Me Talk Pretty One Day (13 page)

Patrick would throw back his head and let out his hearty communist laugh, an extended bray that suggested I was young and
could not yet tell the difference between good money and bad.

“We’ll do a big job tomorrow,” he’d say. “Relax, brother. How much money do you need?”

“Enough for a town house,” I’d say.

“You don’t want a town house.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Well, then, you’re definitely in the wrong business.”

He was right about that. Carrying boxes up and down stairs wasn’t going to earn me a million dollars. Still, the extra money
in my pocket allowed me to walk down the street not caring that other people had more than I did. I’d go to a movie or buy
a dime bag of pot from Richie and not feel burdened by envy. I just had to understand that for Patrick, moving a certain kind
of person was the equivalent of me calling a pigeon Cheeky — it simply wasn’t worth the money to him. Maybe he felt those
men looking at his teeth and thinking him a loser. In their great, tenacious drive to succeed, perhaps Patrick saw the futility
of his own struggle. Detailed questions about his decisions only led to the quoting of Marx and Lenin, so I soon learned to
stop asking.

The best of times were snappy autumn afternoons when we’d finished moving a two-bedroom customer from Manhattan to some faraway
neighborhood in Brooklyn or Queens. The side doors would be open as we crowded in the front seat, Patrick listening to a taped
translation of Chairman Mao boasting about “the great leap forward.” Traffic would be heavy on the bridge due to an accident,
and because we were paid for travel time, we’d hope that the pileup involved at least one piece of heavy machinery. When the
tape became too monotonous, I’d ask Richie about his days at the reformatory and pleasantly drowse as he spoke of twelve-year-old
car thieves and boys who had killed their brothers over an ice-cream sandwich. Patrick would get involved, saying that violent
crime was a natural consequence of the capitalist system, and then, eventually, the New York skyline would appear on the horizon
and we’d all stop talking. If you happen to live there, it’s always refreshing to view Manhattan from afar. Up close the city
constitutes an oppressive series of staircases, but from a distance it inspires fantasies of wealth and power so profound
that even our communists are temporarily rendered speechless.

I
T IS HIS BIRTHDAY
, and Hugh and I are seated in a New York restaurant, awaiting the arrival of our fifteen-word entrées. He looks very nice,
dressed in the suit and sweater that have always belonged to him. As for me, I own only my shoes, pants, shirt, and tie. My
jacket belongs to the restaurant and was offered as a loan by the maître d’, who apparently thought I would feel more comfortable
dressed to lead a high-school marching band.

I’m worrying the thick gold braids decorating my sleeves when the waiter presents us with what he calls “a little something
to amuse the palette.” Roughly the size and color of a Band-Aid, the amusement floats on a shallow, muddy puddle of sauce
and is topped with a sprig of greenery.

“And this would be… what, exactly?” Hugh asks.

“This,” the waiter announces, “is our raw Atlantic swordfish served in a dark chocolate gravy and garnished with fresh mint.”

“Not again,” I say. “Can’t you guys come up with something a little less conventional?”

“Love your jacket,” the waiter whispers.

As a rule, I’m no great fan of eating out in New York restaurants. It’s hard to love a place that’s outlawed smoking but finds
it perfectly acceptable to serve raw fish in a bath of chocolate. There are no normal restaurants left, at least in our neighborhood.
The diners have all been taken over by precious little bistros boasting a menu of indigenous American cuisine. They call these
meals “traditional,” yet they’re rarely the American dishes I remember. The patty melt has been pushed aside in favor of the
herb-encrusted medallions of baby artichoke hearts, which never leave me thinking, Oh, right, those! I wonder if they’re as
good as the ones my mom used to make.

Part of the problem is that we live in the wrong part of town. SoHo is not a macaroni salad kind of place. This is where the
world’s brightest young talents come to braise carmelized racks of corn-fed songbirds or offer up their famous knuckle of
flash-seared crappie served with a collar of chided ginger and cornered by a tribe of kiln-roasted Chilean toadstools, teased
with a warm spray of clarified musk oil. Even when they promise something simple, they’ve got to tart it up — the meatloaf
has been poached in seawater, or there are figs in the tuna salad. If cooking is an art, I think we’re in our Dada phase.

I’ve never thought of myself as a particularly finicky eater, but it’s hard to be a good sport when each dish seems to include
no fewer than a dozen ingredients, one of which I’m bound to dislike. I’d order the skirt steak with a medley of suffocated
peaches, but I’m put off by the aspirin sauce. The sea scallops look good until I’m told they’re served in a broth of malt
liquor and mummified litchi nuts. What I really want is a cigarette, and I’m always searching the menu in the hope that some
courageous young chef has finally recognized tobacco as a vegetable. Bake it, steam it, grill it, or stuff it into littleneck
clams, I just need something familiar that I can hold on to.

When the waiter brings our entrées, I have no idea which plate might be mine. In yesterday’s restaurants it was possible both
to visualize and to recognize your meal. There were always subtle differences, but for the most part, a lamb chop tended to
maintain its basic shape. That is to say that it looked choplike. It had a handle made of bone and a teardrop of meat hugged
by a thin rind of fat. Apparently, though, that was too predictable. Order the modern lamb chop, and it’s likely to look no
different than your companion’s order of shackled pompano. The current food is always arranged into a senseless, vertical
tower. No longer content to recline, it now reaches for the sky, much like the high-rise buildings lining our city streets.
It’s as if the plates were valuable parcels of land and the chef had purchased one small lot and unlimited air rights. Hugh’s
saffron linguini resembles a miniature turban, topped with architectural spires of shrimp. It stands there in the center while
the rest of the vast, empty plate looks though it’s been leased out as a possible parking lot. I had ordered the steak, which,
bowing to the same minimalist fashion, is served without the bone, the thin slices of beef stacked to resemble a funeral pyre.
The potatoes I’d been expecting have apparently either been clarified to an essence or were used to stoke the grill.

“Maybe,” Hugh says, “they’re inside your tower of meat.”

This is what we have been reduced to. Hugh blows the yucca pollen off his blackened shrimp while I push back the sleeves of
my borrowed sport coat and search the meat tower for my promised potatoes.

“There they are, right there.” Hugh uses his fork to point out what could easily be mistaken for five cavity-riddled molars.
The dark spots must be my vegetable.

Because I am both a glutton and a masochist, my standard complaint, “That was so bad,” is always followed by “And there was
so little of it!”

Our plates are cleared, and we are presented with dessert menus. I learn that spiced ham is no longer considered just a luncheon
meat and that even back issues of Smithsonian can be turned into sorbets.

“I just couldn’t,” I say to the waiter when he recommends the white chocolate and wild loganberry couscous.

“If we’re counting calories, I could have the chef serve it without the crème fraîche.”

“No,” I say. “Really, I just couldn’t.”

We ask for the check, explaining that we have a movie to catch. It’s only a ten-minute walk to the theater, but I’m antsy
because I’d like to get something to eat before the show. They’ll have loads of food at the concession stand, but I don’t
believe in mixing meat with my movies. Luckily there’s a hot dog cart not too far out of our way.

Friends always say, “How can you eat those? I read in the paper that they’re made from hog’s lips.”

“And…?”

“And hearts and eyelids.”

That, to my mind, is only three ingredients and constitutes a refreshing change of pace. I order mine with nothing but mustard,
and am thrilled to watch the vendor present my hot dog in a horizontal position. So simple and timeless that I can recognize
it, immediately, as food.

M
Y CHILDHOOD FRIEND ALISHA LIVES
in North Carolina but used to visit me in New York at least twice a year. She was always an easy, undemanding houseguest,
and it was a pleasure having her as she was happy following me around on errands or just lying on my sofa reading a magazine.
“Just pretend I’m not here,” she’d say — and I sometimes did. Quiet and willing to do whatever anyone else wanted, she was
often favorably compared to a shadow.

A week before one of her regular December visits, Alisha called to say that she’d be bringing along a guest, someone named
Bonnie. The woman worked at a sandwich shop and had never traveled more than fifty miles from her home in Greensboro. Alisha
hadn’t known her long but said that she seemed like a very sweet person. That’s one of Alisha’s most well-worn adjectives,
sweet, and she uses it to describe just about everyone. Were you to kick her in the stomach, the most you could expect would
be a demotion to “semisweet.” I’ve never known anyone so willing to withhold judgment and overlook what often strike me as
major personality defects. Like all of my friends, she’s a lousy judge of character.

The two women arrived in New York on a Friday afternoon, and upon greeting them, I noticed an uncommon expression on Alisha’s
face. It was the look of someone who’s discovered too late that she’s either set her house on fire or committed herself to
traveling with the wrong person. “Run for your life,” she whispered.

Bonnie was a dour, spindly woman whose thick girlish braids fell like leashes over the innocent puppies pictured on her sweatshirt.
She had a pronounced Greensboro accent and had landed at Kennedy convinced that, given half a chance, the people of New York
would steal the fillings right out of her mouth — and she was not about to let that happen.

“The cabdriver said, ‘It sounds to me like you two ladies are from out of town,’ and I knew right then that he was planning
to rip us off.”

Alisha placed her head in her hands, massaging what had become a visible headache.

“I knew exactly what he was up to. I know the rules, I’m not stupid, so I wrote down his name and license number and said
I’d report him to the police if he tried any funny business. I didn’t come all this way to be robbed blind, and I told him
that, didn’t I, Alisha?”

She showed me the taxi receipt, and I assured her that this was indeed the correct price. It was a standard thirty-dollar
fare from Kennedy Airport to any destination in Manhattan.

She stuffed the receipt back into her wallet. “Well, I hope he wasn’t expecting a tip, because he didn’t get a dime out of
me.”

“You didn’t tip him?”

“Hell no!” Bonnie said. “I don’t know about you, but I work hard for my money. It’s mine and I’m not tipping anybody unless
they give me the kind of service I expect.”

“Fine,” I said. “But what kind of service did you expect if you’ve never ridden in a cab before?”

“I expect to be treated like everybody else is what I expect. I expect to be treated like an American.”

That was the root of the problem right there. Visiting Americans will find more warmth in Tehran than they will in New York,
a city founded on the principle of Us versus Them. I don’t speak Latin but have always assumed that the city motto translates
to either Go Home or We Don’t Like You, Either. Like me, most of the people I knew had moved to New York with the express
purpose of escaping Americans such as Bonnie. Fear had worked in our favor until a new mayor began promoting the city as a
family theme park. His campaign had worked, and now the Bonnies were arriving in droves, demanding the same hospitality they’d
received last month in Orlando.

I’ve had visitors from all over, but Alisha’s friend was the first to arrive with an itinerary, a thick bundle of brochures
and schedules she kept in a nylon pouch strapped around her waist. Before leaving North Carolina, she’d spoken to a travel
agent who’d provided her with a list of destinations anyone in her right mind would know to avoid, especially around the holidays,
when the crowds multiply to Chinese proportions.

“Well,” I said, “we’ll see what we can do. I’m sure Alisha has places she’d like to go, too, so maybe we can just take turns.”

The expression on her face suggested that give-and-take was a new and unpleasant concept to Bonnie of Greensboro. Her jaw
tightened, and she turned back to her brochures, muttering, “I came to New York to see New York and isn’t nobody going to
stop me.”

Our troubles began the following morning when I disregarded the itinerary and took the two women to the Chelsea flea market.
Alisha wanted to look for records and autographs. Bonnie wasn’t much of a shopper, but after a pronounced bout of whining,
she decided she wouldn’t mind adding to her lifelong angel collection. Angels, she said, were God’s way of saying howdy.

The flea market was good for records and autographs, but none of the angels mustered an appropriate howdy. “Not at these prices.
I asked some lady how much she wanted for a little glass angel playing a trumpet, and when she said it cost forty-five dollars,
I told her to go straight to you know where. I said there’s no way I’m paying that much when back home I can get ten angels
for half that price. ‘And,’ I said, ‘they’d be a lot more spiritual than the sorry-looking New York angels y’all have here.’
That’s exactly what I told her.”

She pronounced the flea market a complete waste of time, adding that she was cold and hungry and ready to leave. It was decided
that even though $1.50 was a lot to charge for a ten-minute ride, we would take the subway uptown and get something to eat.
Things went smoothly until the transit clerk accidentally shorted her a nickle and Bonnie stuck her mouth into the token window,
shouting, “Excuse me, but for your information, I do not appreciate being taken for a fool. I may be from Greensboro, North
Carolina, but I can count just as well as anyone else. Now, are you going to give me my five cents, or should I talk to your
supervisor?”