Chicago: Land of the Dreaded Pancake

This is a photo I took in an independent bookstore in Chicago. Quite a nice bookstore, with lots of books both new and used, and comfortable chairs and sofas to lounge on.

On this incredibly cold and dark afternoon, the lounge area was occupied by sleeping men who apparently had nowhere else to go to escape from the cold. But at least they made an effort to appear as if they were there to read. Because to just park your ass in an independent bookstore and pass out right then and there would be rude.

The photos of these large and powerful men, for the moment unconscious but surely able to awaken any moment and crush the camera into my face like an empty can of Pepsi, are saved in an album which I’ve titled: “SOME BALLS, RACHEL”.

Sadly, they were politely but firmly ejected from the bookstore half an hour later. At the same time, I understood the bookstore owner’s decision. After all, you want your customers to feel comfortable when they shop at your store, and not have to tiptoe around in fear of waking up and angering the sleeping homeless men in the basement. Especially when they’re taking pictures of them.

How I wished the homeless in my Barcelona neighborhood would behave more like these gentlemen, instead of filling the streets with insults, liquor bottles and feces. Maybe we could create some kind of Homeless International Exchange Program. After all, we all know that the homeless will never go away. But it wouldn’t hurt anyone to shift them around a bit. And everyone would learn something.

But let’s rewind a little.

Arrival to Chicago — like nearly all my arrivals in American cities this year — was bleak and depressing. We took a nearly empty Amtrak train from Milwaukee late in the afternoon on a cold November day, so by the time we boarded the train, it was already pitch-black outside. We arrived in the Chicago’s Union Station around 7 pm, but it seemed like midnight.

The next day when we woke up, the entire city gleamed with bright, icy sunshine. It was cold as HELL. We left our hotel and instantly froze our asses off. For the next half hour, we RAN around the downtown area to keep warm as we looked for somewhere to eat breakfast.

I can’t help it: I’m a big fan of those American restaurants dedicated to just one thing: PANCAKES. I realize that a menu that consists solely of pancakes, waffles, eggs and fatty pork products is a culinary obscenity. But when I’m in the U.S., I’ve got to go back to my roots. The need to frequent one of those places — even if just once — is all-consuming. Even though it sends your blood sugar levels through the roof and you’re rendered physically and mentally useless for the rest of the day.

We found this place called The Original Pancake House. Looked and sounded great to me! ‘Cause when it comes to pancake houses, I accept no cheap imitations. Here it looked like the food would be homemade: an important priority for me.

The menu was typical of Breakfast-in-America places: millions of variations on the same basic theme of sugar, starch and fat. Cesar, as always, began to feel disoriented as he pored through the menu and its dizzying array of choices. “Ordering food in America is like taking a test,” he once said. Or an interrogation by a brightly smiling, overly friendly officer.

Here’s how it typically goes with Cesar vs. The Waitstaff:

“I would like the Breakfast Combo Number Three.”

“Very good, sir. And would you like your eggs fried, scrambled, or poached?”

“Fried.”

“And would you like the eggs fried sunny-side up, over-easy, or over-hard?”

“What?”

“Would you prefer bacon or sausage? We have turkey bacon, regular bacon, or low-sodium bacon. Sausage we have patties or links.”

“I don’t understand anything you just said.”

“What kind of toast would you like with that? We have white, wheat, rye, and pumpernickel…”

“I am not so hungry anymore. I feel dizzy.”

“And would you prefer real butter or low-fat margarine with your toast?”

“I think I will lay down for a moment in this booth. You have a pillow?”

“How ’bout a refill on that coffee? Was it regular or decaf?”

“Oh my God…”

“We have Columbian, hazlenut or vanilla.”

“Somebody… Please help. I’m over here… Please, anybody… help me….”

Ah yes, the coffee. The neverending refills on your coffee, as if it were WATER! This ain’t water; this is caffeine! A highly potent drug that they keep pushing on you until you start to believe what they want you to believe; that it’s nothing more than hot, tasty brown water. So you keep emptying that cup and the waitress keeps refilling it, each party fulfilling their part of this dysfunctional relationship, until your hands shake too much to pull the cup to your lips without spilling it down your shirt, your hair stands on end and, before you can reach the bathroom, you shart your pants.

And the cream. In New York, as in Spain, they serve the coffee with milk. Not so in Milwaukee or Chicago. There, they serve it with cream. Why drink your caffeine with milk when you can drink it with a heart attack? Can’t you see the globules of insoluble fats sticking to the sides of the … the thing? Whatever it’s called? The creamer-thing?

Then the food comes: lacy Swedish pancakes with lingonberry butter and Eggs Florentine. The best words to describe it are delicious and lethal.

Meanwhile, the woman at the table next to us received her order. A little bit about this woman: she was alone, in her late twenties or early thirties, conservatively dressed, and quite a bit overweight.

And she’d ordered something so massive, so obscene in appearance, so absolutely unholy, that I forever curse my fate for not being able to take a picture of it. It definitely would have been rude. Luckily, internet being what it is, I’ve been able to find many pictures of this monster on various websites, so here’s one I stole from a blog called Tomato Soup.

It looked like the brains of a mastodon, slopped together onto a plate and covered in steaming, caramel goo. It covered the whole goddamn plate.

All for her.

Hey, to each his own. Believe me, I’ve been there: my late teens and early 20s were consumed by overeating, food fixations, and sugar addiction. Still, I found it hard to believe that someone could order, of their own free will, something so gigantic and unappetizing at the same time, in the very first hours of the day. How could someone eat that, knowing they had the whole rest of the day ahead of them? It looked like something you’re forced to eat if you’re a condemned prisoner, and the method of execution is forced Caramel-Apple-Pie-feeding. Just looking at this thing made me nauseous. Just smelling the sugary, overwhelmingly cinnamony sauce that wafted over to our table… Oh my God!

The woman could only eat half of it. Somehow she was able to get up from her chair without assistance when she was through, and make it through the dining room to the cashier without falling on her face. I saw the busboy lift the plate from the table using two hands. Of course.

As they say here: Que pasada.

Once on the street again, we passed the saddest, ugliest, most nondescript church I’ve ever seen in my life. It looked like a warehouse with a plywood saint tacked on as an afterthought.

It was Saint Joseph, “The Worker”. I’ll bet he’s a worker. Probably a Teamster. Don’t let that sad face and slim shape fool you: you see those muscles in his arms and the way he menacingly holds that two-by-four? Imagine how many skulls and kneecaps he’s broken with that plank. I’ll bet he’s also quite talented with cement, and making entire bodies disappear inside it. Don’t fuck with this guy. --I mean, don’t fuck with this saint.

Suddenly the church didn’t look as forlorn as it did menacing. I wondered if Jimmy Hoffa was somewhere inside those bricks.

Looking at this stern, spartan church on a frozen street in Chicago, I started thinking again about the pancake breakfast.

I have a theory about this obscene use of food in America (at least in the Midwest), of the transformation of food to near pornography. I think it has to do with the sexual repression of the culture. The Midwest is a Protestant, Puritanical culture that frowns on sex but celebrates violence, alcohol, and, more than anything else -- food. Namely, unhealthy food. Every kind of food that’s bad for us: sweet, fatty, and too much of it.

I think the food is so over-the-top in these cities for two reasons: 1) it’s damn cold out there, and 2) comfort food is a replacement for sex.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying that people don’t have sex in Chicago! After all, Barack Obama is from Chicago, so imagine all the Chicagoans who’ve met him and later gone home and wanked off thinking about him. Oh come on, don’t tell me you’ve never done that after watching one of his speeches.

I’m saying that comfort food is the easiest substitute for sex. It’s cheaper, more accessible, and more socially acceptable than alcohol or drugs. And specifically, sweet foods are often used as a substitute for love and affection.

In repressed cultures, food is always more socially acceptable than sex. It’s hard to explain, but in Midwestern American culture, there’s a tremendous guilt about sex. Sex is something dirty and shameful… still.

And that Apple Pancake at the Original Pancake House isn’t? That is where the schizophrenia lies.

I just remembered something. I remembered when I was in college, living in Ohio, far from home, and I had grown fat. I couldn’t control my eating and I ate tremendous quantities of sweets.

My roommate, who was thin and charismatic and confident — everything that I was not -- on several occasions, brought home boys that I had crushes on and fucked them. Late at night, I could hear the sounds coming from her bedroom as I slumped over the kitchen stove, making… PANCAKES.

Ughhhhhhhhh!

I’d forgotten about that. Christ. I can’t believe I still order pancakes in restaurants.

I guess that means I’m cured!