Remembrance of things Pabst

When I was eleven or twelve years old, my dad brought me to work with him on a Saturday and Sunday. He worked for the Irving Trust in the accounting department as an auditor but on the weekends he picked up extra money doing tax returns for this guy in Midtown. He had his own accounting practice and as I said he specialized in the garment center and Chinese restaurants.

Anyway my job was to file, sharpen pencils and copy the tax returns. It was around 1969 or 1970 or so and they didn't have such a thing as a Xerox machine. What they had was a Bruning Copyflex which was a "Wet" copier. Now that is not as exciting as it sounds. What it was is you did the returns on a stencil and matched it up with "treated paper" and it was run through a machine. There was fluid in the machine and when it came out it would be wet and you would have to lay it out to dry. Then you had to put the pages in order and staple it and mail it to the government. Of course tax returns were about five pages then not the twenty to fifty pages they are today.

Since I had a good work ethic and worked really hard the boss hired me to work through the summer. When I was in high school he hired me to come help him at his accounts during the summer. Now in those days there was no such thing as a computer or a calculator or a laptop. You had green accounting paper, pencils and your fingers and your toes. So it was a lot of adding and subtracting and proving out ledgers and old time accounting work like you were Bartleby the fucking Scrivner.

So I would go with Eddie to these Chinese restaurants. I was a punk kid and I couldn't have a beer legally but I got a good grounding in Chinese food. Now in the early seventies you didn't really have the variety and knowledge about Chinese food that we have today. Basically when you were talking about Chinese food you were talking about Cantonese style food. You know. Egg Rolls. Chop Suey. Spare Ribs. Egg Drop Soup. Birds nest soup. It was really big with the Jewish guys. They loved it.

Now we had this client on Ann St in downtown Manhattan. It was called Yee's cafe and it was a pretty interesting place. They had just taken over a Greek diner and sold food like a diner. I mean it wasn't a traditional old school Chinese restaurant with the decor of the Budda and the fish tank and all that happy horseshit. You could get eggs in the morning too. A lot of the back office people who worked on Wall St would go there for lunch. He did have a great dish with shrimp and bean sprouts that was really tasty.

Anyway it was a pretty easy account in the accounting sense. I mean he did a lot with cash and only wrote a few checks if you know what I mean. So it became the first account I went to on my own without any supervision. For years upon year I would go and do the books and chow down on some bean sprouts.

But then we had the Szechuan invasion. A lot of people came over from the Szechuan province or whatever the hell it was and brought the spicier and hotter Szechuan style to compete with the blander Cantonese style. This new place opened up around the corner on Broadway on the corner and started to steal a lot of business. It was tough for Yees Cafe.

Now I bet ricpic is the only guy old enough to remember when Chinese food only came in cardboard cartons and there was no such thing as the Styrofoam lunch containers that are so ubiquitous today. It seems that a Chinese restaurant supply company came up with this compartmentalized lunch packaging that you could go in and get a combination plate with fried rice, beef with broccoli and a egg roll in one shot for three dollars. The problem was what do you do with it when you are done? You see Yee's was like a diner. You got the stuff on real plates and ate with a metal fork. Old school. But this new fangled place was all modern. The dude running thought he was going to start a string of them and be the Chinese McDonald's.

Now around 1978 or so I was in college in Pace and still doing the taxes for Yees. He was holding on even thought the competition was tough. They had knocked down the building next door and there was just a big hole in the ground. And a funny thing happened. The other guy with the fast food Chinese decided that he could save money by firing his carting company and dumping his garbage in the big empty lot between his store and Yee's cafe. Mounds upon mounds of garbage. Of course this was the seventies and the city was all fucked up so no one noticed or they bribed the sanitation guys or whatever.

One hot summer night a pipe burst and hot scalding water was emptied into the lot. About a thousand rats came pouring out on to Ann Street. They bit passerby's, tires, garbage bags and anything they came into contact with in lower Manhattan. It was like a horror movie. Just like the movie "Ben" only without the Michael Jackson songs or the creepy white guy. They swarmed the cops and the fireman who were sent out to kill them. They closed the whole street for two weeks.

After that no one would eat at Yee's. The other guy was gone with the wind because they could prove it was his fault so he want back to Hong Kong or whatever. But Mr. and Mrs. Yee lost their business and there was nothing you could do about it. I mean they probably would have lost it soon anyway because all of the big chains like McDonald's and Burger King and Wendy's and what not took over the fast lunch business. People didn't want to sit down in a diner setting so much anymore. So like Cantonese food, a Chinese diner became a thing from out of the past. Like a gas light or a hitching post.

I have eaten a lot of Chinese food since then, but I have yet to get a shrimp with bean sprouts that matched up to Yee's.

And the rats. Well man, they are still around. Watch out because at any minute they can come streaming out and start biting you on the ankle.