You Gonna Eat That?

               On any given weekend night in Charlottesville, more than one thousand students will enter a New York-style delicatessen on the Corner called Little John’s.  At first glance, it looks exactly the same as any given greasy-spoon in a college town, but most of the people at UVA can remember with stunning clarity the first time they ate a Little John’s sandwich and how they fell in love at first bite.        
              While their sandwiches are the stuff of legend, the folks at Little John’s also offer several other items that cater to the tastes of a generally inebriated college crowd. The counter is stacked with hundreds of baked goods, from cookies to triple chocolate cake, hermetically sealed in shrink wrap. These confections have a reputation around town for being somewhat of a gamble, because you can either luck out with a mind-bendingly delicious baked treat that satisfies every last bit of your drunken cravings, or you can get stuck with the unsold item from three weeks ago which tastes even worse when it comes back up for round two.

                My friend Mark once took that gamble late on a Friday night when he bought a chocolate muffin to complement his Reuben after a group of us had come in from a night out. After a few bites, he started to notice something strange about the muffin’s consistency. He was chewing on something tough and rubbery, and as he pulled the muffin away from his mouth to investigate, a long, dirty shoelace unraveled from between his teeth.
                We all sat there silently for a while, staring at the thing that had just come out of Mark’s mouth. It lay on the table coiled in a wet, brown lump, like a tapeworm or some other terrifyingly huge parasite that comes out in your stool. Then, before the shock of seeing a shoelace come out of a muffin had completely worn off, Mark gingerly picked it up with two fingers and very calmly brought it to the attention of the cashier.
                “Excuse me, sir. I would like a refund for this muffin, given that it contained an old shoelace.”

                The cashier barely looked up from what he was doing, as if shoelaces in muffins were commonplace.
                “No refunds. We get those from the bakery downtown. After you buy it from us, it’s no longer our problem.”

                Mark dangled the shoelace in front of the man’s face, just to make sure he got the point.

                “But I almost ingested this.”
                “Honestly kid, I don’t give a flying shit about what you did or did not ingest. It could have been worse. Some girl last week got a hearing aid in her brownie. Now get that shit out of my face. No refunds.”

                For me, this exchange really begged the question of how these items were ending up in baked goods. A misplaced hearing aid was almost plausible, given the combination of a half-deaf baker and gravity. But the shoelace was tougher to explain. You would think that even the most idiotic muffin man should have been safe against the possibility of accidentally putting footwear in the mix. But you never know what is going to show up in your food.

                In high school, my classmates had a daily competition at lunch to see who could find the grossest thing in the hot lunch. The school didn’t have a cafeteria, so all our meals were catered by a family-owned Italian restaurant in town. The owner and his wife came to school every day and set up in the commons by the gymnasium, where they served vile concoctions that hardly resembled Italian food. Worse than the food were the surprises we found in it. Students commonly pulled clumps of hair out of their lasagna, or bit down on a fingernails lodged in the tomato slices. One girl I knew ended up chewing a discarded piece of bubble gum in the pizza, and another discovered a used Band-Aid under the cold cuts on her sandwich.

                Given the frequency of these repulsive discoveries, most students opted to pass on the school lunches. Consequently, the industrial-sized boxes of condiments and sauces provided by the administration often went unused, so the boxes began to get stacked on top of each other, forming mountains of ketchup, honey mustard, and sweet n’ sour sauce. The students were quick to notice, and soon every male in my school was filling his pockets with sauce packets that were to be put toward sinister purposes. Some were used to smear lockers and door handles with frothy, oozing mixtures, while others were placed under the toilet seats in all of the restrooms to coat the legs and undergarments of hapless defecators with ketchup. But the most popular idea, by far, was to throw them at people.
                By the end of my freshman year, the lunch period became reminiscent of trench warfare. We ate lunch on the gym bleachers, where the older jocks sat on the top row and sniped underclassmen with 80-mph condiment packets as they walked by. On some days, several of them teamed up to bombard the nerdiest, weakest kid in school, who just so happened to be me.
                Ultimately, I became the preferred target of the junior-varsity football team, who pelted me from twenty yards away while they shouted taunts in guttural, broken sentences. I didn’t mind at first. Really, I was just glad for the attention. The hard plastic edges of the packets left angry red welts all along my face and my neck, which I tried to pass off as hickies when questioned about their origin. Obviously nobody believed me.

                All of this continued on a daily basis until one afternoon in November.  This particular day was a T.A.G. Day, standing for Tasteful Appropriate Garment Day, when the normally uniformed students were allowed to wear whatever their heart desired as long as it did not violate any of the 115 dress code rules that were strictly enforced by the faculty. The girls were told that they should avoid any outfit that would make Mother Theresa blush, but after being forced to wear skirts and knee-length argyle socks all year, many of them did what they could to unleash their inner skanks on those T.A.G. Days.

                They perfected the technique of quickly adjusting their low-cut tops to make themselves look temporarily modest when the principal walked by, only to let the same tops slip back down to reveal generous cleavage whenever they strutted down a hallway full of gawking guys. A few girls were too slow to evade the watchful eye of the faculty and were sentenced to covering themselves for the remainder of the school day with an XXXL white T-shirt which said in enormous black lettering “I AM IMMODEST.” Amanda Saunders, my high school crush, was fortunately not one of those girls. On this day she was wearing an exquisitely cut designer blouse. It flattered her, to say the least. 
                Amanda sat next to me in Spanish freshman year and served as a constant distraction. She would occasionally laugh at my jokes, and she actually seemed to find my dorkiness endearing. Day by day, I worked to build up the confidence to someday ask her out.
                On that fateful day in November, I picked a seat on the bleachers that was just far enough away from Amanda that I could inconspicuously check her out throughout the lunch period. She sat surrounded by her posse of fawning admirers, allowing me to shoot furtive glances in her direction every so often without being noticed. Compared to my usual lunchtime experiences, this was making for a fantastic day.
                Then, inevitably, I heard a familiar whooshing sound, followed by the biting sting of a packet of barbecue sauce nailing me in the temple. Several more of them peppered my body in quick secession. I sat there for a moment, looking down at the packets that were now lying in the lap of my Wal-Mart jeans, listening to the jeers of the football team and the laughs of onlookers, my face turning redder than the barbecue sauce.  And in that moment, something stirred deep inside me. It was something bestial, something defiant. I was not going to allow these troglodytes to taunt me anymore, especially in front of Amanda Saunders.
                I stood from my seat on the bleachers and looked over at the group of my assailants, who sat about twenty feet away. Setting my jaw, I locked eyes with their ring leader, Thomas Billingsley, the captain of the Junior Varsity team. He was still laughing, and I wanted so desperately to wipe the grin off his face. I gripped one of the packets of barbecue sauce in my right hand and drew myself up as tall as I could stand. I wound up and whipped my arm forward in a grand, sweeping arc, aiming for the bridge of his nose.

                 The second the packet left my hand, I knew something was wrong. I had forgotten to follow through with my throw, and instead of sending it whizzing at Billingsley’s face, it went hurtling off at a twenty degree angle. My eyes followed the long, arching trajectory of the packet as it sailed over three rows of bleachers, but I did not need to watch, because I already knew where the cruel hands of fate were sending it.
                As if in slow motion, the packet collided with Amanda Saunders’ cheek and burst open on impact, spraying barbecue sauce across her face and drenching the front of her white blouse with globs of red.

                The entire gymnasium went absolutely silent. Even the JV jocks swallowed their laughter as eighty pairs of eyes went from my horror-stricken face to Amanda, who sat wide-eyed and open-mouthed, as if in shock. My heart raced rapidly, and I suddenly wished that one of the light fixtures in the ceiling would collapse and put me out of my misery.  No such luck, and several agonizing microseconds passed while I waited to see how Amanda would react.

                Words cannot possibly express the terrible scream that escaped Amanda’s lips in that moment. My closest description would be ‘sub-mammalian.’ She shrieked for about five solid second before turning her gaze on me, her eyes narrowing to slits.
                “Will…” she hissed. “Paper towels……now.”

                I sprinted to the bathroom and returned with a roll of paper towels. Then, with the entire school watching, I proceeded to dab at the stains on her blouse, inadvertently groping her breasts in the process. She shrieked again and pushed me away from her before running out of the gym in tears.

                Needless to say, my hopes of getting her to go out with me were fairly shot at that point. Amanda ignored me for several weeks following the incident and then transferred to a more elite school the next year, so my relationship with her ended with a wayward packet of barbecue sauce. Part of me still wishes that I had never thrown that packet. If fate had shined on me that day, I would have just choked on something gross in the school lunch. Where’s an old shoelace when you need one?