I always wanted to be a bachelor when I grew up. My friends may have had fantasies about raking the yard, seeing their loved ones in pin curlers, and cleaning the garage on Sundays, but not me. I saw myself at thirty-eight lounging around a penthouse in a brocade smoking jacket. Vivaldi would be playing on the stereo. I’d sip brandy from a snifter the size of a fish tank and leaf through an address book full of R-rated phone numbers.
It never occurred to me that the penthouse would be littered with dirty socks, damp bath towels, old sports sections, and empty pizza boxes. I’d have to dig through all that stuff to find the brocade smoking jacket, and then it would need treatment with complicated spot removers. Lounging around the penthouse in an undershirt is not the same. Besides, it isn’t a penthouse. Who can afford a penthouse in a job market filled with wildly competitive married guys supporting three ex-families?
I think I’ll skip the brandy. You shouldn’t drink on an empty stomach. I looked in the refrigerator—nothing in there except half a bottle of flat tonic water, two withered limes, and one more empty pizza box. (The brandy snifter got broken in the dishwasher anyway.)
Of course, bachelors can just go hang out in fancy restaurants all night. And I would if I weren’t broke from buying new clothes. You know how it is with us fashion-conscious bachelors, always trying to keep up with the latest sartorial trends. Well, sort of. Actually, I have to buy new clothes because I destroy all my chinos and boxer shorts every time I go to the laundromat.
I used to do this with bleach and fabric softener. These made enormous piebald blotches and great big holes in my clothes. Being a suave bachelor and all, I felt it beneath my dignity to stand in a laundromat reading the instructions on the bottles. Not to mention the instructions on the machines. I might as well try to land a DC-10. What on earth is a “prewash cycle”? Prewash means “before washing.” Before washing is when the clothes are scattered all over the floor. Why would I want to put money and bleach in a washing machine then? If anyone ever designs washing machines for bachelors, there will be one big dial with two settings: DIRTY and DON’T BREATHE.
Now, I just use lots of detergent. If some is good, more must be better, and a whole box should be great. (Another thing about washing machine instructions, they’re printed on the inside of the washing machine lid. This is not where you want the instructions when the machine is spewing foam all over the laundromat and you can’t even get near it, let alone open the top.) The clothes do get clean. True, they’re stiff, have chunks of solidified laundry soap in the pockets, and smell like eau de Fab. But that doesn’t matter because I’m going to ruin them in the dryer.
The way dryers work is you put wet clothes in, run the dryer for an hour, and take wet clothes out. Leave these mildewing in a laundry bag for a couple of days, and they’ll smell every bit as bad as they did before you washed them. What I recommend is insert a hundred quarters in the coin slot and go watch football games. When you come back the clothes will be dry and just the right size—if you own a doll collection. Like most bachelors, I don’t.
So I go out and buy new chinos and new boxer shorts and try to save money by cooking at home. However, it’s hard to make even a simple omelet with flat tonic water, withered limes, and empty pizza boxes.
The problem with grocery shopping is it lacks an element of surprise. Wait until you’re very hungry before going to the store. This way you’ll make lots of surprising impulse purchases. It’s like Christmas when I get the grocery bags home. I don’t know what might be in there—a ten-pound bag of pistachio nuts, jars of pickled squid, tinned guava jelly, goat pâté. However, it’s hard to make a simple omelet with pistachio nuts, pickled squid, guava jelly, and goat pâté, too. This means another trip to the store.
Why does everything come in Giant Size, King Size, and Holy Roman Empire Size boxes? A package of macaroni as big as a Japanese car is not what I need. And I don’t understand unit pricing. There’s the price, the unit price, the sale price, but what does the damn thing cost? And I can’t find stuff. Whatever I want is always thirty brands of sugar-frosted cereal away from where I am. Supermarkets should arrange it so important purchases like peanut butter, roach spray, and cigarettes are in one place, while everything else is off in a married-couple annex with the fabric softeners and breakfast foods. (Do people really feed their children purple cornflakes shaped like movie monsters? Are they mad at the kids, or what?)
I go to delicatessens because they’ll bring me what I ask for. “Give me a six-pack of eggs,” I say.
Bachelor cooking is a matter of attitude. If you think of it as setting fire to things and making a mess, it’s fun. It’s not so much fun if you think of it as dinner. Fortunately, baloney, cheeseburgers, beer, and potato-chip dip provide all the daily nutrients bachelors are known to require. I mean, I hope they do.
I have several specialties. Instant coffee is one. Simple omelets are another. My recipe: add contents of refrigerator to two eggs and cook until everything stops wiggling. A bachelor friend of mine has an interesting variation. Mix last night’s Chinese takeout food with your scrambled eggs. (Remove fortunes from fortune cookies first.) He calls it Egg Foo Breakfast.
I also make a stew. I put meat, beef bouillon, potatoes, celery, carrots, onions, and a splash of red wine into a large pot. When it begins to simmer I go watch football games until all the ingredients boil down to a tarry mass. Then I phone out for pizza or Chinese.
Nomenclature is an important part of bachelor cooking. If you call it “Italian cheese toast,” it’s not disgusting to have warmed-over pizza for breakfast.
Pizza for breakfast is one of the great examples of bachelor freedom. And, as a bachelor, I’m free to eat pizza anywhere I want—in front of the TV or on the bed or in the bathtub. I also eat, at least to judge by where I find leftovers, in the hall closet and under the couch.
I find a lot of things under the couch whenever I clean up, giant dust bunnies mostly, but mysterious things, too—rubber beach toys, copies of Livestock Breeding Quarterly, “Souvenir of the Seattle World’s Fair” pen and pencil sets.
Maybe there are other people who live in my house and I don’t know about it. I certainly don’t remember putting a cigar out in the soap dish or using that new Vivaldi CD as a drink coaster or hiding my cuff links behind the thesaurus. What are my dress shoes doing in the toilet tank? Why has somebody been scaling fish on the bedroom rug?
A lot of bachelor time that married people believe is spent paging through address books is really spent using T-shirts as dust cloths and getting vacuum-cleaner cords tangled in footstools. Or thinking up reasons not to. I think, “Dirt is superficial, a matter of appearances.” I think, “If you can’t see dirt, it doesn’t really exist.” No fair looking behind the stereo speakers.
I keep the light low. Not hard when your windows need washing as badly as mine do. Also I’d be risking my neck to wash windows in my fifth-floor apartment. What if I dropped something? A paper towel soaked in Windex might kill from that height. No use washing the dishes either. The automatic dishwasher breaks everything. I tried using paper plates, but the dishwasher made a mess of those, too.
Being a bachelor has turned me into a housewife, a lousy housewife. And now I have a different perspective on the traditional woman’s role in society. A housewife has to be a chemist, engineer, mechanic, economist, philosopher, and workaholic. That’s just to pick up after herself. I shudder at what it must be like when there are kids, pets, and somebody like me in the home. Therefore it is with profound respect that I ask for advice from my women friends.
“What should I do about that green fungus in the bread box?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” they tell me. “You’ll have to talk to my husband. He does the cooking at our house. I’m pretty busy with my career.”