My Hero's Chili

I don’t know Ben, but I respect him. Around 50 years ago, this fellow opened what is now a legendary black-owned restaurant in Washington, DC called “Ben’s Chili Bowl.” It’s a can’t miss late-night stop in the nation’s capital, so I absolutely had to go back on my recent visit.

Imagine walking into a narrow diner at three in the morning. You see a single row of vinyl booths on the left, a half dozen fry cooks on the right, and a line of 30 customers in various states of sobriety and alertness. 1970s funk music is blasting. Mirrors and signed publicity photos of African-American celebrities line the walls, and a collection of homeless people wait outside for change and extra food.

The workers are fast and efficient, and nothing like Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi, but still I didn’t want to mess up, so I rehearsed my order silently as I advanced in the line. Chili-cheeseburger, chili-cheese fries, vanilla milkshake. Chili-cheeseburger, chili-cheese fries, vanilla milkshake. When my turn came, I ordered well. When my food came, I didn’t leave a scrap. When the heartburn came at sunrise, I took it like a man. Just like Ben would have wanted.

Juicy Pants, Reassuring Bailey

I took my seat on Jet Blue’s San Diego – New York flight. I had everything – Direct TV on the seat in front of me, a novel in my hands, and new people to spy on. I focused on the two seats to my right: a mother-daughter combo. The mom was cute, dark, petite, with a white sweat suit that looked trendy and expensive. Maybe it was those “Juicy” sweat pants I had heard about, with the word Juicy written across the butt. I could only wonder. The girl was maybe five, cute, smart looking. I listened intently and reviewed what I’d learned so far: the girl’s name was Bailey, and they were headed to New York.

We took off and minded our own business until Bailey’s mom spilled grape juice on her pants. Juicy pants. Juice on her pants. I laughed and tried to pretend there was something funny on the TV. She gave me the international sign of “I wanna get out!” so I stood up to let her find the lavatory. I settled back in and began devouring my new book, Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami. The mom had been gone quite a while, but I didn’t notice until Bailey began to cry. Her distress call punctured my zone of consciousness slowly, like a police siren coming from the other side of town. I looked over, and her whimpering turned to bawling, and then into body-wrenching sobs.

“What’s wrong, Bailey?” I said. She replied immediately, as though waiting anxiously for my question. “I want my mommy!” More sobs. Ok, she wants her mommy. Couldn’t have made herself more clear. I twisted around in my seat. Empty aisles. Not even a flight attendant slinging peanuts. How long had it been? Five minutes? Ten minutes? 30 minutes? She couldn’t have very well gotten off the plane.

“Oh, don’t worry,” I said, pretending we were old pals, “she went to the bathroom to clean off her pants.” Her juicy, juiced up pants. At least the crying had stopped, temporarily.

I glanced back at the cover of my paperback book, wanting to open it but thinking Bailey might need some distracting for a while.

“How old are you?” I asked.

“I’m four and a half, and I’ll be five in two days,” she said confidently.

Either her understanding of fractions wasn’t so good, or this girl was aging dangerously fast. She’d be older than me in 12 and a half weeks, I calculated. I put my sarcasm aside for a moment.

“Do you live in San Diego?”

“Yeah.”

“Going to New York on vacation?”

“No, my mom is taking me there for a class.”

That’s odd, I thought. What five-year-old San Diegan takes classes in New York? I pictured a chess champion, or the youngest holder of a seat on the New York stock exchange, or more likely a TV commercial actress. She looked just like the actress in “Life With Mikey,” that bad movie where Michael J. Fox plays a talent agent. Adorable, ambiguously ethnic, the kid could pass for Indian, Puerto Rican, Lebanese, whatever you need. And when she wasn’t crying, she was as cute as they come. She could promote breakfast cereals, toys, cookies, even cell phones and insurance if she had the right script.

She had calmed down a bit, but still I craned my neck to look back and again saw nothing. What happened to Bailey’s mom? I thought back to my first flight alone. I was around the same age, also going to New York from the west coast, and I sat next to a man who taught me how to play Solitaire. He showed me how to set up the columns, how to move cards, how to draw from the pile, how to put your aces in separate stacks. He was a kind and patient man, and I wondered if I could help Bailey get through this crisis. Did I have a deck of cards? Was Solitaire seven or eight columns? Instead, I imagined myself as a hostage negotiator, stalling with small talk.

“A lot of times on planes you have to wait a long time to use the bathroom,” She nodded. But another glance told me there was no line at the lavatory, and I hoped Bailey wouldn’t look back.

“Your mom will be right back.” She nodded again, a little less vigorously.

My eyes went back to the book, and I stared at the cover. A sliver of a Japanese girl’s face on the right, her right eye looking past the frame, half of her pink lips in view, one nostril. And on the left, an artist’s rendering of Sputnik, the Russian satellite. I had just started the book and didn’t yet grasp the connection between a young Japanese girl and the Russian satellite. Maybe it’s about a young history-obsessed woman who falls in love with another Cold War buff. Maybe Sputnik is a metaphor for something impressive, but essentially useless. A propaganda ploy. A public relations move. A dinging machine floating through spa-

“Excuse me.” A tap on my shoulder jolted me back to reality. It was Bailey’s mom, de-juicified at last. I stood up, she took her seat, and I sat down, wondering if I should say something. “Bailey was starting to miss you,” I reported, placing my bet on an understatement.

A Typical Day In LA

Where in Los Angeles can you buy a shot glass, a cheap plastic bracelet and Chinese finger cuffs for 40 dollars? The answer is bar/adult playground Dave and Busters, and that’s what I did with my friends Chang and Mark on a warm July Saturday in Los Angeles after lunch at In’N’Out Burger and almost blowing up a gas station trying to jump a dead battery.

We won the bulk of our gift shop tickets playing Skee-Ball – bowling’s under appreciated cousin – but we did pretty well shooting baskets and playing the classic carnival game where eight people roll balls into holes and each player’s horse clunks awkwardly from right to left across the “track.” “Roll ‘em, race ‘em, horsy chase ‘em!” is the best description I’ve heard.

The modern video arcade features dozens of head-to-head racing games – Formula One, stock car, dune buggy, Jet Ski, Harley Davidson, big rig – and we tried them all. However, you realize pretty quickly that they are all essentially the same game. You just sit on a slightly different shaped thing, and the screen shows a barely modified track or cityscape. In any event, your game is over in 24 seconds and you walk away wondering how you ever got a driver’s license.

Chang drove home, because he won all the driving games. I was in the front seat struggling to get out of the Chinese finger cuffs (Chang refused to reveal the secret escape maneuver, and he isn’t even Chinese!), and watching Michael Douglas in “Falling Down” on the car’s in-dash DVD player. Yes, you heard me correctly. In America, you can have a DVD player installed in your car. It’s probably illegal, but it’s undeniably awesome.

So we’re creeping through LA traffic, losing our cool, and watching Michael Douglas creep through LA traffic, and lose his cool. For my money he gives the most enjoyable performance of his career, with Exhibit A being his disgruntled character’s justification for busting up a grocery store with a baseball bat: “I’m exercising my rights as a consumer.” Don’t try that line on the officer who nabs you for the unlicensed mobile movie theatre.

The rest of the day was punctuated by dinner at a Korean restaurant, watching old episodes of News Radio, falling off a hand-truck and almost breaking my neck, and staying up until sunrise talking about who knows what with friends old and new. Just a typical day in Los Angeles.