Gut Instinct

Gut Instinct: Daddy Issues
Angioplasty? Colonics? What does the future hold for an unrepentant overindulger?

Just like lusty men fantasizing about performing pretzel-like acts with Barbie blondes, I sometimes daydream about colonics. Or doing the Master Cleanse detox diet. Or following the path blazed by my pal the Nucleus.

Nucleus: “I went to a month-long yoga camp in Arizona where I drank gallons of warm salt water.”

Me: “And?”

Nucleus: “I vomited. Repeatedly. Then we did yoga. I’ve never felt so pure and clean.”

Me: “…”

Nucleus: “I’d do it again.”

Me: “Goodbye.”

These are extreme remedies for overindulgence, that peculiar affliction enabled by venti mocha Frappuccinos, batter-fried Mars Bars and Wendy’s Baconator. Nearly one-quarter of Americans are classified as obese blimps, eliciting knee-jerk reactions like Herr Bloomberg’s trans fat ban. Newsflash, Mr. Mayor: Banning trans fats won’t diminish our shameless love of unhealthy grub and tasty, tasty fat. Sweet lollipops, my hangovers demand crispy sesame chicken, not wheatgrass juice and salad. Grease gives me the happy.

Thus far, I haven’t needed the Master Cleanse’s toxin-ridding, belly-slimming power. My furry body’s magical inner machinations have kept me at my buck-40 fighting weight, despite a diet heavy in dumplings and enough daily alcohol to help me anesthetize my neuroses, disrobe and engage in conjugal relations. With other people. And myself.

“Oh, you go to the gym. You’re a stair-machine maven,” you whisper, feeling my taut calves. “Up down, up down, up down.”

Scout’s honor, I’ve never been a Crunch bunny. Wait, scratch that: At 19, I puffed a very potent joint and played ping-pong at a gym. However, I counteracted any minute cardiovascular benefit by ingesting a family-size Cheetos bag soon afterward.

Like the game show of yore, I’m pressing my luck. Sure, my hairline hasn’t gone missing on a milk carton, and shaving my five o’clock shadow helps me pass for 25. (This almost makes it socially acceptable to eyeball subway-riding high school gals. Almost.) Yet I can see the writing on the scale, the whammies waiting to pop up. A nutritional intake centered on high-proof Dogfish Head beer and deep-fried Mama’s Empanadas will doom me. My heredity demands it.

My father was once a svelte scamp. Every day, he pedaled from Riverdale, the Bronx’s Jewish stronghold, to work at a West Village shoe store. Several hours of riding kept off poundage provided by his mom’s brisket. Then came college, medical school, marriage, three kids: At 35, his job whisked our family to Dayton, Ohio, land of suburban sloth. He developed an affinity for quarter-pounders and curly fries. He jonesed for jelly donuts and cheese steaks, too. His inseam expanded. His belts were re-notched. He looked like he swallowed a globe.
“I’ve got my own built-in computer table,” he said one burned-into-my-brain evening. I was 14. My father was supine on his king-size bed. He wore clingy tighty-whities, his chest pelt scraggly and thick, with his laptop resting on his stomach mound. He typed away happily, contentedly, oblivious that in a decade his gut and arteries—as clogged as L.A. rush hour—would conspire to create agonizing chest pain. Shortness of breath. A frantic dialing of three simple digits. And miniscule balloons sent flying through arteries to cleanse a lifetime of super-sizing.

“I think I should start eating better,” my father announced during his convalescence.

“No shit,” I said. Jittery sarcasm is my preferred coping mechanism.

“And exercising more,” he added.

He kept his recuperating-bed pledge. My dad bought Spandex workout clothes and joined a YMCA. Chips were barred from the snack cabinet, and meats vamoosed from the freezer. Four years later, he’s made a mole hill out of his mountainous stomach.

A smarter me would view this saga as reason enough to curtail my double-cheeseburger addiction. But sweethearts, we’re living in a gilded medical age. If Hugh Hefner can have a hard-on, I bet I’ll receive a cloned, unclogged heart by middle age. I’ll spend my golden years recklessly indulging in Nathan’s cheese fries and dim sum at Chinatown’s Golden Unicorn, devouring early-bird dinner specials with a ferocity reserved for feral tigers.

And if science fails? You’ll find me in the desert performing the Downward-Facing Dog, chugging salt water and upchucking uncontrollably, as the hot sun beats down on my unrepentant back.
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In case any of y’all were curious, I pen a biweekly beer column for Gourmet magazine’s online component, Gourmet.com. This is my latest column, about the battles our dear beer-drinking brothers in Alabama are waging to be able to sip a pint o’ delicious, high-alcohol nectar. Drink it up!

The Battle for Craft Beer
Long deprived of world-class brews, Alabamans are fighting back.

Stuart Carter is crazy for craft beer. The Alabama computer-service technician loves refined Belgian Trappist ales, Great Divide’s rich, dark, decadent Yeti Imperial Stout, and Dogfish Head’s strong, sweet Midas Touch Golden Elixir. There’s only problem: In Alabama, drinking these beers constitutes a criminal act.

“You can buy fortified wine or pure-grain alcohol, but you cannot buy Atlanta’s SweetWater IPA because, gosh, it contains 6.7 percent alcohol,” says Carter, president of Free the Hops, a grassroots beer-advocacy group fighting to reform the state’s many antediluvian laws.

Home-brewing is currently illegal in Alabama. A brewpub can only operate in a historical building situated in a county that sold alcohol pre-Prohibition. You can be fined for bringing two cases of beer into dry counties. And most problematic for craft-suds fiends like Carter, Alabama (along with Mississippi and West Virginia) prohibits the sale of beer that’s higher than 6 percent alcohol by volume (5 percent alcohol by weight)—just a bit stronger than a Budweiser (which has 5 percent ABV).

“Most craft breweries’ beers start at 6.5 percent alcohol by volume,” Carter says, adding that, out of Beeradvocate.com’s top 100 beers in the world, just four are sold in Alabama (though the number varies because the list changes weekly). “We need to bring Alabama into the twenty-first century.”

To remove the restrictions, the three-year-old organization introduced bills into Alabama’s legislature. They failed in 2006. And 2007. Carter partly blames Birmingham Budweiser, which distributes Anheuser-Busch products, for the bills’ defeat; he claims that Birmingham Budweiser vice president Pat Lynch has lobbied against changing legislation (Gourmet was unable to verify the claim).

In January, Free the Hops escalated its tactics by calling for a ban on products handled by Lynch’s distributorship. Lynch did not respond to calls for comment, but on February 13, Free the Hops revealed that the Alabama Wholesale Beer Association (AWBA) had helped broker a compromise between Lynch and Carter’s organization. The beer concerns are hammering out a bill that would increase the allowable ABV from 6 percent to 13.9 percent—welcoming most craft brews to Alabama.

“Passing this should be a no-brainer,” Carter says optimistically about the bill, which should go before the legislature later this year. “Wholesalers will make scads of money, more tax money will go back to the state—and we’ll finally be able to drink good beer.”

Beer Before Coffee, You’re in the Clear?
A serious case of whiskey dick (and raw nipples) during the Brooklyn Idiotarod race

Last week, in a major-league blow to my waning self-respect, I shattered one of my sacred drinking commandments.

No, it wasn’t Stop Boozing Before You Think Your Sister Is Smokin’, a rule born one uneasy night during college when I imbibed great lakes of Jägermeister. This fogged my faculties so much I mistook my little sister’s cheek kiss for a paramour’s smooch—a memory seared into my brain like a bull’s branded rump. Instead, my mistake was hitting the happy juice before noon.

“Big whoop,” you mutter, clutching a mimosa. Morning-time drinking is an integral part of American culture, from football tailgating to brunch-time inebriation. It’s the rosy glow that makes the days go. But babies, a.m. swilling smudges a fine line I stumble between work and alcoholism. Patronizing Brooklyn’s latest microbrew bar? Acceptable. Turning off the alarm and taking a slug of whiskey? Problematic.

Except during backyard BBQ parties and Cincinnati Bengals football games, I abstain from the sauce until at least 5 p.m. This pleasantly demarcates afternoon and evening, when office troops flee their lairs to self-medicate at happy hour. I have no such lair. Instead, I wear stained pajamas and clack away at a keyboard, pausing occasionally to peruse blogs and titillating web portals. Inspiration has been found in odder places than Pornotube.com. Such actions are a socially acceptable part of the “writing process,” or similar pap I feed my friends about why I marinate in my pajamas until 4 p.m. But if you compounded my bare-flesh procrastination with beer drinking, you’d find a miserably wretched existence. Or an after-school special. Or both.

To write about booze is to embrace wild abandon mixed with self-control. Yes, I hit saloons nearly nightly and glug cocktails aplenty, yet it’s impossible to write while nursing a throbbing skull-splitter. It’s the eternal Catch-22: I must drink for material, but too much drinking means my words are gobbledygook. Hungover, I mope and scarf greasy General Tso’s bought from my bulletproof-glass Chinese eatery. And peruse porn. The shame circle is complete.

I’m not fishing for sympathy. Countless lushes would kill for my predicament. Besides, last week’s before-noon boozing was integral to participating in the Idiotarod. It’s an annual do-it-yourself race subverting Alaska’s dogsled contest: attach four humans to a shopping cart (decorated like an octopus, for example), let another “mush” then dash through Brooklyn and Manhattan. This means running. Lots of running. I abhor running. More specifically, I despise runners. This exercise transforms rational folks into holier-than-thou shlemiels blathering about the “high” provided by slapping overpriced running shoes against pavement. Want to get high? Smoke a bowl; don’t run 26.2 miles and chafe your nipples as bloody and raw as ground chuck.

Given my rubbery legs, I could only haul our shopping cart via Jameson Whiskey Power™. Three hefty shots of that amber ambrosia and anyone’s ready to run through brick walls or have sex for longer than two minutes. Either way it’s a win-win, so I spent my princely column fee on several bottles of Irish intoxicants.

“This’ll make the pain go away,” said my teammate Aaron. He has knees that, after he jogs several miles, swell up like
delicious citrus fruit. Running makes my thighs feel like they’re being pummeled with a razor-tipped sledgehammer. Hence, hard liquor to the numbing rescue.

Our team, Hair Cult for Men (wearing bald caps, khakis, white button-downs and ties culled from a dead grandfather’s wardrobe), sauntered to the starting line that frigid January morning with all the swagger of sniveling preschoolers. “It’s so cold,” someone whined. We quieted the complaints with hooch. The chill disappeared, replaced by alcohol’s false bravado.
“Thank god for liquor-fueled delusions of grandeur!” shouted one runner, as we began sprinting beneath a storm of condiments. I’ll spare you grody details (Vaseline, human hair and baby shampoo played roles), but know that our furious legs flew across Brooklyn at a clip that could’ve rivaled Barbaro. We reached the Red Hook finish line with asthmatic wheezes, covered in flour, mustard and thanks to a sloshing Jameson bottle I stored down my pants, a serious case of whiskey dick.

How does one celebrate completing the foolhardy, well-lubed endeavor? With beer. I chugged a congratulatory can of Genesee Cream Ale at 4 p.m. Another at 5 p.m. Seven p.m. saw me sip Sixpoint’s Bengali Tiger IPA. By 9 p.m., I was attending a microbrew party, downing high-butane beers possessing double-digit alcohol percentages that, as the night blurred away, were higher than my IQ.

Howdy, chickadees:

The last month has been all about me being a cheapskate which, now that I think about it, is really no different than the first 29 years of my life. Except now I’m getting paid to be cheap. This week, I crafted a diet for Time Out New York that, for the low price of $19.99, will allow you to eat and get bamboozled for a week. Amazing? Depressing? You decide. Eat it up!

Driven by dire economic straits and insanity-wreaking solitude, I occasionally don pants and an unstained shirt and join the office corps. This is frightening for co-workers, because I loathe mankind.

I don’t despise every mouth-breather. I love my girlfriend and pals, but my love—by which I mean buying cohorts’ drinks and gently mocking their shortcomings—is only possible by spending 12 hours a day sequestered in my drafty Brooklyn apartment. When 6 p.m. hits, I’m so desperate for camaraderie that I embrace compatriots with new-puppy affection.

Consequently, in seven-plus years of city dwelling, I’ve held just one full-time job. Those nine months were among my most woebegone, inebriated days. Of course, scholars may contend that my melancholia was fueled less by the daily grind than my profession: editing father-daughter smut, interviewing bimbos about double penetrations and penning pearls such as, “Shove your egg roll in my combination box, soldier.”

Ever since I quit that gig following 9/11, when I realized the bleakness of a career built on facilitating prisoners’ self-pleasure, I’ve been allergic to the 9-to-5 trudge. Still, being a freelance food-and-drink writer is decidedly non-lucrative, as compared to distributing fliers and flame-broiling Whoppers.

To make ends meet, I marshal my grammar-hound skills—a lifelong fixation since finishing third in my sixth-grade spelling bee, for misspelling bicentennial—and sell myself as a magazine copy editor. I’m an English-language janitor, tidying up errant semicolons and misplaced modifiers. It’s a thankless, tedious profession that tethers me to work until 9 p.m., 10 p.m., sometimes as late as 2 a.m. To compensate for late hours, my employers ply us with something sadder than the American dollar: catered dinners.

While morning donuts or bagels are aces (more everythings, please), work dinners are an experience no less enjoyable than coughing blood. The work day’s sole pleasure, besides stealing pens and toilet paper, is mealtime. For an hour you regain free choice: Will today be Wendy’s? By-the-pound salad bar? General Tso’s chicken? Or maybe sit in a quiet park and tabulate the years, hours and seconds until retirement?

Eventually, corporate bean counters decided to goose productivity by eliminating the need to grab grub outside. Welcome the catered meal, often presented as a “perk” you’re expected to be thankful for. Except for Google’s ludicrously high-quality Chelsea-headquarters cafeteria (offering a raw bar and ceviche station!), free dinner is typically available in two inferior forms. The first is the buffet, which gives humans a crash course in feeding like barnyard critters.

During high school I worked at Ponderosa, a Midwestern steakhouse crossbred with an all-you-can-eat buffet. My job was deep-frying the blue-ticket item, chicken wings. No sooner did I refill plastic troughs with crisp, oily wings than diners, turkey necks and bellies jiggling violently, stampeded the steam table. I was scarred by the experience. But I was not as scarred as diners would’ve been had they known I often scooped frozen, deformed wings off an unmopped floor.

At work, buffets bring employees uncomfortably close. Folks you’ve avoided all day are lined up beside you, bellies growling, bleating unwanted opinions.

“Chicken parmesan? I hate slimy chicken parmesan.”

“I can’t eat steak. I’m a vegetarian.”

“Beans give me gas in the worst possible way.”

People mutter approval. Or disapproval. It’s lowest-common-denominator conversation. No one utters what they’re really thinking: “Hurry the fuck up and scoop up some mashed potatoes so I can get a biscuit and get back to ignoring you.”

Dinner option two is ordering from a work-selected restaurant you’d never choose (say, an Americanized Mexican eatery offering fake sour cream). The food’s arrival is as dignified as sharks attacking a bloodied seal. Leaky takeout containers are acquired and then squired back to desks, whereupon folks resume work or numbly click on websites, hoping for news of another Spears pregnancy, of a blockbuster sports trade, of anything but the obvious: You’re eating together but you’re alone, surrounded by individuals as seemingly randomly selected as lottery balls.

Each week, I’m afforded maybe 15 meals to chomp through, lest I dream of becoming a little Jewish Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man. Work-mandated dining robs me of one meal. That’s depriving me of another chance to uncover a rootin’-tootin’ dumpling depot or revisit my favorite hand-pulled noodle dive.

It’s with vast misery that I order a gloppy taco salad. And a Diet Coke. And a side of guacamole. And hunch over my glowing computer screen. I eat until full, eat until I’m disturbingly full, hungering to go home and regain my appetite for people and food alike.

I am a cheap bastard. This much is true. For Web site Metromix.com, I am penning a recurring column wherein I find 10 things to eat for $1 apiece. Then I eat them. It is delicious. And sometimes horrible beyond belief. Below, behold my most recent dining adventure on Roosevelt Avenue. Eat it up!

Dollar Grub: Roosevelt Avenue
Fertilized duck embryos. Unkown gray mush. Our cheap-hound braves $1 deals in Jackson Heights.

Consider Queens’ Roosevelt Avenue a food court of low-cost international eats, from Flushing’s plump dumplings to Sunnyside’s fatty Irish burgers. Yet the most pleasantly priced tummy-stuffers are found beneath the 7 train between Elmhurst and Jackson Heights—Mexico to India, in 20 scant blocks.

On an icicles-and-frostbite weekday, I decamp at Elmhurst’s 90th Street stop—a $10 bill in hand—and saunter past salsa-CD salesmen to Las Palomas (89-16 Roosevelt Ave., 718-533-7014), where a stout woman with several gold-capped incisors heats up a pot on a portable stove.

“Muy caliente,” she says, removing the vessel’s lid to reveal scalding, snow-color atole. A steaming Styrofoam cup of the cinnamon- and-vanilla corn-meal beverage warms me as I mosey to Cholula Bakery (88-06 Roosevelt Ave., 718-533-1171). Men solemnly munch greasy, overstuffed spicy-pork tortas ($4.95, darn it), but a glass display offers chocolate-drizzled cake slices crammed with custard—gooey, messy and priced just right.

I wipe my fingers on my jeans before entering Mi Bello Mexico (87-17 Roosevelt Ave., 718-429-4300), a convenience store where customers procure raw meat, cactus leaves and MSG-packed, corn-tortilla Takis snacks in flavors such as “fajitas,” “fuego” and “guacamole,” which I acquire. The crisp, highlighter-green cylinders look like leg-less caterpillars and taste like rotting salted limes.

The culinary gods’ wrathful vengeance continues at Jaff Candy Store (85-16 Roosevelt Ave.), a bodega with an impressive prophylactics selection and a heat lamp warming gray, desiccated chicken empanadas cooked—well, there’s no kitchen in sight. I chomp into gummy dough encasing flesh grisly enough to make Styrofoam seem like filet mignon.

Soldiering onward, I discover Bravo Comida Rápida (81-16 Roosevelt Ave., 718-429-6444), a neon-lit fast-food joint with a steam table where unidentified brown meat is stacked like firewood beside tureens of murky stews. Price tags are absent. “What’s a dollar?” I inquire of an officious man wearing a collar shirt. He points at slimy fried plantains and an orange half-moon. To the moon I go, devouring a delicious, corn-meal-coated mush of beef and potatoes spiced up with cilantro-flecked salsa.

Spirits rising, I shuffle several blocks to Cositas Ricas (79-19 Roosevelt Ave., 718-478-1500), a combination ice-cream parlor and steak house. At a counter, an aproned, balding man stuffs another deep-fried empanada—“beef,” he says with an undertaker’s solemnity—into a bag marked “barbecue.” This empanada has been deep-fried to disintegration. It’s like French-kissing a jug of Wesson.

I toss the artery-clogger into the trash, then notice a mural of a cake-carrying chef and enter the skinny, mirror-covered Miracali Bakery (76-04 Roosevelt Ave., 718-779-7175). On offer are fluffy bread, oily chicharrón and salt-covered, skin-on taters—40 cents apiece and soft as a teddy bear. I order two and dip them into a searing, sinus-emptying salsa. Bliss.

My veggie streak continues at Merit Kabab Palace (37-67 74th St., 718-396-5827). The steam-table joint with rickety, crammed tables sells me a flaky, triangle-shaped samosa bursting with curried peas, carrots and potatoes. Sweet heavens, it’s tasty.

Sweet heavens, why is Kabab King Diner (74-15 37th Road, 718-205-8800) selling Chinese food? I skip the chop suey and skewered $1.50 mutton kebabs and request a shami kebab. It’s a disconcertingly mushy patty of beef and spiced ground chickpeas—baby food for misbehaving infants.

Nine down. One left. What spot deserved my last buck? Phil-Am Food Market (70-02 Roosevelt Ave., 718-899-1797), a Filipino grocery vending four kinds of canned meats. I contemplate liver spread, then spot balut—fertilized duck embryos for 80 cents. I grab one and rush to the register.

“You know that’s no ordinary egg, right?” the cashier asks.

“Yes.”

“Have you had it before?”

“Not exactly,” I answer, taking my partially formed, protein-packed treat to a quiet corner. I know I’m supposed to boil balut, but I’m feeling bold: I’ll pull a Rocky and down this baby raw. I crack the egg carefully, revealing red streaks and a tiny duck in the fetal position.

In the name of cheap eats I bring the egg to my maw. Closer, closer, I open wide—when my gag reflex revolts and I drop the duck, its final resting place an oil-stained driveway.

Reader, some bargains are no bargain at all.

Oh, hello there, sailor. Welcome to Gut Instinct, wherein I, inveterate glutton and mild dispomaniac Joshua M. Bernstein, will post his published food and drink articles, along with a smattering of whatever effluvia floats into my brain. I am often hungry. I am often thirsty. And I’m often surly and willing to stick my neck (and sweet, sweet mouth) where it doesn’t belong. This will make for stories equally cringe-worthy and exciting! I hope. Or I’ll soon be out of a job, and back to temping as a receptionist, losing calls as frequently as I do my dignity.

Don’t expect daily updates, or pictures featuring puppy dogs, but do expect posts and articles that will nourish your mind and make your belly grumble—or put you off your lunch forever.