by Barry Goldman
It was more than 50 years ago that Mike and I invented Corn Mush Latke Pie. We were living in a flat on Margaret Street near 7 Mile and Woodward in Detroit. We paid 110 bucks a month for the place. It had white walls, white drapes, red carpeting and the kind of bathroom sink that has the hot water coming out of one faucet and the cold out of another. For furniture we had two lawn chairs and a big brass ashtray. We were “in school.”
One night it got to be time to eat and neither of us had any money so we had to look in the cupboard. Naturally, there was nothing in there you could just eat. Stuff you could just eat we had long since eaten. The stuff that was still in the cupboard you had to cook. It was left over from the first week we moved in when we said we would stop eating in restaurants all the time and save money.
What we came up with was some potatoes with giant tubers growing out of them and some Jiffy Corn Muffin Mix. We snapped off the tubers and grated the potatoes, mixed the corn muffin mix with some water and garlic powder and hot pepper flakes, and put the whole thing in a cast iron skillet and put it in the oven. We called it Corn Mush Latke Pie because we didn’t know what else to call it and because latke is Yiddish for potato pancake and potato pancakes are traditional on Hanukkah and it was roughly Hanukkah as near as we could figure.
It was awful, as you might have guessed. So we dumped it in a big pickle jar that happened to be around, empty of pickles but still with a little pickle juice on the bottom, screwed down the lid, stuck it in a corner, and went around the block to visit Lisa and Barbara to see what they were having for dinner.
A month or so later it was Christmas, and we had a big Christmas party. We had a tree that we decorated with beer can tabs and turkey bones, but we didn’t have any other decorations. With just our two chairs in the room and all that white, the place didn’t look very festive. We decided to let the party decorate itself. We invested in a box of assorted color magic markers and hung them from strings around the walls. Some of the people who came to the party were artists of one description or another and there was plenty of holiday spirit flowing so by about 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning we had quite a colorful place.
We lived there for a few months after that. By then the Corn Mush Latke Pie had turned black inside the jar, and the drawings on the walls had begun to lose their charm. Then one day a guy showed up and announced that he was the new landlord and the rent was going up to $200. We told him we were planning to move anyway and asked about our security deposit. He said he would return our deposit if we painted the walls. We said we tried painting the walls, which was true, but the magic marker just bled right through. It would look fine when we first did it, but by the time the paint dried it looked just like it did before we started. He said we were using the wrong kind of paint. He said oil-based paint is thicker and more opaque and permanent than the other kinds and it would cover the stuff up fine. So we made a deal. We promised to paint the walls with oil-based paint, and he promised to return our security deposit. Then, just before he left, I remember distinctly hearing him say, “I believe in returning people’s security deposits. You don’t return their deposits, they’re likely to drop a can of paint in the middle of your carpet.”
So we found a new place and moved our chairs, and we bought a gallon of oil-based paint and a roller and a 12 pack of Stroh’s and set about painting the walls. First we drank a couple of Stroh’s to get in the mood and then we yelled HUP HUP and I ran over to the paint and grabbed it and threw it to Mike.
It might have been a bad snap, or maybe he wasn’t paying enough attention, but whatever it was there was a fumble and a sickening glub glub sound and we wound up with this enormous pool of thick, opaque, and permanent white paint in the middle of the red carpet.
We used the roller to push a lot of the paint back into the can. But then we needed to wipe up the rest. And since we had moved everything out of the place, there wasn’t anything to wipe it up with except the drapes. They were white drapes, as I mentioned, so you couldn’t really tell. Then what we had was a big pink spot in the middle of the floor. The new landlord seemed like a nice enough guy and we didn’t really want to mess with him too much, and besides he had our security deposit. And besides that, this was exactly what he said bad tenants might do and we didn’t want him to think we were bad tenants. So we got to thinking. Red mixed with white makes pink. What do you have to mix with pink to get red again? Black, right? So what do we have that’s black? Nothing… except… Corn Mush Latke Pie!
We got that big old jar with the black glop in it out from behind the stove. And we slowly poured what had once been Corn Mush Latke Pie onto that pink spot and gently rubbed it in. In a matter of moments the spot was gone. Gone like it had never existed. Vanished.
We hung the drapes back up, painted the walls, and looked around with a sense of wonder. The paint was still wet when the landlord showed up. He looked the place over and handed us our money. And we lived happily ever after.
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