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.