cNutgroist

What I did on my Holidays: Part 2

So after the KJster we went for a drink at the John Hancock tower, the second tallest building in Chicago and 96 floors above the city; the whole thing spread out in front of us with thousands of little tangerine lights (honestly) stretching into lines beyond the horizon. Lake Michigan was like deep space compared to what enveloped it. My friend said it was as if we were looking into a Canyon of Skyscrapers. A hyper-real 3D high-definition slowly-evolving painting, like 21^st century Nazca lines, like a circuit-board seen from the top of the CPU, like that scene in Tron, like the pear martini I had ordered lavishly garnished with overblown simile and a dash of hyperbolic, fruity regret. Here’s a photo I took with my camera phone that does it about as much justice as the State of California gave OJ's in-laws.

We stood over this city, separated only by a pane of glass and felt immensely satisfied with the way the day had gone. But we still took a cab to a 24hr diner famous for selling big fat dirty sausages. For me, it was the resolution of an unconscious wish to visit such an establishment. Though largely unbeknownst to my conscious self, the minute I stepped through the door this dream was realised. After a lifetime of receiving a whole century’s worth of Americana, suddenly here I was: In The Movies. And so tasty were the hotdogs that after eating two plus a box of fries, I went ahead and ordered The Big Al. I had visions of a large long heavy sausage, perhaps baked in a mould fashioned from Big Al’s own, original sausage. Maybe it even came with balls and a cheese filling. But no. Indeed, as the words came out of my mouth to order I realised I’d got myself into a world of trouble:

“You want that diiiIIIiipped?”

-I don’t know. Do I? What is it?

Turning to his colleagues at the grill station. “Aw man, he don’t know what diiiiiiipped is.”

-I don’t even know what a big al’s is. Im from out of town (said in an accent somewhere between Bertie Wooster, Billy Bunter and Little Lord Fauntleroy)

“Yo’, I give it to you haaaalf-diiiiipped. Sweet peppers or hot peppers?”

-Hot, please

And with that, in some portakabin on the upper slopes of Mount Olympus the minor official that deals with the Retribution for Foodic Hubris took a break from his work to crack open the vintage Ambrosia, having just won himself a fat bonus for the classically Greek way he’d guided me to engineer my own downfall, fatal flaw and all.

2 minutes later I get a big wrap of far-from-grease-proof paper and have to unfurl a good five layers of this thing. I feel like im at a pass-the-parcel party where it’s been decided to put a big lump of sticky dog shit in the middle and im the lucky winner. But no, underneath the soggy catering paper is a soggy, sodden hot dog bun jammed with 20,000 very thin slices of mystery meat (at a guess, somewhere between free-range Dog and factory-farmed Cat) and slathered in the chilli equivalent of hundreds and thousands - four colours of minutely chopped hot peppers. Half-dipped meant, I think, that they take the whole thing and immerse it in a big pot of bubbling animal grease for a short space of time. What would it have turned out to be if I’d gone for the full dip? The bap was literally falling apart in my hands as it was.

It looked disgusting but it tasted vile. I only ended up eating nearly all of it, the last little bit I left when my inner adult kicked in and reminded me that this holiday from Planet Vega didn’t mean I was contracted to spend my time in last summer's Beirut. As I left, I noticed they had a framed Zagat certificate on their counter. Either they’d stolen it or Zagat’s standards have slipped a couple of thousand points

The difference between my shits the next day was quite, quite fascinating. Do read on. The one I took at 3am when I got in was smooth, slightly oily, neatly packed and densely flavoured. In appearance it had a nutty brown hue generously marbled with strains of rich mahogany. Delivery was friction-free with gentle and satisfying ploppage. Aftertaste was clean, fresh and sharp. No crumbs.

The one I took at 7am when I woke up was a whole different ball game, if the ball is a lump of loosely congealed poo-flakes and the game is to spray as much of the toilet bowl as you possibly can in the few billionths of a second you have betwixt sitting down and total bowel evacuation.

So I had a shower and washed away the bad memories stuck to my inner thighs.

The one I took at 7:15 am cannot adequately be described within the paltry confines of the English language. It was so spectacularly angry.

If the one at 3am had been the perfect child and the one at 7 was the difficult, tantrum-prone middle child, this third one was the axe-murdering, kiddy-fiddling, black shite of the family. It offered no openings for redemption. That morning I stared into the face of pure evil. Happily, due to a youthful phase of self-experimentation, I rendered myself blind in my brown eye so I don’t actually know what that face of evil looks like but I got a taste of it, a taste even pigs would turn up their snouts at. It was dead. It was wrong. It was a holocaust. A pooclear holocaust.

It was born and it died in the same moment, just a flash of hot black stinking disgust at the world and it was gone again. No name, no recognition, no mark of influence did it leave on the world. And out of the corner of my eye, I swear I saw things swimming in the bowl. I wanted to investigate further but remembered that the Truth may never let me sleep again, so I sent it packing to poo heaven.

(There is no poo hell, in case you’re wondering. It’s not that some poos aren’t good and some poos aren’t bad (and of course ugly), as I hope I’ve gone some way to explaining, and maybe you can argue that there should be some method of segregation for these babies, but really it’s a matter of logic. What could possibly constitute a poo hell? The life of a poo is already poo. How do you make that worse? Burn it in sulphurous fumes?!)

Another absolute classic Jarrett encore from the mid-70's, this time Nagoya. Play it loud.

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