Chez Chesler

It's around 1966 or 1967. I might be in nursery school or kindergarten, but that's not a big part of my life. We still live in the apartment building at 651 West 171st Street, Washington Heights. It's probably early fall or spring. We don't go to Chinatown in the summer, the heat and humidity make the smells too much. We drive downtown. Those years my father had a champagne Mercury Monterey, but I don't pay much attention, because like the apartment it's the only one I've ever known. I'm probably riding in the back with my younger brother, my mother is up front. We take the Henry Hudson Parkway down, and it soon becomes the West Side Highway. Riverside Drive is up on the left. We pass billboards for an orange drink, and the Strick truck up on a roof, level with the highway. We park in Foley Square. We walk up Worth Street. Kids are playing in Columbus Park. Chatham Towers are still new. I find the sand-colored poured concrete so ugly that it makes me physically ill. We walk through Chatham Square to Doyers Street (or do we come in through Mott and Pell Streets? I remember the Bowery end was foreign territory.) We go down the steps to Wah-Kee, in the basement of number 16 Doyers Street. At that time I thought that whereever you were, at least in Manhattan, if you dug underground you'd hit concrete. That's what was under the apartment building, in the basement with the dryer that took dimes. The staircases on Fort Washington Avenue led down to the subways. Once I dug as deeply as I could in the sandbox at J. Hood Wright Park, until I got to the bottom, which was concrete. I think I thought that parks were created by dumping soil onto a concrete foundation. The restaurant was no exception. We walk past the kitchen to the back room, and get a table on the side. The room is illuminated by pink and green lights, built into the walls, facing the ceiling. I don't remember where the bathroom fit in, but it has urinals that go all the way to the floor. The sinks have separate faucets for hot and cold water. My father washes his face with pure hot water, but I have to use cold mixed with a little hot to wash my hands, otherwise it will burn. The towel is a continuous cloth roll, looping down from a box mounted on the wall. The first dinner course is wonton soup. It has dark green leaves in it, and little red slivers of pork. We add some fried noodles to it, the same noodles we were eating dipped in duck sauce while we waited. Then the appetizers come. Spare ribs, fried wonton, and egg rolls. There is a little dish of crusty hot mustard. We use so little that I never realize it isn't reused the way a ketchup bottle or salt shaker would be. My mother mixes a little hot mustard with the duck sauce, to dip the egg rolls in. The main course is sweet and sour something -- chicken? shrimp?. It comes with red and green maraschino cherries. I have no idea that maraschino cherries start out as actual cherries. And chow mein of some sort, and white rice. The food is served on a metal tray, covered with a metal bell. We eat with chopsticks. The chopsticks are round on the bottom, but square on the top, imprinted with Chinese characters. Dessert comes. The ice cream is almost like sherbert. Green pistachio, and a light brown chocolate. Stirred together they melt in the bowl. And kumquats in syrup, and little squares of pineapple with toothpicks in them. Probably fortune cookies too. After dinner we walk to Pell Street and turn onto Mott Street, to the Chinatown Fair. We play tic tac toe with the chicken. There are no video games yet, but the place is noisy with pinball machines. There are SkeeBall games in the back, the kind without a zero-points moat. On the side towards the back are poker games: roll a soft rubber ball until it falls into a hole. Each hole makes a light on the back glass light up, and after the game tickets come out, the same as with the SkeeBall. The poker game costs only a dime. There's a machine to stamp coins, and machines to test strength. The last game we play is a little crane, you manipulate it over a sand pile, drop the clamshell bucket, pick up a load of sand, and drop it in a hopper. Before we go we take the tickets and redeem them for a prize. Sometimes it's a magic trick, a plastic egg cup with a false top to make the egg disappear. Sometimes it's rubber stamps and a pad. Then we walk back to the car, and drive home. When we get upstairs I play with whatever prize we won.