Hidden in the Mayonnaise (Part 1)

A blinding red light glowed obnoxiously over the studio room at the WNRC radio station in New York. The bulb was a clear warning for all to stay out. Broadcasting was in progress.

“…slippery… slippery…”

Standing underneath that bulb was a man named Harvey Stone, a sub-tier news anchor for that sub-tier station. Harvey wasn’t sub-tier by choice, however. It was by virtue of the stories that he was assigned to read over the air.

It was nonetheless a job to take seriously, and that’s what he did. He was practicing to make sure he wasn’t under-pronouncing his P’s.

“Slippery… sliPPery situation…”

Harvey would be on air in just minutes.

He took a cigarette out of his front pocket and put it between his lips. A bespectacled producer that had happened to be nearby struck a match for him.

“Thanks, pal,” Harvey said, as he puffed the cigarette alight. He then took one long pull from it and exhaled through his nostrils.

“…slippery… slipp-errry…”

Harvey graduated in 1926 from Washington State University, a lonely college surrounded by the vast swaths of wheat fields in Eastern Washington. He had dreams of going to New York and becoming a serious news anchor. He wanted to report hard news—political scandals and the coronation of kings. But when his producers discovered that Harvey had too much a flair for comedic timing, all he would ever get to read were fluff pieces.

Unlike Winnie Banks.

Winnie was in the studio finishing a story about an arsonist who had set fire to a parliament building in Germany last winter. Stirred up a real hornet’s nest over there.

Winnie wouldn’t know comic timing from a bucket of confetti.

“…found themselves in a slippery situation… slippery…”

“You’re up, bud,” the bespectacled producer said, tapping Harvey on the arm.

“Thanks,” Harvey replied dully. He handed the producer that smoldering cigarette who promptly stamped it out in an ashtray.

Harvey straightened his tie and ran his hand over his oily hair to make sure that it was slicked-back neat.

“…slippery, slippery… slippery situation…”

But Harvey supposed he was lucky to have a job—this being Hoover’s economy, and all.

The red light above Harvey’s head began to flicker, and Winnie said his closing catchphrase: “And that’s the news—from my lips to your ears.” 

When the red light flickered off, Harvey nodded and promptly entered the studio. An assistant put a needle to a vinyl record, which played a canned advertisement for the Rosewater Soap Company.

“What have you got for us today, yuckmeister?” Winnie said to Harvey. Winnie was organizing his papers on the broadcasting desk. “A mermaid sighting off the coast of Florida? A man in Iowa chewing gum for 24 hours straight?”

Harvey flashed Winnie a weary grin.

“For your information, I have a story about a tragic accident off the Union Street Bridge in Brooklyn,” he said, quickly.

Winnie seemed taken aback. He stopped his paper shuffling and turned to Harvey and said, “Oh really! How come I didn’t hear about that? How many people died?”

Harvey twisted his lips and shifted his eyes a little and replied, “Well, none…”

Winnie harrumphed and asked, “What’s the tragedy, then?”

“Well,” Harvey said, “it was a truck full of mayonnaise. It toppled over and spilled on the bridge…”

“Manganese?” Winnie said, squinting at Harvey.

“No… mayonnaise.”

“Like the condiment?”

Harvey nodded. 

Winnie shook his head and said, “I was under the impression there was a Depression going on, that people were starving. At least that’s what they tell me to read on the air…” He crumpled the papers in his hands and extended them to Harvey. “Yet they spill mayonnaise on bridges.”

That commercial for Rosewater Soap was wrapping up with a jingle from The Boswell Sisters, crooning about how this product could transform the putridly human smells into that of a fragrant bouquet of roses.

Winnie tucked the mess of papers underneath his arm and stood up.

“Well, good luck Harvey,” Winnie said. “Our public has thirsty ears.”

“…that are about to be quenched with mayonnaise,” Harvey replied.

Winnie let out a laugh and said, “That’s why you’re the yuckmeister.” He continued laughing as he exited the studio.

Harvey let out a weary grin. That wasn’t even his best stuff.

Harvey sat down at the broadcasting desk, brought the microphone up to his mouth, and cleared his throat.

“Ready!” the assistant called out. “In one, two…”

Harvey nodded and began speaking.

“Good evening, folks. I’m Harvey Stone with your Daily Digest.”

“Motorists found themselves in a slippery situation when a truck filled with mayonnaise—that’s right, folks—mayonnaise struck head on with a cement truck at around 1 o’clock this afternoon at the Union Street Bridge, overlooking the Gowanus Canal…”

 

~*~

 

“Is it manna?” asked Sullivan. 

Sullivan was a short-haired, orange and white alley cat who lived underneath the Union Street Bridge with his best friend—a human named Sam Jones. 

“Manna?” Sam said.

Sam and Sullivan stood on their hind legs on the wet, silty bank, and marveled over a mysterious stream of thick, white liquid dribbling down a steel column. Sam thoughtfully stroked his long dusty beard with a grimy hand, while Sullivan twirled one of his wiry whiskers with a retracted dewclaw.

“Yeah, that mysterious sustenance described in the Book of Exodus that God sent to hungry Israelites while they escaped Egypt,” Sullivan explained.

Sam let out a chortle and said, “You’ve been reading that Bible again, have you.”

“Interesting stuff, huh?” the cat shrugged.

“That’s one way to put it.”

That Bible had been gifted to Sam by a pair of missionaries. Sam had just as soon that well-meaning duo save their money on the book and instead share a square meal with him instead. But at least it made for a nice pillow. And it also gave something for the cat to do.

“The Israelites were also said to have purified bitter water by tossing a log into it,” Sullivan continued.

“Is that so?” Sam replied.

Sam picked up a broken up piece of wood from an old crate that had six rusted brads that spiked out dangerously on its ends and chucked it into the that toxic cesspool that was Gowanus Canal. That industrial body of water where unknowable gasses could be seen wafting out of it like dry ice in that hot summer sun. He and Sullivan watched the board as it became dyed into a green and iridescent color as it floated down the current and out of sight.

“You won’t catch me drinking that water,” Sam said.

Sullivan, not terribly impressed by Sam’s apparent mocking of the Bible, was still fixated on the mayonnaise.

“Well is it?” Sullivan asked.

“Is it what?”

“Manna?”

“Oh…”

Sam reached out to dip a finger into the stuff and examined it. He then sniffed it and grimaced sourly. 

“No. It’s not manna,” he said. “It’s mayonnaise.”

“Oh,” replied the cat, looking down, dejected. His stomach made a rumbling noise. 

Suddenly, another thought occurred to Sullivan. He looked back to Sam hopefully, and asked “Can you eat it?”

Sam wiped the goop on the seat of his dirt-ridden pants and said, “Only if you had about two tons of salami and two hundred slices of rye.”

Sam then made a sour grimace and added, “Besides, this stuff is already going rancid.”

Sullivan then sighed and asked, “If God sent the Israelites manna, why would he send us mayonnaise?”

“Easy,” Sam replied, “because we’re not God’s chosen people.”

Sullivan sulked, “In my case, I’m not even a people.”

“Trust me, being a people is not all it’s cracked up to be,” Sam replied, taking a deep breath of the chemical-ridden air. “I’ve never seen a cat do anything like that to water.”

Then, all of a sudden, Sullivan gasped and shouted, “Sam, look out!”

“What is it?” Sam reflexively looked up.

Part of the bridge had given way, and a colossal wave of mayonnaise was barreling straight for them.

The next thing they knew, they were drenched in the gooey liquid from head to toe.

“Oh cripes!” Sam cried as he tried to wipe the viscous liquid off his face. But all the good he did was smear it around.

“Yuck!” Sullivan whimpered, trying to do the same, but all it did was lather it in his fur.

“Ugh, this is awful, just awful,” Sam cried, as he cleared mayonnaise from his eyes so that he could see. The canal, which was usually a mess, was now even more so. Mayonnaise was oozing into it and chunks were floating down with the current like little icebergs. Sam looked over to his lean-to shack that he’d constructed with scrap wood that he’d scavenged around the Gowanus canal to see that it too was completely smothered in mayonnaise. “Oh, Jiminy Christmas,” he cursed.

Sullivan turned to his friend with mournful eyes and asked, “Where do we sleep now?”

Sam didn’t respond. He tried to take one step in that mayonnaise muck, but his worn-out shoes couldn’t get a grip. He slipped and fell onto his backside.

Just then, a women’s voice called out, “Sam! Are you in there?”

Sam’s heart leapt. It was Rita, a woman often seen selling poppies along 3rd Avenue for a penny a piece. She was rail-thin, garbed in an understated red dress with a delicate white and yellow floral pattern, and a sash that hugged her waistline. She wasn’t technically homeless, but she wasn’t too far removed from it. A kindly florist named Mr. Rosenblatt not only let her sleep in the backroom of his shop, but he supplied her with the poppies to sell. 

“Rita!” Sam called back to her, waving a mayonnaise-soaked arm at her. “I am OK, I’m just a little slicked up!”

Rita’s eyes widened in horror. “Sam! Let me help you!”

“No, no, stay where you are! You don’t want to go anywhere near this stuff!”

Rita cared for Sam deeply, but Sam was too embarrassed by his squalid living conditions to take things further than friendship. Sam did often dream of stumbling onto a nice paying factory job, or something, so that he could afford a wedding and perhaps make enough money to rent a place in the city. But jobs had been difficult to come by lately.

Sam grumbled as he struggled to get back to his two feet. When he did, he wriggled his shoe through the mayonnaise and into the silty soil until he could steady his footing. He then took a large stride through the muck, and then dug in that foot. So on and so forth, and he was out of the mess in a minute flat. Sullivan fared much better than that, scampering out of there in no time, being much closer to the ground and having a propensity for walking on all fours.

“Normally, I’d just give myself a tongue bath when I get all mucky like this,” Sullivan said, “but this stuff is disgusting.”

Sam replied, “We’ll have to find someplace to wash ourselves off.”

Sullivan gazed into the chemically canal and watched the chunks of mayonnaise float down it, then intermixing with a new, oily red substance. Seemed that the paint factory upstream had just dumped out some of their byproduct.

“We could really use that magic log about now. It’d clean up that canal in no time, and we could wash ourselves off,” Sullivan said.

“You can say that again, brother.”

Just then, the sound of feet crunching through silt could be heard getting closer. It was Rita. Her mouth hung agape as she brought a hand to it. “Sam, oh no!” she cried.

“It could be worse,” Sam said.

She looked over Sam’s shoulder to see that his lean-to shelter was completely ruined. “And your home…”

“It wasn’t much of a home,” Sam admitted.

“Yeah, but…” Rita trailed off, grimacing at him pathetically. “Come on, you’re coming with me to go wash up in Mr. Rosenblatt’s shop.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Rita,” Sam said, his voice filled with concern. “You don’t need an old vagrant like me stinking up old Mr. Rosenblatt’s place. You got a good thing going on there.” 

“Don’t be silly,” Rita insisted.

Sam sighed. “Really,” he said. “We will go find someplace else to clean off. If I spoil your living arrangements, I’ll never forgive myself.”

Sam turned to the cat and said, “Come on, Sullivan. We will go find someplace we can wash off.”

Rita pressed a palm against her forehead, and said, “I wish you would just…”

Right then, Sam tripped over an old beat up brick and fell face-first into the silt. Strangely, the mayonnaise on his body did not come off but instead acted like glue and caused silt to get stuck on him. As a consequence, he looked like a giant human size blob of dirt. He turned around and laid on his back and the dirt accumulated there was well.

“Sam, oh, look at you!” Rita shrieked.

“Wow, this stuff…” Sam said, trying to grab clumps of it and toss it off his body but only ending up mixing it together.

He struggled to get back to his feet, especially then since the mayonnaise and the dirt added at least 25 lbs on him that he wasn’t used to.

Come on, Sullivan,” Sam said. “Let’s go to the Coney Island Beach.”

“Oh, Sam,” Rita cried, “but that’s a five-mile hike from here.”

“Exactly,” Sam responded. “We better get going.”

“I wish you would just let me…”

But Sam and Sullivan were already walking off. “So long, Rita!” he yelled after her. “Me and Sullivan will be back in no time, good as new.”

 

~*~

 

...Click here for Part 2

Image from Wikimedia Commons