Judge the livability of your city using the White Castle Index
At a proud moment last year, I won the Literary Open Mic competition hosted by my comrade-in-arts and Renaissance man Filthy Phill Lentz at The Cobra Club. I decided to celebrate my victory with a late-night snack before heading home. I drove to where my navigation system indicated was the nearest White Castle, only to find a construction site in its place.
It is at least the second White Castle to be purged from the popular and overrated borough of Brooklyn. The much-valued Castle in Williamsburg on the corner of Metropolitan Avenue and Humboldt Street was closed nearly two years ago to make way for more overpriced apartments.
Before I got married, I made sure my bachelor party ended with a visit to White Castle to cap off an evening of Yankees baseball, strippers and punk rock. When my band plays shows near a White Castle we are sure to stop by for some sliders on the way home.
I wouldn’t advocate eating junk food regularly, and I limit my White Castle visits to special occasions and balance with attempts at a healthy diet and regular exercise. But after a night of victorious effort, whether that be in producing great art, achieving a career or personal victory, or otherwise exerting yourself above and beyond the call, it is suitable to indulge with some excellent excess, and you should be able to safely do that in multiple locations around any major American city.
New York City has fallen behind in its White Castle Index, meaning that low-cost good food at all hours is increasingly unavailable. Williamsburg was once a haven for artists; it’s now home to the $150 doughnut. Williamsburg managed to strike it rich and still slide into the sewer.
I prefer White Castle, and I’d be happy to expound on its excellence both culturally and calorically, but there are other options that are similarly convenient and meaningful. Regionally there are many differences and the White Castle chain does not ready many parts of the U.S. But every region should have its own version of White Castle. Waffle House often fits the bill in many parts of the country. It is open 24 hours a day and has plentiful offerings of quickly made indulgent food at a relatively low cost (it might be useful to call this the Waffle House Index in the Southern U.S. I don’t know any Waffle House restaurants north of Pennsylvania). And diners are a great American institution that are being priced out of existence as well.
Everyone should be able to have an all-night restaurant that they can go to relax among their own kind (leaving it up to each person who counts as “their own kind.”)
If the all-night party isn’t available at an affordable cost, then something is wrong, and we are getting to the point in New York City where only the extravagantly wealthy can afford to live life to the fullest. That leads to a decline in the character and long-term viability of the city. Without strong, vibrant, working and middle classes, the cultural and physical rot of its society becomes evident very quickly.
The world’s best artists do not emerge from the pampered class that looks down their noses at the common people. The arbiters of taste and culture should not be people who’ve never waited tables, washed dishes, or dug a ditch. With fewer and fewer working Americans able to find a rewarding life in our urban centers, cities will cease to be engines of creativity and genius.
As goes the working class, so goes our city. Luckily, there are still numerous White Castles to be found in the outer boroughs. I’ll see you at one.
A Father’s Day Quest for Laziness
This Father’s Day my quest is to be as lazy as possible without appearing to be ungrateful or a bad father. If I could move my couch and laptop to the nearest White Castle and camp out for a day feasting on delicious burgers and watching hunting shows.
There were days before I had children that I enjoyed extreme forms of laziness. I have spent some days doing nothing but eating and watching ‘Law & Order’ reruns. I’m not proud of being that lazy, but sometimes you just have to be. I spend the rest of my time trying hard to achieve ambitious things, so a day here and there of intense couch warming is not out of line.
But having children means that those days of restorative sloth are behind me for the time being. If you are the father of small children you have some kind of work to do just to make sure your children don’t wander into traffic and get themselves killed. Children have to be fed every day, and if you don’t change their diapers with regularity they begin to smell bad and behave strangely.
This coming Father’s Day I will relax as much as possible and I plan to travel with my family to Staten Island to the Punk Island festival. This will be the first time in several years that our band Blackout Shoppers is not playing the all-day FREE festival (our guitar player will be out of the country). I’m eager to be able to go and enjoy it without having to worry about bringing equipment or being ready to play. My wife and I plan to bring ear protection for the girls and they can walk now so it may be a chore keeping them out of the mosh pits because they love to dance when they hear music. But any stress will be well worth it.
I am very lucky to have the father I have. He raised me with a good sense of right and wrong and a love of reading and the arts. Not everyone is so lucky, but having a good father is not a prerequisite for being one. I’ve discovered that fatherhood is a lot like hunting. If you have good instincts and are willing to put in the time, you’re chances of success will be much greater.
At the end of the day Sunday I will have relaxed as much as I can and my children will have survived my indulgent slacking off.
Of course I’d like to do better than having children that merely survive. I want my daughters to be willful and strong, and smart enough not to be subservient to the societal groupthink that is slowly choking the life out of the American intellect. I want my girls to be able to be legendary warrior-poets and forge their poetic souls to the cause of their people and be among the elite of their future world. But I’ve got to get them potty trained first.
A Night at White Castle
Sometimes when I am in Manhattan late, either for a work function or some other reason, I will treat myself to a meal at White Castle and a more luxurious ride home to Flushing, Queens on the Long Island Railroad. Last night was one such night.
White Castle holds a unique place in the sphere of American fast food. It is a small chain that is not widely franchised like McDonald’s or Burger King, and so enjoyed a cult status among greasy food enthusiasts long before the Harold & Kumar films brought the restaurant wider notice. It popularized “sliders” or miniature burgers that many restaurants have emulated.
The low cost of the small burgers brings lots of poor people there, and because of this and the fact that many or most White Castles are open 24 hours a day, there’s often an element of danger associated with the chain. My father grew up in the Bronx in the 1950s and 1960s and said when he was a teenager, his friends would dare one another to eat at one of the local White Castles on Fordham Road.
White Castles are mostly in the Midwest and the Northeast. New York City has at least a dozen spread throughout its boroughs, but only two listed in Manhattan. The more centrally-located one is the one on 8th Avenue between 36th Street and 37th Street. This is very close to Penn Station and a moderate walking distance from Times Square by current American standards. And this part of the city is where many of the seedier elements that were once comfortable in Times Square have been chased. I had come from a fancy restaurant where I had gone for an event for work, and after chatting pleasantly over fine finger foods for a few hours I needed some balance. So there I was.
Entering this White Castle, I saw that there was a man in a wheelchair who was slumped over one of the side counters, passed out. He had the dirty appearance and slumped look of a vagrant, but luckily didn’t smell as bad as he looked. A few people stood near the counter waiting for their food, and a few diners sat in the small booths.
I placed my order and noticed a couple by the soda machines having an animated conversation. After several attempts, the man finally extricated himself from the conversation and bid the woman a hopeful farewell. With the man gone, the women kept up her end of the conversation with no one and everyone. She noted that she had warned people about other people and made good on her commitments to things, as much as I could gather.
While I was waiting for my food, the staff at White Castle decided that the man in the wheelchair had been passed out on the side counter long enough and that it was time for him to go. Staff at the White Castle are usually friendlier and more competent than their counterparts at other fast food places. Maybe they pay better or maybe they have better or more interesting clients. Anyway, the White Castle worker very gently started to move the man in the wheelchair, who woke up and started making noise.
“Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep!” The guy in the wheelchair was making noises like a truck backing up as his wheelchair was moved back. “Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep!”
Once he saw he was headed for the door and out of the restaurant. He began to protest. “Hey! Hey! Hello!? Hello!?”
At this point, we heard from the disembodied voice of White Castle’s remote security. They monitor White Castles through security cameras at remote locations and will sometimes remind you that they are watching and recording all proceedings. One time at this White Castle a man was there with Wendy’s food and the voice told him to leave and threatened to call the police. He didn’t leave.
Now though, the voice wanted to remind the wheelchair guy that they were there. “This is White Castle security monitoring, recording all proceedings at this location,” said the voice over the public address system. “All proceedings are being recorded by White Castle security.”
A helpful customer ran ahead and opened the door for the man in the wheelchair, who mumbled and complained until he was outside on the sidewalk. He later recruited a departing customer to push him around and I saw them going up and down 8th Avenue.
After a wait I got my food and sat watching people walk by outside. Every once in a while someone will do the White Castle Peek, the act of carefully looking inside the White Castle to see if it’s safe enough to go inside. One nervous woman doing this decided to come in and order food, but she never lost her nervous demeanor. She moved around frequently as if to throw off the chances of some unseen assassin ready to shoot at her from somewhere outside.
I sat in a small booth, methodically making my way through my too-large order of burgers. I had an outside soda on the seat next to me, lest the disembodied voice of White Castle security call me out on it and tell me to leave or buy a soda from White Castle (White Castle offers Diet Coke, which tastes like ass; I smuggle in some Diet Pepsi for taste and sanity).
I finished my meal, threw away my garbage, and headed out the door. On my way out a staff member wished me a good night and I wished her the same, a rare moment of fast food camaraderie not available most places. I walked on into the New York night, sated and satisfied.
Matthew Sheahan 
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