This is a long lost column.
I found it one Saturday afternoon a few years ago. I had a roaring fire going in my library. I was settled back on a window seat. The music I was playing on my iPod was Woody Allen: Music from His Movies, which seemed to blend in beautifully with the sound of the waves crashing to the shore just outside my window. At one point I got up to throw another log on the fire. I looked into the bottom of the basket where the logs are stored and saw a newspaper page with an old copy of my column. Apparently my wife, The Beautiful Judy Licht, uses my columns as fire starters. She seems to get some perverse pleasure out of watching my caricature at the top of this page going up in flames. Anyway, I started reading my old column and realized it was one that I had been searching for for a number of years. I’d like to share this old memory with you.
The incident took place at the end of the summer and the column is so old that it talks about Grace’s Frankfurter Stand in Manorville, which has been gone for years, although I can still taste the last frankfurter I ate there.
My week of mishaps culminated this past Monday with my “flying egg sandwich” trick, which I performed on the Long Island Expressway. On the subject of name-calling, no one has called me worse names than the unidentified driver (and his companion) of a red Honda Accord did on Monday morning.
It was a scene right out of a Woody Allen movie. I left my house at 6:30 a.m. and headed for New York City. It was a toss-up as to what was foggier, the road or me.
Although it was damp and chilly I opted to drive with the top down on my convertible. Summer is passing by too fast; I guess I was trying to hold on. I got to Grace’s in Manorville and bought myself a cup of steaming hot coffee and then spotted a sign for an egg sandwich. I can’t remember ever eating an egg sandwich in my life, but being a sucker for advertising, I decided to buy one.
I jumped in the car and turned on to 495. Now, there’s a stretch where you can really move on the LIE, between exits 70 and 69. I was doing about 75, maybe 80. There was no one in front of me and only the red Honda following closely on my tail. I took a bite of the egg sandwich and tried to reach for the hot coffee with my other hand and steer with my elbows.
What I succeeded in doing was to drop the whole cup of scalding hot coffee on my crotch. I let out a scream and must have put the sandwich on the dashboard. All I know is the wind picked up my sandwich and it shot out of my car like a missile, hitting the car behind me with a splat.
It was sort of a culinary drive-by shooting.
The two mean-looking muscular guys who were driving to work in the Accord had tattoos on their bare arms depicting things that I have nightmares about. They pulled their car into the lane next to me. One guy leaned out of the window and told me where he and his beefy friend planned to shove my egg sandwich. They were menacing me and kept swerving their car into my lane, trying to push me off the road. I was terrified.
I tried to gesture to them that I had burned myself, so I kept pointing to my crotch, but they found it to be a provocative gesture, given where I was pointing. Finally I realized the insanity of my plight—here I was about to have the crap beaten out of me by these two giant thugs, and I’m directing them to my crotch—so I started to laugh. The two guys looked at me as if I was insane. They got scared and drove off.
I did a lot of thinking about luck and God on the rest of the drive.
If you wish to comment on “Jerry’s Ink,” send your message to jerry@dfjp.com.
