Red

Heckert, for Esquire: Steak when you were four years old, cut up into strips on a paper plate in the kitchen of your parents’ first house, steak bound by tribunals of carrots and peas. Steak when you were a little older, at Golden Corral and Ryan’s, meat gray and slick as the back of an eel. Steak pooled in ketchup, mustard, gravy. Steak buffet at the behest of your friends’ parents, who gossiped and coughed in the smoking section. Big, flat, alien steak under the aegis of a high school lunchroom. Steak served in a restaurant in Austin, Texas, where women swung from a trapeze in a massive dining arena with waiters who wore tuxedos, steam trailing them from the tin tops of plate covers, $35 steak. A steak sermon from your steak-ordained uncle: Here is how to cut it. Here is why you should never put anything on it (leveling a fork at your cousin-in-law, who was putting spicy mustard on and ruining an otherwise perfect steak).