Daily Story: Category—Stories from my books.
Tuesday, September 29, 2009 at 3:18PM Here’s another travelogue memory piece from my book “99 Beers Off The Wall.” I hope you’re not eating while you read this!
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12:10 p.m. I’ve walked three blocks and can’t believe what I’m looking at on the corner of 22nd and 3rd: The Lyric Diner. The fucking Lyric Diner...hah! Hah, hah, hah! No, I haven’t started drinking yet, it’s just that one of my favorite New York stories took place right here in the Lyric Diner.
And here it is: In ’97 or ’98 a guy we’ll call Alvin (I swore to him I’d never tell this story, so the least I can do is change his name) had moved here to Manhattan. He was a writer I had known for a while and we decided to have lunch. He was going to tell me his plans for the future in this city some call the Big Apple. I never do...call it the Big Apple that is. I meet him and he suggests we go to his neighborhood diner, The Lyric Diner. So we walk to the diner, it’s Sunday around 1:30 p.m., and it’s jam-packed with patrons all hungering for a patty melt and fries with gravy and other daily diner specials.
We get a table towards the back in the middle of the rectangular, brightly lit diner. I usually don’t eat much in the daytime, so I have a diet Coke and a glass of water. But Alvin really packs it in. Eggs, sausage, toast, bacon, potatoes, jelly, butter, coffee and I think cheese was involved somewhere in the course of the meal. It was the brunch special and it was more food than I’d ever seen someone eat for breakfast in my entire life of watching other people eat breakfast. And he was really shoveling it down fast and furious, Fatty Arbuckle style.
He had just jammed the last forkful of the gargantuan feast in his mouth and started to say something, but then he gags. His eyes cross for the briefest of moments, and then he starts choking. I ask him if he’s alright and he puts his hand to his mouth. Only one second of normalcy remained for the rest of our stay in The Lyric Diner. For it was then that puke started to stream between his fingers and he stood up over the table and let out an ear-piercing BARRRRRFFFF!! sound and puked all over the table. And then he did it again. And then, just for good measure, he did it once more with feeling.
By now I’ve jumped back from the table which is literally dripping with puke. And we’re talking really gross throw up here folks, big grey chunks and sickening looking multi-colored runny matter all over our table and dripping down to the floor. By now Alvin has stopped puking and is standing there kind of in a daze. His face is red and his eyes are watering. I look around the diner and it’s like someone has shot an Uzi off in the joint. No one is talking, no one is eating, no one is moving. In one instant it went from the typical noisy, clinkity-clank-silverware-hitting-plates diner noise to complete and utter silence.
Everybody is staring at us and the puke-riddled table. It’s like time was frozen. And it’s at this moment that I see something that I’ll never forget. I look a couple of tables ahead of me and off to the left in a booth is a typical Manhattan yuppie power couple with their two boys who look to be roughly five and seven years old. Dad and the boys have on navy blue suits, white shirts and ties and mom is decked out in a summery white dress and wearing jewelry that maybe I’ll be able to afford after three lifetimes of working hard labor. The entire family is shiny, clean and polished ten times from Tuesday. And the whole stinking lot of them are staring wide-eyed, open mouthed at our table which has been turned into a vomitorium. And they all have full plates of food in front of them, they had just been served. I instinctively know that their cherished after-church weekly brunch has been ruined, maybe for the remainder of the summer, perhaps for the rest of their lives. The children would be scarred, that much was certain. But I couldn’t waste valuable time worrying about them, I just had to get out of that place and away from the puke.
By this time Alvin cleans himself up by fouling every napkin at our table. We walk up to our wide-eyed, frozen waitress in the corner and she nervously scribbles out our check. All eyes are glued to us as Alvin places a twenty on her tray and apologizes for the mess she’s going to have to clean up. She just stares ice at us. We pay the bill up front to the sickened cashier and as we leave there is still entire silence in the diner. Right at that moment I felt as if I were a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army holding up that bank with Patty Hearst back in the ’70s. I hadn’t been back to this place since.
And now, four years later, here I am. I have a weird feeling that as I walk in, someone will say, “There he is, one of the throw up guys, lynch him!”
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Reader Comments (2)
AAAAARRRGGGHHHHH!!! GROSS!
Hilarious , laughed my ass off. I have a west coast restaurant puke story myself.