LET ME TELL YOU something that happened to me in the Times Square Nathan’s that still sticks in my craw.
I like Nathan’s hot dogs, and Nathan’s fried shrimp (which, strangely enough, are fried the way my mother used to fry them in Georgia), and Nathan’s tartar sauce that you dip Nathan’s shrimp in. And I like Nathan’s corn on the cob.
I prefer—I would sell one of my relatives for—the sweet, white, exquisite little-crisp-kerneled corn on the cob that you get, if you know where to look, in Georgia. Or the just-off-the-stalk Butter and Sugar (yellow kernels alternating with white) corn that you can get, in season, in the New England country where I live. But the plump, yellow kernels of Nathan’s are succulent too, in a cruder way.
So when, years ago, Nathan’s opened its outlet on Times Square, I hied myself there with alacrity. And purchased fried shrimp, a vanilla shake, and a nice, juicy ear. And carried it all over to one of the many Formica tables in the place.
Now I know there are—I hate to use so harsh a term—scummy people that come into Nathan’s. But I have a strong stomach. That’s one thing I’ve always had, a strong stomach. The last time I threw up was 1969, and that was unusual circumstances, that’s a whole nother story. Didn’t have anything to do with what I ate, or at least it mainly had to do with getting hit in the stomach, and then I ate some stuff, but it was getting hit that made me throw up. I tell you what. I’d probably be a lot better off today, weigh less, have a lighter karma (if I understand Eastern religion at all; maybe I don’t) if I threw up more often. But I don’t.
So I can handle Nathan’s. It was crowded and stirring in there, this first time I went in. People were milling around, the tables stayed full despite a rapid turnover, and they were shared by strangers. (And I’m talking about strangers. But that’s all right.)
Everyone was fully dressed and no one was lying down, and no one was relaxing, but otherwise Nathan’s was much like the beach at Coney Island, I thought. As I settled in for a substantial if not ideally digestible lunch, an exercised mother impelled her three busy children, aged about four, six, and eight, and hard-looking every one of them, into the three chairs opposite me.
So, okay. We all got to live. But.
“Now what you want to eat?” the mother queried over my shoulder—her intention evidently being to leave the young ones there while she went for the food.
“That!” said the eldest of the three, a girl, and she physically poked, with her finger, my ear of corn.
I sat there. Staring incredulously at my corn. As it rocked back and forth slightly in its butter. And then I stared at the trespassing girl, who sat—with an air about her of not having exceeded her rights, or even having begun to exercise them good—some fifteen inches away from my nose.
“Cynthia. …” said the mother then, sharply. And I figured the girl was going to get a lesson in the inviolability, in a civilized society, of another person’s ear of corn. “… that is not enough.”
So, against her will, Cynthia ordered a hamburger and a large Coke to go with her corn, and the whole family continued to take no notice of me personally as I resignedly ate mine.
Okay. Okay. I guess I should have leaped up and seized either Cynthia or her mother by the throat and thrown her to the floor. I guess you could say that by not speaking out, by not standing up and saying, “Now listen here. Now listen here. People don’t do that to other people’s corn”—I guess by not doing that, I was as guilty of ignoring their personhoods as they were of mine.
But I was astonished. You don’t poke another person’s corn! Okay, it was a child. But my children wouldn’t poke another person’s corn. And if they did I would first turn to the owner of the corn and say, “Listen. If you want to have these children brought before charges, I understand. They deserve to be sent to the Tombs for what they did. But if you could find it in your heart not to saddle them with a criminal record, could you just let me snatch a knot in them?”
And I would snatch a knot in them.
I don’t mean physically. I don’t pound on my children. But I have, by word, gesture and maybe grabbing their arm or something, let them know when they have done an outrageous thing.
You know what I mean? I mean when Roy Cohn and George Steinbrenner and Alexander Haig and Jerry Falwell and John Simon were children going around poking other people’s corn, if their mothers or fathers had just snatched them bald-headed (I mean figuratively), once, and said, “You can’t get away with that shit,” they wouldn’t be such a problem today.
Of course their mothers or fathers would have been lying. You can get away with that shit. It sticks in my craw though.