Cherry on Top

When I was an inmate at the state-operated boarding school for cripples, aka the Sam Houston Institute of Technology (SHIT), there was one staff member who derived sadistic delight from torturing me.

I’m speaking of the dietician. As soon as they checked me into the place I became her captive prey.  She immediately slapped me onto a strict low calorie diet. God how I hated her bloody guts!

Here’s a graphic example of how her sick mind worked. First of all, inmates received their dinner trays at 4:30! Did you hear me?  4 fucking 30! What human being under age 95 who doesn’t live in Miami eats dinner at 4:30? One day all the kids who weren’t at the diet table (fatties had to sit at a segregated table) got chop suey or something that was gourmet by SHIT standards. I lifted the lid off my plate and what was my main course? Two scoops of cottage cheese atop a sad shard of iceberg lettuce! And each scoop was garnished on top with a maraschino cherry! Are you kidding me? It made them look like tits! What kind of twisted prank was this? Putting a cheery cherry on top of my cottage cheese entrée was like presenting me with a dead dog gift wrapped with a pretty pink bow! Somewhere in the mess hall there had to be a hidden camera focused square on the fatty table through which the dastardly dietician spied on us from her office in the darkest nether region of the basement. I pictured her doubled over with diabolical laughter at the sight of our despondent expressions when we lifted our lids. “Priceless!”

I still hate low cal diets! They’re a scam! You can’t tell me that in the richest nation on earth we don’t have the technology to ensure that everyone weighs pretty much what they should.  We drain fat out people with liposuction, right? So why not lipotransfer? Hear me out! There are plenty of people running around who eat like a goddam horse but still stay skinny as a broomstick. Those people are so fucking irritating. Everybody knows somebody like that. So I could be a fat donor for one of them. Hook us up through a tube. I know it’s not as easy as it sounds. Donors and recipients will have to be tested to make sure it’s the right fat match. But we do it for hearts and lungs and kidneys so why not fat? That’s right, I’m advocating for a radical redistribution of fat in America.  We left it up to the free market and look what happened. Some people ended up with way more fat than others. Lipotransfer is the solution. It would make diets obsolete! And dieticians, too!

But anyway, I survived the brutality of the SHIT dietician with the help of the Fried Chicken Underground, better known as Benjamin the night janitor. Word got around that Benji was an easy mark. If you approached him on the sly, slipped him a few coins and gave him a sad story, he might go get you something from the Chicken Shack across the street. He’d complain about it under his breath. “Gonna get me in trouble.” But when he returned from his dinner break, he smuggled in brown paper bags. I opened mine in a secluded corner. Nestled in a rectangular, cardboard basket was a fried drumstick and slice of doughy white bread soaked through with hot sauce. Glorious.