You Get What You Pay For

The worst meal I've ever eaten seemed, at the time, to be one of the best.

It was the summer after my freshman year of college, and my best friend from high school and I had planned a three-week road trip around the east coast. Leah and I had drawn up a loose itinerary based on visiting far-flung friends and seeing interesting things, starting with a few days in New York City, before driving as far and as fast as possible in any direction that struck our fancy, and ending up on Martha's Vineyard. We were hoping to end up getting a little taste of the south as well, toying with the ideas of Florida and North Carolina, and we were hoping to do it on a shoestring budget. We'd spent the beginning of the summer working retail jobs (she in a drugstore, me in a bookstore, which in a way describes the difference in our personalities) to afford food and gas, and now, at the beginning of July, it was time to go. In my parents' driveway, we packed Leah's beat-up white sedan with the things we'd need: maps of the east coast, changes of clothes, a tent, a huge bottle of shampoo, our toothbrushes, flashlights, phone chargers, enormous boxes of three kinds of granola and protein bars, potato chips, gummy worms, bottled water, diet Mountain Dew and Dr. Pepper to keep us awake, and Leah's excellent camera. We'd portioned the food into individual servings to last three weeks, budgeting enough money to only buy one meal a day on the road to save money and to force us to choose only restaurants we really thought would capture the essence of the place we were in, meals we could only get that one time. We popped in the first of many CDs burned for the occasion, cranked the music, and set off.

We hit New York a few hours later, having parked the car in the suburb of White Plains and taking the train into the city with backpacks full of provisions and clean clothes. We spent our first meal allotment on incredible pizza from a hole-in-the-wall place by the George Washington Bridge and then spent the night at a friend's nearby apartment. The next morning we left before he got up and headed downtown to explore, munching granola bars on the subway. While walking around Greenwich Village, we found the perfect place to eat our second meal of the trip: before us was a sunny outdoor terrace, with a bright red banner announcing a $6.99 All-You-Can-Eat buffet-style Indian lunch special. It was glorious. Before us was a stunningly laden table full of rice, samosas, four kinds of chutney, three kinds of naan, chana masala, various unlabeled curries, and several other dishes unlabeled and unfamiliar to us. Leah and I loaded our plates, and she made me taste everything first to make sure her delicate vegetarian tummy didn't accidentally ingest any meat. Everything was incredible, the rich spices and cool condiments refreshing against the summer sun beating down upon us as we ate and watched the city mill by. The restaurant staff was beginning to close down the lunch buffet and urged us to finish the entire contents of the buffet table before they had to whisk the dishes away, and we filled ourselves to capacity. After paying and heaving our sated selves out of the restaurant and back on to the street, Leah and I high-fived: a meal well chosen.

Until, a few hours later, on the subway, when I met my doom. Leah and I were headed up to the Bronx with our friend Jackie, to drop our things off at her apartment and explore her neighborhood. The three of us were laughing and joking, and then, mid-giggle, my stomach clenched in incredible pain. My face blanched and I fell silent as my insides began to tangle and jostle themselves into foul designs. "We have to get off the train," I told them. They asked why, and I told them I needed air, I needed to get off the train, just trust me. The doors creaked open at 34th Street, and I ran up the stairs and out of the station. I looked around, trying to make for a Starbucks with a bathroom I could use, but before I could dart off, my body rebelled, and then, like one of the many odd denizens of the streets of New York who are often immortalized in the hilarity of visitors' stories, I vomited on the sidewalk. Forcefully, mightily, painfully, messily. My body began to shake, and Leah, art student that she is, snapped a black and white film photo of me as I sat against the wall of a building in abject misery, before sitting next to me and stroking my hair as Jackie ran to find me a club soda to sip. A cab driver pulled up so his passengers could ask if I needed a ride. A homeless man asked if I was alright. In a blur, I was whisked to the Bronx by Leah and Jackie, leaving terrible projectile deposits in my wake as I made my way between boroughs.

Needless to say, my six-day long bout of food poisoning seriously derailed the trip and irritated my travel companion. I spent the next few days with my head in the toilet, overstaying our welcome at Jackie's as she and Leah went to museums and clubs without me. Finally, Leah dragged me back to the car in White Plains, ignoring my groans of pain and pleas to just go home. We'd lost a lot of time, so heading south was out, and dreams of camping could be kissed goodbye, as I was in no shape to help assemble a tent anywhere. We were headed to Leah's sister's bridal shower in rural Pennsylvania, where I nodded and smiled and tried not to double over. I was no longer a travel companion, but a pukey burden, and it was not until the trip turned toward Massachusetts and the sea that I began to feel better, to get my bearings, and to be able to eat solid food. The trip picked up, and was an incredible experience full of beautiful places, good people, new friends, and the very important lesson of avoiding cheap and questionable restaurants, no matter how enticing their goods.