As things were timed, I went without a meal. Airport food
prospects are dismal for me even under normal circumstances. In Seattle, the
only choices near my departure gate were McDonald’s or a fish chowder spot. Not
real options for a quirky vegetarian. (Side note: Why is it that McD’s is
finally introducing a veggie burger in Europe but not in North America?) By the
time I figured out NYC transit and dealt with a subway delay due to evening
maintenance—this week only, of course—I got to my Chelsea hotel at 10:57. Whole
Foods, my go-to for a healthy meal, closes at 11 and I couldn’t negotiate the
mechanics of self check-in on time to drop off my suitcase, run the block and a
half, race in and grab any salad with the word kale or citrus.
Yep, Whole Foods had the nerve to get some shut-eye.
That left me walking the streets of Chelsea, passing on a
24-hour diner with one patron on a stool and searching the shelves at 7-Eleven.
I settled on a highly unhealthy pint of Ben & Jerry’s cookie dough ice cream
and then, just to be sure I wouldn’t awaken hungry in the night, opted for a
cheeseless Domino’s pizza.
How the hell did I from healthy Whole Foods to total junk
food? Slippery slope. Maybe it’s what I wanted all along. Maybe I had something
to do with that medical emergency on the plane at SeaTac that resulted
paramedics coming aboard and a family having to get off. Ice cream! And pizza! Let
this be my What-Happens-in-New-York-City moment.
The woman taking my pizza order made no effort to repress
her disgust. “You want no cheese.” Not posed as a question. More like a wad of
phlegm she was spitting back to me. If there was any subtext, it was, Why haven’t I quit this f*#king job? If
she had the chutzpah of The Soup Nazi, she’d have declared, “No pizza for you.”
The best she could do was deny me spinach as a topping. “It’ll be burnt.” Huh? “If
the pizza has no cheese, the spinach is gonna burn.” Pretty sure she made that
up. How would she even know? I got the sense “hold the cheese” wasn’t a thing.
Translation: You wanna f*#k with me, I’m
gonna f*#k with you. So I asked for onions. If they burn, I like ’em even
more.
I’m sure there was a lot still happening beyond the two
blocks I walked to grab dinner. (Pizza and ice cream! Together!) And I realize
Whole Foods should not be a Big Apple barometer. The weird thing about walking
around Manhattan is, after a while, it always seems I’m either walking in
circles or the same few establishments have multiplied in a bad retail cloning
experiment: Duane Reade drugstore, Le Pain Quotidien, Pret à
Manger, nail salons, souvenir shops and Johnny’s/Jimmy’s/Joey’s Pizza. (Apparently
women know enough not to ascribe their name with mediocre pizza by the slice.
Yeah, New York, I called your pizza mediocre. But then maybe I carry grudges. None
of these guys, not Johnny, not Jimmy, not Joey, have ever had vegan pizza in
the window. Not once.)
I could have headed back out in search of non-Whole Foods
night life after eating every morsel of my pizza and ice cream. (Surely it
would take a few hours to go up two waist sizes.) Of all nights, this first
night would be the easiest for me to go yawn-free until closing time—whenever that
is—in some gay bar in Chelsea or Greenwich Village. (That’s where they are, isn’t
it?) Midnight is only 9 p.m. back home, 2 a.m. is only…yeah, yeah, you can do
the math. But it’s telling that I Googled Whole Foods before my trip but not
gay bars. I decided I’d rather stay in and read the label of my colorful Ben
& Jerry’s pint, fretting over how much fat and how many calories were in
each mouthful. It led to a different kind of action. I promptly Googled my jogging
route to the High Line and beyond and then set my alarm for eight, an Are-you-crazy?! five in the morning back
in Vancouver.
I really like New York City. I just don’t do it the way
everyone says you’re supposed to. Maybe I’m not cut out for this city. Maybe I
should be booking trips to Omaha or Saskatoon instead. But I’ll take it in the
way I want to, all the shoulds and supposed tos be damned. And maybe that’s
pretty close to the New Yorker mindset after all.
No comments:
Post a Comment