How to Wash Your Hands, Part 2

After the first day of our Mobile Food Vendor License class at the Health Academy up in Harlem, we all went back to our respective homes and…well, maybe some of us studied for the exam the next day. I did, actually; the class workbook came with about a dozen insanely easy fill-in-the-blank review worksheets, and I filled them out while waiting for MySpace pages to come up.

Some of my fellow pupils may have needed to study because of language hurdles; the class is taught in English, but the workbooks came in about a dozen languages—so half of the lesson could have been gibberish to them. And maybe some students didn’t have a language barrier, but they did have a stupid barrier. So perhaps good but dim little students went home to practice hand-washing all night long, even though there was no practical segment of our exam.

Class on exam day commenced late. I forgot my #2 pencil, but the kind fellow next to me lent me one. It would have been great if we were to take the test right off the bat, but we wound up having a review session for about an hour. Then we had a very practical Q. & A. session with our sprightly instructor, Akin, about health code violations. For instance, if you are working at someone else’s cart and an inspector comes and writes up a ticket, who pays—you or your employer? (Your employer.) I wanted to ask if it was a violation to wear jewelry. Would hoop earrings be a violation? How about a simple ring that’s not a wedding ring? But I didn’t ask, because I wanted to take the test, not sidetrack Akin and open up what might perhaps grow into a heated debate.

Akin announced a 20-minute break before the test. I’d not brought any snacks, as I had the day before, and I was starving. So I ran down the street to the roach coach I’d passed the day before to order some cheap, dirty food. It was a fairly big roach coach/street meat hybrid, selling hot dogs, gyros, hamburgers, knishes, shish kebab, and probably bagels and ice cream, too. The cart was positioned right in front of a hospital entrance, and I saw a man in scrubs with an plastic I.D. badge around his neck run out and order a chicken gyro plate. See, even health professionals patronize roach coaches.

A wizened neighborhood lady got in front of me and ordered a hamburger. The man taking the money shouted the order to the man working the grill, even though there was no need to shout since they were in close quarters. The grill man slapped together a hamburger, the cash handler stuffed it in a small brown paper bag and handed it to the wizened lady, and the lady pulled the foil-wrapped burger out of the bag. She peeled back the foil and the top of the bun flopped off, reveling anemic patty under a pile of tired, shredded iceberg lettuce. “It fell apart!” she cried. “I didn’t do nothing to this hamburger and it fell apart!”

The roach coach cash handler shrugged. “I don’t want this no more,” she said. “I want my money back.” She seemed a little nuts, the kind of person it’s wisest to give into. Better to lose $3 than make a big scene in front of gyro-plate-buying doctors in scrubs. He gave her the $3 back, and she limped off, hopefully in search of a more nourishing lunch. What can you expect from a $3 roach coach burger, though?

It was my turn to order. I got two hot dogs, which turned out to be those “dirty water hot dogs” that they boil instead of grilling or griddling. The dogs were a buck each, and the grill man wadded them up in regular grocery store aluminum foil, which the cash handler then bagged and gave to me. Two dirty water hot dogs with yellow mustard and ketchup. The buns were gummy, the franks lukewarm and mealy. This roach coach didn’t sell no Sabrett dogs—their franks were without a pedigree. They were USDA Grade Barely Acceptable, like school cafeteria hot dogs. Well, for two bucks, I got what I paid for.

I had five minutes to be back in my seat, taking my test. I gobbled those cocks down in about 30 seconds and rushed back to the Health Academy.

Back in the classroom, my fellow pupils had reassembled. Akin asked us for a show of hands to tell him who would be needing tests in what languages. I kept track of this: we had people taking the test in Farsi, Spanish, Greek, Russian, English, Chinese, Arabic, and Bengali. Had the two native Vietnamese speakers in the class chose to take the test in English, we’d have at least one booklet of each language in the class.

This really ticked me. Here we were, people from all over the world, and the thing that brought us together was the desire to sell food from pushcarts. We all wanted to take the test and hit the streets to seek our fortune. I felt a wonderful solidarity with all of them.

Except these two Latina ladies, who I think were fixing to cheat. Akin zeroed right in on them before the test was to begin, and he put them at opposite ends of different rows. I wonder of they passed.

I did. I completed my test in about two minutes (we had thirty), and I reviewed my answers to the 15 questions before handing in my answer sheet, just to be sure I didn’t make a stupid mistake and fill in the wrong bubble. Then I settled down with my book, The Age of Innocence (mention of sausages so far: zero) and read until Akin softly called out my name to inform me that I’d passed, and that I’d earned a perfect score, and that I was free to go.

I gathered my things and left. As I went up the staircase, the Greek woman (or the Russian lady, I’m not sure) asked me if I’d passed. “Yes,” I said.

“Good luck!” she said. I wished her luck as well. I didn’t have to ask her if she’d passed, because she was smiling (besides, a monkey could pass that test). We walked out into the Harlem sunlight, past the roach coach/street meat cart, and in our idealism we dreamed of how much better our pushcarts would be.