Sometimes when you’re having a particularly busy day, you hit the point where you’ll eat almost anything…anywhere.
Today I was in the backwaters of CT, passing through a town that looked like it had been a nice place to live once upon a time when the great brick mills were roaring.
I stopped at a little Chinese place, in the basement of an old white clapboard house on a corner, the only splash of color in the front dirt yard was an old pink tricycle, with the stubs of those pastel streamers sticking from the handlebars.
The railings off the sidewalk needed to be painted since forever, and led down three or four steps into the place. To the right was a counter with the largest tip jar I’ve ever seen…like the size of a fish-tank. Straight-ahead was a table stacked high with cardboard boxes: fortune cookies, napkins, packets of duck sauce and soy sauce. To the left were two empty tables and a bunch of mismatched chairs.
The young woman behind the counter was tall and slim, with long black hair pulled back into a ponytail. Pretty but forlorn, like at one time she'd wondered how she'd ended-up here, but was beyond caring now. Her daughter, about five, was skipping in a circle, her coloring book and stubby crayons on a little desk in the corner.
I ordered chicken and broccoli and a spring roll…a safe bet. She cooked it like I was a friend of the family who’d just stopped-by unannounced, and she was obliged to make me something to eat.
She brought it to me on a thin paper plate with a tiny plastic Barbie fork.
It didn’t taste like the Chinese food I’m accustomed to…it was kind of smokey, the spring roll tasting of jasmine.
A young blonde-haired shirtless guy came bounding down the stairs, wearing khaki cargo shorts, and a pair of ripped Converse sneakers. He grabbed a giant Pepsi from the rattling cooler, breathlessly said, “$2.75 right? I’ll leave it on the counter,” dumped down a pocketful of change and a crumpled dollar bill, and flew away.
I finished, paid, and dropped a few bucks into the fishtank.
On the way out of town I stopped at a Dunkin’ Donuts for a coffee. I asked the kid behind the counter if he’d ever eaten at “The Wall.”
“Yeah,” he said, “I’ve eaten there a bunch of times.”
“I just had lunch there,” I said, then after a long pause asked, “Am I gonna die?”
“No…NO…,” he said. “You ate at the good place! There are two Chinese places over there,” he said. “The one that’ll kill you is across the street!”
Sometimes you just get lucky.