Epicurious

I know that I’m a girl, but I think that this is the moment that I become a man. It all looked unassuming enough. I had enlisted a Local Native to help me out in the Scariest City in the World and he had only one suggestion. We pulled up outside Le Parker Meridien and I was disappointed. The Local Native was supposed to be showing me the real deal, I wanted down and dirty but he’d taken me to a hotel in uptown with a doorman. He told me to uncrumple my face, that it looked like a used serviette and that I wouldn’t find any of those where we were going.

Now I’m laughing, at the sheer perfection of it all, it feels like a Salinger novel and buddy, I’m the star. The room is tiny and sweltering, the air is mostly grease. It must have taken years to pool the autographs that are scrawled on the bare brick walls. I play a game: think of a famous person (writer, actress, photographer, historian, comedian, webseries producer, small-time made-for-tv movie director or porn star), and find their name on the wall. I run out of stars before I run out of mortar.

The menu is simple: burgers (rare), beer (Sam Adams) and milkshakes (chocolate – the Local Native tells me that they’re thinking of adding an oreo variety to the mix but it’s all very hush-hush and that I should keep it clandestine if I want to keep my fingernails). I ask for one of everything and a mountain of a man with a face that lets you know that God has a sense of humor grunts and turns away (one doesn’t walk away in a room this size – by the end of his swivel, he’s in the kitchen on the other side of the room, which itself is a cupboard).

I look behind me and catch a glimpse of the world outside. I can see the seeming acres of white marble flooring and cream coloured ottomans of the decadent lobby of Le Parker Meridien. I can hear the soft-spoken, ivory-clad concierge at the cream desk that masks the entrance to the Burger Joint as he directs a banker to a “very agreeable Italian bistro” and sumptuous, no doubt.

I turn back to the Local Native, he’s dropped a spoonful of milkshake on his tie and is abrasive, red-faced and good-humored. The room is at full capacity now and crammed with a dull roar of human activity. Vast flies buzz about in drones, stun themselves on the bare light bulbs and die, fatly on the concrete floor, the last bliss of Musca Domestica. I’ll never forget the day that I first saw that flickering neon burger, the only sign of the bright bustling world beyond all that beige.