Written by Mel Reichler and Jim Egan
Copyright 2002
The Man With
The Ladder Stories II
One sunny afternoon, the Man with the Ladder found himself perched on his ladder surrounded by his friends near his favorite bench in his favorite park. Each of them had intended to be somewhere else, but the sunny beauty of the day had commanded them to break appointments, renege on obligations, and set aside intentions and go to the park.
Reb Dunzel and Timothy Michael huddled on a bench arguing, and the Man with the Ladder, sitting on the bottom rung of his ladder, was mediating the debate. Mediating was pleasant and easy because the debaters were pre-occupied with absorbing as much sun and fresh air as they could get and neither of them knew much about the subject they were arguing about. In the midst of a pause in the discussion, Tatanya Schwartz—almost forgotten at the foot of the Ladder—suddenly interrupted.
“The Man with the Ladder isn’t your real name is it?” she asked, with an innocent but intent look.
Reb Dunzel and Timothy Michael froze on the bench. It was a question that neither had dared ask when they had first met the Man with the Ladder and, having come to know him they had felt their familiarity made it awkward to ask it later. They had waited patiently for someone else to broach the subject but it had never come up—until now. They tried not to seem too interested in his response, but their argument collapsed. The park itself seemed to grow quiet as if all of its occupants were now holding their breath to hear how he answered the little girl’s question.
“No, not the way you mean it.” said the Man with the Ladder taking a deep breath, “It was not the name my parents gave me.” His friends had heard the Man with the Ladder talked about, and gossiped about, and rumored about with many names and aliases but no one—to their knowledge— had ever asked him to his face what his real name was. The quietness of the park and the stillness of the people around her unsettled the little girl and she paused awkwardly before her next question.
The Man with the Ladder sensed her uncertainty and confided to her softly, “The name my parents gave me was quite an ordinary name, and like their own, pretty much arbitrarily chosen when I was born and they didn’t know me really. It took thirty years before I earned a name that was truly my own, and though it’s not a particularly glamorous name, it is unique and mine and was given to me without prejudice or forethought from the people I come in contact with everyday. It’s the realest name I have.”
Even though it seemed like the Man with the Ladder was not going to reveal his given name Reb Dunzel and Timothy Michael breathed out quietly. Their hope lingered for a moment as Tatanya prepared to summon up another question.
“Would you give me a name of my own?” she asked with a mischievous glint in her eyes.
“How about Miss Nonstop Questions?”
“I don’t like that name.”
“It doesn’t matter if you like it or not, it only matters if it fits you or you fit it.”
“Isn’t that the same thing?” asked Miss Nonstop Questions.
“Oh no,” the Man with the Ladder said, shaking his head solemnly, “For instance, `the Man with the Ladder’ is a name that fit me the minute someone spoke it, but I have had other names that I’ve tried to fit but they just never fit me.”
“You’re going to tell us a story aren’t you?” Tatanya squealed with delight, “He’s going to tell a story now!” she announced to everyone in ear shot.
“Well as a matter of fact there is a story I could tell right about now if someone wouldn’t try so hard to live up to her new name.”
“He’s talking about me.” Tatanya decided out loud. “Okay, I promise.”
“One afternoon,” the Man with the Ladder began, “I was here in the park minding my own business when a stranger strides right up to the foot of my ladder and says with a big smile, “Hello Derrick!”
“I’m sorry, my name is not Derrick,” I told him.
“Oh, but you look exactly like a Derrick. You’re quite sure, I suppose.”
“Oh yes, I’d probably be the first to know.”
“What makes it so hard to believe is that you’re so tall and well spoken. You are well spoken aren’t you?”
“Well, I suppose so.”
“Unique, charming at times, confident but diplomatic?”
“I’d like to think so,” I admitted.
“Well then there you go,” the stranger said, “a Derrick.”
“You don’t have to be named Derrick to be any of those things,” I insisted.
“Well if you insist your name isn’t Derrick,” the stranger said, piqued, “then what is it?”
“People call me the Man with the Ladder.”
The stranger rudely burst out laughing, “Derrick, you’re such a kidder. You had me going there. You have a wonderful sense of humor.”
“Thank you, but I’m not joking, that’s my name.” I twisted my ladder around to face him with my namesake.
The man shrugged. “You were better off as Derrick,” he announced, turning around and heading off.
I decided I had enough of strangers in the park for one day and was about to hoist my ladder on my shoulder and set off when I ran into Utei, the painter on air, being followed by a whole pride of cats and kittens. Every so often as he walked he would spray a misty patch of paint toward the ground. Before it would hit the pavement, it would swirl around making little darting motions, like a school of fish, and his little followers would pounce on the illusion, chasing the spirals into one another until there was a tangle of paws and tails and kitten noses where the pseudo fish had once swam.
“And humans think they enjoy art,” he chuckled at the furry pile of pussycats. The air seemed to be tinged with the smell of salmon. Before I could ask about it, Utei turned to me and asked, “Is it my imagination or you taller today?”
I laughed, “It’s funny you should say that because a perfect stranger just walked up to me and not only said I was tall but confident and charming as well.”
Utei looked me over carefully, “I’m no perfect stranger but you do look more confident, more self-possessed. Perhaps new hair cut?”
“No, I haven’t been near the barber. But listen to this, the stranger insisted on calling me Derrick.”
“Hmm, you do look like a Derrick, though I never noticed before. Until you mentioned it I wouldn’t have thought I even knew what a Derrick looked like, but then there you are,” he said, nodding in my direction. As he spoke, his audience grew more impatient and were slowly but surely climbing up the folds of his robe trying to make their way up his sleeve.
“I have to go now,” he announced, “If I don’t keep moving my adoring fans will probably eat me.”
I sat there trying to imagine what a Derrick might look like. I concluded that whatever he looked like it was most likely a little too urbane and sophisticated for my taste. I realized must have been staring blankly across the playground because, when I focused my attention on what was in front of me, a stunningly attractive woman was staring back at me from the bench just across from me.
I assumed that my staring must have seemed like a rude assault, so I turned my head and got up quickly to avoid a scene, but as I was turning to go, out of the corner of my eye I saw the woman smile and wink at me. My body had already started to turn and the momentum of the ladder pulled me one way, and my incredulous eyes pulled me back in disbelief. Just as I was certain I was about to lose my balance and topple, ladder and all, on the well dressed lady’s’s lap—when something seemed to rally my muscles, and, with a deft spin I was seated not twelve inches from the most beautiful woman I had ever seen up close.
“Nice move.” she purred. I looked into her face. It was like a work of art. In place of mere eyes she had deep blue crystals and her lips were moist and slightly pursed as if preparing for a kiss—the more I looked, the more I felt my jaw tightening. I couldn’t speak and I prepared myself for the worst.
There is a moment in everyone’s life where events seem to take on monumental significance. At that moment either you drop the ball or you run with it. Whatever the outcome, we carry that moment around on instant replay for the rest of our lives. Mine was going to be of me sitting in the bleachers as a ball flew past me, sailing slowly enough to count stiches and grasp easily between a thumb and pinky, and me not even reaching out to try to catch it: this beautiful woman, the wink, my speechlessness.
Just then a confidant called from the noisy turmoil of my mind. `Stop being your old bumbling self’, it seemed to say, `You look like a Derrick, why not act like one?’ I was willing to try; if anyone was going to drop the ball it might as well be Derrick—anyone but the me I had to live with.
“Hello,” I said, my voice sounding surprisingly confident, “My name is Derrick.”
She seemed surprised, almost self-conscious, “I never met a Derrick before. My name is Martha.”
“That’s a pretty name.”
“No it’s a plain name, I never liked it. I guess someone like yourself with a name like Derrick wouldn’t understand, but I’ve always wanted to be called Melinda.”
“You look like a Melinda.”
“You think so?” she asked shyly.
“As surely as my name is Derrick.”
“You’re very sweet, I can tell. I meet clever, handsome men all the time but they’re not graceful like you. She paused for a moment.
“I’d love to travel exotic places and ride an impulse to wild, romantic adventures, but it’s harder for a woman, especially since I’m not glib and resourceful.”
“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” I scoffed, “a Melinda who wasn’t quick and resourceful?”
She looked past me into the park. “I’m sure you’ve had wild romantic adventures in exotic places.”
“I’ve had a few,” I admitted, “but nothing to speak about.”I must have blushed.
“You are too modest,” she said sweetly. “Sweeping women off their feet must bed second nature to you.” She hesitated. ”Lets say my name was Melinda and I put you on the spot and said, sweep me off my feet, what would you do?”
`Quake in my boots’ was the first answer that occurred to me. I
had to think fast but my imagination struggled to come up with a something that
a Derrick would do. Certainly not pool or bowling.
Maybe dining or dancing. I seriously considered the Hungarian Festival on
Unlike Derrick, I had never been to
“Ohh Derrick, you’re a dream come true. Ordinary men would have
offered dining or dancing or worse, that Hungarian Festival on
After we left the park the rest of the evening was an exciting
blur of activities that only Derrick would think of, at places few besides
Derrick would go. Derrick danced and sang and why we didn’t end up in
“Last night was wonderful, Derrick,” the voice thundered at me.
“I wish I remembered more of it. Tell me Melinda, what happened after the belly dancers and elephants…”
“My name isn’t Melinda. This is Stacy.”
“Stacy?”
“Is this Derrick? You don’t sound like Derrick.” The voice changed from a purr to an accusing whine.
“No, no, Derrick is out,
“Oh, just like Derrick to be in gay Pari. So you’re Derrick’s friend,” she said suddenly interested again, “what’s your name?”
“The Man with the Ladder.”
“Oh.” then an awkward silence, “Well don’t forget to tell Derrick I called.” The phone went dead.
To avoid any further embarrassing repercussions from Derrick I decided to rid myself of him that very morning.
“Hello Derrick!” I warmly greeted the first person I passed on the street that morning. He was a tall slim man in a business suit and he looked enough like Derrick for the name to stick. Puzzled, he turned to face me but I was already past him, leaving him to live the Derrick life for a while.
Derrick undoubtedly lives on in someone else’s shoes, probably
dancing in
“How would you like to be Derrick for a day?” the Man with the Ladder asked Tatanya upon completion of his tale.
“I’d rather be Queen Motifa,” the little girl replied without hesitation.
A man jogging past suddenly called out, “Hey Alfonse, nice ladder you got there—What’s the matta’, your cat up a tree or somethin’?” The Man with the Ladder winced.
Queen Motifa tugged on the side of his trousers, “Hey Alfonse, how about getting me a soda?”
Reb and Timothy Michael had themselves a good laugh over the Man with the Ladder’s new baptism, and while they were deciding what names they would like to don, the Man with the Ladder clung to his ladder tightly and heard a name, his name, echo loudly in his ears.
The Man with the Ladder was in the park sitting on the grass with Reb Dunzel and his wife, Sister Greb. Couples paraded around them, flashing love like a badge, and knots of young men and women unravelled and re-tangled exploring every possible twist to see if it would hold together under the weak gravity of flirtation. The wind lapped around them and the day was engorged like a sponge with spring and love.
Over Reb Dunzel’s shoulder the Man with the Ladder watched a clown putting on a show for a tiny audience who gave him their attention fitfully. The clown, following a crease in the grass, pretended to be walking a tightrope carelessly taut over the center of a circus ring. He was alternatively defiant and vulnerable, one minute completely buoyed up by the love laden air around him, nonchalant, challenging the rope to snake up and hurl him to the ground, the next, anxious and defensive, as if the slightest miscalculation meant a netless plunge down a spiraling staircase of air to a hard, bare, circus ring floor. The Man with the Ladder was impressed by the performance.
“Why are you so edgy?” Reb Dunzel asked. He had surrendered to the day completely. “It’s a wonderful day. Love is in the air.” He looked at his wife concerned that she might get the wrong idea but, like the Man with the Ladder, she held the day lightly away from her and let it dangle. “Love is in the air,” Reb Dunzel repeated again. “Why are you two so detached and guarded?” he asked.
“It’s the day,” his wife said.
“The day is wonderful,” Reb Dunzel exclaimed, “Love is in the air, can’t you feel it?”
“I can,” the Man with the Ladder said. “I feel it. It’s wonderful”—he relaxed as he turned toward Reb Dunzel and then tightened up immediately, as if he was on guard against something that might suddenly leap and devour him—“and terrible.” He watched the clown who, taking his eyes off of the imaginary rope, surveyed the crowd and realized his audience was unconvinced. The audience’s aloofness made him sweat and his makeup began to run.
“What’s terrible about love,” Reb Dunzel wanted to know. “It’s wonderful.”
The Man with the Ladder shuddered. “Love is wonderful and terrible. Always both.”
Sister Greb nodded.
“You don’t fool me, you two,” Reb Dunzel said. “You can act withdrawn and indifferent,” he said, “but I know you. You are romantics, of all the people in the world you two are most open to loving.”
“I know about love,” Sister Greb said. “My former profession was all about loving. Today I have only you to love, but yesterday I had the whole world and God,” she said with what seemed to her companions something of an ambivalent sigh. “Loving you is a full time job. Imagine what work loving everything takes.”
“Tell me how love is terrible,” Reb Dunzel demanded, watching a couple wend their way through the park completely engrossed in one another. “I mean these days you have to worry about harassment charges… . I know that is a bother for people asymettrically in love but otherwise… look at that couple.” As he watched the pair tripped over a homeless man because they were looking at each other not where they were walking.
“Love is wonderful in uncountable ways and, in each way it is wonderful, by some awful symmetry of the world, it’s terrible also,” Sister Greb said.
Before Reb Dunzel could ask again how love was terrible, the Man with the Ladder turned to him. “I have regards,” he said.
“From whom?” Reb Dunzel asked.
“Remember the actor?”
Reb Dunzel took a moment to shake himself free of the couple in love. “Yes. I haven’t seen him recently.”
“You might have,” the Man with the Ladder said.
“What do you mean?
“I met him the other day here in the park. I was sitting on the ladder when a sallow faced man with stringy hair that rippled down his face like spaghetti came up to me. From a distance I could not identify him, but when he got close I recognized him right away as the actor. The actor… “
Reb Dunzel interrupted and gave Sister Greb the background she needed to understand what they were talking about. “This actor began hanging around the park after he enrolled in an acting class with a teacher who insisted that in order to act well you had to study people close up. He would wander around talking to people and studying and imitating them. When he began studying the Man with the Ladder, the Man with the Ladder began studying him. They studied one another and imitated each other until they felt they knew one another quite well.” He waited for the Man with the Ladder to resume his story.
The Man with the Ladder started again. “‘I haven’t seen you around for a while,’ I said to him.”
“‘No, I’ve been around but you didn’t recognize me. I was working,’ he said.”
“Working?”
“‘Acting, playing a role. Do you remember the father and son who were around for a few says last month?’”
“Actually I did remember the pair. They had spent three days in the park arguing and talking. ‘Yes.’”
“‘I was the the son.’”
“I had seen them on occasion up close. ‘You were the son? I remember them. You don’t look anything like the son I remember.’”
“The actor took the statement as a compliment and replied modestly, ‘I’m an actor and a good one. Remember the man and his secretary. I was the secretary. And the man with the priest. I was the priest,’ the actor said.”
“I must have looked confused,” the Man with the Ladder confessed. “You said you were working. I had seen him a few times in plays in storefronts in the neighborhood. No matter who he played, he looked like an actor playing that character.”
“‘I was never any good in the theater,’ he confessed. ‘Being on stage made me self conscious,’ he said. ‘I became a private actor, a commission actor.’”
“What’s a commission actor?”
“‘A commission actor puts on private and personal performances not public ones. No script, improvisation, the way we live our lives.’”
“‘It sounds dangerous,’ I said to him.”
“‘Oh not that way,’ he answered. ‘If I don’t like how a role feels I turn it down. If you’re a good actor there are always lots of roles available.’”
“I’ve never heard of commission acting, I told him.”
“‘You have no cause, the actor said. You… ’”
“ ‘You could have said hello,’ I said to him, when you were in the park.”
“‘I didn’t know you in those roles,’ he explained.”
“And your between gigs now, I said.”
“‘Sort of,’ he replied. ‘I wanted to get your advice.’”
“About acting?”
“‘It’s a little hard to explain,’ he said, quietly. ‘I took this job. A woman had a lover. He left. He let his job take him to another city. It was more or less a mutual decision. She loved him, and she believed he loved her, but she never could get through to him.’ He was quiet for a moment.”
“So you were hired to play the lover.”
“‘Yes. She hired me, gave me some clothes, some pictures, let me watch a video they had made on vacation. He was not hard to imitate and it wasn’t hard to insert myself into the role. He was easy to play.’”
“What did she want? I asked him.”
“‘It’s hard to say exactly.’ He grew silent.”
“That’s always the trouble, I replied.”
“‘She was an exceptional person. She loved most of the parts of him she knew. But she couldn’t get through to him,’ he said again.”
“‘What do you mean?’ I asked. I thought I understood but I wanted to see if he did.”
“‘I mean he never understood her, he didn’t have a clue what made her tick. She’s very complex.’”
“Aren’t we all, I said to him.”
“‘Complex?’ he asked. ‘Yes we are all complex but she’s more than most. She’s a very intelligent woman. She has a very important job. It has to do with computers, information, the internet. She’s very creative. He only saw a tiny piece of her. She couldn’t even get him to acknowledge these other parts. I think he really hated them—the other parts of her,’ he blurted out suddenly. Then he turned and looked out over the park. ‘ When most people love us they love only a little part of us. We are really lucky if they just ignore the other parts. Tragedy happens when they despise those other parts, because then we have that job of making the small part of us that is loved into the whole of us. It means stretching and pulling—and most of us rip the fabric. No wonder we are unhappy. She struggled to love him as he was.’”
“Oh.”
“‘Acting an improved him was easy. I only had to adjust a few parts, shuffle a little bit of him around. He wasn’t a bad character, dense, not a bad sort. A typical man. He hadn’t a clue about the woman.’”
“I waited and then asked what was on my mind. ‘Did you, I mean…’”
“‘After a while it seemed the natural thing to do. I adapted, but… I fell in love with her, really in love, I never felt that way about anyone,’ he said sadly.”
“You mean you fell in love with the role, I said.”
“‘No, I fell in love with her,’ he said quietly.”
“And…”
“‘… out of the blue he called her. He said he missed her and wanted to try to work things out. He was coming back to town. He wanted to see her. She terminated my contract. I didn’t actually have a contract. It was day to day work.’”
“Oh, I said.”
“‘I stopped acting for a while. I just couldn’t get into…into other roles.’”
“Well? I asked. The actor pretended to be angry but I could see that he was only an actor acting angry. The memories that telling the story brought back mostly confused him.”
“‘That was a few weeks ago,’ he said after a pause. ‘Yesterday she called. She kicked him out. She wanted me back.’”
“I hesitated. She loves you.”
“‘Not me,’ he whispered, ‘the him that I was.’”
“Not you?”
“‘She never really knew me.’”
“‘Maybe,’ I said,‘ she really saw through your performance and…’”
“The actor glared at me. ‘No, I’m a really good actor.’”
“What are you going to do? I asked him.”
“‘I don’t know. I love her more than anyone. Do you have any suggestions?’”
“Love had gouged out valleys of pain on the mans face. ‘It depends of course how much you love her,’ I said, ‘really love her… ’ I held back but I think he filled in what I left unsaid.”
“He looked up at me perched on the ladder and got up. ‘Thank you,’ he said.”
“I started to complete my thought but he interrupted me.”
“‘You don’t have to say any more. I’ve made up my mind, thanks,’ he said and rushed off playing the role of a man who had seen the light at the end of the tunnel.” The man with ladder finished the story with a long, sustained and impassioned silence. “I haven’t seen him since then,” the Man with the Ladder said finally.
“What do you think happened?” Reb Dunzel asked.
“He decided,” the Man with the Ladder said. “I think he decided.”
“He loved her,” Reb Dunzel said.
“Very much,” the Man with the Ladder agreed. “More than he loved himself, I guess.” Sister Greb sighed and turned to watch the couple stumbling their way through the park.
“Do you think… ?” Reb Dunzel asked.
“It’s possible. I think he was a great actor,” the Man with the Ladder said quietly, “really a great actor.”
The Man with the Ladder and Reb Dunzel found themselves in the park one spring morning watching the usual morning crowd orbit around them. Dented circles of playing children swarmed over the sand boxes and monkey bars and swings and slides of the playground, and pulsating circles of watchful mothers filled the benches surrounding them. In larger irregular circles surrounding them, retired people occupied the benches in small bunches, heads bent close together, gossiping. Across from the Man with the Ladder and Reb Dunzel a young, new mother nursed her baby.
“Don’t stare,” the Man with the Ladder admonished his friend.
“I wasn’t staring,” Reb Dunzel said. “Looking, I was, staring I was not. I spent my last dollar yesterday,” he announced suddenly, his eyes fixed on the joint between nursing baby and its mother.
“On what?” the Man with the Ladder inquired.
“Nickels and dimes are hard to remember, even when they make up dollars,” he said. “I forget, I only know it by evening it had dribbled away,” he groused. “I was hoping you had some cash to buy croissants and coffee and lend me a few dollars. Sister Greb is away for a few days,” he explained, “and my clients don’t get paid until today so I don’t get paid until tomorrow.”
“And I was hoping you could lend me a few dollars,” the Man with the Ladder replied. “I paid the rent yesterday and it cleaned me out. I’m broke until tomorrow too.”
“I’m craving something,” Reb Dunzel grumbled after a few minutes of restless silence, “but I can’t tell exactly what. It feels a lot like I’m hungry but not exactly.” After a moment he continued. “I can see a piece of what I want clearly, but not all of it.” The nursing mother shifted her child to the other breast. Reb Dunzel watched the maneuver then looked away.
“A piece of what?” the Man with the Ladder asked.
“A piece of my desire, the rim of what I want,” Reb Dunzel said. “Have you noticed that sometimes you have a very particular hunger that seems to be named and labeled and only one very specific thing will satisfy it, and other times you are aching for something with no name, something indefinite and obscure.”
“Exactly,” his friend said. “Sometimes only one very specific taste will satisfy your craving and other times chewing on a piece of string will satiate you. I’m hungry too,” he added. “I have about eighty four cents in my pocket, how much do you have?”
“Sixty seven cents more or less,” Reb Dunzel said without looking, “at least that’s what I had the last time I checked about fifteen minutes ago.”
“Not enough for coffee and croissants. We could buy a couple of candy bars,” the Man with the Ladder suggested. “At least they would kill the hunger.”
Reb Dunzel looked dubious. “Candy bars attack hunger and appetite indiscriminately,” he said. “I was looking forward to lunch.”
“We have enough for nachos or a bag of potato chips,” the Man with the Ladder said.
“They’re not sweet enough,” Reb Dunzel complained.
“Well, we don’t have enough for coffee and croissants, candy is out, chips are not sweet enough,” he enumerated the choices painstakingly. “I think we have exhausted the affordable treats.”
Reb Dunzel sat back on the bench and closed his eyes. The Man with the Ladder could make out the butt ends of voracious, miniature appetites racing through the twisting fissures of his friend’s brain, making sharp turns, and slamming into dead ends, scouring the terrain for something that was not only desirable but affordable—in the present circumstances.
“Crackerjacks,” Reb Dunzel boomed out. “Not too sweet but sweet enough, not candy, but candy like. Croissants they’re not, but…. And there is the surprise.”
“Crackerjacks,” the Man with the Ladder repeated, running his tongue over the name of the confection. “I haven’t had Crackerjacks in….” He was surprised how long it had been. “Do they still make them?” The idea of a surprise, a bonus under something that you could also eat stoked his appetite.” To tell the truth,” he said, “I really don’t like the sugary popcorn.”
“I really don’t care that much for the nuts part of it either,” Reb Dunzel added. “But it seems I don’t know, appropriate now. Just the right combination.”
“You’re absolutely right,” the Man with the Ladder said. “After you put aside the idea of the popcorn and block out the sticky coating and the nuts it seems exactly what we were looking for.” The irony was lost on Reb Dunzel who jingled the change in his pocket. “It’s decided then,” he said. “Now the only problem is to find them.” He stood up and looked around.
He saw a man pushing a small silver cart along a path tangent to a circle of children at the far end of the park. The image of the man was blurred but he could hear the tinkle of silver bells suspended on a string above the cart. “I don’t remember seeing that particular cart around,” he said as he pulled the Man with the Ladder up and dragged him by the elbow towards the wagon. “Maybe he sells Crackerjacks.”
“Crackerjacks,” the Man with the Ladder asked, when they got close to the snack seller.
The unfamiliar man who was pushing the three wheeled cart set the back wheels down and swung around to face them.
“How old?” he asked, lowering his eyes and surveying an arc knee high around the two men who stood in front of him.
“38,” said the Man with the Ladder.
“How old is the child for whom you are buying the Crackerjacks?” the pushcart man asked rather formally.
“38,” the Man with the Ladder repeated. “We are buying them for ourselves.”
“For children,” the man in front of the pushcart said brusquely, turning around to face them. “Crackerjacks are for children.”
“Is there a law again adults eating Crackerjacks?” the Man with the Ladder asked brusquely, “Do you have to show a certificate proving you are under 12, before you can buy…”
The man in the white uniform in front of the little wagon turned to stare at him. “The popcorn, no,” he said. “No, it’s the surprise. When adults eat Crackerjacks and get a surprise,” he paused to drive the point home, “the results are uncertain. For adults the surprise often really is a surprise.” His tone was that of someone merely stating a mundane and obvious fact of life not making a judgment. “Crackerjacks and adults are an unpredictable mix,” he added.
“Why should children have all of the fun?” The Man with the Ladder grumbled.
“I don’t remember having all that much fun as a child,” Reb Dunzel stated sadly.
“Neither do I,” the Man with the Ladder said. “But it looks that way now. I mean you look at children and all you see is a big head, a blurred hand stretched out, and a lot of laughing all of the time. I don’t see why they should be able to monopolize Crackerjacks also.” His hunger was clearly making him irritable.
The man shrugged and pointed to the section of the cart that had boxes of Crackerjacks. “Pick,” he said.
“Pick what?” the Man with the Ladder asked.
“Pick the box,” the man behind the cart said.
“They are Crackerjacks,” the Man with the Ladder replied. “One box is like another box.” He stared at the boxes.
“Pick,” the man insisted.
Reb Dunzel and the Man with the Ladder surveyed the boxes. “They all look the same to me,” Reb Dunzel announced. All of them said ‘Crackerjacks’ and had a large gold seal pasted on the front that said, “SPECIAL PRIZE.” Each of them picked a box. “Remember, I warned you,” the man behind the cart said reaching out his hand for the money that completed the transaction.
They walked away excited and found a bench. “It makes me feel like a kid again,” the Man with the Ladder said, his hunger replaced by the anticipation of his prize. “What do you think our surprise will be?” the Man with the Ladder asked, suddenly remembering prizes he had gotten as a child. “I remember getting a kaleidoscope once,” he said. “It bent and fractured the world and made it look wondrous. I nearly went blind looking at things,” he remembered excitedly.
“What happened to it?” Reb Dunzel asked.
“I took it to school. I was looking at the formulas through it in a geometry class. It seemed to make them intelligible for the first time, and Mr. Peters took it away from me.”
“I remember him,” Reb Dunzel said. “He was a terror. Everything was geometry to him. He fell silent for a moment. “I got a magic ring once,” he said giddily. “Myrna Sweet promised she would kiss me for a week if I gave it to her. I did, but after she had it on her finger she ignored me.”
They both tore their boxes open greedily spilling sticky pieces of popcorn on the ground as they rummaged around looking for the prizes. “Wait,” the Man with the Ladder said. “Lets take turns looking for the prize, otherwise there won’t be popcorn left to eat. I’ll go first,” he asserted.
“Why you?” Reb Dunzel cried, “you have the ladder. I should go first.”
“No, me first,” the Man with the Ladder insisted. “You picked your box first. I should get to get the surprise first.”
“It’s not fair,” Reb Dunzel complained. “Your box looks like it’s packed more. I should get to pick out my prize first.” As he said this, adultness seemed to seize him again. He looked at the Man with the Ladder. “The Crackerjacks seem to have made us childish. Look for your prize first,” he said in an adult voice.
“No, you go ahead, you first. I’ll catch what you spill,” he said, cupping his hands under Reb Dunzel’s box.
Reb Dunzel began digging for the prize. “Wait a minute,” the Man with the Ladder said, his hand full of sticky popcorn. He piled the overflow from his friends excavation on top of his own box. “They seem to have added a lot more popcorn to the prizes than I remembered,” Reb Dunzel said.
“It’s not a good sign,” the Man with the Ladder said gravely. “As I remember it, the law of Crackerjacks is ‘the more popcorn you get, the less valuable is the prize.’”
“I still have half a box to dig through,” Reb Dunzel commented. They looked around for something on which to put the popcorn, settling for a newspaper that someone had left on a bench near them. When he had emptied the box and still not uncovered a prize, Reb Dunzel began to complain. “It’s not fair, all that anticipation, lets go back and demand our money back.”
“Turn the box over and smack it,” the Man with the Ladder instructed. “Sometimes the prize sticks to the bottom and you can’t tell it’s there.”
Reb Dunzel followed his friend’s suggestion. A small cellophane envelope popped out of the empty box of Crackerjacks.
“How did I miss it?” he asked, then “what is it?”
“It’s hard to tell exactly,” his friend said, picking it up and handing it to its owner.
Reb Dunzel ripped the opaque envelope open. “It’s a miniature whistle I think,” he said staring at the surprise. “Not a bad prize,” he volunteered, “not a bad prize at all.” He picked up the whistle and blew on it. No sound came out. “Maybe its a dog whistle,” he said. He aimed the whistle at a dog stretched out on the grass at the end of a loosely held leash, and blew. The dog scratched himself lazily.
“It’s broken,” he said disappointedly and blew again, listening carefully for a fragment of a sound. He shook it angrily. “Broken, not a sound. You try.” He handed the whistle to the Man with the Ladder.
“Broken,” the Man with the Ladder echoed after a few silent blasts. “At least the prizes we got as children worked, at least most of them did,” he said, although he vaguely remembered getting a miniature car with only three wheels. He held the whistle to his mouth, filled his lungs and blew again as hard as he could. No sound came from the whistle but he seemed to hear some echo coming from the end of the park. “Did you hear that?” he asked, “it seemed like an echo.”
“No sound, only an echo,” his friend mumbled. “I wouldn’t call a whistle that produces an echo a prize.” He walked to the nearest wire basket that held an overflow of discarded refuse and angrily flung the whistle in. He came back to the bench with a dispirited look on his face.
The disappointment brought back the hunger. Clearly disappointed, they sat and munched the popcorn from the newspaper for a while. When they finished all of the popcorn that had been produced by the search for Reb Dunzel’s prize the Man with the Ladder said, “I’m thirsty. Lets go to the fountain and get a drink before we go after the next prize.” They got up and moved slowly into the park the Man with the Ladder clutching his box of Crackerjacks tightly and holding the lid down so that the popcorn did not spill out. He turned suddenly and started walking through the trees. “Where are you going ?” Reb Dunzel asked, “the fountain is this way.” He pointed in the opposite direction. “What do you mean?” the Man with the Ladder said. “It’s this way. It’s always been this way.”
“Remember, they tore that fountain down years ago,” his friend said. “The new one is this way.”
“I can see it from here,” the Man with the Ladder insisted. “Look.” In front of him, off to the side was a water fountain. A group of children were playing, squirting water at each other.
“It can’t be,” Reb Dunzel asserted, “They tore it down years ago.”
The Man with the Ladder and Reb Dunzel moved toward the fountain carefully.
Along the path someone they recognized came walking towards them briskly. “It’s Bill,” the Man with the Ladder said. “Or Beatrice,” Reb Dunzel added.
“He’s dressed as Bill so he must be Bill today,” the Man with the Ladder said. “Hello Bill,” he said to the man who slowed and stopped in front of them, “how are you?”
“Great, really great. I’ve finally made up my mind,” he said. “I’m going to get the operation.”
“Are you sure about it?” the Man with the Ladder asked.
“Sure as I could be,” the man said. “Beatrice is very happy. I’ll see you around,” he declared moving away rapidly. “I have to go and prepare for the trip.”
The Man with the Ladder wanted to ask him about the jacket he
coveted but hesitated. “Well, I’m sure we’ll see you around before you head off
to
“
“
“Very strange,” Reb Dunzel said after Bill had disappeared around
a bend. “He had that operation years ago. Remember, we got a letter from
Beatrice saying it was a great success and she had gotten married and was
settling in
“I haven’t seen him for a long time,” the Man with the Ladder remembered suddenly. In front of them, an adult had joined the children and was organizing the crowd around the fountain into a triangle whose vertex lightly touched the handle that released the water. Reb Dunzel and the Man with the Ladder moved to the base of the triangle. “Keep the angle correct,” the adult insisted.
“That man bears a striking resemblance to someone I can’t quite place,” the Man with the Ladder whispered to Reb Dunzel.
“He does,” Reb Dunzel said, trying to move so he made an absolutely straight line with the small child next to him.
“Mr. Peters,” the Man with the Ladder suddenly said, breaking into a sweat. “He looks just like Mr. Peters, the geometry teacher.
They moved forward slowly until the Man with the Ladder stood at the fountain. Next to him the man who looked like Mr. Peters instructed him. “Press the handle down so that the water flows exactly in a parabola before you drink. A parabola exactly, otherwise no drinking.” The Man with the Ladder tried to move the lever down so the water made a gentle, rounded curve but it was erratic. “Not quite there yet,” Mr. Peters insisted, “no drinking yet.” The Man with the Ladder jerked the handle and waited. The approximation to a parabola collapsed into a fractious, awkward spiral.
“Sorry, next,” Mr. Peters commanded.
“I’m thirsty,” the Man with the Ladder complained.
“Sorry, those are the rules.”
Reb Dunzel made a parabola the first turn of the handle. “Beautiful,” Mr. Peters said, “drink your fill.”
“I’m still thirsty,” the Man with the Ladder complained as they moved away from the crowd of children, “how did you do that, the parabola?” he asked Reb Dunzel.
“I haven’t a clue, but I always liked geometry,” Reb Dunzel said, letting his eyes rest on a young girl who sat alone on the ground behind the troop of children. She was looking at a ring she was wearing. When she spotted Reb Dunzel she began to throw kisses at him.
“That looks exactly like Myrna Sweet,” Reb Dunzel said, blushing as he felt the kisses land sloppily on his face. “She hasn’t changed a bit in thirty years.”
“That’s impossible,” the Man with the Ladder said scratchily. “She would be as old as you are now, not a young child,” he insisted. “She would probably look like that.” He pointed at a heavy set, middle aged woman who sat on a bench behind the child.
Reb Dunzel looked at the woman and she threw him a kiss also. He felt it land sexily on his cheek. “That might be,” he admitted, “but I would prefer if she…” he scanned the people in the park before him, “… if she looked like that.” He pointed to an scantily dressed beauty in her mid twenties standing daintily on a patch of grass close to the middle aged woman. When she caught him looking at her she wiggled and threw him a kiss too.
Reb Dunzel blushed and dropped his head.
“That was very strange,” the Man with the Ladder said.
“All of it started just after…” Reb Dunzel declared.
“Just after the whistle,” the Man with the Ladder said. “Maybe…” Both of them swung around and started walking back to the garbage can into which Reb Dunzel had discarded his disappointing prize.
“You didn’t have to throw it away immediately,” the Man with the Ladder complained.
“I thought it was broken,” Reb Dunzel said, walking a little faster, “no sound came out. It’s empty,” he exclaimed as they got to the wire basket into which he had thrown the whistle 15 minutes before. In the distance they saw the truck which collected trash in the park disappearing around a bend. “It was fun while it lasted,” he said, accepting the disappointment in an adult fashion, but staring into the empty wire basket to make sure the whistle had not escaped collection. “We still have your prize,” he said enthusiastically pointing to the box of Crackerjacks the Man with the Ladder still clutched tightly. “Lets open it now.”
Encountering Bill and Mr. Peters and Myrna Sweet had excited them and the popcorn from Reb Dunzel’s box had taken the edge off of their appetite. The Man with the Ladder let the sticky kernels scatter to the ground as he dug for the prize. “I feel it,” he said anxiously. He extracted the object he found in the box and held it up so that they could both look at it.
“What is it?” his friend asked after scrutinizing the small, metallic, cluster of miniature levers and buttons his friend held out.
“I haven’t a clue,” the Man with the Ladder said, staring at the object. “What is it for, what does it do?” he repeated after a few seconds of staring. He put it down on the bench between them and they stared at it for a while. “Maybe it has instructions on the bottom,” Reb Dunzel suggested and turned it over. It said, ‘Made in Kahzakstan.’ He set it back down on the bench.
“Maybe you have to push it,” the Man with the Ladder said and poked at different parts of it without effect.
“Don’t throw it away yet,” Reb Dunzel admonished as a disgusted look formed on the Man with the Ladder’s face. “Maybe it takes a while.”
“What takes a while?” he said. They waited fifteen minutes before Reb Dunzel picked up the device and commented, “Maybe if you shake it,” he said, shaking it violently. “It seems warm to me,” he announced.
“You are right,” the Man with the Ladder agreed poking it again. “Maybe its electronic and has to warm up.” They sat waiting another ten minutes. “This is childish and stupid,” the Man with the Ladder complained. He picked up the device and said boldly, “I’ve had enough. It’s bad enough they give you a prize without instructions, but when you can’t use your adult common sense to make it work, it’s not worth the pain.” He put it on the ground and stamped on it. The device beneath his feet seemed to make a noise and he yanked his foot away. A soft moan that was vaguely sexual suddenly came out of the device. They Man with the Ladder and Reb Dunzel stared at the ground as the noise increased in volume.
“It seems to have developed a voice,” Reb Dunzel commented. Both of them moved away and looked at the device from which an increasingly loud series of sounds of passionate love making came.
“It’s very loud,” the Man with the Ladder said.
“It’s going to attract attention,” his friend added as the device ratcheted up the passionate noises. As the sounds got louder, they looked up and saw people stopping all over the park and staring. “We’ve got to do something,” Reb Dunzel said. People were turning and walking towards them, scanning the ground around them for whoever was responsible for the noise. In front of them the sound from the almost invisible device was increasing in volume. Bursts of passion mixed with the moans and thrashing sounds came at a loud pitch from the device that was almost invisible on the ground. “Oh, Oh, No, Ohhhhhhh,” came from the device.
“Do something,” Reb Dunzel said loudly, the command drowned by the sound from the device.
“What should I do?” the Man with the Ladder asked helplessly.
“Stamp on it again as hard as you can,” Reb Dunzel urged.
The Man with the Ladder put his foot on it gingerly and it burst into louder squeals of delight.
“Stamp on it,” his friend insisted.
“You stamp on it,” the Man with the Ladder said. “It started to moan when I stamped on it, maybe a different foot…”
Reb Dunzel gathered his strength and plunged his foot down. The device fell silent.
A policeman appeared from behind a bush. “Is that you guys making those, those sounds,” he said looking them up and down for some corroborating evidence of what he had heard. “This is the 90’s but this is a public park.” The Man with the Ladder and Reb Dunzel tried to look as innocent as they could but Reb Dunzel’s foot jutted out in front of him at an odd angle. “Keep the noise down or I’ll take you in for disturbing the piece,” the patrolman said. He glared at them and moved away. The people who had been moving toward them stopped suddenly and then resumed their interrupted treks.
“Keep your foot on it, for heavens sake,” the Man with the Ladder urged.
After a park like quiet had nearly returned Reb Dunzel began complaining. “My foot is falling asleep. I can’t hold it any more.” He pulled his leg back to a normal position. Immediately sounds started coming from the device. The noise of sexual thrashing was replaced by a loud wimpering which changed rapidly into sad, hurt moans and the screams of pain of someone suffering some terrible calamity.
The Man with the Ladder and Reb Dunzel backed away quickly and watched people stop moving forward, and stop and turn in their direction. People hurtled toward them rapidly. “Lets run away,” the Man with the Ladder suggested as he turned and started walking in a direction opposite to the flow of humanity in the park. Reb Dunzel followed him, passing the policeman who was rushing toward the noise.
Breathless, the Man with the Ladder and Reb Dunzel found a bench and waited. As a crowd gathered around it, the device went silent. The throng milled around confused, looking first in one direction then in another, straining for a sight of the calamity had caused the noise. A gaggle of policemen descended on the area and scoured the underbrush for a body. When they found nothing they dispersed the crowd and, after standing around joking and laughing, they wandered off. As they walked away the cop who had approached them earlier pointed them out to his companions.
“We’re marked forever,” the Man with the Ladder grumbled. “What kind of prize was that?” he asked resentfully. As they sat staring in the direction of the Crackerjack surprise, they saw a little girl wander past the spot where the prize lay and bend down and pick it up. Even at the distance they were from the child they could see the look of pleasure and surprise on her face, and from the distance they could hear a gentle, tinkling, music box like sound coming from her hand.
“You can’t go home again,” Reb Dunzel said sadly, stuffing a last piece of popcorn that had stuck to his jacket in his mouth, “not even to the same neighborhood.
The Man with the Ladder agreed, turning the empty box he still held upside down and scraping the last of the sticky pieces of popcorn that stuck to the very bottom of box. “I’m not sure I would want to,” he added, “if I could.”
The Man with the Ladder and his friend Reb Dunzel ate in
They were aspiring writers. Each had a daytime job. The Man with a
Ladder earned his living working on a ladder doing whatever someone would pay a
man on a ladder to do. Reb Dunzel had recently begun earning money by making up
mantras and chants for new immigrants who felt they needed an edge in the
struggle in the new world. Once a week, over a meal in
Neither of them were sure why eating in
They were picky about their choice of a restaurant. They tried to choose exactly the Chinese restaurant that matched the particular creations they were pregnant with that week so that it would thicken the air around their inventions and they could stuff them into their pockets and carry them home to nourish themselves later. In order to do this they went on expeditions to locate restaurants with atmospheres that would sustain moods they had not yet had but wanted to have, or imagined having.
When they first started eating regularly in
They spoke in whispered tones of an ultimate Chinese restaurant,
the Mother restaurant, the restaurant that embodied and incarnated the heart
and soul of all Chinese restaurants. Each of them recognized—although he could
not acknowledge it to the other because it seemed irrational and un-modern—that
the search for the Mother restaurant was a search for something else, for the
soul of
But each of them tried to conceal his conviction that something undefinable and wonderful would happen when they found the Mother of Chinese restaurants. Each dispassionately claimed to the other, that, as far as they were concerned, the only possible significance of finding the ultimate Chinese restaurant was that it would make them rich, that they would get a fortune cookie with a message about how to make a million dollars very quickly.
One night, when the choice of a place to eat was particularly difficult, they wandered around furiously trying to decide which restaurant would match their current mood. They stood for a while, on ambivalent right feet and indecisive left feet, in front of a number of restaurants waiting for a push or a pull that would carry them into a restaurant, but each time they tilted uninspired until hungry eaters pushed them into the street and they moved on.
They were standing flat footed and confused when a smell, saturated with the essence of Chinese food, knocked on the door of their noses. “Do you smell it?” Reb Dunzel asked.
“Smell it? I can taste it.” the Man with the Ladder replied, “Let’s follow the scent and eat it—I mean eat whatever smells like that.”
“Where do you suppose it’s coming from?” Reb Dunzel wondered.
“I don’t care if it’s coming from a linoleum factory, I’ll eat anything that smells that good.” They had heard rumors about a linoleum factory disguised as a Chinese sweatshop where Mexican illegals used an exotic processes to turn discarded animal parts into linoleum.
They followed it for a surprisingly long distance until it stopped at the doorway of a store front. Except for the smell which hovered around some unseen vent, there were no signs that the place was a restaurant. The smell was adamant and anchored itself to the doorway and resisted drafts that would move it an inch. They tried to see inside but the large window was lined with paper so the inside was shielded from them.
“It feels like the Grape Street Schul,” said Reb Dunzel to himself ignoring the Man with the Ladder’s perplexed look.
“Like a library,” the Man with a Ladder said in response, confusing himself.
“I don’t see any menu in the window.”
“And there are no dead roasted things hanging around. Do you think it’s a restaurant?” the Man with the Ladder asked his friend.
“It looks more like an un-restaurant,” Reb Dunzel said as he ventured through the door, “but we can always ask.” They found themselves in the vestibule of a large, empty, tiled room in which the only furniture was some heavy marble tables without table cloths and a few folding chairs. Bare bulbs hung from the ceiling. No eating utensils were in sight.
An old crone dozed in a nook in one corner, her head resting on a glass case. Half hidden by her elbow, a sign read, ‘Hostess.’ As the door closed behind them, she lifted her head and squinted at them then resumed her nap. In a far corner table, ensconced in shadows which hung like decorations, two old Chinese men sat carrying on a low, sing song guttural dialogue. A jug and two glasses of wine sat on thick books in front of them.
“I believe,” the Man with the Ladder said under his breath while he moved tentatively into the room, “in a place like this one we’re sure to get a meal…”
“…the likes of which we have never eaten before.” Reb Dunzel completed the sentence as he took a step backwards.
“My thoughts exactly,” said the Man with a Ladder, “let’s get out of here.” There was a unsettled, un-Chinese disquiet in his voice.
As Reb Dunzel began his run for the door, a blur he identified as a waitress appeared and a finger waved up and down and pointed vaguely to one of the tables. As he started a turn to the exit, he followed the gesture to its source.
As he noticed that the waitress who owned the finger also had long silky tresses his motion slowed slightly. When she smiled ever so delicately, looking at him through moth eyes, over high, beautifully shaped cheekbones he stopped moving entirely. It was the face of an oriental princess, a Madam Butterfly, or Mata Hari, certainly not the face of a waitress. It was the face of one of his fantasies.
The Man with the Ladder headed for Reb Dunzel who stood motionless by the door. “Where are you going?” Reb Dunzel asked a confused Man with the Ladder, ushering him back towards a table. “ Why should we run away from a little adventure?” he asked. “How bad can the food be? Why should a smell deceive? We’ll eat and write and….” The startled Man with the Ladder shuffled with Reb Dunzel to the table to which the waitress had motioned them. The table was bare; no menus, no condiments, no tea.
The waitress moved gracefully in front of them and stood silently waiting. The Man with the Ladder noticed a short yellowing list of what looked like the day’s specials for the last decade, attached to the wall, but nothing looked appetizing.
“What would you suggest?” Reb Dunzel asked the waitress.
“Dumplings.” she said, without thinking. The Man with a Ladder
recognized the accent as
“Anything else?” the Man with the Ladder prodded.
One of the old men yelled something at the waitress. She turned and chirped like a bird at them. “That’s all I like,” she said, screwing up her face as she scanned the list of specials on the wall. “Well, beside the dumplings, maybe, pan fried shrimp. The chef bought a new pan.”
“What did they say?” Reb Dunzel asked, pointing at the two men in the corner.
“Don’t pay any attention to them,” she instructed. “Their suggestions are…,” she hesitated, “impractical.” She turned and renewed her chirping complaint. Reb Dunzel stared at her, suddenly remembering another restaurant where the waitresses wore dresses slit up to their hips. The waitress looked at him as if she was reading his mind and his fantasy evaporated instantly. “That sounds fine by me,” he said enthusiastically, though he had only listened to her voice and not heard what she had actually recommended and hoped it didn’t involve frogs or parts of eels.
“Anything else?” the waitress asked.
Reb Dunzel desperately wanted to impress her. He wanted her to think of him not as an ordinary walk-in-off-the-street-tourist, not as the run of the mill dumb big nose, not even as a powerful foreigner—even though her English was better than his—but as something else although he was not sure of what.
“I would like Chicken Confucius style,” he said in his most
authoritative, commanding voice. Someone had told him it was the most elegant
dish in
“OK,” she said, not particularly impressed, “just remember I warned you.”
When the dinner came the dumplings were spectacular. They tasted
of
“It tastes like someone cooked a drawing of a chicken,” the Man with the Ladder decided. “Crayolas and construction paper, I think,” he said, not able to get the taste out of his mouth.
“Charcoal on parchment,” Reb Dunzel suggested.
“Sumi and Cinnabar on rice paper,” the waitress chimed in.
The idea of cooking a picture of a chicken tickled their imagination. A blurred outline of a story appeared and hovered over the remains of the Confucious chicken in the plate in front of them. The notion was much more appealing then the actual dish and they began weaving a story about it. As usual, they wrote on napkins. One idea sprung from another until they had filled up all of the napkins on their table with rambling scrawl and had to ask the waitress for more.
“We are low on napkins,” she replied. “Writers should write in a book.” She carefully extracted a brown, paper covered Chinese notebook from the cabinet on which the old lady was resting our head. “Only the first page is used,” she commented. “It’s a gift,” she added, “since you are our only customers tonight.”
The Man with the Ladder and Reb Dunzel took turns scribbling notes. Behind them, the voices of the two elderly Chinese men filled the air like tobacco smoke. Although they could not understand a word, it seemed clear from the density and texture of the exchanges, that the old Chinese men, reading and drinking tea, were having a literary argument.
“What are they arguing about?” Reb Dunzel asked the waitress when she came to fill their water glasses.
She dismissed the elderly debaters. “Old men
talking nonsense. They are poets,” she said, half in respect, half
contemptuously. “They pretend to be writers of fortunes
because they think that will make them respectable in
She turned and went to the kitchen but returned quickly with the treat that marked the end of the meal. On a small plate were a heap of Lichee nuts and two fortune cookies. They tasted distinctly of old tea leaves and were as stale as the fortunes inside. “You like Chinese food,” Reb Dunzel’s told him with amazing accuracy. The Man with the Ladder’s fortune was even blander, “You will have an interesting day, but not to excess.”
“Unforgivable, horrible,” the waitress remarked as she read over their shoulders. “Dull, dull, dull,” she barked at the two old men. The older of the pair of old Chinese men yelled toward the table at which Man with a Ladder and Reb Dunzel sat. “His fortune,” he said pointing shakily at his companion. The second old man drew himself up. He was a little tipsy. “Absolutely falsified. Not mine, his.” He pointed at his companion.
“Neither of you telling the truth,” the waitress interjected. “You write them together. Poets,” she snorted.
“A bad translation,” the two old Chinese men squealed together and turned to the jug on their table.
Reb Dunzel insisted on paying for the meal so he could leave an impressive tip. The waitress giggled at him as she picked the bills and coins from his hand, counting slowly.
“Come again,” she said to him and then added something in Chinese.
“What does that mean?” he inquired.
“It means…” she broke into giggles and ran off.
The two friends made their way out of the twisted entranceway and walked home in silence, each thinking about a different part of the meal but both of them about the Mata Hari waitress.
II
Although both the Man with the Ladder and Reb Dunzel thought about the un-restaurant and the giggling waitress many times in the week that followed the meal, the next time they met in Chinatown and had to decide where to eat, the odd un-restaurant did not come to mind immediately, but, like some impossible paradox, kept itself hidden, around some curve in their heads, obscured by shadows.
“Where shall we eat?” the Man with a Ladder asked innocently when
they met on the spot from which they usually invaded
“I was thinking someplace quiet but intense,” Reb Dunzel said.
“I was leaning to toward something traditional but progressive,” his companion replied. They consulted their inventory of restaurants searching for the place that was quiet but intense traditional but progressive. They searched their data base of establishments. “Well there’s Sam Wu’s,” the Man with the Ladder noted.
“Or Mon Bo’s,” Reb Dunzel suggested, “and that exhausts intense but quiet and traditional but progressive.”
The haunting aroma assaulted their noses and the memory of their experience at the small restaurant with the giggling waitress and flooded back and surprised them.
“I wouldn’t call it quiet and intense,” said Reb Dunzel.
“Certainly not traditional and progressive,” the Man with a Ladder added.
“I don’t know if we should bother, the food wasn’t that good.” Reb Dunzel said, playing the devil’s advocate. While their head prepared for a debate, their feet had already turned them into the smell which carried them in the direction of the little un-restaurant with no name. “The pan fried shrimp were OK, but the Chicken Confucius was awful.”
“But the dumplings were superb,” the Man with the Ladder proclaimed.
“I don’t know if good dumplings are a sufficient reason for choosing a place to eat. Remember the time you chose that restaurant because the waitresses wore nearly transparent silk dresses,” Reb Dunzel reminded him. The waitress with the Mata Hari face slammed into his memory and he started walking faster.
“You were the one who picked out the meal,” the Man with the Ladder replied accusatorially.
“The menu was in Chinese,” Reb Dunzel said defensively.
“Well even with pot luck you think you could have done better then ordering three different varieties of algae.”
“Is that what it was?”Reb Dunzel sighed. “I was afraid to ask, those waitresses looked a little fierce up close.”
Their heads continued to evaluate restaurants on their mental list
while their feet carried them through the twisted vestibule of the
un-restaurant with no name. The old crone dozed behind her display cases; the
two old Chinese men in flowing robes were arguing forcefully in the corner
booth. It was as if it was only a few minutes, not a week, had passed since
they had been there. The moth eyed, waitress greeted them with a rough
familiarity. “The writers,” she said warmly as they settled into their chairs.
She pointed to the specials on the wall and leaned close to whisper, “No matter
what I say when the hostess passes by, don’t order anything made from an animal
with four feet tonight.” She used her head to point toward the crumpled, dozing
old woman who roused herself and ambled crookedly towards them. They were still
pondering this mysterious communication when she announced, “The pork is very
fresh today.” The old crone labored past them. “Empress of
“How many feet does a sesame chicken have?” the Man with the Ladder asked Reb Dunzel.
“One more than the Confucius chicken which is good today” the waitress said. “Practice make perfect.”
Two of the three dishes they ordered were exceptional. “How can chicken Confucius style taste like cardboard one day and ambrosia the next?” Reb Dunzel wondered aloud.
“It’s like sex.” he heard a deep voice say from behind him. He turned but all he saw was the waitress with her hands covering her mouth giggling her way to the kitchen.
After they finished their meal and the table was cleared, she returned with their fortune cookies which tasted like styrofoam packing material. When the fortune cookies came the two poets who had argued constantly in the corner fell silent and stared at them. They cracked them open. Reb Dunzel read his fortune. “When the string of a lute breaks there is always a way to tie it back together again.”
The Man with a Ladder listened then read his. “When your heart is torn there is no way to mend it.”
The two Chinese men leaned over. “Do you like them?”
“They’re…exceptional.” Reb Dunzel said, hiding his confusion. “Are they supposed to be logically clear or is guessing permitted.”
“Oky doky, does not matter particularly,” the frailer of the poets answered. “In Chinese they sound even better.” He said something quickly in a softly flowing mandarin. Both of the old men were a little tipsy again. “We were wondering perhaps you could settle an argument for us,” the more sober of the two asked in unaccented English, “if you happen to know. I say before there was a restaurant here there was a book store but my companion here, says that before there was a restaurant here there was a store that sold maps.”
“Plumbing supply store,” the waitress yelled.
“Church,” the old crone muttered lifting her head for a fraction of a second.
“Brothel,” came from out of the kitchen.
“I have no idea,” the Man with a Ladder answered quickly.
“I’m not sure either,” Reb Dunzel added.
The scholarly looking Chinese man shrugged; “it does not matter I expect,” he said quickly.
The idea of an establishment that carried the spirit of the businesses that preceded it sparked the impulse to write, but when they asked for more napkins the waitress was adamant. “That’s what you have a notebook for,” she reminded them sharply. “Bring it along with your appetites and imagination when you come to eat.” They were reduced to scribbling the ideas they had on cuffs and collars until one of the old men in the corner surreptitiously handed them a piece of a scroll. “Its fortune cookie paper but no matter,” he said. “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”
After the second meal in the un-restaurant, making a decision
about which restaurant to eat at became part of the ritual of eating in
“Maybe there’s a crowd at lunchtime,” Reb Dunzel guessed. Their curiousity got the better of them. “When is it really busy?” they asked the waitress.
“Monday, the Majong crowd, Tuesday, the Tongs come in, Wednesday, the Bonsai club and bowling league, Thursday, we gear up for you, of course, Fridays and the weekends, tourists.”
“I see,” the Man with a Ladder said,
“Which nights are the tips best?” Reb Dunzel asked.
The waitress looked at him. “Thursday, tonight.” she laughed. “Thursdays the tips are best,” and she whispered something in Chinese. “Are you lonely,” she asked. “We aim to please?” Would you like to eat in company. We can hang the light out.” The next Thursday the place was full. Waiters in white jackets and waitresses in smart oriental uniforms danced through the isles of tables.
“Tourists. We lit the light,” the Mata Hari waitress said, when she finally came to take their order. They pleaded with her for the quiet again and the next week they were the only customers. In the weeks that followed, each time they ate at the un-restaurant, the food seemed to get better and better though there was always some disastrous dish masquerading as a delicious one they had had, usually only the week before.
“It’s like a symphony with a madman playing second fiddle, then the piccolo, then the tuba,” is how Reb described it, “You never know where the discordant element will pop out at you next.”
In spite of this unpredictability—or perhaps because of it—their creative juices always seemed to flow. The anticipation of the meal spawned ideas and images, and afterwards, the struggle to find words, both good and bad, to describe the panoply of taste sensations stirred up stories. Their imagination soared and their stories became, at least it seemed so to them, deeper and more profound.
“Something’s dreadfully wrong,” the Man with the Ladder solemnly announced one week as the last of the Beef Chow Fun disappeared into Reb Dunzel’s mouth.
“You mean the old crone?” Reb Dunzel asked.
“No, what’s wrong with the old crone?” the Man with a Ladder asked, looking up.
“I may have imagined it, but I thought I saw her smile at me.”
“No, that’s not it.”
“The waitress?” Reb asked breathless. She was wearing a sweatshirt over a traditional silk dress that was slit up to her hips. Reb Dunzel tried not to think about it too much or the size of the tip he was going to leave.
“No, I’m talking about the food,” the Man with the Ladder said.
“What do you mean, everything was delicious.”
“Precisely, not a single dish was disappointing. Where’s the other shoe going to drop?”
“What other shoe?” Reb Dunzel asked innocently as if, if he pretended to be ignorant of what the Man with a Ladder was talking about, he would not have to think about it.
“Maybe on the fortune cookies,” the Man with a Ladder muttered to himself.
“They’re always bad, how could they get worse? I’m not even going to touch mine,” Reb Dunzel announced, “maybe it will explode or something.”
When the fortune cookies arrived they glistened as if they were plated with gold. The waitress waited as they cracked them open. The Man with the Ladder was still suspicious even when his cracked open delicately like a porcelain shell, disgorging its fortune easily gently. “Learn your lessons while they’re easy.”
Reb Dunzel’s cookie opened to his touch like a flower. The fortune lay there exposed. “Mourn in your victory, the death of possibility.”
The old men were napping, heads resting on the table. The activity at the table across from theirs stirred them. “Do you like them?” they asked in unison.
“They’re a mouthful!” the Man with the Ladder exclaimed, popping the cookie in his mouth. Even the waitress nodded her approval. The meal was perfect and the evening was complete.
“It feels wonderful,” the Man with the Ladder announced.
Reb Dunzel muttered to himself “it’s become the ultimate Chinese restaurant.”
The Man with the Ladder agreed. “It has. It didn’t start out that way. It never looked like the ultimate Chinese restaurant. It was an un-restaurant. The food…”
“was incomplete…”
“erratic…”
“at first but…”
“Now…”
“it’s become the ultimate Chinese restaurant.”
“It feels wonderful, like…”
“… a time bomb ticking, a fuse fizzling, a rope swinging in the breeze, a…”
“Stop,” the Man with the Ladder insisted, although Reb Dunzel had expressed his feelings exactly. Reb Dunzel continued complaining. “How can we eat anywhere else now. We are bound here. After this meal choice has become an illusion. There is nothing to look forward to, at most repetition. “Mourn in your victory the death of possibility,” he recited. “And…”
“And what?” the Man with the Ladder asked.
“Nothing happened,” came the reply. “I am just as ignorant about why we eat Chinese food as I always was.”
“No revelations.”
“No fortune making fortune cookie. No million dollars.”
“But…”
“the food was wonderful…”
“and…”
“…who know s what next week is going to be like?” Reb Dunzel said hopefully.
For each of them the week was a crowning joy; they were as creative as they could be. They finished stories that had resisted them for months. Reb Dunzel’s chants seemed particularly effective and customers came back raving about how successful and lucky they had been that week and ordered a second chant. The Man with the Ladder whose week it was to receive the rejection notice received instead a letter saying one of their stories was being considered for publication in an anthology of interesting pieces of new odd fiction. It was a spectacular week.
III
The Thursday after the tiny un-restaurant became the ultimate
Chinese restaurant began routinely. Each waited quietly for the other to bring
up the question about where they should eat and while they waited in silence
the smell came and conscripted them. But it took them on an unusual path to the
ultimate Chinese restaurant. It zig zagged through all
of
It looked like a toy fire engine out of a children’s story book. The firemen hopped off energetically and unraveled a brightly colored hose. They connected it to a hydrant which stood near by. “Turn on the water” the Man with the Ladder heard one of them cry, and the fireman holding the hose on the hydrant twirled his wrench. The water surged briefly, twisting the hose in a curliqued arc, then stopped, and, like actors in a silent comedy, the firemen scrambled and dashed around until they found another hydrant and repeated the operation with the same effect. One of the firemen set energetically out to find another hydrant.
The fire was maliciously intent on destruction. They watched through the broken front window as it waltzed a turn in the dining room where it bounced off of the tables and chairs as if it were playing; it curled itself into the little cubby hole in which the hostess huddled and scorched it. It moved to the table at which the two Chinese old men always sat and charred it to ash. It leapt to their table and burnt it to a cinder. As they watched it tunneled into the invisible heart of the restaurant, the kitchen, flaring and blazing like fireworks. Then it snaked back out the vestibule and escaped into the street where it did a little victory dance and then extinguished itself.
“The other shoe has finally dropped,” the Man with the Ladder grieved.
“I’ve lost my appetite, perhaps permanently,” Reb complained as he turned away.
They shuffled around restlessly surveying the disaster. A man in a cooks outfit stumbled out of the restaurant carrying a pan. Around a corner two men who looked very much like the fortune cookie writers disappeared in animated conversation into the shadows.
“I didn’t see the waitress…” said the Man with the Ladder in a worried and anxious tone.
“… or the old crone,” Reb Dunzel added.
“Do you think they were hurt? What will they do now?”
“Them, what about us,” Reb Dunzel moaned.
The fireman who had disappeared in search of a working hydrant reappeared. He handed them a note. “An old lady said to give it to you.”
“Don’t worry,” the note said, “spirit endures,” signed, the Empress of Mott street and, on the bottom penciled in so that the words giggled; “Avoid any food with three legs today.”
They watched as the fire company completed its work packing the brightly colored hose back on the truck. A man came out of one of the nearby stores with a mop and mopped the sidewalk in front of the burned out store. Someone else came out with a large sign done in Chinese characters which he put up over the broken window; In English under the characters were the words, ‘GONE TO VISIT THE QUEENS.’
The Man with the Ladder and Reb Dunzel stood aimlessly on the deserted street, as water sloshed around their feet. The faint remnant of the smell that had carried them there was so thoroughly mixed with the acrid stink of fire and burnt memories that it stung their noses. The moved away sorrowfully, and wandered around purposelessly until their appetites woke up. “Any place,” Reb Dunzel muttered, but they could not contemplate eating Chinese food so they found a table at the local McDonalds and finished off hamburgers and a soft drink in silence.
“Not even a last meal,” the Man with the Ladder lamented. “Not even a final fortune,” Reb Dunzel eulogized, “a condemned man gets better. They walked home without uttering a word.
IV
It was a month before they could gather the resolution and
appetite to think about eating together in
“I think we should try to find a new, a new, favorite restaurant,” Reb Dunzel suggested, refraining from using the word ultimate.
“Like getting back on the horse after it throws you,” the Man with the Ladder explained.
“… or getting back into the water after you nearly drown,” said Reb Dunzel.
“We should at least try to discover which of the restaurants in
“… has a wandering smell… “
“… that doesn’t look like a restaurant…”
They took turns finding an excuse to linger on the street waiting hopefully for the smell to come to them. Reb Dunzel found stones in his shoes which required sitting and searching his shoes and socks thoroughly. The Man with the Ladder complained that some piece of city dirt had gotten in his throat and spent a long time with a handkerchief sneezing and coughing. Finally, after the exhausted every reasonable misfortune they could think of, they conceded that the smell was not coming. They searched their memories and visited the restaurant that was their anchor before they encountered the un-restaurant, the place they could always depend on for a more than decent meal and a modicum of inspiration and, although the dishes were good, they seemed nothing more than the semblance of food and raised mocking ghosts of meals at the burnt out, ultimate restaurant. Their inspiration and creativity hid from them resentfully.
“We have to start looking for it again,” was the most the Man with the Ladder could get out.
“It’s hopeless,” Reb Dunzel replied. “We found it and it was taken away. Why bother?” but he nodded his head in agreement. “I guess we have to try.”
The next Thursday in
“Lets go back and look at… at…where it was,” Reb Dunzel suggested, “perhaps we can get a clue about…” With a shrug, the Man with the Ladder agreed and they set off. When they turned into the street where the un-restaurant had lurked, they saw that something new had replaced the burnt out remnants of the mother of Chinese restaurants. The construction was makeshift. “They seemed they’ve put just enough over the old structure to make it usable,” the Man with the Ladder said, “There’s a lot of lumber.”
“It looks like a lumberyard,” Reb Dunzel observed.
From the inside they could hear the sound of a saw slicing lumber. “It is a lumberyard,” the Man with the Ladder said. He pointed to a sign dangling above the door that said LUMBERYARD in English under some Chinese characters.
“Maybe one of the workers knows if they have re-opened the restaurant somewhere else” Reb Dunzel hoped. A man in a hard hat stood moving 2x4’s from one pile to another. “Excuse me,” Reb Dunzel said, trying to get the man’s attention, “Excuse me sir. We’re looking for the restaurant that used to be here.”
The man gestured casually toward a charred wall where the remnants of the days specials could still be made out. “What do you want?” he barked at them.
“We’d like to know if the restaurant relocated,” Reb Dunzel asked.
“You have trouble with English? I said, there’s the menu what do you want?” Reb Dunzel stood stock still, confused.
“I’ll have the Moo Shu Pork.” the Man with the Ladder blurted out.
The hard hat turned and yelled some long convoluted message in Chinese to someone in the back of the yard. The saw stopped buzzing.
“And you?” he asked Reb Dunzel who was still a little confused.
“I was looking forward to chicken Confucius style,” he admitted.
“Sorry, all out of chicken pictures,” the worker said solemnly. A familiar giggle rang out from the wood shed.
“How about Roast Duck and dumplings?” Reb Dunzel replied.
The hard hat gave another yell to the back and gestured them to a semblance of a table made of a piece of plywood resting on two wooden horses. They had only just sat down when a female worker, hair tucked under a cap advertising the lumberyard, walked out dressed in coveralls, carrying a tray with their meal. They scrutinized her carefully and although there seemed to be a family resemblance it was not the moth-eyed waitress from the ultimate, un-restaurant. But her coveralls danced on her body and Reb Dunzel’s imagination squirmed.
The meal was erratically good. The Moo Shu Pork and the Roast Duck were spectacular but the dumpling were unbelievably awful. Reb Dunzel and the Man with the Ladder quickly found ideas bobbing and weaving around the dinner. Reb Dunzel Dunzel took out the notebook they had taken to carrying around and they scribbled profusely. After the meal they waited.
“Anything else?” the waitress said as she wiped the plywood panel they were eating on. “Oh,” she reminded herself, “You want fortunes.” She called to the person working the saw. The man ripped off the top page of an order-book and scribbled on it in pencil. He tore the page in half, crumpled both pieces and tossed them over to the waitress. She carefully flattened out the papers and turned to the Man with the Ladder and read: “You can’t cut down tree without going against the grain.” To Reb Dunzel she recited, “You like chicken pictures, but not to excess.” Then she handed them the bill which was for fourteen board feet of 2 x 4’s and disappeared. Reb Dunzel Dunzel left the tip under a scrap of veneer.
“Why does this place look like a lumber yard?” the Man with the Ladder asked the worker who stopped slicing panels of plywood just long enough to take their money.
“It is a lumberyard.”
“How come a lumber yard serves food?” the Man with a Ladder asked.
The worker shrugged. “We don’t really serve food, only occasionally someone wanders in and if there’s stuff left over from lunch it seems a shame to let it go to waste. Big noses always are asking questions,” he muttered and a giggle seemed to ride towards them over the noise of the saw.
The next time they went to eat in
“We can always ask,” Reb Dunzel said with an unhappy look on his face.
When they walked through the door they were greeted by a squat, pudgy Chinese man in a business suit whose face reminded them of the hostess at the un-restaurant. “Yes, how can I help you?” he asked, looking up from his computer. On the wall an electronic sign ran quotes from Asian markets. The construction was partial at best; a list of wood and cost per running foot were still on one of the walls and the menu of weekly specials from the original restaurant still had not been painted over.
“Excuse the interruption,” Reb Dunzel stuttered, “last week this used to be a lumber yard. How…”
The stockbroker did not let him finish the sentence. “How did it
become a stock brokers office so quickly?“Things
change, fast, especially Chinese things,” he said. “Keep up with the times. Change, change, change. International
commerce. Lumber is out; stocks are in. Buying and selling is
everything. What is it exactly that you want?” he asked. The office was filled
with the noise of a hidden tickertape and the screen
in front of them announced that CMCV futures had opened in
“Well,” Reb Dunzel hesitated, “we’re really looking for a place to eat. We thought you might know where…”
“What do you want?” the stock broker asked insistently.
“We thought you might know where the lumberyard which was here…”
“Are you hard of hearing or something?” the pudgy man asked quite loudly.
“I’ll have pan friend shrimp,” the Man with the Ladder said abruptly.
“And you?” he asked Reb Dunzel.
“Dumplings and Confucious chicken,” Reb Dunzel said without thinking.
The stock broker swung around to his computer and typed furiously. The noise of the tickertape stopped. He gestured to a desk which had been cleared off and two swivel chairs. “It’s non-smoking,” he apologized and got up and disappeared into a room in the back of the office, reappearing almost instantaneously with their dishes.
“This would make a good story,” Reb Dunzel decided over his dumplings, “but for the life of me I can’t figure out what the plot is.”
“It’s in Chinese,” the Man with the Ladder whispered.
“Well then don’t ask me to figure it out,” Reb Dunzel cautioned, “or it will end up having something to do with algae.” A familiar giggle rang out from the back room.
“Anything else?” the stock broker asked them when they were through with their meal.
“Fortune cookies would be nice,” the Man with the Ladder suggested.
The stock broker reached into a rolledex and produced two fortune
cookies. They opened at the touch. “Change is collective pretend,” said the Man
with the Ladder’s. “Easier to parallel park Himalayan mountains
then take spirit of
“How did you like the food?” he asked.
“Well,” the Man with the Ladder said gingerly, “the pan fried shrimp was excellent but dumplings were…” he searched for a word. ‘Horrible’, ‘disastrous’, ‘inhumane’, all presented themselves but he left them unsaid.
“Well, what do you expect, this is a stock broker’s office,” the stock broker reminded them.
“I’ve had better Chinese food in lumber yards,” the Man with the Ladder whispered a little too loudly to Reb Dunzel. The stock broker looked offended and was only slightly mollified by the generous tip.
They walked out of the stock brokers office with puzzled looks on their faces. “I don’t understand,” the Man with the Ladder said, looking for guidance from Reb Dunzel who had a look on his face that reflected the Man with the Ladder‘ own.
“It doesn’t make a lot of sense,” Reb Dunzel agreed.
“I think we should think about it,” the Man with the Ladder suggested.
“About what exactly?” Reb Dunzel wanted to know.
“I’m not exactly sure,” was the Man with the Ladder’s reply. “But
maybe we should take a break from eating in
For the next few weeks they ate at the local Burger King. “It’s
neutral,” Reb Dunzel commented, defending their choice. “Nourishment,
no provocative inspiration, only hamburger smells.” They struggled too
make sense of their
“I think we are ready for Chinese food again,” the Man with the
Ladder announced one Thursday. “We can’t put off eating in
Reb Dunzel concurred with reservations. “I’m not sure we
confronted anything.” The memories of the ultimate restaurant, the fire, the
lumberyard and the stockbrokers office were fading.
“It might have been a run of bad Moo Shu Pork that had an aftereffect. We
should go back.” Their creative energies had weakened from the string of
foreign restaurants they had eaten at, and both of them were looking to
“I think we should decide on the restaurant before we set out,” Reb Dunzel suggested. “How about Sam Wu’s?” It was a safe, familiar choice. “Wonderful,” the Man with the Ladder said, agreeably.
They made their way to Sam Wu’s only to be confronted with a sign that announced that the restaurant was closed for renovations. “What kind of renovations?” the Man with the Ladder demanded to know standing in front of the entrance and speaking so loudly to the shuttered doorway that the tourists passing by looked at him. “It was completely renovated when it opened twenty years ago,” he complained, “I liked it the way it was.”
“Why don’t we just look?” Reb Dunzel suggested. “It can’t hurt
just to look, maybe…” He turned to the Man with the Ladder who conceded that
looking couldn’t hurt probably, although he had a feeling that they may have
been premature in their decision to resume their
“Its completely redone.”
“Really finished.”
“No pieces of a lumberyard…”
“…hinting at a restaurant.”
“…decorating a stock broker’s office…”
“It’s a…”
“restaurant,” they said together in disbelief.
“But where’s the smell?” Reb Dunzel asked suspiciously, “there’s no smell.” They stood quietly waiting for the smell to make an appearance, sniffing the air, searching for it. “It’s completely remodeled…” Reb Dunzel said, trying not to pay attention to the significance of the absence of the smell.
“There’s a dead duck in the window,” the Man with the Ladder pointed out.
“And a menu,” Reb Dunzel added, “and…” The front of the building was all glass but when they peered in all they could see were potted trees and red banners announcing a grand opening. It was a beautiful shiny new restaurant. No trace of the decades’ specials appeared on the wall.
“Do you think they serve food?” the Man with the Ladder asked Reb Dunzel as they pushed through the front door.
“Of course we serve food—we are a restaurant if you haven’t noticed.” a startled maitre de said testily. The menus on the table were a bad omen and the meal they ordered arrived carried securely by a middle aged Chinese waiter dressed in a black suit, certainly no food for Reb Dunzel’s fantasies. The food was even less exciting. The dishes were uniformly mediocre, without promise or potential; the Confucius chicken tasted like Confucius chicken, the roast duck like roast duck. They were recognizable and indifferent.
“Even the stock broker’s office served better Chinese food,” Reb Dunzel reflected loudly without any attempt to cloth his disappointment in a diplomatic garb, “and he might have been Korean.” When the fortune cookies came they were sharply to the point. Reb Dunzels said; “When Cyclodyen reaches 110 buy. Sell when it hits 234. The Man with the Ladder‘s fortune stated bluntly, “Sell Romulex short.” They rolled up the fortunes, left them in the remnants of the Moo Shu Pork without a second thought, and walked home in silence.
V
When Thursday came they were caught in a dilemma. Their creativity
and imagination demanded
“What’s left for us,” the Man with the Ladder asked directly.
“Nothing but starting from scratch,” Reb Dunzel submitted, but the tone made it clear that he shared the Man with the Ladder’s reservations. They were running through their list of abandoned restaurants when each of them smelled the smell. Each refused to acknowledge it, insisting the other make the first move. Finally Reb Dunzel couldn’t take it any more. “Do you think?” Reb Dunzel whispered, without finishing his question.
“I haven’t go the least idea,” the Man with a Ladder replied, whispering also. “Don’ t pay attention,” he said as they turned simultaneously into the smell. “Don’t look as if your paying attention,”
“I don’t care,” Reb Dunzel said nonchalantly.
The smell took them up and down alleys, through twisted back streets that they did not remember existing. After a while Reb Dunzel said in a hardly audible voice. “It’s taking us in a different direction entirely, the opposite direction.” As both of them slowed down, preparing to bolt at the first sign of something weird, the smell took one final sharp turn, deposited them on an unfamiliar street corner and disappeared.
They looked around.
“No lumber yard here.”
“No stock brokers office.”
“Not even a restaurant. Only…”
There was no one and nothing in sight except two pretzel sellers standing in front of their wagons which were parked right next to one another.
Reb Dunzel took the initiative. “You wouldn’t happen to know if there’s a lumber yard around?” he asked the nearest preztel seller.
“Or a stock brokers office,” the Man with the Ladder chimed in.
The Chinese pretzel sellers looked at one another and shrugged.
“I didn’t think so,” the Man with the Ladder said. “We been set up by a smell.”
“Smells are wicked things,” one of the pretzel sellers commented. “A taste is even wickeder.”
The Man with a Ladder stared at the pretzel sellers. “I’m curious. Why are the two of you bunched up on the same corner. Why don’t you sell from opposite corners or different blocks.”
“It’s a merchandising strategy,” the other announced. “Give the customer a choice. Freedom to choose.”
“But you have the same pretzels and soda,” the Man with a Ladder insisted.
“Freedom is another word for nothing left to loose,” the first pretzel seller asserted.
“Or gain sometimes” the second chimed in.
“Besides,” the closer of the two pretzel sellers remarked, “selling is merely a way of making a living. It is boring. Together we keep one another alive. What I can’t reach from the front, he reaches from the back. He can watch the store when I want to shop…”
“…or go to the bathroom. He’s
Chinese, so around him there’s a bit of
“I’ll settle for a pretzel,” the Man with a Ladder said very tentatively, not sure he wanted to kill his appetite with a pretzel.
“All out of pretzels,” the pretzel seller declared. There was a big pile of pretzels on his wagon. “These are for show, hard, stale,” though it seemed to the Man with the Ladder that steam was rising from them. “Anything else you like?” he asked.
“I like pan-friend shrimp,” the Man with the Ladder said boldly.
“Why didn’t you say so. I don’t happen to have any but my friend here”—he pointed with a flourish to the other pretzel seller beside him—”I know for a fact that he has…”
“Here you are,” the other pretzel seller said. “From lunch you understand, but untouched,” he assured him and opened a door in his cart and whipped out a little seat from under his cart and pulled down a flip down panel which jutted out and made a little table. The other pretzel seller made a similar seat for Reb Dunzel.
“And you,” his companion asked, turning to Reb Dunzel.
“Confucius chicken,” Reb Dunzel responded hesitantly.
“I’m sorry,” the seller said. “I’m out of chicken pictures, “but…but…” He turned to the second pretzel seller who was polishing the chrome on his wagon and chirped a little in Mandarin then in English. “Remember you got a take out order of Confucious Chicken for lunch and never ate it. Check your inventory.”
“Yes,” The other pretzel seller turned very serious. “Let me check the inventory.” He plunged his head into the guts of the wagon.
“One cooked drawing of a chicken,” he said jokingly, whipping out a tray on which a delicate plate of Confucious Chicken lay wrapped in cellophane. “It comes with an order of fried dumplings,” he added, putting the plate of dumplings next to the glistening chicken.
From somewhere behind the pretzel sellers and their customers a giggle arose. The Pretzel tellers polished their wagons making believe they heard nothing. “I bet you fellas were looking for that restaurant that used to be around here. You’re looking for that Chinese restaurant, aren’t you?”
“That restaurant,” Reb Dunzel repeated, confused.
“That restaurant, you know, the restaurant with real Chinese food, that restaurant.”
“The one my mother was the hostess at.”
“And my sister worked at.”
“You’d remember my sister,” the taller of the pretzel sellers said, “she was beautiful. My mother slept a lot,” he added, putting his head down on the cart in a perfect imitation of the old crone. And our fathers, they wrote fortunes for cookies.”
“They wrote fortunes like this,” his partner chimed in, bending over and mussing his hair and throwing a towel over his shoulder in a perfect imitation of one of the old Chinese poets in the restaurant. He looked at Reb Dunzel. “Armies never never surrender at night.”
The other pretzel seller caught the spirit. “The warning shoot warns the shooter.” They burst into laughter. “That was fortune cookie writing all right.”
Then both of the pretzel sellers grew very serious. “That restaurant burnt down,” one said.
“Yes, down to the ground,” his companion added.
“If you’re looking for that restaurant,” the other said, “it went up in smoke. Cheech and Chong.
“Up in smoke is right.”
“Became pure spirit.”
“Pure smog.” They laughed and laughed.
“Had to be.”
“It’s the fate of ultimate restaurants.”
The two pretzel sellers turned to face Reb Dunzel and the Man with the Ladder. “There is no ultimate Chinese restaurant, no spirit caught, embalmed and mummified. The spirit of people is in the people, in the nitty gritty of living—and in their food, of course.
“And in their poetry,” the other pretzel seller added, “and their fortunes.”
“Certainly their poetry, but it loses something in the translation.”
“Forget about ultimate restaurants,” one of the pretzel sellers reminded them.
“Once you’ve seized the spirit—or it’s seized you,” the other interposed, “you have it.”
“Or it has you,” the other added.
“It may not be over until the fat lady plays the Erhu as we Chinese say, but when its over its over.”
“The trick is,” the pretzel seller standing closest to Reb Dunzel explained, “the trick is to bring that spirit to the table at every restaurant you eat at. No point in searching for the ultimate Chinese restaurant. The spirit endures, it persists, it continues in the face or argument that it shouldn’t or can’t.”
“You may not like all of it. Some of it is not likeable,” the other pretzel seller acknowledged.
The Man with the Ladder and Reb Dunzel finished off the meal while the pretzel sellers leaned against their wagons and chattered. “I expect you want a fortune cookie,” one of them said suddenly. “I don’t have a fortune cookie,” he said, “but…”
“I happen to have a couple of fortune pretzels,” said the other.
“That’s going too far,” the Man with a Ladder said.
“I guess so,” one of the pretzel sellers said, “but this is
The Man with the Ladder and Reb Dunzel read their fortunes in turn.
“Beauty is always bait for one trap or another,” said Reb Dunzel’s. The Man with the Ladder’s read, “The improbable is merely the impossible with a license.”
“Well,” said the pretzel sellers “we are closing up now. Have a good trip, search well and prosper.”
“And come visit us now and then.”
“Don’t be strangers.”
“You know where we are,” they said.
“How much is the meal,” the Man with the Ladder asked.
“Oh this one is on the house.”
“Free.”
“No charge at all.”
A giggle seemed to grow louder from behind the pretzel sellers. “It’s been fun,” they yelled as they swung the carts around and disappeared down the street and swung around a corner.
“No more ultimate restaurants,” Reb Dunzel said sadly after a moment.
“But something better I think,” the Man with the Ladder was quick to respond, “Something much better.”
In the weeks that followed they ate in
The Man with the Ladder was babysitting for Tatanya Schwartz the way he usually babysat the little girl while her mother was working. He sat at the very top of the Ladder and she sat on one of the benches in the park.
“Tell me another story about God,” the little girl said, very seriously.
“My stories about God are a little wicked,” the Man with the Ladder confessed. “They are not suitable for a young girl growing up.”
“Sometimes they get a little tangled,” the girl acknowledged, “but I like them because they make God very interesting, whereas most of the stories I hear make him plodding and dull. And they are very respectful in their own way. He is always powerful and usually thoughtful abo