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XXIV The Restaurant at the Bottom of the
Night
Eating out with the Captain was often an intentional exercise in
futility. Most of the time, food was something that had to be gotten out
of the way, whether it was in the lurid lights of a truck stop or the flat
glare of a McDonalds or Burger King. That’s not to say we didn’t both
agree on the desired fare: chicken fried steak.
It seems that type of cuisine wouldn’t be hard to find in small town
Montana, but usually that raw hankering for hammered cube steak rolled in
egg and flour became an epic quest ending in front of some tawdry heat
lamp-shrunk clam strips or a flying saucer made of a scoop of instant
mashed potato with a ring of pickled crab apple around it.
The first time we ate out together was at the Sport Bar in
Livingston. After what appeared to be a North Dakotan burrito under a
viscous green fluid that the waitress called guacamole arrived at our
table and we stared at it for a while, I offered to get the tab. Richard
immediately said, “You bet big guy. You’ll learn.” And I did learn that
Richard only got the tab when there were a lot of people around and he
could look like a big spender.
Much of the time, I was surprised that Richard was so patient with the
odd fare that appeared at our table. Chicken fried steak came out of the
truck stop kitchen burned under a gelatinous white slick and he ate it
with gusto. What seemed to be a salad of grapes, grape jello and nuts
mixed with whipped cream and (I hope) chunks of celery, came to our table
from the Martin’s Cafe kitchen, and Richard ate his portion AND mine after
dubbing it dwarf vomit. Richard liked to use the ward dwarf since his
friend Peter Fonda had been in a total bomb of a movie called Dance of the
Dwarves.
But once at the 4Bs restaurant in Bozeman, when Richard ordered eggs,
a sausage patty and hash browns, and the sausage patty came out pink in
the middle, it was as if someone had taken a pot shot at him. He started
yelling at the waitress,
“It’s raw! It’s raw! You’re trying to kill me!”
“Let me take a look,” said the waitress, not knowing what she was
getting into.
“What! Don’t you believe me? Do you think that I am lying when I
tell you that this thing you have placed in front of me is a breeding
ground for trichina worms?”
“I guess it does look a little pink.”
“You guess! You guess? You are serving as an active agent in a
trichina delivery system and you GUESS!”
Since I hate confrontations, and I’ve always had a soft spot for
waitresses, especially ones that have to work the night shift, I took the
sausage patty from his plate and wolfed it down in a couple of bites.
“There, I guess that settles that. It was really very good. Thank
you Lou Anne,” I said, glancing up at her name tag.”
Richard looked at me as if he expected me to explode. “You are a very
foolish man. Can you feel the little cysts start to open up in you? Can
you feel the worms eating their way through your organs?”
“Yes,” I said. “And it feels pretty darned good if I do say so
myself.”
“Well, they’re your organs, not mine. And I can always find myself
another large fool to drive me around.”
“Yes,” I said, “there are many of us. There must be because the worms
eat us so quickly.”
Richard didn’t say much after that, even when I left a large tip for
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