Big Mexican Food, Little Hair

Eatonwood, NJ – The waitress deposited the black granite bowl of fresh salsa and the basket of warm, fresh chips before me. As Jerry Seinfeld once said about his reaction to fresh bread in a restaurant, “it was like I was alone in a hotel room in Milwaukee.”

She was lucky to get her hand away fast enough.

It has been too long since I had a good Mexican meal. Israel is a nice country, but I haven’t found a decent burrito, nacho, huevo, or enchilada in four months of searching. I tried to pretend like I had a good burrito a few months ago. But who was I kidding? There were no beans or cheese, it was a wrap (made by a nice lady), and I was desperate.

It wasn’t a hotel room in Milwaukee, but I was alone in the dining room of a Mexican restaurant somewhere near Deal, NJ last night. The restaurant had a small bar area with a couple of TVs, and I would have bellied up, but there were eight obnoxious JETS fans screaming their faces off. The JETS weren’t playing, but there were fantasy football issues at stake. Clad in green shirts and JETS baseball hats, they needed Peyton Manning to throw six touchdowns, not six interceptions. They wanted LaDanian Tomlinson to run for four touchdowns, not four yards. Obviously, the outcome of the game didn’t matter.

So I sat in the empty dining room and attacked my food. Not just for the speed and ferociousness with which I ate those chips and then my enchiladas, but for my anti-social tendencies, I felt a little like an axe murderer who hadn’t eaten in a few days. I finished my food in seven minutes and then had to wait for George, the town’s cab driver to come back and get me.

While I waited, I positioned myself so that I could see half of a TV through a little window into the bar. I sat there quietly, in my coat, for 25-minutes while the JETS fans lived it up in the bar.

Waiting.

Axe murderer.

I just haven’t gotten much sleep since I wedged myself into the second to last row of a Tel Aviv-Atlanta flight in the wee hours of Friday morning. Tired, cranky, and a little sick, the prospect of hearing “J-E-T-S JETS! JETS! JETS!” from close range was enough to make half a TV screen ok.

Besides a good Mexican meal, my trip home has also included a good haircut. My overgrown mullet has been corrected. “The September Surprise” i.e. “the Massacre at Damascus Gate,” i.e. my latest bad overseas haircut, never really grew in. The sides just didn’t come back and the top and back kept getting longer. This past year, Israel started professional baseball and football leagues. If they do hockey, I would have been a first round draft choice on looks alone. They at least would have found room for me as a mascot; until Friday afternoon, I looked like the missing Hanson brother.

My brother’s wedding is next week and those pictures are going to be for life. I couldn’t take the risk of having the haircut fixed in Israel. So I waited for my trip home and went to Gino’s in Squirrel Hill. Here’s an exact quote from Gino:

“What happened here in the back?”

I just don’t know.

Gino fixed me up and I’m now ready for the wedding. But here’s an interesting twist – they confiscated my hair product at the Pittsburgh airport yesterday on my way to my first book talk in New Jersey. It was 150ml and the limit is 100!

Aside: In Israel, where a guard checks your bag at the entrance of every building, you don’t have to take your shoes or belt off at the airport. Here, I think we are one step away from walking through airport metal detectors in our underwear.

I understand that we are working off of the premise of “fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me,” and I cooperate because people are doing their jobs and the intent is right. But when you are on a plane, do you feel safer because you know all the other passengers have had their shoes and belts run through a metal detector? Or can you fall asleep because you know that the person next to you doesn’t have more than 100ml of contact lens solution or hair gel with them? I just hope some would-be terrorist doesn’t try to get on a plane with a bomb stuck up his ass.

So, they took my gel -- which left me at a NJ supermarket last night trying to find some product. There were so few choices that I ended up with Queen Helene Cholesterol Conditioning Styling Gel. According to the back of the tub I bought (no travel sizes), I am now conditioning and protecting my over-processed and chemically treated hair with Cholesterol.

Talk about living dangerously, forget backpacking through the Middle East, I’m rubbing cholesterol into my hair!

I guess I really only have one question, whose cholesterol is this?

Huevos Rancheros, the Peacemaker

Dupont Circle - My brother and I ate Mexican food last night in Northern Virginia. Neither of us ate huevos rancheros, but we polished off two baskets of chips and a couple troughs of salsa. Is there any ethnic food with a better free appetizer than Mexican food? You can count on fresh bread and olive oil at an Italian restaurant, but I find it impossible to contain my excitement when those fried tortilla chips are placed before me on that red tablecloth (they’re red to hide the salsa dribble).

My obsession with huevos rancheros started in a roadside diner in Northern Arizona in 1997. My buddy Brian and I were half way through a seven-week camping trip that would have made Clark Griswald envious. We started in Indy and did a lap around the western part of the country, hitting 12 national parks, Vegas, and several friends’ couches in the 9000 miles in between.

Up to that morning in Arizona, we had some great times, camping with a few buffalo in South Dakota, playing Frisbee on the sides of some Colorado roads, and hiking the Narrows. The only thing missing from our trip were the free love campfires and drum circles that we’d expected to find in America’s parks. The only people we’d met, so far, were German seniors in rented Tiogas campers, intent on burning their fair skin a lighter shade of red.

Brian is my “most fun friend,” but three weeks of driving, hiking, cooking, eating, and then sleeping in a tent with the same person is intense. At a certain point, you cover all the road trip games, brainteasers, and greatest little league moments. Around day 19 of such a trip, your traveling pal’s idiosyncrasies cease to be endearing. They leave their dirty socks on your side of the tent, they can’t throw the Frisbee straight, they keep playing Phish on the car stereo . . . Basically, you’re ready to explode.

This happened to me the summer before, too, when I backpacked through Europe with another pal, Tony. We split up for a couple of days, vacationing separately in Barcelona. It’s tougher to separate when you’re traveling together in a car, unless you make invisible walls with duct tape like Les Lessman on WKRP in Cincinnati.

Anyway, Brian made a wrong turn on the way to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, we drove fifty miles out of the way before we realized it, and we both combusted. He yelled at me for being a worthless navigator and I screamed at him for being a moron. We’d yet to eat breakfast and things deteriorated further when Brian tried to retrace the fifty miles in 15 minutes. Somewhere between Page and Kaibab, we pulled over at hole in the wall diner, famished and furious.

We were on the verge of sitting at separate booths, but out of a fear of losing the trip we squeezed into a booth across from each other. In that formal clipped tone that people use when they really just want to tell you how much they loathe you, Brian said, “The special sounds good.”

“Yes, that does look good.” I replied as I pictured pulling the hockey move on him. He was wearing the same stinking San Francisco t-shirt that he hadn’t changed in two days.

We both got the special. Huevos rancheros.

I was in love from the moment that my fork broke the seal on those eggs and the highlighter yellow yolks spurted out over the red sauce and on to my crispy tortillas and cheesy yet crispy fried potatoes. It was the perfect food.

Brian felt the same way. We got back into the car, drove to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon and continued to look for a drum circle. It turns out that huevos rancheros are not just the perfect food, but a peacemaker, too -- and not just between me and Brian.

There are accounts that Jimmy Carter served huevos rancheros to Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin at Camp David. It was over a mouthful of corn tortilla that Begin called Ariel Sharon and asked for his support in dismantling the settlements in Sinai. In fact, the story is told that Zbig Brzezinski split Cyrus Vance’s portion of huevos evenly between Sadat and Begin, demonstrating that the U.S. was a true honest broker. Vance was outside locking up his bicycle after a morning ride.

Insiders have not denied that at Camp David II, Bill Clinton served Ehud Barak and Yasir Arafat homemade grits. Poking around in his grits with a spoon, Barak mumbled, “Ma ze?” or “What’s this?”

Inadvertently, we believe, the motion from Barak’s spoon flicked some grits onto the stubble of Arafat’s beard. Clinton himself intervened, preventing a food fight escalation between the two men. Talks eventually broke down and analysts have asked the question, what if they would have broken bread over huevos rancheros instead?

We’ll never know.

My next post will be “Live from . . . Jerusalem.” I leave Thursday, hopefully.