Days of beef and thunder; the night of the iguana

Like most good and decent Americans, my best memories involve beef in some fashion. It may sound like hyperbole, but it is quite true.
In 1988, I was a wee slip of a lad celebrating my second Veishea as a student at Iowa State. This was back when ISU students still went to Veishea. It was also the infamous year of the so-called “first” Veishea riot. There had been a previous “riot” during the ‘50s — which probably started as a protest over the House Un-American Activities Committee not going far enough to root out splitters and blackball them — but that one was typically not referenced alongside the ’88 riot because of the relatively lax moral climate of the Reagan-Bush years.
The drinking age had been changed from 19 to 21 just the year before, so I spent my day at the Battle of the Bands, eating gyros and hot dogs while sipping on lemonade. The dogs were 100 percent beef and the gyros were 80 percent beef and 20 percent lamb, but I think we all know it was the beef part that tasted better. As far as I could tell, the lemonade wasn’t more than 1 percent beef if that. It’s always amazed me how just a little mustard on a beef frank is enough to make both me and Patty Duke lose control. You just don’t get that effect with a turkey dog.
A great many innocent bystanders found themselves trapped on Welch Avenue that night at 2 a.m. The funny thing about street festivals and riots is that there isn’t a great deal of notice regarding the transition. Both look like a bunch of people standing around on the street having a good time and without advocating the whole riot scene, the latter does tend to look just like a more successful version of the former until the police, fire department, state troopers, CNN and Johnny Orr show up. At that point, it’s too late to leave unless you like mace on your beef frank.
Well, I did manage to slip quietly away eventually without damaging or flipping anything. I went home like any other upstanding citizen around 3 a.m. and I can tell you this much: I have never been so grateful for the advent of the 24-hour supermarket in my life. My roommate, Pete, and I had a mad craving for steak that night. It was almost savage in its intensity. The thing I’ve noticed about beef is that the more of it you eat, the more of it you want to consume. Or maybe it was the hint of lawlessness in the air that night that hung alongside the scent of sweet beef juices wafting about the carnie concessions. Or maybe it was the flames that rose from the center of Welch Avenue that night put us in the mood for fire-grilled beef; who knows? The point is, we found ourselves figuratively ransacking the meat counter of the old Ames Sav-U-More (now defunct).
Pete had a special method for cooking steaks that to this day cannot be topped or repeated with any degree of safety. It was one of those recipes culled from the stupidity of youth. Pete always cooked steak in the oven on the top rack underneath the heating element set on broil. Many people do this, but the difference in Pete’s method was that he never put anything under the steak to catch the drippings. You see, Pete (at all of 20) believed it was the smoke created by the drippings that made his steak taste so good. Open a few windows, turn the fan on high and when the smoke alarm went off, you knew those charcoal steaks were done. Served with a side of crème fresh with horseradish, bleu cheese sauce or even a generous dollop of Heinz 57 and those Riot Steaks were a meal fit for a head of state.