“I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday, for a hamburger today.” Wimpy! That’s the first thing I thought of when I read that a local bar, actually THE BEST local bar — An Beal Bocht — was using “cheeseburger” as a prompt in a Moth-adjacent Wednesday night event.

The second thing I thought of was my Uncle Arthur. Artie! My dad’s brother in law and the bane of my father’s existence. Arthur was a gratuitously cruel, uncultured arriviste.
Arthur sold home appliances. He was a commissioned clerk in a Fairfield County strip mall store. He and his family lived in my grandfather’s big old Victorian house in Bridgeport.

The kid that was me marveled at how Dad, uncharacteristically, would hold his temper as Uncle Arthur bloviated. Artie berated his wife, Dad’s sister, sponged off his wife’s family, and trolled my father in issues related to World War II (they were both in the Army, European Theater, but my Dad saw combat and Arthur toiled in Graves Registration), politics and business. “So Mort!” he’d taunt, raising a glass of Wild Turkey, as my father’s blood pressure rose. “You make it? You make it yet? I made it! You?”

“Why don’t you punch him in the nose?” I’d ask my Dad as he drove our ten-year old Pontiac home from Connecticut to our Bronx dump, back when I was a little boy.

“Ahhh. Empty barrels make the most noise.” That’s all my Dad would say.

But, back to cheeseburgers! The Connecticut contingency invited us poor relations up for a BBQ once in awhile. One time, Uncle Arthur popped some pre-formed patties on his charcoal grill in his — or, rather, my grandfather’s — backyard. He split open a bag’s worth of Wonder Bread buns and unwrapped a package of Kraft Singles.

And then, he began to bloviate, oblivious to his culinary duties. And, as he talked smack, trying so hard to “engage” my father, he absently flipped the burgers.

One by one, our meal slipped through the grill to die a Viking death in the fiery ashes below. Uncle Arthur began to curse. It was somehow his wife’s fault. It was somehow Weber’s — the grill’s maker — fault. Then, the haymaker:

It was my father’s fault!!! Yes, he flipped the switch; my Dad distracted him and thus the protein perished. And as he screamed, the buns ignited in Wonder-ous fury and burned to black.

Everyone laughed at the sight of this obnoxious heathen, this…this…EMPTY BARREL of a man, flail about after cluelessly setting the burgers ablaze.

Everyone but my father. And I’ll tell you straight up: never in my life was Dad one to give advice. In fact, one time, my sixth-grade self asked him to help me solve a weighty life-strategy question and he said, simply: “I don’t give advice.”

But in not laughing at Uncle Arthur, I learned something. There’s a popular old Kenny Rogers song, “Coward of the County” and the payoff line is: “Sometimes you gotta fight when you’re a man.” But Dad held it in, because he knew the full extent of Arthur’s backstory. Hardscrabble upbringing on the Lower East Side. A brother who was, well, today we’d say he was “troubled.” Select your own descriptor. He took a razor sharp shears from his mother’s sewing basket and stabbed the kid that was Artie in the neck.

And it was downhill from there. So the amateur shrinks among us can think of defense mechanisms such as compensation and displacement. Whatever it was, Uncle Arthur had a lot of psychic scar tissue. Enough that even my Dad, the six-four dreadnaught with the hair-trigger temper, knew who and what he was dealing with.

Very damaged goods.

Inadvertently, my father gave me sage advice after all.

That’s my “cheeseburger” story, and I’m sticking to it.