My Fair Lazy - Jen Lancaster [63]
I basically feel like I’m visiting another country, so I’m trying to respect her culture by not shouting back. Or maybe I’m keeping my fat mouth shut because I suddenly realize that even though she only weighs seventy-eight pounds, she scares the living crap out of me.
I ask her to just give me what everyone else is getting. She stuffs something into white paper and snatches the five-dollar bill out of my hand. Then she takes my change and eyes the tip jar. I make a “Please, you keep it” gesture and bustle out of the store with my bag. I have no idea what I got, but I suspect I’d better eat it and like it, lest the old gal has a go at my calves.
Once I’m a safe distance from the shop, I tentatively open the bag. There’s a big golden something or other in there. I take a cautious whiff, and I’m delighted that it smells like whatever drew me to that bakery in the first place. The aroma’s vaguely sweet and yeasty, and there’s an undertone that’s familiar but I can’t quite place it. I grab a napkin and wrap it around the disk, examining it in the sunlight. This appears to be a . . . donut? Maybe? But it isn’t fried, so maybe not?
The dough’s puckered on one side, and it’s really tender. There’s filling inside, and I desperately hope it’s not scorpion. Elyse from Cycle One of ANTM lives in Asia now, and she’s always showing snapshots on her Web site of vendors selling bug-based roasted street meats. She’s more adventurous than I am, though even she was squicked out by frog oviduct soup.
They wouldn’t put oviducts in a donut, right? Not in America.
I sink my teeth in and tear off a small bite. The dough isn’t that sweet, so it’s not a true donut. What I taste next is rich and meaty and tangy and reminds me of Texas.
Is this . . . barbecue?
Like, barbecued pork?
Wrapped in an almost-donut?
Because that would be genius.
As I slowly savor whatever this thing is, someone in an Alcatraz Psych Ward shirt approaches me. “Excuse me, ma’am. Can you tell me where you bought that steamed pork bun?” My mouth is full, so I gesture to the claustrophobic storefront up the street. He and his socks-and-sandaled companion stroll farther up the hill, and I have my answer.
I finish my bun, quietly delighting in the fact that diving into a new foodstuff didn’t go horribly, scorpion-tastically wrong. I make my way up the hill and spot a tea shop on the left-hand side of the street. I’m waiting at the light to cross when I see one of its employees walk through the open storefront and hawk the largest loogie I’ve ever seen onto the street.
Although I’m sure what he just did is ethnically appropriate, I’m going to skip that shop.
Another couple of blocks north, I find a clean, well-lit, loogie-free shop offering tea service. I decide this is the place I want to patronize. Watch out, Miss Tyra and the rest of you top models—I’m about to get my culture on.
“I’m lost.”
“Where are you?”
“I don’t know. I’m lost! I’m somewhere in Chinatown!” I’m on the phone with Angie. As I’ve just finished my tea-tasting session, I’m both disoriented and hopped up on caffeine.
While looking for a nonspitty tea ceremony, I went off the beaten path and headed down some weird side street. As I wove my way past dark shops on slant-y streets boasting bizarre curios, I realized this was exactly where Billy Peltzer’s dad bought him Gizmo in the movie Gremlins . . . and we all know how that ended up. I mean, yes, I understand the story was fiction, but the more authors I meet, the more I realize that fiction is never quite fictional. The writers I know all base their work on something real. Thus, it stands to reason that some shit went down here, so I immediately pledged to buy nothing for fear of accidentally unleashing an army of tiny, bloodthirsty monsters.125
When I left the shop, I guess I got more turned around than I even realized because now nothing looks familiar. I thought I could find my way out if I went back down the hill, but the problem is the hills keep going up and