THE LAST BURGER JOINT ON EARTH

Normally I don't eat breakfast, contenting myself with strong coffee, and a cigar outside the healthclub while waiting for the bus. The cigar will have been started while in the bathroom earlier. But today I woke up from a vivid dream involving hamburgers grilled to a medium, some with bacon and cheese, some without, tomato and pickles, ketchup, mustard (Dijon), lettuce optional, ninety six ciabatta buns, and Dame Judy Dench.
So I am enjoying imaginary cooking aromas.
A lingering ghost in the nose.

Dame Judy works in a burger joint.
Which is a very clean place.
And well-lighted.


The last time I had a burger was after Monzer ('Mike') Shawa died. He was the owner of Sams on Broadway, where the late night crowd would have a bite to eat in between stripping, pouring, or shooting up. Or after drinking. Years ago when I lived nearby I ate at Sams two or three times a week.
After the American beef industry got caught obfuscating about mad cow disease, I started eschewing their products, and consequently had not eaten beef since 2004.

The American beef industry, for your information, seems to be represented largely by lying sons of bitches in Texas.

Sams was the last honest burger joint in a city that used to have a greasy spoon on every block. Mike ran it like a home for the wayward, making everyone except the disorderly feel welcome. Cooks, ex cons, exotic dancers, painters, poets, faux intellectuals, retired Chinese gentlemen who just wanted a quiet six pack in the evening followed by a nap, a syphilitic Bostonian, short pugnacious little Italian men and a few nationalists from Balkan countries (playing cards together at the table in the back), Ah Choi gambling with the racist from Louisiana and methodically taking all his money, batshit crazy Helen who was convinced that Willie Brown and the NAACP had taken her mansion on Nob Hill and had had microphones embedded in her flip-flops, AND were sending wires into her spine, up through her mattress at the Sam Wong Hotel across the street .....

Anthony Bourdain ate there once. He loved it.

That's a damned good burger.



No, I don't know why I mentally placed Dame Judy Dench in a glorified version of Sams on Broadway. She'd make a great burger flipper, though.
It would be a fabulous movie.





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