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Overview
When Chase Compton met the love of his life at a dirty dive bar on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, he had no idea how far from comfort the relationship would take him. Their story played out at every chic restaurant, café, and bar in downtown New York City. Ravenous hunger, it seemed, was their mutual attraction to one another—until suddenly the appetite was spoiled, and Chase was left to pick up the pieces of a romance gone wrong.
Left high, dry, and starving for affection (and cheeseburgers), Chase turned to an unlikely audience in a moment of desperation: Yelp.com. Detailed in the Yelp reviews is the story of how to survive a broken heart. Every meal and cocktail shared is a reminder of times spent with the ever elusive “Him.” In recounting the bites devoured and the drunken fits of passion that propelled the relationship, the author chronicles his whirlwind relationship with the man of his dreams, revisiting the key places where the couple ate, drank, and fell in and out of love in the West Village and beyond.
The Yelp is a memoir of personal transformation and self-realization, or more simply—a memoir of food and love, played out on a map of modern Manhattan’s culinary scene. The book includes the original twenty-eight Yelp reviews, with interwoven narrative chapters that provide context, insight, and delight to Chase’s story.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781510713611 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Skyhorse |
| Publication date: | 09/20/2016 |
| Sold by: | SIMON & SCHUSTER |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| File size: | 782 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
I LAY ON THE FLOOR AND STARED at the ceiling. It was cold in my room, and I was only wearing one sock. I wasn't exactly sure how this had happened, but then again, I wasn't exactly sure if I cared. Outside, snow was coming down in buckets. It had been like this for weeks now, and much to my dismay, it showed no sign of stopping. I rolled onto my stomach and pressed my forehead to the cold wooden floor.
This wasn't the first time we had broken up. This was months after I returned from Paris, where he "officially" broke up with me over an email on my birthday. Heartbreak is a place we've all been to; I knew I wasn't special or anything. This was just a thing that happened. People's hearts get broken, and everyone feels like it has never happened to anyone else before in history like it is happening to them in that moment. But for a second I selfishly slipped and let myself believe that no Capulet nor Montague had ever felt the anguish that I now had pressing down on my chest. The devastation of the ages was now my best friend, and it felt like New York City was the perfect place to be if I wanted to wither away into a tiny ball of heartbreak and depression. I was the mayor of Heartbreak. I was the crown prince of Despair. I owned it, and I wore it like a straightjacket.
What a drama queen.
I had just returned to the arctic tundra once known as Manhattan after an unexpected trip to California. I had escaped the East Coast two days after Thanksgiving, and for that I was thankful. I can say, without hesitation, that Thanksgiving 2013 was the worst day of my entire life. On a day that was supposed to be about family and friends and (most importantly) binge eating turkey, I had found myself curled up in fetal position on my couch, sobbing hysterically and unable to move. I was completely paralyzed, and the only thing I could do was cry. It didn't help that every half hour or so I would get festive text messages and pictures of grandiose dinner tables with little blurbs saying things like "Happy Thanksgiving! Wish you were here! So much turkey!"
Meanwhile, I craved a swift and painless death. I would gobble-gobble alright ... a fistful of Valium, if I didn't know any better.
And I did know better, most of the time, but I just dug the hole even deeper. I met up with Him (who shall forever remain nameless) and tried to figure out what was going on. The thing is, I knew what was going on: our relationship was coming to an ugly end. He had betrayed me and shattered my trust, and there was nothing that was going to change that. A matter of days prior, we still had the intentions of moving in together and starting what I had hoped would be a "real adult relationship."
I had so many feelings and so few places to put them anymore. It boiled over in me like a pot simmering too high, and every once in a while it would get the best of me and completely incapacitate me. I felt wretched and sad and completely defeated. I thought long and hard about what had happened to me and tried to think of a way to fix the entire situation. Naturally, there was only one thing I could think to do that would make the feelings any less pungent.
I began to write letters to Him every morning when I awoke from my fitful slumber. I'd crawl out of bed looking like the Crypt Keeper and sulk my way over to my laptop by the couch. For minutes, I'd sit there and stare at the screen, wondering what I could say that would make any of this cruel plot twist any different. It wasn't so much about begging and pleading for Him to reconsider his sadistic actions and come back to me, but more about trying to get Him to remember all of the good stuff that he threw away when he decided that I wasn't enough. The letters I wrote Him were long and detailed, usually reminiscing about how happy we were together as we walked through the Village hand in hand on our way to breakfast or lunch. After I'd finish a letter I would sign it always the same way:
I love you. And I miss you.
Then I'd delete the entire thing.
The entire time we knew each other, he was constantly trying to escape. Then he'd come crawling back once he had successfully fled. Men in Manhattan were so typical at times, and I'd known them all. He had cut me loose — on my birthday — when I went to Paris. I received an email from Him telling me to drown in the Seine. Upon return, he had sought me out again and asked for forgiveness, which I was happy to extend. Weeks went by, and we had resumed our role as the happiest couple in all of New York, but eventually he came to meltdown again. It happened on Thanksgiving. I knew it would never be the same after that.
People deal with heartbreak in a myriad of different ways, but most of the time they are just a variation on the same general idea. The monologue by Julie Delpy from the last scene in the film "2 Days in Paris" came to mind, where Julie calmly states:
Always the same for me: Break up, break down. Drink up, fool around. Meet one guy, then another, fuck around. Forget the one and only. Then after a few months of total emptiness start again to look for true love, desperately look everywhere. And after two years of loneliness, meet a new love and swear it is the one, until that one is gone as well.
Ouch.
I wondered if it was happening again, just as it always had. I'd been in love a few times before, and I honestly felt that I had a pretty firm grasp on what all that business was about. Stars get in your eyes, and every song is about them. Eyes lock during sex for a change, and you honestly see the person instead of just looking at them. You remember that suns set, and you notice them as if they are suddenly filled with meaning — even though they've been there, silent and unnoticed, all along. All of these were the things I had come to know about the nature of love, but for some reason this one felt different. I wondered if I thought this way about each new love at first, and then upon ending those trysts, erased that general knowledge like a dry-erase board crammed with fruitless equations.
If it all sounds very grim, that is not the intention. I am a rational man with a strong head on his shoulders, and I wouldn't have stuck around if my entire relationship with Him was a never-ending nightmare of deceit, lies, and sadness. That wasn't the way it always was, and to fully explain why I loved Him so dearly, one must know that to be the truth. As much as I had wanted to spread the gospel of what an evil monster he was, it would not be the full story. Being with Him made me the happiest person I'd ever been in my entire life.
Before Him, I always thought that the things I wanted out of life were "corny." At thirty years of age, I used to sit in the park and long for the storybook love that one usually only read about in a sixteen-year-old girl's diary. I wanted sunsets and sunrises on the beach, embracing each other curled up in an abandoned lifeguard tower. I wanted trips to get ice cream in the dead of winter, in the middle of the night, and sharing said ice cream with one spoon. I wanted a man to take my last name and sleep in bed with me in my parent's home back in California when we took vacations there. I was dog-crazy, even though I'd previously never even wanted one to call my own. Suddenly, every time a cute little Italian Greyhound pranced by me on the street, I nearly dropped to my knees with a swoon as I imagined what it would be like to own a dog with my partner.
I'd always been "that way." It was as if finding my soulmate was the most important thing in the world to me. Most gay men my age had different drives. Most of my peers made the gym their soulmate (I both envied and despised the lousy fucks) or made a career their life's calling. People in the city were married to their work and to their futures. Sure — I had a job and paid my bills and took decent care of myself, but taking care of myself wasn't enough for me. I wanted with all my heart to find someone who I could take care of and who would in turn take care of me and perhaps propel me into ... I don't know. Adulthood? Happiness? Wholeness?
If you've ever lived in Manhattan, you'll know what it is like to be the loneliest person in the entire world even when you are surrounded by millions of people: screaming cab drivers, ranting hobos, fighting children, chanting Hare Krishnas, clucking queens on 8th Avenue, growling punks on St. Mark's Place. There's always an ambulance, street performers, psychics, fanatics, and people, people everywhere. It's maddening to feel like, in the midst of all of the buzz, there isn't a single person on your team.
When I first met Him, I felt like I had finally found a teammate. He was a needle in a gaystack, everything I had ever wanted and more. He lived in Manhattan on the very same street I did, just across the length of the island. It was a straight shot from the West Village to the East on 4th, and I convinced myself that surely this must have been fate. He wore the same clothes as me — that sort of disheveled chic that was so au courant and involved a lot of black blousy things and painted on skinny jeans that we'd bought from Oak. He even had a job, too. Much like myself, he was a waiter. This made me feel better about life in general because I felt like he was in the same boat that I was in: trying to stay afloat while trying to pursue dreams by serving the masses. I was a failed artist and a would-be writer, and he was interested in pursuing a career in fashion. I could imagine the beautiful day when my fashion mogul boyfriend would attend my book signings draped in exquisite Rick Owens and smiling at me because we no longer had to wear aprons or ask anyone ever again "how would you like that cooked?"
And the sex? Forget about it.
He knew what he was doing. He held out for a month when we first started dating. Although we were attached at the lips and getting off every other way we could manage, he didn't actually fully give up the goods until I was completely enraptured with Him as a person. After we made love that first time, we couldn't stop. We fucked every day, sometimes twice or three times. It would be easy for me to say that I was obsessed with his physical beauty and sexual prowess, but that wasn't the case in the slightest. When he lay before me naked, sometimes I would just stare at Him, unable to move. His body was the most gorgeous I'd ever had the pleasure of seeing. Sure, I'd dated a muscle queen or two in my day, and one of my last loves had the body of a Greek god. His wasn't like that — it was the little things that turned me on with a passion I'd never known before. Besides his rippling muscles and his perfect ass, he was littered with imperfections. These were my favorite parts.
His feet were disgusting dinosaur claws with big chunks of blister peeling off of the heels. A scar from a hernia ran across his stomach. He had scars on his back from minor surgery to remove what could have become cancer, and his balls ... his balls were a nightmare. He never trimmed his pubes, and it was a jungle down there. The talons, the scars, the jungle balls — these were my favorite things. His imperfections showed me that he wasn't the kind of guy you saw photoshopped to hell in a magazine or filtered out in the shimmery studio light of a porno set. He was real. He had lived. And his realness made Him the most extraordinary thing I'd ever been with.
I could wax poetic about how perfect he was to me for days. But that wouldn't change anything, and I had to find that out the hard way, because that was exactly what I did after Thanksgiving when everything fell apart. I waxed. Hard.
CHAPTER 2THE CITY THAT WAS ONCE THE SCENE for what I considered to be my dream come true soon became my nightmare. On every street corner, I saw phantom images of the two of us in full swoon, dancing hand in hand. Every cup of coffee I attempted to take in was a war zone flashback set directly in the trenches that jolted me from my momentary reverie and sent me scurrying like a frightened animal. I must have looked positively feral as I darted in and out of every single café or restaurant in the West Village just trying to find myself breakfast. As a result of this, I quickly became very skinny. I'd always been a thin man, but this new inability to eat made me positively gaunt.
Because I couldn't eat, food of course became the one thing I wanted the most. Eating was what we had done best together in our short time. He was a big boy with a big appetite, and he always wore a smile from ear to ear when presented with a delicious meal. Because he spent time in the military, he ate like a wild animal. Watching him eat a pastrami sandwich was like watching the Tazmanian Devil whirl into a frenzy of swirling fury. It was insane. I loved it. No tablecloth was safe from Him, and by the end of a meal he always left the table looking like a battlefield.
I was sinking into a morbid depression and wasting away, and I didn't know what to do about it. I couldn't talk to my friends about it because they were sick and tired of the same old sob story. They all told me the same thing, anyhow: "He warned you he didn't want to be in a relationship. You did this to yourself." It pissed me off to no end.
"How can you not see that we conquered that?" I'd yell in retort. "We fixed it! He fell in love with me! He got a tattoo for me on his arm! He told me he wanted to move in, and start our lives together! Coney Island ... Montauk ... Central Park ... The Temperance Fountain ... All of those delicious dinners holding hands and staring into each other's eyes for hours ..."
They would shake their heads and tell me I had imagined it all. This, also, infuriated me to no end, as I was convinced they hadn't a clue what was really going on. I wished that they could have seen the way he looked at me as we lay on top of each other everywhere we could possibly recline in Manhattan and beyond. I wished I could show them the way we used to laugh and eat and make love and (quite literally) skip through the streets of SoHo together.
I wanted to show everyone that it was indeed love, and it had happened, and it meant the world to me. And it was still happening — everywhere I turned, memories of Him. A war zone. A minefield of memories.
I sat in my underwear, shivering and manic. I needed to find a way to let Him, and the world at large, know that this love was not an illusion. It was real as shit. It had rocked me. How did everyone not know that I had found my soulmate? How did magazines and newspapers and Barbara Walters not want to interview us about how we managed to find The Greatest Love of All Time? I felt like we deserved a medal or a trophy for how perfect and beautiful our happiness was. How did he not cherish this romance the same way I did? It was everything. I was there. I saw it. I lived it.
I had to get it out, so I did the only thing that I knew how to do. I wrote it.
I'd always written in my life, but for the first time ever I felt like nonfiction was more unbelievable than the greatest of love stories. Eat your heart out, Juliet. My man's twice the lover than that Montague dump of yours — and mine's actually real. He was flesh and blood, and he lived on this island with me, and we ate sandwiches together and did it in the butt.
I began to write the story of the rise and fall of the love of my life. I assumed that I would send it to Him one day in a beautifully bound book, and he would then realize that he had thrown away the greatest love he'd ever known. That was the plan. Or, of course ... I could Facebook it. I could share our story with the whole world in the click of a button. Maybe if all of my friends and his friends and our mutual friends knew about our love, then it would be validated and real and he would come back to me.
I immediately knew that was crazy and stalker-ish and immature and totally wrong. If he didn't want to be with me, then that was his choice. All of our friends didn't need to know that something born of such love dissolved into such a mess. At the same time, I wanted someone to tell me that I was right. I wanted someone to tell me that it was love, and that it was real. I needed to get it out there into the world, and hopefully the world would understand me and the sad, blathering fool I had become.
I could retrace every single step of our relationship. Manhattan had become a map of memories, and every single bar and restaurant and park had become like a pin drop on it. Our story had happened in 3D, and the stage we had played it on was this great big island filled with millions of other people's "pins." I had to take a moment to force myself to understand that this same thing was probably happening to every other heartbroken weirdo in this city. I wished that there were a meeting place, like AA, where all of the heartbroken masses could congregate and hide away from those dreadful pins. I wondered if I could go someplace and just be listened to.
I don't know how it struck me initially, but I pulled up my laptop and began to write. Hungry as shit and in a frenzied fit of desperation, I could only think about eating at my favorite restaurant that I used to go to with Him. It was Café Mogador, in the East Village. I didn't know what to write, and I didn't know what to feel, but I began to write my story starting with where it was the happiest: breakfast.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Yelp"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Chase Compton.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Prologue,
Introduction,
Chapter One,
Chapter Two,
Café Mogador,
Von,
The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf,
Uncle Ted's Modern Chinese Cuisine,
Polish National Home,
Minetta Tavern,
Chapter Three,
French Roast,
Nathan's Famous,
Sunset Tower Hotel,
Chapter Four,
Veselka,
New York Public Library, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building,
Melvin's Juice Box,
Eva's,
124 Old Rabbit Club,
Tompkins Square Park,
Chapter Five,
7A - CLOSED,
Susanna Pizzeria,
Tue Thai Restaurant,
Sundaes and Cones,
Cafeteria,
Dean & DeLuca,
Chapter Six,
Murray's Cheese Shop,
Happy Taco Burrito,
Sweet Revenge,
Bethesda Terrace,
Chapter Seven,
Brooklyn Bridge,
Chapter Eight,
Epilogue: Yaffa Café,