S1E08: Built with Smoke and Something Like Love

Porchlandia Season One, Episode Eight: Built with Smoke and Something Like Love

Time moves differently when you're building something.

Not faster. Not slower. Just — sideways. Untethered from the ordinary markings of a day. You stop measuring in hours and start measuring in what got done, what didn't, what aches, what surprised you. Three months passed this way beneath the porch. Later, none of them would be able to say exactly where those months went. Only what they left behind.

A restaurant.

Or something that would become one.

It started with the dirt.

They dug for a week before they laid a single thing, clearing the floor to proper depth, Brent and Senty trading shovels in shifts while Glorp supervised from a folding chair he had produced from somewhere.

"You're digging against the grain," Glorp offered, on the second morning.

"Dirt doesn't have grain," Brent said.

"Everything has grain, Brent. The universe is made of grain."

Senty didn't look up. "Cousin, are you going to help? Or just sit there pontificating?"

"I am helping. I am providing perspective."

On the third day, Glorp put the chair away and picked up a shovel himself, and he was — both Brent and Senty noted privately, neither said aloud — extraordinarily strong. The dirt moved differently when Glorp was moving it. As if it had decided to cooperate.

There were no blueprints. Just faith. And a sketch Brent drew on a napkin that accidentally turned into a blueprint anyway.

Senty worked like prayer. Up before the light, down into the cellar with his notebook already open, standing in the space and reading it the way he'd read it the first night — not for what it was, but for what it intended to be. He measured twice. Then three times. He foraged nearby farms and forgotten groves for heirloom herbs and orchard-plucked ingredients. He woke at four in the morning to perfect the rib rub. He built his own smoker from a fallen satellite dish he'd found behind a neighbor's fence, spoken for and forgotten, and spent two weeks bending and sealing and lining it with a patience that bordered on meditation.

The menu began to take shape in the notebook's margins. Smoked peach-glazed duck. Collard greens that whisper your grandmother's name. And a brisket so tender it once made a health inspector weep and apologize.

Brent handled the wiring like a man who'd read enough manuals to know what not to do. He painted walls while humming old jazz — Coltrane mostly, sometimes something without a name that lived in his hands rather than his memory. He installed the bar-top from a long-since shuttered Shreveport jazz club along the north wall, all three of them lifting it into place, the thing heavy in the way objects become heavy when they've absorbed years of music and spilled drinks and conversations that mattered.

The Technics PR305 went on a Tuesday in the second week. Brent didn't make an announcement. He loaded it into his car before anyone was awake, drove to a music shop on the edge of town, and came back two hours later with four hundred dollars in cash and an espresso machine that had seen better decades but still had good bones. He spent three evenings polishing it. Not because it needed to be beautiful. Because the work required it.

Senty saw the space where the keyboard had been and didn't speak for a long moment.

"Was that the one you practiced on?"

"Yeah."

"Not the one you perform on."

"No. That one's not for sale."

Senty nodded. Put a paw briefly on Brent's shoulder. Two pats. Went back downstairs.

That night, during an hour he would otherwise have been at the piano, Brent stood at the porch railing in the dark, fingers moving against the wood without making sound, running through something that lived in his hands the way certain things live in the body when the mind can't hold them. He hummed. An old standard. The music was still there. It had just moved somewhere else for a while. Into the walls, maybe. Into the work.

Glorp was both chaos and miracle.

One day he was gone for forty-eight hours and returned through the crawlspace with a crate labeled Mithril Gin, Handle with Reverence.

"Don't ask," he said, setting it down.

"I wasn't going to," Senty said.

"Good. Because the answer has three parts and one of them is still legally sensitive."

Another afternoon he burst into the kitchen shouting "THE TAHINI HAS LANDED," followed by four raccoons in formal jackets who looked, Brent thought, not entirely uncomfortable in them. They carried a sizeable container of the most delicious smoked tahini sauce.

"Glorp."

"They're helping."

"But they're raccoons."

"They're colleagues. Don't be reductive."

He traded pocket lint and a poem for saffron. He acquired a smoked elderberry cordial through what he described only as an old arrangement.

"Last unbitter orange in the world," he announced one evening, holding it up like a relic. "Gone after this one. The tree is sentient now and has taken a vow of privacy."

"Glorp."

"I'm telling you what I was told."

No one examined the claim too closely because the orange was extraordinary.

His approach to construction followed similar principles. He had opinions about everything and attachment to almost nothing.

"The kitchen should face east."

"It's facing north," Senty said.

"I know. That's the problem. East is for beginnings. North is for Canadians."

"Glorp."

"I'm saying what I'm saying."

He suggested they skip the ventilation system entirely — "the breeze knows what it's doing, cousin" — a suggestion Senty declined without comment. And he arrived one morning having traded something — he would not say what — for a bundle of wood he claimed came from a tree struck by lightning on the Isle of Skye.

"Cosmically seasoned," Glorp said, laying it across the sawhorses.

"I already have the oak."

"But does the oak have provenance?"

"The oak has load-bearing capacity, which is what shelving requires."

"Shelving requires character, cousin."

They used both. The oak on the upper shelves. The lightning wood on the lower ones, where the cellar lamps would catch it in the evening and make it look like something that had survived something.

The Senty-and-Glorp friction arrived in the fifth week and stayed, on and off, like weather.

Senty wanted precision. Glorp wanted vibes. Brent mediated with cornbread. What he discovered was that Glorp would stop almost any argument to assess cornbread, which created a natural recess in which Senty's patience — the deep, steady kind — could reassert itself. It worked every time. Glorp never noticed. Senty did. Once, meeting Brent's eyes across the cellar over Glorp's head as Glorp reached for a third piece, there was something in the Bear's expression that was equal parts fondness and exhaustion and gratitude, and it was one of the funniest things Brent had ever seen on anyone's face.

Somewhere in the sixth week, on a Thursday afternoon, Senty was outside working the smoker and Brent was alone in the cellar with Glorp, running wire along the east wall while Glorp held the flashlight.

"You know," Glorp said, after a while, "I wasn't sure about you."

"When?"

"First week. Maybe two. You seemed very—" he searched — "residential."

"Residential."

"Committed to the horizontal. Very pleasant. Very stationary."

"That's fair," Brent said.

"Senty adores you obviously. Which told me something. But Senty also adores a very old teapot he found in a market in Galveston, so I wasn't ready to draw conclusions."

Brent laughed despite himself. "What changed your mind?"

Glorp pointed the flashlight at the far wall — where, in the second week, frustrated with a pipe fitting that had refused to cooperate through three days of reasonable effort, Brent had addressed it in a calm and even voice using language so inventive, so architecturally complex, so committed to its own internal logic, that Glorp had stopped what he was doing across the cellar and simply stared.

"That," Glorp said, with the reverence of a connoisseur. "That was not residential."

Brent looked at the pipe fitting.

"It had it coming," he said.

"It absolutely did." Glorp turned the flashlight back to the wire. "You have range, Brent. I did not initially suspect this."

Something settled. Some question Brent hadn't known was being asked had been answered.

"For what it's worth," Brent said, "I wasn't sure about you either."

"And now?"

Brent thought about the raccoons in formal jackets. The lightning wood. The old arrangement. The way Glorp had named the restaurant with a pickle in his hand like truth was just something he occasionally bumped into while rummaging through his coat.

"Now? Well, I think you're just about the strangest thing that's ever been on this property," Brent said, "and that includes the bear who showed up and asked if he could sit."

Glorp beamed. "Wow. High praise. I'm honored."

Connecting the neon sign to power was a near disaster. They nearly set the hedges on fire twice.

The first time was Glorp's fault and everyone knew it.

The second time was also Glorp's fault but Brent had contributed a decision that, in retrospect, he acknowledged had been suboptimal.

"In my defense," Glorp said, to Senty, as the smoke cleared, "the idea was inspired."

"The hedges are on fire."

"The execution was poor. The idea was sound."

"Glorp."

"Brent agrees with me."

Brent, who had been keeping his head down and his shovel moving dirt onto the flames, did not confirm or deny. Somehow this made Senty more exasperated than if they'd both simply admitted fault, because now he had to contend with them as a unit.

He made tea. He drank it. He went back to work.

The hedges recovered.

By month three, the cellar glowed. Not with electricity, though they finally got the wiring right. It glowed with intention. With scraped knuckles and soft jazz. With a thousand little acts of unspoken devotion.

The sign was the last thing. A piece of reclaimed wood, sanded and stained, letters burned by hand. Senty hung it above the cellar stairs on a Sunday morning while the others were sleeping.

Smoke and Soul.

They stood together in the finished cellar on a Sunday evening, sawdust still in their fur and hair. Brent had paint on his jeans. Glorp was holding a ladle like a scepter. Senty's apron was stained with something he refused to name but smelled suspiciously divine.

"This," Brent said, looking around, "shouldn't be possible."

Senty placed a paw on his shoulder. "But it is."

Glorp sniffed. "I give it six weeks before we're shut down by the Department of Mythic Cuisine."

They laughed. Then fell quiet.

The quiet was different from the kind the cellar used to hold. Fuller. Inhabited.

Senty was standing in the center of the room, and his eyes had gone somewhere else. Not far — just forward. He wasn't looking at the walls or the bar-top or the sign above the stairs. He was looking at something that wasn't there yet. The tables. The candles. The jazz curling through the rafters. The guests who would come by longing rather than by map.

Brent watched him see it. Crossed the room quietly. Put his hand on the Bear's shoulder.

"Feels like you're already there," he said. "Opening night."

Senty came back slowly.

"I can see every table," he said. "I can see who's sitting at them."

Brent didn't ask who. Some things you don't pull toward you. You just make room for them.

From across the room, Glorp raised the ladle — to no one and everyone — with the confidence of a bear who has been a great many places and has decided, finally, that this is the one worth staying for.

The cellar held them.

Above, the porch waited.

And somewhere between the smoke still seasoning the walls and the vision already living in the Bear's eyes, Smoke and Soul took its first breath.

Built with smoke.

And something like love — the kind that stains your apron and doesn't wash out.