Noir Food

Martinis, filets and cigarettes, tea sandwiches with butter and matted

snarls of watercress, coffee silky with sugar and coffee black that

stares at you like that dark eyed hound in mama's kitchen . . . all that gray

diner stuff, the egg's gray iris looking up from a frizzled mat of hash.

The food looks suspicious, it looks guilty, slippery, and why not? It's cooked

by men in wraparound aprons. There seems to be no motive to this cooking;

it's all a hodgepodge of half tones sliding by on a conveyor belt called

three squares a day. On the plate the T-bone slowly bleeds to death.

The coconut cream's little pill box hat, sleek and dewy, beside the mince pie's

downtrodden, flat fedora. Only a couple of things are clear: the ceiling's bare

bulb is clear and perfect as a hard-boiled egg. Martinis, filets, cigarettes,

a cobbler's dark clottedness looks like a hemorrhage in a bowl. A block

of Stilton's gangrenous and veined. It's a good thing we're tough.

It's a hard and dirty world.