explanation.
Hey. We're guys. We like beer. We're going to yuck it up a bit, no matter how much the women in our lives want to roll their eyes and say, "Really?" Besides, do men ever actually ever grow up? Kinda, sorta. But not really. Anyway.
So, one afternoon I get this call from Felix. "You guys want to come over and have a barbecue tonight?"
"Sure," I told him. But of course it dawned on me that Kacha and Felix did not have a grill.
"When did you get a grill?" I asked him.
"Well, we have to go get one," he told me.
He had a car. I had a truck. Aha! This was going to be our "evening" of sorts.
At the time my wife and I lived in West Allis, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee which is about 45 minutes from Racine. So we hiked our butts to Racine and the ladies gathered while Felix and I went to Menard's, a popular home imporovement store similar to Lowe's and Home Depot, but better, and proceeded to purchase a grill.
Of course these things do not come preassembled. So, we were going to have to spend some time putting all the parts together.
From Menard's we stopped off at the local grocery store chain, Pick 'N Save and picked up some steaks and other fixings like onions and mushrooms—all the sort of fare you'd expect to have with a nice barbecued steak dinner.
We needed beer too, of course. And in Wisconsin, you just don't go anywhere. Liquor stores in Wisconsin are almost as ubiquitous as air. So we stopped at the local Arbee's Liquor in Racine and picked up a 30-pack of Miller High Life, a 12-pack of Sam Adams (my favorite beer at the time), a 12-pack of Blue Moon, and a mini-keg of Heinekin.
Just to make sure we'd have enough of course.
Naturally we did get some malt beverages and a bottle of wine for the ladies as well. I mean, we didn't want to leave them out. And they were going to be busy in the kitchen a bit preparing the steaks and cutting vegetables for Kacha's famous Serbian salad while Felix and I got busy putting together this new grill.
First things first after we unloaded the grill and delivered the food to the ladies. Crack a beer and discuss a plan of action.
Felix looked at the instruction manual and went fishing for some needed tools. Then we began to set out the various pieces and parts in the box. Crack another beer, revisit the instructions. Discuss it as we look at the pieces and parts.
Crack another beer and begin the process of assembly. Examine it, make sure we are doing this correctly. Does everything look right?
Crack another beer.
At some point in the process, to be totally fair, we did give up on the instructions. Things were getting complicated and convoluted. So we had made the decision, "We can handle this. This part looks like it goes here, right?"
Needless to say, as we cracked another beer, at this point we were putting our two cents together and winging it a bit, but things were still shaping up, and so far nothing seemed to be going wrong.
So, we continued our process. Piece by piece. Part by part. Cracking beers and assembling our grill.
At some point I do know that we were talking. We were conferring. We were making sure everything was going according to plan. But the words were of course getting more and more muddled, and when we looked at the pieces and parts we had to focus a bit more on everything.
Even the tools. We had to focus more on those as well.
All the while the ladies checked in from time to time to see how things were going. "S'fine," I think we said.
Minutes passed. More beers cracked. But the good news was that the grill was shaping up. Nothing looked out of place yet, and regardless of how many beers had already passed the gullet, everything was going according to plan—even if the process was slowing significantly the more beers were cracked and as more time passed.
To make a long story short, Felix and I did manage to get the grill put together properly without any hiccups.
Well, maybe there were some hiccups, but who needs to talk about that?
By the time we fired up the grill we were no longer who we started out to be. The process of us actually cooking the steaks was something more akin to a Vuadeville act, although, cracking more beers, we did manage to cook the steaks without burning them.
We sat down to a delicious meal that neither Felix nor I remember eating, with very pissed off women who scowled the entire tire throughout the meal, and needless to day, by the record accounted by my wife the ride home was not a very pleasant one and she did not talk to me the entire next day.
I heard the steaks were delicious though.
You did well keeping your head low the next day and ensuring survival for future endeavors. Who says men can't read women's signals - haha.