Alabama White Sauce

“As humanity progresses, meat will be used less and less, for the teeth of man are not carnivorous. ~ 'Abdu'l-Bahá”

There’s a few feelings as aggravating as food stuck in your teeth.

Stubbing your toe when you’re sitting down to eat a meal you’re really excited about. Burning your tongue on the appetizer at a restaurant you’ve been dying to eat at. Quitting Survivor.

The thing about BBQ places is they never seem to have toothpicks, Rob muses as he looks at the empty plate before him. It isn’t quite licked clean, but there’s no doggie bag coming from this meal.

As Rob gnashes the tip of his tongue against the bits of barbecue stuck in his teeth, he wonders if there’s actually a God. Big G, not little g.

With all of the violence and sadness that is this life, how could there be?

But, there’s beauty, too.

And everything seems so impeccably timed. The ocean tides and sunrises and how little baby deer come out ready to walk. Fruit falls from the trees and grass grows - all to feed the animals.

“Can I get ‘ya anything else, sweetheart?”

His waitress is a young blonde. Cute with little, dumbass scribbly tattoos all over her arms. A patchwork of unorganized bullshit.

He thinks for a moment about asking her opinion. Does she think there’s a God? And if so, what kind?

Is it a woman? A man? Do they wear a white cloak? Maybe it’s altogether beyond our comprehension as we are stuck in the frames of man or woman or image.

If he didn’t have a pregnant girlfriend he was putting off proposing to at home… and if he was twenty years young, he’d of hit her with more than a, “No, thank you.”

Panic sets in.

If there is a God, he doubts this entity ever intended for man to eat his other creations. And Rob just committed a small genocide - eating cows and pigs and chicken indiscriminately.

Get your shit together.

“Well, you’ve tried each style of barbecue. Which is your favorite?”

“I gotta be honest with you,” Rob says as he leans back, rubbing his full belly, “I ain’t much for barbecue.”

“Sure could’a fooled me,” she laughs as she rips the check and sets it on the white and red checkered tablecloth below him.

It clicks for him.

They were going for a picnic type vibe here. Swing and a miss.

He eyeballs the bill and pulls a worn down billfold out of his back pocket. Nodding towards it, he lays down a handful of bills.

The waitress is shocked.

“Holy shit, thank you mister.”

Mister.

The honest truth is Rob doesn’t even know what he laid out for her. Could be fives, could be hundreds.

“All I got is money.”

That ain’t true.

And he knows it. Every day he spends in the Survivor challenge with Towel’s bad attitude and Keyes trying to teach him about fashion, he knows it just a bit deeper.

Cause back home he has the woman of his dreams waiting on him.

Along with his son. And John.

Why the fuck am I doing this?

“So, what are you gonna do?”

He’s caught off guard.

“Huh?”

She slugs him on the arm. There was a time that this would be exactly what he wanted. The whole fucking why behind it.

Attention.

Affection.

Some confirmation that he isn’t all bad.

Now it just makes him sad.

“Which type of barbecue are you goin’ with?”

Oh. That.

A barbecue cook off.

What began as a fun little throwback act of nostalgia with the big mountain has gotten even more ludicrous each week.

Will next week be a circle jerk?

Yeah, that.

The whole reason for being in this god forsaken state. Who the fuck knew that Kansas City was in Missouri?

“Run me through the options again.”

“Well, you had Kansas City - obviously the best choice, but I may be a bit partial. Memphis style if you like dry rubs and ribs… only. Texas,” she fakes a puking motion,”if you’re the type of heathen that thinks beef brisket belongs near barbecue.”

Something is missing.

“What was the other one? With the white sauce?”

She looks like she just smelled a fart. Honestly, with all the meat Rob just ate, she might not be wrong.

“The Alabama White Sauce? Mister that isn’t barbecue. It’s a condiment. It goes on chicken.”

Yeah.

That’s the one.

Rob loves the discomfort it causes even referring to it - keeping it in the same breath as the long standing greats.

Just like me.

Just like the raggedy, old fucker who had the balls to call himself “The Legend” while playing Indy shows now being in the same breath as Daytona Diamonds and Cecilworth Farthington and Coral Avalon and… all those other fuckers who have held the PRIME Universal Title.

I hope my name tastes like that in their mouth when they talk about the title scene.

Who the next contender is.

A fucking outcast.

An abomination that somehow made it onto the same stage.

Yeah… that’s the one.

Rob won’t admit it, but he is beginning to look forward to his little park meetings with Dr. Shantz.

He stands next to a wishing fountain, hands in his jean pockets, rolling a rock around under the tip of his snakeskin cowboy boots while waiting for Shantz.

Rob always thought therapy was about the hour (or less) you spend with the doctor.

No wonder he never got that white light experience he was hoping for.

Yeah, he’s beginning to see that’s not what changes. It’s almost inconsequential.

The other hours of the day are what matters.

The meeting with Shantz is just finally turning on the light in the kitchen. Them cockroaches scatter in the twenty-fours stacking up in between each meeting.

Memories come to the surface - things that he had stuffed way down - so down he really thought they would never resurface.

Like being a little boy with actual empathy and emotion.

His dad actually asked him what was wrong that day driving home from school when he got in the first fight of many.

Crying and telling the old man it was because his favorite wrestler got beat up in a bar and was in the hospital.

He remembers how jarring that smack that came across the truck like a blast of lightning was.

“Yeah, well, I got fired today.” The old man screamed at him.

Fucker was always getting fired.

“Hello, Rob.”

Shantz’ voice pulls Rob from that truck and drops him off in whatever nameless park this is in Missouri.

“Hey, Doc.” Rob nods to him.

“What’s keeping you up at night?”

Straight to it.

And with a good one, too. None of this tugging and wetting the bandaid. Shantz rips it right the fuck off.

Rob takes a deep breath, looking into the smaller man’s thick framed glasses. Through them. Looks him in the eyes.

“I was, uh, I was thinking about my dad.”

Shantz’ perfectly coifed hair stays perfectly coifed as he nods.

“Mhm. That’s common.”

“Not for me it ain’t.”

Shantz runs a manicured finger across his chin slowly. He doesn’t pry on the why because he already knows.

He also doesn’t waste time doubling back to explain to Rob that he specifically meant it’s common for a man to think about his father when he’s about to become one.

There’s a gold vein in striking distance without digging that deep.

“What have you been thinking about?”

Rob chuckles and nods his head up and down. He can’t help but smile.

The first time he met this guy he made fun of his car.

Now he’s in front of a wishing well about to tell him about when he still believed he was good.

“There was one time, uh, well shit. I don’t know man, I just been remembering how he used to beat my ass. It didn’t take much, y’know?”

Shantz squints at Rob, his blue eyes piercing through him.

“No. Continue, please. There was one time…”

“I was just a dumbass kid. All upset cause some wrestler I loved got his ass beat outside the ring and was in the hospital. I got into it with some kid at school who told me wrestling was fake - beat the shit out of him. So, naturally, the old man came to pick me up.”

The alarm bells aren’t even going off in Rob.

Telling him to stop. Cut it short. Don’t go into the dark alone.

Don’t feel this.

“I remember it was maybe lunch time and… and he was still in fucking pajamas. That seemed really weird to me. We rode in quiet, y’know, just knowing that ass beating was coming, right?”

Shantz nods.

Maybe he does know, maybe he doesn’t.

Either way, it makes Rob feel safe enough to keep digging.

“But he didn’t. He asked what happened. I start crying and I tell him the whole story. And, uh, well he beat the living shit out of me going a hundred miles an hour down highway eighty-five. Screaming about how he had just lost his job.”

Dr. Shantz, wise as ever, lets that sit in Rob’s stomach like a lead weight.

A kid behind them throws a penny in the fountain, the loud pluck sound of it hitting the water breaking the silence.

“Great job, kiddo.” The kid’s dad says before hoisting him up and putting him on his shoulders.

If there is a god, and damn does Rob hope there is these days, he has a hell of a sense of humor.

You can’t call what happens waterworks, but the astute Shantz doesn’t miss Rob acting like there’s something in his eye.

A flock of birds fly above them preparing to head south for the winter.

Life goes on.

Despite this man, this bastard, laying open his chest and baring his soul to this well dressed doctor.

“And what did that teach you?”

Shantz can tell by the way Rob’s eyebrows raise that this question had the intended impact.

He’s kept this memory so out of the light that he’s never even asked himself… what does it mean? Who did that make him?

“I don’t fucking know.”

Rob looks down, rolling the pebble underneath his snakeskin boots again.

“Sure you do, Rob. You just don’t want to ask yourself the hard questions.”

“Like what?”

“Do you use ChatGPT or Claude, Rob?”

“Sure. Who doesn’t? Hard to think about how we got by without it.”

Shantz bites his bottom lip and nods his head in understanding.

“Mhm. What do you use it for?”

Rob shrugs, confused at this line of questioning.

“I don’t know? The same shit everyone else does I guess. How long to boil an egg? How the fuck do you turn on an air fryer?”

“How should I handle this situation or that?”

With a chuckle, Rob pulls a hand from his pocket and runs it through his hair.

“Let me rephrase that. Would you want Charlotte or someone in the locker room to see your chat history?”

The f is so emphatic in Rob’s “Fuck no,” it’s amazing his top teeth don’t cut his bottom lip.

Maybe they do.

He’s tasting iron.

“Thought so. Imagine if, when you’re home with the quiet of that Air BnB room tonight, you asked it what that meant - what do you think it would say?”

That one hits like a Mike Tyson uppercut in his prime.

There’s no witty retort. Rob’s legs are, once again, cut out from under him with a subtle one liner from this well-to-do.

I bet he’s great at golf. I always wanted to be good at golf.

Rob watches the father and son duo from the fountain fading away.

The kid looks like he feels… secure.

How his arms squeeze the top of his dad’s head as they bounce side to side scream that he knows he can tell his dad anything - and he doesn’t have to worry about getting a slap in the mouth because of it.

That little boy could tell his daddy about whatever dumb fantasy world he believes in.

But most important of all?

That little boy would be encouraged to grow that fantasy world. To enjoy it as long as humanly possible before the bills and the failures and the stress that grind a man who is just trying to get by in this life down to whatever lives on the other side of creativity can’t be dreamed away.

“I know.” Rob mutters.

“I know.” Shantz responds, gently putting a hand on Rob’s shoulder.

There is no pretending that he has something in his eye this time. And he’s fucking ok with it. This isn’t the performative, cry for help type of tears everyone’s come to expect out of Rob.

No, just a man realizing what it means to be a father in some shitty park in Missouri while his therapist pats him on the back.

Shantz lets him have his moment before ripping him back to reality.

“What kind of barbecue are you going to make, Rob?”

“W-what?”

“For Survivor. What kind of barbecue are you going to make?”

“Alabama.”

“That’s not barbecue, Rob. It’s a condiment.”