Act of God

Mo, I didn’t.”
    “Well, they don’t. At least, the Chinese don’t have them over there now, so this guy down in Brooklyn—a Chinese-American himself—he’s going to export them back to China. Can you imagine that?”
    “Sounds like a pretty good—”
    “I mean, we Americans, we don’t know from these sayings, are they authentic, you know? Tell me, John, you open a fortune cookie in a Szechuan place here, can you tell whether Confucius or whoever actually said some of the things in there?”
    “Probably not, Mo.”
    “Huh, probably is right. I remember this one company up here, they did reverse fortune cookies.”
    I had to ask. “Reverse fortune...”
    “Cookies. Cookies, you know what I’m talking about here, right, John? I mean, these hard, sugary things you break apart and read the little slip inside there.”
    “I get the picture, Mo.”
    “So, okay, this company up here, they make cookies with terrible fortunes in them, like ‘You will get syphilis and your brain will rot,’ and so on.”
    “I wouldn’t think there’d be much market for that sort of thing, Mo.”
    “Neither did anybody else. I don’t think the company’s still around.”
    “Mo—”
    “But this guy in Brooklyn, now, how do you suppose he’s going to know if his sayings are right for the real Chinese 0ver across the Pacific, huh? I mean, how are they going to react, he sends them fortunes that aren’t quite kosher?”
    “Sounds like a genuine problem, Mo.”
    “Problem, huh. That guy’s problem pales in comparison to the other story idea.”
    “What’s that, Mo?”
    Katzen removed the cigar from his mouth and regarded it disdainfully. “Condoms.”
    “Condoms?”
    “Yeah. The city council’s going to make all the bars and restaurants in Boston have coin-operated condom machines in the rest rooms.”
    “I must have missed that, Mo.”
    “Yeah, well, it’s going to be kind of hard to miss them, I’m thinking. Most of these places, they got a men’s room the size of a broom closet, you can barely turn around in there by yourself, and you’re going to be doing your business with this machine staring you in the face? I remember when I was young—this was quite some time ago, John, believe it or not.”
    “I believe you, Mo.”
    “I remember we used to carry the little buggers around in our wallets, hoping we’d get lucky. Only in those days, lucky meant once, so you’d have just this one in there, and you’d be praying your mother wouldn’t go into your bedroom to put some lunch money in the wallet and see the thing and have a heart attack and die, right there at your bureau, and all the family would know when she was found with the thing in her hand that you’re the one who killed her, killed her stone cold. And the problem was, they always got ruined in there, anyway.”
    “Ruined, Mo?”
    “Yeah, ruined. I mean, you keep that wallet in your back pocket, you’re sitting on it all day, every day. You never thought to, like, replace the thing. I mean, you know you haven’t used it, there’s no reason to go through the agony of buying a new one. And that’s what it was, too. Agony, John. That movie got it right, there.”
    “Movie, Mo?”
    “Movie. Film, whatever. Summer of ‘42, when the kid goes into the pharmacy and tries to buy a condom.” Pharmacy brought me back to William Proft and his sister. “Mo, I wonder if—”
    “Now they got whole stores of them.”
    “Whole stores, Mo?”
    “Yeah. Condom stores, with corny names. They got one over by you there in Back Bay, whole place is like a card store except instead of catchy verse they got legions of
    latex.”
    “That’s pretty catchy itself, Mo.”
    He gestured with his cigar. “What is?”
    “ ‘Legions of latex.’ ”
    Katzen pointed the cigar at me. “I can’t use that, John.”
    “Why not?”
    “You can’t make fun of this stuff anymore, not with AIDS and all. It’s off- limits, unless you want to do a serious story on it, and I’m not sure I’m in the mood for a serious story today.”
    “Then the fortune-cookie one sounds like a good bet.”
    “Yeah.”
    “You can do it like spaghetti.”
    “Spaghetti?”
    “Yes. The way Marco Polo brought spaghetti to Italy from China.”
    “Italy? I’m talking Chinese restaurants here, John, not Italian ones.”
    “Mo, what I mean is—”
    “Who ever heard of a fortune cookie in an Italian restaurant?”
    “Nobody, Mo. That’s—”
    “Wait a minute. You know,