Photo: Mr. Stupidhead

Hello. It feels…quaint, nearly, doesn’t it, this thing we do each year together?

A ritual from another world, and I suppose it is, but the “we” and the “together” sustain, in the sense of a held note, but also in the sense of nourishment. Here in New York City, where the ritual began 19 years ago, the powers that be have decided to allow a modified version of a rite of the old world: indoor dining. Good news of a sort, though I’ll stick on al fresco for now, but looking at the calendar (empty of dinners off my property), looking at the pictures out of California (full of reminders of the ashy winter that covered downtown that day), I have the meals on my mind. Not the food, although often it’s great, and even greater in the memory. Not what we ate, but who was there. The chairs, not the table.

Pull some chairs up yourself, old friends. Bring a glass of your favorite and a covered dish to pass around, like we used to do. You’ve heard me tell some of these 19 meals before, but the stories we finish for each other fill us up just as well.

No. 1: Terry’s Lunch
A wood-paneled greasy spoon slung into a niche of Summit’s preppy downtown, it closed when I was still in school. My mother took me here on blue-moon vacation days when Mr. Stupidhead, still in diapers, was at playgroup; he must have come with us sometimes but I only ever remember my mother there with me, our having a secret, how good a grilled cheese and a root beer tasted. That I could have anything I wanted, and I pretended to puzzle over the menu, to drag it out, the time alone with Ma in our little club, playing the placemat word search.

No. 2: Ho Lee Chow
I forget how we arrived, Wing and Glark and I, at a noirishly shot bit in which, whipping a cloche off a meanly glinting silver tray, one of us would offer Michael “Ben Stone” Moriarty a chicken ball from Ho Lee Chow while he was getting drunk in a hotel bar. I do remember that this is the same cab ride on which I became “Buntsy,” as a joke, but it stuck. It was cold, so we were jammed into the back of a Toronto cab like a heap of coats with eyebrows. I was on the left, I remember that too.

No. 3: The Waffle Houses of Murfreesboro, TN
After a while, Dad and I stopped bothering to discuss it and just went, every morning, to the closest one to our hotel where they made the coffee the way we make it, strong enough to stand a fork up in. The waitress always put us at one of those two-top booths and our knees touched underneath.

No. 4-6: El Parador
Before I was born, my grandmother, who didn’t drink alcohol and couldn’t nurse any beverage, asked to taste my father’s margarita. Finding it delicious, she ordered one for herself and proceeded to pound it, because: Grandma. Cut to: my father pouring her into a cab and asking the driver to make sure she got to Penn Station, “she’s a little drunk.” “Great, so am I!” burbled the driver, and gunned it. Everyone survived. Years later, I drank two strawberry ‘ritas in 40 minutes, announced to Couch Baron that these daiquiris were the beshsshhht, went home, and slept for 14 hours. He still makes fun of me. Everyone survived. We had a TWoP summit dinner at El Parador back in the day; they put us in some well-appointed subbasement, which was smart, and discounted the sangria, which was not. Everyone survived.

No. 7: McDonald’s
Shotgun feeds the driver, that’s the rule. Two fries at a time, keep the line moving, don’t get cute with the skyhook. Many nights in many cars with many different seating configurations later, I can tell you that an oldest of two sisters is your ideal shotgun for fry targeting. Older sister of a younger brother will neighborhood-play it; more than one sibling, they’re on autopilot. A little Heinz on the earlobe never killed anyone but if you want to complete a highway merge in the rain without taking a shoestring to the nostril? Older sister.

No. 8: Neiman-Marcus
You may recall that time I ordered a turkey from Neiman-Marcus for Thanksgiving and it just didn’t show up, forcing Mrs. Mikey The K to cook us all Cornish hens instead. You may also recall that we wrote expansive fan-fic about the turkey’s The Terminal-esque adventures on Thanksgiving Day. You may not remember that the bird was delivered to Couch Baron’s mom’s house on Black Friday. I still get clocked for that, like, monthly? But if the thing shows up like it’s supposed to, nobody remembers that year. It didn’t, and the riff odometer on that story is still going up.

No. 9: Ben’s
Every day at the Cape, Dad would flea-dip us in sunscreen, pick out a presidential memoir to fall asleep under, and pile us and our towels and chairs and inflatables into the wagon to go to the beach for the day, but first we had to stop at Ben’s to get turkey hoagies and Cape Cod chips and whatever violently sugary Crush the owner got for cheap that week — usually strawberry, which had no damn business going with a turkey extra mustard extra shell fragments, but it really did. Dad never rigged up the same towel/raft shade tent twice, but mostly they worked. Every now and then, on the downhill side of college, you still get a summer day like that where you feel like you won something.

No. 10: West Windsor
We’re at Gen’s parents’ for some occasion. My nephew was still a little loaf of a thing. Gen’s mom calls out from the kitchen that she cut up some watermelon, would anyone like some? Gen, in the politest, cheeriest, “It’s A Sunshine Day”-ingest tone you can imagine: “Noooo thaaaanks!” Gen’s mom, from the bowels of a volcano for some reason: “FUUUUUCK YOUUUUUU.” Someone may have grumbled something about Cthulhu not needing to take fruit so fuckin’ personally, but I think we were all laughing hysterically. To this day, I cannot see watermelon in any form without thinking about that exchange; I cannot hear anyone sing-song “no thanks” without muttering “fuuuuuck youuuuu” under my breath in a Sam Elliott voice; none of us can! People who weren’t even there have this problem now! Someone hollered a “noooo thaaaanks” down our street the other day and there’s Dirk, rumbling “FUUUUCK YOUUUUU” from the pantry! I have called watermelon “no thanks” instead of “watermelon” and been understood! “You want some of this no-thanks and feta?” “I’ll fuck-you a bite of yours.” Now y’all are stuck with it but it will bring you joy, I promise. PS Gen’s mom is a peach, this is just one of those dumb things that becomes a layer of glue in a family.

No. 11: A Closet In 9R
The Hobe had had all these surgeries. They sent him home in a cone, with some kind of appetite stimulant, which didn’t really work, so I climbed into the closet and tried to get comfortable on top of a pair of boots, next to his hidey nest on top of a stack of TN shirts, and I fed him lemon Dannon, one fingertip at a time. It took a while, so the next time, I brought a magazine. The time after that, I brought two magazines, a cushion from the couch, and a sleeve of Lorna Doones. By the end of the week, half the desk and half the fridge were stacked up in there, along with a makeshift hammock and a ziggurat of sneakers with the top one a cupholder. When Hobey wandered back out into our life, I was a little sad that it was over.

No. 12: Tuscany
Ernie’s family friend M drove us to Lucca, to a cemetery with a long table under a big tree, set for lunch, although “lunch” isn’t really what happened. Plates came and went. I wasn’t seated near Ernie or M, and I didn’t speak Italian, but somehow my end of the table made do with Charades gestures and my teetering Spanish. In between courses, our tablemates wandered into the stones and had little lie-downs with their dead. I took pictures of the vitello tonnato with my disposable camera. There was a heat wave, but I didn’t feel it, under a big tree. The meal took hours, but seemed montaged even as it was happening. Everything was just so: enough garlic, enough bites. The very definition of “companionable.”

No. 13: The Test Kitchen
It was actually my dining room. Mark and I thought sure we’d make a million dollars marrying my two favorite ice-cream-novelty concepts together: the ice-cream sandwich and the creamsicle. We put sherbet on Nilla Wafers; we put vanilla bean ice cream on lemon cookies; I felt vaguely ill and sugar-twitchy for three days. I got sherbet in my hair. We laughed and laughed.

No. 14: King Killer Studios
The heater by the main stage downstairs didn’t work back then, so wintertime shows meant ordering a stack of pizzas and sitting under them for warmth. We drank a bunch, and our fingers still ached but we didn’t care. I still love Angela and Nat’s “Wagon Wheel” better than the original. Whenever I hear that song I think of our whole AIDS Walk team locking elbows in a whipchain on hills. I think of getting to the tops of those little rises in the park and looking back at the sea of people.

Nos. 15-17: Far Thill
Our old house worked great for Thanksgivings — two kitchens, two ovens — but when it came time to transfer the side dishes I was responsible for from the top of the house to the ground floor, it was a mission-control situation. “Extra mitts?” “Go.” “Both doors wedged?” “Go, flight.” “Patio-door slingshot sequence is go?” “Go, flight.” Mr. S and I talked on a weekly basis about rigging up a dumbwaiter, but clattering down two storeys, lids rattling, pets scattering, hollering “FIRE IN THE HOLE” became a part of the tradition. The last dishes would hit the table, we’d cram in and bow our heads, and in the moment of silence before grace, someone still chuckling at “fire in the hole.” Well, multiple someones. Fine: all the someones, except Miss S, who’s laughing because everyone else is.

Our old house also worked great for launching Peeps into the backyard and filming it in full makeup and a lab coat.

And for getting married in the backyard, and eating flag cupcakes G Force made in the downstairs kitchen. The only wedding-y thing we really did besides the ceremony itself was feeding each other those cupcakes (and stashing one in the freezer to eat in a year). The day after, I found one in the medicine cabinet of my downstairs bathroom, waiting for its owner to return.

No. 18: The Shores Of The Fragrant Gowanus
Dirk and I took our anniversary lobster rolls to a dead-end street — Huntington, maybe — and ate on Edie’s tailgate, looking at the canal. After months of quarantine and quiet, it felt more like a stereotypical canal and less like an oily hazard, flowing instead of lurking. I had a bourbon rickey in a to-go cup. Across the way, a boy tried it without training wheels, unwillingly, and I remembered that feeling of being let go of, the dread and then the pride. Everyone survived.

No. 19: Prospect Park Southwest
I forget when Ice-Cream Sundays started. Before we got married, I know that. Dirk would appear with two pints from Uncle Louie G’s, some kind of chocolate diabetes bomb for himself, birthday-cake ice-cream for me. That particular location does it the best, not just a gesture at icing but a wide, bright blue swath that carries the heart back to pool parties, more and more candles, the shiny tall grass where the catchable lightning bugs lived, the smell of new Barbie hair, falling asleep in a station wagon’s way back with your three besties, a row of little damp spoons.

Happy birthday, Don. We saved you a seat.

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