by Tom Papa
“Hold on,” she said. “This is zone five.”
The husband pretended not to hear.
The arrogant wife spoke up. “Oh, we’re pre-boarding.”
“No, you’re not,” said the gate attendant.
I was as excited as a child on Christmas morning. I was giddy. I was restored.
“Yes, we are. We did it on the flight out,” lied the wife out of her lying lips on her lying face.
“If you were pre-board, it would say on your boarding pass. It does not. It says zone five.”
With nothing left to say, the husband decided to make a run for it but was way too slow.
“Sir, get out of line and wait your turn like everybody else.” She held out her arms to block them. “Now!”
Oh, was I happy. We all were. Someone clapped. A stranger patted me on the back.
The worms put their heads down in shame and walked off to the principal’s office. I made eye contact with the wife. I didn’t have to say it. We both knew.
Everybody knew.
I moved forward with my boarding pass with the joy and confidence that comes with knowing that you did the right thing. I handed it to the gate attendant, excited to be so close to someone so strong.
I gave her a reassuring look and said, “Great job.”
“Ooh, that makes me so mad. If there’s one thing I can’t stand in this world, it’s sneaks and liars.”
I nodded in agreement and said, “Shit People.”
She laughed. “You got that right, honey.”
Will those people do it again? Probably. Some people are just horrible. While the rest of us are trying to get along, looking out for each other, they’re interested only in themselves. I don’t like them and I definitely don’t respect them.
And every once in a while the good guys win.
HAVE YOU EVER BEEN OUT TO DINNER WITH PEOPLE WHO TOLD THE WAITER TO NOT BRING BREAD TO THE TABLE AND YOU ASKED TO MOVE TO ANOTHER TABLE? I HAVE …
I’M SO BAKED
How do you find meaning in your life when you know that you are just one tiny speck tooling around in a giant universe? What are the answers? How do you live with purpose? I don’t really know, but I sure have been spending a good amount of my time baking bread and that seems to do the trick.
I bake a lot of bread. I make it, bake it, and eat it. I think about it when I’m awake and dream about it when I’m asleep. I look for new recipes on my favorite bread sites. I have a tower of books on nothing but bread. My Instagram is filled with bakeries from around the world. I visit those bakeries when I’m traveling and spy on their ovens and their flour and their techniques.
I love the smell of it. I love the taste of it. I love what I can do with it. I love sharing it. I give it to friends and family. I send it to strangers in brown paper bags that I bought just for the bread.
To my wife’s dismay and against her wishes, I have taken over a large portion of the kitchen with breadbaskets, mixers, and flour containers. I get upset if my kids forget to put a fork in the dishwasher, but I have no problem with the mountains of flour piled on the floor.
I order my flour from a company in Utah called Central Milling. It costs more to ship it than it does to buy it. It comes in fifty-pound bags. I always know when it arrives because it lands on the front steps with a thud like an elephant taking a seat.
I have to drag it into the house like a dead body. Not that I have ever carted around a dead body, but I can only imagine it wouldn’t be easy. I feel good when I open the box and see the giant bag. It means something. It means that I bake. That I take it seriously. And that my wife thinks I’m annoying.
The other side of the kitchen is the bread box, a giant cutting board that is just for bread, and bread knives. A good serrated bread knife is a must. The sensual difference of a smooth slicing of a loaf of bread is palpable.
Baking bread the way I do is not easy. It’s a three-day process from the time I decide to make it to the moment I am stuffing a slice in my mouth. It can be complicated, there’s a lot that can go wrong, and I love every minute of it.
It begins by taking the sourdough starter out of the refrigerator and feeding it flour and water. Yes, feed it.
The sourdough starter is a living organism. It’s living yeast like the plant in Little Shop of Horrors that needs to be fed. You can create one of these pets by mixing up a bowl of flour and water and leaving it on the counter. Microscopic natural yeast that is flying all around us will enter the mixture and eat it. This becomes a mini ecosystem of yeast feeding and extracting gas. It’s believed that someone, probably in ancient Egypt, accidentally stumbled upon this process and this supercool baker made the first bread more than four thousand years ago.
I have two of these creatures living in Mason jars inside my refrigerator.
Although people name theirs, I have not. We were, however, featured on the cover of the New York Times food section when the prolific Sam Sifton interviewed my starter and me and sent a photographer to snap some shots of us. This caused confusion in my comedian friends, who thought someone had stolen my identity.
When it’s time to bake, they get brought out onto the counter and fed repeatedly for a couple of days, essentially putting the yeast into a feeding frenzy before it can be added to the flour for the creation of the bread dough.
My only regret about this lengthy process is that I don’t have more time to do this. My life has been so busy over the last two years that if I can get a week or two at home without leaving, it’s a luxury. It’s gotten to the point where I gauge my touring schedule by the amount of bread I’m able to bake. If there’s bread, I’m home and I’m happy.
My basic bread is a country loaf. A round, rustic-looking bread that is mainly malted wheat flour mixed with all-purpose white flour and a touch of rye. I bake these two at a time in cast-iron Dutch ovens that allow me to generate a lot of heat and steam when the lids are shut.
I also bake bagels, the best in L.A., and an olive loaf that is insanely good. Green and kalamata olives mixed with herbes de Provence and lemon zest. It reaches another level with cream cheese spread on it.
One of my favorite things to do with the bread is make the Gentleman’s Breakfast. It’s so good it will break your heart. The night before, you mix chopped garlic and diced anchovies into soft butter. The next morning, you pull it out of the refrigerator and spread healthy portions of it on toasted country bread. A fried egg on the side is optional. I’m telling you that a bite into this with some great coffee on the side is transformative, but I don’t recommend booking any meetings or romantic interludes that day.
Another favorite that might make your skin crawl but is heaven to me is to spread cream cheese on a thick piece of toast, spread sardines across, and top with capers and olive oil. Gadzooks, it’s delicious. It’s not as salty as the anchovies, but it has a natural, more fragrant taste and apparently is crazy good for you.
The kids love avocado toast, almond-butter toast, or just plain butter with scrambled eggs.
It’s the baking for others that makes the experience really special. With each step of the actual baking process, the oven door is opened and some baking-bread aroma escapes into the house. Everyone is alerted that something is being made for them.
Someone is baking bread that can be enjoyed and made into grilled cheese or a simple toast on the way out the door to school. Someone cares.
So, this is what I do. I fail. I succeed. I have glorious loaves that I’m proud of. I have flat failures that I quickly put in the garbage before anyone can see. But with practice things got easier and I developed an intuition about it all.
I know by the weight of the metal scooper in my hand how much flour will be measured out on the scale. I know the same about how much weight is in a cup of water, how long the dough has to rest. I know before it goes into the oven with very little variance how much it will rise. It is the knowing that has made this practice transformative.
Whatever you do and do well, y
our swimming, your running, your painting, these are more than hobbies, they’re an extension of you. The real you. The simple act of doing something well over time stirs up a part of your subconscious that even you may not be aware of. And make no mistake, that is nothing short of magical.
It’s magical because we’re dealing with unknowable parts of ourselves. Parts that are difficult to explain. I like that.
I love the writer Gabriel García Márquez, but I find it funny that when critics write about him they feel the need to describe him as writer of mystical realism. I see him simply as a novelist, and anywhere he wants to take me is just fine, and the idea that magic enters his work only tells me that he was open, truly open, to every aspect of the world, both seen and unseen.
Doing something that feels worthwhile and valuable taps into that same space. Of course, he also wrote about ghosts showing up and mingling with the living, but again, who’s to say.
I had the opportunity to travel around the United States and meet bakers in different cities. This was for a TV show called Baked that took me to some of the highest-acclaimed artisans of baked goods. I was struck by the similarities not only in the people but also in their stories.
Many were baking because it had been a craft in the family that was passed down throughout the years. But many more started off in another career that they thought was the responsible way to make money. But after baking as a hobby, they eventually became so enamored with the process that they all took a leap of faith and turned their passion into their career.
Over and over I heard how they left a job in IT or law or computer engineering and opened a bakery, and even though they may be working even harder, longer hours now, they are much happier. And not click-your-heels, phony Instagram happy but truly content from living a good, purposeful, simple life.
When we’re looking for purpose or a reason for being, the answer is really in the doing.
It’s not in the picture we post of ourselves on vacation, it’s in the sewing and hammering and cutting and sawing. It’s in the dancing and dicing and singing and sketching.
Start small. Start by helping someone. Start by loving something. And just start doing it. Whatever it is. Because that will turn into a passion and introduce you to a part of you you’ll be happy to know.
But what do I know? I just bake bread.
A COUPLE OF REALLY BAD DAYS
We all run into rough patches. Times when it seems fate just wants to mess around with us like a vindictive cat toying with a newly caught mouse. You can try and escape, you can try and turn things around, but sometimes all you can do is ride it out.
This is one of those times.
It’s January and there’s a giant blizzard on its way. The weather reports have been grim and constant, sending most people on the East Coast running for cover and fighting their way to their homes to huddle with their loved ones beside the fire.
I am alone on a cold train, hurtling along icy tracks to a casino, deep in the woods of Connecticut.
I try and spend as little time as possible in casinos and now there’s a good chance I’m going to be stuck in one, possibly forever. This is a dumb thing to do, but I have a show, and like many cold, soggy performers before me, I have no choice but to get to the gig.
I boarded in Penn Station, which is a bleak New York underground hub that makes the journey less like the start of a trip than it does a prison jailbreak.
They make everybody stand in front of a giant board that lists all the upcoming departures in rotating signage. When your train comes up for boarding, a track number is added and everyone runs off to beat the competition to the escalator that takes you belowground even more, to your dirty train. In most places this may be an organized way to shuttle travelers around; in New York it’s the beginning of a riot.
It doesn’t take more than a little pressure to watch the worst part of people’s nature rise up. What seemed like a rather docile woman carrying a Trader Joe’s bag filled with gifts for her grandchildren suddenly becomes a conniving monster, hell-bent on destroying everyone in her way. I was in her way.
This is what happens when they start delaying the departure time. You can feel the mob begin to turn because they’ve been betrayed. You kept up your part of the bargain—you bought your ticket, you showed up on time—and now it’s clear that you’ve been lied to. Anger starts to mix with nervousness, which adds to stress, which results in sweating. A lot of sweating.
This betrayal is also what has turned flying in this country into a blood sport. By chipping away at the size of the seats and the size of the overhead, by creating a separation of class even within coach, the airlines have pitted the travelers against each other in a battle that resembles a cockfight. It may not be in most people’s nature to act this way, but the airlines have a real way of drawing it out.
Once we were all on board the train, this horde of disoriented people with low blood sugar had to scramble and find a seat. Normally you try and pick the best person to sit next to, who is going to be the least offensive, less rude, and who doesn’t smell like old tacos. But today, we didn’t have the luxury of sizing anyone up; this was all about grabbing whatever seat you could find or risk having to stand in between cars like a hobo on the rails. Being picky about your seat on Amtrak doesn’t really make sense anyway. There is literally no difference between a business-class seat on Amtrak and the restroom on Amtrak.
As I settled into my seat, my stomach was making noises. My plan to eat at the end of the trip was thrown out the window thanks to the delay. I needed food and had no choice but to head to the café car. This isn’t the luxurious café car you’ve seen in the movies, unless you’ve seen a movie about people eating salty snacks with their fingers and warm beer from a can. This is the real-life café car that must have been designed and built by a farmer used to feeding livestock and smelled a lot like the men’s room at Yankee Stadium.
I was doing everything I could to get a hot dog and most of a beer in my mouth as I hung on to a railing squeezed between two gorillas in suits at the bar. I got a second beer and loaded up on pretzels and Fritos before taking the wobbly walk back to my seat.
It’s amazing what a couple of quick beers can do to the view of any apocalyptic landscape. Suddenly the people around me didn’t seem so bad. I was actually feeling pretty good. Alcohol gets the job done yet again, which speaks to the never-ending popularity of airport bars, Irish taverns, and Margaritaville. For all the talk of the dangers of climate change and economic collapse, if you really want to see the world in chaos, close the bars.
However, my good mood was short-lived as I overheard a loud businessman giving the bleak snow forecast and was reminded that I was on a train to a prison filled with slot machines.
If you like to gamble, this probably sounds pretty good. My father loves to gamble, because he’s actually won a bunch of times so he knows what that feels like. I have no idea what that experience is like. Not only do I not win but I can change the luck of a table just by looking at it.
When I was a kid we would vacation at the Jersey Shore, about an hour away from Atlantic City. The entire time we were swimming in the ocean and making sandcastles he was plotting his escape, which always involved bringing me along as if it were a father-and-son outing.
I knew what he was up to. He really wanted no part of me and my bad mojo when he was gambling, but he figured he could bring me along, toss me twenty dollars to go play the slots with the other ladies, and he’d be free to gamble the night away.
I kind of enjoyed it. The cocktail waitresses give out free drinks when you gamble, without checking your ID. So I’d play some games, order some gin and tonics, and hang out with the seniors who came down on the bus.
The old people never asked my age, they were just happy to have someone to talk to. They liked to gossip, and after a couple of drinks I was filled with questions and strong opinions.
“What do you mean she didn’t give you your dish back? That’s just p
lain rude,” I’d say as Delores lit my cigarette. “If you ask me, I’d say she’s a little jealous of you.”
We’d play the slots until our money ran out, smoke a couple more cigarettes, and have a good old time. I didn’t realize it then, but I was definitely being flirted with. There are only so many times an eighty-year-old woman accidentally puts her hand on your lap.
Eventually I’d get tired and want to go home. There was no use asking my father to leave, he would have stayed there the rest of his life if he could. I knew that if I wanted to go, I would have to use my superpower to end whatever lucky streak he had going on.
He was once on a hot streak playing craps, throwing dice to the screaming encouragement of the crowd he was helping to win. I could see he was having a good time and probably winning a good amount of money, but I was tired. So I walked up and stood behind him, and for the first time in an hour he threw craps. The crowd groaned, went silent, and walked away. The fun was over. He didn’t even have to turn around; he knew I was there.
“I’ll get the car,” he mumbled.
I get why people want to go. These casinos are expertly designed with the right amount of flash and noise to keep people amused and entertained. But even for those who enjoy being there, it’s a nervous system overload. And when you’re there for work, which was why I was headed there, it’s as amusing as a colonoscopy.
The train was rocking back and forth from the wind that was just ahead of the coming storm. I looked at the weather app on my phone and the radar showed a monster storm, bigger than five states, that seemed to be moving just as fast as we were.
I was returning to a comedy club up there that I hadn’t played in a couple of years, where the crowds are really drunk and obnoxious. You might think that there’s no way the crowd could be the same as when I was there two years ago, but you’d be wrong. Certain places bring out a certain something in people.