Tuesday, October 14, 2008
i laugh until my head comes off
Lunch
Here I am.
Here we are.
Here we go now.
There is nothing more important than eating right. I’ve got my sandwich. I’ve got my apple. I’ve got my juice. The sandwich is bologna. The juice is full of sugar and the apple skin gets stuck in my teeth, but I’m not one to complain. Especially after considering what everyone else in this mammoth cafeteria is eating.
I see the girls. I see the fat ones, the skinny ones, the pretty ones, and the ugly ones. I see the athletic ones with their letter jackets draped over their chairs as they eat what little they allow themselves to eat. A thousand girls, all of them with vending machine lunches. They eat their corn chips one by one, and sip their diet pop slowly. Occasionally, one will gracefully snag a pepperoni off of someone’s pizza, and then chew it with her mouth open, giving everyone a detailed example of exactly how food particles can get caught inside a girl’s braces. I look at her with veiled disgust. You do too.
A thousand boys in this cafeteria, and they’re all sucking down the grease, right before athletics class. It’s okay, it won’t come back to harm them until they reach college. Today, after lunch, they’ll just exfoliate the grease through their skin during their warm up laps around the football stadium. Of course, it all comes out as acne and terrible white heads on their backs, but this is Texas – everyone is gross here anyway.
And there are those kids like my friends and I, the kids who bring their own lunches out of contempt for the cafeteria food (plus it’s cheaper than even getting the discount lunch). We’ve all got our lunches wrapped up in plastic grocery bags. It’s our mothers’ way of recycling and being “green”, even though it technically does nothing to help the environment. But still, it’s recycling… and we’re too poor to afford reusable or paper bags anyway.
We’ve all got the same things: sandwich, apple, and juice. All off us except Tim Burgess, but that’s because his mom is crazy.
We knew his mom went crazy the day she sent him to school with a plate of filet mignon wrapped in a white grocery bag. There was a side of melon-balled potatoes and a sprig of parsley. The gravy was already poured on. The next day he had a red snapper fish with a slice of lemon. The day after that he had stuffed mushrooms with couscous.
At first she just gave him Perrier to drink with these swanky meals, but eventually starting packing a small bottle of Merlot with his lunch instead. No teachers have noticed, but Tim’s been tipsy every day in his fourth period class for weeks.
Tim is the last person to sit down at our table today. He’s carefully balancing the plate that’s inside that plastic bag so as to not make today’s feast spill inside the bag. He unravels today’s lunch. I give a little drum roll. It’s fettuccine chicken alfredo, with a light salad and a small bell pepper on the side. Fantastic. Mrs. Burgess is an artist, even if she did become a nut bar after her husband disappeared.
I’ve got to hand it to Tim as well. It would be hard carrying around a plate of food all day in your backpack. It’s hard enough being a ninth-grade nothing without opening up your backpack in class and finding that your schoolbooks are covered in beef au jour dipping sauce. It once happened to me, except it was a can of Coke that had exploded all over the stuff in my backpack. It was kind of my fault, though. I guess that’s what I get for being the kind of guy who throws his backpack hard against a wall as soon as he enters a classroom.
Maybe that’s why I’m eating a grocery bag lunch. Maybe it’s because of my assertive complexities. Maybe we all have that same excuse at this table. All except Tim. His mom is just crazy.
Every five minutes or so I stand up just to survey the people in this cafeteria. It lets me stretch and gives me a respite from the mundanity that is the usual conversation at our table. I can see everyone, everyone in little cliques. Everyone in their own proclaimed territories. You’ve got the jocks, the douchebags, the burnouts, the trash, the punks, the thugs, the dangerous intellectuals (us), the bangers, the kickers, the band geeks, the game freaks, the skaters, the preps, etcetera, etcetera.
The game freaks are whom I’m scoping out today. Today is Wednesday. On Wednesdays, my friends and I usually like to cause some sort of scene here in the cafeteria. We always get away with it, too.
I sit back down, take a swig of Tim’s wine, and give my friends Todd and Brown a nod. “Go for it,” I tell them.
Todd and Brown get up from their seats and make their way to the long table at which the game freaks are seated. The game freak table is actually numerous rectangular tables put together consecutively to make one long table. This is where these kids escape to their magical world where they aren’t fat and lazy, they aren’t ridiculed, they aren’t utterly useless, and their parents aren’t ignorant and spoiling. At this table, the game freaks obsess over the card game Magic: The Gathering. At this table, these kids are gods. And Todd and Brown are about to ruin their shit.
Todd stands at one end of the table, while Brown goes to the other. Brown takes several long steps backward, and then runs forward and lunges head first across the table, ruining the numerous Magic games that were taking place. Todd grabs several stacks of cards from the table and tosses them in the air. Cards are scattered all over the place. Creepy little kids with stained clothes are panicking, frantically trying to gather their own cards out of a fear that the cards will be stolen or ruined.
Some of the kids throw weak punches at Todd and Brown for ruining their decks, but the kids are too wimpy and worried about their cards to do anything serious about it. A kid named Oliver Teems grabs Todd by the collar and punches him in the shoulder, furious. Todd laughs in his face and Oliver puts him down. We actually call Oliver “Teemster”.
Teemster is the only one at that table that knows our names, but won’t tell on us because he knows how badly we can ruin him. He knows how low we’ll go to tear your world apart, and he knows not to tempt us.
Teemster knows this because he used to hang out with us, back in the day. He was like the little pet friend that we pitied and made fun of. We had his back. I like to think that we still do.
His family is really poor, poorer than any of ours. His mom is too fat to work and his dad broke his back on the job when a gigantic rack full of huge carpets fell on top of him. His family is currently sitting in lawsuit limbo – the case still stands, but the only money they’re collecting is from welfare. They don’t have running water. They use an outhouse.
But eventually Teemster found his little card game and a whole group of people like him who just wanted to escape from their dreary lives and everyone’s condescending, shit-eating grins.
Todd and Brown come back from the game freak table laughing. We’re all laughing. The whole cafeteria is laughing. And nobody is going to turn us in, because we will fuck shit up.
I’ve got to go to the bathroom, so I do.
When I come back, the cafeteria is in a frenzy. People are running from their seats, some hiding under tables. Food is flying through the air. My friend Robert is covered in ketchup. The campus police tackle a couple of throwers. A good quick food fight just went down, and it didn’t start from our table. I know this because all my friends are still in here. If it had been one of us, we’d have all escaped before anybody could point a finger.
The bell rings. We all make our way out of the cafeteria. And I think to myself, damn, today was a bad day to bring my gun. Didn’t expect that food fight.
Oh, well, I think. There’s always tomorrow.
Here I am.
Here we are.
Here we go now.
There is nothing more important than eating right. I’ve got my sandwich. I’ve got my apple. I’ve got my juice. The sandwich is bologna. The juice is full of sugar and the apple skin gets stuck in my teeth, but I’m not one to complain. Especially after considering what everyone else in this mammoth cafeteria is eating.
I see the girls. I see the fat ones, the skinny ones, the pretty ones, and the ugly ones. I see the athletic ones with their letter jackets draped over their chairs as they eat what little they allow themselves to eat. A thousand girls, all of them with vending machine lunches. They eat their corn chips one by one, and sip their diet pop slowly. Occasionally, one will gracefully snag a pepperoni off of someone’s pizza, and then chew it with her mouth open, giving everyone a detailed example of exactly how food particles can get caught inside a girl’s braces. I look at her with veiled disgust. You do too.
A thousand boys in this cafeteria, and they’re all sucking down the grease, right before athletics class. It’s okay, it won’t come back to harm them until they reach college. Today, after lunch, they’ll just exfoliate the grease through their skin during their warm up laps around the football stadium. Of course, it all comes out as acne and terrible white heads on their backs, but this is Texas – everyone is gross here anyway.
And there are those kids like my friends and I, the kids who bring their own lunches out of contempt for the cafeteria food (plus it’s cheaper than even getting the discount lunch). We’ve all got our lunches wrapped up in plastic grocery bags. It’s our mothers’ way of recycling and being “green”, even though it technically does nothing to help the environment. But still, it’s recycling… and we’re too poor to afford reusable or paper bags anyway.
We’ve all got the same things: sandwich, apple, and juice. All off us except Tim Burgess, but that’s because his mom is crazy.
We knew his mom went crazy the day she sent him to school with a plate of filet mignon wrapped in a white grocery bag. There was a side of melon-balled potatoes and a sprig of parsley. The gravy was already poured on. The next day he had a red snapper fish with a slice of lemon. The day after that he had stuffed mushrooms with couscous.
At first she just gave him Perrier to drink with these swanky meals, but eventually starting packing a small bottle of Merlot with his lunch instead. No teachers have noticed, but Tim’s been tipsy every day in his fourth period class for weeks.
Tim is the last person to sit down at our table today. He’s carefully balancing the plate that’s inside that plastic bag so as to not make today’s feast spill inside the bag. He unravels today’s lunch. I give a little drum roll. It’s fettuccine chicken alfredo, with a light salad and a small bell pepper on the side. Fantastic. Mrs. Burgess is an artist, even if she did become a nut bar after her husband disappeared.
I’ve got to hand it to Tim as well. It would be hard carrying around a plate of food all day in your backpack. It’s hard enough being a ninth-grade nothing without opening up your backpack in class and finding that your schoolbooks are covered in beef au jour dipping sauce. It once happened to me, except it was a can of Coke that had exploded all over the stuff in my backpack. It was kind of my fault, though. I guess that’s what I get for being the kind of guy who throws his backpack hard against a wall as soon as he enters a classroom.
Maybe that’s why I’m eating a grocery bag lunch. Maybe it’s because of my assertive complexities. Maybe we all have that same excuse at this table. All except Tim. His mom is just crazy.
Every five minutes or so I stand up just to survey the people in this cafeteria. It lets me stretch and gives me a respite from the mundanity that is the usual conversation at our table. I can see everyone, everyone in little cliques. Everyone in their own proclaimed territories. You’ve got the jocks, the douchebags, the burnouts, the trash, the punks, the thugs, the dangerous intellectuals (us), the bangers, the kickers, the band geeks, the game freaks, the skaters, the preps, etcetera, etcetera.
The game freaks are whom I’m scoping out today. Today is Wednesday. On Wednesdays, my friends and I usually like to cause some sort of scene here in the cafeteria. We always get away with it, too.
I sit back down, take a swig of Tim’s wine, and give my friends Todd and Brown a nod. “Go for it,” I tell them.
Todd and Brown get up from their seats and make their way to the long table at which the game freaks are seated. The game freak table is actually numerous rectangular tables put together consecutively to make one long table. This is where these kids escape to their magical world where they aren’t fat and lazy, they aren’t ridiculed, they aren’t utterly useless, and their parents aren’t ignorant and spoiling. At this table, the game freaks obsess over the card game Magic: The Gathering. At this table, these kids are gods. And Todd and Brown are about to ruin their shit.
Todd stands at one end of the table, while Brown goes to the other. Brown takes several long steps backward, and then runs forward and lunges head first across the table, ruining the numerous Magic games that were taking place. Todd grabs several stacks of cards from the table and tosses them in the air. Cards are scattered all over the place. Creepy little kids with stained clothes are panicking, frantically trying to gather their own cards out of a fear that the cards will be stolen or ruined.
Some of the kids throw weak punches at Todd and Brown for ruining their decks, but the kids are too wimpy and worried about their cards to do anything serious about it. A kid named Oliver Teems grabs Todd by the collar and punches him in the shoulder, furious. Todd laughs in his face and Oliver puts him down. We actually call Oliver “Teemster”.
Teemster is the only one at that table that knows our names, but won’t tell on us because he knows how badly we can ruin him. He knows how low we’ll go to tear your world apart, and he knows not to tempt us.
Teemster knows this because he used to hang out with us, back in the day. He was like the little pet friend that we pitied and made fun of. We had his back. I like to think that we still do.
His family is really poor, poorer than any of ours. His mom is too fat to work and his dad broke his back on the job when a gigantic rack full of huge carpets fell on top of him. His family is currently sitting in lawsuit limbo – the case still stands, but the only money they’re collecting is from welfare. They don’t have running water. They use an outhouse.
But eventually Teemster found his little card game and a whole group of people like him who just wanted to escape from their dreary lives and everyone’s condescending, shit-eating grins.
Todd and Brown come back from the game freak table laughing. We’re all laughing. The whole cafeteria is laughing. And nobody is going to turn us in, because we will fuck shit up.
I’ve got to go to the bathroom, so I do.
When I come back, the cafeteria is in a frenzy. People are running from their seats, some hiding under tables. Food is flying through the air. My friend Robert is covered in ketchup. The campus police tackle a couple of throwers. A good quick food fight just went down, and it didn’t start from our table. I know this because all my friends are still in here. If it had been one of us, we’d have all escaped before anybody could point a finger.
The bell rings. We all make our way out of the cafeteria. And I think to myself, damn, today was a bad day to bring my gun. Didn’t expect that food fight.
Oh, well, I think. There’s always tomorrow.