May the spirit of the BBQ line prevail
“Excuse YOU!”
Harsh and sarcastic, this utterance fell from the lips of the tall young man standing ahead of my party of three in a barbecue line this past Saturday.
He directed it downward, toward my friend who had scooted behind him to read the framed reviews posted on the wall of 2M Smokehouse, the highly regarded barbecue joint where Tex meets Mex in southeastern San Antonio.
My friend is a slight young woman who weighs maybe 100 pounds soaking wet. She didn’t hear the guy, or more likely had no idea his snarl was aimed at her. She just kept reading.
I, on the other hand, stared up at him in puzzlement. Had my friend bumped into him by accident? Had she blocked his view of the reviews? I couldn’t figure out what was happening, but I thought I must have misunderstood his tone, or the situation.
So with a mental shrug, I turned back to my own thoughts as maybe a hundred of us waited in a low ceilinged corridor to make our way up to the chopping block, where pitmaster Esaul Ramos was laboring to serve the long queue that had formed before the doors opened at 11 a.m. Restaurants hadn’t been ordered to close yet, but I suspected that was coming, and I told my friends I considered our barbecue expedition my last hurrah before I headed back home to
Houston, and our new reality.
Probably I dismissed the weird moment with Angry Guy because I love the fellowship and good cheer of barbecue lines. I enjoy the random conversations struck up and the barbecue shop talk; the jokes and the tip-swapping; the commiseration about the heat or the lack of progress as the crowd inches forward. It’s a communal exercise, a tribal rite.
But not today, as I found out maybe five minutes later. As my friends and I stood chatting, suddenly Tall Young Man loomed toward us and barked, “Could you give us some SPACE?” in a way that was more of a threat than a question.
All of a sudden it dawned: he and his girlfriend wanted to social distance, but they hadn’t figured out a way to make the request politely, with the good humor a barbecue line seems to demand.
Startled and a little shocked, my friends and I immediately moved back 3 feet and gave him the room he required. I looked around and realized nobody else had instituted a no-go zone around them. His girlfriend had looked on approvingly, and I grasped that he saw himself as the alpha male from “World War
Z,” or maybe and episode of the “Walking Dead.”
I wondered then — and I wonder still — why this pair had chosen to go out for barbecue to a wildly popular spot on a Saturday morning. Texans have barely begun making the adjustments that will be necessary to perform such rituals in a manner with which we’re all comfortable.
I guess he hadn’t read the sign 2M had posted on a pillar near where he stood. It read, “If avoiding a crowd is something you plan on doing … we would like to encourage the use of our preorder and delivery service for any amount of $100 or more to skip the line and avoid the crowd.”
It finished, “most of all, we want our customers to … know that 2M Smokehouse is a safe place where you can escape the BS and enjoy a friendly environment during a not so friendly time. Support local and be kind!”
Finally, this prickly couple reached the serving line. From behind us, a woman tapped my shoulder and said, “Hi, we’re from Houston, I follow your work.” We joked about not shaking hands and performed a shoulder bump and chatted a bit.
And there you have it: two kinds of exchanges in the new era of COVID-19, one aggressive and threatening; the other rueful and respectful and kind.
We’re all going to have to pick our approach in the difficult days ahead. We’re all going to learn things about ourselves, and about others. It’s not always going to be pleasant.
“It’s easy to be nice when things are going your way,” observed a wise soul on Twitter this morning, as the coronavirus anecdotes tumbled in an everflowing stream.
We’ll have to build a new, humane etiquette to ease us through a thousand unfamiliar social transactions. I hope we’re up to it and that the longtime spirit of Texas barbecue lines ultimately prevails, even if the form of the line changes, whatever the circumstances.