Stories I'd Tell My Children (But Maybe Not Until They're Adults). Michael N. Marcus

Tom Seaver, Cy Young or Sandy Koufax. She’d never be a major league pitcher. She missed us, and the spaghetti hit the ceiling. The individual noodles hung like stalactites on the ceiling of a damp limestone cave.

      Every so often, a noodle would wriggle out of its saucy adhesive and go “bloop” and hit the floor.

      Mom didn’t laugh. We did.

      Sink spaghetti

      Years earlier, before I was allowed to use the stove, I tried to cook spaghetti by putting it in the bathroom sink and running hot water over it for about 15 minutes. After it softened up, I dumped in a jar of sauce and stirred the glop. It was terrible, but I ate some of it. I didn’t realize that boiling was a critical part of the pasta- preparation process.

      I also failed in my effort to store ice cream sandwiches in my toy chest by loading up the big maple box with ice cubes. I’m sorry about the mess on the floor, Mom.

      Barbecued spaghetti

      Many years later, while waiting for the kitchen to be completed in my new house, we did most of our cooking on a barbecue grill on our rear deck. We even tried to make spaghetti. The water almost boiled. That mushy meal tasted almost as bad as sink spaghetti.

      Cat lasagna

      One Saturday while we were in junior high school, Howie and I went to Pepe’s, a neighborhood Italian restaurant, for lunch. It was not glamorous. It was a dingy, long and narrow place with tables against two walls, and a center aisle that ran from the front door to the counter and kitchen in the back of the joint.

      Instead of our usual pizza, we both ordered lasagna, and we waited. We waited for a very long time. Periodically, our waitress would come out of the kitchen and apologize for the delay, refill our water glasses and promise that our meals would be out “soon.”

      At some point, a bedraggled alley cat came in through the open front doorway, and quickly walked down the center aisle, made a quick jog around the counter and went into the kitchen.

      A moment later, we heard a clatter and squealing that sounded like an episode of Itchy and Scratchy on The Simpsons. Or maybe the velociraptors in the Jurassic Park kitchen.

      After a little while, the waitress brought out two plates of lasagna. Howie and I turned pale, got up and walked out without eating or paying.

      Too-famous lasagna

      Another time, Howie and I were wandering around Greenwich Village. We were hungry and almost out of money and were looking for an inexpensive way to fill our bellies.

      We were relieved and pleased to find a really crappy-looking restaurant with grease-encrusted windows, a door with cracked glass, tufts of litter swirling near that door, a drunk sleeping under the torn awning and a suitably unimpressive name.

      “Joe’s Italian” seemed to be a likely source of cheap, two-buck lasagna.

      When we went inside and sat down and started looking around, we sensed that we might be wrong.

      This Joe was not merely some anonymous Joe. He was Giuseppe Marcello Bacciagaluppe, an award-winning chef who apparently had no need to pay anything to enhance the exterior décor of his famous establishment.

      Photographs on the wall showed Joe with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Tony Bennett, Perry Como, Annette Funicello Connie Francis, a pope, two mayors, a governor, two presidents and a capo de tutti capi from the Mafia.

      Joe’s lasagna would have cost $14.95 each.

      We quickly sneaked out before the waiter put water on the table and we found a Sabrett’s hotdog cart that better suited our budget.

      The Sabrett’s cart had a picture of just one president, and Jack Kennedy was not shown shaking the hand of the Greek hotdog man.

      Sautéed piscatorial penises

      Steve was hired to teach biology, but he wasn’t much of a teacher. He read each textbook chapter just before the students, misassembled a human skeleton and had trouble pronouncing words—even simple, short one-syllable words.

      Steve’s first love was music, and hardly a day went by without his demonstrating some newly discovered sound that would emanate from one of the major orifices of the ventral or dorsal surfaces of his body.

      But even if he had insufficient gas to belch or to fart, the show would still go on. Steve would treat our class to a mangled recitation of the cafeteria menu. He loved to announce “fried fish dicks” instead of fish sticks.