TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 194
Tobie Shapiro
tobie at shpilchas.net
Mon Apr 2 08:22:59 PDT 2007
April 2, 2000000000000007
Dear Beacons,
Today is a day of cooking. Solid
cooking. I get to make the red beet horseradish!
This is horseradish that is legend. One dot and
your whole head is on fire. Don't breathe it;
you'll choke. You have to put a paper bag over
the Cuisinart to contain the fumes, and even so,
the skin on your hands starts to burn from being
in the vicinity. We make the tsimmes today:
carrots, yams, onions, raisins, a meat bone and
knedlach. The knedlach are called the gonifs. A
gonif is a thief, and the knedlach steals the
flavours from the rest of the dish. We have to
set up the seder plate. That means reading the
Hebrew and putting the appropriate ingredient in
the little concavity. There will be a hundred
plates on the table, and that's just for five of
us tonight. It will be the coziest seder we've
ever had. When I was growing up, the whole
extended family came to the seder, and then, all
the friends of the offspring. Sometimes there
were more than forty five people. We read the
Haggadah, everyone taking turns with one
paragraph apiece. There's always some hog who
just has to take several paragraphs. And no one
says anything. We just let it happen. A shande
auf ihr. I made the charoshes a few days ago.
We peeled 25 apples. I used one of Feyna's fancy
pieces of equipment. Yes, Cutco makes a peeler.
I peeled part of my left middle finger. Only now
am I taking the bandaid off. We made the gifilte
fish and the soup on Saturday. It's a big deal,
Passover is. It's bigger than Thanksgiving.
More food, more ceremonial food, and the rituals
are myriad. I love it. Oh gosh do I love it!
Outside, I hear the birds starting to
chirp. The sun isn't up yet, but the birds know
what's going to happen. I've never gotten over
my dread of hearing the birds chirp early in the
morning. When I was on cocaine, it was the sign
that I'd stayed up all night and still couldn't
sleep. Innocent little birds.
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Dinner for three minus one
I was twenty eight and had come back up
to Berkeley from visiting Harry in San Diego. I
divided my time between writing songs, worrying
about the music business and frequenting a coffee
house called the Caravansary on College Avenue.
It was right in the middle of the block. You
could buy coffee beans there, and you could get a
cup of coffee, sit at the counter and talk to the
other wanderers. Behind the counter were the
familiar employees who sometimes took part in the
conversations, and sometimes helped shoppers pick
their favourite bean, or favourite method for
making coffee. There was, even then, a dazzling
array of coffee equipment: drippers, inverse
pots, stove top espresso gizmos, cones, beakers,
press pots, turkish coffee ibriks. Before
Starbucks lurked on each street corner, little
coffee houses like the Caravansary existed, and
each place had its steady clientele. It was a
tradition to go in there at about 10:00, a.m.,
every day, and have my cup of coffee.
There was usually the retired
Pediatrician who spoke to everyone about
anything, and engaged her conversation partners
in lively discussions about the cultivation of
roses, what it was like in the '20s, how the '60s
and '70s were very much like the '20s, and every
detail of her Pediatric practice, her long
history of healing babies, children, adolescents,
dealing with their parents, doing house calls.
She practised in a time of no insurance maze, no
HMOs. Once Dr. Peterson got hold of you, you had
to get used to your bar stool, because you would
be growing around it, as a tree grows around the
straps wrapped around the stick that supports it.
If Dr. Peterson were not there, Jane
would be there. Jane was an employee, but came
in on her days off. Jane could be found on both
sides of the counter. She was a transplant from
the Ozarks. She'd come to the bay area in the
'60s with the runaways to find her inner God in
sex, drugs and rock'n'roll, but she abandoned all
that for a tipsy organic life, tending an edible
garden outside her cottage, learning about
culture, taking up with the people at the end of
the bell curve, people you could write a book
about. John, who opened up a travel agency
called, Trips Out Travel. He was married to his
boots, high ones with hammered patterns in them
and heels. He wore a black leather jacket, drove
a motorcycle and grew his hair very long. He and
Jane were sometimes lovers, and sometimes not,
but they had their secret life that no one could
quite figure out. Jane had her own way of
looking at life. She was avant-garde but still
had the Ozarks in her. Men fell for her,
business men, rich men who wanted to buy her
furs. She told me about one such case, a love
struck three piece suit who brought her presents
and courted her formally. She told him she had
no interest, but he persevered.
"There's only two things you kin do with
a guy like that. You kin set him down and tell
him the straight truth. Send him on his way.
Or, you kin take him to the cleaners. Know what
I mean?"
Jane had a streak of anti-semitism in
her, and I caught her once, exhibiting her
stereotypes when she didn't yet know I was
Jewish. She referred to an ex-boss.
"He was Jewish, but he was nice. Know what I mean?"
"No. I don't know what you mean."
"Well, he was a Jewish business man, but he was nice."
"Explain that."
"Well, you know Jews and business
ethics," she said, as if everyone thought this
way. The Jewgirl next to her sat in the puddle
of anti-semitism.
"Don't tell me about Jewish business
ethics. I've got people in my family who are in
business. Some of them are good at it, and some
of them aren't, but they're all ethical!"
She lifted off the seat she was sitting
on. There was no apology, but there was a
silence and fitting embarrassment. I guess Jane
had met her first anonymous Jew. There was no
label on me, though, "Shapiro," is a dead
giveaway.
There was also Dennis Bum. Dennis Bum
showed up outside the Caravansary and sometimes
came in. He wore rags, filthy rags. The crust
on his clothing and his skin was a couple inches
thick. Grease, dust, dirt, the pants acquired a
slick patina. He wore shoes made of a hundred
layers of socks, and they were all worn through
so that his heel was exposed, a toe or two, with
long arcing nails like butter curls. They were
black. His hair had not been combed, ever. He
stank fearfully, and his teeth were rotten. He
stood outside, not begging money from anyone. He
seemed to have money. He'd wait there at the
threshold and stare inside. I don't know what
sign he was waiting for, but at some point, he'd
walk in, dragging his stripped shoes behind him.
He'd order a cup of coffee and put a fifty dollar
bill on the counter. He never talked to anyone.
He only mumbled to himself. His appearance grew
denser as the weeks flew by. He'd get absolutely
intolerable. He could clear the whole place out
just by venturing in the vicinity. Then,
suddenly, Dennis Bum would disappear. He
wouldn't show up for months. We'd all forget
that he existed. Then one day, there he would be
again, but with his hair cropped short and neat.
It turned out to be reddish. He was wearing
clean clothes and actual shoes, a watch on his
left wrist. He'd come right in and ask politely
for a cup of coffee, pay and leave. It took a
few weeks before he started to resemble Dennis
Bum again. And several months to work his way up
to his former glory. His eyes would get wilder,
he'd drag his feet in their layers of socks,
blackened by mud and the detritus on the
sidewalks. Then suddenly, he'd disappear again,
and the cycle would start all over. No one ever
looked him in the eye.
There was a young mother who came in with
her five year old son. He didn't have a name.
She just shouted at him, called him, "Squirt",
"Idiot", "Ya little monster". She'd park herself
on a stool and let Ya Little Monster roam around
the store dismantling things. He liked objects
that had many working parts. He'd wrest the
pieces from each other, scatter them around and
leave them where he'd dropped them. The
employees got stiff when the two of them came in,
and their eyes would follow Idiot around the
store. I think the mother's name was Robin.
There was never a reference to a father. When
Squirt was done with his disassembling projects,
Robin would get up, drag her son out of the store
and up the street.
The man who owned the Caravansary was a
brute, a pig. He had a huge head and always wore
work clothes. He had a sail boat that he loved
more than his wife who ruled over the store.
When they were both in the same place, they spoke
to each other in German, a harsh dialect with
lots of gutterals. They didn't seem pleased with
each other. She was a stickler for order and
pinched pennies. He threw himself around as if
there were no such thing as gravity except for
the blocks of lead in his boots. One day, when
he was out sailing the bay, the boom swung around
and knocked his head off. He died instantly.
It was at the Caravansary that I met
Norman Shea. He was the manager, and had the
responsibility of opening and locking up the
joint. He didn't get paid considerably more than
the other employees, but it was enough to keep
him afloat. He was a literary type. He found
antiquated books that were in public domain and
republished them. He was clever, had a dry sense
of humour and secretly laughed at all the
characters who patronized the store. He did
studied renditions. He had fine shoulder length
hair that fell from his temples like a sheet of
water. We made eyes at each other.
From making eyes to making conversation,
we progressed through the standard courting
procedures and thought we'd fallen in love. One
of the things Norman liked to do was cook. He
took it very seriously. He would invite a half
dozen people over for dinner at the house he
owned and shared with a roommate, Hector. The
people would arrive, as instructed, at six, and
Norman had barely started to take the food out of
the shopping bags. Some time around nine o'clock
he'd get around to serving dinner. He'd make
gnocchi from scratch, or marinate and grill
squabs. He followed recipes to the last detail,
and experimented on his friends with complicated
recipes he'd never tried before. When you were
invited to one of Norman's dinner parties, you
had to eat before you came or your stomach would
catch up with you and kvetch loudly.
When Norman and I got together, the
natural thing to do was to cook. I introduced
him to Chinese dishes, weird vegetables he'd
never heard of before, and organ meats that
frightened away the average American. I found an
out of the usual market where they carried fresh
bull testicles, Mountain Oysters, and I bought
several packages of them. Norman looked up a
recipe and I said I'd follow it as far as the
preparation went, but after that, it was in black
bean sauce with black mushrooms and onions. He
agreed. There was quite a pile of oysters, so he
invited his roommate. Hector was Hispanic, had
the machismo disease and was a dyed in the wool
chauvinist. I found him amusing, but not
appealing. Understanding Hector's take on life,
I insisted that Norman tell him what it was we
were serving him. Norman wanted to surprise him.
I thought that was unfair. It would be like
serving pork to a Muslim and telling him
afterwards what he'd just packed away. So Norman
agreed after I gave him the ultimatum. I don't
cook it unless you tell him beforehand.
Cooking the Mountain Oysters was not
difficult. But there were parts of the
preparation that gave pause. First, we were
instructed to toss the oysters in boiling water
until they puffed up and floated to the top.
Then we were to slit open the outer sack and
pull out the nuts. After that it was a matter of
slicing them into strips. Actually slicing the
balls was bothersome. Just a little. Norman's
face fell. He identified.
When the dish was ready, it had a subtle
taste like sweetbreads, and it was rich like
brains. It was not the only dish on the table,
but Hector took a hot liking to them. He pulled
the bowl over to himself, wrapped his arms around
it and said, "This is all for me." I was
delighted that he wasn't squeamish about eating
testicles, and was about to re-evaluate him when
Norman jiggled his eyebrows and told Hector,
"Guess what you're eating!"
"You didn't tell him!" I gave Norman the look and shook my head.
By this time, Hector, no fool, had an
idea that something was up. He stared straight
at Norman's brown eyes and demanded, "Okay, what
is this?!" He held his breath.
Norman took some obvious delight in this.
He waited for the timing to be right, then said,
offhand, "They're Mountain Oysters." He smiled.
Hector's face went blank. "What are Mountain Oysters?" he asked.
"Bull testicles," Norman grinned widely, maliciously.
"I'm sorry, Hector," I said, earnestly,
"I thought Norman had told you before. He
promised he'd tell you before." I turned to
Norman. "You shit!"
Hector turned a shade of green, and got
up from the table. He said, "I'll get you for
this," to Norman, and staggered into the bathroom
where he threw up a day's worth of serious
eating. Norman Shea was snortling, chuckling,
laughing. I was furious.
"You tricked both of us!" I gave him the
meanest look I could muster. "It's not funny!"
This didn't phase him. Norman was a
literary type, and they're ruthless, as you know.
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--
Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California USA
tobie at shpilchas.net
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