There’s a restaurant on Martha’s Vineyard called the Black Dog, which you may have heard of. They sell a lot of T-shirts with a black Labrador Retriever on them. The official name of the restaurant is The Black Dog Tavern, even though it’s in a dry town and their specialty meal is breakfast. Their breakfast is mean. It’s so good that my stepfather, who ran a barely-kept-afloat Marine Brokerage business across the street for years, used to go there every morning. He probably went there more to bullshit than to eat, but they charge summer prices year-round, so it’s forgiven to some degree. Anyhow, the point of the story is that they would make him garlic pancakes, which were most definitively not on the menu, and may not in fact be on any menu, anywhere, except at some garlic estate or something. He said he never got sick because he ate all that garlic, and that always made enough sense to me, given the little plant’s olfactory potency. You know something good is going on with it.

Let’s fast-forward whatever number of years it takes to get to a month ago, when I picked up my brother, who is studying in Spain, from Newark Airport. After three months in Zaragoza, he couldn’t have passively-aggressively expressed his distaste for America any clearer, and I was subjected to the social criticisms and down-the-nose looks typical of the newly-minted cultural elitist. When we got to my apartment, he insisted not on ordering pizza but on, get this, making paella. Get it, because it’s Spanish? Anyhow, it took him 12 minutes to pick a rice, because in my Astoria grocery store, I was told several times over, that none of the rice was good enough. This limitation, I was told, stopped him from making great paella, but it wasn’t his fault that we didn’t have the ingredients. He produced chicken and rice in green sauce. It was fine, but, naturally, “much better in Spain,” he noted, more as criticism of me, my neighborhood, and my culture than his cooking prowess. Because there was obviously nothing wrong with that.

Another Atlantic-transition error occurred the next morning when I found him fruitlessly rooting around my kitchen. He asked me where my garlic was. Not “the garlic,” my garlic. I said I didn’t have any, and he studied me to process what is, I guess, in Spain, a statement akin to one proudly identifying yourself as a child molester. I tried to de-ice the situation by reminding him that it was, like, eight in the morning, whereupon his glare melted from shock to disdain. “No, I have garlic every morning,” he said. “So I never get sick.” Turns out he had fallen ill during his first week IN SPAIN, WHERE HE LIVES, and took to this particular home remedy, and has since been right as rain.

Here’s the great part: my brother and stepfather can’t stand each other. Like, at all. Their relationship is brilliantly and unnecessarily potent. If my brother pointed at a car coming down the street and said, “Nice car,” my stepfather would respond, “That’s not a car.” I’m serious. My brother brought a bottle of wine for Christmas dinner from a vineyard owned by a Spanish friend’s family, and Phil said he doubted it was from Spain. It gets better. Phil still talks about the two years he lived in Memphis 30 years ago like he visited the moon, and acts as if this experience means he alone can translate the goings-on of the world outside of whatever room or public area in which he’s attempting to hold court. When my brother took exception to something he said—really his own damn fault for speaking up—Phil said he would understand once he started “traveling the world.” Amazingly, there was subsequent yelling!

I find these exchanges too good to be true; pointless family fights are the holiday’s raison d’etre (Hey, that was French!). But it’s even better that they both love garlic. They can never again claim to have “nothing in common.” It keeps them healthy!

Bryan Joiner likes to write about politics, sports, literature, philosophy, and television, occasionally all at the same time. He is a contributing editor for Last Exit Magazine and writes a blog called Intricately Independent. He has written about Shea Stadium in Issue 8, Martha’s Vineyard for Issue 5, and A-Rod for Issue 3.

Copyright Last Exit 2009