It glistened while it spattered. A dangerous smell had already filled the second-floor apartment. What in the world was I to do? The Weinsteins had moved from an elm-lined, tulip-strewn street in Midwood, Brooklyn -- two-family houses built in the 1920s -- to a "development" in Howard Beach, Queens, the year before I would have graduated from eighth grade in Public School 238. I was confused about being uprooted, which sounds like a common U.S. story, of army brats and kids of World War II parents looking for postwar jobs. I'm not claiming I … [Read more...]
Your Last Supper?
Each time I get a post from the site Memorie di Angelina (Easy. Authentic. Italian.) I assume it includes a recipe I want to cook. Author Frank Fariello's nonna Angelina left Campania in the 1920s and settled in The Bronx on Arthur Avenue. Through her Sunday dinners, Angelina took the boy on an eating and cooking path that his later years working in Rome and around the home country made inevitable. Yet Fariello's kitchen voice whispers in welcome modesty, which is a paradoxical result of direct engagement and … [Read more...]
Iceberg, Melting
[contextly_auto_sidebar] Hungry beyond myself, I come to a cartoon field of wet, glossy globes. Leaping into mud, I get on my knees and lean over, biting and choking to swallow one down. The way nightmares work, I see the lettuces, run, bend and chew -- again and again. Then I wake up, blinking and faint. Iceberg. Caesar. Mesclun. Hedda. These make my two-syllable lettuce poem, and they're welcome, though my next thought is about the recently denigrated M.F.K. Fisher for her youthful lettuce memories. She wrote what she remembered and … [Read more...]
Do You Recall Matthew Shepard?
I wrote this in October, 2008, for the online "Obit Magazine," which called itself " 'The New Yorker' of Death." It's been two decades since his murder. None of us can control how we’re remembered, though we may try to live in ways that minimize the dancing on our graves. Yet a special place should be made for those who are memorialized not for how they lived, but how they died. Those singular victims of war, accident, or crime may become famous, even important. But their daily voices, their quirks and smiles, their plain ambitions and … [Read more...]
I Hate Burritos
[contextly_auto_sidebar] The headline isn't mine, it came as a demand from my longtime eating partner Shelley, who heard me complain yet again about one of her beloveds -- this particular paragon presenting as fat, limp, edible. "Make 'I Hate Burritos' the title of your book, it will fly off the shelves." On wings of beans? What an inviting image, so inimical to the burrito itself, a blimp that can't get off the ground, no less burst into tasty flame. Burritos are the opposite of flight and, in a telling way, the opposite of cooking. … [Read more...]
Licking Our Plate
[contextly_auto_sidebar] Your stubby pointed flesh juts out and stays out, moving as if nothing could stop it. Half the world opposes what tongues like to do. Our hands, in concert, lift plates so they can be licked, which is such a human gesture, never having us bowing, bow-wowing, to the food. The Eva Zeisels or Dixie Ultra Disposables return to the table clean as can be. I see plate-licking almost every day, which delights me because I do the cooking. (I will not consider the possibility that anything in front of this one would be … [Read more...]
Tab Hunter, 1931-2018
[contextly_auto_sidebar] Tab Hunter passed away Sunday, it was announced by his husband. The 2005 autobiography Tab Hunter Confidential: The Making of a Movie Star is filled with true surprises -- his vicious Jewish father and rocky childhood -- and relative ones, like his being gay when Hollywood would have none of it. I wrote about his serious, brave story when the book came out, hopeful that younger folks in public life and private would have a much easier time. Was I wrong? Was I wrong. Here's that piece, published in my … [Read more...]
Three Tall Teachers
[contextly_auto_sidebar] When you're old, dreams become your memories. The mother raises her voice from another room while you're alone at the table. The father drives a Buick with you on the bench seat so close that your thighs touch -- or is that what you think should have happened? The brother who bites you is missing, and you're frantic. A phone call next afternoon finds him, and we share how it feels to be together in various times. The teachers, they come back too. I cannot focus their faces, in the way we use tricks to pretend … [Read more...]
The Big Crack
[contextly_auto_sidebar] The polite ones pretend to remember, because they don't want to show they aren't down with your age. "Down with" is their age. And the smart ones know what you're talking about, though their eyes twitch as they grin. Old candy is what we liked when we were young candy. No one warned me not to take candy from strangers because I was a boy. Anyone who passed a piece of fudge into my small, sweaty hand was a friend, whether or not I paid with a Buffalo nickel or Mercury dime. Sweet boys like candy -- though no … [Read more...]
Salt-and-Pepper Grindr, or Shaker Heights
[contextly_auto_sidebar] One dating app I've used is called SilverDaddies, and my straight friends usually belch a laugh when they hear the name. "What's funny?" I ask, and they never have an answer. Silver threads among the gold? Hair turned quite gold from grief? It isn't Salt-and-Pepper Daddies, although I giggled at age 8 when "salt-and-pepper" was applied to the head of movie heartthrob Jeff Chandler (born Ira Grossel, went to Brooklyn's Erasmus High) by my mom or dad, can't remember which. That was the first time I heard … [Read more...]