Part I: Donuts
Before it closed, Donuts Sandwiches, along with the Chelsea and the McBurney Y, was one of the pillars of the Bohemian community of West 23rd Street. You could get a Cheeseburger deluxe -- that’s a cheeseburger with lettuce, tomato, a pickle, and French fries—for $2.95 in the mid 90s. For a dollar, you got two donuts and a coffee. You could even pay with a subway token, if that’s all the rehab center gave you for the day.
The cook was a middle-aged man named Jerry, who looked like Jack Kerouac—when Jack Kerouac was a fat drunk. Despite his bulk, if somebody acted up, if a junkie cursed him, say, Jerry would grab a baseball bat and hop the horseshoe counter and run the guy out the door.
Every time I came into the diner I would order my coffee black with no sugar.
This always seemed to offend Jerry. “No milk, no sugar?!” he would say every time. “Why don’t you want some milk? How ‘bout at least some sugar.”
“I don’t like it like that.”
“Why don’t you like it? It’s good like that. I can’t understand it, I can’t understand how anybody drinks their coffee like that.”
Luckily, he wasn’t generally the one who fixed the coffee.
Jerry was talkative, and aside from the thing with the coffee, usually cheerful. Over the years I learned a lot about him: he lived in Queens, he was an expert fisherman, a fine gardener, and he could fix anything around the house. He had a son who was a lawyer, apparently the best in the business, who made five-hundred thousand, or sometimes it was a million, a year. Jerry was a Mets fan, permanently disgusted with their performance.
One year, over the Christmas holidays, Jerry’s wife died. Though she had had serious medical problems, it still came unexpectedly. For all his talk, I had never heard Jerry mention his wife before, except in passing. Now he discussed her at length:
“I’m just glad it was my wife instead of my mother-in-law. I loved my wife, but my mother-in-law was the one that cooked and took care of the house. I know maybe that sounds funny, but it would have been more of a loss if she had died. My wife was always like a child, she never could clean, never could cook. There at the end she was an invalid, she got really fat. She just laid in bed and drank beer and smoked cigarettes, three packs a day, watching TV and killing herself.
“She had diabetes. She should’ve got out more, it would’ve helped her circulation, but it was hard for her, it made her tired. She was always in and out of the hospital for something. A blood clot went to her brain and killed her, a stroke, just like that, died in my arms almost.
“Now, I’m not saying I’m glad she’s dead, but I’m gonna save a lot of money now, I’ll tell ya. I figured it up, and I’m gonna save three hundred dollars a week just on beer and cigarettes alone.
“My mother-in-law was the one who took care of her. My wife couldn’t have made it without her. My old mother-in-law—she’s 80—had to wait on her hand and foot. If my mother-in-law had died she wouldn’t have had anybody, so that’s why I say it’s a good thing she went first. I know it sounds weird to say that, but that’s how I feel.”
I did think it was weird—though not so much to feel it, as to say it. It was natural to be relieved that someone who was so much of a burden had died, and it was natural also to feel guilt at experiencing that relief. I decided that Jerry, being a talker, had to deal with his feelings verbally. (Copyright 2006 Ed Hamilton) Next week: Part 2 Sandwiches
Recent Comments