Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin Page 6

  A few years after my sentence was imposed, James and I were talking on the telephone about an imminent New York visit that was to include the preparation of one of his dinner specialties, and he told me not to worry about the problem of items rattling around in his ice chest. I told him that I actually hadn’t given that problem much thought, what with global warming and nuclear proliferation and all. As if he hadn’t heard me, he went on to say that he’d stopped the rattling with what he called packing boudin.

  “Packing boudin?”

  “That’s right,” James said.

  I thought about that for a moment or two. “Well, it’s got bubble wrap beat,” I finally said. “And we wouldn’t have to worry about adding to this country’s solid-waste-disposal problem. Except for the casing.” The habit of tossing aside the casing of a spent link of boudin is so ingrained in some parts of Louisiana that there is a bumper sticker reading CAUTION: DRIVER EATING BOUDIN—a way of warning the cars that follow about the possibility of their windshields being splattered with what appear to be odd-looking insects. From that visit on, I took charge of packing boudin disposal whenever James was carrying his ice chest, and I tried not to dwell on my disappointment when he wasn’t.

  Not long ago, I got a call from James before a business trip to New York that was not scheduled to include the preparation of a Louisiana meal—that is, a trip that would ordinarily not include boudin. He asked if he could store a turducken in my freezer for a couple of days; he was making a delivery for a friend.

  I hesitated. A turducken is made by deboning a chicken and a duck and a turkey, stuffing the chicken with stuffing, stuffing the stuffed chicken into a similarly stuffed duck, and stuffing all of that, along with a third kind of stuffing, into the turkey. The result cannot be criticized for lacking complexity, and it presents a challenge to the holiday carver almost precisely as daunting as meat loaf. Or, I wondered, is the duck stuffed into the chicken rather than the chicken stuffed into the duck? While I was trying to remember that, James apparently took my hesitation as an indication that I was reluctant to take on the storage job. I suppose there are people who would rather not have a turducken in their freezer, on the grounds that it goes against the laws of nature.

  “There’d be rental boudin involved, of course,” James said.

  “Fair’s fair,” I said.

  2002

  Goldberg as Artifact

  I was not surprised to hear that the Smithsonian Institution had expressed an interest in the neon sign on Fats Goldberg’s pizza parlor. I have always thought of Fats himself as an American artifact, although he is ordinarily regarded as a medical wonder rather than a piece of Americana. What brings doctors around to the pizza parlor occasionally to have a stare at Fats and poke him around a bit is not merely that he once lost some 160 pounds—no trivial matter in itself, being a weight equivalent to all of Rocky Graziano in his prime—but that he has succeeded for seventeen years in not gaining it back. Apparently, keeping off a large weight loss is a phenomenon about as common in American medicine as an impoverished dermatologist. Convinced that remaining a stick figure is the only alternative to becoming a second mountain of flesh, Fats has sentenced himself to a permanent diet broken only by semiannual eating binges in Kansas City and a system of treats on Mondays and Thursdays that reminds many New Yorkers of alternate-side-of-the-street parking regulations.

  Because Fats is now exceptionally skinny, most people call him Larry instead of Fats. (Nobody, as far as I know, has ever called him Mr. Goldberg.) Having known Fats in Kansas City long before he let his Graziano slip away from him, though, I have difficulty thinking of him as anything but a fatty. He has even more difficulty than I do. He is, he cheerfully admits, as obsessed with food now as he ever was. (Fats cheerfully admits everything, which is one reason no one has ever thought of calling him Mr. Goldberg.) One of his doctors has told him that most of the successfully reformed fatties seem to involve themselves in food-related businesses. Still, Fats is restless being a pizza baron. “You can’t schlepp pizzas all your life,” he often tells me. He is constantly phoning for my reaction to the schemes he thinks up for new lines of work. His schemes are almost invariably concerned with food and are invariably among the worst ideas in the history of commerce. I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that Fats may be like one of those novelists whom publishers speak of as having only one book in them. My usual response to hearing one of his new business ideas—a scheme to produce an edible diet book, for instance—is to say, “Fat Person, there are worse things than schlepping pizzas.”

  Fats, now that he has had some time to reflect on it, is not surprised that the Smithsonian asked for his sign. “It was a nice piece of neon work,” he says. As it happens, one of the regular customers at Goldberg’s Pizzeria works for Chermayeff & Geismar Associates, the firm commissioned to design a five-year bicentennial exhibit for the Smithsonian called “A Nation of Nations.” When it was suggested that Goldberg’s sign might be suitable for a display that would amount to a selection of ethnic neon, Fats said, as he remembers it, “You want me to take it down now or will you come back for it?” (A Smithsonian curator came back for it, Fats having in the meantime ordered a precise replica to take its place.) Fats’s cooperation was based partly on an understandable pride (“There I’d be with Lucky Lindy and everybody”) and partly on a quick calculation of how many pizza eaters might pass through the exhibit during the next five years.

  It is natural for a restaurant proprietor to see publicity as a way of attracting customers, but Fats must be alone among his peers as seeing it also as a way of attracting a wife. Ever since his emaciation, at the age of twenty-five, Fats has thought about finding an appropriate wife almost as much as he has thought about food, and he tends to regard publicity partly as a sort of singles ad. Fats is often mentioned in the press—in articles about pizza or about men’s fashions (his views on clothing are as deeply rooted in the fifties as his views on courtship and marriage; sartorially, he is best known for an addiction to saddle shoes) or about what celebrated New Yorkers like to do on Saturdays in the city. (“Larry Goldberg, a bachelor who operates Goldberg’s Pizzeria on Fifty-third Street and Second Avenue, said he spent his Saturdays at Bloomingdale’s, where he rides the escalators and ‘looks for girls.’ ”) Somehow, though, there are still a few people in town who have not heard of Goldberg’s Pizzeria. So wherever he goes, Fats continues to spread the word by handing out small paper Goldberg’s menus that list pizzas with names like “Moody Mushrooms” and “Bouncy Meatballs” and “SMOG” (sausage, mushrooms, onions, and green peppers)—the last a house specialty that Fats describes on the menu as “a gourmet tap dance.” Extracting a menu from Fats does not require strenuous persuasion. “I don’t press them into the hands of accident victims, or anything,” Fats once told me. “But I did hand them out to the orchestra at Radio City Music Hall one night as they came out of the pit after the last show.”

  From the start, Fats was looking forward to the opening of “A Nation of Nations” as his first trip to a museum in the role of a benefactor. He is not one of those New Yorkers who never seem to take advantage of the city’s great museums; he long ago decided that museums are ideal places to strike up a conversation with someone who just might turn out to be the future Mrs. Fats Goldberg.

  “On Sundays, I schlepp through Central Park and stop for a rest on the steps of the Metropolitan,” he once told me. “But I never go inside. The Metropolitan depresses me.”

  “You mean because of all those Egyptian tombs and everything?” I asked.

  “No, it’s mostly families,” he said. “For girls, the Whitney’s the ticket. I usually work the Whitney on Sunday afternoon. I used to go in, but now I just work the lobby and save the buck and a half.”

  The subject of museums had come up suddenly, as I remember, during a conversation about a business scheme Fats had concocted—a plan to offer a sort of food tour of New York that would take visitors from one ethnic delicacy
to another for four or five hours.

  “Fats,” I said, “I hate to be the agent of your disillusionment once again, but I think you should know that many people do not customarily eat for four or five hours at a stretch. Many people eat breakfast and wait a few hours before eating lunch. Then they go about their business for a while, and then they eat dinner.”

  Fats looked puzzled. When he is not on a diet—that is, when he is in Kansas City—he does not exactly divide his eating into meals, although I did once hear him say, “Then I stopped at Kresge’s for a chili dog on the way to lunch.” For several months, he stopped talking about his ethnic-food tour and concentrated on the edible diet book, which many connoisseurs of Goldberg schemes believe to be his worst idea ever. “Don’t you see it?” he would say. “The whole thing would be edible. Food coloring for ink. I haven’t figured out what we could use for the pages except maybe pressed lettuce, but we’ll find something. Each page would have menus for the three meals of the day, but one of the meals would be the page—so, for instance, you’d just eat that page for breakfast.”

  “If you ate the page for breakfast, Fats, how would you know what to eat for lunch and dinner?”

  “It’d sell like crazy,” Fats said, ignoring my quibble. “Bloomingdale’s, Neiman-Marcus, Marshall Field’s. Goldberg’s Edible Diet Book. I’d autograph them at the cookbook counter at Bloomie’s. The cookbook counter is the best place in the store to meet girls.”

  1976

  Inspecting the Cork

  This supposedly took place at a particularly fancy restaurant somewhere in the United States. The sommelier arrived at the table with the expensive bottle of wine that had just been ordered. He displayed the label, opened the bottle, placed the cork on the table in front of the customer who had done the ordering, and poured an inch or so of wine to be tasted. The customer ignored the wine in his glass, but he ate the cork.

  I came across the story in a recent speech about the trials facing someone trying to serve wine to the sort of untutored clods who frequent American restaurants—a speech that had the tone of those nineteenth-century accounts of the frustrations experienced by someone trying to bring a working knowledge of Latin grammar to the Hottentots.

  It was obvious to me that the storyteller didn’t understand the story he was telling. He assumed that the cork was eaten out of ignorance. He didn’t realize that there are any number of Americans who might want to eat a cork for effect. In other words, we are dealing here with someone who never met my old Army buddy Charlie.

  I could easily imagine Charlie eating a cork—although I’ll admit that it takes a leap of imagination to envision him in a fancy restaurant, particularly if he happened to be wearing his Jayhawk sweatshirt. It’s bright red, and it’s designed to look like a jayhawk, beginning with two huge eyes around chest level. Charlie wears it as a symbol of the semester and a half he put in at the University of Kansas before what he always refers to as “the little trouble down at the Tri-Delt house.” I don’t think cork-eating would present any physical problems that Charlie couldn’t handle: He always used to delight in startling convenience-store clerks by finishing off a bag of Fritos in four or five bites without opening it. All in all, I think Charlie would consider cork-eating what he sometimes refers to as “a real hoot.”

  I can envision any number of ways he might do it. He might swallow the whole thing at once—an alternative available to someone who has always been able to put his gullet on automatic pilot and pour down a couple of cans of Budweiser—or he might put it in his mouth and wash it down with water, as if it were a particularly large anti-cold tablet he had been instructed to take immediately before meals. He might take a small bite, spit it onto the floor, and shout, “You call that cork, my man!” Or he might finish up the cork, turn to the rest of the people at the table, and say, “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV, so I know the importance of fiber in your diet …”

  I think it’s more likely, though, that he’d raise the cork to his mouth and chomp off a big bite, as if he were eating a radish. I can just see him chewing the bite slowly, staring very hard at the sommelier the entire time, and doing that trick he does with his stomach to make the beak of the jayhawk seem to open and close. The rest of the people in Charlie’s party—the band of galoots Charlie often introduces as “my good friends and accessories”—are playing along, of course. They continue their small talk, occasionally glancing over at Charlie to see if he seems to be satisfied with what he’s eating. Maybe a couple of them try to get the sommelier’s attention so that they can ask him whether he would recommend a red or a white for chugalugging.

  The sommelier is trying to muster the polite and expectant expression he learned in sommelier school, but his face is drained of color and he is emitting some soft beeping sounds that might be sighs or groans. The proprietor, who has come over to see what’s going on, at first stands there with a fixed smile. Then he begins to look desperate as he notices other diners following Charlie’s example. All over the restaurant, diners are eating their corks. Then Charlie finally swallows what he has been chewing, puts the rest of the cork back on the table, pauses for a moment to give the matter one last bit of consideration, and turns to the sommelier. “Fine,” Charlie says. “That’s fine. It’s not the year I ordered, but it’s fine.”

  1987

  The Italian West Indies

  I daydream of the Italian West Indies. On bleak winter afternoons in New York, when the wind off the Hudson has driven my wife, Alice, to seek the warmth she always draws from reading the brochures of ruinously expensive Caribbean resorts, I sometimes mumble out loud, “the Italian West Indies.” Alice gets cold in the winter; I yearn for fettuccine all year round.

  “There is no such thing as the Italian West Indies,” Alice always says.

  “I know, I know,” I say, shaking my head in resignation. “I know.”

  But why? How did Italy manage to end up with no Caribbean islands at all? The French have islands. The Dutch have islands. Even the Danes had one for a while. The English have so many Caribbean islands that they have been hard put to instill in every single one of them the historic English gifts of parliamentary democracy and overcooked vegetables.

  “The English obviously had a lot more islands than they could use,” I say. “Aren’t they the ones who are always going on about fair play?”

  The Italians have none. Christopher Columbus—a Genoan, who taught Ferdinand and Isabella how to twirl spaghetti around their forks—took the trouble to discover the Caribbean personally before the end of the fifteenth century. Try to get a decent plate of spaghetti there now. When I happen into one of those conversations about how easily history might have taken some other course (What if the Pope had allowed Henry VIII’s divorce? What if Jefferson had decided that the price being asked for the Louisiana Purchase was ridiculous even considering the inflation in North American real estate?), I find myself with a single speculation: What if the Italians, by trading some part of Ethiopia where it’s not safe to eat the lettuce, had emerged from the colonial era with one small Caribbean island?

  I dream of that island. I am sitting in one of those simple Italian beach restaurants, and I happen to be eating fettuccine. Not always; sometimes I am eating spaghettini puttanesca. Alice and I are both having salads made with tomatoes and fresh basil and extra virgin olive oil and the local mozzarella. That’s right—the local mozzarella. (The residents, descendants of peasants who had managed to coax already-stuffed eggplants from the cruel soil of Calabria, would scoff at the notion of having to import mozzarella.)

  The sea below us is a clear blue. The hills above us are green with garlic plants. The chef is singing as he grills our fresh gamberos. The waiter has just asked us the question that sums up for me what I treasure about the Italian approach to drinking wine: “You won raid or whyut?” I say “whyut,” and lean back to contemplate our good fortune in being together, soaking up sunshine and olive oil, on my favorite Caribbean island, Sa
nto Prosciutto.

  Then the proprietor of our hotel stops by our table to inform us that, because of a disastrous drop in the lira, our stay will cost a quarter of what we would have paid for those resorts Alice was reading about in the brochures.

  “Benissimo,” I say, and ask him if he’d like to join us for a glass of whyut.

  1986

  Unhealth Food

  “Am I the only one worried about how unhealthy the people who work in health food stores look?” I said to my wife, Alice, one day. I described, in some detail, a clerk I had just encountered in a health food store—his sunken chest, his quivering hands, his ominous pallor, the dun-colored tint to his wretched little wispy beard.

  “Calm down,” Alice said.

  “Why isn’t there a Whole Grain Defense Committee working to put some meat on their bones?” I said. “I’m beginning to think those Washington soothsayers are right about how uncaring Americans have become. Dozens of customers a day must walk right by this quasi cadaver, and not one of them is willing to get involved even to the extent of calling 911.”

  “What were you doing in a health food store anyway?” Alice asked. “You’re always saying that health food makes you sick.”

  “I was on a mission of mercy,” I said. “A friend of mine who lives in a place that lacks the shopping resources of this great city had run out of soy waste.”

  “You know very well there’s no such thing as soy waste,” she said. “Why do you keep going on about soy waste?”