hot wings polemic

Charley Brown’s is uncharacteristically crowded tonight. An otherwise sleepy neighborhood tavern on Capitol Hill, once haunted by Kerouac and Cassidy, now typically empty except for a few hopelessly drunk middle-aged assholes crowded around the piano singing, lost in the hazy delusion that they are Elton John or Billy Joel. But not tonight. Tonight the place is so full we have to search for a place to sit. Why? I look around and notice immediately that there’s something wrong with the crowd. Everyone’s either elderly or mentally handicapped or physically handicapped or blind, or black. That can’t be an coincidence. Is this a trap? Are we going to be gassed? It could some sort of modern (and highly comedic) euthanasia chamber. After the wait staff quietly exits, the doors will be sealed and poison gas will be pumped in through nozzles disguised as beer taps. Ordinarily I would approve of this if we didn’t have the misfortune of stumbling in on it.

Michael and I find a small table in a shitty corner of the room beside a large party that seems to have been bussed in from an assisted living center. An elderly woman leaves and shoves me with her oxygen tank. On the other side of us there are four other senior citizens, all wearing big dark sunglasses indoors. Their fashion sense is remarkable. Behind my friend I see three black men heckling a frustrated waiter relentlessly about getting them a table on the patio. He eventually stops listening and vanishes. There’s a flurry of irritating activity. What are we doing here?

After a long time a waiter arrives and gives us complimentary hot wings, then leaves hastily without taking an order or bringing drinks or anything. The hot wings lay in the middle of the table, inert and extremely disconcerting. I didn’t want any fucking hot wings. Then everything clicks into place, makes perfect sense. Everything becomes clear in light of these chicken wings. I realize that all these goddamned people have overrun our hangout for these free hot wings. The lure of free shitty food is what drew all these people together. Had the management of Charley Brown’s bar gone insane? Clearly, this is a far-out business strategy. They have deliberately attracted a horde of poor miscreants into the bar, people who’s principle motivation is to not spend money. What the fuck were they thinking?

I stare at the hot wings. They are covered in spicy fluorescent orange goo. It occurs to me that hot wings are the final insult to the poor and uneducated. What’s weirder is that the jokes on them, yet they still play along. Offering this sort of food should be an insult, and yet they still show up for it and love it. Let’s face it: chicken wings are a bad omen. You know you’ve strayed into a nasty and possibly dangerous neighborhood when you start seeing hot wing places. This is the favored food of the sub-human rabble that breeds in the shittiest peripheral areas of our cities.

Michael picks up a chicken wing and begins chewing the meat off a small bone. Suddenly a transformation takes place. This otherwise intelligent and cultured man begins to look like a fool. He gets the brightly colored sauce all over his hands and mouth. No mere napkin can wipe it away. I dig in too. We have blended in with the muck that surrounds us. The hot wings have made our society’s horseshit ideals about equality a reality. It’s as though we have entered a grotesque medieval picture or peasants with terrible inbred faces mocking Jesus on his way to Golgotha, the last true man left on earth. Michael eats another hot wing. I imagine people living someplace down south eating chicken wings all day and throwing the bones off the back porch until the yard is completely buried under a little hill of nasty chicken bones. Oddly enough, this is a plausible reality.

We come to the conclusion that hot wings must be some kind of conspiracy from on high. Mike proposes that hot wings are invented by the wealthy and elite to keep the poor socially immobile, to repress and humiliate them. The experience of eating hot wings is so inherently embarrassing, so aesthetically uncouth, that it must be a deliberate plan to expose these uncivilized peasants for what they truly are on the inside.

Well, surely that’s all a lot of bullshit. What’s true is that the people eating this stuff and smiling about it are the only ones guilty for it. I’m reminded of Pasolini’s weird movie, Salò. In Salò there’s a houseful of inexplicably compliant slave children being forced by French perverts to eat their own feces. Instead of feces, modern man is being fed other forms of shit: things like hot wings, Mexican soap opera, Fox News, bad music, worse movies, etc.

One’s also got to consider that refusing the chicken wings makes a statement too. We saw that all too clearly during the recent presidential campaign. The candidates had healthy solid diets, but didn’t dare refuse to eat any nasty fried fat chunks put in front of them in the name of “local fare.” This is because one who’s too good to eat shit is clearly the enemy of the people. The discerning mind is not an egalitarian mind.

The hot wings are just the beginning, my friends. Tell me how good they taste. Yum.

8/14/09
Charley Brown’s
Denver Colorado