THE BOY WHO ATE NEW YORK
Hank Gross
(originally published in the National Lampoon)
"New York?" Mr. Balsam had said with a patronizing chuckle when his boy Charles announced his intention to ingest and, where indicated, imbibe the metropolis across the river. "Why not Hoboken or Newark or - ha ha - East Orange!"
"I'm serious, Dad," Charles persisted, glancing at his mother's starched face across the dinner table. "I really want to do this. I've already told all my friends."
"Well," said his mother, "you'll just have to go back and--"
"No, wait, dear," interrupted Mr. Balsam. "Let's hear him out. Charles?"
"Well, Dad, Mom . . . you see, today at school our guidance counselor told us it wasn't too early to start thinking about what we want to be when we grow up. And I want to be a trencherman."
Laura Balsam's fork hit the table with a thunk. "Absolutely not, young man. I am not raising my boy to be a ditchdigger. If you think--"
"It's not digging ditches, Mom. It's eating. Trenchermen are people with hearty appetites. They go around, you know, eating things . . . setting records. I want to be in the Guinness Book. Like the man in Missouri who ate a car - a whole car, Mom!"
"A car!" exclaimed his mother; and then archly, "May I suggest you begin with your peas?"
"They don't let you in for peas," Charles enlightened her gently.
"Why would a person eat a car?" asked Mrs. Balsam, with a worried glance at her husband.
"To set a record, Mom. He ate an entire Pontiac: tires, headlights, the steering wheel--"
"Ugh."
"Or Michel Lotito of France," continued Charles. "Ten bicycles, seven TV sets, six chandeliers--"
"Honey--"
"And a casket," added Charles. "Oh God," said his mother.
"It's the world's only example where a coffin ended up inside a man. It took him seven months."
"And you want to eat New York City," said his father.
"Yes, Dad."
"I daresay that would take a tad longer."
"Well . . ."
"Honey," pleaded Mrs. Balsam, "you'll hurt yourself. New York City is no diet for a little boy."
"I'm not a little boy, Mom. I'm twelve. I need lots of iron."
"Iron, yes. But you don't need bricks, you don't need concrete, you don't need . . . Heaven knows what cities are made of these days."
"Besides," pointed out Mr. Balsam, "you can't just walk in and eat a city. It belongs to other people."
"The Brooklyn Bridge belongs to everybody," protested Charles. "I'd have as much right--"
Mr. Balsam peered closely at his son. "I do believe you're serious about this, aren't you, Charles?"
"I am, Dad."
"Well, then . . ." Mr. Balsam looked at his wife. "What do you say, dear? Perhaps the boy can learn something from this, in terms of a science project."
Mrs. Balsam appraised her son sadly. "You really want to eat New York," she said with resignation.
"Yes, Mom," said Charles brightly. "I want to be the greatest trencherman who ever lived."
"Trencherperson," cautioned his mother. "We live in equal times today."
"Trencherperson," agreed Charles.
"All right, then," Laura Balsam relented. "But first finish your peas."
The silver cobwebs of the Brooklyn Bridge sparkled appetizingly in the Sunday-morning sunshine as young Master Balsam set up his folding table beside one of the span's colossal concrete pilings on the Manhattan side and prepared to eat the structure. As the press, his somewhat uncomfortable parents, a representative from Guinness, and a modest crowd looked on, Charles billowed a tablecloth and secured it against the breeze with a hacksaw, pliers, a pitcher of lemonade, and a fork. Then he approached the bridge with his utensils and set about his repast.
Dislodging a chunk of concrete from the bridge, the young trencherperson brought it to his table, placed his napkin in his lap, crushed the sample with his pliers, and proceeded to ingest it. When he had successfully done so, he belched discreetly, arose to cheers, and returned to the structure for a second helping. "Better than peas," he quipped to NBC-TV, as his mother reddened. Then he filleted a somewhat rusty rivet, salted it, and popped it into his mouth, followed by a swig of beverage and another satisfied belch, while the man from Guinness dutifully tabulated his intake. The man from Guinness was not alone. "Boy Sups on Span!" the New York Post would scream the next day. "Bon appétit," Newsweek would wish him slyly a week later. "How utterly right," Gourmet's wine expert would coo in due time, "for the lad to choose a light lemonade to go with the Brooklyn Bridge."
When he'd eaten his fill (several more servings of cement with a side of shavings from the cables), Charles napkined his lips and began to pack up his supplies. True, he'd swallowed but a fraction of the metropolis, but then, he was young yet. As he told the woman from the Times, "I don't want to wolf it down, you know."
At home that evening, Charles received a phone call from a young lady named Melinda. "I saw you on the news," she told him, "and I think it's super."
"Why, thank you," said Charles, liking her voice immediately.
"You're the coolest dude ever."
"Thanks," said Charles again. "Do you want to go out?" Melinda asked him breathlessly.
"Sure," said Charles.
An exquisite silence.
"Charles," demanded his mother, "who is that?"
"Nobody, Mom." To Melinda, he said, "How about next Sunday?"
"Super," she said. "What do you want to do?"
Charles thought for a moment. "Dinner?" he suggested.
"Mmm, granite," murmured Melinda, whose pretty brown eyes, like his own, were gazing up at the Empire State Building from a roped-off area of Thirty-fourth Street. "I've never had granite before."
"You'll love it," Charles assured his chaperoned date, gallantly unnesting a Saarinen chair from the Mies van der Rohe table on which sat two Lenox place settings, a pair of goblets donated by Waterford, and a squeeze bottle of catsup by Heinz. Beside the table was an ice bucket containing a bottle of Dr. Brown's cream soda (to which Gourmet would in due course grant its oenological approval).
"Thank you," said Melinda, graciously taking her seat, as the cameras rolled and gossip columnists took notes on this most unorthodox of Big Apple romances.
"May I take your order, sir?" asked the black-tied waiter, courtesy of the Four Seasons.
Charles took his seat and pointed to the polished siding of New York's most famous building. "I'll have a slice of that, please," he selected. "Melinda?"
"The same," said the girl, daintily deploying her napkin on her periwinkle skirt.
"And some of that brass doorknob," continued Charles, "and . . . How is the glass today?"
"Excellent, sir," said the waiter.
"Fine, we'll have a couple of windowpanes - nothing above the eightieth floor, if you don't mind. And some wallboard, center cut, please. Is that all right with you, Melinda?"
"Perfect," she said.
As the waiter went off to fill the order, Charles helped himself to a high-speed- elevator button from a bowl and gazed across the table at Melinda. "It's very nice of you to join me," he said conversationally. "It gets lonely eating New York all by yourself."
"I can imagine," said the girl, masticating a square of tile from one of the skyscraper's upper corridors and blinking her eyes against the popping flashbulbs. It was very nice of you to ask me."
The wine steward came over and poured a small amount of cream soda into Charles's goblet. Charles brought the rim of the glass to his nose, prickled approvingly at the tonic's bouquet, and indicated to the server that he deemed the beverage suitable for his companion.
"Very well, sir," said the steward, but before he could pour Melinda's, a pair of New York City policemen pressed through the crowd and approached the table. One of them asked, "Are you Charles Balsam and Melinda Simmons?"
"Yes," answered the children.
"Pursuant to city ordinance 401-B, malicious destruction of property," said one of them, "you are both under arrest. Come along, please."
And, as cameras rolled and two sets of parents protested to no avail, the youngsters were handcuffed with their arms behind them, led to a police van, and locked inside. Melinda began to cry. In an act of bravado intended to cheer her, Charles asked the policewoman guarding them, "Is that uniform you're wearing provided by the city?"
"Yes, it is," replied the officer. "Why?"
Without answering, Charles tipped his body forward, bit off one of her buttons, and swallowed it.
"Hey!" she snapped, but it was too late.
Charles grinned. Eating New York was fun.
At home, in the custody of his parents, Charles was picking at his peas and trying to put it all into perspective. True, he now had an arrest record that would follow him the rest of his life. On the other hand, he'd received dozens of offers from organizations and individuals eager to have him "trench," as the media now called it, portions of their property for publicity purposes, including one from the Prudential Insurance Company to fly to Gibraltar to "eat a piece of the Rock."
"Honey," said his mother, "you just can't spend the next year doing commercials and making guest appearances no matter how much money they're offering you. You're in the eighth grade. You have studying to do."
"You said it was a science project," Charles appealed to his dad.
"This is no longer physics or chemistry," retorted Mr. Balsam.
"Nor nutrition," put in his mother. Certainly not nutrition."
"I kind of like it," said Charles.
"How does it feel to have a criminal record, son?" demanded his father.
"Great," said Charles, who'd become the envy of all the boys and the heartthrob of all the girls at his school.
"Great," echoed his mother hollowly. "And what about that . . . that moll of yours who's in this with you?"
"Melinda? She thinks I'm super. But her mother's bribing her with junk food and won't let her see me anymore. I don't care - I'm having lunch next week with a girl named Suzy, who says she needs more variety in her diet. We're trying Lincoln Center."
"What you need, young man," said his father sternly, "is a good dose of common sense."
Charles picked at his peas. What I really need, he thought, is a good agent.
What he didn't need, to his mother's relief, was a good lawyer, as New York City's mayor, ever mindful of public opinion, intervened and saw to it that the charges against Charles were dropped. Not only were they dropped but, by executive order, portions of Rockefeller Center, the BMT subway, and the boardwalk at Coney Island were made available for the young trencherman's dining pleasure. These he ate with gusto, becoming increasingly famous with every bite, feeling Gotham erode before his insatiable palate. Though offers poured in from around the globe, Charles remained loyal to his native cuisine, declining the opportunity to partake of the Pyramids, the Eiffel Tower, and, most notably, the Parthenon ("I don't eat leftovers," he quipped to the press).
Never was he in want of dining companions. He swept Amy off to Radio City Music Hall, where the two munched on buttered lobby sections and a frozen vinyl seat cushion provided by the management. He escorted Rosemary to Queens, where they roller-skated and ate a fire hydrant. He whisked Teri to Staten Island to dine on a post office, though they compromised both their appetites and fourteen hundred lives by gnawing holes in the ferry on the way over. He even got into a much-publicized spat with Irene at the Statue of Liberty by slipping under the statue's copper folds and trenching the insides of Miss Liberty's thighs.
Adolescence passed. Charles made money, consumed substantial amounts of the public sector, and obtained in the process rather more than his minimum daily requirements of minerals, including those, such as Portland cement, for which no MDR has been established. Inevitably, however, things began turning sour - even though foodstuffs such as the Flatiron Building have shelf lives that can be reckoned in centuries. After seven years, the novelty of his wild dietary adventure was itself wearing thin. Indifference snowballed. The Tonight Show stopped returning his calls. The swimming coach at Charles's high school barred him from the team on the grounds that one of the things you don't want in your stomach on a long-distance swim is the fender of a crosstown bus. And even Guinness dropped him from its current edition, informing him that when New York City had been conveyed in its entirety through his digestive system he should let them know.
Charles was hit hard. He suffered the trencherman's gravest nightmare: loss of appetite. The brownstone on which he'd been supping with such relish for several weeks now seemed coarse and tasteless. Aluminum turned to ashes in his mouth And as for the Guggenheim Museum - well, he'd rather eat peas.
"Son," said his father, "it's time to think of the future. A man's work can sustain him for the rest of his life."
"That's right, dear," said Laura Balsam. "You've been accepted at NYU. You have a wonderful career ahead of you."
"Recommit yourself, son!" exhorted his father.
A look of determination came over Charles's face. "You're right!" he said. "I'll do it!"
His mother's eyes shone with happiness. "So, you're going to become a lawyer after all!"
"No! I'm going to finish eating New York if it's the last thing I do!"
Undiscouraged, Charles dug in for the long haul. To his parents' dismay, he never pursued higher education. Instead, he bought a listing in the Yellow Pages under "Trash Removal, Custom" and hung out his shingle as a professional, picking up eating gigs wherever he could, like a dedicated jazz artist refusing to compromise his talent. During the lean years when his fame was in eclipse, Trencherperson Balsam ate New York purely on principle, gnawing on fire escapes, grazing in Penn Station, bingeing on the Pan Am Building, and purchasing and then gobbling down an absolutely mouthwatering revolving door in the Port Authority Bus Terminal. He ate storefronts and sidewalks and traffic lights. He trenched the Bowery, pigged out on Wall Street, and satisfied his craving for ethnic food by noshing on synagogues and foraging in Cuban pool halls. And, should you ever have occasion to peer closely at the statue of Columbus at the Circle which bears his name, you will find that all the fingernails on the great explorer's hands have been nibbled to the stone.
Thus did his life pass, until, at the age of seventy, Charles was briefly rediscovered by the media. Long appreciated as a trencherperson's trencherperson, he was now reintroduced to a wider audience as a leading expert on the ingestion of metropolises, "The Burgher King," as Time called him, who apart from a few chipped teeth appeared to have flourished on his diet of nuts and bolts. He published a cookbook, which included preparation tips, menus, and the usual cautions about asbestos, barbed wire, and the bars of lions' cages. "Stick to the basics" was Charles's acquired wisdom: the World Trade Towers, lampposts, newsstands, and the eastern half of the George Washington Bridge. This brief reprise of notoriety, while satisfying, was no longer central to Charles's happiness. His joy was trenching itself, and the Big Apple remained as scrumptious as ever - Macy's, Forty-second Street, curbstones, asphalt, the Chrysler Building - he savored it all, never marrying but often inviting women friends to join him at table. It was at one of these afternoon tête-à-têtes in the Bronx that the boy who ate New York, surrounded by 60,000 fans - though not of his - choked on a piece of Yankee Stadium and died.
He was laid to rest in Queens, belatedly honored in Guinness as the individual who'd eaten more of New York City than anyone else in history. And yet, while becoming one of the better-known of its eight million stories, what he actually ate did not even amount to a brownstone. It was determined that, were New York City the size of St. Patrick's Cathedral, Charles's aggregate consumption would have been less than a corner pew.
Less than a year after Charles's stomach rumblings ceased, the growlings of another great maw were heard - that of City Hall, which had decided to dig up the cemetery in which Charles was buried to make room for la housing development. Duly, the bulldozers arrived, along with a great derrick with a scoop the size of a cottage. It paused briefly over Charles's grave before plunging its teeth into the earth and demonstrating in one mighty bite that the utopian gluttonies of men are but feeble gestures before the voracious appetites of their civilizations. In the end, New York City ate Charles Balsam.
Copyright 1991-2005 Hank Gross