Sunday, June 29, 2003

I sit at my desk staring out the window onto Jackson Avenue, licking maple syrup off my lips.  It is a peaceful, breezy Sunday morning in Long Island City.  Traffic is light.  Delicate white flowers twine up through the chain link fence surrounding the parking lot.  Garbage bags billow gently in the overflowing dumpster in the alley.  The Guatamalan sweatshop workers are home celebrating the Sabbath.  It is a morning for contemplation.  Because I’m pathetic and obsessive, I am contemplating the bevies of beautiful girls I saw last night when I made the mistake of venturing below 14th street.  We’d just gone down there to check out the air conditioners at Kmart (“All out,” as the salesgirl grunted so charmingly) before heading off to Helen’s birthday party in Sunset Park.  But of course once we were down there, we had to wander around aimlessly, looking for a place to eat.  We wound up at some eatery that was trendy without being exclusive, populated entirely with twenty year old girls with fabulous manes of hair, asses six inches wide, and very well-formed belly buttons.  Going downtown is a mistake.  While the Upper East Side sets off my class rage, downtown in the summer activates my self-loathing, which is infinitely worse, and more boring to be around (sorry, Eric.)  “Why,” I couldn’t help asking myself, as I spied on the girls nibbling on their mahi mahi tacos, “Can’t I be like them?  What,” I wonder, as I inhale my cheddar cheese burger, generous helping of fries and under-chilled, over-Rose’s-ed vodka gimlet, “am I doing wrong?” Part of the answer, I imagine, lies with Tranches de Jambon a la Crème. Tranches de Jambon a la Crème is much like Tranchas de Jambon Morvandelle.  That is, it is ham steak in a cream sauce.  But rather than starting with a sort of roux of flour and cooking fat, as the Morvandelle does, when making the ham a la Crème, you just sauté some shallots in the cooking fat with just a bit of Madeira and cognac, then stir in two cups of cream, mustard, and tomato paste and simmer until thickened.  Then the ham can go back in the skillet to rewarm.  Eric and I ate this Friday night at around nine-thirty, at our TV tables, while watching the end of “The Tailor of Panama.”  And very good it was.  It is also the reason, of course, that my ass will never be six inches wide.  Well, that and some unsolvable bone structure issues.  But before I can get into too much of a funk about my essential gluttony and subsequent terminal undesirability, I remember two points: 1) the waiter at the trendy non-exclusive eatery, who was very handsome in a John Corbett-crossed-with-Benicio del Toro sort of way, noticed me, and even waved to me when we passed by the restaurant half an hour later and he was taking his cigarette break outside, so maybe I’m not completely persona non grata, and 2) at Helen’s birthday party at her boyfriend’s super-hip Sunset Park apartment, with an amazing huge backyard and a dog and lots of very smart, cool people doing real things with their lives, there were a lot of very beautiful women, none of them blank-faced and banal, and all of them with asses at least one foot wide.  So maybe having a one-foot-plus ass is just a sign of intelligence.  As is, it follows, eating lots of pancakes and French fries and Tranchas de Jambon a la Crème.   11:17:23 AM    comment []