Hamburger heaven

The Brownies of my youth, gone to greener pastures

He doesn’t have an office, only an answering machine. And he always wants to meet at Hamburger Heaven.
    —Holly Golightly, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”

Bill Bowen and his sidekick—a guy we always called and knew only as The Sidekick¹—walked into The Grapevine as if they owned the place. They entered through the back door, past the kitchen, like the regulars they were.

Both of them sported eyeglasses, and the brown slack, thin white button-down uniform of their other home away from home, Brownies Hamburgers. They sat down at Davo Kifer’s bar as if they owned that, too. I saw more of Bowen then than I did as a kid, growing skinny in part on his 2-ounce hamburgers. I never saw a guy have more fun.

We’d come for the jazz. The Frank Adams combo. Charlie Parker’s “Au Privave.” We were in the mood.

“Rolling Rock,” my buddy Jim said, but I’d been reading my first Hemingway and was looking to fry bigger fish. 

“Whiskey and soda,” I said.

“Scotch whiskey or Bourbon whiskey?” said Davo, his ponytail still on his head and not yet in the frame that would hang behind the bar. 

“Scotch,” I guessed, and correctly, as time would tell. It was a lesson learned.

1988. I was to learn a great many things that summer.

In our salad days, Brownies was our go-to place, it and Furr’s and Monterey House. You are what you eat. I was something of a mess.

My parents took us to Brownies before Golden Hurricane basketball games at the nearby Pavilion, where the great Steve Bracey held court. Willie Biles, Sammy High and Ken “Grasshopper” Smith shooting jumpers down at the rim from the baseline corner, hanging high enough off the floor I could have walked beneath him. The pep band playing horny renditions of “The Horse” and “Light My Fire.”

My wife says a realtor took us there during our search for a house over in Bryn Mawr, but I don’t recall that trip. She’d never been to Brownies, Mrs. Brown, and hasn’t been since. It’s where I took my dad to tell him we were moving to France for a year. The haze of the World Trade Center had yet to clear. While we were away, Brownies put “freedom fries” on the menu.

When America was more lean than mean, hamburgers were single patties the size of a coaster, buns painted with mustard and garnished with dill pickles and sliced onions. Now they’re double and triple meat-stuffed with bacon and barbecue and gobs of cheese and special sauces. And America is, well.

“Look at that hamburger!” said my kid, pointing to such a specimen glowing on a billboard out on 412 near Locust Grove, just over Snake Creek. You’d think he’d seen a UFO.

I eat a hamburger a year and try to keep it simple. I like how those burger-stand burgers will perfume a person’s clothes for hours. I’ve always liked the way the buns shine with the mist of grease, like Susan Dey’s chipmunk cheeks.

I ate a black-bean burger once without irony. There’s a gourmet Brownies in Utica Square where a sushi bar used to be.

I’m just taking stock.

Gary Lee Hahn waited tables at Brownies until he died of cancer in 2008. He was 57. He started at Brownies in 1964. Do that math. The lone blip on the radar: He opened Gary’s Grill in the Jenks RiverWalk in 2005 and closed it in 2006. He returned to Brownies, the prodigal nephew, coming home to open arms and onions-fried-in.

Sterlin Harjo eases the title character of his film “Mekko” back into the world (after 19 years in prison) with a friendly waitress and a generous slice of pie. I’m reminded of Jim Harrison’s character Brown Dog, who fell in love with a woman because she smelled like food. Harjo shot his scene at Brownies.

“It’s a type of place that bridges our grandparents’ generation with ours,” he said. “Asian fusion or hummus doesn’t do that.”

People come here to eat, not watch TV, their menu choices limited, unlike their Dish and cable. Going by the menu, you’d think it was 1972. The only thing simpler would be a soup line. Bread and meat are the foundations of a burger, Harjo said, “like a house built with wood and steel.”

In my father’s room are many houses: Bill’s, Claud’s, Hank’s, Ron’s, Ted’s, Arnold’s, Freddie’s, Moe’s, over the eons. Brownies could have been Bill’s but it must have already been taken. Bowen got his start at Troy’s on 11th, which was next door to Brownie’s Root Beer Stand, the owner of which sold Bowen his root beer machines and even his neon sign, the one of the kid running off with a burger and mug.

Everybody called Ken Brown, my dad, Brownie. Only one or two of my friends call me that. Disambiguation: A brownie is also, of course, a chocolate treat; a Kodak camera, the original point-and-shoot; a rank of Girl Scout, one ahead of Daisy in the chain; a small-caliber pistol; the model of Fender Stratocaster favored by Clapton during his Derek and the Dominos days; and a wee goblin of Scottish lore who’ll perform household tasks, typically at night, in return for something to eat. Progenitor of the “Will work for food” promise.

Sterlin Harjo’s dad’s nickname? Yup.

The counter was wide open, its stools upholstered in ketchup red, their footrests worn to bare steel in spots. Instead, I snuck into the first booth, beneath the Diane Ainsworth McDonald painting of the Brownies crew of old (pictured above). Eleven caricatures in the illustration, eleven characters. Bill and Darrell Bowen, each with a glass in hand; Cleo Peace, Brownies baker for 34 years, brandishing a pie. Both the Hahns, Gary and Rodney. Another fistful of folks I vaguely recall. Nearly all, if not all, gone. A kind of hamburger heaven.

“You know what you want,” asked a waitress, “or you need a little time?”

I ordered a frosty mug of root beer for the first time in years.

“Menu’s up there,” she said, pointing high above the counter. An old-fashioned hamburger is $2.55, a cheeseburger $3.25. Old-fashioned means mustard, onion, pickles. Add lettuce and tomato and you have Deluxe, $2.90 and $3.60, respectively.

In spite of that, I ordered the 4-ounce hamburger steak, hold the Texas toast, and the fries, freedom fries, a colossal mound of the once-fried, soggy variety. Freedom isn’t free: A side of them is $2.25. Slaw, salad, cottage cheese, each $1.75. The prices are frozen in time, unlike the one I read in the sports page lying on the counter: “Riley to make $3.1 million.”

The grill cook read the slip and spanked a patty of ground beef into a thin disc, heaved on a pile of chopped onions, smacked the patty facedown onto the grill, and smothered it with a bacon press. Amid this harsh discipline, my hamburger steak came out, as promised, a perfect medium. I ate it slowly—who knew when I’d be back?—and all but the greasiest of the fries, raking them through the Heinz ketchup that Brownies still keeps in glass bottles, the ones you look silly shaking back and forth. Anticipation.

Bill Bowen bought his hamburger meat up the street at Sipes, now a Dollar Tree. Drysdale’s, Mi Cocina, the Office Depot near ORU—all former Sipes grocery stores.

“Save room for a slice of pie?” my waitress asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. Chocolate, butterscotch, banana, coconut, lemon. Meringue like the lid on the Metrodome.

“I’ll let you sit and ponder it,” she said.

“This must be where pies go when they die,” said Agent Dale Cooper, “Twin Peaks.” First “Twin Peaks.” Six thousand nine hundred ninety-five views on YouTube, 18 seconds. Peggy Lipton in baby blue. I decided to settle for a piece of complimentary green apple Super Bubble.

“Was everything OK for you, honey?” said the woman ringing me up. Without thinking, I said it sure was.

“You have a blessed day, then,” she said, handing me my VISA.

I got in my car and turned the A/C to 11, backed up carefully in the undisputed Worst Parking Lot in Midtown, and drove out the rear entrance into a sea of asphalt on the edge of FloSo, between Empire Optical and a gutted old building with a sign in front: “Coming Soon.”

1) Ed Mondor. “He and Bill said, ‘You should put our names on the back of our chairs,’” said Joe Kifer, brother of Davo and son of Grapevine owner Nelson Kifer. “Instead, I bought them each hand-blown glasses at Margo’s in Utica Square. It’s funny: The same people who hung out in Utica Square would loosen their ties when they came to Brookside.”

For more from Mark, read his farewell to Spaghetti Warehouse.