The Steak Knife Incident

There were no steak knives. It’s one of those things you don’t notice until you notice. I glanced over at the dish rack. No steak knives there either.

I searched my memory. No recent parties, obviously. No steak-knife donation drives. There was clearly a place for steak knives: Four little slots at the bottom of the knife holder with no steak knives in them.

Most people problems are caused by other people doing unexpected things in unexpected places. Living alone means expecting close to no people problems, but it also means the remaining potential problems are very bad problems. So, naturally, upon discovering no steak knives where there should be steak knives, I started losing my mind.

I glanced at the lock on my back door. I call it my back door, even though half my friends call it the front door, because it’s farther from the building door than the other door that everybody gives me a condescending glance for using at all because apparently everybody except me is fucking crazy and thinks any of this matters. I turned to view my back back door. I should clarify: There’s a door to the backyard which is even farther from the building entrance than the back door in front of which the USPS person insists on leaving my packages. Whatever, it’s not a door through which ingress is possible from the public space so it’s the garden door but I don’t want to call it that because that’s not a thing most people have in the city and I’m the common folk like everyone else.

Both doors were locked. There was still the front door, two rooms away. There were two closet doors in the middle room. There were two sets of cupboards. One bathroom. My lines of sight were blocked on all counts. There were four minutes left before my pasta was done. My situational awareness had identified a jar full of knives that don’t fit in the knife holder near the sink by the back back door. It had a cheap knife from Target and a Japanese knife that hadn’t been sharp in six years but was so sharp when I bought it you could close your eyes, toss a tomato in the air, and not know when to move your foot to avoid two tomato halves crashing down on it. I got it from a store somewhere in the West Village that I can’t find anymore so it either closed or it was a paradimensional potrusion existing for less than an hour for the purpose of delivering humanity a knife to kill an evil god I didn’t find in time. Whatever, that was Thursday Peter’s problem.

Cats! No, the cats didn’t take the steak knives. That was a ridiculous thought. But where were the cats? Didn’t matter. I grabbed the Target knife, unsheathed it, gripped the handle, and laid the blade across the back of my forearm.

The bathroom was first, of course: It had the most room for a human to hide in, and the most action movie pedigree of humans hiding in places. I pulled the door open, checked left, checked right, checked the ceiling, because so many people in movies die because they couldn’t bother to look up for half a second.

Nothing.

Since I was already stalking my apartment armed with a chef’s knife, I decided to take the training wheels off my paranoia. You should always clear the room before you move on anyway, so I went for the cupboards. Of course there’s no such thing as elves or gremlins or glowing gateways full of tentacles unless anybody who’s seen any of them never got to tell their tale so you should be completely sure there are no elves or gremlins or glowing gateways full of tentacles in the small spaces behind cupboard doors.

Clear. Next, under the bed. Back to worrying about humans, maybe. Tactically competent humans don’t usually hole up in low spaces with minimal maneuverability and only one exit. But it could be a tactically incompetent home invader who ninjaed their way into my apartment and into the least defensible position. Maybe they had a shotgun. So maybe suddenly plunging my face under the bed with a chef’s knife was the best way to disprove that hypothesis.

As this process continued, I appreciated more and more the genius of horror writers. It’s not that the kids don’t know they’re in a horror movie. In their terror, the teens are throwing themselves at the darkness to remind themselves that the horror isn’t real.

Until it is. But it’s cool; I had a knife. I scanned the apartment for my cats again, to make sure they weren’t anywhere that might get them knifed, and made for the closets.

This was the worst of it. As lucky as I am to have two closets, they’re shallow, small-doored affairs with two feet of space extending into darkness on either side. There’s no way to get a full view in one glance: You have to expose the back of your head to one demon-filled alcove to check the other, and if there’s one thing I know, everybody checks the wrong side first, then turns their head to see the killer bringing the blade down.

Yank open closet 1: Look left, look right, up, down, clear. Secure door. Yank open closet 2: Left, right, up, down, clear. Secure door.

There are two things to note here. First, these closets were both filled to capacity. The only things I could logically have been looking for in either of them was a raccoon or Eugene Tooms. Second, I was not high on cocaine.

Thinking of Tooms sent my brain into a tangent that ended up fixating on knife fights. Could I win one? I doubt it. The first knife fight I remember is the one from Under Siege between Steven Seagal and Tommy Lee Jones, and if you watch it now like I just did, you’ll notice all the late-life Seagal crazy is already apparent in 1992, and the knife fight is so ridiculous that if you google “steven seagal under siege knife fight” the first hit is a video of a knife expert breaking down how ridiculous it is. It also has that problem that the hero totally owns the villain from the outset, so you kind of feel embarrassed for Jones and it breaks all the tension. It still doesn’t bother me as much as the fight between Jet Li and Dolph Lundgren in The Expendables that some asshat decided to script with The Dolph somehow winning against Jet Fucking Li.

I could probably win if I was bringing a knife to a fistfight. But whoever this person might have been, they already had a steak knife. For that matter, maybe it was actually a gun fight with a knife collector? Most of my knife-collecting friends have a gun or two handy; they tend to be general weapon enthusiasts.

I was stalling. I had to do the front room. There’s no place to hide there, so this was a quick visual sweep and a glance at the front door to be sure it’s locked, assume there’s no such thing as Eugene Tooms and tentacles, and done, even though tentacles are definitely real things.

As I stood alone in my living room brandishing a seven-inch knife, I began to feel like I’d missed something important.

Ah. Yes. I didn’t own any steak knives.

The one piece of technology I still use that hasn't changed since I was born.