A Foodie Fairytale

Dilly Dan was a pickle man, selling his gherkins and garlics on the corner of 1st avenue and 12th street. His cart was in the shape of a dill and he wore a uniform of all green, down to his socks and shoes. Dan lived for pickles. He ate them at every meal, canned them, sold them and slept on a green pillow.

All was green and briny in Dan’s world until the day a new food cart opened for business across the street.

Funnel Fran was a funnel cake girl, a fourth generation food cart vendor. Her great grandfather Penny Candy Stan the Cheap Candy Man opened a cart on 4th avenue in 1932 selling licorice, bubble gum and ribbon candy. Fran’s grandfather Corndog Bob operated his cart throughout Central Park. He passed the cart onto his son, Fran’s dad, who transformed into Apple Pie Peter whose pies were known all over the five boroughs.

Funnel Fran opened her cart across the street from Dilly Dan on a warm July morning. It only took until the afternoon for Funnel Fran to be out of ingredients. The local people were crazy for her cakes. Meanwhile, Dan had only sold one pickle, a Texas Dill to a small child who took a bite and dropped it down the storm drain.

That evening Dilly Dan concocted a plan to get his business back from Funnel Fran. Dilly Dan was a big fan of plans as well as cheese in a can, spray tans and ’64 Chevy oil pans. When Dan made his way to 1st avenue the next morning he was sans cans, tans or pans. In his mind he carried only his plan. And in his arms he carried a 5 gallon drum of pickle brine.

He found Fran hard at work inside her cart. She had four plastic containers each filled with her famous funnel cake batter. Dan needed to distract his rival so he set her cart on fire. While Fran sprayed the flames with an extinguisher, Dan snuck into the cart to pour his pickle brine into the funnel cake batter. Dan stirred the juice into the batter until you couldn’t tell it was there.

Dilly Dan snuck away to watch from the shadows as Fran’s business was ruined when she sold funnel cakes that tasted like pickles. However, to Dan’s astonishment, people loved them. Fran couldn’t make them fast enough. The line at her cart stretched across the road, blocking traffic. Drivers abandoned their cars to purchase a Funnel Fran funnel cake.

Dan got in line himself and purchased one of Fran’s confections. As he ate it he fell into a state of bliss he didn’t know existed. The combination of the sweetness of the sugar, the thickness of the dough and the tartness of the pickle juice made for a flavor that outshone pork rinds, fried Oreos and pheasant broiled in a white wine reduction and covered in mango hollandaise sauce.

Dan looked at Fran with her frizzy blond hair, crooked smile and giant, mannish hands and realized he was falling in love. As he ate his funnel cake he envisioned the two of them working side by side in their carts selling pickles, cakes, pickle flavored cakes, cake flavored pickles, and assorted souvenir hats, shirts, bumper stickers, iPad cases, nasal inhalers, lunch meats, lemon reamers, cutlery, hair clips, antiperspirant, window decals, combustion engines, flower vases, front end loaders, breakfast cereal, balloons, alpacas, finely crafted furniture, ceramic mugs, notebooks, pocket watches and sunglasses. Lots of sunglasses.

Dilly Dan wandered the streets until the end of the day. When Fran finally put out her closed sign, Dan approached the exhausted confectioner. He introduced himself as Dilly Dan the pickle man. Fran smiled shyly.

“I’ve seen you with your cart,” she said.

Dan smiled back and told her how much he loved her funnel cake. Fran thanked him but explained she didn’t even know how they got that flavor.

“I’d love to sell more,” she said, “but I don’t know how I did it.”

“I can help you with that,” Dan told Fran. “You could say it was my recipe.”

Dan explained how that morning he had been angry with Fran for taking his business. Using animated hand motions he described his love of plans, cans and tans and how he executed his plan at 8 a.m. by setting her cart on fire then sneaking in and pouring pickle juice in the batter. Dan continued his story and was at the point of the souvenir combustion engines when Fran punched him in the face. Repeatedly.

Dilly Dan was a pickle man until he lost all his teeth and his eyes swelled shut and that cut on the bridge of his nose wouldn’t stop bleeding and his ear drum perforated and his brain swelled inside his skull . . .

Was it Something I Said?

Twice in the past months I have submitted to an online publication only to see them go out of business shortly after. These were not fly-by-night zines; one was in business for 4 years and the other for 6 putting out 36 issues. I’m starting to wonder if it’s me. Here is my cover letter to the first publication:

Dear Sirs:

I have included 3 poems for you to consider. They are brilliant and most likely beyond your comprehension. If you do not publish them I swear to God I will find where you live, sell tickets to the neighbors and let them watch while I burn your house to the ground. Have a great day!

I was direct and to the point, didn’t waste the editor’s time and wished him well at the end. I think this was the perfect introduction. Here is one I sent a few weeks ago:

Hello,

I have attached a file containing several poems for you to consider. Work this transcendent cannot not be showcased properly in a publication as low brow as yours but I still believe it’s in your best interests to print them. Good luck in your future endeavors. You’ll need it if you reject my poems.

Again, I think I did an admirable job and this time a threat was only implied. I don’t see the problem, but the magazine decided to stop publishing days after I submitted.

I went through my records and noticed a disturbing trend back as far as 1993 when I had a story called “Taking Jenny Seriously” accepted but the magazine went out of business just before they were to print it. I found this note I wrote to them:

I see you have finally come to your senses. I will now release your cat Pipsy.

Hmm. I guess I should have held onto the cat a while longer. The following year my story “Magic Hands” was accepted, but again, the zine in question went out of business right before my story was to be printed. I had written this to the editor:

Sir, it is with profound disinterest that I accept your acceptance of my story Magic Hands. I have accepted that being accepted by a publication such as yours is a necessary step to acceptance by a higher class of magazine for which I would like to be accepted.

I was drinking a lot of cough syrup at this time. A particularly maddening example happened in 2000. Three of my poems were accepted by a small zine. Before the publication date arrived I had to withdraw one of them. This angered the editor to the point where she decided not to publish any of them. I won’t reprint here the whole letter I sent her but it included the phrases “drop your ashes back down into the pit of hell” and “if you regain consciousness”.

I’m beginning to think it’s something I said.