The Brisket Baron

During a get-together celebrating her brother Travis last month, my friend Sam invited me to attend a much smaller scale meal with her father, a man whom I’d never met. In my excitement to finally become acquainted with an Emil, I offered to bring garlic mashed potatoes, unaware that I’d also need my comedy A game at all times. Something about the energy of all six people combined to produce enough laughter to make the downstairs neighbors, one assumes, cry about how sad and empty their lives are.

“I think I spot a Harrison-Friday,” Sam announced while smoking a 305—a four-dollar-per-pack brand of found-in-Florida cigarettes—on her deck.

Approaching her door, I shook hands with Emil, a man who inexplicably reminded me of David Harbour, the Stranger Things actor, if he shaved his beard, thinned his hair, and aged twenty years. After petting Sam’s beloved Persian cat, Wrigley Fielder, I joined Emil at the table to eat some raw vegetables and briefly tell him about my friendship with Trav (as he calls him).

“Trav had that shirt,” Sam said about my red-and-gray collared shirt.

“It’s called JCPenney.”

“And he wore cargo pants all the time.”

“So uncommon!”

“This cauliflower is weird,” Danielle, Sam’s best friend, anxiously told us. “It breaks apart when you bite into it.”

“Do you only eat fried cauliflower?” Sam rhetorically asked her.

Emil removed the foil from the brisket atop the oven, sampling a piece smothered in sauce to do “quality control.”

“I live for this stuff,” he told me, which I assumed was an embellishment. “When I’m working, I’ll pick hotels that are closest to barbecue restaurants. ‘Oh, the Holiday Inn is next door to a place with brisket? Put me there.’”

“This guy’s whole life is lived in service of brisket,” Sam said after assisting Danielle with playing a Christmas Vacation DVD, unaware that her father had just informed me of his obituary’s first paragraph specifics.

Once Sean, a former co-worker and good friend of Sam’s, arrived with (an unnecessary amount of) pulled pork wrapped in two towels—“How much dried semen is on this Green Bay Packers towel?” I asked him to amuse Emil, a lifelong Chicago Bears fan—everyone was authorized to begin eating.

“Do you mind if I begin with a prayer?” I asked.

“Sure…” Sam replied.

“May our once and future king, President Donald J. Trump, be returned to the presidency that was stolen from him…”

“You get the fuck outta here if you’re not kidding!” Emil told me, mostly confident I was messing with everyone.

As the six of us dug in, I put a blob of coleslaw on my plate, taken aback by its soupiness.

“That’s my dad’s recipe,” Danielle said. “Heavy on the mayo.”

“I think I’m going to drink it,” Emil said.

“You want it on the rocks?” I asked.

The menu was littered with deliciousness—cavatappi macaroni and cheese, homemade cornbread, tangy burnt ends Sean also cooked after raiding a slaughterhouse (jokingly referred to as pepper prunes due to their size, taste, and color), and an obligatory vegetable to help our collective punishing farts surface quicker (corn)—although everyone ate fast except for Emil, savoring each bite of slow roasted beef. Danielle also brought dessert: a dozen ornately decorated cupcakes (one sported a faux unicorn horn) from an artisanal bakery.

“Is Cake Gypsy an acceptable name nowadays?” I asked. “I mean, it’s not like you’d grab dessert from Cake Hebrew.”

“What about Cake Negro?” Emil asked. “I like to throw a ‘negro’ in every now and again to get a reaction.”

“Dad!” Sam said while he smiled at us, the wink implied.

“Just like your hero Nathan Bedford Forrest,” I said.

“Think I’ll have the New York City cab driver flavor,” Emil said while picking a caramel one from the container.

“That doesn’t taste like a Muslim,” I told him, “but you do have to say ‘As-salamu alaykum!’ after each bite.”

Returning to the deck for more off brand Florida carcinogens, Sam mentioned how she recently took Tony, her boyfriend, out to a fancy birthday dinner at the casino. Due to an adverse reaction to the Covid vaccine, Tony had to get a colostomy bag to aide his diverticulitis. As we pondered how rusty he’ll be when returning to ass wiping, Tony explained that he smiled widely while “taking a shit at the table” during the celebratory meal.

“I could feel my bag filling up,” he explained. “Maybe you’ll get to hear it fart later.”

After Danielle expressed her desire to obtain a one-night-only eating disorder while devouring a cupcake—“The ole B&P,” or binge and purge, as she put it (“Talk about an oil spill!” I offered in reaction to the fake vomit she’d be spewing)—Sam had us gather near her shiny fake tree. It had been her birthday the day prior, which for Sam means giving reverse birthday gifts. Danielle opened a pair of tickets to a ‘90s nostalgia event, Sean discovered four containers of barbecue sauces including his favorite (maple), and I cut open an Amazon Prime box to find a hooded sweatshirt with a baby duck on it that reads I LIKE DUCKS AND MAYBE 3 PEOPLE, a callback to the hundreds of rubber ducks that decorated my desk when Sam and I worked together at a StubHub call center. It seemed fair to assume that Emil’s gift, a cow’s pectoral muscles, was sitting in a container full of dry ice to accompany him on his flight back to southern California in the morning.

“There’s glitter all over my shirt,” I said.

“I love glitter,” Sam told me. “Now you can run through the streets and shine.”

More (literal) toilet humor arose: Danielle explained how Sam shit her pants at Popeye’s (“She was wearing a jean skirt and sharted before taking forty minutes to clean and blow dry herself in a single-use bathroom!”), Tony said how an Indian man gave him a negative Yelp review—claiming Tony had severe body odor—to earn a free ride when Tony was driving for Uber (“I disputed it because he was the one who smelled like shit!”), and a discussion of homeless people shitting in the streets of San Francisco, Emil logically proposing that being homeless in California or Florida makes sense due to the climate (“They should all move to Florida at the same time, like a Trail of Tears for the homeless,” Sean supportively added). It was like Last Fecal Comic Standing was being livestreamed from Sam’s living room.

Before Tony began reminiscing about the days when his anus served a purpose, Danielle brought philosophy into the mix.

“Under Siege 2 is my second favorite nuclear train-related movie.”

“WHAT’S FIRST?!”

“Broken Arrow. I don’t know why we don’t have more nuclear trains leaving children’s hospitals.”

Sam provided me a copy of the “House of Cheer” itinerary she made for Emil in advance of his arrival. By the end, I told her how much I wished I’d written it, laughing at something in every paragraph (shots of the empty Enfield Mall used to persuade him to embark on a soul-crushing return trip, dining at The 99/“A great meal at a great deal,” and how to behave when sniffing samples at Yankee Candle Village, among dozens of others). The man in question, who everyone thought had disappeared into the bathroom for fifteen or so minutes (probably to eat a brisket sandwich without hearing poo banter), emerged to take photos. We stood around the tree, and he requested a topless group shot; Sean obeyed and exposed his belly, unexpectedly reminding me of Jabba the Hut’s face if he were a cyclops. We did a “prom photo” as everyone put their arms around the midsection of the person to their right, the one time all night I hoped Tony’s colostomy bag wouldn’t fart given my wrist touched it.

As Emil made his way downstairs in his Goodyear sneakers—“They’ve got ninety-two thousand miles left on them”—Sam asked me to read the blog post I’d written about my favorite times with Travis. Fearing how Emil might react at some of the debauchery in question, I avoided looking up until I read a line about how Travis once claimed to use photos of a comely UConn women’s basketball player in the local newspaper as masturbatory material.

“Me too!” Emil said. “Ron Francis was mine. GO WHALERS!”

It felt like Travis was in the room encouraging the man. Emil, Sean, and I conversed about our favorite stand-up comedians afterward while Sam played an Anthony Jeselnik special, the desire to seek out new laughs a longstanding Travis tradition. Emil told us about having sex on a waterbed (“You barely have to do any work”) much to the disgust of Sam and mentioned how his sister watches Hallmark movies all day long (“It’s the same story every time: Guy loses his penis on a hike, falls in love, gets it back at the end, and an angel gets its wings”). Unconsciously still with shit on the brain, I discussed potentially moving to a nearby cow town—“Shit: It smells like Ellington in April”—only for Emil to suggest that it sounded like a lost song from The Producers. He recommended a few comedians I should check out (Brandon Vestal and Bob Zany) before prepping for bed.

As I was petting Wrigley, tucked away in the guest room because Sean’s dog Liam was present, Emil entered. I told him how nice it was to meet him, a guy brimming with kindness, warmth, and a terrific sense of humor that was clearly inherited by Travis. I patted him on the back and hoped when I saw him again that he’d quote Todd Barry, the comedian whose name I’d written on a piece of paper for him to check out.

While watching A Bad Moms Christmas with Sam (falling asleep on the couch after complaining about her itchy nipples) and Tony (telling me stories of uploading content to Stringr, potentially getting a job for Instacart, and selling numerous toys on eBay—I hope the surgeon replaces his bag with a free, unlimited data connection for all his troubles), I could sense the night was nearly over. I grabbed five recyclable to-go containers from Sam’s counter to bring home a variety of the sweet and the savory, ultimately cleaning the stovetop because some orange grease stains were irritating my OCD. Luckily for me, Tony cut a couple sphincter-free farts while Justin Hartley got his scrotum waxed by Kathryn Hahn on television.

Navigating a minefield of mud to reach my car, I accidentally stepped in a puddle that produced a sound not unlike what Tony is sure to make once he returns to the realm of the defecators. I wanted to text Sam about the happy finality but figured that she and Tony were snuggling in bed watching 2 Girls 1 Cup after removing the latest door on their Pepto Bismol-branded Advent calendar.

“Once shitten, twice ply,” Emil proudly dreamed about his daughter triumphantly returning to Popeye’s in the adjacent room.