Honey Don’t Eat No Flesh

We were in a restaurant the other day with a couple we had just met and the waiter was extolling the virtues of their finest entree, chicken cacciatore.

He was a drama student who had just completed a course in foreign accents at UCLA and was speaking in his best ersatz Italian, saying that the chicken was so fresh and tender he had eaten it him-a-self that very night.

We all said OK, we’d give it a shot, except for the woman whose name was, so help me God, Honey. She said stiffly, “I don’t partake of flesh.”

I thought she was kidding at first and replied, “We aren’t advocating cannibalism here,” but she said, “I don’t partake of any animal flesh.”

I should have known that anyone who used the biblical partake had no capacity for humor and was therefore serious as hell in every phrase she uttered.

“Honey is a vegetarian,” her husband, Mac, explained uneasily, clinging to his Scotch and water so hard I thought the glass would break.

“I would prefer that no one partook of flesh at this table,” Honey said with great finality.

My wife, Cinelli, is an accommodating person who tries to avoid trouble whenever possible and ordered rigatoni with a non-meat sauce.

I, on the other hand, offer no compromises to the damned and told the waiter that I would partake of chicken flesh, adding, “Could you kill it at the table?”

Honey got the message and jerked Mac up off his chair like he was a dog on the couch and off they went.

The waiter, who had been silent during the ordeal, finally found voice and said, “I’m-a sorry, sir, we don’t-a kill chickens at the table.”

I mention the incident only to illustrate a rising level of intolerance to personal annoyances.

It began with a drive against cigarette smoking led by tense, skinny people who carry bottles of Evian water with them wherever they go, the better to damp the fires of their all-consuming zeal. They drove smokers out of many public and private places into small clusters on street corners then began looking around for who to get next.

I’m for the campaign against cigarette smoking, but opposed to the climate it has created for attacking those with habits or lifestyles of which we do not happen to approve.

Honey is a good example. I don’t care whether she eats broccoli and tofu the rest of her miserable life, but it’s none of her damned business what I eat unless I drop under the table and start gnawing on her leg.

We have become a people obsessed with annoyances.

One neighbor complained about my old dog Hoover barking because he’s a television writer and needs his quiet. Not Hoover, the neighbor.

I suggested a compromise, that Hoover would give up barking if he would give up writing, but it was no deal. He moved. The writer, not Hoover.

Hoover, by the way, is about 102 dog years old and his bark is no louder than a baby’s burp, but I guess anything can be jarring when you’re writing for such sensitive shows as “Roseanne” and “America’s Funniest People.”

The evening of the Honey-don’t-eat-no-meat incident we came home to newscasts that featured a restaurant owner railing against chewing gum, and residents of an upscale retirement village suing a church over its bells.

The restaurateur was annoyed because somehow all of Newport Beach had taken to leaving its chewed gum on the sidewalk in front of his establishment. He was therefore demanding that everyone stop selling gum.

The retirement villagers were white breads in Florida whose lives revolved around golf and Bloody Marys and whose degree of civic participation was limited to hating the Sunday morning bell chimes at a church across the way.

The simultaneous attacks on God and Wrigley’s spearmint got me to thinking about all of the complaints I had heard or read about lately. A lawyer in Calabasas hates airplanes flying overhead. A woman in Westwood is liable to assault anyone wearing animal skin for clothing. An activist in Woodland Hills wants a world free of skateboards. A purist in Topanga will punch out anyone who uses the word ambience.

We have no tolerance for minor aggravations.

For instance, I annoy Cinelli because I hum and meander when I walk. “You are like a giant bumblebee,” she said to me once, “wandering in space.”

But she allows me my humming and meandering with wry forbearance, which is a lesson we might all learn, to bear small annoyances with equanimity.

Unfortunately, most people won’t learn the lesson, and the world will end not with a bang, but a petty complaint.

I don’t know about you, but I hate the very idea.