Bagel Boys
Written & illustrated by Bernard Greenwald

Certain foods, like greasy greens in the American South or fish and chips in London's South End, embody an ethos. They are spoken about with humor, affection and admiration by those who identify with them. They help characterize a way of life for people who may not even be conscious they are experiencing any such thing. In my memory the bagel, when I was a teenager in the mid-50s in Newark, New Jersey, was not mere nourishment--it was almost an icon. Proust's madeleine held no greater powers of evocation.

The bagel--not the Brobdingnagian puffy round white rolls with holes in the center decorated with fey aberrations as diverse as jalapenos and cheese or blueberries, but the honest, three-for-a-dime, about four-inch-in-diameter peasant food, burnished with a crunchy brown, egg-glazed carapace that demanded of an eater either a mouthful of sturdy dental equipment or some scalding, solvent-like beverage to soften them enough for mastication. Flavors? True, the bagel sometimes came with a sparkle of Kosher salt or a shadow of poppy seeds, but its essential flavor was simply "bagel"--chewy-crunchy on the outside, soft, yeasty and lovely on the inside.

In those days we lived near Clinton Place, probably a couple of miles from Weequahic High School on Chancellor Avenue. On a frigid Saturday night after dinner my friends and I would accumulate on the street near Yogi Segal's house. Hands in the back pockets of our Levis or the side pockets of our leather bomber jackets or red-and-black corduroy Braves Athletic Club jackets, we'd spit on the street and engage in mock fights. We traded good-natured insults in a formally codified ritual that would eventually require the insulted party to punch the upper arm of the insulter and dodge out into the street between the parked cars.

As we kidded around we exchanged sports trivia and discussed girls, always in terms of physical measurements, not personalities or temperaments; facial beauty was also held to be unimportant. We traded opinions and information on sex, always implying a storehouse of personal experience that was seldom grounded in real events. The guys with girlfriends would have been with them, not strutting around stiff-legged among us.

There would be some discussion of the evening's plans--basically none. We didn't smoke, only some of us even rarely drank, we certainly didn't do drugs and we didn't drive. Someone would say "let's walk over to Chancellor Avenue," and this milling group of adolescent boys, still bantering, arm-punching, and spitting in our "manly" way, would make its ragged trek across town. Once on Chancellor Avenue, we'd watch more fortunate older kids cruise by in their Chevvies or moms' Pontiacs.

Around 10:30, frozen and exhausted, we'd begin the 45-minute walk home, dropping off guys as we passed their homes. The residential side streets we traversed would be dark and empty, the occasional blue flicker of Jack Paar on the TV through someone's window. Sometimes a passing car or the 14 Bus making its way along Clinton Place. Cold, bleak, empty.

Then in the distance we'd see the warm light of the Watson Bagel company. They were baking bagels for Sunday morning. A fragrance bathed the street.

Inside, long counters were manned by harried employees, their hands flashing like nervous circus jugglers as they filled large brown paper bags with hot bagels to be delivered to various groceries in the neighborhood before dawn. At each station a dowel, perhaps forty inches or so, would be affixed vertically to the counters, like lingams in a rock-cut temple. Workers would grab the hot bagels as soon as they were out of the oven and were tumbled onto the counter. These would be threaded over the dowels to a certain height--a system quicker than counting I suppose now, not then--and then slid off into the bags, labeled with a black crayon but not sealed. To enclose hot bagels in a steam-trapping package would turn their crunchiness to rubber.

For a dime, they tossed three of these hot dusky beauties into a small paper bag. We never considered bringing some home for our families, First, carrying packages was not cool. Second, our mothers were the food providers at home. The bagels required no other adornment. Jammed into jacket pockets, their warmth and nourishment would supply sustenance for the rest of the trip home.

The bagel, and its cousin the bialystok or bialy, are eastern European Jewish inventions. They were probably brought to this country during the great wave of emigration at the turn of the 20th century. During the Middle Ages, Jews were prohibited from taking part in certain professions and trades by the guilds that controlled them. However, in the shtetls, or remote villages, inventive Jewish bakers developed products that were briefly boiled, like dumplings, before being baked--thereby getting around the guild's prohibitions and supplying their product with a crunchy outer covering. From the shtetls of Europe to the Lower East Side and up the river to Red Hook and other villages they came like the migration of jazz up the Mississippi. An apocryphal tale? Who knows. But it's a version I'm willing to accept.

When I was a kid, people would joke that a bagel was a doughnut dipped in cement. Or that stale bagels could be used for hockey pucks. Or had other industrial uses. A friend claims her father told her that the holes in bagels were made by pistol packing rabbis who tossed them in the air and plugged their centers out. There were also other, more Freudian rumors about how the holes were made. My mother, in preparing a bagel for my boyish breakfast, would "shmear" it with butter or cream cheese and coyly ask what kind of cheese I wanted over the hole. Seriously, Doctor.

But today's bagel is not what it once was. When in the past few years McDonald's started serving perforated buns that they referred to blasphemously as bagels their decline was complete--the evocative imagery of the magical shield made by Hephaestus for the gray-eyed Athena, and given to her son Achilles, reduced to the banality of a plastic garbage can cover.

Each day after my morning walk, I take my breakfast in the Bagel Shoppe in Red Hook, on Rt. 9. I order, almost invariably, a bagel stick because its modest proportions, I think, allow it to develop more of the crunchy, chewy outer covering I remember from my youth. I take it either plain or with sesame seeds. Sometimes I see people I know, but mostly I sit anonymously with other villagers drinking coffee and reading my newspaper, at peace with my latest life. But does anyone know where to get a good onion pletzel around here?