Helen

Yesterday was the 90th anniversary of the Black Tom explosion, which was a German-led act of sabotage on a New Jersey munitions plant. Anyhow, you can read a few summations of what happened here and here. (It is, however, one of those classic shrouded-in-mystery events, so there isn't a lot out there. A book about the saboteurs was recently released, though I haven't read it.) I'm the last person who should be giving any history lessons. No matter--I am not here to talk about the exacts. In fact, one of the most nebulous aspects of the Black Tom explosion is that there seems to be no agreed-upon casualty count. Various sources put it at anywhere from seven to 12, though at the time it happened, this paper claimed 200 people had died. (Why I'm mentioning this will all be clear in a bit.)

So, this is my great-grandmother Helen. By the time I was born, she was a stooped, wizened little thing who relished insulting everyone in my family and insisted on eating only ham and Pepsi at every meal. I suppose you don't outlive three husbands by being easygoing.

Helen grew up in Red Hook, Brooklyn. As teenagers, she and her sister passed their summers by swimming in the Erie Basin every day. They were both known as such expert swimmers that a movie director paid Helen's sister (whose name I can't remember) five dollars to do a swan dive off of the bow of a very tall ship--I think it was like a 30-foot jump--for a scene in a movie. (Her mother beat the hell out of her when she got home that night--I guess word spread quickly in Red Hook.)

The Black Tom explosion happened in the early morning of July 30. If my great-grandmother is to be believed (and that's debatable: you don't outlive three husbands by telling the truth, either), later that morning, she and her sister went down to Erie Basin, which was close enough to Black Tom that debris from the explosion was floating everywhere.

The story goes that she and her sister helped the police by swimming out into the water and bringing in the bodies. I'm not even sure if they were entire bodies or just pieces. Then again, I'm not even sure there were any.

I'm not old enough to have heard it firsthand, and so I've been told multifarious versions by my father and my aunt, both of whom are either too senile or too drunk to remember what really happened. The tale of my grandmother the body recovery scout has taken on the patina of myth. When I finally got around to actually researching the Black Tom Explosion for this post, I was terribly disappointed.* Seven freakin' people? All those years, she must've been lying.

Still, I like the story.
*I like my death tolls horrific.

A la recherche du temps perdu

Remember the other day when I was whingeing about missing Great Aunt Chi Chi's ropa vieja? The truth of the matter is that I actually know how to make it--well, a version somewhat like hers--I'm just too lazy.

But N loves it, and because I know it's my wifely duty to have a hot meal on the table when he gets home, I make it every now and then, particularly if there's a sale on stringy, fatty cuts of beef at the supermarket.

Most auspiciously, the pot I cooked this particular batch in actually belonged to Chi Chi herself. It's just a crappy stainless steel pot, but for some reason it's perfect for stews. I actually liberated it from my mother's house last time I was upstate.

My mom: "Do you want the Cuban pot [see, we called it the Cuban pot because it was Chi Chi's and it was all she cooked with and for all I know she rowed all the way from Cuba in it]? It's taking up too much space."

Me (eager to have a big pot and also to piece-by-piece disassemble my mother's Collyeresque kitchen before she moves to Florida*): "Hells yeah."

So, herewith: Chi Chi's Ropa Vieja Simulacrum.

Howling like a hypocrite at an auto-da-fe

Sometimes I am so filled with dread that I am actually sad. Today I am going to a meeting where I anticipate being yelled at, not because I've done something wrong, but because...because things are the way they are and there is nothing right in this godforsaken shitsucking world. (I would love to elaborate, but self-interest and my love of dental insurance prevents me from doing so.) Dealing with difficult clients (and the farcical use of "client" is something I am obliged to do based on my job description) makes me sometimes wish that by "clients" I actually meant "johns" because if I am going to get fucked I'd rather be paid $300/hour for the duty. As my gentleman's agreement stands now, I'm lucky if we're served spiritless apricot danish.

Speaking of getting fucked, see this? These are all iMacs, just like the one I work on, except the difference is that mine is sitting on my desk and it doesn't have a yellow "AUTHORIZED FOR DISPOSAL" sticker on it. Wanna know why I'm the only person in the office who is working on a five-year-old computer? Yeah, me too.

And although N and I have confirmed our extended trip to Italy (starting in less than two weeks, Thanks God for blessing our expat friend J with a legitimate visa so that we may frolic with her and The Great Leader on beaches where banana hammocks are considered Puritanical) I can't help but feel that vacation time is not coming soon enough. Maybe partying will help.

I am so itching for a vacation that I'm feeling increasingly homesick for Hollywood, Florida, a town I haven't visited in 15 years, but which was my childhood home every year during the winter months. Things I miss about Hollywood: Walking with my grandfather every morning to get the paper and stopping to look at the jewelry in the windows of the pawnshops--singing the Mulligan Guard the whole way; eating chicharrones at the dog track flea market; stealing grapefruits with my grandmother from the neighboring yard; swimming in the not-very-warm Atlantic, dodging Man O' Wars and giant globs of tar that floated in on the tide; 3 o'clock Sunday spaghetti dinners; hanging laundry in the back yard near-overwhelmed by the stink of bleach and rotting sapodillas; my great aunt Chi Chi's ropa vieja and flan (a dessert I truthfully didn't like at the time, but now of course I'd give my left arm for her recipe).

Of course, Hollywood then was famous for two things: the largest French(-Candadian)- speaking population in the USA (and its attendant and impressive assortment of distended-beer-belly-Speedo-overhangs) and the Hollywood Mall, where Adam Walsh was abducted by Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole. Yay Hollywood!

(Hm. There was jai alai, too, I guess.)

The fact is that Hollywood was sort of the Edith Bouvier Beale of South Florida. It had the most gorgeous Art Deco-to-'40s architecture, and a lovely, if slightly decrepit, downtown circle where you could buy espadrilles and girdles and Floridian (emphasis on the "florid") shirts. Since I've been gone though there's been a renaissance of sorts and now you can get Thai food but probably not a reasonably priced, pre-owned three-finger gold ring that reads Raphael. As is the case with all festive rehabbing, you can thank the gays for this.

What was my point? Right. As we watched Big Love last night, I even began thinking, You know, Utah is kind of pretty. I wonder how far that compound is from the SLC airport?

Oh, and by the way, we missed the season finale of The Sopranos, so woe betide he who mentions any of the plot points to me today.