Burgers and Beer

this entry was supposed to post yesterday; for some reason it didn't auto-post correctly

my apologies 

“Grillin & Chillin: Burgers & Beer” said the front of the squat gray building.  Little flames rising from “grillin;” little icicles hanging from “chillin.”  I drove past at sixty.  I have learned a thing or two about burger & beer establishments on this trip, having visited the Green River Bar in Daniel, WY, the Cowboy Bar in Montello, NV, and sundry other establishments that I didn’t write about.  And something about that place didn’t feel right.  But I looked at the clock – 12:30.  I hadn’t had lunch yet.  Could I really claim expertise in burgers and beer if I passed up a restaurant that purported to specialize in those exact food groups?  Especially at lunchtime?  I looked at Duke, who agreed with me.  I turned the truck around.

Near Hollister, CA.

A row of stools behind the bar, a several tables on the floor.  Nothing unusual about that.  But the place was clean.  No grit jammed where the walls met the floor; no dust on top of the beer lamps.  No smell of old hamburger grease; no eu de stale beer emanating from cracks in the bar.  Four plasma TVs hung from the walls, but no outdated calendars or badly-mounted deer heads.  Twelve beers on tap, mostly fancy ones like Sierra Nevada or Longboard Ale.  Someone came out of the kitchen and hauled away a Starbucks coffee dispenser that, apparently, they’d set out for breakfast.  A sign advertised yogurt.  Grillin & Chillin also had a liquor bar, and next to the liquor sat a little glass-doored refrigerator specifically for Red Bull, an energy drink.  More mysterious different-colored bottles stacked on top of that.

The bartender handed me a menu, and I smiled and gave it back to her.  “You know, I don’t guess I’ll even need that,” I said.  “I’d like a cheeseburger and –” I glanced over at the row of taps – “a coke.”

“What kind of cheese?” she asked.

When she came back from giving my order to the cook, she drew an oversized Mason jar from a glistening stack of identical ones and poured me a coke.  I asked her about the mysterious bottles sitting on top of the Red Bull refrigerator.  They were like Vitamin Water, she said, but a little different.  The red bottle was for energy, the green for strength, the blue for relaxation, the yellow for alertness – or something like that.  She explained that there was powder stored under the cap, so you’d buy the bottle, then pop the cap and shake the whole thing, thus mixing the powder with the water and thereby producing the mood drink of your choice.  “We’re the only place around here that has them,” she said.

“Oh,” I said.  “So people come from miles around?”  I smiled, but I think she sensed my skepticism. 

“Actually, some people do come here to get them.”

She was blonde-haired and pushing forty with a straight-line businesslike mouth, but I hadn’t met many women of any age or shape recently and just wanted to chat with her.  I asked if she ran the place – no, just the bar – whether she was from around here originally – oh yeah – and how long they’d been open – since June – as she shuttled back and forth behind the bar.  Efficient.  She was cordial, but didn’t really want to talk to me.  I drank from my Mason jar and waited on my burger.

Grillin & Chillin was an representation.  Rural folks originally drank out of Mason jars because they didn’t have glasses, but this place had ordered a crate of them specifically for drinking out of.  Probably without the lids.  The Green River Bar, the Cowboy Bar – those places were imitations of old west saloons, but they were genuine beer & burger joints.  You got the impression in those places that they served up burgers because they weren’t equipped to cook anything else.  Not so here.  Places like the Green River Bar and the Cowboy Bar attracted fans – people like me who preferred colorful restaurants and were willing to tolerate a badly-cooked hamburger to get it – and so run-down beer & burger joints carved out their own niche in the cultural landscape of America.  The hole-in-the-wall burger joint became a recognized category.  It attained rhetorical reality; it created its own cultural space.

The bartender brought me my cheeseburger.  It was neither under- nor overcooked, the meat was of high quality, and the fixings on it were fresh.  Delicious.  Grillin & Chillin wasn’t fooling anyone.  No one could come into the restaurant and think, “oh, this is a run-down hole in the wall, as you can tell by their use of Mason jars as serving vessels.”  People came, in all likelihood, for the good hamburgers and the powdered passion water or whatever it was.  The place provided only the superficial trappings of a classical beer & burger joint.  Judging by the way the restaurant filled for lunch, though, customers were satisfied with the trappings.  The Mason jar was a symbol of another time, and nothing more.  And apparently, people didn’t want anything more.

So it goes when life mimics an ideological niche, instead of ideology adapting itself to fit life.  When Jay Adams had leaned over and said drunkenly, “I’m a pioneer,” he was imitating ideology, attempting to align his own identity with the particular cultural space in America occupied by pioneers.  Grillin & Chillin took it one step further: Grillin & Chillin wasn’t even an imitation.  Jay Adams had been trying to fool me into thinking he was a pioneer, but Grillin & Chillin wasn’t trying to fool anyone into thinking it was run-down.  It was an unabashedly modern restaurant, replete with flat-screen TVs, offering only the symbols of a classic beer & burger joint.  And the symbols were all people wanted.

So it is with much of modern America, and maybe it has always been so.  When I pulled on my cowboy boots and wore them to class at UGA, no one thought, “oh, I guess Jeb rode his horse to class today.”  But they probably did think, “hmm, I bet this guy prefers Willie Nelson to Marilyn Manson.”  When teens who dress in the gothic style wear combat boots, no one thinks, “oh, this young lady must be shipping out to Afghanistan in the afternoon.”  But they do think, “I will look elsewhere for a babysitter.”  Such footwear is not so much an imitation of an ideological niche as an invocation of certain cultural space.  Another mode of communication.

And it’s common.  Nearly everyone wears clothing, speaks in a certain way, or acts in a manner designed to evoke thoughts of some cultural space that he does not pretend to occupy.  It’s a means of communicating one’s identity.  Tent stakes in the cultural landscape, so to speak.

I finished my burger and licked my fingers, then looked up for the bartender.  Against the far wall I saw packets for making green tea.  Green tea?  In an alleged burger and beer joint?

Damn.  I’ll grant you some cultural invocation, but you’ve got to keep the ratio to a respectable level.