I'm Not "Street Smart," Just "Pavement Intelligent"

As I mentioned in a previous post, I worked as a custodian at a Jewish community center (back then it was called a YM-YWHA) while I was in high school. I worked with a couple of guys my age who, to be honest, were likely to continue working as janitors after high school ended.

Robert Moses was streets smart, amirite?

I generally fit in with everyone, and there were plenty of crude jokes, profanity, and insults traded about. The one thing that made me a target was the fact that I did pretty well in school — better than my co-workers, at least — so this one guy in particular, I'll call him Freddy, liked to toss out this canard every now and then:

You may be book smart,
but you ain't street smart!

(This is an abridged version of his statement, as Freddy's vocabulary normally injected an average of three f-words per sentence.)

Does not count as book smart.

Whenever I did something that was stupid or embarrassing, which, given the nature of the job, was admittedly frequent, Freddy took the opportunity to brandish that particular taunt. If I put the trash bag into the garbage can incorrectly, it's because I wasn't street smart. If I got too close to the bathroom tiles with the pressure washer and blasted a few right off the floor, it's because I wasn't street smart.

Up till this point I had assumed that the only things you learned in "The Streets" was how to properly tape a stickball bat, open a fire hydrant on a steamy day, and hide from the coppers when you're caught snatching an orange off of Giuseppe's food cart. Apparently there was an entire streets-based education that I had been missing. Then again, Freddy must have been home sick from street-school when they taught that you shouldn't try to open a bottle of beer with your mouth, because it could split your molar in half, as it did Freddy's. Hell, I wasn't even street smart, yet I knew that fact quite intuitively.

That being said...

HEY, DUMMY
...there are plenty of stupid things that I've done in my life, including my own adventures in self-dentistry, so maybe Freddy is partially right. Here are a few DUH moments from my past.

INCIDENT: Running my finger across a rotary cutter.

REASON: Curiosity/stupidity.

Ouch.

YEAR/AGE: Probably my early to mid-teens.

DETAILS: See that pizza-cutter-looking thing over there? That's called a rotary cutter. If your mom is really into quilting and other fabric-related crafts, like mine is, she owns one of these tools. It cuts your textile of choice very easily, and, as I can attest, it will cut skin with aplomb. When the black shield is slid into a safety position, you can jab it into your carotid artery and cause little damage. (Note to my 14-year-old self if he is able to read this thanks to some time machine or Internet waves beamed to him from the future: do not attempt.) When the shield is down, all bets are off. All bets, that is, unless you're betting that if you run your finger across the blade, it will create a cut so thin that you won't even feel it, and then when you squeeze the tip to see if anything happened, blood will seep out like oil from the ground in There Will Be Blood. And yes, there will be blood. A lot of blood.

AFTERMATH: The wound was probably worthy of a stitch or two, but I put a Band-Aid on it tightly enough to keep it my finger together. It did reopen several times over the next couple of days, however. And I stayed away from rotary cutters, even though whenever I use a pizza cutter I'm tempted to test how sharp it really is.

*     *     *

INCIDENT: Eating a teaspoon of ground cinnamon. From a spoon.

Death sticks.

REASON: Ironically, for my health.

YEAR/AGE: Jeez, this was less than 18 months ago.

DETAILS: I'd read that cinnamon was good for you in quantities larger than what I normally sprinkle on my oatmeal, so I figured I should take a megadose without shelling out for cinnamon-filled capsules. I soon learned why they make cinnamon-filled capsules.

I should have assumed this would be a bad idea, having tried unsweetened cocoa with unpleasant results. Most powdery spices don't dissolve in your mouth as easily (or as tastily) as sugar, brown sugar, superfine sugar, powdered sugar, and Fun Dip, which is mostly sugar. Then again, I eat cinnamon with my oatmeal, so how bad could cinnamon-sans-oatmeal be?

Very bad. A mouthful of cinnamon is like a mouthful of sand. Horrible, spicy sand.

AFTERMATH: Mrs. The Anthony Show, who witnessed the whole thing, was like, "What did you expect?" Not that, obviously.

*     *     *

INCIDENT: Grabbing a Hades-hot frying pan handle without the pleasure of an oven mitt.

REASON: Because I was distracted by the taping of a reality/home-makeover show in my kitchen. (Bet you don't hear that excuse every day.)

YEAR/AGE: Last summer — you know, I originally planned this to be a "look at how stupid I used to be" post.

DETAILS: So, Mrs. The Anthony Show was able to get us onto a home-makeover show on A&E called $100 Makeover. I'll spare the main details about the show for a future post, but the night before the real shooting was to begin, the producer had the production staff over to film some preliminary bits, which included me going through the motions of cooking. This was all normal except for the black sheets covering all the windows to prevent any light to ruin the shots but made the house look like we were being quarantined for cholera. Oh, and the bright production lights and camera in my face.

Makeover: $100. Pain: priceless

Anyway, the dinner I chose to begin preparing was a very good recipe for London broil, which I'll probably talk about in another post. The gist of the recipe is to get your oven as hot as possible: 500 degrees, preferably at that temperature for at least 20 minutes. Then you're to put the meat into a pan that can handle high temperatures (a pan that's been preheated on high for 15 minutes), the pan then put into the oven...on the bottom, where it's hottest, especially if you put it on a recommended pizza stone.

In other words, you turn your oven into a kiln.

I was filmed heating the oven and preparing vegetables, then the shoot ended, the crew left, and I continued my preparations, which included having the steak in the oven for 4 minutes, removing the pan while wearing  oven mitts, flipping the meat, and returning it to the hell-hole for another 3-4 minutes.

Sure, I was mad, but one taste and all was forgiven.

But this time around, Chef The Anthony Show, instead of preparing the meal with no distractions, was talking to Mrs. The Anthony Show about the upcoming shoot for the weekend, and what we just went through, and how exciting it would be to have our dump turned into something less than a dump, like a living room that wouldn't shame me into never letting my kids invite friends over in case they return home to tell their parents that they now know someone whose family's on welfare which is almost true because here I'm making London broil and not a porterhouse, and OH MY FUCK I GRABBED THE FUCKING METAL HANDLE WITH MY BARE FUCKING HAND AND OH FUCK FUCK FUCK THAT HURTS LIKE ALL-FUCK.

There's the speed of light and the speed of sound, and then there's the speed of pain. When I grabbed the handle, the pain registered so fast that I heard a yelp that originated from me, but happened so fast that I didn't even know where the sound came from. The pain was concentrated in two small areas in the web of the hand and my thumb, but it was like taking the agony of my whole body if were set on fire and compressing it into something as small and dense as possible.

You're Solo, but we made
quite the duet that day.

AFTERMATH: In one of the smarter moves I've executed, I kept the hand in a red Solo cup full of cool water, which prevented the situation from getting worse and my having to appear on free-cable TV wearing a large gauze glove looking like some kind of Michael Jackson fan. I also, somehow, finished cooking dinner, ate dinner, took the family to get Italian ices, considered leaping over the counter to shove my hand into a tub of rainbow ice, left the wife and kids in front of the Ralph's ice stand while I drove to the CVS across the street to get some burn cream, had a brain lock as I wondered whether I should be using burn cream at all because I'd heard somewhere that burn cream only makes it worse (a decision made more difficult because of the throbbing pain), remembered to pick up the wife and kids, and considered going to the hospital, all with my hand in that red Solo cup.

I wanted to marry that red Solo cup.

*     *     *

This post is long enough, so I'll stop here, but I'm sure this will be a continuing feature, as I've done plenty of stupid things in my life. Including, as I learn each day, this blog.