Recipe For Disaster

When I was a young kid – knee high to a grasshopper, barely more than a glint in my father’s eye, etc. – I had a pretty good idea of exactly how my life was going to play itself out. It involved becoming a filmmaker, learning how to cook (I own a microwave, so…check), spending New Year’s Eve 1999 on a boat with my girlfriend (I have no idea why I thought that would be awesome but there you have it) and renting the exact apartment described in “Losing Joe’s Place”, which was one of my favorite young adult novels. I specify “young adult” since I experienced no small degree of self-satisfaction upon my graduation from the short stacks of the library’s “Wee Readers & Tiny Eyes” section to the comparatively soaring shelves of “Y.A.” – as it was known in all the right circles – and the untold secrets of its tweeny tomes.

One such secret was the exact layout of the perfect bachelor pad, described with all the passion of a wartime love letter in the pages of “Losing Joe’s Place.” Telling the story of two young kids who move into their older brother’s apartment over the course of one magical summer, the book described a spacious one-bedroom constructed entirely out of reflective black tile and furnished exclusively with black leather sofas, black leather love seats and, if memory serves, a tasseled rug made of – you guessed it – black leather. Essentially, the interior design equivalent of a black hole.

Needless to say, my tastes have shifted (in this area, at least) over the past few decades. Anyone who’s been inside the white walls in my apartment knows – and for the benefit of those of you who haven’t, refer to page 72 of this season’s Ikea catalogue – there’s nary a noir piece of furniture to be found. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t have a soft spot in my heart for the decorating suicide represented by Joe’s place, which might be the reason why I immediately felt at home here in my Montreal apartment. While it, too, lacks the design aesthetic of Scarface’s bathroom, it did possess a stove with a black glass surface – kind of a two foot square salute to what could have been.

Notice I say “did”. As in past tense.

Two nights ago, after firing up the stove for the very first time, that black glass stovetop – the last known photographic evidence of which can be seen at left – exploded with the sound of a shotgun blast and the fury of a thousand dying suns. And while I’m still not sure exactly what happened, I do know that I was lucky enough to be standing more than fifteen feet away from the stove, which is the exact distance that shards of glass managed to soar through the air. In other words, I managed to transform my stove into a blender – a deadly, zero-gravity blender.

So what’s to be learned from this? That cooking should be left to Iron Chefs who are, literally, made of iron? That it’s a pastime best left to extreme sports enthusiasts who need to pass the time until they perform the street luge on a swarm of live bees? That purchasing appliances manufactured in Kreplachistan might not among the best of ideas?

Probably none – or all – of the above. In the end, I’m taking it as a divine sign that my tastes in interior design have, irrevocably, advanced beyond those of a pre-pubescent boy. I guess the old saying is true – you really can’t go home again.

Especially if you live at Joe’s place.