On the Grill: A Big Slab of Summer

Hello summer, my old friend. I’ve come to grill with you again.

Here’s the menu: porterhouse steak. Baked potatoes big as Jay Leno’s head. Beer, heavily iced. What else? There is nothing else.

Horseradish, you say? OK, maybe. Every meal needs a vegetable.

“Why Porterville?” my wife asks.

“Why not,” I tell her.

Actually, I’m not sure. My friend, Irv, he’s got this butcher shop he likes in Porterville, two hours away. Knows a guy who knows a guy. There are family traditions involved. It’s all sort of secretive, like we’re headed off to dispose of a body.

“Hey, why Porterville?” I ask Irv one day.

“You’ll see,” Irv says.

Which makes me think we’re headed to some butcher shop/bookie joint/speakeasy. Irv talks of it the way you would a great alehouse. Or a high-stakes poker game.

Knowing Irv, I suspect that this butcher shop offers only a special grade of beef, marinated in garlic and $100 burgundy, then served by butcher’s daughters in bikinis. And then, only if you know the password.

“Sure this is legal?” I ask.

“Trust me,” Irv says.

So we begin our long drive with thoughts of attorneys and possible jail time.

I’ve brought a hundred bucks, enough for beef or bail. A hundred bucks, which will get you pretty far in rural Tulare County.

“So why’d you get married?” I ask Irv, who ran off to Vegas recently.

“You know, dude, that’s a very interesting story,” says Irv, who then begins a very interesting story, about 80 miles long.

Like many love stories, there was magic involved. A bathroom mishap. A childhood friend.

“One night, we just got to talking,” he says, as if that explains it all. Which it does.

He tells me about Vegas and the Little Church of the West, where Richard Gere and Cindy Crawford were married. Judy Garland. Betty Grable. And Irv and Cindy.

“Everything was right,” he says.

“Have you ever been with a ballerina?” I ask, fearing for a moment that we will go the entire day without talking about sex or sports.

“You kidding?” he asks. “Back in the ‘80s . . . .”

We reach the butcher shop and load up on steak. Irv gets 10 pounds of porterhouse. I see his 10 pounds of porterhouse, then raise him five T-bones.

He picks up a tri-tip. I pick up a tri-tip. He adds a nice turkey roast for his new bride. I eye the spare ribs.

“This place is great,” I tell him, grabbing a bottle of Basque marinade, juiced with three kinds of pepper.

“Look at those steaks,” Irv says.

In the back of the shop, one of the butchers is carving 1-inch steaks from the thick end of the short loin. The masterpieces roll off the knife one at a time. Irv and I grunt a little whenever a new steak thumps the table. Touchdown. Home run. Score.

“Comes to $99.83,” the cashier says.

Back in the car we go, with 40 pounds of Porterville’s finest work stashed in the back. We flee town like bank robbers. The engine growls. Our stomachs grumble.

On the way home, Irv talks about his work. Back in L.A., there’s a bunch of stuff happening all at once. A mountain of projects. Nothing special. Just the avalanche of crap that working people deal with on a weekly basis, rewarded by threats of layoffs.

“It’s a crap-alanche,” Irv explains, then shrugs like it’s no big deal.

Irv is a throwback. A raconteur. There are few raconteurs left in the world, guys quick with a story, who know about fly-fishing and quail hunting, whiskey and dogs. In fact, Irv may be the last raconteur. They ought to clone the guy. But carefully.

“So tell me about ballerinas,” I tell him, stirring up the conversation for the long ride home.

“Gotta get it hot,” Irv says, as we stand over the grill two hours later.

We are in agreement on the value of heat. First, a steak should be seared on the outside, to seal in the juices. On the inside, it should be medium rare, pink as a puppy’s tongue.

“Get that grill white hot,” Irv says.

“How’s that?” I ask, stirring the fire.

“Hotter,” he says.

Men and fire. There’s something about open flames. We sit watching the fire and devolving into cave men. Like werewolves, our bodies are soon completely covered in hair. Our skulls become more oblong, our foreheads more pitched. We’re hunched. We’re happy.

“How about those Lakers?” I say.

“Ugh,” grunts Irv.

When the fire is hot enough, we slap the steaks on my new grill, the one I put together late Christmas Day on the back steps, with the light fading and my wife calling me to dinner. The grill came in a hundred parts, all carefully mislabeled.

I attached the hood while holding a flashlight, my wife and the Christmas star both blinking at me from above.

“Remember all the grills you ever had?” Irv asks.

My first was a hibachi, I tell him. Found it in a college apartment in Des Moines. I would stand out in the snow flipping burgers and dreaming of spring break.

When I got my first job, I splurged on a $5 drugstore grill. My wife and I got a Weber as a wedding gift, then a Kenmore when the kids came along.

Now this new one, which has a little side burner to simmer a pan of onions. With enough grilled onions on top, I’d eat your left shoe. With your left foot still in it.

“To all the grills we’ve loved before,” says Irv, raising a cold beverage as the steaks sizzle, a whisper of summer thoughts in the night.

“To all the grills,” I say.

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Chris Erskine’s column is published on Wednesdays. His e-mail address is chris.erskine@latimes.com.