The New York Wrestling Restaurant
A friend invited me and Willow to dine at the New York wrestling restaurant, followed by live wrestling at Madison Square Garden. He was holding the event for friends with children. We wandered around Times Square for a while trying to find the place. There was a hotdog stand and Willow said, "I want a hotdog." She had chosen her own outfit for the party: glittery red high-heeled shoes several sizes too large; a voluminous Chilean folk dress, given to her by her godmother; hot pink tights with runs. And she had done her own hair, in two pointy pigtails similar to horns, on top of her head.
"We'll be at the restaurant in a minute," I said. "You can get a hotdog there. It's dinner." Actually I wasn't sure if they'd serve hotdogs, but they would have something she liked. At 5:30 there was a long line in front of the place, behind ropes off to one side, but I wasn't certain what they were waiting for. A man was unrolling a red carpet.
"Is this the restaurant?" I said. He pointed to the stairs. So we didn't get on the line. Maybe they were waiting on line for something else. We went down the steps and there was another long line, off to one side, waiting to go in, to the farthest door, but there was a whole row of doors and I opened one.
"Is this the restaurant?" I asked. There was a huge room, totally empty, though there was a gigantic floor-to-ceiling screen on which 20-foot-tall nearly naked men were bodyslamming each other around a ring. My friend had apparently organized three large tables (I knew they were his because each one had buckets of champagne, and party decorations) on a sort of balcony area, but nobody was sitting down or had arrived. Then a girl, about 19 years old, came with her younger brother, who was around 10. She?and the younger brother?seemed to be in a catatonic stupor. Whether they were always like this or it was the effect of the restaurant I couldn't tell.
The roar was deafening, though nobody else was in the place. Although the lines outside had been so huge, no one else ever seemed to come in. Maybe the genuine wrestling fans were all being led into special cellblocks. Then the host arrived and told me not to drink the champagne from the bottle on the table. As usual he had his own private stash of superior-quality champagne, kept elsewhere, that he always arranged for in advance, and he let me have a glass of it.
The waiter brought menus, heavy leather folders made heavier by metal insets on the front of it, as if because of it being made extra heavy you wouldn't want to steal it.
"I want a hotdog," Willow said.
Nervously I perused. There were hamburgers and cheeseburgers and salads and chicken fingers. The choices went on for two pages of very tiny type, different kinds of pasta, porkchops, everything between 10 and 20 dollars that a wrestling fan would probably want to eat, what you would call, I guess, American food. Finally under "Kids Menu" I found a hotdog and shoestring fries. I thought for a while about getting a steak, there was a filet mignon and a strip steak, both 20 dollars, and I thought for a while about getting the vegetarian burrito, which I turned down because of the herb mayonnaise, and the chicken in a tortilla, which I also decided against, though I no longer remember why. I opted for the Buffalo-style chicken salad, a salad that was lovingly described, the bacon, the onions, the tomato, the blue cheese dressing on the side, with chicken. "Good choice," the waiter said approvingly. It was hard to imagine what you would really want to eat while watching big nearly naked men punch at each other.
Then some other people arrived: the host; a movie star with her son; some other couples and two little girls about nine years old; a man with his godson who was about 10; a newspaper reporter with his son who was nine. The little boy who had come with the 19-year-old blonde sister was shouting, "I want the lobster!" At the other table the host was saying that everyone could order whatever they wanted. "I want caviar," one of the little girls screamed.
While we were waiting the waiters kept bringing around platters of chicken pieces and dipping sauce. Some chicken pieces were fried and covered in orange sauce; others were boneless and fried. You could cover them with two different kinds of sauce, one yellow and one white. There were also shrimps stuck on skewers on a pineapple. When you tried to pull a skewer from the pineapple the whole pineapple came with it. "Why are the shrimp stuck in a pineapple?" Willow yelled before jumping up to sit, uninvited, on various laps. The waiter brought over a plate of chicken wrapped in tortillas and cut up, though it might have been something else, and then a huge plate of raw meat he said was steak tartare, which really was the last thing I wanted to eat while, onscreen, men, oil-slicked, gnawed each other's legs. The giant torsos rutted like beached sea elephants in mating seasons.
I lured Willow back to the table just as her hotdog arrived. It was the saddest, baldest hotdog I had ever seen, on a plate with white french fries. The 19-year-old had ordered the cheeseburger, which was also quite bleak. Two tiny cheeseburgers, again with those white french fries, only the cheese on the two burgers had not been melted. It was just two slices of hard cheese. But for some reason the man opposite had one large cheeseburger and the white fries and his cheese was melted, though it did not look any more appetizing.
"Isn't the cheese on a cheeseburger supposed to be melted?" I asked the bored girl.
"I know," she said.
My salad was a large platter of shredded iceberg lettuce, two triangles of pale tomato, some chunks of onion, a few crumbs of bacon, a tureen of what appeared to be white glue but was in fact the dressing and a gigantic slab of breaded and fried chicken meat in orange. The little boy who had wanted the lobster got, instead, a giant slab of ribs, or at least what appeared to be small brown ribs, hundreds of them, covered in brown sauce, served with white french fries. Willow had almost finished her hotdog and was now harassing the movie star's son, who wore an earring and was not unfriendly.
"Willow, if you had some steamed broccoli I would let you get an ice cream sundae, or some cake..." I said.
"But I don't want an ice cream sundae or cake."
"Have some steamed broccoli anyway," I snarled politely.
The poor waiter in the middle of this din and racket, the naked men flinging each other around and the screaming announcer on the taped video coming from some New Jersey match, and my daughter who kept leaping up to fling herself on men's laps, and tripping the waiter with his huge troughs of teeny greasy chicken tidbits. It was as American as you could get; especially with the Moet & Chandon champagne. I couldn't help but enjoy myself. The only thing that would have made me happier is to have been able to bring a group of cloistered nuns to dine here, or at least a foreigner from a pure remote region of laughing, singing shepherds.
They let other children in the restaurant up to the balcony to get the signature of the movie star, though it was obvious the kids didn't know who she was and had been sent by their parents. The movie star, now surrounded by pigtailed little girl wrestling fans, looked as if, momentarily, she was going to be devoured a la Suddenly, Last Summer, that part where the street kids ended up cannibalizing someone, I forget who.
Then a huge practically uncooked head of broccoli arrived?everything was inedible, but speedy?and naturally Willow didn't want it, or couldn't eat it?and a man on the other side of the table reached for it and said, "Thanks for the broccoli."
In this restaurant a steamed vegetable did not seem out of place, it merely seemed as if someone's mother was trying to get a kid to eat?or at least look at?a vegetable. I thought for a minute they probably had them back there in the kitchen for use as scientific displays for people who came from certain regions of New Jersey or Long Island, something special you might see on a night out on the town in Manhattan.
The surprise lay in that it was undercooked, rather than overcooked. "If you eat it, you can have ice cream," I told the man. He looked slightly pleased, maybe at being ordered to eat his vegetable in a wrestling-themed restaurant.
Then a giant wrestler arrived, part of the festivities, with a woman who might have been a wrestler, only I couldn't tell if she was a wrestler or one of those women who were in the ring, sometimes, to aid with the increase in testosterone level.
"Where's the celebrities?" said the wrestler.
"Yeah, where's the VIPs?" said the woman.
They stood for a moment alongside the wall, surrounded by four or five men. Suddenly the wrestler noticed Willow. He seemed to be on another planet, maybe because he was so much taller and bigger than other people, and he slowly bent over and, unexpectedly, picked her up from her chair. Then he held her close to his face.
"Do you know how beautiful you are?" he said to her in a booming yet seductive voice. "Has anyone ever told you how beautiful you are?"
Willow looked suspicious. I hoped she wasn't going to hurt him. He was supposed to wrestle, later on. The week before she had head-butted me, and though it was an accident, the soft cartilage of my nose had been shoved into my brain pan with such force I was doubled over in pain for several hours. Then there was that fellow in the elevator who got off on the wrong floor after Willow gave him a blow to the groin. The wrestler finally put her down, it seemed to me reluctantly. Willow was still staring at him like he was nuts.
A few minutes later the wrestler and the woman, who turned out to be a woman wrestler, were called over to one corner of the balcony and the host announced that the children could go now to get their books signed (the kids at the party had all gotten gift bags containing a book of poetry in cartoon form about wrestling; a t-shirt; and a baseball hat) and have their pictures taken. All the kids?around 10 or 12 of them?who were at the party ran over.
"Go with them, Willow," I said. "You can have your book autographed. It will be your first book signed by an author."
I didn't think the two had written the book, but I wasn't sure it mattered. She was so tiny that she disappeared in the crush. The kids?and their parents?had their pictures taken with the man and the woman, and then the host yelled for me to come up and get my picture taken with Willow and the two wrestling celebrities. I squeezed through the tables. The man was holding up Willow.
"Do you know you're beautiful?" he was saying lovingly.
Fortunately it was time to leave. Limousines courtesy of the New York wrestling restaurant took us to Madison Square Garden. They were huge limousines. Inside ours the tv blared some game show and one nine-year-old was pretty quick with some difficult answers. The journey from 43rd to 33rd Sts. seemed to take many hours. The movie star put on her sunglasses and bolted from the car with her son, perhaps hoping to rescue him from my daughter. The rest of us trudged up many flights of stairs.
We didn't last long after we had found our seats, though, way at the top and to one end. My daughter isn't really a wrestling fan, she's more at the age, or stage, when she'd appreciate Barbie on Ice. After some loud firecrackers were set off to announce the arrival of a bad guy?or a good guy?I decided we should go home, even though we were going to miss seeing the wrestler whom Willow had left unscathed. The host asked if he could have our ticket stubs back.
It wasn't until we were past the sign that said "No Return Entrance" that Willow announced she had to go to the bathroom. I asked the guard at the gate for the location. We couldn't go back in, he said, but if we made a right and went down one level, into Penn Station, we would find one. I was a little queasy from all the champagne and dipping sauces. We were bundled in our winter coats, I was carrying a bag with the gifts from the party and Willow's security blanket and stuffed toys and fake fur scarf, along with her knapsack containing her homework and schoolbooks. I saw an elevator to the right. It was marked "handicapped" but two nonhandicapped people were getting on, and so we followed.
"No," said the elevator operator. "You can't come in. Where are you going?"
"The security guard said to go down one level to find the toilet for her."
"Where are your tickets?"
"Upstairs," I said. "We were leaving. I left my tickets."
It dawned on me that this elevator was not going to the main level of Penn Station but carried people to some backstage wrestling area, for wrestlers, or for Very Important Wrestling Fans. The woman passenger smirked at me as if I were a wrestling groupie, who traveled with a kid and pretended the child needed a toilet in order to crash backstage areas and in that fashion pick up wrestlers, only she knew what I was really up to.
"Where are your tickets?" he asked the other couple. The man showed the elevator operator two tickets.
"You have to leave," the elevator operator told us.
"Nice try," the woman cackled delightedly as the door shut behind us and wearily we trudged off into the night in search of a public toilet. "Nice try! Ha!"