Cody Bellinger was back in the Yankees' lineup on Wednesday, after a day off due to what medical experts might describe as "shitting and puking his guts out." This is a refreshingly straightforward diagnosis compared to the usual "flu-like symptoms" suffered by athletes, which I have always assumed was a mealymouthed cover for a hangover. Bellinger wanted everyone to know he was not hung over. He just ate some bad wings and embraced the toilet.
Bellinger told reporters how he ordered room-service chicken wings at his Detroit hotel, to eat while watching Monday night's NCAA men's championship game. "They were good coming in," he said, leaving to your imagination the implication of their quality while coming out. "But I woke up at 4:00 a.m. sweating and just started throwing up for a few hours."
The culprit? Traditional, bone-in wings, with "no sauces, spices or rubs."
Excuse me?
Cody Bellinger, let me tell you a story about a bar named Chinese Fantastico, which was not actually named that, and was not actually a bar. It was the Deadspin staff's go-to after-work drink spot in the late aughts and early 2010s, and it was the tiny foyer of a restaurant which we never patronized, preferring instead to sit at the short bar and drink endless Tsingtaos served with bemused equanimity by Paul the bartender, and complain about why we kept coming to this place. It had been chosen by A.J. Daulerio, who reveled in campy shit everyone hated, and dubbed "Fantastico" by A.J. for its gaudy neon furnishings and cheesy decorative fountain and palpable lack of fantastic-ness. If there were more than four of you there, it became uncomfortably crowded, blocking the way of people making their way to the actual restaurant. One time a guy walked in from the street, calmly tucked under his arm the maneki-neko figurine on the counter, and walked out. We saw a rat in the fountain, doing a little Busby Berkeley routine. It was an awful place. I miss Fantastico nearly every day.
As I said, we never used the restaurant for its intended purpose. Once, with a particularly big group, we decided to try being seated at a table; we ended up aborting that plan even before ordering because it was weird to not be at the bar in front. We felt like a chimp dressed in human clothes: superficially civilized against our will, and supremely uncomfortable with it. One time, however, toward the tail end of our patronage (the Gawker offices would soon move uptown; the restaurant would soon be shuttered by the health department), I ordered food. I don't remember why I was particularly famished that evening, or how everyone reacted to this breach of tradition. I remember my dish was sublime: honey walnut shrimp. The best I'd ever eaten. I will never know which of the ingredients was the culprit that had me, hours later, writhing on my bathroom floor, pressing my cheek to the cool tile to distract me from the cramps ravaging my guts. It was the first time I'd ever had food poisoning, and it remains quite possibly the worst I've ever felt.
So, Cody Bellinger, I can sympathize ... to a point. The moral of my story is if one is to suffer from being chosen by E. coli's impartial flagellum of fate, one should at least enjoy oneself first. Earn the pain. Do not spend hours of this short life barfing because you had some plain chicken wings. I get that athletes are freaks about diet, but no sauce? No spices? Nothing? Just plain chicken?
"I can say I will not eat wings for five years," Bellinger said. "I swear. Because the thought of it right now makes me sick."
You did this to yourself, man. It's been real easy for me to live with a deep aversion to honey walnut shrimp consumed next to a cash register. Years without wings, one of the primary food groups, sounds like hell.
