Read Online Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin by Calvin Trillin - Free Book Online
Authors: Calvin Trillin
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to the pizza parlor occasionally to have a stare at Fats and poke him around a bit is not merely that he once lost some 160 pounds—no trivial matter in itself, being a weight equivalent to all of Rocky Graziano in his prime—but that he has succeeded for seventeen years in not gaining it back. Apparently, keeping off a large weight loss is a phenomenon about as common in American medicine as an impoverished dermatologist. Convinced that remaining a stick figure is the only alternative to becoming a second mountain of flesh, Fats has sentenced himself to a permanent diet broken only by semiannual eating binges in Kansas City and a system oftreats on Mondays and Thursdays that reminds many New Yorkers of alternate-side-of-the-street parking regulations.
Because Fats is now exceptionally skinny, most people call him Larry instead of Fats. (Nobody, as far as I know, has ever called him Mr. Goldberg.) Having known Fats in Kansas City long before he let his Graziano slip away from him, though, I have difficulty thinking of him as anything but a fatty. He has even more difficulty than I do. He is, he cheerfully admits, as obsessed with food now as he ever was. (Fats cheerfully admits everything, which is one reason no one has ever thought of calling him Mr. Goldberg.) One of his doctors has told him that most of the successfully reformed fatties seem to involve themselves in food-related businesses. Still, Fats is restless being a pizza baron. “You can’t schlepp pizzas all your life,” he often tells me. He is constantly phoning for my reaction to the schemes he thinks up for new lines of work. His schemes are almost invariably concerned with food and are invariably among the worst ideas in the history of commerce. I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that Fats may be like one of those novelists whom publishers speak of as having only one book in them. My usual response to hearing one of his new business ideas—a scheme to produce an edible diet book, for instance—is to say, “Fat Person, there are worse things than schlepping pizzas.”
Fats, now that he has had some time to reflect on it, is not surprised that the Smithsonian asked for his sign. “It was a nice piece of neon work,” he says. As it happens, one of the regular customers at Goldberg’s Pizzeria works for Chermayeff & Geismar Associates, the firm commissioned to design a five-year bicentennial exhibit for the Smithsonian called “A Nation of Nations.” When it was suggested that Goldberg’s sign might be suitable for a display that would amount to a selection of ethnic neon, Fats said, as he remembers it, “You want me to take it down now or will you come back for it?” (A Smithsonian curator came back for it, Fats having in the meantime ordered a precise replica to take its place.) Fats’s cooperation was based partly on an understandable pride (“There I’d be with Lucky Lindy and everybody”) and partly on a quick calculation of how many pizza eaters might pass through the exhibit during the next five years.
It is natural for a restaurant proprietor to see publicity as a way ofattracting customers, but Fats must be alone among his peers as seeing it also as a way of attracting a wife. Ever since his emaciation, at the age of twenty-five, Fats has thought about finding an appropriate wife almost as much as he has thought about food, and he tends to regard publicity partly as a sort of singles ad. Fats is often mentioned in the press—in articles about pizza or about men’s fashions (his views on clothing are as deeply rooted in the fifties as his views on courtship and marriage; sartorially, he is best known for an addiction to saddle shoes) or about what celebrated New Yorkers like to do on Saturdays in the city. (“Larry Goldberg, a bachelor who operates Goldberg’s Pizzeria on Fifty-third Street and Second Avenue, said he spent his Saturdays at Bloomingdale’s, where he rides the escalators and ‘looks for girls.’ ”)
Because Fats is now exceptionally skinny, most people call him Larry instead of Fats. (Nobody, as far as I know, has ever called him Mr. Goldberg.) Having known Fats in Kansas City long before he let his Graziano slip away from him, though, I have difficulty thinking of him as anything but a fatty. He has even more difficulty than I do. He is, he cheerfully admits, as obsessed with food now as he ever was. (Fats cheerfully admits everything, which is one reason no one has ever thought of calling him Mr. Goldberg.) One of his doctors has told him that most of the successfully reformed fatties seem to involve themselves in food-related businesses. Still, Fats is restless being a pizza baron. “You can’t schlepp pizzas all your life,” he often tells me. He is constantly phoning for my reaction to the schemes he thinks up for new lines of work. His schemes are almost invariably concerned with food and are invariably among the worst ideas in the history of commerce. I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that Fats may be like one of those novelists whom publishers speak of as having only one book in them. My usual response to hearing one of his new business ideas—a scheme to produce an edible diet book, for instance—is to say, “Fat Person, there are worse things than schlepping pizzas.”
Fats, now that he has had some time to reflect on it, is not surprised that the Smithsonian asked for his sign. “It was a nice piece of neon work,” he says. As it happens, one of the regular customers at Goldberg’s Pizzeria works for Chermayeff & Geismar Associates, the firm commissioned to design a five-year bicentennial exhibit for the Smithsonian called “A Nation of Nations.” When it was suggested that Goldberg’s sign might be suitable for a display that would amount to a selection of ethnic neon, Fats said, as he remembers it, “You want me to take it down now or will you come back for it?” (A Smithsonian curator came back for it, Fats having in the meantime ordered a precise replica to take its place.) Fats’s cooperation was based partly on an understandable pride (“There I’d be with Lucky Lindy and everybody”) and partly on a quick calculation of how many pizza eaters might pass through the exhibit during the next five years.
It is natural for a restaurant proprietor to see publicity as a way ofattracting customers, but Fats must be alone among his peers as seeing it also as a way of attracting a wife. Ever since his emaciation, at the age of twenty-five, Fats has thought about finding an appropriate wife almost as much as he has thought about food, and he tends to regard publicity partly as a sort of singles ad. Fats is often mentioned in the press—in articles about pizza or about men’s fashions (his views on clothing are as deeply rooted in the fifties as his views on courtship and marriage; sartorially, he is best known for an addiction to saddle shoes) or about what celebrated New Yorkers like to do on Saturdays in the city. (“Larry Goldberg, a bachelor who operates Goldberg’s Pizzeria on Fifty-third Street and Second Avenue, said he spent his Saturdays at Bloomingdale’s, where he rides the escalators and ‘looks for girls.’ ”)
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