Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Hardly Unwanted; plus photo update from North Beach
This one is in honor of the old crowd. Two weekends ago Nool came to visit and nine of us - nine! - who’d gone to college together a very long time ago got together for drinks and hunan food. I took over 70 photos but honestly they came out so badly they’re not worth sharing with anyone who isn’t in them. Last weekend was a movie with two of that crowd, both local, both brilliant and fabulous company. And now tomorrow night I’ll be dining somewhere outrageous with another old classmate who’s stopping by on his peripatetic path, whose company I’ve much missed. In honor of the old college crowd, then, and of our sustenance those byegone days, I offer you thusly:
It was one of several college evenings of which my recollection is spotty - flashes of hilarity and poignancy interspersed among periods of quiet meditation and inward journeying. I particularly recall this night, though, because I was on a field trip, far form the familiar comforts of my comprehensively-furnished bedroom. I had left that cloister behind me to sit up all night with Nool down at the foot of Broad Street in South Philly, in the parking lot of the Spectrum.
This was 1984 or ‘85, an era in which my computer literacy course at Big-Time University focused solely on programming in PASCAL, and even the most sophisticated home relied entirely on land-line telephones for all outside communication. There was no internet, and no sense of deprivation without it. What snailmail couldn’t handle, Ma Bell probably could. When you wanted something, you went out and got it, just like frontier days. And that’s why Nool and I were hunkered down in his mom’s Audi for an overnight stay in the parking lot of a sports complex which Nool described as the work of Frank Rizzo, our first capital’s poet laureate.
Behind us loomed the grim bulk of JFK stadium, dark and forbidding, all poured concrete arcades and windowless walls. Before us, the Spectrum was, by contrast, a jewel of glass and neon, set off by the infamous statue of Balboa triumphant, contrasting cheerfully to JFK as a garish paste bauble might contrast to a drawer full of rocks.
This was the era - the mid-80s - in which the Dead began to rise again. The Grateful Dead had already arced from obscurity to cultish popularity; then trends reversed on them and they grew more cultish and less popular for a decade or more. But in those days of Reagan, their straightforward dancehall vibe and twisted counterculture found increasingly more receptive audiences as a new generation learned to appreciate the old favorites of their forebears. By the time of the evening in question, the Grateful Dead had reestablished sufficient market traction to guarantee three sold-out shows at the Spectrum during their annual spring tour. Nool and I wanted a piece of that action, so we camped out overnight to be in line when the box office opened on the first day of sales.
Yes, childrens, that is how we used to roll in the olden days. We’d park the car, wait all night, and then line up for tickets. And thus it was that a bright late-winter morning found Nool and me stumbling with multiple blearinesses across a damp, manure-strewn parking lot to take our place in a surprisingly long queue with our confreres du mort.
The world had morning breath. There was a pointed dearth of coffee. Everyone was out of sorts and aching for home comforts, or, at least, a hot breakfast. And as we know, where a market arises, a marketer will emerge to exploit it. This day, that exploiter was Mr Pretzel Dude.
In Philly, the soft pretzel is considered tantamount to a food group of its own. They’re big ovals of salted bread with a crossbar in the center, not the macrame knot version with which I’d grown up. But they tasted good, warmed you up, filled bellies and provided a full RDA of crystal sodium and yellow mustard. Along with street dogs, the soft pretzel was a ubiquitous Philly snack. Mr PD was positively loaded with them.
He was a lean, enervated man, face drawn and spine slumped with the weight of pretzels and the strain of selling them. He looked like he was rather resentful of us for making him get up so early. But he was there to flog his wares, so flog them he did. He trudged up and down the line we’d formed, a sack of snacks slung from his bony shoulder, seemingly more out of it than even we deadheads were. His pretzel-monger’s cry fell dully from his lips: “Soft pretzels… who wants a soft one? Soft pretzels… who wants a soft one?” He repeated it over and again, till all the meager poetry was drained from the phrase.
“Soft pretzels… who wants a soft one?” He’d come abreast of me, a poverty-struck student with more wit than energy, and more energy than cash. I replied to him, irony purling from my lips, “Who wants a soft one?” The ‘heads around me, starved for entertainment as much as for carbohydrates, burst into laughter. Pretzel Dude regarded me with an injured yet callous expression, and kept walking, intoning his cry despite my jibe. It was his living, though it was the butt of my joke. And to this day, I don’t know how I feel about having said that to him. Yes, I gained the approbation of a horde of unwashed strung-out strangers, but at the cost of humiliating a man who sought only to earn an honest wage. Oh well, I’m sure I’m not the first to have said it to him. And even now, there are still times when, in fact, a soft one is exactly what I want.
the one photo from the Nool visit I feel okay about sharing:
this is the lamp post outside Henry’s Hunan on Sansome. After supper, it’s apparently traditional to get a few Ande’s chocomints and to jam their green foil wrappers into the cracks in the wood of this post. So jam and post I did, and now you can enjoy it too. Last night’s supper was better. I mean, crazy good. More later. Going now. Bye.
