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skate teeth
Friday, August 10 2001
Why do some people eat only half of a Krispy Kreme donut and leave the other half in the donut box for... for no one? Does anyone ever come upon half of a donut, semi-crushed and visibly handled, and decide to eat it? Half-donuts are immodest indulgences, efforts to communicate to the world, "I am not a glutton." In this way they have some of the nauseating quality of public prayer photo-ops, although usually they also share some of the anonymous demonstrative quality of a carefully unflushed toilet.
In celebration of her recent poetic successes (of which the Paris Review is only one), I took Gretchen out to a nice restaurant of her choosing in Park Slope, a place called Rosewater down on Union Street just south of 6th Avenue. This was the first time I'd ever ventured south of 7th Avenue in my neighborhood. We ate outside in the patio area beneath a moaning air conditioning unit. But it had rained off and on all day and the weather now was almost perfect for human life. Craving funky seafood as always, I ordered the skate entree. A skate is a flat cartilaginous fish related to the stingray. As I was eating it, I found four skate teeth loose in my food. They were each about 3/8ths inches long, slightly curved and wickedly pointed. Using moist skate proteins as glue, I stuck the teeth to the back of my left hand, where they remained until much later in the evening. For her part, Gretchen thought her food, some sort of vegetarian pasta confection, had been flavored with entirely too much orange peel.
Normally when I go out for a fancy dinner I automatically order a bottle or red wine, but tonight Gretchen suggested that we get a bottle of white wine instead. This led me to give a monologue on the subject of how my ideas of wine had evolved. Back when I was a kid, my parents always use to get white wine, which I enjoyed drinking. But later, when I started going to art openings and hanging out at Big Fun, I found that most of the civilized world preferred red wine for nearly all occasions. I gradually came to regard white wine as provincial, or worse yet, in league with wine coolers. Gretchen is the first person in my life who actually preferred white wine, and for reasons that don't seem provincial at all. Chilled white wine is indeed more suited to hot summer days.
After dinner we walked further south down Union Street, which is presently dug up for some sort of plumbing work. Every so often there are little metal foot bridges allowing pedestrians to get across. I love dug-up streets. I should go down there sometime during the daylight and look for the layers and artifacts of past civilizations.
5th Avenue in Park Slope is noticeably more "ghetto" than fancy-schmancy 7th Avenue. The white and black dykes with their dogs and fashionable glasses are mostly replaced by heterosexual folks of evidently Puerto Rican descent. Oh the joys of urban tourism; we even came upon a spraying fire hydrant that some community-minded outlaw had tapped for the good of the precious children.
We ducked into this one sort of divey bar near the corner of Bergen Street (O'Connor's perhaps?), mostly because Gretchen had seen Guided by Voices CDs in their eclectic jukebox. We sat at a little rickety table and I drank two glasses of Jack Daniels on the rocks as slowly as I could, which wasn't very slowly at all. Gretchen grabbed my left hand at one point, accidentally sweeping away all four skate teeth still adhering there, but I managed to see them on the floor despite the murky light.
Gretchen interrupted the default punk rock playing on the jukebox by punching up the Beach Boys' "Wouldn't it be Nice?" and several fine Guided by Voices tunes. You don't get much bang for your buck when you rent GBV songs on a jukebox; many songs from the GBV classic period are only about forty seconds long. No wonder everybody gets so used to requesting "Free Bird."
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