One of the good things about the pandemic (you know, the Covid one) was that it launched me as a backyard BBQ star, though sadly without talent or a fan base. Up until then, I hated cooking enough to not do it, and besides, to get to the backyard involved a trip down a very long driveway, which was an incredible hassle.
Three years earlier, feeling that I was much too lazy, I bought a Nexgrill charcoal grill at The Home Depot and assembled it in the car port while hopped up on Kombucha. The Nexgrill was no quarter inch thick steel beast, but it looked vaguely like what I imagined a grill was supposed to be.
I don't recall how many fingers I lost putting that thing together, but once it was done, I parked it under the car port and forgot about it till the apocalypse.
The plague was a real time lesson in how badly I handle adversity. I did all right for a couple of weeks, but by the end of the first month, I came to the conclusion we were being played, and I shifted into “f*ck off, don't tell me what to do” mode.
Between all the restaurants shutting down and the risk of committing murder against once ordinary humans who'd morphed into mask-enforcing Moonbeam Mussolinis, it was easier to just stay home and burn charcoal, even if I had no talent or, more importantly, patience.
You can't just light charcoal and throw your food down right away, even with a fancy electric Looft lighter, recommended on YouTube. A Looft lighter, if you don't already know, looks like a thick curling iron and blows hot air like a talk show host. It’s what you invest in at the start of your barbecue career, when your enthusiasm exceeds the combination of your knowledge and experience.
The Looft lighter, used correctly, will get your charcoals going, slowly. Here's the part where patience is supposed to kick in. Mine didn’t. I didn't wait for the smoke to turn the right color, at least not at first. Not till I started watching barbecue videos while waiting. No wonder my early experiments yielded bitter, acrid fruit.
One of those videos convinced me that a weed burner, which is the gardener’s equivalent of a flame thrower, is the right way to get down to backyard business. By then, I’d graduated from the Nexgrill to an honest to goodness ugly drum smoker, fashioned out of a 55-gallon oil barrel. The weed burner is how you can reach the coals and wood sticks at the bottom. It works.
But not on your patience. That's something you've got to work on yourself, and it always takes too long. If patience is impossible, persistence comes in second. I’m persistent.
Had it been up to the Moonbeam Mussolinis, we'd still be on lockdown today. Somehow, having something to do with politics, the pandemic was declared over, and somehow, through persistence, I learned how to manage a fire, but not till years later.
My biggest lesson from that miserable time was that most people don't want to fight alone. Many will take the opportunity to become their neighborhood’s petty tyrant. And even a nice guy like me can turn into a fire-breathing a**hole. I'm still in the “don't tell me what to do, f*ck off” camp.
When life hands you lemons, make lemonade. When life hands you Moonbeam Mussolinis, grab a weed burner.