Hanging with Harry
In any given lifetime we probably get to have deep friendships with only a few people. I've always had plenty of friends and could be out every night of the week if I wanted to, but real intimacy is rare for me, and maybe for everyone! I'm friends with this odd character I met in the neighborhood.
He, like me, lives in a ridiculously cheap apartment (rent control) that he's been in for years and years. LA is not any different from New York now. If you've got a bargain apartment you just stay forever, through peeling paint, leaky roofs, bad plumbing, noisy neighbors...there's just nowhere else to go. His place is big, with 2 levels, and nooks and crannies and even an outdoor space. He, like me, would get a notion to 'fix everything up', and start pulling up old linoleum only to find 4 more layers of old linoleum underneath, so the project became impossible and an area rug would be placed down 'just for now', but stay down for years. These ideas need to be squashed right away because you're inevitably left with a far worse situation then when you started. This was the first thing we bonded over. He is a great movie lover and introduced me to films I never would have found myself. We went on a Michael Haneke binge for a month.
I've never been more depressed...but brilliantly so. Did you ever see a movie called 'Funny Games'? First Haneke made it in German, and then in English, because he thought it important that the Americans see it. I'm sure he was right, but before you go make sure you don't eat anything too heavy because it might not stay down. Our dates are always about movies and meals. Not only does he know everything about film, but he knows every hole-in-the wall family-owned little weird restaurant in this whole city.
I think it was with him that I experienced my first pupusa, at an open air stand on the corner of Hoover and Melrose. How does he find these places? Anything he suggests is always interesting and new, just like his movies. The friendship goes way deeper than this of course, and by now we are members of the same family. For one thing, it feels like we had the same parents, although he was raised in New Jersey, and I in New York. We both had fathers that left the family and became minor celebrities. His in show biz and mine in the literary world. We were only conceived because of our respective mother's desire to have kids. The fathers barely noticed. When we first became friends we were having a conversation about narcissism in a parent, and how the child suffers from lack of attention...'mirroring' they call it.
We talked about our trouble in becoming successful adults. I don't think I ever talked to anyone who truly understood what this was like, except of course for my sister who gets it, having had the same lousy childhood. Something else about Harry that I haven't mentioned is his love of pot. He had quit for many years, and then he had a big party for his 50th birthday. Someone brought a bag of weed, and he smoked a few joints, and he's been at it ever since. This has put a strain on things of course, since I don't smoke, drink, or take anything that affects me from the neck up. I don't see him as much, and I miss my special friend. I must call him.
This recipe is almost like a chutney we had in a great Indian place on Western Avenue where you had to go up some stairs in the back of a building that had a Buddhist temple on the first floor. The meal was divine, and you could hear the chanting.
Apricot Cranberry Chutney
When choosing fruit for a cooked sauce like a chutney, or even for a cobbler or buckle, you needn't use perfectly ripe fruit. A harder more bitter fruit will hold up better to cooking and not go mushy, and as in this chutney you will be using a bit of sugar so the fruit itself needn't be too sweet. I like to use part fresh fruit and part dried in my chutneys for the textural differences as well as the bitter/sweet flavors.
Place in an enamel pot:
5 apricots, chopped coarsely
1 cup dried cranberries
1/3 cup finely diced red onion
2 tablespoons brown sugar
Juice of one lemon
1 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
½ teaspoon salt
1 cup water
Cook on a low flame uncovered for about 45 minutes until the liquid reduces and the sauce gets thicker.
Let cool for 15 minutes and add about 1 tablespoon chopped mint.