FOOD COURT JESTERS

As the Most Blessedest Day of All Year approaches, it becomes necessary to enter stores, even malls. Or in our case, “Collections.” Yesterday Stavros and I—following a hearty breakfast of Ikea-brand frozen pancakes and my special homemade English muffin breakfast sandwiches—did both.

I believe I have mentioned this assortment of shops before. This is a mall so vast it is on both sides of the same street, as crazy as that sounds! LOL!

We never go over to the south side, though, because it is mostly made up of Neiman-Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue. Stavros and I prefer stores like Club Monaco (pronounced Muh-NAH-ko) and Urban Outfitters. If a store doesn’t deafen us with ear-splitting decibels of shitty music, we ain’t going in.

After an hour or so of riding escalators and elevators and dodging ugly teenagers and those people who just suddenly stop walking for no reason when in malls, I was nearly faint from hunger.

“I need soup. Let’s go to the food court,” I told my love.

“Okay,” he replied.

(We were kind of tired by then so the repartee wasn’t as snappy as usual.)

Because the escalators are only placed nearby stores no one wants to go to (the all-candy-apple emporium; the thousand-dollar pen store; the chairs for schizophrenics outlet; etc), we had to take the elevator up to the food court. Normally one wouldn’t view riding an elevator as a negative, but at the Collection, the two elevators are impossibly slow and there are always a couple of hundred meatheads clogging up the entrances and it’s hard to get on one in under a half hour or so. Luck was on our side and one of them was opening just as we approached. There was a lady in a wheelchair accompanied by her husband, a toddler, and a sleeping infant in a stroller. Why can’t they take the stairs? I thought bitterly, as they rolled in, hogging most of the elevator. We forced our way in as a tall girl with a luxurious mane of chestnut hair stood in indecision just outside the doors.

“Come on in!” I said generously, “There’s plenty of room!” Gesturing to the vastness of the elevator, I accidently backhanded the lady in the wheelchair.

“Excuse me,” she mumbled.

“How rude,” I whispered to Stavros, as the brunette finally made up her mind and stepped onto the elevator.

We rode in slow motion up to the second floor. The rear of the elevator is all glass and looks out onto the mall. Stavros and I turned and gazed out at all the holiday mayhem. The photo-with-Santa opportunity at the Collection consists of a much more elaborate setting than the one I visited as a child. Here, Santa lives in a castle. A two-story castle, overflowing with maidens inexplicably dressed in Ren-Faire garb. We peered down at Santa’s throne where a small boy huddled, weeping.

“WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!” Stavros suddenly shouted out of the blue, startling the elevator’s other passengers and waking the sleeping baby, who began to wail at once.

“Stavros!” I said, frowning.

“I’m just kidding,” he said, looking exasperated, and the doors opened.

We stepped out and I realized at once that the food court was on the third floor.

“Oh, God,” I said, looking around for an escalator. “Come on.” I took Stavros’s hand and dragged him along, past the underpants for hookers store and the soap made from soybeans shop.

“Whoa,” I cried, once we stepped onto the moving stairs, arms windmilling.

“What’s wrong?” asked Stavros, gripping my wrist.

“I just lost my balance, those hanging things…” I waved in the direction of the giant Christmas puppets suspended from the ceiling, which is about a thousand feet high.

“What are those?” Stavros asked.

“They are…jesters,” I replied.

“Oh.”

Once at the food court, I looked around at the selection. There was a salad place (no), a “Sbarro” (no, I can’t even say that word), a Chinese place, a Zoup!, (no, no) a deli and a place called “Honey Tree” (maybe and no). I hesitantly approached the deli.

“I want soup, what’s the soup?” I asked.

No one responded since I hadn't really directed my question to anyone and then I saw the board: Chicken noodle, matzoh ball, or white bean chicken chili. Chicken noodle sounded safest, so I ordered that, plus a side of pickles. In a flash my order appeared. Everything seemed to be in order except for the old pickles, which I quickly exchanged for new.

We took a table overlooking the parking lot and grimly grey sky. I peeled back the lid of my soup and saw with disappointment that it was the Just broth! version of soup, the kind where they scoop noodles or rice or a matzoh ball in. After I added two salts and two peppers it had a vague flavor, but not very much so I picked up the package of Saltines they provided.

“What the…Stavros! Look at this!” I commanded.

Stavros reached over and took the Saltines from my hand and turned the package over.

“I can’t believe it,” he said.

“Yeah, what is that? Some kind of cost-cutting measure?”

ONE SALTINE. When would you ever want just one Saltine? What the hell sort of a gyp is that?

Well, I’ll tell you, it didn’t make the soup any better at all. To make matters worse, an event I was trying to put out of my mind forever surfaced as I was trying to swallow a large glob of noodles and I nearly threw up. I had to tell Stavros about it; I had to try to expunge the memory.

“When we were in the Apple store….” I began.

Our first stop had been to pick up an item I special ordered for the new phone Stavros gave me for my birthday. Inside the store had been an older lady with an oldish golden retriever who was with a man pulling a large suitcase. The suitcase was unzipped and open when we walked in and I noticed two ugly decorative pillows inside and a large plastic-wrapped item.

He closed the suitcase before I could fully inspect its contents, however, so I turned my attention to the dog, who I had assumed was a seeing-eye dog and unpettable. He wore a vest as those dogs do, but this one, instead of reading, “Don’t pet me!” or whatever they say, said “Pet me! I’m friendly!” so I reached down and gave him the petting of his life. Stavros joined in and we gave him a full-body rubdown for a few minutes until the lady and the suitcase man left the store.

“The dog we were petting…he had a booger or something on his face and it got on my hand,” I continued, retching slightly.

“What? A booger? How do you know? Was it a glob? Or mucus?”

My mind reeled as I relived the sight of the grayish glob glistening wetly on my knuckle. I’d tried to wipe it on my receipt but it dissolved into smaller chunks and just spread around further.

“Yes,” I answered. “It was…mucus.”

“Like this?” He poked at a noodle on the edge of my Styrofoam bowl.

“Don’t.”

“Like this?” He lifted the noodle by its edge and let it flop back down.

“I mean it. Don’t.” I pushed the tray away.

At this point I have to believe that Stavros wanted our relationship to cross the barfing-in-front-of-each-other line, but I had to put my foot down. I stood up and like the gentleman he is, he bussed my tray for me and dropped the jokes.

My stomach back on solid ground, we strode out of the food court and back into the teeming madness.

“Let’s go to SEE.”

“Ok,” I said, knowing full well that my beloved has 20/20 vision.

He tried on a variety of frames with the help of a heavily made-up “associate,” who wanted him to make an appointment for an exam.

“Well….” he hem-hawed, “I’ll come back this week. Do those frames have an item number I can write down?”

“Yes,” she said, “I’ll just enter it into the system for you so when you come in we can find them.”

I could tell by Stavros’s body language (shoulders slumped, chin lowered in despair) that he’d wanted to try to find them online for less.

“Come along, my babboo,” I said, taking his arm, and we strolled out of the Collection and immediately became lost and could not find the car for a half hour.

GUEST POST--TOAST IS TOAST WITH ANDRE AND CINDY

Today's guest post is from local aesthete and man of arts and letters, Andre Prudhomme.

Thoughts of grand breakfasts swam through our heads as the night of December 1st drew to a close—I had taken a dear friend to Flint to pick up a quantity of good drywall, and neglecting dinner, found myself very hungry by the end of the night. Luckily I’d been able to furnish my insides with a thick morass of stout, but Cindy hadn’t the option to supplement solid food for good beer, so she took to pretzel rods, and we lumbered through the night. Needless to say, upon waking we found ourselves extremely famished.

“Breakfast. Where do you wanna go?”

“Well, it’s either Toast or Sam’s,” Cindy sighed.

We have our regular haunts, but rising after noon, those certain standbys were cut in half. So we found ourselves not thinking too hard, and with these two options.

“Let’s go to Sam's,” Cindy suggested, “You’re hungry, it’d be good.”

“Maybe... No, let’s go to Toast, the coffee...” Coffee is such an intimate part of the morning, and truthfully, the coffee at Sam's is not to standard. Toast became the victor.

As usual, when arriving at Toast, we found the back parking lot to be populated by cars belonging to aloof assholes; their haphazard idea of parking left little room for our little vehicle. Scuttling through the causeway I noticed a sign on the door of the adjacent restaurant giving hours, 4-9 PM, Friday and Saturday. I thought aloud, “My, that place must be fantastic!” Luckily the restaurant held only lunchgoers and not the usual hungover elites in for their weekly shovelful of “The Cure.”

It being a Wednesday we were able to seat ourselves and chose a table under a newly decorated wall, adorned with what must be the Christmas refuse of Anna’s Coffee Shop (God bless her).

We promptly ordered water and coffee and settled in with the menus, I determined to stray from the bacon and gouda omelet, my usual.

As quickly as we received our beverages Cindy commented, “This is going to be a while.”

Already she observed (what I later deduced) to be the waiter, and then a second man in the kitchen, operating the grill and dishwashing duties, taking on even the third task of bussing. The duo was operating the entire establishment.
Of course there was a table of demanding old ladies gumming up the works, so this meager staff (surely determined by some colleague’s “illness”) were already sinking into what seemed a maelstrom of gigantic proportions.

Our server was finally able to make it back for our order (and refill the coffee); Cindy deciding on oatmeal with a side of sausage and I choosing the Farmer’s Omelet, not a profound choice, but a great morning standby. Seeing as it had been nearly 24 hours since I’d eaten, I longed for the gluttonous portion.

As always Cindy was correct in her prediction—we talked of the week’s events, orated wild tales for our salt and pepper shakers (small bears in aprons), and waited for our order.

Finally the hustling server delivered a bowl of grey matter which Cindy immediately deemed “Soupy”; I with my lifelong abstinence of oatmeal couldn’t tell, but the porridge looked awfully drab and tasteless.

More revolting to me was the plateful of breakfast I received: the home fries appeared to be mutated raisins mixed with fried cheese and possibly pancake batter, accompanied by a pile of eggs and sausage lumps. A Farmer’s Omelet houses sausage, green peppers, onions, potatoes, and American cheese—this pile exhibited some vegetable pieces probably frozen around last Christmas (resurrected for this meal) with a portion of cheese lodged at the south end of the omelet, and uncertain trunks of sausage scattered about. As on the side, the potatoes exhibited a small, wrinkled appearance. However, in the omelet these tuberous pieces were at least edible, being soaked in the watery, half cooked egg like brine, which poorly housed this collage.

As soon as I saw that white runoff of the eggs I became appalled, pouring some obscenity across the table and cursing the very nook I had chosen for our repast. The gruel and sausages seemed to appease Cindy, though satisfaction certainly didn’t emanate from her side of the table. I struggled through, leaving a plate of withered potatoes astride a soupy remainder, and a sad side of dry rye on a small plate by the coffee. Yes, as lame as it is, even the toast was subpar.

R.I.P. "ANNA"

 ✝


The end of an era.