The Littleton Diner uses buckwheat from a gristmill down the street for their thin and gritty pancakes. Real maple syrup costs an extra 50 cents; after all, Littleton is eight and a half miles south of the Vermont State Line. The town nestles in the north-east cradle of Interstate-93. There is a Hampton Inn, a Walgreens, one human cemetery, one horse cemetery (where Maud and Mollie Wallace, Mrs. Eli Wallace’s horses, currently reside), and a railroad depot. The Ammonoosuc River flows soft and still below the babble of tourists ogling Chutters: The World’s Longest Candy Counter. Drowsy from the mountain air and rich food, fat old folks and grandchildren straddle the sidewalks. It is a sleepy town punctuated (or punctured) by the occasional skateboard punk or hobo. After a pancake dinner, you might want to waddle to Bishop’s Homemade Ice Cream. A scoop of maple nut does not cost more than any other, despite the long walk to proper sugaring grounds.

I think that dairy fat has really messed with my digestive system. One week into this road trip and several frozen custards, ice creams, cream pies, buttered toasts and pancakes later, I sense a disturbance in my natural equilibrium. I require a snap pea or carrot to correct this imbalance. Unfortunately, I have been forced to settle for a sorry plate of steamed vegetables at a pretentious restaurant in Skowhegan, Maine. Only now do I understand why nursing home residents need so much Metamucil.

A short drive from Littleton, on Sugar Hill, you will find Polly’s Pancake Parlor, recipient of a “James Beard Classic” award and favorite among Franconia’s bed and breakfasters. Besides its history, which, I assure you, is long and illustrious, all you need to know about Polly’s is that they grind their own flour—take that, Littleton Diner!—and if you visit on a weekend, you will wait for a space at the communal table. The dining room is rectangular and a little warped around the edges, like a ski-lodge not quite dried out, even in August. An order of pancakes includes a platter of maple sugar products—take that, Littleton Diner!—but a request for fake syrup, fruit syrup, and other blasphemies will be honored. The waitresses cook the pancakes and deliver them three at a time. They are small, perhaps three inches across, but filling. Six was enough, with a strip of bacon or three.

Robert Frost lived down the hill from Polly’s. Although the building existed during Frost’s residency, it was a shed for carriages and camp wood. The Frost family spent summers at their Franconia farm after Polly and Wilfred Dexter had turned the shed into a tea room. Yet, the very year that the Dexters started serving pancakes, 1938, marked the final Frost summer in Franconia. Perhaps Frost drove back from Ripton, Vermont. His visit, if it ever occurred, does not merit a mention in promotional materials.

If Frost never ate Polly’s, I imagine that he might have cooked his own pancakes in the cool late days of a Franconian summer. In 1982, William Matthews wrote, in “On the Porch at the Frost Place, Franconia, N.H.”: “So here the great man stood, fermenting malice and poems. . .” Frost would have eaten his pancakes on that porch, listening to the partridgeberry trees and sparrows thrushing and twittering. Everything would tremble in the turbulent effluvium of many leaves adjusting their tanned backs in the sunlight.

It is a place old enough to have buried cemeteries of years.

Sausage gravy comes in as many shades of brown as a paint color manufacturer could imagine. I have seen sausage gravy in woodland snow, winter sky, candle white, driftwood, smoked oyster, barren plain, cement gray, stormy Monday, and sea life. In case you wanted to follow along, those were all Benjamin Moore paint colors. I am sitting on a dirty hotel bed with a pile of paint chips fanned in front of me, scratching my head and trying to match my memories to the proper sample.

Good sausage gravy does not disintegrate into a pasty liquid on the tongue. Chunks of sausage distract the mind from the sensation of swollen starch granules, still gritty, swimming along like sperm. Bad sausage gravy forms a skin when left to languish on meatloaf or mashed potatoes. Then, you have to stir it with a fork and break up the skin, which wiggles as though a real epidermis, complete with moles and just sprouting hairs. The skin gets caught between the tines. And then, you’re stuck with the one-handed scrape, a slight slap and drag against the plate’s chipped china lip that dislodges the mucus. At the John Brown Wax Museum in Harper’s Ferry, I saw a mannequin with a motorized chest that heaved up and down as though breathing. Nothing else in the diorama moved. The slap and drag is likewise disturbing.

The best sausage gravy, the kind of sausage gravy that a diner aficionado encounters only once in a lifetime, maybe twice if he is exceptionally lucky, tastes like meat and pepper. Most sausage gravy, I report with the greatest regret, comes out of a can. Sausage gravy out of a can tastes like tin and salt. The consumption of canned sausage gravy happens in the passive tense, in the dreary pre-fabricated diners found along ex-Interstates. In a sardine can of a pre-fab diner, it is difficult to practice good posture. Even when joined by reliable friends, the variety of companion who asks for a third refill on coffee instead of checking his watch and excusing himself with a half-squinting smile, “we should get together again soon, good to see you, but I have an important meeting with our distributed product team in Thailand,” the shoulders slump. Everyone sits in a huddle of one.

For breakfast this morning, I had sausage gravy on pancakes. I prefer maple syrup. In Virginia, it is called “hot cakes and gravy.” Enough calories to power a nine-mile hike, but the salty-sweet taste belongs more in an Applebee’s ad or a hipster’s wet dream than my breakfast. A salty-sweet breakfast depends on a buttery palate, more yellow than gray. Hot cakes with maple syrup and salted butter. Now that would be delicious.

For dinner today, I had sausage gravy on everything: meatloaf, mashed potatoes, pickled beets, whatever. Very whatever. At least dessert, a vanilla frozen custard, did not come with gravy. I think I would have cried and crashed my car into Hans Frozen Custard. I never would have made it to this hotel, where I am already considering tomorrow’s lunch options. I see that sausage gravy is on many a Pennsylvanian menu.

Perhaps, I have saved room for another serving. After all, tomorrow could be my lucky day; the day of great sausage gravy. That is why we go on: for the promise of better sausage gravy, tomorrow.

I stopped by exactly eleven days before the grand finale. Monday lunch leaves a long week ahead, and a table of construction workers enjoyed smokes after slices of coconut pie. I worked on my half-chicken undisturbed. The fried crust, saturated with grease and spice, overwhelmed the aroma of fine Virginian tobacco, pesticides, formaldehyde, and human sweat. The marinated white meat—the juiciest flesh of any breast I have yet tasted—distracted me from the leering grimace of a camel or a cowboy or whatever is the official mascot of evil now in America. Contrary to cliché, Kentucky smells like cow, not horse. On the drive to Lexington, the lingering smack of fat on my lips, mingling with dung and cud, bothered me more than the occasional whiff of Marlboro.

We can only ask, what is next for the Bon Ton? It has already topped numerous “Best Fried Chicken” charts. (No doubt a consequence of judicious borrowing between editorial departments at your favorite publications. After all, how many aspiring food writers have been to “the top 19 fried chicken monuments across America” and shot TasteSpottable photos, too? Cross-pollination is the easiest way to populate a web-exclusive slideshow.) I suspect a gift shop. Currently, customers exit into a gravel parking lot. For such an esteemed eatery, a titan of its class, media darling, icon of all that is good and right about Main Street and mid-America, anything less than magnets, custom beer koozies, and bumper stickers is a failure.

The kitchen was no better. Two of the gas burners worked properly, enough for French toast or a pot of chicken curry, but certainly not for anything more elaborate. On the Fourth of July, I cooked pork chops, spinach, and sweet potatoes, a meal that just about strained the capacity of the stove to catastrophic failure. Early, perhaps the third week into our lease, we detached the kitchen smoke alarm. I prefer cast iron, and to cook properly in cast iron, one needs to heat the oiled metal till it splutters and blows thin smoke. The sink filled with flies, our milk went sour every Monday after Sunday shopping as though cursed, and I could barely manage to maintain a baseline threshold of cleanliness. No matter how much effort I put into scrubbing the Tupperware we used instead of china, grime seemed to accumulate in the corners with disturbing regularity. A minor tragedy. But in summation, the many minor tragedies of 600 Park Place made normal life a near impossibility. No air conditioning, broken windows, missing light fixtures, crumbling plaster, water damage, and the occasional rodent renter. Like with human cohabitants, the mouse demands a degree of privacy. When encountered in the middle of the night, on the way to the fridge for a sip of spoilt milk or a piss, the mouse darts for his lair behind the plastic garbage can. The intruder, equally startled and embarrassed, sidesteps towards his final destination with a nod of recognition, eyes turned down to avoid obligatory conversation.

The Franklin Avenue Shuttle runs above ground past Park Place. Every morning, I crossed the street, bounded up two flights of narrow stairs and snagged the train on its brief bobble between Prospect Park and Franklin. At night, however, the train still operated with the same regularity, departing in seven-minute intervals, or thereabouts depending on the style of the conductor on duty. Trains really do chug, I learned this summer: they clatter and rattle rhythmically like a predictable jazz drum kit warming up for a solo. Have you ever lived under the train tracks? Eventually, you fall asleep in a hypnotic daze, pounded into bewilderment by the continual crush of steel wheels on steel tracks. It is not a restful sleep, the slumber of those living under train tracks. But like Alvy, Woody Allen’s delicious nebechal who lives under a rollercoaster in Annie Hall, the trauma of mechanical motion becomes a part of ordinary life. I think I will miss the sound of the subway. An empty space will open in my sleeping mind, and something nasty will want to creep in, a hairy ball of waking neuroses. Right now, the train protects me from unconsciously turning daylight horrors about my palms; soon, I will need to face the plumber or the broker banging at the door and demanding to show the apartment to two clients who ‘came all the way from Texas.’ 

Time goes nowhere on Park Place. The first day I moved in, an old man with a cane was leaning against the front door, his mouth pinched in and thick lines curled around his cheeks. His skin was the truest expression of mahogany I have ever seen, a deep burnished brown that reflected the sun in mesmerizing rainbow spirals. He wore a beret. I saw him twice a day, every day, and I might say hello and ask how he was doing, or I might just nod and open the door. The entire neighborhood wobbled in place on its axis, like that man—name forever unknown—or a gyroscope kept standing only by its own spiral energy. Young kids on scooters blew past under the tracks, shot a basketball through a makeshift hoop they hammered to a chain link fence, and played with Nerf guns. They grow into the same kids who gossip and kiss on stoops, feed and taunt a tabby cat that disappeared in week eight, posture with hands stuck in lowslung jeans pockets, tilt straight-brim hats back and swagger in loose pure white wife beaters. They grow into the same guys who drink from cans in brown paper bags, feed and taunt the girls who sling ass in tight jeans and gossip on smartphones, the same guys who hang on the stoops of the bodega and smoke before bed, who get gray hairs and fat necks that bubble up around their once strong jaws, whose biceps sag and bellies swell in those once loose wife beaters, who lose those wives and watch their kids sit on stoops and then sit themselves, all day, until it is sufficiently late to stagger up the stairs with the help of a cane to bed. Time is not like the sunflowers that are already wilting in the planters along Park Place. Time does not erupt from seeds and grow into green life and die. Time is like the Franklin Avenue Shuttle, running the same point-to-point circuit forever.

I liked to eat in the African restaurant on Franklin Avenue called Fatima. Inside, there was a long buffet: chicken in mustard sauce, roasted chicken, barbecued goat, oxtail, baked fish, plantains, cassava, beans, and greens cooked with little fish. I am not sure of the exact pricing scheme. Something like five dollars a pound. Even though the restaurant was hot and unventilated, I usually took my Styrofoam plate to a table. From an open plastic jar, I would season my food with a spoonful of red pepper sauce. I could never tell whether I was sweating from the spice or the summer humidity. I am told the owners are from Guinea, which is fine, but I cared more that the food tasted good for the price.

There are four parties interested in the future of Crown Heights: Caribbean and African immigrants, Hasidic Jews, hipsters, and yuppies. The Crown Heights race riot of 1991 involved a clash between Caribbean residents and the Hasidim. Today, there is little open animosity; the tension has shifted to the newest intruders, young white professionals and poseurs. It is becoming easier and easier to mistake hipsters for yuppies, because bicycles, retro clothing, and waxed mustaches have gone mainstream. Nevertheless, the discerning spectator can still distinguish the yuppie from his younger cousin by conspicuous stroller pushing and an intolerance for late-nite partying. I do not think that the Caribbean faction bothers to discriminate. Their attitude, and rightfully so, is hostile. While “gentrification” of Franklin Avenue—the slow but steady displacement of bodegas and barbershops in favor of expensive bars—accompanied a decrease in crime, it also exerted a pressure on the Caribbean community.  The diaspora continues farther out into Brooklyn, where rent and the cost of living remain more reasonable. My brother and I fit into none of the above categories. Viewed with suspicion from all quarters, we went about our nerdy business without interference.

I consider dinner a serious business. Blogging requires the most rigorous of nourishments.

A digression of greatest importance: Here are some points of interest (and caution), in case you ever find yourself hungry in Crown Heights:

David’s Brisket House: The pastrami sandwich at David’s Brisket House is one of the few foods in the world deserving of the adjective “luscious.” For example, “the stronge may eate good looshiouse meate,” from Drant’s translation of Horace’s Medicinable Morall. Its fat percolates through layers of pink meat, bypassing bread, straight onto fingers.  Thin slices of rye prove insufficient to mop it all up. The brisket and corn beef—the “-ed” is silent—are also very good. Voluptuous women like to eat at David’s.

Trini-Gul: Warning: a roti is like a burrito filled with bones. Take care not to break a molar on a curry spiced filling of duck and potatoes. Wash it down with a giant glass of mauby, bitter as poison and a laxative to boot.

Joy & Snook: The curries come with enough rice for two. A salt cured fish drowned in yellow curry, also known as “curry fish,” is quite refreshing.

Super Wings: Not as cheap as possible. In spite of or maybe because of pricing, delicious. Among the many flavors, I like the mild Island BBQ, not too sweet, unlike the lava sauce. Underneath the goop, the wings are crispy as shit, so I might take them back to my house and sprinkle them with curry powder and salt and call it a night.

Tom’s Restaurant: Once upon a time, I ran a half marathon and went to Tom’s for brunch. I ordered the banana walnut pancakes. The rest of the day, I felt full. Once upon a time, I went to Tom’s for breakfast on a weekday. I ordered the sweet potato pancakes. The rest of the week, I felt full.

Café Shane: Like Tom’s but for the rest of us. Slow food, slow music, good omelets.

Chavela’s: Yuppies and a few hipsters go to Chavela’s for the “authentic Mexican” affectation. The brunch and lunch deals are tempting, but I don’t think they even serve dinner. Chavela’s seems to transition into a bar after 5 o’clock. At brunch, they pour you as much coffee as you want and bring you a stale conchita for free, which is reason enough for the stroller humpers to crowd the door.

Barboncino: I am addicted to the Americanos at Barboncino; they add just a little water to a shot of espresso, making for a rich and intense sip or three. The margherita pizza flops around the middle but the fior di latte tastes fresh and appropriately milky and the crust is chewy enough. In short, the best yuppie restaurant on Franklin.

Breukelen Coffee House: The coffee tastes like wood pulp.

Pulp and Bean: The bagels taste like wood pulp.

Little Zelda: A friendly and tiny coffee shop where the better hipster specimens go to preen. Alright Americanos, better than alright croissants. I think they sell quiche, if you’re into that.

The Islands: Having visited a few islands, I thought “island time” was a myth, that is, until I tried to obtain some jerk leg of lamb here on a Saturday night. The one time I did successfully acquire food, I was impressed by the jerk chicken and the curry goat.

James Restaurant: Sometimes, the burger is cheap ($10) and sometimes, the burger is expensive ($16). Enjoy one cocktail and the difference won’t matter.

I could continue, but the pattern is as follows: most of the Caribbean restaurants are worth a visit, because they are memorable, most of the yupster establishments are not, because they are annoying. [End: digression.]

Eventually, the novelty of living in a new place wears thin, and then, what once seemed enchanting feels either familiar or fucking awful. I wish I could stay in Crown Heights instead of returning to Morningside Heights. But I know it is for the best that I must move away. If I had squatted in 600 Park Place, I would have come to hate all that I once loved about the neighborhood. Now, when I go back to Fatima, finish my food, and stand in front of my old building, I can wax nostalgic in peace. The same wild wind will blow over the subway tracks, carrying the same horrible smell of sweat, sandalwood, and weed. The same garbage will rustle in the gutters, uncollected by the same absent authorities. But shady streets are creeping north up Park Place from Flatbush. First Vanderbilt, then Underhill, Washington, and soon, Classon. And in the shade, naught can grow except the delicate petals of discarded Shake Shack wrappers. At least on the concrete, broken glass and used condoms can flourish uninterrupted.

As Paul Bowles wrote of Istanbul, the character of New York “derives from a thousand disparate, nonevident details, only by observing the variations and repetitions of such details can you begin to get an idea of the patterns they form. Thus the importance of wandering.”

The first time I went to the Bronx this summer, I got off the 4 at Burnside Avenue and walked through a block party to Accra, a restaurant named after the capital of Ghana. I stood bewildered before the steam table, staring at hotel pans piled with chicken and whole fish. “What is that,” I said, pointing at an unidentifiable mound of bones in brown sauce. The woman who seemed to be in charge, by virtue of her ladle and authoritative stance, hip and head cocked, shrugged. “What?” She replied. Incapable of simplifying my question, I shrugged, too. We got two large plates of yellow rice, each easily half a kilo, flecked with dry fish and onions, roasted chicken, fried fish, dried salty beef in gravy, plantains, and black-eyed peas. As we ate—and it took a while, mind you, to finish the absurd portions of rice—a preview of the Olympics played on a TV. Flooded in black lights, even around lunchtime, the dining room looked like a diskoteka, a dance hall where partiers could eat sackfuls of yellow rice, if they wanted.

It is a two-mile walk from Accra to the Bronx Botanical Garden. The route follows Jerome Avenue and the 4 tracks up to Fordham Road. One of the filthiest rap songs I’ve ever heard is  “Miss Fordham Road (86’ 87’ 88’)” by Action Bronson. I can’t say that I know how much prostitution still happens along Fordham, but I remember my friend from Yonkers warning me away from the area during my first few weeks in the city. “People get shot.” Now, I’m totally comfortable, and the stretch reminds me of 125^th Street. Vendors hawk incense, bootleg CDs and DVDs, Welch’s Fruit Snacks, and discount clothing. Capital One Bank, Verizon, Foot Locker, Gap? That’s not to suggest that bad things never happen between Jerome and Dr. Theodore Kazimiroff Boulevard. Shit just goes down under the watchful storefronts of chain restaurants and big box retailers.

“Botanical Garden” is an unfair title for what is basically a giant, well-manicured park that contains a few spectacular, curated, carefully cultivated flowerbeds. It’s something like a six mile hike around the perimeter path. There’s an old growth forest in the center, complete with mossy trunks, sound dampening undergrowth, and a canopy to rival downtown Manhattan. (When the city shuts down Park Avenue to motor traffic for the “Summer Streets” promotion, it is possible to run down the center of the street and experience the full effect of New York’s concrete canopy. The skyscrapers tilt in-wards and cast a deep, jungly shade, a humid darkness that blots out vegetable life and brings out man’s more animalistic impulses.) After a visit to the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden, a fragrant and refreshing thorny tangle, I felt hungry for a break on a bench and my novel, Volcano by Shusaku Endo.

The Bronx is like Endo’s title mountain, Akadake: “in youth it gives reign to the passions and burns with fire. It spurts out lava. But when it grows old, it assumes the burden of past evil deeds, and it turns as quiet as a grave.”

My brother napped. Then, we went to dinner on Arthur Avenue.

The second journey began on Starling Avenue. We ate lunch at a Bangladeshi restaurant. (The name escapes the tentative clutches of my memory. Not Neerob, in case you were wondering.) “What do you recommend?” I asked the owner. He checked us out, and said, “the chicken biryani is very good.” My counter-offer: “do you have any little fish?” He smiled. “You like little fish?” Half-way between bemused statement and serious inquiry. “Very much so,” I said, and his smile widened. “We have lots of small fish.”

The waitress brought us two Styrofoam plates of white rice. If I moved to the Bronx from Brooklyn or Morningside Heights, I would need to adjust my diet to include an additional two kilos of rice a week. I suspect the change would improve my long-distance running.

We mixed a spicy stew of baby mackerel and peppers into the rice, alternating bites with two long flat fish lying in an puddle of red oil.

After lunch, we walked to Castle Hill Park. The path runs past a YMCA and Pugsley Creek, a marshy low-slung series of black sludge flats. I found a bench. When the rain started, we retreated to a branch of the New York Public Library, where I finished Volcano. Thirsty, we headed back to Starling Coffee Shop. The owner tried very hard to sell us a samosa, but we stuck with fatty sweet cups of coffee, spiked with chocolate and cardamom. To work up an appetite, we walked past Tremont to Morris Park Avenue. We managed to buy a loaf of Italian bread from Scaglione Brothers’ Bakery & Deli before another cloudburst, a thunderstorm that forced us into Dunkin’ Donuts. Finally, we snuck back to Starling under the cover of a drizzle. Kebab Curry Halal Food, our original lunch destination, was closed around noon. But by six, it had opened for dinner service. Naan, cooked in a tandoor oven and spread with ghee, is mandatory for mopping up a goat curry. I preferred the stiffer roti for scooping black chickpeas.

I needed something sweet, so we bought a plastic carton of jalebi on our way back to the train. Jalebi looks like an incandescent orange pretzel. Made from fried batter and soaked in syrup, jalebi disintegrates into a molasses-rich liquid on the tongue.

Everything above: just the measure for rainy evenings in the Bronx.

I went for breakfast on a Saturday, just as the barbershops started opening for business. Electric clippers, the faintest match strike of a razor strop, rumba on the radio; but I smelled the shaving cream first.

These are my morning smells: black coffee, dried figs, the clean emptiness of yogurt, which has no smell at all, and is intended to fertilize the bowels with cleanliness, and Gillette shaving cream. I am always thirsty for coffee in the morning, as soon as I wake up, and smell someone walking past on the sidewalk with a cup from a corner donut cart. Then, my mouth and nose water and I want coffee. I have not shaved in a few weeks, so I cannot honestly say I miss the scent of shaving cream. I can experience shaving well enough from the voyeur’s vantage point.

In Bakery La Flor, there is a diner counter, a large glass case of pastries, and plastic tables. I picked up my order of huevos con tocineta at the counter and brought it to a table, along with a cup of coffee with milk, which though inferior to black coffee is a necessary substitute in a Mexican bakery. The eggs and bacon came with French fries and a generous portion of buttered bread. Barely awake, no thanks to the soporific subway ride (the N is an exceptionally smooth train, seeming to hover above the rails instead of grinding out wide aching turns), I squeezed out three packets of ketchup on the fries.* Although I felt full after breakfast, I convinced my brother to join me at Cafe con Pan, where we bought pan dulce**, a sugared donut***, and a flaky guayaba and queso concoction. We walked to Sunset Park—the actual park, not the neighborhood—and sat in front of the public swimming pool.

Two drifters, my brother and I, walked into a grocery store and drank too sweet coconut soda. I snagged a plastic baggie of morita chiles. Sunday night, I made a pork stew with chopped shoulder meat, canned tomatoes, summer corn, red kidney beans, and six peppers. My brother tried to toast them in hot oil and filled the apartment and exterior stairwell with tear gas. I ran, doubled over and racked with pain, while he stood, calm, wheezing and stirring the incandescent oil.

For most of the afternoon, we reclined on a grassy hill in Green-Wood Cemetery. In PrairyErth, William Least-Heat Moon describes how he enjoys eating lunch in cemeteries. A visit to Green-Wood served equally well as a digestif. Entering from 23^rd Street, visitors pass through a Gothic gate. It’s some Spirited Away shit. I half expected the dead to rise as hazy shades and float among the tourists. One cannot help but feel like trespasser, crushing the skeletons of the not-too-recently deceased with every footfall. Careful to avoid stepping on graves, we wandered to an isolated knoll. I read a book and sat quietly, caught between the tranquility of an urban sanctuary and its unsettling context.

My sister came in town Thursday night, and she joined us for dinner at Tacos Ricos. The number of taquerias in Sunset Park is overwhelming, and we chose on the basis of positive reviews, location, and instinct. Seated at a long communal table, we sipped cold horchata and waited for our tacos. My favorite, a taco filled with cueritos, had the great sticky slimy gelatinous tug of fresh pork skin.

On the way back to 36^th Street we bisected a block party complete with fire hydrant spraying a thick mist against the backdrop of a dying sun.

The next morning, we returned to Sunset Park, again for a kind of breakfast, dim sum. At 10:30 a.m., we waited thirty minutes for space at a table. Diners are given a number, and a man calls them out, one at a time—in Cantonese!—over a loudspeaker. So we taught ourselves Chinese, packed tight in the lobby with native speakers who disregarded our discomfort. What else were we to do, ask for help?— easier but not nearly as exciting.

East Harbor Seafood Palace prepares a divine har gow, almost transparent, crystalline, the pleated wrapper cradling a giant juicy crunchy shrimp. Red barbecued pork, folded into puff pastry, killed my craving for roast pork buns—forever. We ate clams in black bean sauce, pork and shrimp shumai, snow pea leaf and shrimp dumplings, and a taro cake softer than jello. A gargantuan helping of sauteed greens, enough for a family of six, disappeared over the course of brunch. And we stuffed ourselves with beef rice rolls, fishy sticky rice, and fried glutinous rice balls filled with lotus seed paste.

I cannot say what Sunset Park means. Other than a day, a diversion, an investment of hours, what impression does it leave behind? When rewritten as an accounting of time, the memory ceases to hold significance. Its meaningfulness leaks out, filtered through plaster into an insubstantial gruel. Left alone, as mysterious as a barbershop, it is a thicker and richer dish.

———

*The proper procedure for extricating ketchup from a foil packet is as follows: 1) Tear open along the perforated edge to make a small slit. The opening should not extend more than two millimeters into the body of the packet, or else the volume of flow will be sub-optimal. 2) Position the packet at an oblique angle to the plate, downwards. 3) Squeeze, using the tip of the thumb and the first joint of the index finger, from the very back end of the packet to the front. Do not be afraid to exercise a good amount of force on the packet. 4) Stop before the beginning of the slit. 5) Repeat until all available ketchup has been extracted.

The largest ketchup packet in the world weighs 1,500 pounds. That is enough ketchup for 28,571 servings of huevos con tocineta, if customers are ordinarily provided with standard issue condiment sachets, and if they use approximately three sachets per serving. The exceptionally crispy and, well, potato-y fries at La Flor demand exactly three packets, that is, if customers order their eggs over easy, and if they sop up the yolk with the fries, not the bread.

**One of my friends, who shall remain anonymous but has appeared numerous times in my adventure writing, told me on a trip to East Harlem, “I always order pan dulce.” Implying, of course, that I must always order pan dulce, too. So now, every time I enter a bakery of Hispanic extraction, which is an event of some regularity, I ask for pan dulce. Often, the staff looks at me as though I am insane, pleads ignorance, or simply shrugs with indifference. In Lockhart, Texas, I finally received a positive response, some recognition that pan dulce is not a figment of my friend’s warped gastronomic imagination. A sweet bread, as the name implies, eggy, crusted with sugar and cinnamon. Like the pineapple buns available at Chinese bakeries—because pineapple buns contain no pineapple, artificial or otherwise. Just that crumbly sugar topping. The pan dulce from Cafe con Pan lacked my familiar sugaring, though the actual pastry tasted similar to other, unnamed specimens in the pan dulce family.

***When I originally made this annotation, I am sure I had something marginally interesting to note about the sugared donut. Oh, yes: I will hereinafter refuse to write the word “doughnut.” That is an incorrect spelling. The only acceptable spelling—hell, the only properly American spelling, is donut.  As in the “donuts strawberry-glazed” of Albert Goldbarth’s poem “All-Nite Donuts.”

Save my City Aurora —Message written on a t-shirt, worn at a vigil for the victims of a mass shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado.

Let me bring you up to speed. My name is Wayne Campbell. I live in Aurora, Illinois, which is a suburb of Chicago. Excellent. —Wayne’s World (1992).

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, there are 29 towns named “Aurora” in the United States. Before Friday, July 20^th, 2012, most Americans of a certain age and cultural persuasion had heard of one, the home of Wayne Campbell and Garth Algar, two twenty-somethings who host a public access show out of Wayne’s basement. The movie Wayne’s World, released in 1992, was based on a popular Saturday Night Live sketch of the same name starring Mike Myers as Wayne and Dana Carvey as Garth. “Aurora” is a kind of Anytown, representative of boring, straight, stiff, white American life. It’s the perfect setting for Wayne and Garth’s bizarre antics, including a “Bohemian Rhapsody” sing-along, Garth’s homemade Taser, and sticking it to “the man,” figured as a rich old dressed-up dude whom Wayne accosts at a traffic light with a request for “Grey Poupon.” Although Aurora is a boring-as-hell middle-American pit, in Wayne’s World, it becomes surreal, a place where the laws of probability devolve and absurdity feels just par for the course. The great joke of Wayne’s World plays out in the tension between Aurora’s obvious banality and Wayne and Garth’s peculiar fantasies. Wayne and Garth radiate an electromagnetic field that distorts Aurora’s diners and guitar shops into a theme park populated by post-adolescent grotesques.

My favorite scene takes place in Stan Mikita’s Donuts, an “excellent munch post.” The manager, Glen, works 24 hours a day, or so Wayne says. Glen is a heavy-set, Cro-Magnon fellow, pink shirt, white pants, face perpetually twisted into a comical frown. “I’d never done a crazy thing in my life before that night. Why is it, if a man kills another man in battle it’s called heroic, yet if he kills a man in the heat of passion, it’s called murder?” He delivers these lines to the camera with the utmost seriousness, a lunatic fever almost boiling over in his voice. Necessarily, Wayne’s World immediately rejects Glen’s extrapolation of military logic—an ideology that rationalizes murder—into everyday, domestic life. Wayne grabs the camera back, as though to imply that such an extrapolation is, indeed, insane. Yet, moments later, Wayne and company are seated at a table drinking coffee and eating crullers when Wayne accidentally catches the attention of his ex-girlfriend, Stacy. Like Glen, Stacy is a caricature of suburban insanity. Instead of the neighborhood psychopath—the quiet guy next door who “goes postal”—Stacy stands-in for a deranged, rejected lover. “Happy Anniversary, Wayne,” Stacy says as she totters over on high heels, lugging a pink gift-wrapped box. “Stacy, we broke up two months ago,” Wayne replies. “Don’t you want to open your present?” “If it’s a severed head, I’m going to be very upset.” But Wayne acquiesces and tears off the wrapping, revealing some strange wooden shelving. “What is it?” “It’s a gun rack.” “A gun rack. I don’t even own a gun, let alone many guns that would necessitate an entire rack. What am I going to do with a gun rack?” The empty gun rack expresses Stacy’s masochistic desire for an absent sexual violence. Although that reading makes sense in the context of Wayne’s World’s half-kidding misogyny—Wayne’s refrain, “she will be mine”—it fails to account for a proximal, associative relationship with Glen’s psychopathy. If the connection between Glen and Stacy resists direct analysis, it suggests that militarized, “warrior” violence is continuously repressed in domestic settings. Following the implicit logic of Wayne’s World, while the expression of violence in suburbia is socially unacceptable, illegal, and immoral, it cannot be avoided. The rehearsal of military activity, of professionalized violence, by civilians, in an everyday milieu, is inevitable.

Therefore, the mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado, a Denver suburb, has more in common with 1992 blockbuster comedy hit Wayne’s World than just its setting. I do not intend to trivialize the tragedy. But I do think that the juxtaposition of the real, tragic events of one Aurora with the fictional, comic events of another prompts two related questions: how does the media treat “tragedy” and violence; and why are we fascinated by the spectacle of suburban violence? Bringing Aurora, Colorado and the Aurora, Illinois of Wayne’s World into proximity will make some complacent thinkers uncomfortable, because it automatically indicts a variety of disaster pornography that exploits the suffering of others for our pleasure. Reading discretion is advised.

On July 20^th, 2012, James Holmes put on a bulletproof, Kevlar vest and combat gear, armed himself with an AR-15 rifle—capable of firing two to three rounds a second from a 100-round drum magazine—an 870 Remington 12-gauge shotgun, a .40-caliber Glock handgun, and two canisters of tear gas, and entered a movie theater showing the midnight premiere of The Dark Knight Rises, the latest installment in the Batman series. Holmes purchased his vest, pistol magazine, magazine pouch, and a knife from TacticalGear.com, a company that services military and police officers, as well as civilians. When Holmes entered the theater, moviegoers initially thought that he was part of the show. Then, he set off his tear gas and opened fire, killing 12 people and wounding 58. Much digital newsprint has been spilled speculating on the relationship between the violent Batman movie and the attack, and on the effect of the shooting on gun control laws. Convention dictates that these two speculations accompany media coverage: because there must be something wrong with both our culture and our government to have catalyzed and permitted such an atrocity. From my brief and regrettably incomplete outline of the events, a case could be made for a Waynesworldian displacement of military violence into everyday life. But that argument would engage in the same ideology as other media coverage that turned the tragedy into a spectacle.

The volume of media coverage surrounding the attack was overwhelming. A Google News search for “Aurora” between July 20^th and July 21^st returns 107,000 results, and “Aurora shooting” returns 15,900. Expand that volume exponentially to account for unauthorized commentary on Twitter and Facebook. It seemed as though every other shout-out into social media space concerned the shootings. Between traditional and new media, the story has been investigated from every fathomable position. To feed the frenzy for information, editors—and the lay public—have been generating redundant content that, while sensitive to the demands of journalistic ethics, is nevertheless overwhelming. Even if the substance of one article is not sensational, in aggregate, 15,900 articles sensationalize the incident. The amount of content transforms the reader into a spectator who gazes on Aurora from a distance, reviewing the events as they are refracted through multiple media lenses. The shooting and its aftermath—the press conferences and vigils and pundits—appear nothing more than performances for a studio audience. In effect, the news spectacularizes and becomes spectacular as a consequence of its urgent, hysterical personality. Aurora is one spectacle; the news about Aurora is another.

Although the media is merely satisfying the demands of a hungry audience, to some extent, the media creates demand via the expectation of voluminous content. The public can never be sated, not because its appetite is infinite, but because it sees an infinite smorgasbord before it. Overconsumption of news media follows from overexposure. The problem is thus distributed between producers and consumers of content. We fixate on Aurora because it gives us a perverse pleasure: it satisfies our need to know. The sense of an enigma—and the promise that it will be resolved in that next article, just one more article!—replicates the structure of the TV drama or the pulp paperback. In the case of Aurora, or any similar tragedy, we face an uncontrollable cliffhanger, the wild, unregulated production of suspense. Reading about the shooting, we get the same thrill as watching a good movie or reading a comic book. We relish in coming to know the suffering of others. And we understand the very intense wrongness of that impulse, and we protect ourselves from coming to know our own enigma: why we care about the suffering of 70-some-odd people somewhere else. We do not care because we have an excellent capacity for empathy, though we might feel awful for the victims and scared for ourselves. We care because it is a really good story. The news coverage of Aurora is the sadistic counterpart to Stacy’s masochism; insofar as the suffering of others is the story of Aurora, we take our daily pleasure from pain. Whether watching a natural disaster unfold on network television or reading about James Holmes’s high school days, we are helpless before the allure of the spectacular tragedy.

The shooting in Aurora is like Wayne’s World gone bad. Wayne’s World expresses James Holmes’s psychotic desires without acting them out: we hear the horrifying dreams of “mental” characters with a punctual regularity, even though none of those dreams come true. Like American Beauty, which explores the schizophrenic rupture of violence in a suburban setting, Wayne’s World pressures the suburb to give up its nightmarish cravings, its violent potential. Rather than reify that potential, however, Wayne’s World lances the pustule with dark humor: psychopathic violence translates into a joke. The assumption that ‘the suburbs contain an intrinsic capacity for violence that must and will be released’ is the implicit theme of the tragedy in Aurora, too. The New York Times even published an article headlined, “Aurora, an ‘All-America City,’ Left to Search for Answers.” According to these schematics, there is something inherently wrong with suburbia, something repressed in the idea of ‘All-American-ness,’ that produces violence. Perhaps, from a sociological standpoint, that proposition is partially true. But the narrative of the “dark suburbs” is, like the spectacular tragedy, a self-fulfilling prophecy. To believe in the psychopathy of the suburbs is to will that psychopathy into existence. And we suburbanites commit that crime on a daily basis, because the boredom of suburban life forecloses enigma. The tragedy of the suburbs is that there is no tragedy. So we must write it ourselves, in our retrospective interpretations of suburban tragedy, and in the generation of those tragedies by psychopathic, aberrant, individual action.

Can you imagine a Wayne’s World in which Glen’s fantasy comes to life, or in which Garth’s story about a Twilight Zone episode (“Ever see the Twilight Zone where the guy signed a contract and they cut out his tongue and it wouldn’t die”) is acted out? A Wayne’s World in which Aurora, Illinois and Aurora, Colorado converge? Not such a party after all. But, at the very least, it would be spectacular.

I’ve had plenty of Joe jobs. Nothing I’d call a career. Let me put it this way. I have an extensive collection of nametags and hairnets. Okay, I still live with my parents, which I admit is both bogus and sad. But at least I’ve got an amazing cable access show. And I still know how to party.

I had read about the Ganesh Temple online. It is an infrequent recommendation on the blunter of foodie blogrolls—the type that make claims to authenticity, that disregard the complexity of personal politics in favor of deliciousness, that dismiss ethics as academic hogwash, except when the adoption of an ethical stance, always disingenuous, authorizes an aesthetic position. There is a fascinating anthropology, yet to be written, of food blogs, the majority of which excuse the most mediocre imperial violences—meaning the most rote and banal, not necessarily poorly executed—as irrelevant to the comparative pleasure of the body. The narcissism of these blogs is terrifying but not surprising. Thinking is painful and interferes with the hedonist’s yawn. The realization that all pleasure comes at the expense of another, one who may be trained to consider such extortion pleasurable in turn, is of course incompatible with the hedonist’s orientation to the world. Rather than rotate the structural nature of hedonism about in the mind like a smooth pebble on the tongue, the hedonist elects to never think at all. That, in my estimation, is the great tragedy of foodie politics: all so-called complexity and philosophy and thought swivels to peer at the sum of hedonism like a foul rotting daffodil turning to the sun. Immanent critique, institutional critique, is impossible as long as we validate the usefulness of our conclusions on the basis of their sadomasochistic value. After all, the asceticism of the vegan is no better than the wallowing of the glutton: a satisfaction in deprivation follows the same logic, and in fact converges with, the doxa of overeating: the minor sublimity of punishment.

On the train ride, one hour and twenty-seven minutes from the four to the seven, I hung my head between my knees. I saw legs scabbed over with sun spots, toenails painted fuschia; her daughter’s moonstone.

The walk to the Ganesh Temple from the Flushing Main Street stop must be close to a mile. In the heat I sweated and wanted the giant watermelons heaped in cardboard boxes at the Chinese markets, or the white ribbed footballs called golden squashes that seemed, from their oracularity, cool stones dug from the bottom of a riverbed. The neighborhood looked suburban and dinged around the door handles. Women wobbled under the weight of their umbrellas. While carrying a camera and mike, we feel like feds dispatched to monitor a criminal conspiracy. But the charge of criminality is reflexive. We are the interlopers, inadvertent violators of social norms, uncomfortably unaware of the most basic protocols. Yet, the burden of ethnographic discovery has been lifted from our sufficiently yoked shoulders. Other eaters before us have foreclosed the complication of “discovering” a foreign site, or at least the ignorant, self-deceptive fun of imperial cartography. The energy of ethnography has been exhausted. We must identify alternative but perhaps equally pernicious motives for invading these spaces. If the most obvious and the easiest—to map the unknown—is neutralized, then others, with a greater capacitance for ethical possibility, may arise.

In the canteen, we ate alu bonda, onion uttapam, idiyappam, and rava dosa, and drank Madras coffee with two tablespoons of sugar. A Hindi cartoon played on a big screen TV. Kids ran around the tables while their parents stacked dirty cafeteria trays. I nibbled on a square of almond cake and breathed deep of black and green cardamom. No one was busting a nut. I felt relaxed.

[In the Ganesh Temple the offerings warm and close as waxy flesh.]

For dinner, we rode back down Roosevelt Avenue, into Jackson Heights. I walked into an ordinary storefront advertising electronics, passed through shelves of new rubber and metal widgets, and stumbled into a sewing room. After backtracking out of the basement, we found our destination, a T-Mobile store. At the far end, just visible from the door, there’s a counter and a glass case holding trays of food. One table and a bar with a few stools, that’s it, and as my brother and I shared a bowl of thenthuk, the store filled with families. The soup, with its soft floating fragments of dough, reminded me of chicken and dumplings. I associate chicken and dumplings with the hottest most miserable days of summer, because one year I went to camp and the only tolerable food they served was a glutinous stew of thick-ass dough and dark meat chicken. In the July jungle heat, steamy off the reservoir, I came to love a hearty porridge. Campers downed glasses of sweet powdered drink from plastic pitchers. The counselors told us that the red koolaid concoction was made from wringing out the bug zappers on the back of the mess hall. In the evenings, I went to my first dances and wandered around between pre-pubescent couples, horribly awkward—not that that has changed, particularly—and wondered about those myths: did they really make juice from mosquito abdomens? would you get butt rot from wearing a wet swimsuit too long? was “Buffalo Soldier” Bob Marley’s best? I hated camp, but it remains one of my aesthetic anchors, a still point of nostalgia in a floating world. Memories from that summer are an index of metaphor. Rivers smell like the Black River, gunpowder smells like the .22s we shot at targets twenty feet off, and the best ice cream tastes like a foamy push-pop and fireworks on the fourth of July rupturing the blackest Ozark sky.

We also ordered momos, Tibetan dumplings, brothy and stuffed with beef and greens. I bit off a tiny corner and drank the soup inside, but my brother struggled, slopping the soup all over his plate. I learned to eat soup dumplings on a “date to see if you want to go on a date,” you know, the arrangement wherein you and a potential significant other do a date-like activity accompanied by friends. Theoretically, the presence of other people defuses the threat of sustained one-on-one interaction. The gathering lets the pre-daters figure out whether a real date is worth the investment. And hey, it’s not such a bad way to go bowling or try a new restaurant. Probably not a best practice for exploring Flushing, though. The hour plus train ride both directions, half-day commitment on location, and absolutely unfamiliar, well, everything, make that particular “how about we” less than optimal. Unfortunate, too, for me, because she was a nice girl. She did teach me how to eat a soup dumpling. None of my brother’s “dates to see if you want to go on a date” at Great Wall in New Haven involved soup dumplings. Unlucky him.

Perspiring from soup and roasted chilis, we staggered to Rajbhog and drank a sweet lassi. Two greying Indian men yelled at each other across the café. We shared gulab jamun, plain burfi, and bundi ladoo. Before leaving Jackson Heights, I stood outside the café and let the ache of sugar course over my gums and infect my jawbone. Indian sweets are a luscious headache. Guilty of all the charges I leverage against others, I feel stuck in a narrowing cave, sticky with subterranean mud. Claustrophobia grips my rib cage. I can focus on the headache and forget the threat of entombment in its cold silvery pleasure. But with every second of indulgence I slide deeper into the crushing maw of the underground.