beer I embraced her, and kissed her romantically. She kissed me back sisterly. Then she told me she was a lesbian.
Anyway, I got the place painted and furnished and began my life as a New Yorker. I enjoyed exploring and taking pictures and seeing how much had changed—and not changed—since I had moved from the Bronx to Connecticut in 1952. For a while I thought I’d write a book about my discoveries. Its tentative title: In the Bronx, Boys Still Piss in the Street.
At about 4 a.m. on a Sunday morning, about a year after I moved in, I heard a strange gurgling sound. I got out of bed, checked my bathroom and kitchen and found nothing abnormal, and went back to sleep.
Around 7 a.m., I heard much more gurgling, and much louder gurgling, and got out of bed. I was horrified to see a stinking slimy mixture of RICE AND SHIT (“arroz con caca” in the common Bronx vernacular) oozing out of my bathtub, sink and toilet and rapidly coating the floors of my apartment!
I remembered the old joke about someone falling into a septic tank and yelling “FIRE!” because no one would come to help if he yelled “SHIT!” I called the fire department, and asked them to pump me out. They wouldn’t, but they did arrange for the city’s Emergency Services Department to clean up and find out what caused the disaster.
Apartment buildings have vertical waste “stacks”—pipes that run from the basement to the roof and connect to the drains in each apartment.
Typically, there is a stack for all of the bathrooms in the “A” apartments, all of the “B” apartments, etc., and other stacks for the kitchens in each apartment line. At the top, the stack is open to the air on the roof to help the waste to flow downward. At the very bottom, below my ground-floor apartment, the stack made a turn to run almost hori-zontally through the basement and then go underground to the sewage pipe in the street.
Investigators found that some wise-ass kid had gone up on the roof and dropped a 7-Up can down the waste stack. It passed through six floors to the basement below my apartment but couldn’t make the turn to the street, so it blocked the path for the flowing crud.
As people in the building awoke and started cooking, eating and flushing, whatever should have gone outside, backed up, squirted out and ended up in my carpeting.
Two months later, it happened again and I moved out.
Chapter 19
The food chapter: stalactite spaghetti, sink spaghetti, barbecued spaghetti, cat lasagna, too-famous lasagna, fried dicks
Stalactite spaghetti
The lunches served in our high school cafeteria cost us 35 cents a day. And, as you might expect of food supplied by the lowest bidder, it usually sucked.
As an alternative, sometimes we’d bring brown bags of mommy food, or go to nearby Chuck’s or Al’s restaurants after school. Sometimes we’d go to one of our houses and raid the refrigerator.
My mother was getting pissed off about the fridge raids. She didn’t mind our eating the leftovers, but she didn’t like the mess we usually left on the stove and in the sink. Mom gave me specific instructions to terminate the after-school cooking.
One day, some friends were at my house, and of course we were hungry. I didn’t expect my mother to get home for a couple of hours, so I thought we could safely reheat some spaghetti, eat it and clean up any trace of it before she came home.
Unfortunately, Mom’s plans changed and she walked in while the pot of pasta and sauce was still on the stove. She got REALLY pissed off. She grabbed the pot, and flung it at us.
Mom was no Tom Seaver, Cy Young or Sandy Koufax. She’d never be a major league pitcher. She missed us, and the spaghetti hit the ceiling. The individual noodles hung like stalactites on the ceiling of a damp limestone cave.
Every so often, a noodle would wriggle out of its saucy adhesive and go “bloop” and hit the floor.
Mom didn’t laugh. We did.
Sink spaghetti
Years earlier, before I was allowed to use the stove, I tried to cook spaghetti by putting it in the bathroom sink and running hot water over it for about 15 minutes. After it softened up, I dumped in a jar of sauce and stirred the glop. It was terrible, but I ate some of it. I didn’t realize that boiling was a critical part of the pasta- preparation process.
I also failed in my effort to store ice cream sandwiches in my toy chest by loading up the big maple box with ice cubes. I’m sorry about the mess on the floor, Mom.
Barbecued spaghetti
Many years later, while waiting for the kitchen to be completed in my new house, we did most of our cooking on a barbecue grill on our rear deck. We even tried to make spaghetti. The water almost boiled. That mushy meal tasted almost as bad as sink spaghetti.
Cat lasagna
One Saturday while we were in junior high school, Howie and I went to Pepe’s, a neighborhood Italian restaurant, for lunch. It was not glamorous. It was a dingy, long and narrow place with tables against two walls, and a center aisle that ran from the front door to the counter and kitchen in the back of the joint.
Instead of our usual pizza, we both ordered lasagna, and we waited. We waited for a very long time. Periodically, our waitress would come out of the kitchen and apologize for the delay, refill our water glasses and promise that our meals would be out “soon.”
At some point, a bedraggled alley cat came in through the open front doorway, and quickly walked down the center aisle, made a quick jog around the counter and went into the kitchen.
A moment later, we heard a clatter and squealing that sounded like an episode of Itchy and Scratchy on The Simpsons. Or maybe the velociraptors in the Jurassic Park kitchen.
After a little while, the waitress brought out two plates of lasagna. Howie and I turned pale, got up and walked out without eating or paying.
Too-famous lasagna
Another time, Howie and I were wandering around Greenwich Village. We were hungry and almost out of money and were looking for an inexpensive way to fill our bellies.
We were relieved and pleased to find a really crappy-looking restaurant with grease-encrusted windows, a door with cracked glass, tufts of litter swirling near that door, a drunk sleeping under the torn awning and a suitably unimpressive name.
“Joe’s Italian” seemed to be a likely source of cheap, two-buck lasagna.
When we went inside and sat down and started looking around, we sensed that we might be wrong.
This Joe was not merely some anonymous Joe. He was Giuseppe Marcello Bacciagaluppe, an award-winning chef who apparently had no need to pay anything to enhance the exterior décor of his famous establishment.
Photographs on the wall showed Joe with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Tony Bennett, Perry Como, Annette Funicello Connie Francis, a pope, two mayors, a governor, two presidents and a capo de tutti capi from the Mafia.
Joe’s lasagna would
