Cruz gets old

I feel compelled to comment on How I Spent My Fourth of July Vacation in the middle of MSV.

Saturday was, in a word, hot. We were going to help celebrate O’C’s 40th 30th birthday. To tell you the truth, while I enjoy accumulating birthdays, as each one is a good indication that I am still alive and kicking, I don’t put a lot of energy into celebrating them. They are not that great an accomplishment, unless the doctor gives you two months to live and it’s ten months until your next birthday and when you attain this milestone all medical science sits up and takes notice. For the average person, all you have to do is, as I suggested, not die. This usually doesn’t require any specific effort on your part, unless you have a really dangerous job. Nowhere near the top of that list of really dangerous jobs is Director of Forensics, where the only real danger is that you will succumb to the never ending pile of doughnuts in the judges’ lounge. In fact, DoF is way down at the bottom of the danger list, somewhere between Carmelite nun and mattress salesman.

O’C, on the other hand, is a born celebrator, and the fact that this particular birthday ends in a zero was more than enough for him to pull out all the stops. He invited a bunch of friends over to see his new apartment, and then, in a show of creativity that set the New York social scene spinning, chose the restaurant Japonica for a gala dinner. O’C? Japonica? Whoda thunk it?

As I say, the city was hot. Parlously so. And we were bringing a housewarming gift that weighed about a hundred pounds, which I lugged from Grand Central all the way to Bryant Park, at which point I needed to sit down for half an hour and watch the tourists read their maps. We also got panhandled a few times. In Paris, the panhandlers lay prostrate on the ground with a tin cup outstretched, a truly medieval style of mendicancy. In New York, they tell you that they’re veterans, which would make me feel bad if I hadn’t already contributed recently to legitimate veterans. Anyhow, after getting up a head of steam, we headed for the Disney Store on Broadway. Egad! Times Square becomes more of a nightmare with every visit. Why are tourists thronging this area? If mean, if you’re going to go see “Wicked,” go see “Wicked” and get off the streets. Jeesh. Anyhow, I fought my way into the Disney Store and quickly found the perfect gift, a Prince Charming doll. At the counter the woman chided me for not also buying Cinderella. I told her that in this case, Prince Charming was all that was needed.

We subwayed down to the Village, now lugging both the original housewarming gift and a birthday present. After another pause in Washington Square Park (their little imitation Arc de Triomphe just doesn’t hold up to the one in Paris), we headed over to O’C’s, where the festivities were in full swing.

If you haven’t been to O’C’s apartment, you’d be shocked by all the Star Wars crap memorabilia around the place. And political crap memorabilia. Plus a lot of et and a lot of cetera. He showed me where he was going to feature the Apple IIgs that I had passed along to him (it was either him or the county's annual electrical trash collection—he is an easy fellow to please in many ways). We knew some of the people there, but most of them were new to us, accruals O’C has made in other areas of his life over the space of 40 30 years. The People’s Champion showed up at the restaurant, having officially now changed his alma mater from Hen Hud to Bronx Science, a kind of plastic approach to history that you don’t see all that often in a college undergraduate. There were other Vassarians and Bronxwegians and Debateorians and Cruzian relatives, quite a fine mix of this and that and the other. I think we collected at least one new recruit for DisAd14, while we were at it.

And then we headed over to Japonica. It’s about three blocks from O’C’s house, and although I noticed other restaurants along the way, O’C seemed to be blind to them. We were welcomed warmly at the restaurant, which I suspect is because O’C represents a hundred percent of their profit, and without him, they’d all be slinging hash in Hoboken. I have nothing against sushi, and Japonica is a good example of the breed, but let’s face it, it’s not like they have to cook anything. All they do is chop it and put it on the plate. Try that in an Italian restaurant!

The food kept coming, and unless you knew what it was, you had no way of knowing, but no one seemed to care, and we all kept shoveling it in. Then the cake came, which you know is a stretch for a Japanese restaurant. For that matter, coming up with forks was a stretch for them, for obvious reasons; my piece of cake came with what looked like a clam fork. Whatever. As you can see from the picture below, despite the fact that he’s their biggest customer, they don’t know how to spell his name, which makes one wonder if, in fact, when he says he’s going to Japonica he isn’t actually standing outside checking in on Foursquare with his nose pressed up against the window, after which he skulks off and picks up a couple of slices of Ray’s Famous Pizza to surreptitiously smuggle into his fancy-shmancy Village apartment. I wouldn’t put it past him.

Happy 40th 30th birthday, Mr. Cruz.