The Development in the Chowder

It has grown to be a popular assumption that apparitions and similar paranormal events are to retain the size and scale of their flesh-and-blood yesteryear. I now know this to be false. I will hereby relate to you the events that led to this most queer discovery of mine.

Recently I had a late lunch at an ill-populated seafood restaurant that sits nestled between an old torpedo factory and a Nepalese silk shop. The place was named after a local legend, a whaling ship captain, who had acquired a good deal of fame due to his ability to place himself and his crew in all sorts of peril and then, against every odd known to humanity, emerge with only the thinnest set of casualties. His habit for recklessness and subsequent avoidance of catastrophe had provided him with a life of tiny triumphs and was therefore plush with cinematic anecdotes. His lone protocol is that he offload his calamitous jibber on any star-cursed bubba within back-slapping distance. 

The Captain, as he was simply referred to as, was also a self-proclaimed connoisseur of “old fashioned maritime instinct”—a trait that no one, including the Captain, could define without going full-blown lowland gorilla on their interlocutor with the kind of ectomorphic spectacle people launch into when they are in need of the Heimlich maneuver or an exorcist or both. The Captain’s distrust in nautical maps was so comprehensive that they were not permitted within “pootin’ distance” of his ship, and his disregard for compasses and all other directional instruments had surpassed the level of Apache League baseballers. I’m sure many are familiar with the literal tendency of the Captain to famously “throw the compass to the wind and make way by the stars themselves”—a popular phrase of the Captain’s that I am told has since been promoted to the role of barroom toasts. Saner captains have gained no such fame for their maritime foresight.

I also understand that the Captain, possibly unbeknownst to the proprietors of the restaurant that shares his name, enthusiastically boasted of a strict vegan diet. He had proudly and frequently (and incorrectly) insisted that man can live off kelp alone. Legend has it even that it was not uncommon to see the stuff severely entangled in the Captain’s famous smile. It was the Captain’s oft disgruntled crew that had formulated the idea that he painstakingly applied this kelp to his teeth before social events (usually fundraisers for new masts or bigger harpoons) or interviews with the local press (ordinarily conducted from the dodgy confines of life rafts or the naval hospital).

The Captain’s fate was one of severe ignominy. He had just arrived back at port after steering what would be the last ship under his command, the Benny Briggs, through a tempest that seemed to have flared up out of the Old Testament. ("Mountains and valleys of rabid waves, undulating like a swarm of pythons” was the description proffered by one of the more imaginative crewmen.) Despite the weather reports that he had disregarded (or perhaps never heard), the Captain had taken the Benny Briggs out to sea in search for a behemoth of a humpback whale that had been reported several days earlier by one Tuppy Q. Muldoon while at the helm of his Estrella. Muldoon had been the Captain’s fiercest competitor, and the prospect of besting his rival supplied the Captain with a gleefully wicked motivation. Rather than surrendering to the tremendously favorable odds and embracing a death at sea, the Captain, having returned with zero contact with the humpback, decided to lie down for his afternoon nap on a pier where a steamer called the Caddo Bossier had come to dock. The Caddo Bossier at the time was undergoing an intensive refurbishment, and the steamer’s crew, having retired for the day, had decided to relax with some good Bermudan rum and a tournament of anchor tossing. It would be a tournament whose wayward disposition would work its way into local lore. The Captain’s last words were “Sheathe your baton rouge, friend, or I shall dice thou into chum.” They had been spoken to his beagle Murray.

Conspiracy theories were quick to sprout, as they usually are when such an unlikely and misfortunate death is introduced to someone with the caliber of fame as the Captain. Local fingers immediately pointed in the direction of Muldoon, as he was the Captain’s most high-profile nemesis. It was an accusation that Muldoon cold-shouldered repeatedly and with aggressive brevity before finally getting tipped into the realm of indignation and countering (now bug-eyed with rage) with why anyone would think he’d ever feel compelled to take the time to orchestrate such a bizarre demise for a foe that possessed such popular incompetence. A biographer of the Captain’s later asked a long-retired and geriatric Muldoon what he had really thought of the Captain; Muldoon had replied with his famous smirk: “The Captain set a standard for all us captains! If you found yourself doin’ somethin’ he’d do, then you’d know you’d gone madder than a sprayed roach!—or were drunk!”

But, yeah, it was this day, in this restaurant of waning merit, that I encountered an alarming new development in my unconditional quest for a solid ontological perspective.

I was hovering over my lunch, contemplating the restaurant’s décor, which was a sort of Age of Sail bric-a-bric Valhalla—all dark wood and electric lighting that masqueraded as candlelight, walls slick with sickly-looking maps of lakes and seas that I had never heard of and portraits of admirals with smeared beards and seemingly AI-generated names like “Wanksmith” and “Luckdown” and vast cast-nets occupied by yesteryear’s taxidermy: a barracuda, partially gnawed on by indigenous vermin, a dogfish, tragically bent, as if he were pantomiming Ouroboros, and a trio of zero-gravity crustaceans that were frozen mid-scurry and guarding a way-too-big cardboard sign that instructed customers, in as many words, that they DO NOT touch the pufferfish—a warning-cum-aphorism since, yeah, there was no pufferfish. Not anymore, at least. A gumball machine with no gum held post near the entrance. A cigarette machine with no packs of cigarettes clogged up the little waiting area near the host stand. Anachronisma ruled supreme here… And the whole place looked like old books smell, if that makes sense. Years ago, I remember as if it were a dream, I once came here and steeped myself in Cutty Sark at the restaurant’s little bar and ended up on an explorative sortie to the restroom (an urban myth, I am convinced, since it seems one is liable to happen upon a minotaur in a moo-moo before finding this joint’s john) and wound up in a dark, damp, uninhabited private dining room that featured a hopelessly asymmetrical catamaran, roped off like it was the Wright Brothers Flyer. It was this sort of dated leftfield devilry that kept me occasionally coming back here…

(That and the okay food and, yeah, the fact that it’s supposedly haunted.)

But, yeah, I was contemplating all of that when I moved my contemplation over to more immediate concerns: what should I do with the pickle that had come playing sidekick to my shrimp po’boy? This restaurant, I had loosely been informed, had an almost obnoxious pride in the quality of its pickles. (When a restaurant boasts of its pickles you know you’re in trouble.) And this fact alone should have ebbed my zeal for this place, alas, a persistent growl in my stomach had squelched the voice of common sense.

I opted to bite off the ends of the pickle in oblique protest and then I balanced the newly deformed thing on top of a bottle of ketchup. The implied message of the spectacle being: don’t let this happen to you. I then turned my attention to the remainder of my Manhattan clam chowder. I am not known as one who pays careful attention to the contents of soup. For that matter I tend to disregard inspecting my meals before devouring them, as a blue collar decade of meals-on-the-clock has instilled a hurried manner to my eating: I eat with the pastiche of a Hollywood werewolf, and I am 100% certain I chew less than anyone in my social sphere…

So, yeah, it surprised me that I found myself staring into a spoonful of chowder, again contemplating. I remember thinking of origin of the word Manhattan: “Land of many hills” it meant in the language of the Delaware Indians. It only then occurred to me that the current showcase of dense verticality that is modern day Manhattan had settled for bona fide misnomer. Nonetheless, it was a good set of syllables. Man-hat-tan. Very user friendly and far superior to the sickly, lingering vowels of New York.  For it was impossible to say “New York” ten times in a row without feeling you’ve lost some vital handle on the ability to speak English or any other language. New York does, however, seem a more appropriate moniker when rendered in text, as the N, Y, and K do well to suggest height and severity. Still I couldn’t help but think that New York deserved a better name. Maybe this was where the allegiances to its boroughs derived from: Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx were all better names than New York. Nobody really ever referred to Staten Island, but even it possessed more aesthetic merit. I concluded that the City was sometimes added to New York not as a method of distinguishing the great city from the state that emanated from it, but rather as a means of providing an outpost for those seeking familiarity and sanity.

I had hopelessly moved onto the word “chowder” when I noticed a tiny splash in the contents of my spoon. The splash was followed by a set of ripples—and then by another splash with more ripples. I brought the spoon closer and peered into it. I was beginning to second guess my eyeballs when I spied another series of splashes, just south of a small square of diced sautéed onion. At this point, I realized there was something abnormal about my chowder.

“Everything taste okay?” asked the waiter, who had taken notice of my wrinkled brow.

As a diner I had a bit of a reputation as a milquetoast. I had managed to work my way through undercooked omelets, overcooked steaks, and had even removed the occasional rogue strand of hair from dishes to avoid awkward confrontations with waiters. This lust for amity was easily satiated due to the fact that I usually approached my foodstuff with a trophy level of indiscrimination. I was neither finicky nor easily grossed out. My chowder, however, was beginning to weird me out.

“Something…” I said, “is wrong with this soup.”

“You want it hotter? I can heat it up,” he replied, too quickly, too loudly.

“No, no, it’s just…I don’t know, it’s just acting kinda kooky.”

This reply confused the Holy Spirit out of my waiter. He grimaced for a long five seconds and then asked me if I’d like something else instead. Perhaps the New England clam chowder. I looked up at him. He had the sturdy build of a baseball player, ambiguously cross-eyed, and probably still comfortably perched in his twenties, although his weathered face, with its indentations of premature grief and absence of steady hydration, insisted otherwise. He was wearing an oversized white vest that was stained with a potpourri of condiments. He was cleanshaven and his matte black hair was severely slicked back. An acrobatic tattoo lay claim to his left arm from its elbow to its wrist: Libre, Soberana e Independiente. The gaze he continued to fix upon me was the variety reserved for vacated wasp nests or spiders of suspicious disposition.

“Here,” I said, quietly, returning my attention to my spoon. “Check it out...”

I raised the spoon a little so he could see. He bent over with his hands clasped behind his back and stared into the spoon like he was looking at the tip of his nose. He asked me what exactly he was supposed to be looking for.

“There!” I said, pinky-pointing at a new series of splashes, “That. You see it? It’s like tiny little splashes…”

My waiter yelped in reaction. He had seen it. I shifted in my seat and peered deeper into the spoon. I could now see two small dots, each about the size of the tip of a ball-point pen, that were responsible for the commotion. The waiter inched closer. I realized he had sneakily commandeered control of the spoon and was fixated on it.

At this point a couple of other waiters had accumulated. One of them inquired in Spanish what was going on with the soup. My waiter filled them in hurriedly as they drew closer. After much time spent staring at the tiny tomato-based enigma, one of the waiters, a Caribbean-looking fellow with short bleached blond hair, sprang into garrulous animation. My perpetual beginner level Spanish allowed me only to understand that he had instructed my waiter to go fetch something and come right back. My waiter obliged and handed the spoon to one of his comrades and loped off into the restaurant’s innards.

For the first time I thought to look into the cup of chowder where I had retrieved this eventful morsel. After a solid minute of thorough study, I came to the conclusion that the cup offered nothing more than I should’ve expected of it: it was merely a cup containing a small sea of red punctuated by tiny bergs of onion, tomato, and clam. The action—I now knew—was entirely limited to the pool in my spoon.

I looked up and noticed that the two newcomers had exponentially multiplied. There was now a host of restaurant personnel as well as a few regulars that had heard the commotion from the bar. A weathered old timer, all wrinkles and out-of-focus facial hair and flannel, unleashed a fusillade of disclaimers about the quality of the restaurant’s food and said there was a reason he stuck to the tap beer and Saltines in the thirty years he had been frequenting the place. Then he started up with a big bout of chunky-style laughter, followed by an even bigger bout of uncontrollable coughing. He doubled over and sort of pinballed himself back into the bar. In a tragically rustic font, the back of his belt read: Honest Abe.

Suddenly a nearby door that I had not noticed popped open and my waiter came in, walking backwards in a hunch, pulling something: a wheelchair, stuffed to the max with a comically old man—he was at least ninety years old, and his head was tilted up at a forty-five degree angle, as if scoping the ceiling for mosquitos. His eyes, comically magnified by a pair of steampunky eyeglasses, were the color of turkey gravy, and I would’ve believed him to be dead had it not been for the tremendous outpour of snoring he emitted. The blond waiter shushed the peanut gallery that had gathered around, rolled up his sleeves, and adroitly removed the old man’s eyeglasses and then held them up high, displaying them as if they were a boxing title-belt or a king-size mackerel.

The blond waiter passed the glasses off to my waiter—Diego, I now knew him to be, via the chronic chatter now around us. Diego held the glasses up to the spoon. He stared hard at the chowder through the glasses, again doing that thing where he looked like he was looking at the tip of his nose.

“That him?” that blond waiter asked, fidgeting like a hamster. “Is that him?”

Instead of replying, Diego swiveled carefully and began to walk slowly toward the entrance to the restaurant. The crowd curiously accompanied him until he came to a stop at the hostess stand. Here, Diego, as if on cue, took the lamp that had been illuminating a seating chart on the stand and raised it up to the spoon. The staff and the an increasingly bigger nest of regulars all huddled tightly around Diego, peaking over his shoulders…

“I bet it’s him,” said somebody. “It’s him, I bet.”

“It’s gotta be,” said somebody else.

“C’mon, pretty please, pretty please,” said someone.

“It’s him, no doubt about it,” said someone else. “He’s due!”

Diego suddenly leaned back, as if in recoil. Then he sighed, laughed, and cursed in Spanish, all in the same breath. He carelessly handed off the spoon and its contents to the blond waiter and left us with a gesture that indicated he was done with this whole weird thing.

I was booted from my tentative, observational state by the distinct sound of broken glassware. A fight had erupted. Two members of the kitchen staff were going at it like stags. I later learned from the local press that it had been spawned by a verbal slight of the Captain. After tons of squirming around on the floor, the smaller of the two scrappers managed to get his opponent in a headlock, and the other, in a desperate effort to free himself, toppled the both of them into a table full of brittle-looking Euro-tourists. A partially eaten lobster was introduced to the melee. One of the waiters decided the lobster would be useful to quell the small uprising, as it made for a handy malice. The waiter, though, was blindsided before he had the opportunity to strike and the lobster was rendered airborne. Eventually it came to rest at the foot of the old man’s wheelchair, but not before doing extensive damage to his urostomy bag. A yellowish lagoon quickly formed alongside him and did well to ambush the blond waiter, who was holding the very spoon that had prompted the whole fiasco. The spoon, now minus its contents, took flight in my direction. I grabbed the thing out of the air and returned to my booth, where I finished off my chowder and my po’boy, left ample cash to cover the tab and well-deserved gratuity, and headed for the restaurant’s exit, while carefully avoiding the ruckus.

The old guy with the Honest Abe belt was lurking near the hostess stand, cigarette in one hand, beer in the other. He was observing the action, which had now grown to include seemingly the entire restaurant with the exception of me and him, with an air of laxity that suggested that he’d been in more prickly predicaments.

“They should rename this place Guernica,” I said, taking in a final look at the whole big mess before opening the door to leave. Honest Abe shook his head and did some testy gesture with his hand, implying that he had gotten my reference. I countered with a soft query of what they had seen in my chowder, and why it had provoked so much bedlam.

Honest Abe stubbed his cigarette on the side of the hostess stand and gave me his full attention—  

“I don’t claim to know much about anything these days. I’m plenty content to peter out here at this endearingly mediocre eat place or whatever they call it, griping my little head off to anyone who’ll pretend to listen. Hell, I’ll gripe if they don’t pretend to listen. And if there ain’t nobody around to gripe at, guess what I do…”

“Gripe to yourself?” I said, before I realized I was saying it.

“Exactly!” he shouted, poking me in the ribs. “You nailed it, buddy-boy. I gripe to myself, probably look like a damn nutter butter doin’ it but oh-fuggin’-well, right? No less dignity in that than if I were one of them poofed-out cranks who write books or blogs or whatever about what could have done, or what they should have done, and why they didn’t do it, yuk-yuk-yuk, right? No sadder sight in the Milky Way galaxy than these damn chimps with side-parts that come slinkin’ in here, all around my age, and every one of them with something to prove. Nothing nowhere sadder than an old man with something to prove.”

Like a surprise high tide, the ruckus of waiters and regulars encroached on us and ebbed just as quickly.

“No, sir, I don’t know much anything, sure, sure,” he said, lighting another cigarette, “but I do know I don’t have anything to prove to no one, not even myself.”

I could neither confirm nor disconfirm his statement so I just nodded like an idiot.

Honest Abe eyeballed the receding melee and lazily motioned toward it and said, “You know what else I know?”

“What,” I said, flatly. (What else could I say?”

“I know that I know all about what that boy Diego and the rest of ‘em saw in your soup… And I know all about what for the third time this unholy month—in the Manhattan clam chowder, in the New England clam chowder, in the Cream of Crab nonsense, and even in that puddle of mud here they call gumbo—they did not see. You listenin’, brother?”

I was listening and I told him as much.

“They saw a ghost. You hear me? They saw a teeny tiny little ghost.”

I was besieged by the spook mumps one gets when encountering the outré. My eyes widened as the cold wash of mild alarm settled on me. I had questions…

As if reading my mind, Honest Abe de-slouched himself and stood up straight and inched closer and squared up like he was about to throw a punch…

“No, no, my friend,” he hollered, all plosives and fricatives on a bed of death breath… “That was not the Captain and his Benny Briggs lobbin’ them harpoons at that beast in your chowder, you see? For that was the mighty Estrella down there in your soup, sir!—piloted by none other than that fink Muldoon!”