Category: Orphans

Ted Davis: …but don’t get her drunk. If you get her drunk,
[alluringly]
Ted Davis: she loses control!
Walter Davis: Ted, are we talking a loss of inhibitions here, or does she pee on the floor? — From Blind Date (1987)

Perhaps I should just face the facts: When a hot woman about 15 years my junior asks me out and offers to pay, then all kinds of red flags and warning bells should start going off. Right? I say that primarily because I don’t date a lot these days. Most of it has to do with money. The place in which I live is hardly a babe magnet for one thing. I feel old somewhat, sometimes, for another. And yet another fact is that all my exes — whether they live in Texas or elsewhere — are still exes.

But as I live and breeze this nice-looking gal with the most stunning brown eyes I have seen in … weeks … months …. whenever … came by to see me last night just as I had given up on watching the Cowboys go up in flames like a cheap Chinese toy. It wasn’t a blind date, I knew the woman as she had previously dated a neighbor, but the night did turn out to be in some respects like Blind Date, the movie in which Bruce Willis is escorted by Kim Bassinger who has a really, really bad reaction after drinking booze.

“Dee,” as I shall call her wanted to go to a nearby bar, have a couple of drinks and shoot some pool. I was okay with that except the government decided to pay about five days late which hopefully will turn out to be Wednesday. No problem says Dee.

So we go to a place just up the street have a couple of beers and things are going rather swimmingly, said the sailor. For whatever reasons, a change of scenery or not much happening or take your pick, we decide to go up to another bar up the street.

Dee buys us both another drink. By this point we had been getting along very well indeed, better than I would have imagined. She decided to buy some cigarettes and then went outside to smoke. Without a sign, without warning, without so much as a “kiss my a**” things start to go South. She had maybe a total of four drinks that I saw and was fast on the highway to getting plastered. Perhaps she had been drinking all afternoon. If so, she didn’t act as if she had when she first came by. The next thing I know she is powdering her face for some biker on the other side of the bar. I said to myself: “Nope.” I told her I was out of there and she said she would see me “tomorrow.” I haven’t seen her today, not that it matters, no matter how amusing it might be for me.

I thought briefly about leaving her there in the bar but not much more than briefly. She didn’t make a big deal about me leaving and neither did I. I also figured that the patrons there probably had more to fear from her than vice versa. I’m sorry. No, I am not sorry. I have heard too many country tunes and have been witness to many a domestic dispute a couple of which involved the very same good-looking woman who asked me out. Kenny Rogers is damn straight. You got to know when to hold them and know when to fold them. And since I had no losses to cut. I quit and walked out, this time, ahead.

One never knows on what day Meaty Mondays will show up. You see, I like to keep people guessing, especially if they are guessing whether I am an animal, mineral or vegetable. It just so happens my friend Bullet Bob from near Cowtown (as in “Foat Wuth I luv yew!”) was in town visiting his sister over the weekend so he and I did a late lunch at the original Jason’s Deli in Beaumont’s Gateway Shopping Center.

Gateway’s heyday is long past since Beaumont went down the path of One Big America Box Store but Jason’s as a company has kept on trucking since it sprouted out of the 11th Street at Stagg Drive location in 1976. It is my understanding that some 150 or so Jason’s franchises now dot the landscape in 14 different states. Perhaps they have an even larger “footprint” — how I hate that trendy word — than that but I had difficulty finding information about the company on their Web site and I had to rely on Wikipedia which as you know can be useful, a piece of dog crap or something in between. I bet you would almost never find the words “dog crap” in a newspaper restaurant review. Aren’t you the lucky one? Jason’s does now have a blog on which “Rusty,” whom I suppose is founding partner Rusty Coco,” notes:

“When we started our little deli back in 1976, we had no idea that 30+ years later we would be where we are today, and blogging about it no less. Blogging? In 1976, blogging might even have gotten you arrested in Beaumont, Texas.”

Yeah, that’s a Beaumont boy, no doubt about it.

Oh, review, I almost forgot. The Wikipedia says that the Jason’s signature sandwich is the muffalettta. I don’t know that to be a fact and wonder because their menu used to mention for the “Sgt. Pepper” something to the effect of “where it all got started.” That is from memory so don’t hold me to it and, to be perfectly honest, if you knew the state of my memory … What was I saying? The Sgt. Pepper is hot roast beef, sautéed onions and bell peppers, provolone, mayo with cup of au jus. Au jus what? Au jus what I said. It is delicious as is a great many items on the menu. And the muffaletta, I would say, is the best sandwich Jason’s produces.

Even better is the Quarter Muff Special in which you get a quarter muffaletta of ham & hard salami or oven roasted turkey breast with choice of any cup of soup or fresh fruit cup, which in their original Gateway location in Beaumont currently sells for $6.29. I usually go for the seafood gumbo when I have the Half Muff. But on Saturday when Bob and I visited I opted for their “Soup and Famous Salad Bar,” which (once again with a Beaumont, Texas, price) came to $7.29 without a drink — their black currant iced tea kicks tail. Bob and I both had the big old bowl of seafood gumbo to go along with their famous salad bar. Hmm. I wonder if the salad bar ever gets any requests for autographs?

Jason’s has come out swinging with what I like to call “the health thing.” They, for quite some time, have had a line of what they call their “Healthy Hearts Slimwiches” and have a few other types of items along those lines. It seems some of the sandwiches are fatter in fat content than I remember. I don’t know whether that is because of a different analysis being used or whether they fattened them up, but I mean they aren’t like Heart Attack Helper. Their menu also notes that their:

” … product specifications result in a menu that is free of artificial trans fats and partially hydrogenated oils but are not necessarily low in saturated fat.”

I don’t know what that means but I am sure someone with an eighth-grade education could probably explain it to me with little difficulty.

I have been to a few different Jason’s Delis, especially in places where I have resided for some period of time. Each one is different with respect to their personnel and their attitudes as well as service. That, of course, can only be expected from franchised restaurants. I prefer the original article because the service is usually ace there. I do visit their location on Dowlen Road mostly on Sundays because the one on Gateway is closed that day. The Dowlen location seems larger and just doesn’t have the atmosphere as my original Jason’s just down the road.

Oh, and I have no idea who Jason is. Really. They opened in 1976 so it couldn’t be Jason Voorhees of Friday the 13th fame. I suppose I could ask, but in the scheme of things, what does it really matter?

I suggest you consult Jason’s Web site (the link is above dummy!) or a phone book for a location near you. But if you are in Beaumont and want to visit the original location:

Jason’s Deli
112 Gateway St
Beaumont, TX 77701
Phone: 409-833-5914
Fax: 409-833-1378
Price: Is nice

After Thought Alert: I almost forgot. Jason’s has employee-produced sandwiches that are trotted out, I suppose, on a test basis. One I have had several times recently is called “The Italian Cruz.” It’s kind of Italian po-boy and is excellent. I hope they add it to their regular menu.

What
a
bunch
of
weenies!

It is most likely a foregone conclusion now that I am the worst restaurant critic blogger in the world. I mean here it is Friday and where is Meaty Mondays — a critique of restaurants wherever I happened to be?

Now of course I could have used the Christmas defense. But that is used by everyone including most Jewish folks I know. Then I could claim stress from recent events: A looming rotorooter up the old colon for who knows what; the news I just learned Wednesday about my friend Donna’s death; and the (hopefully) much happier news from my now Tennessean daughter who informed me yesterday she just became engaged. So I have had a lot — figuratively speaking — on my plate. But I used to be able to handle damn near anything and still write what I had to when my living was made writing for newspapers. Now look at the pathetic procrastinating sniveler I have become. Tsk.

But better Nate than lever, I always say, being the jerk that I am. So today I will pass on a few places where to get a decent kolache if you happen to be in Beaumont, Texas, or perhaps a couple of other places.

Kolaches are defined by Wikipedia as: a type of pastry consisting of fillings ranging from fruits to cheeses inside a bread roll. Originally only a sweet dessert from Central Europe, they have become popular in parts of the United States.

My favorite kolache, not to be confused with My Favorite Martian, is the sausage kolache of the type I first became familiar with in the small Czech settlement of West, Texas, about 15 miles north of Waco. And in my humble opinion the best place to get a kolache of any type be it filled with sausage or some other goody is West’s Czech Stop. It is against the laws of Texas, humanity and physics to drive down Interstate 35 en route to either Dallas or Austin (No one with any sense actually GOES to Waco) without stopping at the Czech Stop.

Now my mother used to make something akin to a kolache that she and many others call a “pig in the blanket.” I would say they might be somewhat similar to “hogs in a serape,” “swine in a comforter,” “Durocs in a quilt,” or perhaps even “javelina in a sleeping bag.” Well, perhaps not the latter. I don’t think I could sleep even with the thought of a javelina in a sleeping bag.

“Javelina, this sleeping bag ain’t big enough for the both of us.”

Note: Javelinas are mas macho so don’t go calling them collared peccaries.

Mother, bless her heart, used about as simple a recipe as one could find for pigs in a blanket: Weiners, biscuit dough and Cheese Whiz. And they were awesome. Probably the biggest difference one will find in a great Czech-style sausage kolache and Momma’s Cheese Whiz Hot Dogs in Biscuits is that the standard weenie is kind of void of flavor (and is made of God knows what) and needs the biscuit and processed cheese food to carry it along. That is not a criticism of my mom’s pigs in a blanket though. They were mighty awesome as far as I am concerned and made with a mother’s love, something that’s hard to duplicate on a mass scale.

As is the case with ethnic food of all types, kolaches are found now all over. There are more than a few places to find them where I live in Beaumont, Texas. Interestingly enough, I have never been to the chain Kolache Factory on Phelan Boulevard at Dowlen Road. I usually stick to the nearby places such as Rao’s on Calder Avenue and Shipley’s Donuts on South 11th Street, behind Gateway Shopping Center. Both places have sausage kolaches.

Of the two places, I am not too fond of Rao’s kolaches. There isn’t a whole lot to Rao’s sausages, which are either Jimmy Dean or the local Zummo’s. Shipley’s makes a great sausage kolache. I like their sausage and cheese. I used to like their spicy sausage and cheese but they did something to it to make it hotter. You can actually see something green inside it and it can get pretty freakin’ warm if you know what I mean.

One other kolache of note nearby I can think of is in Newton, Texas, about 60 miles northeast of Beaumont where Texas Hwy. 87 and U.S. 190 intersects — or about 10 miles from the Louisiana state line. There is a little place on the corner of where Hwy. 190 turns right called The Donut Ranch. As is the case with most pastry places in Texas not run by Czechs or other white folks, the proprietor is Asian, perhaps Vietnamese. They do sausage kolaches right.

Perhaps I will come up with a Meaty Monday on Monday. But don’t go getting your hopes up. In the meantime, go to your favorite pastry monger and hopefully find yourself a kolache be it filled with sausage, ham, fruit or rhubarb. It will definitely make you smarter, more attractive and not to mention rich and thin. Or my name isn’t (Fill in the blanks)_ _ _. (Hell, add some blanks if you wish.) Just do whatever you want to do. Don’t mind me. I’m just the blogger.

Inside my little brain today flutters scads of thoughts and feelings concerning oodles — well a few at least — of personal matters running the gamut from good to perplexing to bad. Yet I can’t help but also think about how sad I feel over the assassination earlier today of Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto.

Oh, crude human, man, that I am I must admit I that I had long found Ms. Bhutto a very attractive woman — those exotic eyes and nose, and not to mention Seven Sisters-educated. But from the first time that I remember hearing her speak, which I believe was on 60 minutes, I felt that despite her country’s sometimes misogynistic culture, Bhutto talked as if she held the promise of an enlightened East which someday could meet the West at least in a willingness to understand each other.

But many were the occurrences which threw those hopes out of the window the least of which not being 9/11. Bhutto was not perfect. She fled into self-exile after twice being accused of corruption while serving as Pakistan’s prime minister. Whether she and her family did plunder the government’s largess I can’t say. People are people so says the song. George W. Bush may have broken laws much worse than stealing. Does he deserve death for it? No. I would go out on a limb and say that even for the worst crimes he could commit short of genocide or treason that he nor any leader deserves Bhutto’s fate, especially at the hands of fanatics or a mob.

So perhaps it is good Musharraf is still strongman in charge of the nuclear-armed Pakistan. I say, perhaps it is good. Maybe he can keep a lid on the real nut jobs and wide-eyed extremists for the time being.

It is selfish of me to say but perhaps worrying about Pakistan takes my mind off all else that is going on with which concerns me personally this day. But that has nothing to do with the reality of what is left in the wake of a brave Pakistani lady who had to know she was not invincible and stood a real chance of meeting the fate that she did this morning.

Though my words will surely not reach the family or friends of Ms. Bhutto, I still send forth this day my best wishes to those who need them and those who do not. Why? Why not?

Why I couldn’t see it coming Friday evening I just can’t imagine.

The night before taking a bus from here in Beaumont, Texas, to visit a friend in the Dallas area, I spent more than two hours searching for a taxi that might pick me up the next morning and deliver me to the bus station on time. I never found one that night.

On Saturday morning, about an hour before I was supposed to leave on the bus, I called a local taxi service on the first try and told them what time to pick me up. One hour and 10 minutes later the taxi still had not come. I called this taxi service back and the dispatcher said the driver was on his way but that gave me little solace as my bus was scheduled to leave in about 20 minutes. I finally said a few choice words and got into my truck, determined I would drive to my office parking lot downtown and walk the couple of blocks to the Greyhound station. I intercepted my taxi just as I was about to pull out onto the street.

Why not just drive my truck to the bus station and leave it for the few days I planned to be gone to Dallas? Why that sounds like a splendid idea to me. Unfortunately, the bus station won’t let customers leave their vehicles parked there. They will, in fact, have your vehicle towed off.

“There’s a lot of vandalism around here,” said the young bus station clerk, obviously wishing he would someday grow up to drive a mighty Greyhound. Hey, I got to have at least one ‘yuk’ in this sordid tale.

Well, I can certainly understand vandalism because the bus station is located in not the best of neighborhoods even though it is only a few blocks from the federal building, not to mention some of the city’s largest Baptist, Methodist and Episcopal churches. Hence my dilemma.

My bus was scheduled to return to Beaumont from Dallas via Houston at 8 p.m. Christmas evening. If I had my truck, I could have driven home and through the hairy neighborhood — near where I admittedly camped out in my truck during my desperate homeless days. But apparently Greyhound would rather have one person mugged and perhaps killed in a robbery for 25 cents instead of unsuccessfully filing a claim for a vandalized automobile. Pardon me. I know it’s Greyhound yet I don’t quite understand the logic.

One taxi on Saturday morning — albeit late — came through for me. The driver didn’t even charge me full fare because he was late and I was highly agitated. The same didn’t happen last night, Christmas 2007. No I wasn’t charged full fare. I wasn’t even overcharged. That is because I couldn’t GET A FREAKING TAXI!

After pulling out of Houston on the Greyhound for Beaumont, about 30 minutes late, I started dialing phone numbers I had stored from the previous Friday night when I could not get a taxi. And like Friday night, on Christmas night, a taxi was not to be found in Beaumont, Texas, or in all of Jefferson County for that matter. No room at the inn? It doesn’t matter. You’d have to ride a camel to get there!

Now I don’t live in a metropolis. But I do live in a metropolitan area. Which is defined as:

“The Federal Office of Management and Budget’s designation for the functional area surrounding and including a central city; has a minimum population of 50,000; is contained in the same county as the central city; and includes adjacent counties having at least 15 % of their residents working in the central city’s county.”

The Beaumont-Port Arthur metropolitan area is composed of Jefferson, Orange and Hardin counties. It has a total population of about 385,000. It ranks 130th largest such population area in the country (Here’s looking at 129!) Beaumont is the largest city in this federally-designated area and the Census Bureau estimated its population in 2003 at 112,434. Jefferson County is the most populous of the three-county area with almost 245,000 residents. So much for geo-economics lesson. The gist of my useless knowledge here is that the area in which I live is not Mayberry with the city limits lying on either side of the population sign.

A search of Yahoo Local for taxis in Beaumont returns 12 businesses. Search “cab” you get 10. Go for broke, search “taxicab” and it yields 10. As is the case in all three categories, several entries are for the same company and several are out of business. You don’t fare, pardon the pun, much better in the phone directory which lists nine cab companies.

So the problem is that there are a lack of cab companies to serve the population. True. It is also true that the existing cab companies should have their people out doing something better with their lives than driving taxis, such as being a trial lawyer which this area has seemingly hundreds who are available to sue asbestos companies, the local refineries, big tobacco and drug manufacturers. Not that there is anything wrong with it.

I wrote a city official Friday night with my ire concerning an inability to find a taxi. It’s a good thing I wrote him Friday night and not last night when it took me 45 minutes to walk home through a rough neighborhood (and some good ones) from the bus station.

Officials in Beaumont and in Jefferson County for that matter all have their spirits up because of a new industrial boom taking place. This includes construction which will turn the local Motiva refinery in Port Arthur into the nation’s largest as well as the building of a huge liquified natural gas offloading facility for ships at the edge of the Gulf of Mexico on Sabine Pass. Don’t be looking for many hybrids running around here.

Along with this boom, Beaumont officials in particular want to make downtown — only a few blocks from the blighted area around the bus station — into a tourist Mecca anchored upon a big convention hotel along the Neches River.

The city official to whom I zinged off a missive wrote me back today and took a “build it and they will come” take on how to have good taxi service. Dean Conwell, the city’s convention and visitor’s bureau director, said the lack “of quality” cab service in Beaumont is due primarily to little demand.

“When we finally get better air service and a convention hotel downtown, I believe things will get better.”

Well, I suppose that is something to wish for in the new year and probably beyond. But in the meantime, what happens if someone who can’t get a taxi gets mugged and killed? Perhaps if they are tourists or business people from say Germany or Japan who came here to get hooked into our big, new growth it will get our city’s name on the news. Oh well, I didn’t say it would be GOOD news.

Oh, did I mention that the city’s bus system was closed on account of Christmas?

I don’t know what it takes to get a cab license in this city other than paying a fee. I don’t know if there are any standards for service, or lack thereof. But I will be looking into it. And if our city officials have a lick of sense they should be looking into it as well. Any city worth a spit needs a decent way for its citizens and its visitors to get around, see its sights, and spend their money. In Beaumont, we don’t have it and if people want this place to prosper they might get the big hotels out of their eyes and some taxicabs that actually operate out onto the streets.