About half a year ago, I exiled myself from Brooklyn to Carnegie Hill on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It took me a few weeks to find a decent sausage link in my new neighborhood. And when I finally found one at a local diner, I was excited to have my first Sunday morning coffee & New Yorker breakfast ritual that is as sacred to me as candles, kiddush and challah on erev shabbas.
The fact that I have learned to embrace solitude in a steaming hot cup of coffee, a good article about fine art, or music, or the latest lambasting of realpolotik makes me think to myself, “The world can judge me all it wants for eating my turkey sandwiches, drinking a Brooklyn Lager while wearing my bathrobe and listening to a Prairie Home Companion on select Saturday nights, but we can’t all be in our 20s forever you know. ” There are moments when you just have to embrace your own eccentricities as awful as they may be to the public general. I am often reminded of this.
I was two paragraphs deep into an article about the career of Elvis Costello, when I noticed a middle-aged couple sitting next to me. The manner in which the corpulent husband ordered his food was truly intriguing:
“Oh, I’ll just have three eggs over easy, with hash, homefries and juice. Thanks.”
“And for you miss?”
“Waffles with a side of bacon. Thanks.”
“Ok, comin’ right up,” said the waitress as she scribbled the order on her pad.
One can’t just order all of that, especially when the man orders more than the woman and he’s the one using the word just. I can understand grabbing just a cherry danish and coffee at LPQ. I can empathize just getting a bagel with butter from Yusef of Marakesh on 87th and Lexington, or just a chocolate glazed doughnut from DR Jose on 86th and Madison. But it isn’t as if Charlie over here at the diner was just getting a continental assortment of grapes, cheeses, yogurt, and grapefruit juice after taking a healthy jog in Central Park. He’d even get a pass from me if he had just gotten two eggs over with a large coffee. But he ordered a steaming platter of food. And it’s not going to look pretty after his afternoon cup of coffee either! That is the Shabatz litmus test for using the word "just" while ordering food.
I have since observed many people misusing this connoted limitation for a lot of food, when it should only be reserved for meagerness; think eggroll, instead of the poo poo platter. Here is proof that phrases, utterances and tone are a confluence of one's own private internal psychology and the use by society; what the literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin called Hetteroglosia. Perhaps I am looking into this too much. Either I have observed a few individual cases of people's denial about their eating habits, or I have discovered language in evolution. Whether it's one or the other, the fickleness of people ordering food is bothersome. I mean after all we are the country that produced iconoclasts that are dafka ha’hefech. Humphrey Bogart and John Wayne would never order their breakfast in any fashion except furtively! Why should I care about how much food I order when I am hungry? It’s OK to be hungry at breakfast. It's also OK not to be hungry at breakfast, just don't pretend that you aren't when you are.
I once had a British girlfriend that lived in Nolita, where people don’t eat breakfast at all; they eat “brunch.” And what is that? Well, downtown at least, “brunch” is an over-priced combination of an alcoholic beverage and not enough food with excellent aesthetic presentation, after waiting in long lines to sit in an overly-pretentious corridor that probably used to be Moshe Klein’s shoe repair 25 years ago during the New York City crack epidemic. This was lost on her European friends that don’t eat real meals anyway. They just “pick” at cheese plates at their parties. And they usually wore ambiguously colorful sweaters, scarves and large rimmed sunglasses that I think were all collectively supposed to add some layer of mystique that I had no pulse for.
Corrie used the word “just” but in a British sense; a word that siphons a short period of time, excusing an individual from being perpetually late. It not only sounded elegant, but the phraseology and idiomatic expression created for me a sense of faux importance to the reason behind actually being late, which I eventually realized was simply "being late" like every girl:
“David, I’ll be 10 minutes late, I’m just speaking to mum.”
“David, I’ll be 10 minutes late, I’m just doing my teeth and having a shower and then I’ll hop on the metro.”
“David, I’ll be 10 minutes late, I’m just finishing my portion on the UN Kenyan election crisis report for my boss.”
If there was anyone who took being European seriously, it was Corrie. I mean after all, she said that both sleep and eating were over-rated on multiple occasions. It was for this reason that I was always insistent about eating at a diner, like the one morning that I was massively hung over. It was noon already and I decided to order a corned beef sandwich during an argument with her about another argument I had had with one of her friends from the night before:
“Why do you have to always bring up the Holocaust when talking with my friends David,” said Corrie.
“All I am saying that is your French friend – Manure - from last night…”
She cut me off, “His name is pronounced Manu. He’s not horse dung.”
“Sorry,” I said, “Let me try again, your friend HORSE DUNG needs a history lesson, about the significance of the United Nations Security Council.”
“He was just giving his opinion. People are entitled to their opinions, even in the United States and even if you are not Jewish.”
Corrie shook her head at me, wondering why she even bothered to waste her time. To be honest, can I blame her?
“Ya,” I said raising my voice, “Except when you’re a NAZI!! SEIG HEIL!!” I saluted with my hand, drawing attention from people booths around us.
“David, can you lower your voice,” she grabbed my hand from across the table in embarrassment, “And you didn’t have to tell his girlfriend that she had to wax her mustache because her peach fuzz whiskers made her look like a pre-pubescent Fuehrer!”
“Can I help it if she was wearing suspenders?” I asked.
“Listen to yourself! What does that have to do with anything!” she screamed.
“But it’s true," I said taking a huge bite, and continuing to yell with half-chewed meat and mustard in my mouth, "And they were striped. She looked like an anorexic zebra for crying out loud!”
She cupped her ears like ear muffs, “I can’t stand you anymore.”
“When could you? And I’m the one supposed to lower my voice? Maybe you can you lower your accent, this is starting to sound too much like ‘The Life of Brian” - Conjugate the verb please -" I retorted in awfully mimicked British. I spied the pickle on my plate. I picked it up and started waiving it her, like a maestro’s wand after taking a bite.
“All your UN friends are all the same. You try to apologize for the existence of Israel, while eating chocolate and cheese to keep your shapely figures before your visas expire.”
Amidst my diatribe I realized that my left hamstring had begun to tighten, as it often will when I get to worked up for some reason. I started caressing the knot with my left hand, while gesturing to her wit the pickle in my right hand, “Before you make your next point which will be wrong sweety, first try my pickle, I insi…..aghugh ahgugh…..sist!”
My leg didn’t loosen up; it got worse. It’s related to my back issues, which had been flaring up that entire week like a bad hemorrhoid. At least I hadn’t had to pop a Valium the night before. What David Shabatz wouldn’t give for a bout of Irritable Bowel Syndrome in the worst moments that his 4th and 5th lumbar are stubborn! I stumbled out of my seat, like someone had stabbed me and started pacing around the diner, clutching my left leg with my left hand and pacing back and forth, while continuing to gesture towards Corrie with the pickle in my right hand.
“Nazis!!” I said one more time, like a Praetorian Guard waving his sword.
The waitress stopped me mid-limp, to ask if I needed anything else besides the check. I think she wanted us to leave.
“Yes,” I said as I sat back down, “I’ll just have one more cup of coffee. Oh wait, bring me a banana also, it will help with my leg cramp.”
She looked at me like I was crazy. Corrie had already started to button her coat and was leaving, not seeming to wait for me either.
Moments like these make me realize why on the eve of my 30th birthday, that David Shabatz eats at diners alone these days. I don't mind. And at least I order my food with vigor and conviction!
