Primerican Dream

Many people believe that your twenties are a time of exploration, a time for cliches, like finding yourself, sewing your oats, planting seeds for your future, and other farming metaphors. I maintain, however, that your twenties are a time for something much more important--pyramid schemes.  Just float back in time with me for a moment, and recall the warm embrace of your first cult. Mmmmmm.  Just let that crazy-ass philosophy wrap you up in tender promises of money and fulfillment.  

Good.  Now that we’re all here in the late 1990’s, let’s talk about your well-deserved new American lifestyle with Primerica. You see, unlike other “business opportunities,” we want to put you on a “get rich slow” plan.  Because, let’s face it, if you get rich quick, you might find it unnecessary to drive to our leased, Corporate Woods compound every other day to sit in uncomfortable metal folding chairs (which, by the way, are your responsibility to set up and put away) and listen to the same fucked-up, magical thinking sales pitch given by fat Cody and his thin, beady-eyed wife, Brynn.  I mean, if you get rich quick, you might start having thoughts at these “sales meetings” like “What the hell am I doing here?  I think next week, as I open my folding chair, I’ll just drop my pants and bare-assed fart against that cold metal.  Maybe let my balls flap in the wind of it for a staccato effect. See how they like that.”   

Primerica doesn’t want that for you. You’re better than that. You’re not selling perfume or Tupperware or knives. No, sir.  You’re helping people to invest their money in this thing called mutual funds. As the name suggests, mutual funds are about togetherness. And since we’re all in them together, it’s really the safest investment you can make, because in order for these babies to fail, something totally fucked up would have to happen, something like all of the major banks, the housing market, and the automotive industry would have to tank at the same time, and (pause for laughter) that’s never going to happen.  

So, you’re probably wondering, what does it look like to get rich slow? A little something like this:

1) Make every single one of your relationships uncomfortable by selling a financial product to your friends and family that requires them to divulge to you the exact nature of their financial situation.  They especially will love the part where they tell you how much they have in checking and savings.  Try to do this over the holidays, while you’ve got everyone together.

2) Be in constant contact with your sad, middle-aged team leader, so that he can remind you just how fucking awesome everything is.  Call him daily to talk about all of the awesome improvements you’re making to yourself and others through the miracle of mutual funds and self-help books.  He will definitely be calling you and leaving you desperate messages like, “Hey guys, this is Paul.  Just wondering where you are with those appointments and really calling to say awesome...so...awesome.”

3) Set goals.  You see that t-shirt that Paul is wearing? The one with a comma and a check mark on it? Yeah. That shirt signifies that he has finally alienated enough of his friends and family to have earned over one thousand dollars. And if you work hard and self improve like crazy, you too can be the voice on the other end of an awkward, screened phone call to your cousin or work acquaintance.

4) Be perpetually business casual.  Just go to your closet right now and purge anything that is not khakis or a polo.  Good.  Now go lease a BMW, so that all of your new recruits can see how fucking slow-rich you are.

Did I mention that we also sell life insurance? You can, too if you give us $200. This will take your self-improvement to the next level, because there’s nothing that folks like better after a nice lookie-loo into their financial closet than a frank reminder that they are going to die.

Yes. This is what your twenties are for.

Quick preview into your thirties--two words: weight gain.

Cantalouper

Everybody knows that cantaloupe is the fleshy step-child of fruit salad.  Raspberries and kiwi are the headliners, and cantaloupe, well, it’s the craigslist backup dancer.  At least, that’s what I had always believed until I saw some of my students eating cantaloupe sprinkled with bright red powder from a plastic cup.  What was this backup fruit doing taking center stage?

“Miss! It’s chile!  Try some.”

Heaven.  Spicy, salty, sour, sweet TASTE-SPLOSION!  “Where...can...I...get...MORE? What is it called?”

“Tajin.”

For a fortnight, if you needed me, you could find me wandering down on the Boulevard, searching for chile powder.  Cantaloupe became the central focus of my daily food intake, but I supplemented with Pulparindo candy (a chewy tamarind delight, coated in spicy chile and sour).  As you can imagine, an all sugar and citric acid diet is great for your teeth. It gives them a new brittleness and a faint orange glow.  At lunchtime, a haze of spice dust settled over the teacher table, and I developed a hacking cough brought on by my constant inhalation of chile particles. As my obsession mounted, I needed more and more powder to satisfy my craving, and if I ran out of magic spicy sprinkles mid-meal,  I would shamelessly hunt down students in the hall and beg for more.

“Aye, Miss!  You are Mexican now.”

“I just need a taste...just enough to get me through lunch.”

And it was for this reason that I also became a regular at the salad bar of the Brookside Market. You see, they cut the cantaloupe for you.  Every day.  After the first week, the girl behind the counter and I were on a first name  basis, and when she saw me coming, she would get her back-up fruit ready.  We had a nice routine going.

“Hey Chantel,” I chirped as I passed by all of the other salad-foods that no longer mattered, making a beeline to my beloved cantaloupe.   I vaguely remember seeing somebody in my periphery at the front of the buffet, by the spinach.  And I really didn’t consider what I did as “cutting” in the line, because there’s so much acreage between the leafy greens and the fruit section of the salad bar.  But on this day, the tongs were crooked, and they just wouldn’t latch on to the cantaloupe.  I don’t know how much time passed as I struggled to fill my plastic container, but I distinctly remember saying, “Man, this is going to take forever.”   It was at that moment that I felt a smouldering sensation on the side of my skull. 

I turned my head ninety degrees to the left and discovered the source.  The eyes of a six foot tall, husky black woman glared back at me, melting the skin off my face with a red beam of pure scorn.  We regarded each other in brutally awkward silence for about fifteen seconds.  Chantel froze behind the counter, gazing past me at some asparagus on the other side of the produce section.  It was her only defense.  Words failed me.

“I...oh...did you?  I’m...oh God. Sorry?”  Why was that last part a question?  Time froze. Oh sweet Jesus, she’s not saying anything.  Still staring.   A slight breeze from the refrigerator fan caused the cheerful flowered print of her dress to flutter, and it drew my eye to the hem of her skirt which rested casually atop her cruel, sharp, blood-red cowboy boots.  I half expected a tumbleweed to blow between us.  Finally, she spoke.

“Are you through?”  It was more of a demand than a question. 

“Huh?  Uh-huh...I...so...excuse...yes.”  I was trying to back away with what little dignity I had left, but it wasn’t quick enough for her.

“Get the fuck outta my way,” she grumbled. 

I whole-heartedly complied.  Chantel exhaled loudly.   She had been holding her breath throughout the entire exchange. 

I think there are some important lessons here for all of us:

1)      Cantaloupe is a gateway fruit.  It can lead to honeydew, and in extreme cases, jicama.

2)      The salad bar is a lawless outpost of the grocery store where vigilantes will have their justice.

3)      Always check your periph.  Always.

Chapter 6: The Swahili New Year Deductive Theory of Falling

                          

The Swahili New Year conveniently coincides with First Friday in the Crossroads district.  But most people in Kansas City don’t celebrate Swahili New Year mainly because it’s something that my friend Shannon made up just last week.  However, the sanctioned activities for Swahili New Year and First Fridays are pretty much the same:  1) drink box wine/whiskey/both 2) sit in The Living Room on 18^th and Grand, and 3) play games at Shannon’s house. 

Hey, by the way, did you know that certain prescription drugs meant to help you “focus” also help you to make trip after trip to the counter to refill your mason jar of box wine without even knowing that you are piss drunk?  Well, they do.  They are infinitely helpful in that capacity. 

After the “New Year’s” festivities concluded, I picked up my box of wine and bottle of whiskey and headed out the door.  Luckily, I was completely focused and thus able to deduce what happened next.  I stepped from the porch and immediately found myself sprawled on the ground, staring at the night sky. 

Brennan found me clutching the box wine and whiskey to my chest, laughing hysterically. 

“What happened?!” he managed to ask through stifled chuckles. 

“I’m down,” I explained.

Brennan and I pondered the evidence:  yes, I had a history of spectacular falls.  Nobody saw me fall, and I don’t remember the process of falling, but, seeing as how I appeared to be “on the ground,” I could only deduce that I had, in fact, “fallen.” 

“At least you protected the whiskey,” Brennan complimented.

“Yes.  Yes I did.”

Chapter 5: Taekwondo Ice Cream Grift

Shortly after I graduated from college, I took a teaching position in South Korea.  Having never travelled overseas before, I didn’t quite know what to expect, and I arrived rather ill-prepared.  For starters, I could neither speak nor read a word of Korean, so I was basically retarded.  Also, the average Korean woman is about 5’1” and weighs 100lbs.  I am 5’7” and weigh...more than 100lbs.  Essentially, I was Sasquatch.  To make matters worse, Koreans are extremely weight-conscious, especially toward women.   I think they consider a person obese at around 107 lbs. 

But I thought, at least I hoped, that I would be given a pass on this type of judgment, because I was a foreigner...a big, white foreigner.  No such luck.  One aftenoon, my intensely effeminate Korean male co-worker took me aside and said, “You are pretty, but you would be so much more prettier if you were—“  And then he made a slimming motion by holding his arms parallel to my hips and moving them up and down like an angry midget.

After considering places to hide his body, I replied, “Hm.  Why thank you, Alex.  I did not know that.”  And then I marched straight to my desk and contemplated his murder. 

Shortly thereafter, some friends and I decided that we should take taekwondo classes.  Every day on our way home from work, we passed by about a hundred different studios full of children kicking and punching the hell out of each other, and we wanted to do the same.  Also, it had become clear to all of us that any one of our ten-year-old students could probably kick our asses. 

So we set out to find a school, which should have been easy, considering there was at least one on every block.  However, as it turns out, taekwondo is seen as more of a “children’s” activity in Korea, and through a series of strained conversations, we learned that none of the instructors wanted to teach a bunch of giant, bumbling Americans and Brits.  They likened it to teaching taekwondo to a gaggle of Yeti monsters.  It simply wasn’t done.

We had almost given up hope until one man, Wong Jong Nim, accepted us.  He agreed to train us under two conditions:  1) we must come at 7am so that no one would see us.  2) We had to pay twice the normal rate. 

By the third week, it became clear he was trying to kill us, and we had at least one man down per class.  Jess twisted her ankle in the second session while trying to run up the wall.  He made Ian, the 6’4” Canadian, attempt a cartwheel.  Also, he always avoided looking directly at the catastrophe that was our class, and when he did, he seemed like he either wanted to throw up or punch us in the face, maybe both. 

But Wong Jong Nim was nothing if not punctual.  Most days, he was already there in the dojo waiting for us. One morning,however, we beat him there, and since the studio was unlocked, we just walked in and started stretching.  Perhaps, we thought, he might even be proud of us for taking the initiative. 

I was sitting on the floor doing a butterfly stretch when he burst through the door and glared at all of us individually and then as a group.  Next, he fixed his gaze upon the ice-cream cooler  resting in the far corner of the dojo.  None of us had ever noticed it before, but apparently Wong Jong Nim had been keeping a close eye on it.  Frantically, he darted to the freezer and flung open the sliding door on the top.  And then he began counting the ice creams.  That’s right.  He was absolutely certain that his fat American students had merely been pretending to take taekwondo lessons when all the while we just wanted to rip off his bomb pops and choco tacos. 

We tried to tell to him that Americans don’t usually eat ice cream at 7am before a workout, but he wouldn’t hear it. 

The next class, I stole a glance at the scene of the alleged crime, and I couldn't help but notice a shiny new padlock on the door of the ice cream cooler.

Chapter 4: Baconism

I am deeply suspicious of anyone who claims to dislike bacon.   A person may regretfully choose to abstain from bacon due to a religious obligation or a health concern, but he still likes it. 

Fatty, however, took my love of bacon to a very dark place.  One only has to refer to Chapter 3 to understand what she’s capable of. 

You see, Ally sometimes works at a restaurant, and it’s a good one, evidenced by this glorious fact:  several pans of bacon often sit cooling on a rack next to the oven.  In other areas, containers of lardons wait patiently to be scattered atop a salad.  Fatty will not shut up when she sees or smells bacon.   She wants me to scrape together two giant handfuls of still-simmering cured pork from the speed rack and sprint into the parking lot, where we can devour it behind an SUV like an animal.  She repeatedly demands that I grab that container of lardons, unhinge my jaw, and load both cheeks to capacity. 

On one of these occasions, Fatty learned something terrible.  Some innocent co-worker who thought he was talking to Ally explained that bacon (mmmmm....) could be purchased in whole slabs from McGonigle’s Market on 79^th. 

What would have been helpful to me in the coming weeks was some sort of bracelet or facial tattoo that warned the workers at McGonigle’s not to sell bacon to me, because once Fatty was able to procure her own slabs, she was no longer accountable to social mores or the boundaries of human decency. 

Every day for about six weeks, she cut and oven-roasted about 3,000 calories worth of “sliced” bacon.  I say “sliced,” because when something is three quarters of an inch thick and  roughly the size of a rib eye steak, it can no longer be referred to as a “slice.”  Bacon steaks.   

Finally, one of my roommates, Matty, emerged from his bedroom to plead with me to stop.  Clouds of bacon vapor wafted from the kitchen.

“It always smells like bacon in here.  I can’t stop being hungry, and I really need to study.”  He was clearly embarrassed at having to make this request, but it was the flash of fear and pity that caused me to question this new bacon lifestyle. 

What was it exactly that produced that fear in Matty’s eyes?  My newly acquired double chin and all stretchy pants wardrobe?  Or was it my constant presence in the kitchen which had resulted in a severe decline in contact with the outside world? I tried to remember a time in the last two weeks when I hadn't been in the kitchen holding a knife and a spatula.  Shit.

“He’s just jealous,” Fatty quipped.  “He wishes he could eat this much bacon.”

No.  Several feelings (dismay, revulsion, nausea) emanated from Matty’s face, but “jealous” was not one of them. 

Chapter 3: Rock Bottom

Flip flops and parkour do not mix.  This occurred to me as I sprinted toward the rock wall that borders the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art.  It is deceptively low on one side, and should you ever find yourself in mid-hurdle above it, I have three words for you:  sweet gum balls.  Those spiny little bastards are everywhere in the fall. 

My “landing” lasted approximately seven minutes and resembled what might occur if an octopus were catapulted onto an ice rink scattered with marbles.  Both flip-flops were brutally ripped apart by the force of my fall.

When it was all over, I laid ass-out on the sidewalk and let out a soft whimper that built into a full-fledged sob. 

My “friend” Brennan, who had been walking behind me, frowned as he concluded his phone call, “I’m gonna have to call you back.” 

He pressed his finger to his phone, but instead of kneeling down to tend to my injuries, he stared, transfixed, at the yellow school bus behind me.

It’s important to note at this point that the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art is a popular destination for elementary school field trips. 

Raucous laughter erupted from the packed bus.  Tiny fingers poked through the windows to point at the idiot girl who had just spectacularly crashed onto the sidewalk on Oak Street. 

Shoeless, paralyzed from the ankles down, and humiliated, I began to wonder if I would ever get up.  Perhaps it would be best to just stay down here and live amongst the fallen leaves and sweet gum balls. 

Brennan, bored by this point, scooped me up and dragged me to his apartment across the street where he propped me up on the couch with both feet elevated on two pillows atop his coffee table.

And then Fatty took over.  She knew I was injured, too weak to fight back.

“Can I get you anything?” asked Brennan.

“Twisted puffed Cheetos,” Fatty whined. 

Brennan grimaced, but he ran to QuickTrip to pick some up. 

What I am about to reveal will be no surprise to both the Frito-Lay corporation and anyone who has ever suffered a Cheeto addiction.  After that first small bag, I went on what can only be described as a six week bender, which culminated in front of the Dollar Store in Raytown.

“Stop the car!” Fatty shouted.  Huge yellow letters in the window advertised a two-for-one sale on Twisted Puffed Cheetos.

“Oh god.  Really?”  Brennan’s face contorted with fear and shame as we pulled up to the storefront.  He had noticed not only the revolting pace at which Fatty could devour puffed cheese snacks, but also the additional girth the habit had produced.

Fatty stomped into the store and emerged moments later carrying two giant bags of cheesy poofs.  She wouldn’t even let me wait until we got home to devour them in shameful solitude.  No.  She just ripped open the bag and went to town shoveling the cheesy, puffed corn into our mouth.  And that’s when it happened.  Rock...fucking...bottom.

“I fuhwl shek,” Fatty mumbled through the blob of half-chewed Cheeto mash in her mouth.

Flakes of puffed-corn carnage littered the front of my shirt.  Brennan couldn’t bear look at me.

Fatty passed out, allowing me to emerge from my Cheeto-induced fugue state. 

“Brennan, take these away from me.”  I surrendered the chips.

“O.k.,” he said, still looking out the window.

Chapter 2: The Sauce

I recently acquired health insurance, but since I had previously been maintaining my “health” through the socialist Shangri-La known as the UMKC Student Health Clinic, I had to find an actual doctor.  So, my friend recommended hers, a man we’ll call “Dr. Lob.”  She did not tell me that Dr. Lob specializes in geriatrics.  The office is in a time warp.  They don’t accept credit cards.  The only magazine in the waiting room is AARP.  The stench of looming death (which, by the way, is like two parts foot powder and one part Listerine with a hint of Metamucil) is inescapable.  As I filled out my new patient forms, I sat mere inches away from actual old people.  But not just regular old people. Sick old people clutching wadded up tissues, many of whom were probably wearing adult diapers and peeing in them just a little bit.  O.k., fine.  I know what you’re thinking.  But don’t judge me.  I realize the irony of my situation—that I, too, will one day don the adult diaper.  But sweet Jebus, until that day comes, let the aged and I keep our distance. At this point, you may be asking yourself what this has to do with my battle against Fatty McGhee.  Well, if there’s one thing that Fatty hates, it’s getting weighed, a ritual upon which they insist at most doctors’ offices (believe me, I’ve tried to stop them).  And if there’s one thing that Fatty loves, besides bacon, it’s the sauce...booze...grown-up juice.    On the new patient form, there’s a question about the sauce—specifically, how much of it do you drink.  Well, on most of these forms, you get to circle a number per week.  I like those, because the lie is so easy.  Just circle 2.  That’s what they want.  But this one asked “How much do you drink?”  And then it provided a blank space.  Shit.  I tried to think of a reasonable number that was somewhat close to the truth, but every answer that was even remotely honest seemed like too much, so I just wrote, “probably too much.”  Perfect.  Finally, the nurse called me back through the catacombs of the office to be weighed.  “You bastard!” Fatty shouted at the scale. I took off my shoes, stepped up, and requested, “Look, could you just write down my weight without telling me?  I’m obviously not going to use the information constructively.” “Sure,” she agreed, and then she ushered me to a smaller, private room, where I could read AARP in solitude while I waited for another twenty minutes.  Dr. Lob knocked gingerly on the door.  He had a beard, which I don’t like, because I feel that they are dishonest (what are you hiding behind all that facial scruff?) and he trembled slightly as he thumbed through my scant file.  Then he paused. “How much do you drink?”  He was clearly exasperated by my written response. “About two glasses of wine a night?”  Please let that be the right number. “That’s probably too much.  We like that number to be closer to two drinks per week.” Fatty wanted to tell him that his beard sucked and that his hands looked like cabbages, but instead I just nodded.  Sigh.  Goodbye box-wine.  I’ll miss you.