by Tom Papa
If we’re ever out to dinner together and the waiter asks, “Would you like anything else?” and I say, “No,” I’m lying. The real me, the honest me, would always say through a mouth full of something, “Yes, more of everything.”
I love food in such a deep, profound way that I’m salivating just writing about it.
There are sandwiches from my past that I carry with me as if they were memories of lovers. “The Italian Special” from Casa Del Sole in Hillsdale, New Jersey. “The Spicy Dom” at Domingo’s in Encino, California. “The Michelangelo” from Alidoro on Sullivan Street in New York City.
How did this happen to me? How did I become a fine-food piranha? It’s nature and nurture and cheese. The nature is that I come from an Italian family. The nurture is that my Italian family taught me to eat every meal as if it would be my last. And cheese, well, what more can I say?
Italians use food as sport, religion, a career, therapy, and a nonstop celebration.
They are constantly thinking about food, going to get the food, making the food, and feeding everybody the food. Whenever we’re eating, all anybody talks about is what we’re eating next. Italians truly love life, but that’s only because staying alive means they can eat more food.
My childhood was filled with lasagna, meat sauce, and family who kissed me with cannoli on their lips. When we drove to my grandmother’s house on Sundays, the smell of garlic and provolone would roll out of her kitchen and open the car door for us. It would take me by the arm and escort me inside, where she would be making a five-course meal out of one can of crushed tomatoes.
There was very little money but a lot of people to feed. I’m one of twenty-three grandchildren and we were all there, at the same time, leaving her no choice but to perform a miracle out of her tiny kitchen each week.
Today people do much less with much more. Modern kitchens with marble islands, industrial-strength ovens, double freezers, and built-in refrigerators, and no one cooks! Millions of dollars just so they can heat things up. All she had was her small oven and very little counter space, but with the help of the grandchildren learning by her side while washing the pots and pans, it hummed like a fine restaurant.
The dining room was a converted porch where the family ate at a long table, always covered in a crisp white tablecloth. Three generations, united by her cooking, listening, loving, and eating. There seemed to be endless bowls of spaghetti and meatballs, marinated olives, and garlic bread. Chicken Parmesan, homemade ravioli, and gnocchi in heavy cream sauce.
The adults drank wine and snuck it to the children. They would never give it to their own kids but would sneak it to their nieces and nephews, which meant that eventually everyone got some.
I was ten years old, drunk on wine, and covered in sauce. You don’t live this way and learn to eat like this without developing a nice, healthy food addiction.
My father and I took it one step further by joining forces in taking on eating challenges. He would take me to White Castle, a dingy fast-food joint that makes Taco Bell seem like dining at the Ritz-Carlton. They’re still around and continue to serve the very same square burgers in little cardboard sleeves. You slide them out of the packaging and eat each one in about two bites. At twenty-seven cents apiece we would get sacks of burgers and sit in the car with the cartons spread all around us steaming up the windows. We’d plow through fifty of those suckers without a problem.
My father was always on the lookout for food challenges where he knew we would more than get our money’s worth. He’d heard about an all-you-can-eat sushi place, in Hackensack, New Jersey. This was in the 1980s, when sushi wasn’t very well known and the offer was their way to get sheltered people from New Jersey to pay attention to this exotic Asian cuisine.
It was a terrible business decision on their part. We plowed through trays of this stuff as fast as they could roll it. My father felt speed was important because he always feared it was just a matter of time before they realized their mistake and changed the rules.
“You’re taking too many bites,” he’d say. “One bite, swallow. One bite, swallow.”
We ate in a panic while the staff stared at us from the kitchen in disbelief.
There are restaurants all around the metropolitan area with our names engraved on the walls in honor of the damage we did. One was an old roadhouse in northern New Jersey, called Joe McDonald’s Steakhouse, that had a hard-to-beat steak challenge. It was famous for all the World War II memorabilia that covered every inch of the place. Large men ate large cuts of meat surrounded by thousands of guns, uniforms, and war bond posters.
I loved this place and had been going with my family since I was a little kid, but when I was sixteen they came up with the McDonald’s Steak Challenge. If you ate a seventy-two-ounce steak in one sitting, with the sides, you got your name on the wall and a T-shirt with the picture of a cow on it. Despite the hefty carnivores who ate there, not many had won. We wanted to win. We wanted to be on the wall, but even more we wanted the T-shirt. My father would have seen it as a great insult if someone else in town was walking around in that shirt thinking they could eat more than us.
The waitress served the giant dishes with a side dish of disgust.
“You’re going to make yourself sick,” she said.
“Don’t listen to her, Tom, she’s trying to mess with your head,” my father said.
It was the biggest steak I had ever seen. I quickly understood why there weren’t more people with their name engraved on the wall between the hand grenades and bayonets. Eating the steak alone was impossible. Eating the sides as well, insane.
We finished it in five minutes.
“Look, we’re even eating the skin,” I told the waitress while holding up a potato. She shook her head and handed in her apron.
We are on that wall. I lost the T-shirt.
* * *
When I was in college there was the Gaetano’s Cheesesteak Challenge. The upperclassmen told us tales of these gigantic sandwiches that were so big they came in beer case boxes. They told us, “No one has ever eaten a whole one. It’s impossible.”
I quietly smiled to myself.
We drove an hour to the shop and placed our orders. There were no tables, so we all stood around the hood of our car with our sandwiches laid out before us. They were enormous, way too much food for one person. Everyone grew quiet as they struggled to chew. I dabbed the corner of my mouth with a napkin and before anyone was halfway done said, “I’m going for another one, anyone want anything?”
One of my friends passed out. I ate two.
I could be so fat. I’m a little overweight. I’d say happily overweight. Not health problem overweight, but technically, according to my doctor, I could lose a few. I actually got in shape for a physical recently, and while my doctor was proud of my progress, he told me, “Keep it up, only twenty more pounds to go.”
There’s no way I’m doing it. I don’t think it’s possible. My metabolism is so slow that in order to lose that weight I would literally have to stop eating altogether. If I starve, I’ll maintain the weight I am, yet if I eat one M&M, I’ll double in size.
And here’s the real reason why I won’t take my doctor’s advice: I love eating too much. Eating is my life. There’s too much happiness and history to put an end to it. I tried to clean up my diet and become a vegetarian. I lasted a while but eventually broke, not for any other reason than that I walked into an Italian deli. All the joyful smells of my entire life wrapped around me, and before I knew it I was walking out the door with boxes filled with cheeses, breads, and prosciutto. I had to steer with one hand because I had a meatball sandwich in the other.
I know I’m not alone in this food passion. It’s not as if Italians make up the entire population of the United States. The South is covered in fried chicken, okra, and barbecue. The Southwest is steeped in Mexican heritage. Chinatown is a part of every city. New England raised entire generations on lobster rolls. I was touring in the Upper Midwest in early f
all and it was as if someone broke open a bakery case and doughnuts, pies, and maple syrup spilled all the way up to Canada. Wisconsin is literally made out of cheese curds.
It’s really our duty to eat and enjoy ourselves. Who cares if you’re a little fat? We’re all fat. You’re either really fat, kind of fat, or trying not to be fat. Either way, fat’s coming.
So enjoy yourself. More wine! More bread! More cheese! Do it for you. Do it for your ancestors. Do it for me.
HAVE YOU EVER GOTTEN A TEXT OF A MONKEY IN A BIRTHDAY HAT AND REALIZED IT WAS ACTUALLY A PICTURE OF YOU AT A PARTY LAST WEEKEND? I HAVE …
A VERY FUNNY NOSE
Whenever you look at yourself in the mirror and you are horrified with how ugly you are, just remember that you’re not alone. We are all funny-looking. Every single, misshapen, twisted, warped, crooked, spectacularly irregular one of us.
When they say we’re all unique snowflakes, that no two of us are alike, that’s not because we’re all perfectly beautiful, it’s because we’re flawed in the most hilarious ways.
We’ve got funny eyes, curled lips, and weird hairlines. Chins that point out, chins that look like a baboon’s ass, some of us have no chin at all. Some of us were born without the parts that everyone else has. No eyebrows, no ass, and teeny-weeny noses. How about the no-lip people? They look like the rest of their head is in 3-D with a pencil-sketched mouth.
Our ears are always a mess. Hairy ears, little ears, and ears that stick out on the side. Little ears bother me, they’re not fun at all. I have a friend who has little ears with no lobe. It’s like her ears are attached directly to her head and someone forgot to trim them.
I love really big ears. Especially on little kids. Big satellite dishes that look like they’re trying to catch a signal from a distant planet. They always make me laugh. The best part is you can’t hide big ears, all you can do is try and grow your hair long and develop a sense of humor.
We’ve all got our thing, every single one of us, except of course that one exception. The only one human being who has achieved divine perfection: Gwyneth Paltrow. If you think I’m joking, you are wrong. If you say anything bad about her, I’ll punch you right in your cowardly face.
But the rest of us are circus freaks.
What a nice thing to know. Isn’t it a relief? Think about how much time I just saved you in the morning. Now, when you look in the mirror, the only thing that should go through your mind is, “Good enough!”
Even the people we see on the covers of magazines, who seem to have a perfect face, are funny-looking. Not at the newsstand all airbrushed and smiley, but at home with the makeup off, they look just like you and me; like monkeys trying their best to evolve.
I’m funny-looking in myriad ways. I have a head that really belongs on a porpoise: a lot of forehead, a little too much chin, and a bald spot that looks like a blowhole. Depending on what angle you catch me at, I have between two and seventeen chins. And I have a patch of hair on my back. It’s one patch on the left side, in the shape of New York State and about the size of a frisbee. It’s been there since puberty. Actually it started out as a birthmark when I was a child and it eventually turned into hair. Try putting that on a dating profile.
In college my roommate named it, as if it were a third student sleeping in our dorm room. He named it Sammy. I wrote a song about him.
Sammy on my back
Sammy on my back
Whatcha doing there
With all that hair
Sammy!
I also have a big nose. Well, not exactly a big nose, more a fat nose with nostrils that look more like two bat caves than something that belongs on someone’s face.
They’re so big I made a habit of seeing what I could fit up there. It became a bit of a parlor trick that I would perform for my friends and was always a big hit, until eventually I went too far.
That’s when I got a pachinko ball stuck up my nose.
When I was twelve my father bought a pachinko machine at a flea market.
Pachinko is a Japanese, upright pinball machine. It’s a very odd game where you pull a lever and a large ball bearing flies into action, ricochets off a thousand tiny nails, and randomly either lands in a spot that awards you more points or fails. There is literally no skill involved, but it’s very addicting in a slot machine kind of way.
My father didn’t buy a lot of things on a whim. He wasn’t the type to bring something home just for the fun of it. He was pretty frugal and only bought stuff that was either absolutely necessary or solely for him, which made the purchase of a Japanese pinball machine very odd. The weirdness of this device might have been the allure, in the same way you would buy a vintage typewriter or an old radio from the 1930s. But more realistically, he must have gotten a really good deal on it or more likely he found it at the dump.
He brought it home and put it in the basement, and we played with it for hours. Days. Years. But as the game itself was kind of boring, we eventually started playing with the pachinko balls themselves. We’d gather them up from the back and throw them at each other, roll them around, and eventually I got the hilarious idea to stick one up my nose.
When I would perform one of these nose tricks, I wouldn’t just stick it up there straightaway. I wasn’t an amateur. I learned how to build suspense from Evel Knievel, the great motorcycle daredevil. He never blasted off a jump the first time out. He was a master showman who knew how to expertly tease the audience. He’d adjust his helmet, climb on his bike, and work the crowd into a frenzy with every rev of his engine. Everyone would anticipate his jump as he raced down the ramp, and just when he should’ve been accelerating he’d come to a sudden stop at the edge. The crowd would go crazy. He’d shake his head, turn the bike around, and head back to the start while the crowd lost its collective mind. Evel didn’t give you what you wanted when you wanted it. This was his show, on his terms.
I was the Evel Knievel of nose tricks. I held the pachinko ball in my hand. “Is it possible? Can it be done?” The crowd, which consisted of my two friends Keith and Dave, went crazy.
The funny thing about kids, when they’re watching their friend about to do something stupid, is the complete lack of concern for their well-being. Never in the history of childhood has there been a cautionary pal who tells you to slow down and reconsider what you are doing. Never.
The response to any life-threatening endeavor, be it jumping out of a tree house, flying your bike off a jump, or sticking a metal pachinko ball in your nasal cavity, is always the same: “Do it!”
That’s what they chanted as they clapped, danced, and threw themselves on the ground.
“Do it! Do it!”
I had worked them into a complete and proper frenzy.
I held the ball up one last time. They gasped. I posed. They fell silent. Slowly I moved the ball toward the edge of my nostril—and inhaled. The gigantic ball fired straight up my nose, way too fast, way too easily, and way too deep. This antique metal ball bearing, which had entertained Asian pinball fans for more than fifty years, was now in the upper reaches of my nasal cavity entertaining my friends like never before.
The crowd went nuts.
I had a fleeting moment of victory, followed by a brief pause. And then panic. The room went silent. My friends leaned in. My eyes darted around. We hung there in space, trying to piece together what exactly was happening, and we all realized at the exact same moment—that it was stuck!
It wasn’t coming out. I was in real trouble. Keith and Dave were laughing harder than they had in their entire lives. They were rolling around on the floor and hitting each other with delight.
I was caught in a slight two-step where I knew I should be running for help but didn’t know where to go, so instead I just bounced from side to side. I dug my finger up, I felt the ball, but there was no room around the sides of it. It was wedged in tight and my poking around had only pushed it up even higher.
I was scared, but my friends were so extremely happy that I star
ted laughing, too. I couldn’t help it. This was ridiculous. I had a pachinko ball stuck in my nose. The laughter calmed me down and enabled me to see more clearly.
With my friends at my feet, I used my finger to close off the other nostril and with all my might tried to blow the pachinko ball out of my head.
“What is he doing now?” Keith cried.
“Oh no,” said Dave.
At first it seemed hopeless. All I was doing was building up so much pressure that I was turning red. Keith was laughing so hard that he couldn’t speak. All he could do was point at me with tears of joy running down his face.
I took a deep breath, tilted my head back, and pushed with all my might. I turned from red to purple and then something squeaked like a pinched balloon and the pachinko ball fired from my face like a bullet.
It was more powerful than any BB gun I had ever fired. The ball shot out of my nose, across the room, and off the wall, ricocheting around, turning the basement into a life-size pachinko machine.
I was saved. Dave and Keith laughed for another three days. I was a hero.
And none of this would have been possible if I hadn’t embraced that big, fat nose of mine and celebrated myself. I became a legend on that day. All thanks to my very funny nose.
So embrace your flaws. All of you. The girl with the ski-slope nose. The man with the pineapple head and beady eyes. And you with the fish lips. Own it. Enjoy it.
You’re beautiful.
NANCY AND EMILY
The first girl I ever fell in love with smelled like sweat and bug spray. We were two kids, running and playing throughout our neighborhood for the entire summer. Her name was Nancy. She was sweet and fun and we were in first or second grade. We did everything together. We’d play ball, run through the woods, and sit by the side of the brook that ran through the back of our school, skimming rocks and catching crawfish. We did everything that growing kids do when they’re exploring the world and themselves.