The Pastry Mentioned in My Divorce--
     Strangely enough, the pastry mentioned in my 1989 divorce from Phylliss is a wedding cake. A "little" wedding cake at that, or what is called a "casatina" in Italian.
      It all began at La Guli, the fabled Astoria pasticceria of my childhoood. When I became a foodie I toured the five boroughs for special dishes, and i always recalled my childhood wonder at the colorful pastry shelves in the store on Ditmars Ave. Around that time I had also become a fan of a pasticceria in the East Village called DiRoberti's. I was looking for the ideal Italian ice at the time, and I had written about my quest for The Soho Weekly News.
     However, in my travels I became aware of a new pastry, one that both DiRoberti's and La Guli featured. It was called "casatina Palermitana"--or casatina Sicilian style--and it combined some of my favorite ingedients. This dessert consists of a three-inch-round sandwich of sweet, moistened sponge cake and cannoli cream, topped with fondant and a candied fruit, and wrapped around the outside in rich green marizipan. I was an instant fan--and being a cook, I had to reproduce the casatina.
     Chinatown supermarkets feature something called almond powder, meant to mix with milk or water as a drink. But I had other ideas. The ingredients are essentially powdered almond and sugar, although there's some powdered milk as well. I discounted the last of these and experimented. My discovery was that, if you add beaten egg white and a little water you get something very much like marzipan--for about a third of the cost if you were to  buy pre-made marzipan. Add a drop of green food coloring and it was hard to tell the difference.
     I experimented, and finally came up with my own perfectly formed, tasty Casatina Palermitana.
     Phylliss was working at the time for a well-known style house and was trying to lose weight to better "fit in." She told me of this plan and I agreed to support her in her efforts; however, since I was a fledgling baker and respected her experiences in that field (she even took a cake-decorating course), I asked her and she agreed to "just take a bite" of my various creations to arrive at an opinion that I would respect.
     On the day of the incident, and while she was at work, I came up with the final prototype of the casatina. We had a date that evening to go out with a couple of portly friends, and we met them at a Mexican place. I said nothing as Phylliss devoured two burritos and a coule of beers. I was supposed to be supportive, not her diet monitor.
     When we got back to our place, friends in  tow, I brought out the four casatinas I'd proudly constructed. These wlould be our desserts. My friends loved them, but when I offered one to my wife she became aggitated. She angrilly reminded me that I was supposed to "be supportive" and rejected the dessert offer. I foolishly replied that she hadn't been so diet-conscious earlier in the night. This just made her madder.
     And then I whined. It was always a bad move to whine at Phylliss. I said "But you promised to take a bite!"
     That tore it!
      She growled at me: "You want me to eat it?!" Then she picked up the pastry and literally jammed it into her mouth--whole. It was a very gooey pastry, and when she slapped it into her maw it also glopped onto the wall behind her. It was very messy and she was very furious....
     Our guests got up slowly so as to leave; but she suddenly got --I guess the word is "cordial"--and said, "Oh, don't leave on my account!" After they left I cleaned the wall and the incident gradually was forgotten.
     Two years later, when we agreed to part, her lawyer told her to come up with some reason for divorce, like physical or mental cruelty. She had nothing. We were just no longer suited to one another; but to satisfy our legal system, she came up with the incident, which appears in my divorce decree as;
     "Did physically force to eat a rich dessert."

A PINWHEEL OF DUMPLINGS AND BAO

      In 1986 I partnered with down-home restaurateur, Stan Tankursley, to create a dim-sum catering and delivery service called Big Yum Dim Sum. We contracted with John Sung, the manager of Sun Hop Singh on the Bowery, to provide us with formed, uncooked dim sum that we would then take to the final stages by steaming, frying, baking, etc.The plan was to train caterer-cooks to bring each small dish to completion and final cooking, which they would then serve up at clients' apartments for dinner parties, soirees, etc.
     It was an idea before its time. And due to conflicts between Stan and the owners of the restaurant the dim sum service was to be based in, it was a plan that ended virtually before it began. But before it all came down there was that Saturday when I trained a dozen waiters and waitresses from Stan's various restaurants on the basics of dim sum cooking and catering.
     After buying the half-done dim sum from John Sung, I carefully biked the tubs of food to Acme in Soho, set up the training kitchen and spent three hours demonstrating the how to's to the gathered future employees of Big Yum.
     It all went well, and when it was over I greedily eyed all the dishes I had cooked and, after handing out a few samples to the trainees, realized a bounty of about ten more pounds of dim sum and bao in various stages of completion.This was all mine! A small treasure of Chinese delicacies that would bulge out the shelves of my fridge and feed me for the next two weeks.
     So as soon as the food was bagged and hung from the handlebars of my bike, I was off--heading crosstown to my place on Bank Street a mile or two away.
     The ride was uneventful. I was careful with my delicious hoard, pedaled carefully. That is, until I got to the corner of Seventh Avenue South and West 4th Street. The Boston-friendly bar, The Riviera, has been a fixture on that corner for half a century or more. And since this was a warm early summer day, the tables along the sidewalk at The Riviera were packed with diners enjoying a late lunch.
     I don't think those Riviera patrons expected entertainment that day, but they got it anyway--thanks to my careless bike riding. What happened was, as I was angling my bike close to curbside while passing those tables, one of the dangling bags of food got snagged in the spokes of my front wheel. As this began to wobble the bike, the other bags jiggled enough to also get caught in the spokes.
     This was followed by a virtual pinwheel of food. The spinning wheel caught the contents of the bags and hurled them upward! Crystal shrimp balls tumbled in midair, little pork shu mai scuttled across my handlebars, giant flakey puffs of pork pie disintegrated and spewed their red pork stuffing on the street, shrimp in rice noodle slid across the pavement, and hand-rolled silver noodles were everywhere.
     Diners gaped at this, stopped eating, held forksful of food suspended in front of their mouths. I didn't stop to count how many were laughing. I just dismounted and gathered up what I could. Wounded and damaged containers were shored up, a few dozen pieces escaped the disaster and went on to become breakfasts, but it was all done rapidly. I never cleaned up the mess, I'll confess, I just cut my losses and ran away.
     Sometimes, running away is the best option.

The Night East Third Street Earned Five Stars

Don’t ask why we got stuck with all that food. It was that erratic genius of a restaurateur who set up most of the down-home-style restaurants in the '80s and '90s in downtown Manhattan. He was to blame. He was always to blame when things went south in his creations, because the flip side of his Midas touch was a management technique that would embarrass the Three Stooges. Anyway, without going into the specifics here, suffice to say he pissed off the landlord enough that--this time when the wacky wunderkind again missed paying the rent--the place got closed down.

Along with one of the junior partners, the head chef, I had just overseen the preparation of all the side dishes and vegetables, rice, jerk chicken, etc. for that night’s service. Anything that could be prepared ahead of an order was sitting in steam trays, warming up. My late wife Phylliss was also there, and when the sudden eviction notice sank in, the three of us commiserated over the fate of all that food. My wife and I came from backgrounds that considered a sin to waste anything edible, so we felt a sense of panic.

The landlord said, fine, take an hour. But after calling a few places like City Harvest, we learned that these charitable services are bound by law, or their insurance or such, to decline to take already prepared food. We were referred to the city shelters.

So, without calling ahead, the head chef helped Phylliss and me load up the trunk and backseat of a Checker cab, and we told the driver to take us to the East Third Street Men’s Shelter—and to wait for us outside until we had the shelter directors assign people to unload all that lovely food.

The shelter is on a narrow street in a seedy neighborhood, and the structure resembles a cross between a prison and a ghetto high school. It was grim-looking alright –but I could smell the food and knew there were a lot of people who’d be happy to see it. But inside I got the same answer: for all they knew we could be trying to poison all the guys at the shelter. In seriousness, the director thanked me but cited the prohibition.

I scratched my head and was walking out when he called to me. “But there’s nothing that says you can’t pass out the food in the street out front. You might get an eager audience, since they hate the food in here.” I brightened at that prospect, but I knitted my brows and asked him, “Yeah, but what about the…” He put up a hand. “They all have spoons and forks and plates, too. They like having their own…stuff.”

               So we did as he said. And so as to prove his promise, he apparently spread the word among the residents, because before we had the cab unloaded they came trickling out. And by the time the disposable steam trays were lined up and ready to be dipped into, the trickle was a steady stream.                 

               Phylliss and I scooped and scooped and filled bowl after bowl and were gracious in the gentle onslaught of thanks and praise. And never was there a better feast on that grim street. We had been smart to bring the two ladles, but aside from those and the cups, bowls and eating utensils the shelter residents had, that was it. The meal was about over when I remembered….

“We got cake, too!” I called out as I dug the covered cake out from under my pile of trays and bags. But as I opened the cake cover I complained loudly, “Damn! I forgot a knife”

Click! Click,click, click. Click. Click-click-click-click-click. I looked up and there were about twenty of them--guys offering me knives. Of course.

(“Got milk?!”)

How To Cook an Alligator

I guess it started when the blue-haired old ladies of the southern Gulf states had a change of mind. That’s when the “specialty meat” started becoming available, appearing in menus Down South.

Apparently, pro-animal Southern dowagers had been key supporters of species preservation laws enacted in the sixties; but they eventually came to question some of that support.

Support for alligators, specifically. 
One too many of these caring old dears in Florida had watched in horror as a fearsome reptile that she was instrumental in saving slithered out of a nearby canal, into her backyard, and dragged off her precious Fluffy the poodle. So, when alligators got kicked off the endangered species lists, businessmen stepped in.

 In my case, I was introduced to the “delicacy” by a firm called AquaCulture Technologies.

This was the summer of 1988. I had been given creative control over some of the menu while Stan Tankursely was converting Caroline's for Comedy--an old bar-nightclub--into a soul-food restaurant. I was executive chef and was filling the menu with many of my innovative recipes as well Stan's--using traditional ones, and dreaming up ways to keep a Manhattan restaurant that was started in the summer, of all times, from sinking into oblivion. 
Delta 88 was all about the down-home craze of 1988, the classic Oldsmobile, and tummy-rubbing good grub from the Mississippi delta. We had everything you’d expect us to have on that southern-and-soul-food menu–-everything but chitt’lins, which would have stunk up the kitchen

When the AquaCulture rep arrived one day with my eighty pounds of catfish fillets and sixty whole, boned-and-gutted trout, he asked me “What about alligator?”

I’m a natural sort of guy, so I responded, naturally, “What about alligator?”

The salesman proceeded to brag about how AquaCulture was the first modern fish-farming company to take on the raising of the reptile for meat, and how I might have some fun playing with recipes. 
To make it real simple for me, he gave me two five-pound blocks of frozen tail meat. If I said “I was game,” a cartoon alligator with a shotgun would probably pop up out of this cartoon story and lay a cap in my...tail meat. But that’s what I was-–game to play around with the stuff. I accepted the gift

Delta 88 was holding its own despite the unpropitious timing of its opening. We hired gospel groups that usually returned to the South after a weekend of performing in city churches in Black communities, to perform in our “Monday Night is Gospel Night” program–- and the place, five weeks after its opening, was catching on. I had enough to do on-site, putting in seventy-plus-hour weeks; so I took the blocks of frozen tail meat home that weekend and thawed them out on my worktable.

I clamped a hand-cranked meat grinder to the edge of the table, since one of the recipes I dreamt up was for alligator sausage. In another pot, pieces of tail meat the size of beef stew chunks marinated in vinegar and lots of apple cider.

Louis L’Amour watched hungrily.

My late wife gave him that name because she supposed the dog to be French. Louis was a black standard poodle–-a lover and not a fighter. The runt of the litter. And that day, when I ground up the thawed-out tail meat for my sausages, and the bloody water leaked out of the grinder and puddled on the floor, Louis L’Amour became the first of his species to reverse the evolution of the food chain: he lapped up the alligator blood while wagging his tail.

I put together three recipes that day--–sausages, to be served with two sides, alligator stew with potatoes, apples, onions, celery and a few other things–-and spicy alligator fingers: pounded strips of meat (‘gator is not a tender meat) that were then breaded, deep-fried and served as an appetizer with Delta 88's spicy Crystal Butter Sauce.

As I considered how to present all of this, I realized that the downside of Delta 88's summer opening could be used to our advantage. It was all about the seasons...

I’d  come to the restaurant field from journalism, so I knew that the summertime--when so many readers are away, when nothing much happens, and when no one cares because they’re all on vacation–-is the key time of any year for the so-called human interest story to make it into media. It’s called in the trade, the “Silly Season.”

Caroline Hirsch, impresario of Caroline’s Comedy Club, was the owner of Delta 88, so her publicist took my cue and began sending out press notices about my alligator dishes. I gave the stew the name “LaCoste Stew” and it caught the eye of The Wall Street Journal, which put a blurb about it on their front page.

In all, fourteen reviews or notices appeared heralding what I’d dubbed “The First New York Alligator Festival.”

Alligator tastes like a combination of chicken and tuna. That’s all I have to say about it. Do I care that so many innocent animals were blah-blah-blah? Look-–the recipes are below. If you follow any one (or all) of them and come to the conclusion that I have advanced the cause of humans eating big, "helpless", Fluffy-the-poodle-eating, lizardy carnivores, well... (Why do you think there was no Second New York Alligator Festival?)

LaCoste Stew

ingredients:

½ lb. new red potatoes, peeled and cut into quarters

2 lbs. alligator tail meat cut into 2" chunks

1 ½ cups  peeled , diced carrots

1 lb. Roma apples, peeled and cored, cut into 1" pieces

½ cup peeled, sliced onion

½ cup diced celery

1 12-oz can of white cannelini beans, drained

4 cups (1 quart) apple cider

2 tsp. salt

1 tsp. ground black pepper

2 tbsp. olive oil

3-quart stock pot

1.- set a small pot of water to boil. Add the potatoes and return to boil and cook for 10 minutes;

2- heat oil in stock pot, then add onions and saute until translucent;

3- add carrots, celery and apples. Toss and continue to saute for 2 more minutes;

4- add the tail meat and increase the temperature to medium high. Saute until slightly browned (but do not let other ingredients burn–-be sure to keep stirring);

5- pour in cider, stir and bring to a simmer;

6- add the beans and semi-cooked potatoes, salt and pepper;

7- bring to a slow boil, lower the heat to a simmer, cover and cook over low heat for 45 minutes

Alligator Sausages

ingredients:

2 lbs. alligator tail meat cut into 2" chunks

½ lb. pork fat cut into 1" pieces

1/3 cup apple cider vinegar

2 tbsp. finely grated apple peel

½ tsp. allspice

1 tsp. Cayenne pepper

1 tbsp. salt

2 tsp. ground black pepper

1 tbsp. onion juice*

12 pieces of string cut into 4" lengths

2 yards of sausage casings

garlic press

meat grinder with medium grind disk,  fitted with sausage feeder

1-* to obtain 1 tbsp. of onion juice, squeeze onion pieces in garlic press and save in small bowl ;

2- in a glass or ceramic bowl, sprinkle salt, pepper, Cayenne, allspice, apple peel gratings, onion juice and cider vinegar over the chunks of tail meat and pork fat and allow to marinate (tossing every ten minutes) for about an hour;

3- slide the end of the length of sausage casings over the fluted end of the sausage feeder attached to your meat grinder;

4- drain the liquid from the marinated tail meat;

5- grind the tail meat and pork fat into the sausage casings and tie off every 5 inches. Tie off the ends.

6-hang in a cool, dry place to dry and cure for about 4 hours;

7- pan fry and serve.

Spicy Alligator Fingers

ingredients:

1 lb. alligator tail meat cut into strips 3" long and about ½" thick;

1 1/2 cups flour

½ cup stone ground cornmeal

1 cup apple cider vinegar

3 tbsp. salt

½ cup melted butter

1/4 cup Crystal (brand) hot sauce

oil for deep frying

1- place a number of tail meat strips between wax paper and pound flat; repeat until all are done;

2- in a bowl, marinate pounded “fingers” in the vinegar for about ½ hour;

3- heat oil to 375°

4- remove alligator “fingers” from marinade and pat semi-dry

5- in a shallow bowl, combine salt, cornmeal and flour;

6- dredge “fingers” in flour-salt and deep fry until golden;

7- meanwhile, stir together the hot sauce and melted butter until smoothly combined;

8- drain/blot deep-fried strips and serve with Crystal Butter Sauce.

Cajeta Kaboom—With or Without Goat’s Milk

A while back, after coming into a quart of goat's milk, and with the memory of the smoky, sweet-and-sour Coronado brand Cajeta de Cabra Quemada still lingering somewhere on the back of my tongue, I decided to boil the milk down and make my own cajeta.

Dulce de Leche, the popular Latino caramel, is called cajeta in Mexico, and the Coronado company, among others, makes the goat's milk type. This rich caramel dessert is usually flavored with vainilla, but Coronado also features envinado (flavored with red wine) and quemada (flavored with burnt sugar).

The Recipe, briefly

I started by heating the goat's milk over a medium flame. (If you would prefer the less-sour cow's milk type, use a quart of that. I prefer goat because of the sweet/sour combination.) Then, in a small saucepan, I melted a cup of sugar over a medium-high heat, swirling it around until it was liquefied. (It’s best not to stir, as it’ll reharden, or crystallize, even on a wooden spoon; but if you must, you must.) Liquify and watch it all darken, and when it is about the color of dark corn syrup, like Karo, it will be a “burnt” flavor. For anyone who’s ever made a flan, this process will be familiar.

After the goat's milk reached a simmer, I turned off the melted sugar, then poured a cup and a half of the simmering milk into the melted sugar saucepan and stirred it around until it was completely mixed. I poured this into the remaining, simmering goat's milk, stirred it to mix well, and then gradually poured in two more cups of sugar, stirring all the while.

As soon as the cajeta was consistently thickened I turned down the heat and, still stirring, waited for a slow rolling boil. As soon as it boiled I lowered the flame and kept it at a simmer. 
There’s a lot of stirring needed. Stir until it’s the consistency of an uncooled pudding. It will have reduced by about a third of its original volume. (If I'd felt it was too loose, I’d slowly reheat it. It might take two or three reheatings to get it right.)

NOTE: If you follow these simple instructions, keep in mind that you’ll have to be tending the pot from two to three hours. Don’t let it go more than five minutes without stirring, because sugar burns. (Or--of course--buy a jar of this:)

                ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Then—if you don’t mind settling for cow’s milk cajeta--there’s also the “Boil-a-Can” method. But stay awake if you use it.

THE “BOIL-A-CAN” METHOD

You’ll need:

Water  

One 14oz can of sweetened condensed milk                                                                                                  One saucepan—deep enough so that it is more than two inches higher than the can,           

                      but it shouldn’t be more than twice as wide as the condensed milk can.

          Directions:
   

      -Stand the can in the center of the pot full of water. Make sure the water comes up to a level that's two inches over the top of the can.

               -Boil the water and settle the boil to medium. Watch the pot, and when the water boils down (about 2 inches) to the top of the can of sweetened condensed milk, turn off the flame and let water and can cool down.

               -When you finally open the cooled-off can, the sweetened condensed milk in the middle may have stayed whiter than the rest of the final product, but you can stir this together until the "instant caramel" is a rich, dark color—a dulce de leche. A cajeta!

               

               I know what you’re saying. “Boil the can?” Crazy, right? Boil an unopened can?! But it’ll explode, won't it? (Two months ago, Details magazine had a blurb that recommended this method. So if you screw it up, sue them.)

               Earlier, I warned you that if you use this method you should "stay awake". And, no, it will not explode—if you watch your pot. 

               ....Or else it’ll explode:

               It was fifteen years ago, and I was cooking up my three dozenth can of my favorite Mexican treat, when I unfortunately did fall asleep. The water not only boiled down, but the pot became a white-hot launching pad for the can. (I didn’t actually see this, but I know the consequences--and I saw the results.)The explosion at the bottom sent the  can rocketing to the ceiling, where it smashed through plaster and cracked the lathing beneath. The saucepan had a scorched and rounded bottom. The cast iron trivet that supported the pan was bent downward over its burner and could not be re-bent by any force known to man. (Or, at least, this man!)

   And the kitchen! Oh, the kitchen! 
   It was a leopard--a maniacal monotone Jackson Pollack that would take days to un-gum from the ceiling and walls. A caramel nightmare.

              When it went off my mate awoke and called out, wanting to know what the loud noise was. “No big deal,” I said to her. “Just some plates that fell off a shelf. Go back to sleep. I’ll…clean…up…”

               (Don’t fall asleep!)

          POP-UP POPPY SEEDS

When I was in my teens, back in 1958, my friend Lanny’s mom surprised us all one day when she offered candies from a special box. “These are chocolate-covered bumblebees…” she said, pointing to the large sweets, “…and these are clusters of chocolate-covered ants.” With those few words she cured my curiosity for anything and everything referred to as “gourmet”.

Fortunately, the cure didn’t last long.

A lifetime later, in 1990, I ran a small bakery from my 420-square-foot West Village apartment. Using a standard kitchen oven and a convection oven, with a microwave as a backup for melting butter and such, I supplied desserts to a half-dozen local restaurants. I was “Sticky-Face Bakery” and one of my most popular cakes was a super-moist lemon-poppy seed bundt cake. It was full of lemon rind, and while it cooled I'd jab it with bamboo skewers, making about a hundred holes into which I poured a half-pint of sugary home-made lemon juice. It was very moist, and weighed about four pounds.

One of my customers was a restaurant on my corner called Nadine’s. Rich, the head chef, featured my pies and cakes, and the lemon-poppy seed cake was one of their favorites. 
But I got bored with the baking routine and knew I would always stay “small business” because of my space limitations, so I announced that the last week of June 1990 would see my final deliveries
The somewhat hasty decision was arrived at also because I was going on a two-month trip to Oregon. So I planned to give myself a few days after my last deliveries to prepare for the trip, and it was a relief to have had schlepped my last stack of cake boxes. 
Only, there had been a… slight snag with my final order for the restaurant on the corner. Nadine’s dessert chef had ordered about a half dozen pies and cakes, two of which were the delicious lemon-poppy seed numbers. And since they “cured” best of all of my desserts, I made them first and placed one of them on my windowsill to cool while it absorbed the lemon flavor. 
In the course of shuttling back and forth in my small apartment, I would glance in its direction—making sure that it stayed sitting securely on the sill, under its aluminum cake-carrier lid. 
And I barely paid heed to that solitary ant weaving along the windowsill. But after four or five hours of busy baking I started to notice several ants. 
Oh-oh. Where there’s a few ants there are hundreds! 
I ran to the window and ripped the cover off and…Part-AY! Brown ants were popping in and out of the hundreds of sweetened skewer holes, singing old ballads and waving bottles of Limoncello! The ones along the rims were already blissfully drowned in a sea of lemony run-off.

Yikes! There was no time to make another one! I couldn’t let Nadine’s down!

So, in a panic I cleaned off the edges and stingered off into outer ant space the occasional drunken wise guy who stood on hind legs and stuck his tongue out at me. But what about the ones in the lemon juice tunnels? I popped the cake into the microwave and set off a hundred-percent zap for three seconds. When I opened the door, partying ants were scattering for the doors. I helped them along. But there were still those hangers on; so I zapped the cake for three seconds once again. This time a few dozen stragglers stumbled out and called for cabs....

When Lanny’s mom offered us those insects in ‘58, it was only a few years after the last of the Imperial Japanese soldiers gave up after holing up in caves on forgotten islands in the Pacific ten years after World War Two had ended. I had ants holding out that were cut from the same mold. 
I zapped the cake again: Two or three wiggled their way free of a few edge holes and toppled off, were swept away by my butter knife. And then a final zap. 
Nothing.... all quiet on the western front.

But had I really won the war? The juice holes were probably full of dead soldiers! And then I remembered Lanny’s mom, and how sweetened ants were a gourmet treat…at least in lands with protein issues…and how diners should be proud (in that dim-lit restaurant) to eat special stuff like a few ants. Why, they look just like…poppy seeds!

A day before I left for the coast I was passing Nadine’s when head chef Rich popped out of a side door and called to me.

Uh-oh.

“Hey, Art,” he said, “did we order two lemon-poppy seed cakes from you?” 
I said Yes, that’s true—and he said, “Well, it was too much. We didn’t need two. No harm and nothing on you, but now we have more than we need.”

“Oh, um, sorry,” I said.

"Anyway—listen, you wanna come in and have a piece with me?”

Now, to my knowledge I have never turned down a piece of cake.

But…

Oregon was fine that time of year. And I made tons of wild blackberry jam…bug-free wild blackberry jam (as far as I know).

Fruit Stands and Local Legends

Two Poems, Reverse History, a Century Apart–Art Gatti c.2009

Midnight Fruit & Vegetables/poem #1

It must be for lack of a truck.

Why else sit crouched low

in the untraveled dark of the sidewalk

on this side of Seventh Avenue South,

a minute before midnight?

A pushcart brimming with colorful produce by day,

now an ominous cameo of black shapes without the sun.

Who would tend this invisible store?

Why is it not tucked away somewhere?

Pushcarts of old had places to go–

nearby garages that were once stables

for the nags that pulled humble merchant wagons--

before it was cheaper to just push them.

Not like this man’s green world with the lights out

and no home for pushcart or pusher.

A truck is probably a borough away

and not working,

or stolen, or gone.

Or the insurance is too much.

You need a truck if you want to go home.

But this meager business

can only afford one drop-off, one pickup a week–

why he sits there, this unknown being,

huddled against the loneliness

and the dark,

and the unsympathetic shadows

that pass him in the night.

Now and then

someone buys a banana or two;

but it’s mostly just those shadows passing him,

going home to soft shadow beds.

-------------------------------------------------------

Midnight Fruit and Vegetables/poem#2

When I first visited my father’s hometown in Lazio, Italy,

way up near the flowing green Abruzzi mountains,

the family there told me to ask him,

when I returned to America,

"Did you eat the melon?"

It could be that, at nine, he was eager to blow town--

accompany his mom

to search for the dad that never sent for them,

as immigrants were supposed to.

No.

Instead, it was a convenient escape....

"Did you eat the melon?"

How could he ever live it down if he had stayed?

A simple mistake–

one that any rowdy kid might make in the dark.

He was one of a gang of little boys

prowling the sleepy mountain town night, while Mama slept 
and Papa was four thousand miles away.

At eight years old, it’s all about the dare.

That night it was the weekend marketers

who were targeted for their illicit fun and sweet profit.

Weary farmers, asleep by their wagons

in the small, empty piazza,

guarding the humble treasures of

their mountainside harvests

from urchins just like my father.

And so it was that the plot

aimed their tiny hands at the wagon of the melon man...

(Ask him, "Did you eat the melon?")

And each did their dirty deed

like bad little boys,

snatching a melon as the man slept....

My dad’s turn

–and in the moonlight, did he not see the biggest prize?

Did he not imagine the muffled cheers to greet him upon

returning to the thieves lair with this grand trophy?

And it would have been so,

had it not been the farmer’s bald head that he snatched

–or tried to–

followed by the angry wails, and the

horrified,

fleeing feet of my father.

"Ask him, ‘Did you eat the melon?’"