Farewell, Chicken Delight...and Chelsea

The last Saturday night in December is a frosty one–pockets of black snow and ice left over from Christmas Day make the first discarded trees of the season a little more poignant as Bucky and I head down 23rd St. We’ve just been to see Adaptation at the Chelsea Cineplex and the extra butter-flavored grease on our popcorn has merely whetted our appetites. We push our way past the shopping-bag and stroller brigade of yukkies (Young Urbanites with Kids) toward 8th Ave., and as usual the conversation turns to the suburbanization of the neighborhood.

Bucky and I had moved to Chelsea 10 years ago, when it was still a gay man’s paradise and every corner held the promise of a fix, a fuck or at least a fight. The meat-packing district still stank of beef, blood and stale weed smoke from the trannie prostitutes cruising the Javits Center. The Chelsea Hotel still had a room available for $500 a month, if you didn’t mind sharing a bathroom with an artist and a ballet dancer. (I remember sitting on the toilet staring at a pair of tights drip-drying on the shower rod as it swayed perilously close to a rusty Folger’s can full of paint brushes soaking in turpentine and thinking, "One day I will write about this." Now I have.) The junkie coffee shop on the corner of 23rd and 8th specialized in fossilized jelly donuts and being a place to nod out after hitting the methadone clinic. The Woolworth’s on the opposite corner catered to those of us who rolled pennies to buy ramen noodles and toothpaste after rent was paid and subway tokens carefully budgeted for. And the drugstore on the corner of 24th and 8th had condoms on sale, four for a buck, if you didn’t look too closely at the sell-by date.

Chelsea taught me how to survive in New York City, lessons in poverty that have served me well all these years. Even then, 10 years ago, we complained about gentrification. We rationalized, however, that Chelsea would still be okay, that we could still manage to live in the area for $792 a month after taxes, and still be able to have a hot chicken dinner once a week at Chicken Delight.

Chicken Delight, that little storefront on 8th between 23rd and 24th, where for $2.50 you could get a two-piece dinner with potato, rice or macaroni and cheese and a cotton-wool dinner roll–the protein-to-starch-to-grease ratio would ensure you enough energy to get you through a cold Saturday night outside Limelight or Robots or the Tunnel, waiting in line for the velvet rope to be lifted and the burly bouncer to take your last $20 before payday. On a Chicky D special, you could work the room for hours, dancing and scamming free drinks from clueless Brooks Brothers marks whose sole purpose for being let in was to guarantee that you, the clubkid, had access to libation when the E kicked in. Ten years ago, when Chelsea was fun, Chicken Delight provided a hot meal to those of us who couldn’t afford the bus ticket home on holidays and were too proud to accept invitations home from coworkers. Ten years ago, Chicken Delight was a symbol of all New York City’s promises to the young who came and believed: cheap, satisfying and available at all hours.

Ten years ago, Chicken Delight was a bit of my childhood to comfort me when things got rough. Thirty years ago, when we lived in Brooklyn, my mother’s boyfriend Al would bring us a big bag of Chicken Delight on a Saturday night. My sister and I sat in front of our black-and-white tv on the couch with the styrofoam containers spread out on the coffee table in front of us, slathering ketchup on our fries and mashing the dinner rolls flat as we watched Star Trek and Mission: Impossible. My mother and Al were in the bedroom, smoking, laughing, talking in those low tones not meant to be decipherable by five-year-olds. Eventually my mother would emerge long enough to wipe our greasy faces with a warm, wet washcloth and put us to bed, closing our bedroom door firmly against the warped wood doorjamb so that we couldn’t escape. The Chicky D’s would work its magic on our constitutions–we were out cold in minutes from the sheer exhaustion of digesting all that stuff. And in the morning, Mommy would be happy, getting us ready for Sunday school with a smile I wouldn’t recognize until I saw it spread on my own adult face one morning after...

Now, on the last Saturday in December 2002, Bucky and I walk past what was once the junkie coffeeshop, and is now scaffolded and renovated for a Brick Oven Pizza grand opening some time in the new year. We cross over to where the Woolworth’s once stood and are now faced with the Gap. Crossing 8th Ave., instead of the drugstore there is a Dallas BBQ restaurant, in all its winking neon glory, the glass doors wide enough for the largest stroller and biggest shopping bags to pass through. And just two doors down, between 23rd and 24th Streets, there is a small, handwritten sign in the window of Chicken Delight announcing that they are closing their doors for good tonight and thanking the neighborhood for their patronage.

It is a quarter after 9, and they will close at 9:30. Bucky places the order and I clear a place for us. The young Chinese kid at the counter hands us the styrofoam containers, and as he goes outside to pull the metal shutter down halfway we tear into the last two chicken breasts ever served at Chicky D’s. The meat is rubbery from sitting under the heat lamp, the fries are soggy, but we smother it all in packets of Hunt’s ketchup and eat it silently with our fingers. Each bite is important to me, yet somehow I cannot taste much of anything. The smell of the batter is the most memorable thing about the experience, that and the weight of the paper bag as the oils seep out of the styrofoam and form a warm pool in the bottom of the sack.

Finally, we are finished, dabbing our faces with paper napkins and zipping up our jackets as I throw the trash into the garbage can. We nod to the counter guy as he gets ready to clean the friolator one last time and we make our way out into the cold December night. He follows us to the door and pulls the gate down to the ground behind us. Part of New York is dead, and the yukkies blithely push past us, heading to warm places while ignoring the homeless guy who’s taken up residence outside the Krispy Kreme. I hand him a dollar and a smile is my reward.

Bucky walks me to the train in silence, then hugs me abruptly. "Call me when you get home." We have parted this way for almost 20 years, 10 of which were spent in Chelsea, where she still lives, despite the growing fear that she’ll be priced out of her apartment when her lease is up this year.

I manage to make my way downstairs before the first wave of nausea hits me. I vomit violently into a garbage can, then duck shamefaced and shaky into the train. As it pulls out of the 23rd St. station, I realize I’ve lost a lot more than just some bad chicken back there.