Lunchtime!

Another chapter in the unabridged suicide note of Ricky Myron

CHAPTER 13:

OUT TO LUNCH


Instead of getting their provender from regular grocery stores like all of the normal children’s families, my parents shopped at a food co-op. Here they purchased strange, shadow-world versions of regular food items. We had hot-dogs and we had milk and cheese just like all the other kids, only our hot-dogs were organic, had a distinct greenish hue to them and were made weekly by a strange woman with one tooth named Labyrinth who lived alone with her dogs and oxen in a little house near a swamp.
Then there was halva which is a Middle Eastern delight made from sesame seeds and honey. It was the only sweet item we were allowed to eat as children and it tasted roughly like somebody had pissed on a handful of sand to make it clump and then, deciding that was too cruel, poured sugar all over it. Another item we saw far too much of was organic peanut butter which came in large plastic tubs with lids that were sharp at the edges and hard to remove .
Within these giant, sharp edged tubs was a grey, cement-like substance void of any flavor. One did not, could not, spread this substance. It had to be chipped out with a sturdy knife and positioned -like stones in a garden- onto a slice of bread or else perched in chunks on top of a banana like some precarious Wiley Coyote trap.

In addition to the varied horrors my parents unearthed at the food co-op for our daily consumption, my mother also fancied herself a baker and, as such, for the first 15 years of my life I did not so much as taste real bread. The loaves my mother baked were nutritious certainly, succulent in their way and even moist and chewy once the leathery crust had been breached. However, the loaves were also quite heavy as my mother, a germaphobe from birth, had never fully felt comfortable around yeast. Consequently, it was not unusual for a single slice of my mother’s bread to weigh in at half a pound. Granted these slices were usually generously cut as the crust often deflected all but the sharpest blades and even these it would only allow in at strange and glancing angles.

Furthermore my mother, having lost depth perception in one eye due to a bacterial infection transmitted to her via the bite of a diseased harbor seal, would often hack off slices of bread that were nearly two inches thick on one end and paper thin, almost sharp, on the other.

Two such slices sandwiched together with a similarly cut hunk of cheese in the middle would create a sandwich weighing over a pound and towering in at a colossal 4 ½ inches high. For a young ten year old mouth, such a monolithic object was simply impossible to consume given the scant half hour allotted for school lunch breaks.

To make matters worse, my parents, thrifty in all things, had decided to save money by purchasing non-disposable lunch bags, hideous contraptions woven by machines out of thick, bright pink nylon. The basic premise behind these bags was sound: Never buy another paper bag again! Save the trees! Impress your friends with your progressive thinking!
Fine idea.
In theory.

However, my mother (bless her sweet soul) never thought to wash the bags after using them. For the first several weeks this was fine but, over the course of the school year, the errant drops of mayonnaise mixed with the stray crumbs of salami and the occasional blobs of peanut butter to create something that was altogether “unfine” and, more likely than not, toxic as hell.

It was bad enough showing up to school with patched jeans, bowl-cuts and dog-shit sandwiched into the antique waffle-soled shoes we had inherited from Good-will but to also sit down to lunch with the other children and watch as they pulled forth from their designer back-packs sleek, disposable paper bag lunches and proceed to draw forth from these all manner of sterile, pre-packaged foods, was excruciating.

Every day we watched as these well dressed, handsome children traded items from their lunches back and forth, items with recognizable names but unfamiliar tastes. Items such as “Snack Pack Pudding,” “Twinkies” and “Fun Fruits” switched hands quickly while we were left like beggars at the window, slack-jawed at this opulence, bewildered by this bizarre ritual of commerce we were never invited attend.

Every day we’d watch them as they relished the taste of their savory processed meats. Every day we’d wince in jealousy at the sound of the plastic un-peeling from one of their fancy, individually wrapped slices of cheese.

All the while we’d sit there, in our corner of the cafeteria, dreading the moment when hunger would get the best of us and we would be forced to reach into our ancient burlap back-packs, retrieve our own, bright pink non-disposable lunch bags and reach inside to see what horror mother had made for us that day.

There usually wasn’t much suspense as the lunch menus tended to be quite limited in their variety. Generally we would each receive one of three possible entrees:

A Cheese Sandwich which consisted of two 2 inch slices of homemade bread with a ½ inch wedge of cheese inside. To this would be added an almost obscenely large piece of iceberg lettuce and a generous smear of my father’s own homemade mayonnaise which he would prepare each month in bulk, the dregs of which would often sour by the end of the fourth week.

A Tuna-fish sandwich. Which consisted of two 2 inch slices of homemade bread with an entire hockey-puck sized can of Tuna fish in between.
A peanut butter sandwich made with that waxy grey, indigestible organic peanut butter and homemade “jam” made from such lovely fruits as the jalepeno.

To either of these would be added a fresh apple which my father would pick from the tree every morning. The lunch would then be completed by a thermos alternately filled with either milk or orange juice. These were seldom washed thoroughly between refills, my mother preferring to simply fill them with soapy water and let them sit over night.

One day we had all received cheese sandwiches. The sandwiches were huge and revolting looking. We took bites in unison, the uppermost borders of the sandwiches disturbing the bangs of our three identical bowl-cuts.

As if trained, we each pulled back from the sandwiches in unison as we realized that our mother had yet again managed to bake three to four of her impossibly long hairs into the dough of the bread. My sister choked and then almost vomited as one morsel of bread spelunked it’s way down the shaft of her throat while suspended from her mouth by a strand of hair.

Eager to wash down this savory bite we each reached for our thermoses only to discover that our mother had forgotten to empty out the soapy water from the night before and we were each greeted by a mouthful of bitter grey liquid with flecks of old milk floating liberally throughout.

As we were sputtering and coughing and trying to keep our composure I noticed a final bit of devilry emerging from my non-disposable lunch bag. Apparently the little wad of residual lunch matter at the bottom of my bag had begun attracting flies for there, peeking out the end of the bag, were the black, lacquered heads of several large maggots. Scooping them quickly back into the bag, my siblings and I left the lunch table in a hurry.

Although every one of my classmates (with the exception of Jason Delano who was slow and picked his nose in class) was dating by the fourth grade, neither I or my siblings had a girlfriend or a boyfriend until we were at least sixteen years of age. I can only imagine then, that whatever intrinsic sexual appeal my siblings and I may have had at that age was wiped out on a daily basis whenever our fellow classmates saw what it is we were made out of.

I know that I’m shallow enough that, if I were to see a girl with maggots in her lunch, I would probably not want to kiss her, or even really be near her. Regardless, to this day I don’t eat as much as my friends do, I smell my food before I eat it and I have a strange and unhealthy obsession with processed cheese.