Monday will mark two years since one of my best friends, Parker Zane Allen, passed away. He died of lung cancer. He was only 26. Parker was a tremendous prose writer, and we met as peers when I was working on my undergraduate degree in creative writing. His last work, titled Dating Tips From the Gangland Massacre of the Heart, is a brilliant and beautiful collection of short pieces that together constitute a sort of history of one man’s adventures in love and relationship, but mediated by the objects around which those adventures took place. We do love, after all, in rooms, and parks, and cars, and hallways. And we do it with cassette tapes, and rope, and we do it with food.

Parker was also an amazing cook. When I started becoming interested in food and cooking, he was one of the only friends I had to talk with about it. He had worked in bakeries and restaurants since he was a teenager, and knew a lot about baking, and a lot about cooking. He taught me the five sauces!

I really think of Parker every day, and miss him terribly. Thinking of him obviously around this time of year.

Food makes rare appearances in Dating Tips, but below is one I think finds an appropriate place on the food blog. Until a publisher can be found for this really terrific work, this book exists as a little gift from one friend to another.

RICE

White, little, steam


Hot oil on the hand. She's cooking and you're cutting vegetables right next to her. You curse and drop the knife onto the board and there's a piece of zucchini stuck to the blade and the noise is just like a door shutting hard and the sliver of zucchini is so thin you can see the kitchen light shine on the metal so near underneath.

You say fuck a few times and it's punctuated by the wet sound of your sucking on the olive oil burning your skin.

Aw hell, she says and puts her hand on you, and she's still holding the spatula. The garlic hisses in the pan. You think of your skin making the same noise. You think of how awkward her hand feels with the lump of plastic between her and you, and you tell her to get that fucking shit away from me, you're getting more oil on me, even though she isn't, even though if she did it wouldn't really be hot, it would just be oil and that's really not a bother. Even if it got on your clothes. You don't really care about things like that anyway.
She made you a drink with vodka to make dinner with and your ice has melted down to little nuggets that all fit at the top of your glass. It's really hot in here. There's mist all over the windows, it's like car sex windows. It's like winter-breath. You go to the window and your drink makes noises, the sound only cheap glasses make, the kind where the glass would ring if it weren't so cramped. You still got your hand in your mouth. You trade it for a cigarette and you open the window. It makes a noise like a heavy drawer, like there's something really big out there.

It's just a spot on your hand, it's malformed, kind of like one of the ice cubes in your drink, kind of like an island country. But it's little and red and will be gone before you know it. You take a sip from your drink and it's hard and sweet all at once, but the alcohol feels nice, it feels like you swallowed a hum. You blow out a breath of smoke and you hear her chopping in the kitchen. This would be a good time to remember that you forgot to turn on the rice.