“But why?” I asked.
“Because this just came through yesterday.” He withdrew his card-case and exhibited a check. “My final week’s salary for Around the World in Eighty Days.”
The waiter, engaged in removing our empties, grunted sympathetically. “Well do I know the boychick of whom you speak,” he said. “The fastest con in the West.”
1972
CALVIN TRILLIN
CONFESSIONS OF A STANDUP SAUSAGE EATER
I SUPPOSE I would have given up the Feast of San Gennaro years ago if I’d had any choice. San Gennaro has always been the largest Italian festival in the city, and for a long time now Mulberry Street during the Feast has been crowded enough to give the impression that, for reasons lost to history, Manhattan folk customs include an annual outdoor enactment of precisely the conditions present in the IRT uptown express during rush hour. In September, the weather in New York can be authentically Neapolitan—particularly on a street that is jammed with people and sealed on both sides with a line of stands where venders are boiling oil for zeppole or barbecuing braciole over charcoal. Occasionally, I have become irritated with the Feast even on evenings when I have no intention of attending it, since I have become one of those Manhattan residents who get testy when some event brings even more traffic than usual into the city from the suburbs. Those of us who migrated to New York from the middle of the country may be even less tolerant of incursions by out-of-towners than the natives are, and I suppose I may as well admit that, in some particularly frustrating gridlock on some particularly steamy fall day, I may have shouted “Go back where you came from, you rubes!” in the direction of a lot of former New Yorkers who now live a mile or two into New Jersey—an outburst that would have been even ruder if the objects of my irritation had not been safely encased in soundproof air-conditioned cars. The traffic congestion caused by San Gennaro is particularly irritating to me because Mulberry Street lies between my house and Chinatown, and the Feast happens to fall at the time of year when I return to the city from a summer in Nova Scotia suffering the anguish of extended Chinese-food deprivation. Practically feverish with visions of crabs sloshing around in black-bean sauce, I detour around the Feast in a journey that seems to get longer every year, as the lights of San Gennaro push farther and farther uptown from the heart of Little Italy toward Houston Street, on the edge of the lower East Side. It would not surprise me, I think, if one of these years commuters from Westchester County pouring out of Grand Central Station some hot September morning walked smack into a line of calzone and sausage stands that had crept up in an unbroken line fifty blocks from Grand Street. The venders, dishing out food as fast as they can, will still have time to complain to the account executives and bank managers they’re serving about having been assigned a spot too far from the busiest blocks of the Feast.
I love the elements of San Gennaro that still exist from its origin as a neighborhood festival transplanted practically intact from Naples by Little Italy immigrants—the statue of the saint with dollar bills pinned beneath it, for instance, and the brass band that seems to consist of a half-dozen aging Italians and one young Chinese trumpet player—but the Feast has felt considerably less like a neighborhood celebration in recent years, partly because its size has inevitably brought along some atmosphere of mass production, partly because of the inclusion of such non-Neapolitan specialties as piña colada and eggrolls and computer portraits, and partly because of the self-consciousness represented by “Kiss Me—I’m Italian” buttons. Also, I find that I can usually catch the brass band during the year around the Chinatown part of Mulberry, below Canal Street; it often works Chinese funerals. The gambling at the Feast does not attract me, and the stuffed animals that are awarded for making a basket or knocking down milk bottles hold no appeal for someone whose family policy on stuffed animals is moving slowly, in the face of some resistance, toward what the Metropolitan Museum of Art used to call deaccessioning.
Still, there I am at San Gennaro every year—admitting to myself that I rather enjoy pushing my way down Mulberry at a time when Neapolitan music is coming over the loudspeakers and operators of games of chance are making their pitches and food smells from a dozen different booths are competing in the middle of the street. My presence is easily explained: I can’t stay away from the sausage sandwiches. As it happens, I live on the edge of a lower-Manhattan Italian neighborhood where the sort of sausage sandwiches served at Italian feasts—a choice of hot or sweet sausage jammed into a roll with a combination of fried pepper and onions as dressing—can be bought any day of the year in comfortable surroundings, which even include a stool at the counter. I never buy one. Somehow, it has been clear to me since I came to the city that uncontrolled, year-round eating of sausage sandwiches is not an acceptable option for me. It was instinct more than a conscious decision—the sort of instinct that some animals must use to know how many of certain berries to eat in the woods. My wife, who at our house acts as the enforcer for the nutrition mob, has never had to speak on the subject of how much devastation a steady diet of Italian sausage could wreak on the human body. The limits are set. I have a sausage sandwich whenever I go to San Gennaro. I have a sausage sandwich at the Feast of St. Anthony, on Sullivan Street, in the spring. If I’m lucky, I might stumble across one of the smaller Italian feasts in Little Italy to find a sausage stand that has attached itself to some Village block party. Otherwise, I do without. When people from my home town, in the Midwest, ask me how I survive in New York, I tell them that the way I survive is simple: I only eat sausage sandwiches standing up.
I am not the only seasonal eater in New York. There is a time in the fall when a lot of people who have spent August in some rural setting—talking a lot of brave talk about how there is nothing better than a simple piece of broiled fish and some absolutely fresh vegetables—come back to the city and head straight for the sort of food that seems to exist only in close proximity to cement. I noticed one of them during the week of my fall sausage eating while I was waiting in line at Joe’s Dairy on Sullivan Street—right across from St. Anthony’s, the church that sponsors my spring sausage eating. As it happens, my own mission was seasonal—although one sort of business or another takes me to Joe’s all year round. In the early fall, when farmers are still bringing their produce into Manhattan for Saturday-morning markets, it is possible to make a stop at the farmer’s market in the West Village, pick up some basil and some tomatoes that actually taste like tomatoes rather than Christmas decorations, stop in at Joe’s for mozzarella so fresh that it is still oozing milk, put the tomatoes and mozzarella and basil and some olive oil together to make what is sometimes called a Caprisian salad, and congratulate yourself on having captured the essential feature of Capri without having gone above Fourteenth Street. The man in front of me at Joe’s Dairy was looking around the shelves as if he were a Russian defector getting his first look at Bloomingdale’s. He asked for Parmesan cheese. He asked for Romano. He bought some mozzarella. “Jesus Christ! I just had a roast-pork sandwich at Frank’s!” he suddenly said. “Boy, am I glad to be back in the city!” Everyone in the store nodded in sympathy.
WHEN I walk down Mulberry Street, just below Canal, during the Feast of San Gennaro, I am strongly affected by what I suppose could be called border tensions: I feel the competing pulls of sausage sandwiches and flounder Fukienese style. The street just east of Mulberry is Mott, the main drag of Chinatown. There was a time not many years ago when Mott and a few side streets seemed to constitute a small Chinese outpost in the middle of a large Italian neighborhood; in those days, a Chinese candidate for the New York State Assembly endeared himself to me by telling a reporter from the Times that he was running against the Italian incumbent—Louis DeSalvio, the permanent grand marshal of the Feast of San Gennaro—even though he realized that he didn’t have “a Chinaman’s chance.” Over the past ten or fifteen years, though, a surge of Chinese immigration has revitalized Chinatown and pushed out its boundaries—past the Bowery a
nd then East Broadway in one direction, across Mulberry Street in the other. On Mulberry Street below Canal, the calzone stands and beer carts of San Gennaro stand in front of Chinese butcher shops and Chinese importing companies and Chinese produce stores. “They left us three blocks,” an official of San Gennaro told me while talking about the Chinese expansion. The blocks between Canal and Broome are still dominated by the robust Italian restaurants that represent the tomato-sauce side against the forces of Northern Italian cream sauce in what has been called the War of the Red and the White. Even on those blocks of Mulberry, though, some of the windows of second-floor offices have sprouted Chinese writing. There are a lot of Italians left in the tenements of Mulberry Street, but a lot of Italians have moved away—returning to shop on Grand Street or sit in one of the coffeehouses or eat sausage sandwiches at the Feast of San Gennaro. The Feast is still run by the grandson of the man who founded the Society of San Gennaro, Napoli e Dintorni, in 1926, but he lives in Staten Island.
Foreign food—non-Italian food, that is—began to creep into San Gennaro and some of the other Italian feasts half a dozen years ago, but not from Chinatown. There were some Korean booths and an occasional taco stand and some stands at which Filipinos sold barbecued meat on a stick and fried rice and lo mein and eggrolls and an unusual fritter that was made of vegetables and fried in oil. At the time, I decided that the purist belief in restricting Italian festivals to Italian food was narrow-minded and artificial—a decision that was based, I admit, on a certain fondness for the vegetable fritters. There was a sprinkling of foreign food at San Gennaro this year—a gyros stand, a couple of stands selling egg creams, a black man selling fried chicken wings, a Pennsylvania-funnel-cake operation, and at least half a dozen stands run by Filipinos. These days, any street event in New York—a merchants’ fair on Third Avenue, a block party on the West Side—is certain to have at least one Filipino food stand. At the annual One World Festival sponsored by the Armenian diocese—a festival that has always been so aggressively ecumenical that I wouldn’t be surprised to discover someday that a few spots had been assigned to food stands run by Turks—the stands selling Armenian lahmajun and boereg and yalanchi and lule kebab seemed almost outnumbered this year by stands selling what are sometimes advertised as “Filipino and Polynesian specialties.” The man in charge of assigning spots for San Gennaro told me that if no attempt were made to maintain a balance—and a Feast that is not overwhelmingly Italian would obviously be unbalanced—Mulberry Street would have had ten Filipino stands on every block. I asked some of the Filipino venders how they accounted for so many of their countrymen being in the street-fair game, but their explanations did not go much beyond the theory that some people made money at some of the street fairs that began being held in brownstone neighborhoods several years ago and other people decided to get in on a good thing. It may remain one of those New York ethnic mysteries that outlanders were not meant to understand. Why are so many fruit-and-vegetable stores that were once run by Italians and so many fruit-and-vegetable stores that previously didn’t exist run by Koreans? Why have I never seen a black sanitation man? Why are conversations among venders of hot dogs at the Central Park zoo conducted in Greek?
SELECTING my sausage sandwich requires a certain amount of concentration. At San Gennaro, after all, there are always at least thirty stands selling sausage sandwiches. I don’t mean that I do nothing else at the Feast. In the spirit of fostering intergroup harmony, I sometimes have a vegetable fritter. I often have a few zeppole—holeless doughnuts that are available almost exclusively at Italian feasts. I have a couple of beers, muttering about the price, or some wine with fruit. Mainly, though, I inspect sausage stands—walking slowly the length of the Feast and maybe back again before I make my choice. About halfway through my inspection, whoever happens to be with me—usually one of my daughters—tells me that all sausage stands look alike, or maybe even that all sausage sandwiches taste alike. I keep looking.
The stands always look familiar to me. A lot of the food venders at Italian feasts in Manhattan make a business of going from feast to feast around the New York area from spring to fall. In Little Italy, it is assumed that the food-stand operators spend the rest of the year in Florida, living like kings off the sort of profits that must be accumulated by anyone who sells a tiny plate of ziti with tomato sauce for three dollars and has never heard of real-estate taxes. Among New Yorkers, it is practically an article of faith that anyone who runs what seems to be a small seasonal business—the ice-cream man in the park, for instance—can be found on any cold day in February casually blowing hundreds of dollars at some Florida dog track. Although I recognize the stands, I can never seem to keep in my mind which one has served me the best sausage sandwich. The inspection during what had to be my final visit to San Gennaro this year was carried out on a rainy weekday evening in the company of my two daughters—neither of whom has the slightest interest in so much as tasting a sausage sandwich. I was convinced that the stand I had patronized at St. Anthony’s in the spring—acquiring a sandwich whose memory I carried with me through the summer—was called by someone’s first name. All the sausage stands at San Gennaro seemed to be called by someone’s first name. Had it been Dominic’s? The Original Jack’s? Rocky & Philly’s? Tony’s? Angelo’s? Smokin’ Joe’s? Staten Island Frank’s? Gizzo’s? Lucy’s? There was nothing to do but inspect each stand—my daughters tagging along behind me, already full of pasta. I looked for a stand that was frying the sausages on a griddle rather than grilling them over charcoal—and displaying peppers and onions that had been sliced and cooked precisely to my requirements. It was amazing how many sausage stands qualified. My daughters began to remind me that it was a school night. Under some pressure, I stopped in front of Staten Island Frank’s—or maybe it was the Original Jack’s; even now the names run together—and said, “This is it.” When I started to eat, I was convinced that I had chosen brilliantly—until we passed a stand that I hadn’t noticed before. It was serving sausages, with correctly fried peppers and onions, on marvelous-looking rolls that had sesame seeds on top of them.
“Sesame-seed rolls!” I said. “Nobody told me about sesame-seed rolls!”
“Take it easy,” one of my daughters said, giving me a reassuring pat on the arm. “You can have one on a sesame-seed roll next year.”
“Not next year,” I reminded her as we headed home. “At St. Anthony’s in June.”
1981
ADAM GOPNIK
A PURIM STORY
I SUPPOSE it is a sign of just how poor a Jew I am that when I got a letter from the Jewish Museum last February asking me to be the Purimspieler at its Purim Ball I thought there must be some kind of mistake. I don’t mean that I thought there must be some mistake in asking me. I am enough of a ham that I would not be surprised if a Hindu congregation asked me to come forward and recite choice selections from the Bhagavad Gita. I mean that I was surprised because I thought the Jewish Museum was making a mistake about the date of Purim.
“Isn’t that the one in the fall?” I asked my wife, Martha. “With the hamantaschen? And the little hut in the back yard?”
“No,” she said. “No, it isn’t. They have hamantaschen all year round. Even I know that.”
“The thing that puzzles me,” I went on, holding up the letter and reading it again, “is how they ever figured out I was Jewish.”
She executed what I believe our fathers would have called a spit take. “That is the most ridiculous question I’ve ever heard. There’s your name, for one thing, and then the way you use Jewish words in writing.”
“What Jewish words have I ever used in writing?”
She thought for a moment. “Well, ‘shvitz.’ And ‘inchoate.’ ”
“ ‘Inchoate’ is not a Jewish word.”
“It is the way you use it. You’ve got ‘Jew’ written all over you. It’s obvious.”
“It’s obvious,” my six-year-old son, Luke, echoed, looking up from his plate. “It’s
obvious.” I was startled, though not entirely. We lived in Paris for the first five years of his life, and ethnic awareness is one of the first things he’s been exposed to on coming home to New York. The lame and the halt, the meaning of Kwanzaa and the nights of Hanukkah—all the varieties of oppressed ethnic experience have become the material of his education. He sees the world in groups, or is beginning to. His best friend, Jacob Kogan, has a sister who was asked by her grandparents what she wanted for Hanukkah. “A Christmas tree,” she said. Luke reported that with pleasure. He and Jacob have developed a nice line in old, Henny Youngman–style jokes, which apparently circulate permanently in the lower grades of New York schools, like Mercury space-program debris circulating in outer space, getting lower and lower in its orbit each year: “Waiter, what’s this fly doing in my soup?!” “The backstroke.”
I gave him a look. His birth was the occasion of my realizing just how poor a Jew I am. When he was born, at Mount Sinai hospital, in New York, almost every other baby in the nursery had Lubavitcher parents, and in the isolette they had proudly placed a little framed photograph of the Lubavitcher rebbe, Menachem Schneerson, so that the first thing the baby saw was the thin Russian eyes and the great Rembrandt beard of the Rebbe. The Hasidic fathers clustered around the glass of the nursery, and I felt at once drawn to them and inadequate to their dark-suited, ringleted assurance. They looked wonderful, and I, another member of the tribe, wanted, at least provisionally, to attach myself to them.
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