jueves, 19 de abril de 2012

International Ingredients

St. Peter and the garlic bulb My Grandfather had a friend named Pete. He was short and round, with a pink face, a child’s smile. He often wore a white paper painter’s cap perched and tilted on his head and spoke in the same broken English as my grandfather. His big belly hung over his pants when he teetered on a bar stool or sat in a folding chair playing pinochle in a dark cellar, or out on a picnic table in the warmer months. His big, kind eyes bulged a little more each year from all the booze he drank. Pete made his own wine and cooked better, with more subtlety and variety, than most of my grandfather’s cronies. He also drank more, and in the console of his big car, a Lincoln, was always a bulb of garlic. Pete would pop one clove into his mouth and chew it in case a nosy cop pulled him over. It masked the smell of all the wine and cognac, the scotches and sodas. The New Haven cops, who were all Irish according to Pete, or at least not Italian, would quickly send him on his way without so much as a warning, happy to be rid of another garlic-stinking wop. Pete, who defied all manner of cancers and liver disease to outlive most of his friends, did get arrested once. He, my grandfather, and a few other pals armed themselves with rifles and went out to hunt pheasants on the side of a Connecticut highway. No amount of garlic could’ve kept Pete and the boys out of a cop car that day. I like to imagine them smiling and giggling, punching eachother’s thighs in the backseat.


Garlic.. PARTS
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