[title type="h5"]Tuesday, July 12, 2016.
A Fright, Eased By Half A Martini.
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Guys I know from our simultaneous presence at Jesuit High School in the mid-Sixties have always liked reunions. The urge started slowly, with the usual five-year intervals between convocations. They became annual when Joe Fein began to manage his family's restaurant, the Court of Two Sisters. Joe is one of us, and he saw no reason why a reunion lunch couldn't be held between Christmas and New Year's every year. That continues to this day. About fifteen years ago, a couple dozen Blue Jays decided to start meeting monthly at Galatoire's. That had an off-and-on quality, perhaps because it wasn't quite often enough. So a number of the monthly regulars decided to make it a weekly exercise, on every Tuesday on which nothing major was going on.
The new Tuesdayites added a restriction: we will limit ourselves to the special lunch menu, in which Gal's gives us an appetizer, an entree, and a dessert, with two choices in each course, for around $23. And martinis for a buck a pour. Another rule: anyone who orders something beyond the special menu--and thereby makes the calculation of the check difficult--will be forced to pick up the entire check for everybody.
I ran afoul of that last rule by asking for an order of brabant potatoes. They let me off with a warning. Since I am one of a few members of this club who did not actually graduate from Jesuit (I was cast out of the school after three years, the blame for which is entirely mine), the authentic graduates exercise a little noblesse-oblige towards me.
My lunch begins with turtle soup. Then grilled black drumfish with brown butter. And a fudge panna cotta for dessert.
And I drank the martini. Like most Galatoire's cocktails, it's a double, despite the buck price. I don't drink martinis much anymore. But I had a good reason for doing so today.
I was en route to the luncheon, about halfway across the Causeway, when I saw a twister drop out of a very dark cloud east of the bridge. On Channel Four news later in the day, Carl Arredondo showed video of this funnel and said, "It's a waterspout, but, well, that is a very large waterspout. Really, an unusually large waterspout. Do not go there and take pictures of it. It is very large as waterspouts go."
I'll say. Because waterspouts have clean edges and an infinite range of size, and because Lake Pontchartrain is more or less featureless in the middle, there was no telling how far this thing was from me. But it seemed very possible that it would reach the Causeway about the same time I did. I have seen four other waterspouts out there, one of which I grazed about twenty years ago. But nothing like this. My heart beat faster. Should I speed up to beat it to the bridge? Or slow down and let it pass? What I could not do was stop and wait it out. The Causeway has no shoulders.
I watch the dark tube move erratically. And then I was happy to see a shot of lightning, well east of the twister. Lightning is almost always at the head of the parade, followed by the tornadoes and then the heavy rain. And then the thing starts shrinking--not from top to bottom, but in cross-section gauge. Soon it's a long black rope with a lot of kinks. And then gone.
It takes me to the end of the bridge for my pulse to slow down. That was scary. And so I decide that once I arrive at the door of Galatoire's, I would gladly accept the welcome implicit in its one-dollar martinis. But just one.
My arrival bring happy tidings from my classmates. Almost everybody makes a big deal out of how much weight I have lost in the past couple of years. Two of them ask whether I had some sort of health problem. (It's also what my doctor hinted at when, seeing me for the first time in a couple of years, he asked whether I was trying to lose weight. Both he and my new physician tell me that there is nothing to worry about.
At two p.m., I depart Galatoire's to watch the parking valet kill the engine and squeal a little rubber as he brought my new Beetle down from upstairs. Ever since one of these guys screwed up the PT Cruiser, I am reluctant to park in anything but a self-service lot. Nobody seems to know how to operate a manual transmission anymore.
I arrive at the radio station in time to take a twenty-five-minute siesta on the floor of my office. The martini performs another relaxing function. That's a lot to get out of a dollar.
Written by Tom Fitzmorris July 15, 2016 12:01 in
