Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 35, No. 10, October 1990

“What’ll it be, mon compadre?” Jake asked cheerily. He was wielding a cleaver nonchalantly, hacking the inferior long ends off the ribs and flinging them into a trash barrel behind him. I was overwhelmed. At most restaurants, Jake’s throwaways would go for five bucks, a la carte.

“A beef sandwich,” I said, barely able to contain my emotion.

“On the plate or by itself?”

“By itself.”

Jake whisked a sheet of waxed paper from a dispenser, conjured up a bun from out of nowhere, and plunged elbow-deep into a huge mound of freshly sliced brisket, transferring a large heap of the thick slices onto the bun, hot beef spilling over in a trail across the counter that would have been enough for five sandwiches downtown at Leonard’s Wood Pit Barbecue. Before I could blink, Jake had slapped on the sauce with a fat brush (spraying the counter and his apron), pushing the top of the bun on the dripping meat, and served up the sandwich under my nose. It couldn’t have taken more than five seconds. “That’s a buck twenty,” he said. I would have paid twice that and counted it a bargain. I was hooked.

I began to lunch at the Cathedral Barbecue almost every day. My catwalk rental company is a one-man operation, so when I’m tired of hanging around the office waiting for the dust to settle on the file cabinets, I just tape a hand-lettered envelope on the door: “Out to Lunch.” I usually drop in at Jake’s mid-afternoons, after the heavy lunch traffic has cleared out. It’s a dark, restful sort of place when it’s empty — just a few redwood benches and picnic tables and a broken jukebox. I like to linger over a beer, staring at the beautiful waterfall in the Hamm’s chandelier which revolves slowly overhead.

Sometimes Jake will join me, leaning against the wall in his brown-stained apron, the sweat rolling down his round face and neck. We talk about sports or student radicals or grocery prices, but mostly about meat. Jake appreciates the time, effort, and artistry involved in smoking meats, the long night hours tending the oven, the sleepy mornings nursing the meat to perfection. “You take a turkey,” he says. “That’s a good fourteen hours of smoking. People don’t understand what you mean by smoking. They’re used to cooking over a flame. Even a cathedral needs watching. You got to keep the heat down. You go into the Wood Pit and order ribs. What do you get? They come out pink. They’re raw. They need another hour at least.” He waves a hand in disgust. “What do people know?” He talks like that, in short disconnected sentences. He isn’t a good listener, but he’s good company. He’s big and sweaty and happy and his hands are always shiny from handling fat.

For the first three years I patronized the Cathedral Barbecue, there was a cloud over the place, and I don’t mean hickory smoke. The bleak aspect was provided by Jake’s wife, Madeline, a menopausal shrew who seemed to delight in public spats. Madeline helped Jake with the lunch crowds, taking orders and handling the cash register while Jake made sandwiches and wrapped takeout orders of chicken and ribs. She was Jake’s opposite — tall, thin, withered, dark, with nasty almond eyes and a heavily lipsticked leering mouth.

Madeline was always needling Jake. Sometimes she would linger on in the afternoons to nag him about his drinking. It was true that Jake would nip at the bottle from time to time during the day, but to hear Madeline tell it he was a rip-roaring drunk. “I’ve had it!” she would scream, pacing about the room to the embarrassment of the few midafternoon customers. “Why should I knock myself out for a lush? I’m humiliated to be seen on the streets. People point me out and say, ‘There goes the wife of Jake the lush.’ ”

Madeline’s outbursts made Jake livid with rage. “Will you shut up!” he would hiss through clenched teeth. “Shut up!” But Madeline was relentless in her efforts to humiliate him. It was ironic, really, because it was Madeline who would have been taken for the drunk, bumping against tables and barking at Jake in a voice that could be heard outside on the sidewalk. Even when he was under the weather, Jake could total up a bill and make change as fast as he could build a sandwich. The supposedly sober Madeline had to struggle with paper and pencil and still couldn’t get it to come out right.

Often their arguments came to the brink of violence, and I was amazed at Madeline’s audacity in enraging a man so gifted with carving knife and cleaver. Always, however, just at the point when blows seemed inevitable, Madeline would take the car keys and storm out the front door. “Get out of here!” Jake would scream. “Don’t come back! I don’t need you!”