Paula and I were at the PNC bank party, which was in the PNC building, a massive 30’s structure kin of the Empire State Building and the like.  PNC was a global bank, Swiss owned OPIC, which was the acronym for the bank everywhere else in the world.  We were on the roof being congratulated by somebody’s parents, who had bought us gifts.  They wore identical long green plastic raincoats, and I was secretly hoping that the gifts were not these.  The daughter was someone that I knew, but I don’t recognize now.  This part was somewhat like our wedding anniversary or something.  Also on the roof were three elevators, usually used for moving old cash to the incinerators, the bank did this in house, not letting the Treasury Department subcontract this out.  I had left large stacks of books in each elevator.  The most in the center one, which was the largest, like 4 times the size of a dumbwaiter, the two flanking elevators were half that size; the right had fewer books in it and the left one almost none.  Some party guests kept organizing the books for me into different categories, though I had done that myself earlier.  Many of the people had been down to the OPIC gift shop and were now running around with very large OPIC logo flags red with white lettering and a hollow oval in the logo amongst the letters.

The party then moved to more of a dinner phase, within a large Giant Eagle that was colored more like a Tops.  I mentioned to Paula that it was a shame that the Giant Eagle was colored like the PNC colors, and not like the OPIC colors, which were better.  Dinner was being served in the meat deli department.  The counters were low, and had little openings in big windows like bank teller windows.  You chose your meat and it was cooked for you.  Paula and I kept seeing this middle eastern guy and were trying to remember where we had seen him.  He was an actor, and had been in a bunch of action movies with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 80’s, but was still doing movies now, though non action ones.  This party seemed to be about him as well, though in his case it was for an award he had just won.

A guest at the party was having some difficulty with is cut of meat.  He looked like someone from my second high school but worked with Paula, and had ordered a dead man’s steak, but the cut was wrong.  The female butcher had offered to cut it properly for him, but he insisted, and we all watched:  You start with a t bone and trim the fat edges, then make a sharp p angle cut right around the bone, lopping a good bit of the steak off.  The guy did with this with a large cleaver, which was impressive.  He was also using a fillet knife, both of which I saw very clearly;   the cleaver had a small black handle and was knurled along the back of the tang, while the shape of the blade was rounded and balloon-like.  The fillet knife had an identical handle, but the blade was more like a boning knife and had deep serrations, running as groves across the surface of the blade.  Now that the meat was cut, it was now time for the final operation to make it a dead man’s steak.  A young man steps up who’s an expert in this.  The butcher makes lots of tiny slits in the meat, and I think that little bits of meat that were cut of are going to be stuffed into them, but that is a different kind of steak, apparently.  This guy has sharpened one of his fingernails into a tiny, elongated spoon;  he scrapes some of the skin cells and oil of his bald scalp and inserts it into each slit on the steak.  This is widely recognized a delicacy, and the group of us are hushed in anticipation.  He does this over and over for each slit, and I wonder how long his fingernail will last doing this.  Just as I wonder this, I hear a tiny crack, and his fingernail breaks, though not badly, if he’s careful, he can keep going.  I wake up.