Pound of Rice in the Trash Can: Andrew Does the Dishes

by

Andrew Schwartz

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MP00 Life Travel

Nov 24, 2013


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For three days now, a pile of honey-glazed carrots has sat on the table in the middle of my flat. It lies amongst the various fruits of my labor; to its right, yesterday’s cornflakes, by now stuck hard and fast to the bowl; to its left, a plate dyed brown from old stir fry, surrounded by a halo of rice grains that went overboard during the eating process. At the tables edge, an apple core browns; at its opposite, a banana peel blackens.

I’m living alone for the first time and I’m learning to cook. Bean and cheese quesadilla, microwaved to perfection and lathered with taco sauce has always been my specialty, but I’ve always wanted to expand on that and this is clearly my chance. I’ve been working on the fundamentals. I’ve developed two basic pastas, one with smoked salmon and onions, and the other with tomato sauce and onions; the ratio of my oil and vinegar salad dressing is slowly but surely oscillating closer and closer to the golden ratio; now when making my rice, I only need to consult Google once, max twice, for clarification. Poco a poco, they say.

The first thing I did when I moved into my flat was go grocery shopping. In the glory days of my youth, I loved grocery shopping with my mom. It was exhilarating, a rare taste of the wild-world of adulthood. Often, I would veer off, make-believe that I was doing the shopping for a family of my own, that I was the adult. For a few moments, all took on a surreal incandescence and the world expanded around me and I was in command; then something – maybe the sudden burst of the vegetable sprinklers upon my hand – would snap me out of the lull, and I’d remember that my real familial duty was to make sure mom got the right flavor of Goldfish.

As the doors of Mercadona parted before me, I laughed as I reminisced of this more innocent time. High school was done; now I was in Granada, the real world. I was an adult.

The carts at Mercadona are chained together, and in order to take one, you need to put a euro into a slot. Of course, when you return the cart, you get your euro back, but I didn’t know that and thought it a shameless and gratuitous money-grab by the Mercadona ownership. “Baloney!” I thought, and in a solitary gesture of rebellion, I instead took a basket to carry my months’ worth of food.

I didn’t have a list, but I got the things that I figured normal adults get. Oil, garlic, candles (I wasn’t content with my flat’s feng shui), that type of thing

Not wanting to only buy the “cheap stuff” and thus set a sorry precedent in my initial foray into real life, I instead opted for the middle-priced brands. I got almost no pre-prepared food, nothing even in a can. Everything was fresh and middle-high end. “You are what you eat,” I thought.

Three grocery bags to an arm, I strolled up the hill into the Albaycin, the old town where I live. There was not a single piece of dog shit on the cobblestone, and the cool mountain air whispered through the Darro valley below.

The kitchen in which the magic happens is illuminated by a single uncovered stale-white light bulb. There is an electric stove with two burners, placed just close enough together that it’s only possible to use one at a time. There is also a sink and an eight by eight inch area in which I cut and stir. I don’t like to do the dishes, so usually I have a couple days’ worth of crusty food and greasy plates stacked about as well.

At first I kept matters simple. Day one: basic pasta. Day two: chicken and rice. But these felt childish, immature, reminiscent of the youth I once was, and not befitting of the adult I had become. Day three, I got serious. My ambitions unfurled.

As a rule, Spanish food is quite mediocre. However, Pilar, the mother in the host family with which I lived my first month in Granada – she made some of the dank-a-dank.

My favorite dish of Pilar’s is called tortilla de patatas; it’s essentially a big pie of eggs and potatoes and whatever else you might want to throw in. She’d shown me her techniques, so I had an idea of the process, but now the training wheels were off.

In the first attempt, I made a rash judgment as to the status of the eggs, so when the crucial moment came – the flip of the pie – a molten liquid mush flew from the pan, to my wrist, to the burner, where I could only watch as it sizzled to the plump consistency for which the recipe originally called.

For my second effort a few nights later, I over-compensated, leaving the eggs on the burner too long, and again it was during the flip when all went awry; they stuck to the pan and smoldered, choking the kitchen with smoke. The next morning, my friendly Australian neighbor Susan asked me if I’d smelled something funny the night before. “A short circuit in this old Spanish wiring,” she supposed.

Recently, finally, third try, my tortilla de patatas landed intact onto my plate. A bonafide adult, I enjoyed it with steamed asparagus and a couple glasses of the La Atalaya that Susan left to me. If I’ve retained anything from her teachings, I would say it was a middle-palate wine with a Galician terroir. For the hors d’oeuvre, I had freshly baked bread and a garlic oil vinaigrette in which to dip it. For dessert, I had chocolate pudding. The next day, emboldened by my triumph, I thought I’d do something “out there” for lunch. I checked my All Recipes app for ideas, and sure enough, the very first meal on the day’s front-page beckoned. Even through the scratches on the iPhone screen, the honey-glazed carrots sparkled like a summertime lake.

It struck me as the type of thing only an exceptionally mature person would make for lunch. It sounded sexy too. “If I can make honey-glazed carrots that look like that,” I thought, “its game over for the chicas.”

I steamed my carrots; I melted my butter; I mixed my honey and lemon. I cut and I poured and I stirred and I watched and slowly, slowly, steadily, the glaze, the wonderful glaze, it claimed my carrots. There they were, sizzling away, wind through a forest of oaks. Just as it began to seem as though the carrots were themselves producing the light of which they merely reflected, that some kind of fission was taking place deep within their core, the mid-afternoon Granadine sun did pour forth through my windows and onto the table at which I would enjoy my creation. I scooped the carrots onto my plate, and walked them into to the light. Their glow intensified still. A pure, uncut pride enveloped me as I grasped my fork and stabbed this validation of my profound competence as a human being in this world, my maturity, my undeniable adulthood.

Then the sprinklers turned on.

Not even the most youthful of imaginations would be able to reconcile this urgent message of my senses with what my mind had been feeling just moments before. Empirical reality ain’t got time for make-believe.

My honey-glazed carrots were not the worst thing I’d ever eaten. The taste was somewhere between a fermented grape and candied yam caked in salt. I had two bites, and tried to convince myself that there were redeeming qualities yet, but when my body literally would not permit a third, I knew I was only kidding myself. I slumped down in my chair; I pushed my honey glazed carrots away in disgust; I got up to make myself a sandwich.

Three days later, appearance is now somewhat more aligned with reality. The carrots have shriveled and lost their shine; they look like apricots except with a more potent orange, like the color of a traffic cone. They are still soggy to the touch; they feel a lot like how I’d imagine an ear drum would.

I’m not sure why I haven’t thrown them away yet. They don’t smell bad or anything, but I’m pretty sure I’m not going to eat them, and I don’t think they’d impress a chica to the degree that I’d initially hoped. Perhaps it’s my heroic aversion to wastefulness; perhaps it’s that for a brief moment, I saw in their concept an idealized vision of my future self; perhaps it’s because my trash can is already overflowing and I’m too lazy to empty it.

Maybe I’m not yet ready for honey glazed carrots. That’s fine by me; I suppose you can’t rush the learning process. For now, it’s to the Pescaderia, where I’ll spend five minutes angrily insisting that I’m saying salmon, and not jamon; then it’s back through the Albaycin, where I’ll step in dog shit while admiring the first-snow atop the soft peaks of the Sierra Nevada; then it’s to the kitchen, where I’ll clean up the old dishes, put on some Govi, and set to work, imagination gone wild, determined to cut my garlic finer than ever; then it’s to the table, where I´ll take a bite, and the memories of mom’s mashed potatoes will boil up and spill over like my pasta always does, and I’ll wonder why I’d ever wanted to make anything more than a bean and cheese quesadilla, microwaved to perfection and lathered with taco sauce.

The Action Bronson Diaries: Epicurus the Homie

by

Danny Schwartz

Season Categories Published
MP00 Life

Nov 20, 2013


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Laid back, eating smoked veal – Action Bronson

Action Bronson does this thing at his shows where he invites a girl up on stage, throws her over his shoulder like a mink coat, and keeps on rapping without missing a beat. A couple weeks ago, a story came out that he invited some 17-year old girl up on stage at a show, threw her over his shoulder like a mink coat, and dropped her on her head and paralyzed her.

It all turned out to be fabricated, but for a few days everyone thought it was true. After that got cleared up, I kept thinking about the moment before he allegedly dropped her on her head, and how stoked the two of them must have been at the time. He was living his dream, probably, of literally objectifying a woman as thousands cheered him on. She was getting quite a thrill herself, probably, becoming the life of the party all of the sudden, draped over the shoulder of the fattest rapper alive as thousands cheered her on.

——————–

Recently, a friend posted a Facebook link to his food blog, called “Gustatory Epicureanism”. Epicureanism! I did not know what it meant, but I knew instinctively that it belonged in my word bank. Not unlike a third-grader sprinting home from the bus stop, his bladder a ticking time bomb, I raced to Google Docs, found the starred file ‘Word Bank’, and stowed it safely there, never to be forgotten. Epicureanism.

I’m a pretty huge fan of my word bank. Everyone should have a word bank. You should have a word bank. It’s easy. And fun! Here are a few from mine to get you started: Perambulate. Titillate. Whet. Loins. Etc. You get the idea.

Some words are just fucking awesome. I didn’t know what Epicureanism meant. But I could tell, it had steez. It just emanated this ineffable steez. The way it hit the eardrum. The way it rolled off the tongue. The way it formed a unique geography on the page. Epicureanism.

The best words are poems. The best words are songs. The best words are portals into other galaxies. When used at such an angle, perhaps in conjunction with an unexpected turn of phrase, the best words set off fireworks. With the best words, the abstract sensory experience aligns seamlessly with the definition, almost like an onomatopoeia.

According to Wikipedia, Epicureanism is a philosophical system formed in the days of the Roman Republic by a dude named Epicurus. Pleasure is the greatest good, he said, in that great wise voice of his. Go forth and seek pleasure, but not out of desire. Find tranquility in moderation. Do not fear the gods, he said. Do not fear death.

It’s like you’re a squirrel and you come across a rather handsome walnut. You can’t say for certain whether or not this nut will nourish you. You just know in your heart of hearts that you ought to stash it away for later. It’s just lying there, all dusty and effervescent. Soon, before you know it, you’re sitting on 175 of the finest nuts you’ve ever seen. And the best part is, YOU are the supreme ruler of your nut kingdom. They’re not just anybody’s nuts. They are YOUR nuts, even when your body has turned to dust, when the last stone vestige of civilization has crumbled into the sea.

—————–

About a month ago, before my lifestyle took a turn for the Epicurean, before Action Bronson allegedly dropped anyone on their head, I attended a Halloween party in a half-assed Action Bronson costume, in which I dyed a big pirate beard with water-soluble orange hairspray and wore my prized 3XL shirt. “THA REASON RECORDS: WHAT IT IS,” the shirt said.

A gaggle of older females dominated the party. Most of them were engaged, and didn’t have the slightest idea who Action Bronson was. Over in the corner of the living room stood a dude dressed to the nines with a voluminous white beard and tall hat, his face obscured by thick, wrinkly makeup.

I nudged my friend Manter. “Who do you think he’s dressed up as?”

“She. It’s a girl,” Manter said, and he left to apply his cat facepaint in the bathroom.

Intrigued, I went over to test Manter’s theory.

He was correct. The person of interest was in fact a girl. She was dressed as Charles Darwin. I forget her name now, somehow. She spoke gently, with a vague accent, though her English was immaculate. I asked her where she was from. Albania, she said. This nearly made me cry with joy, because Action Bronson was Albanian! She nodded sagely and played with my beard.

Even in the US, it always seems to be the Europeans that come up with the most creative costumes. I guess when you learn a second language, you are forced to give up the notion that you and your people are at the center of the universe. You expand your mind, and the world seems wondrous again. You gain the capacity to converse on end with anyone, even a simple jack like myself, as well as the ability to dress up in a totally kick-ass, unsexy Halloween costume.

Which of course only made her hotter. Her whole face was deformed, except for her eyes. Long lashes and big shining green orbs wide with awe, straight out of a Japanese manga.

We chatted onward for an hour, maybe more. I, Action Bronson, the charming rogue, she, Charles Darwin, the intrepid natural historian. We, brought together by fate. We, united by our beards, but also by the view that life can be reduced to the struggle for survival in a cold, indifferent mother nature, the singular goal to pass along our genes like our ancestors had before us ever since they were single-celled amoeba, the belief that if there is one thing worth consecrating, it is procreation, and its requisite act, coitus.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, that one guy with level 150 zombie makeup came over and eskimo kissed her arm and smooched her gnarled cheek. My heart crumpled into a sorry heap on the floor. She introduced the two of us. He was her husband from Albania. He smiled broadly as we shook hands. We exchanged niceties for a few minutes, but that was all I could handle. The worst part was, he was super cool. He LOVED Action Bronson!

Distraught, I joined Manter on the couch. The gaggle of older females staged a coup of the iPod and led off a streak of putrid song selection with Party in the USA. As they danced the night away, Manter and I sat there and debated the merits of the big butt, for which Manter expressed zero affection whatsoever. “Flapjacks for life,” he said.

Soon it was time to leave. I bade Albania girl adieu. She gave me a big hug. On my way out I tapped the host of the party on the shoulder. “How do you know Albania girl?” I asked.

She shrugged. “No idea. She just showed up.”

———–

As we speak, my word bank is tucked away up in the Cloud. I used to think the Cloud was corny and strictly for moms who couldn’t deal with an external hard drive. Now I am all about the Cloud. I am a proud mom. The Cloud is omnipresent. It is everywhere. It is at the subway stop. It is at Trader Joe’s. It is in Bangkok. With the Cloud at my side, I am practically immortal.

I hate to be a hoarder. Things that might be useful later for posterity — awesome T-shirts, essays from college — I pick them up and tomahawk slam them in the trash. This word bank, which I started a couple years ago, appears to be something worth keeping. It’s something I’ve cultivated and curated over time, it’s a vehicle for discovery. It’s a part of who I am.

Me and Albania girl, we had a rip-roaring good time, but a lot of it was in my head. She was one of a kind. I still think about her. It’s hard to say where reality stopped and fantasy started.

It is true that the arrival of her husband made me temporarily depressed, but I’m glad that I met her, because now I know I’m not some nihilist. It’s good to be open to loss, and bear its pain, in order to rise again.

The Latham Olympiad

by

Danny Schwartz

Season Categories Published
MP00 Life Sports

Nov 04, 2013


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Day breaks hot and heavy in the Berkshires in August. Danger hangs over me like felt curtain. I lie on my back, eyes wide open. I see nothing, but hear everything. The hiss of air through bicycle spokes. The pitter-patter of old lady feet on sidewalk.

The crunch of tires on my gravel driveway.

It was Gurney.  Damn. I threw off the sheets and took the stairs three at a time. Tanabe and Ghosh were already sitting on the soft shabby couch. I joined them. We sat together, three residents of the yellow house on Latham Street.

The front door swung wide. In strode Gurney, he of the broad shoulders, band-iron arms, and clear blue eyes. A BB gun slung easily across his back. He turned to us. “You ready?”

I hesitated to respond. What could I say, after all? My entire life – 22 long years of manly sturm und drang – led directly to this moment. Was I ready? Hell no. But truly, are any of us ready when the white-hot sun bleaches away our pretense and scalds us to blindness? It did not matter. Today my chums and I would shake our fists at the sun and at each other. So I met Gurney’s gaze and offered up a solemn nod.

It was written then. There would be a People’s Olympiad. The Latham Olympiad.

Gurney returned my nod, nodding and smiling fiendishly and rubbing his palms together. He squeezed in on the couch amongst us. We shot the shit, chatted for a bit. Piled into Gurney’s Camry, rolled to Dunkin for fuel. Sausage, egg, and cheese in a biscuit – with its balance of carbohydrates, fat, and protein, a prerequisite for any respectable athletic performance.

The Dunkin sandwiches combined with the natural fragrance of Gurney’s Camry made for near-toxic levels of methane on the ride back to Latham. Nevertheless, morale was high, because each one of us believed victory, the goddess Nike incarnated in the form of a Maxim supermodel, would crown us at weekend’s end.

Tanabe was a superb athlete, probably the most dynamic of us four, though 35 pounds above his college wrestling weight. He believed he would win.

Gurney rested on his Anglo-Saxon laurels, he the heir of Hastings. He believed he would win.

Ghosh was a capricious fellow, a thoughtful, absent-minded English major one minute, a prolific, ungifted trash-talker the next. He was a longshot for the gold, although susceptible to occasional strokes of brilliance on the pick-up soccer pitch, and it was these sorts of moments on which his ego idled. He believed he would win.

I believed I would win because, I reasoned, that was the only way I could win. My fundamentals were sound, my hand-eye coordination keen, but my internal motor was unreliable, my outlook on life too Zen. If I truly craved victory – and I hoped that I did – I would have to measure my will not against itself but against my competitors. I dared not underestimate them. The battle would be fierce.

We pulled onto the gravel driveway and piled out. Time for business. We busted out the tape and scale and chose to each represent the country of our ancestors. It went something like this:

Tanabe — 5’4” / 168 / Japan.

Gurney — 5’9 / 175 / United Kingdom.

Ghosh — 5’6” / 130 / India.

Me — 6’ / 151 / Netherlands.

We suited up. We toasted to our camaraderie. We prostrated ourselves to the Supreme Being. We lit the flame.

The Latham Olympiad had begun.

DAY ONE

Why did the ancient Greeks hold the Olympiad? Why every four years did competitors flock to Olympia from as far as Macedon, seeking victory? I suppose they aspired to test the limits of the human body, to blur the line between human and god and perhaps to become heroes in Olympic lore. But victory would do more than earn them adulation or even eternal glory. Victory would affirm their self-worth. It would affirm the inherent goodness of their body and their will.

Javelin

Tanabe unsheathed his trusty blade and fashioned a javelin from a fallen tree branch in the backyard. It took an hour for us to get out the door. Ghosh was to blame. Eventually we made it down to the rugby pitch, the blades of grass arced in unison like sunflowers.

Four throws each. Tanabe seemed to have an intuitive understanding of trajectory, such that his throws traveled higher, farther, and even came to a satisfying end with the nose of the javelin embedded in the ground. He was a man among boys. I finished last. I was in fact battling a feisty case of the sniffles that day. But, no excuses, heart of a champion. I needed to rise above.

I peeled my shirt off and the wind descended into the valley between my pecs. I had put on a few pounds of muscle that summer working the hiking trails around town. It was true, I was the most jacked I had ever been.

Field Goal Challenge

I used to go to the nearby football field with my pop and brother to boot field goals.

In one of my fantasies about the past, I hit the squats the summer before sophomore year of high school and win the starting kicking job on the football team. We are not the best team, but in this particular game we are down two points to our rival in the waning seconds, with the ball in field goal territory. Coach takes our last timeout with three seconds left. The sky is pitch black, save for the full moon. The stadium rises to its feet. Droves of females scream at the top of their lungs. Coach pats me on the butt, I trot out under the lights, line up and nail a 43-yarder as time expires.

Three kicks each per round, each round the spot moves a few yards back. To no one’s surprise, Tanabe went shank city in the first round. Ghosh often fancied himself a regular Aguero but he soon joined Tanabe in shank city. And there I was, every kick splitting the uprights as sure as every summer the monsoon breathes life into the parched peaks of the Western Ghats. And though my success in the event was predetermined, and though the event was only a formality to weed out the reprobates, I welled with schaudenfreude when Gurney emitted a tormented cry as his last attempt thudded into the left upright and fell limp to the grass below.

Sprint Challenge

Three heats each, from midfield to the try line, then a final 100-meter showdown between the top two contestants. I averaged 5.71, followed by Ghosh at 5.98. Ghosh vs. Me, it would be. Meanwhile, Tanabe’s times wallowed in the 6.6 range. We were curious and looked back at the tape. Each heat he got off to a respectable start, but always appeared to reach top speed around twenty meters in, as if at that instant a parachute deployed from an invisible backpack.

Ghosh talked mess on the car ride up to the track. Claimed I’d been jumping the gun in the prelims. The truth was, I’d learned the key to a fast start by watching my favorite Olympian of all-time, the great Texan sprinter Michael Johnson. In the first ten meters he would keep his head down and take quick choppy strides to generate food speed, so that before long his gold shoes would be one circular blur.

High school cross-country girl runners took their warm-up laps as we sauntered towards the starting line, and the sexual tension was through the roof. Spurred by their presence, Ghosh got off to a brilliant start and edged me in 13.1 seconds. His triumph validated his mess-talk, the dorkiness of his victory jig a function of his euphoria.

Beer Mile

Two beers, four laps. The Day One Showcase Event! We made the mistake of buying PBR, which not only tastes fouler than Keystone but also weighs heavier in the stomach. How to fit in the beers among the laps? Gurney chose to crush a beer at the very start. Chucked the can and came around the first turn like Prefontaine. Having not run a proper mile since 8th grade, I was unsure how to pace myself, so I erred on the side of leisure and ended up cruising in second gear the whole race. A post-race look at the tape would reveal that I had dumped out the majority of my first beer onto the infield grass. Gurney would lap me and win easily in 7:30 — a dominating performance.

Full can and half a lap to go. The hot rubber burned holes in my soles. Ghosh ran a few steps ahead. I glanced across the track. Tanabe slowed as he reached the finish line. He cracked a PBR and took one delicate sip.

Suddenly Ghosh burst to life, flying past a peloton of XC girls and into the turn like a rogue caboose. Had he finished both his beers?  Despite the unsavory result of the 100-meter final, I found myself hoping that he had. Tanabe struck a contrapposto pose and nursed his PBR like a glass of scotch. With Ghosh thundering down the backstretch, he finally looked over his shoulder and started to chug. Go, Ghosh, Go!

Ghosh, across the finish line ahead of Tanabe! He raised his arms and assumed the prone position on the infield, rubbing his face in the grass, savoring every blade. Tanabe opted for the supine position, moaning with hands on forehead. Devastated. This gave me solace. What was worse – my honest indolence, or Tanabe’s complacency?

(Dinner)

Tired. We sojourned to Tony’s, the local Mexican spot. Like the Dunkin sandwich, the burrito covers all corners of the nutritional spectrum, but unlike the Dunkin sandwich, the burrito has a great deal of compassion, like a mother’s embrace. It is an end in and of itself, something you can always turn to when all seems wrong in the world.

Day One Standings

Gurney 23

Ghosh 20

Me 15

Tanabe 14

Though Gurney generally strives to the ideal of the Chill Bro, he occasionally lapses into moments of incredible intensity, as he demonstrated in the Beer Mile. Indeed, in college he played rugby, a sport of bloodlust. It conditions its participants to override their physiological impulses, and trains their inner animal like it would any tangible muscle.

And Ghosh. Ghosh!!! Ghosh. His finishing kick in the Beer Mile seemed not aroused by his inner animal, but rather inspired by some divine spirit. The result of the 100-meter final was a bit of a fluke, but now it seemed that it had been, simultaneously, not a fluke. Maybe Ghosh had constructed such a powerful visualization of how the race would transpire that he ran accordingly. To carry out his prophecy. To meet his destiny.

DAY TWO

The ancient Olympiad was held from the 8th century BC until the 4th century AD, when the Roman Emperor Constantine I condemned it a farcical pagan ritual. The modern Olympiad was resurrected in 1896 and has since become one of our civilization’s great spectacles, a platform for displays of sportsmanship, diplomacy, and athletic ability. There was one problem – the odds that one of my friends or I was skilled enough to qualify appeared slim, unless it be for the Paralympiad or the Special Olympiad.

The next morning, Tanabe and I went on a bacon/OJ run. As we ate on the couch, Gurney emerged from his slumber sporting a shiner above his right eye, apparently from an errant piñata swing the night before. Ghosh rested his temple on the bannister as he descended the stairs in his trademark briefs.

Biathlon

The biathlon was developed in 19th century Norway as an exercise for soldiers – they would ski across the Scandinavian taiga, stopping every few kilometers to shoot at designated targets. In our adaptation, we would run across the huge field behind the local high school with Gurney’s BB gun and take down three empty Four Lokos utilizing the three classic combat poses – standing, kneeling, prone. It took me twelve minutes to complete the course, a stressful experience such that I felt my ventricles unclench the moment I crossed the finish line.

It wasn’t all the running that did me in. It was the pressure of time. The crosshairs trembled in the scope, which aimed half a can to the right. I would pull the trigger and open my ears, praying for that cathartic ping, and either the ping came immediately and with it a deluge of dopamine to the head, or it never came but still I prayed that somewhere the latent echo ricocheted blindly, yearning to come home. With every miss, my confidence wavered, and by the transitive property so did my focus, until my brain left the scene entirely for its own self-preservation.

Tanabe clocked a time nearly ten times lower than mine. Didn’t miss a single shot. He clearly had a gift with the BB gun. He was a great cook too – if he wanted he could be a modern day Samwise Gamgee, living off the land with nothing but his pots, knife, rifle, and wits, hunting coneys.

Playground Obstacle Course

The final most daunting section was the traverse across the top bar of the swing set. Tanabe went first, and he shimmied across with style and ease. I went next, dangling halfway across, my triceps engulfed in flames, two little boys below my feet yelling for me to keep going. I lamented my lanky arms. Once, Tanabe mocked me as I labored to finish a set of push-ups. I retorted that he was only good at push-ups because of his T-rex arms, which was cruel but in essence true. He had no comeback but came to me later that night after a few beers, said I had shattered his confidence, and we then had a long talk about the plight of the short Asian man. It made me count my blessings, that I was white and tallish.

I did not finish the traverse across the top bar of the swing set. I dropped to the woodchips and jogged to the finish line. Tanabe’s shrill protests fell on deaf ears.

100-Meter Individual Medley

To the pool! We had planned to pair the IM with a diving competition, but the boards were out of service, leaned against the wall. Alas. My inner Louganis would never see the light of day.

Gurney’s butterfly was in rare form. He put up a 1:51.8. A fabulous time indeed, but Tanabe edged him with a 1:50.6. Ghosh posted an FDR-esque 4:52.0. He was practically catatonic by the time he finished. I managed a 2:32.7, a respectable time, but as I clung to the wall I sympathized with Ghosh. We all agreed on the walk back to Latham Street – this was the most brutal event by far. Though the heavily chlorinated water had saved us from ingesting too much stale urine, it had sapped us of our lifeforce. The Olympic-sized pool, fifty meters long, seemed to stretch into oblivion. But really it would have been better if the race was one length of a hundred-meter pool, with the far wall a final destination, a mecca, rather than a Saharan oasis that ultimately had to be left behind.

Hot Dog Eating Contest

The Day Two Showcase Event, in which we would eat as many hot dogs as possible, but first a siesta. In bed I formulated a strategy. Our event was modeled after the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest held every July 4th on Coney Island, which usually came down to two contestants: the giant Joey Chestnut, and the bantamweight Kobayashi. Kobayashi’s method involved separating the bun and dunking it in a cup of water to reduce its volume. This, I determined, was my path to the crown.

At dusk we surrounded the picnic table, grilled hot dogs stacked to our eyeballs. We had a special guest, Tanabe’s chum Foote who wrestled heavyweight, his hair fashioned into a nimbus of neon green spikes, a nude female tattooed on his bicep. Foote, Chestnut. I, Kobayashi.

The timer started and Foote came out guns blazing, crushing 4 dogs in 2 minutes. The Kobayashi method was indeed effective, but the bun’s aroma steadily worsened, such that as I held the dripping soggy sop in front of my mouth waiting to swallow the one preceding it, four-day old wet poodle wafted into my nostrils, the taste and texture in perfect harmony. The Oscar Meyers, too, suffered, once bodacious and grilled to perfection, they now showed their true colors, pasty pink tubes of centrifuged preservatives and meat slurry. The key was to treat it not as eating but as exercise, focusing on the up-down of the molars, one set of 50, and then another. In the end, it turned out to be a faithful recreation of the Nathan’s Famous Contest. Foote, Chestnut, beat me. But I, Kobayashi, beat everybody else.

Day Two Standings

Tanabe 42

Gurney 39

Ghosh 30

Me 30

There would be only one event on Day Three: Me v. Ghosh for the bronze. A wrestling match. Wrestling, we figured, was appropriate, the favored sport of the ancient Greek gymnasiums.

But this day belonged to Tanabe, who took gold on the back of a stunning Day Two surge. In truth, the difference between him and Gurney was but a second and a half in the pool or three-quarters of a hot dog. But history would not remember these details, only that in the Latham Olympiad, there was one athlete who stood above the others, and he was Tanabe.

Tanabe often talks about this axiom of wrestling called kaizen, the self-discipline required to affect continuous positive change. Kaizen requires a value system in which hedonism is the cardinal sin. It requires one take a serious approach to each day, to see the world via tunnel vision. If Japan and the US ever go to war, says Tanabe, he borne of DC, he will go and enlist for the Japanese army.

Foote conducted the medal ceremony. He summoned us from the couch to claim our ribbons. Ghosh and I, then Gurney, then Tanabe. When Tanabe was solemn when he accepted his first place ribbon, and I knew that this wasn’t that he didn’t care. It was that he cared too much.

DAY THREE

Why can we moderns – we young acolytes of the ancient ways – not hold our own Olympiad? That is the question that the yellow house on Latham Street dared to ask. We wished to break the quotidian cycle, to inject a sense of glory into our lives. We wished to be Olympians ourselves, and in the process pay homage to the noble classical spirit of the ancient Olympiad that the modern version had perhaps forgotten.

The Wrestle for Bronze

We would do battle in the nearby park, first to three takedowns. On the way I grilled Tanabe for fundamentals. Stay low, he said. Drive with the hips. Elbows in. Kaizen.

But when the bell rang, instinct took over. Ghosh was slippery, and worse, feisty. We were but two apes vying for alpha position. Who was more suave with the ladies did not matter – this here, somehow, was all that mattered.

Ghosh took a quick 2-0 lead, but in the third round I found myself lying on top of him deciding what to do next, the fog of exhaustion clouding the neural pathways in my frontal cortex. Ghosh suddenly grabbed my arm and bent it back at an unnatural angle, freeing him, and we somersaulted backwards and came to a rest with his hands pressing my shoulder blades against the cool grass. The buzzer had sounded. Fin. I felt not so much the agony of defeat but instead the sense of absolute finality, that I had come down to Earth.

***

I lie in bed now. The Latham Olympiad is over. Gurney left immediately after the wrestling match, took his BB gun and Camry back to Connecticut to paint his house with his pop. Now it is three again in the yellow house on Latham Street. I wonder if Ghosh and Tanabe are still awake, thinking back on the weekend. I am nostalgic already, for the good times that were had, and for what could have been. Nostalgic for the loss of any conception of time except for the present, where my chums stood at my side, where our Olympiad was indistinguishable from that of the ancient Greeks. Where I could see clearly the vision of who I wanted to be, the ideal estimation of myself, and that, for my all commendable qualities, I was not him.