Torch Song Trilogy

Two things I learned about food last night:

1) Vanilla beans were at one point prized like diamonds, and those who knew the location of a bountiful harvest protected it through subterfuge and/or violence. The things are also still insanely expensive – the bean dangling from my roommate's blowtorch (she uses them in crème brulee) costs around 13 bucks.
2) The possibly Egyptian guy at my sandwich bodega is madly in love with me. I know this because when I asked him for two hardboiled eggs, he looked away dramatically and mumbled, “Of course my love.”

I've long suspected this. Sometimes he gazes at me intently while giving me a lingering handshake, oblivious to other customers when they approach the register. Sometimes he has this fluttering unwillingness to look me in the eyes. Also, it takes him 10 minutes to make my sandwich even when there's no one else in the store. At first I took this for cultural  unhurriedness – like maybe in Egypt slow sandwich making is akin to the leisurely consumption of tea – but in retrospect it might be part of a plan to keep me around longer. Which is fine, because I can catch up on US Magazine, and learn that British GQ has just named Jon Hamm its “International Man of the Year”.

Anyway, by itself, a gay man being interested in you is obviously no big deal – I'm generally flattered-but-not-interested (but-secretly-wishing-I-was-interested-because-it's-not-like-women-are-beating-down-my-door).  But it's tough to know how to handle

1) a gay man
2) from a foreign country
3) who makes your sandwiches
4) and speaks limited English
5) and might even be considered a little odd back home, gay or straight, though maybe the oddness is partly due to being gay in a place like Egypt...
6) who's actually infatuated with you

Ultimately, this is also no big deal. True, after he finished making last night's roast beef & mozz hero, he presented it to me lovingly and pronounced it “very firm”. But I think he was just proud of the sandwich, because when he handed over the hardboiled eggs, he made no sexual innuendos, and everyone knows how important a man's eggs are to his sexual satisfaction.

It's just that it's not a good idea to avoid addressing any lingering situation, and I don't know how to say flattered-but-not-interested in Egyptian Arabic.

Local Guys Make G.O.O.D.

Outside Minetta Tavern while my dining partner took a pre-meal smoke, ran into an old bartender friend of hers, who we'll call Steve.

How he got fired from his high-profile drink-slinging gig: a drunken Wall Streeter grabbed a waitress' ass, then puked in the fireplace. Steve told him to quit grabbing asses, and try to make it to the bathroom before vomiting. The Wall Streeter said “Fuck you. That's what I tipped you and your Mexican for.” Steve, an ex- Royal Marine, broke a beer bottle, held it to the guy's face, and said, “He's not Mexican. He's Ecuadoran.” Then he dragged the guy over to the window (they were on the 3rd floor), flipped him over and dangled him by his feet – the classic “apologize or I'll drop you to your death” move. The next day the Streeter fired off a letter demanding Steve be fired. That was his last bartending job – these days he's in construction, building boozers from the ground up.

Inside, the next table over happened to be plastered Streeters*, who spent most of the night apologizing and offering to buy our drinks. The guy closest to me described his trio as “local guys made good” (even though one was French), and the warm manner in which they enjoyed getting fucked up and raising a ruckus was kind of life-affirming. I'm not sure what officially got them booted, but it was either one of them screaming “Go Cowboys!” when he found out I was from Dallas, or that same guy actually stuffing his very expensive dry-aged beef burger into his wine glass.

Had we complained, we probably would've gotten a free meal, but since these were the nicest bombed finance guys ever, we didn't, and our sweetly apologetic waitress comped us two glasses of muscatel.


Back outside, the security team for the President of Latvia was just chillin' while he took in a Cafe Wha show by someone who probably wasn't Bob Dylan. The guy in the police cruiser's passenger seat – who's built like Mike Starr (the lumbering hitman from Dumb and Dumber) – is perusing a book about Blue Note a gray-bearded homeless guy just handed him for free after trying to sell it to me.

Finally: stopped by Home Sweet Home's “Wierd” night to say hey to a friend who works the door. Wisdom from the wearer of this t-shirt: “Why should I get a myspace page when I've been playing since before they invented the fucking cell phone?”

I actually saw W.A.S.P. on this tour, opening for Iron Maiden at Reunion Arena, end of 7th grade, also before the cell phone, at least practically speaking. I dug the song “L.O.V.E. Machine”, but I still don't know what the acronym stands for, and couldn't tell you if you dangled me by the feet from a third-floor window.

*Not trying to create an us-vs-them dynamic, but slang just reads quicker

Deliver Your Cakes with Fred Ex

At Milady's last night, Dan was just finishing up his “Freddy Mitchell Goes Deep” story – in which texting that phrase to an Eagles-loving Balthazar hostess somehow prompted her to snuff their gameday SMS flirtation, even though clearly it should have inspired her to take things to the next level – when the bartender broke out this birthday cake for a regular, whose look of genuine surprise and gratitude could make even a guy who'd had his affections rebuffed for making an excellent Freddy Mitchell reference once again believe in life's ultimate goodness.

Chicken Soup for the Soul Glow

This is Ted, tour manager for Bob Schneider, who I caught last night on a Rocks Off boat cruise. It takes Ted's 'fro one to two years to fully blossom, well worth it for a calling card every bit as memorable as Crystal Gayle's.

Also last night, Krysten (my friend's date) told about a different kind of formidable growth: she used to bartend in Kansas with a girl named Marge. Marge was six feet flat-footed. Instead of desperately trying to minimize, she strutted in high heels, license she'd earned after dealing with dwarfing others since 1st grade. When some of the regulars started calling her Marge-zilla. Krysten lit into them: how would you like it if someone made fun of your size, etc. Except it turns out the girl's legal name actually was “Marge Zilla”.

If you're big, be big. If you want to be big, be big. Make it out of 1st grade, and most people will be cool about it, and even if they're not, they can't insult you just by calling you what you are.

Cheese is out of Fashion?

So this is nowhere near as salacious as my last post involving women and big cats, but:

Met my friend Alex at Eataly earlier as part of an ongoing dried-meat exchange: I introduced her to Texas A&M beef jerky, she ordered me some, and I repaid her with today's delivery of buffalo jerky from the Chalet Market in Belgrade, Montana. We ran into these felines on the way out:

They'd had the makeup professionally done for a protest outside Lincoln Center designed to keep the anti-fur heat on designers, celebs, and random attendees during Fashion Week.

Commendable, but if I were going to protest anything right now, it'd be Eataly's refusal to let you put cheese and meat together in the same sandwich. They claim it's about culinary tradition, but I refuse to believe that Italians attach pariah status to people who dairy up their proscuitto. And even if it were true, it's a silly tradition, enforced by nothing -- I'm forbidden by fucking Yawheh to mix meat & dairy (not to mention the whole no-pork thing), but you don't see me denying myself something so obviously righteous as a ham and cheese.

I'm in a tizzy. Anyway, down with fur, and down with not topping the meat of one dead animal with the curdled milk of another.

Knife of the Party

How Jimmy (of Jimmy's no. 43) learned just how crucial having a real chef was: at his former restaurant on 2nd Ave, he had a really talented kid running the kitchen. Unfortunately the talent was matched by a love of heroin, which in turn was matched by a love of carrying multiple knives on his person at all times. Even when driving, not so good when you get pulled over, then mouth off to the cop.

During the kid's incarceration, the same recipes came out tasting crappy to solidly mediocre. Just because somebody's addicted to magic dust*, doesn't mean you won't miss his magic touch.

*technically PCP, but who's counting. Besides people addicted to PCP of course.

XXX-Ray

Went to the basement of Poisson Rouge last night for a happy hour promoting the Camden International Film Festival. Afterwards ended up at dinner at Da Silvano, and sat next to a guy who'd just settled a lawsuit: admittedly wasted, he'd tumbled down a flight of stairs in his apartment building, passed out from the concussion, then passed out again from pain when he woke up, tried to walk, and discovered he'd broken his hip. Turned out two other people had also taken spills that night, because whoever'd cleaned the stairs earlier had left behind a slippery coating, and the coating didn't care if you were drunk or sober.

So: the guy, Neal, broke out his Blackberry to show me the picture of his shattered bone. Then he casually said "Sorry about showing you my dick." I said "er..., no problem" and didn't really think anything of it as I stared in horror at the ghostly image of three nails surgically driven into the ball of his hip. I told him that was some of the worst shit I'd ever seen, etc, and he again apologized about showing me his dick.

"Like, you're metaphorically showing me your dick, in that you're showing me your body at its most helpless, held together by nails and shit?"

"No, no, look, there's my dick. I didn't think a dick would show up in an x-ray, but there it is."

And so it was, in all its Total Recall Airport Scene glory. Except you couldn't see a dick in Total Recall.

So of course I got him to email me the x-ray. Don't pretend you wouldn't have done the same:

The takeaway: if you were wondering about those proposed new airport screeners, the answer is "Yes".