Beware the No-Name Street Vendor

Although it seems like a lifetime ago, I was a vegetarian for just about ten years. Upon our graduation from college, my then-girlfriend (now-wife) introduced the idea to me, and I eagerly accepted her challenge. Our reasons for engaging in this culturally-fringy behavior were fairly different, but complimented each other's perfectly: she had just earned her degree in Anthropology from the University of Illinois, having studied capuchins in the Costa Rican rainforest, and decided that she could no longer in good conscience eat animals without sadness; and I wanted to continue to have sex with her.

In general, I became what my friend Tony once described as "one of those vegetarians who eats just chips." My basic plan of attack was to replace all meat with cheese and, since I had already eaten a fair amount of cheese before I gave up meat, I was now eating double the cheese and, quite regularly, processed cheese food. I was caught off guard when I, unexpectedly, grew to be quite large and constipated. What kind of shit is this? I wondered.

After a fraudulent health scare, I stopped eating cheese, and also things like bread and any food that derived its calories from anything other than fiber. I was quite skinny, and the mass amounts of fiber I was consuming rendered me quite unpleasant to be around. I became quite vigilant about my lifestyle and beliefs, and became a humorless jerk of sorts. I refused to share my backyard bbq-bound cooler with a good friend of mine who seemingly constantly picked me up and drove me around everywhere and was like my brother because I didn't want his "nasty-ass burgers dripping shit all over my shit." He gave me a ride anyway.

I also lectured another good friend, newly back in town after living in Washington, D.C. for several years, upon inviting me to the movies one Friday night, that I had "changed," and didn't go to movies any more on Friday nights—perhaps, I would on a weeknight—but on Fridays I was "more into having experiences with real, actual people." This mostly involved going to the local hole-in-the-wall and getting hammered on Old Style, smoking an entire pack of Kamel Red Light cigarettes while talking to the same four or five people I saw every day about some very particular element of rock music (Iggy Pop's role in Bowie's Berlin trilogy; "Fade to Black" foreshadowing Metallica's tendency toward late-career embarrassment, etc.), getting a vegetarian burrito with no cheese and passing out.

Reveling in my newfound skinniness, I would, from time to time, yell "fuck you, you fucking fat fucking son of a bitch!" to those passersby who would dare run afoul of my new brand of living my best life. Once, this occurred because I had stopped my bicycle in the middle of the street, with my tippy-toes dangling, in order to lean over my handlebars, which were smashing my breastbone, in an attempt to pick up a found quarter, prompting an perfectly average-sized driver to brake quite unexpectedly and honk his horn. "Fuck you, you fucking fat fucking son of a bitch!" I wasn't even able to get the quarter.

The height of my devotion to this new and exciting form of living came when we had to break it to my fiancé's parents that the food served at our upcoming wedding reception (which not only were they paying for, but also hosting in their backyard) would necessarily have to be all vegetarian, which, despite our having been vegetarians at this point for about five years, still couldn't have shocked them any more than if we would have divulged to them that we were planning a Scientology-themed wedding, after which we were joining the circus. I proudly took one for the team—my wide-eyed soon-to-be wife staring silently and nervously in the opposite direction—declaring that, being vegetarian ourselves, we couldn't put on an event that would make us responsible for the slaughter of untold numbers of animals, no matter how picky the guests were or how delicious the food would be. "We just don't think people should eat animals," I shrugged, looking square at the couple who would become my in-laws, my fiancé still timidly crooking her neck to the side to avoid the sheer horror of it all. "You know," my future father-in-law said as he stood up to tend to some burgers he had on the grill, "they'd eat you if they could."

After we got pregnant (her with our child, me with fear), the tenets of our vegetarianism began to melt right off the bone. She began to crave things like hamburgers and concluded that, for the sake of the baby and its development, eating meat was their best and healthiest option. Which was great, because I had already decided the previous Christmas Eve at her Aunt and Uncle's house that when I had been drinking and nobody was looking I would jam as much turkey in my mouth as was possible without choking.

This led to my invention of what I called "Event Meats," as in "I'm vegetarian, but I'll eat what I call Event Meats," a totally pathetic attempt to hold onto a fading vegetarian ethic that was nearly as misguided as that of the strip-mall dwelling "vegetarian" who eats fish and chicken, which is like professing to be a member of Jews for Jesus. Example: Thanksgiving turkey? Event meat (and when placed on a disposable napkin in a misguided attempt at portion control becomes what I like to call the "turkey nap"). Corned Beef on St. Patrick's Day? Event Meat. Ham on Christmas? Event Meat. Fried chicken on my birthday? Possibly Event Meat. Ribs at the Super Bowl? Maybe Event Meat. Chicken fried rice on Saturday? Just meat.

And that was it. I am no longer super skinny and, though I'm over the feeling that I need to eat ten chicken legs in one sitting because it may be the last time I am ever to eat chicken, I still try to take my meat selections seriously. I never throw away or send back any meat, lest an animal gave its life in vain. And if I'm going to eat it, and deal with the residual guilt I harbor for turning my back on my former vegetarianism, then it had better at least approach delicious.

So, last Friday evening, when my wife introduced the idea of taking our two-year old to the Bucktown Arts Festival the following Sunday, I gave it my most enthusiastic endorsement. Oh sure, some of the art would be fine, but any time there's a street festival, there are street vendors selling culinary abominations you wouldn't normally dare to eat, but what are you going to do? Street vendors don't sell Brie and walnut salads, so I guess I'll have to settle for the deep fried taco-on-a-stick and a turkey leg mutated by gigantism.

When we arrived at the festival on Sunday, I had visions of hot dogs dancing in my head. Since I've been back aboard the midnight meat train, I have not yet indulged in a Chicago-Style hot dog—not even at the Home Depot (though I was fully-prepared to on one occasion, the stand was, thankfully, closed). I think about them about two to three times a week, their particularly nasty health-assaultive qualities beating out their possible deliciousness in most every scenario. In fact, a running joke in our house used to be my asking if where we're going has hot dogs. "You want to go to the Gap Outlet?" my wife would ask."Sure," I would reply. "You think they'll have hot dogs there?" This joke is no longer in rotation, not because my interest in hot dogs has dwindled, but because, apparently, it's not very funny, especially after hearing it 1,000 times.

When it was time to eat, we—one crabby kid and two increasingly crabby adults—headed to the modest row of street vendors in search of fulfillment. The first tent we stumbled upon, apparently run by the nuevo punk rock health enthusiasts who run Bite, was precisely the type of vegetarian-friendly refuge we used to wish they had, but never did, at street fairs, selling the intriguing "BBQ seitan taco" alongside minimally aorta-punishing meat selections, like the delightful-sounding chicken sausage. My wife, generally a fan of all things natural, organic and good for you, immediately decided that we were going to eat there, and that I should get the seitan taco, correctly lamenting that it was just the sort of thing I used to go monkey bananas for. I urged her to wait until we had viewed all the food tents, citing the expense of the chicken sausage—that she and my son were to share for a perfectly reasonable $6—but really wanting to find, if not a hot dog, then its culinary equivalent. She gamely agreed, and we made our way to the end, passing corn dogs and funnel cakes, and fried rice and pizza, mouths watering nary a drop. She hurried back to the healthy tent with our starving child, and I suddenly found myself staring down the gyros tent.

I'm not, like cuckoo for pita puffs or anything, but I will enjoy a gyro (which—though most people who mispronounce the word gyros do so as \jī·rōz\—for some reason my father mispronounces as \gear·ohs\) about once a year, if my constitution leans towards the particularly lamb-deficient.

As there were no posted prices for the two delicacies offered for purchase—gyros and chicken pitas (by this logic, wouldn't they be chicken pitas and lamb pitas?)—I asked how much a gyro might set one back. "Eight bucks," snarled the chef/cashier, looking and sounding not unlike the grizzled, tobacco-washed ghost of Lucille Ball from The Simpsons, her puckered lips appearing downright negligent for not dangling a Basic 100 to within an inch of its life. After adding a 20oz. Diet Pepsi to my order (bringing the grand total to $11), I was, much to my shame and embarrassment, left with a mere 55 cents to banish to the mandatory, yet empty, tip jar. "Finally," she said, responding to the mini-thunderous clanks of the three coins before clearing out a laugh whose closest aural resemblance would be to that of a stubborn attempt to start a flooded engine. I smiled and hurriedly shuffled away with a vaguely warm heft of inherent possibilities neatly wrapped in foil in hand, my shoulders hunched and my eyes averted, before the true value of my paltry contribution could be discovered.

I found and sat with the rest of my party, where I administered an unwrapping of and an open-lipped teething to my newly-acquired lambwich. Hmm ... Didn't realize it came equipped with the grilled green peppers and onions—a slimy, nearly tasteless concoction until two hours after you've eaten it and for the entirety of the four hours after that, when its acidic mist returns to burn your trachea when propelled from urgent, unannounced depth charges originating somewhere in the lower torso region. The pita began to flake apart as if it hadn't been properly heated or, perhaps, had been dormant in its plastic storage bag for a month or so, slowly ridding itself of any semblance of moisture in anticipation of my seizure of it. The lamb meat was thin and tough, its taste and texture falling somewhere between a ham-flavored fruit roll-up and the tongue of a canvas shoe. There weren't enough tomatoes, and there was only a mild essence of tzatziki sauce—what any gyro will tell you is its finest quality—as if it had been sprayed daintily from a perfume bottle. If I were being generous, I would rate it a 2 ½ out of 10.

And then it dawned on me as I scanned my short-term memory ... This isn't a real gyro, because that wasn't a real gyros place at all. It had no name. No affiliation. Just signs featuring photographs of gyros and chicken pitas, perhaps taken by the same poor lady who prepares them. And they weren't even the good signs. You know, the ones featuring a curly-coiffed, classy in an '88 Judith Light kind of way, woman of a certain age (let's say 37) enjoying a gyros sandwich, proclaiming something like "Mmm ... Gyros!" And there were certainly no traces of the magnificent handmade gyros paintings that adorn many a ragtag Chicago gyros operation.

I had been blinded to the fact that this particular brand of gyro was of the no-name variety by the potential of the moderate satisfaction gyros have been known to produce, and was now left to suffer its punishing after-effects for the next 4 to 8 hours. Reportedly, the first gyro in the United States was introduced in 1968 in Chicago, and I swear, that may have just been the one I got.

After returning home and laying my son down for his daily nap, with the threat of battery acid tickling the end of my throat and filling my tired eyes with unwanted water, I picked up the ever-thinning Sunday Chicago Tribune and ran into an article entitled 10 things you might not know about Meat. Number 7 on this list was that "(t)urkeys have been bred to have such large breasts that they can't have sex and must be artificially inseminated." My former, vegetarian self would have been outraged, but all my dumber, meatier self could wonder was what kind of sick bastard would want to have sex with a turkey, large breasts or not?