“What did you eat for breakfast, fried rat?” Richie Boy asked his friend at Smith and Wollensky’s after he cut loose under the table.

“It wasn’t me.” The guilty party protested without forgiveness. “He who smelled it dealt it.”

Everyone at the table was over 50. The restaurant was elegant. Our waiter was treating us like royalty. We had sold him a diamond this afternoon. A good deal for him and a nice profit for us. Our conversation should have been less puerile.

“Fast food for lunch.” I sniffed the foul wind. “McDonald’s 100% beef means all the cow, except for the moo. They drop whole cows into a vaporizer. Out comes pink poo for a Big Mac.”

“I like Big Macs.” Richie Boy’s friend exercised religious. His work schedule didn’t allow a healthy lunch.

“Better fried rats.”

“Don’t tell me that you’ve eaten it?” Richie is a bacon Jew. Little is tref for him, but rat is definitely off his menu.

“On occasion.” Rat, owl, vulture, and crow are four animals Americans will never eat and only owls will eat crow. I’m sure there are several other animals missing from any menu of the 50 states, such as seagulls, seals, jellyfish as well as a legion of endangered species, especially whale, which I ate as a child in Boston fish market next to Fanuiel Hall.

“Rat?” Richie Boy and his friend were aghast.

“It’s not so bad. The rats are raised on rice. They never eat garbage not like you.” This past January I was in Thailand.

Mem, Fenway, and I had spent a week in a Cambodian border town and she brought down several fried rats for her cousin, uncle, and me. The rats or noo yang are fat from rice. Her aunt gave her several splayed rats to bring back to Sriracha. The cousins back home were dying for some good rat.
It’s a five hour drive from the Cambodian border to the coast. The rats were on ice. At home her cousin opened the plastic plastic. Hooey is the top girl at the city’s best Japanesse karaoke bar. She wears Ungaro knock-off and Manolo high heels. A model in any other country in the world. Delicate and thin she bend over the tub of rats. Her nose twitched with a rapture like a glue-sniffer huffing a tube of Dupont after a year’s sabbatical.

“Noo Yang,” she cooed and her step-father pranced like a trained bear in anticipation of feasting on his two rat carcasses. Needless to say my enthusiasm was a little more decorous.

“You no want eat.” Mem was upset. Cooking rat takes hours. She had saved me the largest corpse. If I didn’t eat it, she would have been insulted by my refusal. Thais have thin skins and long memories.

“Who say I don’t want to eat rat?” I gave Nai money to buy 6 large bottles of Leo beer. it was good enough to take the sting out of a scorpion tail, on which I had dined the previous evening.

Mem happily fried the rat and cut the body into sixths.

It still looked like a rat and not Mickey Mouse either

New York rat on a plate.

“Why you not eat?” Mem had her arms crossed. Everyone else asked the same question.

“Wait for it not to be hot.”

Two minutes later I cracked off a leg. The meat was dark. I took a bite. Not bad, in fact good.

Rat does not taste like chicken or pig or beef.

Something entirely different yet familiar.

I finished my serving and had seconds. We threw the bones to the mongrel dogs in the street. They fought over these scraps. Mem was happy and the assembled Thais said, “James not same other farangs. He eat same Thai.”

“That’s not true. There’s no thing I won’t eat. Chicken feet.”

Ting gai.

Bleech.

But the Thais love to suck on the rubber feet.

Even my son.

He’s definitely not 100% farang, but not 100% Thai either.

Fenway was scared of rat.

He was his father’s son.

“So how was the rat?” Richie Boy asked as the waiter delivered our steaks.

“It didn’t taste like chicken.”

And neither does the steak at Smith and Wollensky’s.