Put On Your Big Boy Pants

CAPTAIN MUNCH-A-LOT

I was attending my wife’s uncle’s birthday party, standing in the kitchen and staring at the dazzling display of assorted “stone ground” crackers and dips made of pesto, spinach, olives, chives, and cream cheese. I could see that no one had started at the platter as of yet and that I would have to be the first one to christen the snacks. It was already ninety minutes past my normal lunchtime and I was feeling faint. I was reaching for a cracker when I recoiled because the caterer, a fortyish woman in khaki safari shorts, a yellow spaghetti-strap tank top, and a mannish face half-covered with dark straight bangs, slapped my hand. It was a gentle slap but an admonishment nevertheless. The appetizers would not be served for another two hours, she said in a voice loud enough for everyone in the room to hear, because she was still in “prep mode” and then baring her teeth at me she told me I needed to leave her workspace.

I was chastened by the caterer’s admonishment on the one hand, but on the other I was annoyed that the party, which started at one P.M., wasn’t serving appetizers until three. Trying to wrap my brain around this time disparity only served to make me hungrier, and suddenly I was displeased with my wife Lara for telling me to skip lunch so I could save my appetite for Uncle Ron’s birthday party. It turned out that my hunch to engage in pre-emptive eating to stave off hunger proved to be correct and I resented myself for not following my instincts.

I feigned an apology to the caterer for my impropriety. I then navigated my stout physique with the surprising nimbleness of a ballerina through a crowd of people, first in the living room and then in the backyard, and noticed with some resentment that most of the visitors were contentedly drinking beverages, some alcoholic, in the absence of any food. Going without food for any extended time, especially when imbibing libations, gives me anxieties. I find myself so compelled to eat all the time that four years ago, around the time my twin daughters were born, I stopped answering the phone because every time it rung I was in the middle of chewing on something. Even my daughters noticed my proclivity to chew and had jokingly referred to me as “Captain Munch-A-Lot.” Whether or not this title was from one of their children’s books was a possibility that I had not yet to explore since going into their chaotic room to unearth the book was too daunting of a task. In any case, I objected to the Captain moniker, instead wanting my daughters Alyson and Maggie to call me “Lieutenant Munch-A-Lot” since, I explained to the twins, “Mommy’s the real one in charge around here.”

I found Lara in the back patio deck talking to her twenty-two-year-old cousin Madison, a nanny from San Francisco, about childrearing, a subject I found tedious. I said, “The appetizers are under lock and key for another ninety minutes so I have taken it upon myself to go to a nearby store and purchase some snacks.”

My wife and cousin had long ago taught themselves to tune out my frequent interruptions, so they continued their conversation as if I weren’t there at all. I inferred their indifference was a green light for me to exit the premises and buy myself some sustenance until the appetizers were served. Before leaving, I observed my twins playing on a jungle gym with their older cousins, evidencing they were in good hands, and I felt assured I could briefly disappear from the birthday party and buy some snacks without suffering Lara’s castigation.

I drove to the nearby Costco, a giant warehouse where an annual membership gives you “club privileges” to load an SUV full of provisions, clothes, and appliances that you can hoard inside your suburban bunker as if hunkering down for the Apocalypse. I went on the hunt for some multigrain chips and hummus and any other fare that would win him points with the party guests. At the aisle where there were freshly bagged whole coffee beans stacked to the ceiling like towering, magical bean stalks, a gaunt man with an old-fashioned, shiny, black mustachio, a red three-piece velveteen suit, and a cheap oversized fake gold watch was giving out free samples of spicy multigrain chips, “all organic with quinoa, brown rice, pumpkin seeds, chia seeds, lentils, and amaranth.” A heavy woman with damp hair and a shapeless dress observing the “healthy” chips with a doubtful expression asked the salesman, “What the hell is amaranth?” upon which the mustachioed man was gleeful to explain that it is a “healthy, high-protein ancient grain once enjoyed by the pre-Columbian Aztecs until it was almost wiped out by the Spanish conquistadors.”

I espied the chips with a force of lust that almost made me blush and I took a sample plastic cup that held exactly three tannish red chips before biting into one and hearing the satisfying crackle. The strong kick of chili, curry, and cumin exhilarated me in a manner that caused my nose to twitch like a rabbit’s. Observing the beaming expression of the mustachioed man, I grabbed five bags of the multigrain chips and put them in the cart. After that I added three nearby tubs of hummus, five rotisserie chickens, a tray of freshly-baked brownies, and several bags of bridge nut mix, chili-lime mango strips, and wasabi peas before paying with the other embattled customers jockeying for position at the registers.

When I returned to the party, I placed the colorful array of snacks on one of the backyard’s picnic tables and the partygoers descended on the food with the aggression of vultures on a carcass. There was much talk about how delicious the food was and how thoughtful I was for bringing snacks to the party.

I was basking in everyone’s praise when the caterer popped out of the rear house entry and scowled at me. Convinced that the dozens of people munching on the snacks I purchased were vindication of my good taste and thoughtfulness, I felt emboldened and I glared back at the caterer as if to say, “Take that, you little shit.”

Her eyes filled with tears before she ran back into the house, slamming the sliding screen door with enough force to make everyone’s head turn and stop talking. I looked down at the empty bags and trays of food. Part of me was satisfied that everyone loved my snacks. Another part of me however was remorseful that I wouldn’t have any leftovers to take home with me.

I feebly tried to break the silent tension by announcing that the snacks had proven to be a “great hit” because they were all gone and then added, “And if you like, I’d be happy to go back to Costco and bring back some more freshly baked brownies. While it’s a trite proposition that brownies are delicious, the more important thing that can be said about them is that they are the ultimate delivery system for injecting chocolate flavor into the center of your brain.” I was surprised by the verbal incontinence of my brownie comment, and I noticed that rather than bring levity to the party’s growing awkwardness, my words only made the dark cloud above me grow heavier.

The party host Aunt Barbara walked close to me, putting her face close to mine. Barbara had short-cropped silver hair and thin lips. She was a proud woman, a former FBI agent who spent her last ten years working as a security supervisor at a pricey department store before retiring with top honors. She studied my eyes the way a principal looks with pity at a naughty ten-year-old and said, “Do you know anything about the life you just ruined?”

That’s rather dramatic, I, but then Barbara explained the hardships afflicting the caterer Becky. Forty-year-old single mother. Six months ago her abusive husband left her for a younger woman. Her three teenage kids needed dental work their mother couldn’t afford. She was recently laid off at the ports where she struggled with part-time work as a longshoreman. “This job gave her pride and dignity,” Barbara said with the condescending sanctimony of a church elder. “And you took that away from her.”

“For chrissakes, Barbara, I just bought some snacks.”

“But we have plenty of food here.”

“Which wasn’t to be served for another two hours after we got to the party. I was feeling faint, not to mention my blood sugar was low.”

“Have you looked at yourself in the mirror lately? You could learn to space two hour intervals between your feedings, Jeff.”

“If you must know, I hadn’t eaten since breakfast.”

Hearing the conversation, my wife Lara said, “That’s bullshit, Jeff. You had almonds and blueberries with your second cup of coffee after breakfast. And that’s only what I saw you eat. God knows what else you shoved down your throat while I was giving the girls a bath.”

In fact while his wife was bathing the twins, I had snuck a little snack of three hard-boiled eggs doused with Tabasco sauce followed by an oversized red apple sporting an unsightly bruise. But I remained silent on the matter.

“Jeff’s eating habits aren’t the issue here,” Barbara said. Turning to me, she continued, “You called Becky a little shit.”

I had never called her that. I had thought it. Or did I indeed say it? I could no longer be sure and my doubts deflated any chances of standing up to the party’s silver-haired matriarch.

“In any event, Becky is going home,” Barbara said.

“That’s ridiculous.”

“It’s too late. She’s in her car.”

It was at this point that my wife stepped in. She offered to take over the catering because Becky was, thanks to me, too demoralized to show her face any more. Lara turned to me and said, “And you’ll watch the kids for the rest of the party.” She knew me well enough that having to watch the girls for two full hours was a punishment, a prison sentence of managing what I called “The Traveling Fusstropolis.” And she added, “When we get home, you’re going to have a time-out.”

I spent my time-outs in the garage where I read books, listened to sports talk on the radio, or did my kettlebell workout. When I was too angry and too forlorn to do anything, I would close the garage door, turn on the industrial fan full blast and curl up on the floor. As my self-pity flowed through my veins like sweet molasses, I’d feel soothed enough to fall sleep.

I was mentally prepared for the humiliating time-out I’d have to serve when Aunt Barbara approached me again. She said, “Jeff, Becky’s car won’t start. Uncle Ron is going to take it to his shop tomorrow. I think considering your role in all this, you’re obliged to take her home.” This was no small task. Becky and her children, since being evicted from their apartment, were now living with Becky’s sister who lived in a citrus grove, which was a good two-hour drive up the coast.

Before I could say that was impossible because I had to take my wife and children home, Barbara said she would take care of my family’s transportation needs and that I could “redeem” myself by taking Becky home and “repair the damage.” My nose twitched in protest, but Barbara said, “You turned Uncle Ron’s birthday party into a fiasco and took a shit on the caterer. This is the least you could do.” And to take the edge off my punishment, she said I could take a bag of goodies with me because she knew that driving made me hungry.

Worried about my weight in light of the rotisserie chicken I had eaten in Barbara’s laundry room when no one was looking, I decided to take two party trays of baby carrots. I had read a piece of dietary advice in Richard A. Watson’s The Philosopher’s Diet. Apparently, consuming huge buckets of carrots a day was an effective weight-loss strategy. The urge to chew and to munch was better directed at carrots than high-density calorie foods.

Becky refused to sit in the passenger seat, instead opting for the back of my car. “Suit yourself,” I said before eating the carrots ravenously, cramming more and more in my mouth as I drove up the coastal highway toward Becky’s destination.

Winding up the coast among dry brush that looked like a wildfire waiting to happen, I tried to initiate conversation, bringing up the difficulties of child-raising: the brattiness of American kids compared to the relative good behavior of children from other cultures; the way American kids disrupt diners in expensive restaurants and their parents become defensive when asked to quiet their children; the fears of raising children in the social media age and the narcissism engendered by spewing the banalities of one’s existence all day long on one’s smartphone; the difficulty of getting kids to eat healthy foods when they see other kids eating sugar-laden crap at school. But all of my talking points were met with an icy silence that compelled me to resume with the eating of my carrots. The rapidity of my carrot consumption was such that I still had partially chewed ones in my packed cheeks while I inserted new carrots into my mouth.

Finally, Becky said her first words in over an hour. She said, “You’re eating like a fucking pig.”

Looking at her hostile glare from the rear-view mirror, I felt an unforgiving tickle resulting from a carrot chip getting jammed somewhere deep in my nose. With my cheeks stuffed with masticated carrots, I sneezed what felt like several pounds of carrot flecks, which sprayed all over the windshield, my clothes, the air vents, the radio controls. One sneeze wasn’t enough apparently. I sneezed several more times and each time it looked like orange carrot spray coming out of a lawn mower. It was disgusting.

But also funny because I found myself laughing in a way I had never laughed before. My laughter was both protracted and demonic, a high-pitched shriek reminiscent of that diabolical Batman villain, the Joker.

I was no longer simply laughing at the jettisoned carrots; I was now laughing at how surprised I was at the sound of my own laughter and watching Becky’s horrified expression in the rear-view mirror only served to make my shrieking laughter more incessantly spiteful and demonic.

As my high-pitched laughter grew louder and louder, my body was convulsing and I began to swerve on the road, getting dangerously close to the cliff, which afforded me an exhilarating glimpse of the shimmering ocean. Becky shouted, “You’re going to kill us, you asshole!”

Finally, she insisted that I pull the car over and wait until I regained my composure.  There was an exit sign for a place called The House of Garlic, a solitary brick red structure that looked like an oversized barn. I drove about a hundred yards along a gravel road and parked. With a few carrot chips still hanging out of my inflamed nostrils and my eyes still tearful from his laughing attack, I invited Becky to come inside the store with me, but she told me to go in without her. Sulking, she texted someone while sitting in the car with her door open.

Inside the store, I felt energized by my sneezing spree, and I began to buy just about everything in the store: garlic pita chips, garlic jelly, garlic relish, garlic salsa, garlic ice cream.

When I emerged from the store, I crammed several garlic pita chips into my mouth and saw Becky walking toward the main highway. She had her thumb out when a giant bakery truck stopped for her at which time a gust of wind blew her hair, revealing her dark, beady eyes.

I knew the urgency of getting Becky home. My “redemption,” as Aunt Barbara had called it, depended on it. And when word got out that I had not completed my mission, my wife would tack on several more hours to my prison sentence inside the garage. I wanted to call for Becky to come back and to explain to her that we had gotten off on the wrong foot and that a reconciliation between her and me was essential for me not living inside my garage for some protracted period, but I found the pungent garlic pita chips so tasty that all I could do was keep chewing as I helplessly watched my only hope for re-establishing domestic harmony recede into the distance, the truck now disappearing behind a plume of dark exhaust.

It was in that moment that I realized my gluttony stemmed from a deep existential longing that food could not fill. Until I learned how to effectively fill that longing, I would remain a glutton and bring shame upon myself.

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What Happens When You Trap Two Gluttons in the Wreckage of an Earthquake

I was in Prospect College’s faculty bathroom stall, my pants coiled around my ankles, my eyes focused on Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, the part where he describes how he escaped cannibalism, when I sensed the presence of Mary Beauregard, one of my students, standing just outside the stall’s locked door. How did I know it was her? Was it her familiar breathing, rasping and emphysemic from her chain smoking? Was it her familiar smell of mothballs and cloying talcum powder wafting from her green nicotine-stained skin? Actually, the tipoff was her signature neon pink luggage cart with her matching tote bag and backpack, which I could see beneath the partitioned stall.

“Mary, I know it’s you. You shouldn’t be in here.”

“Professor Severity, I need to talk to you about my grade.”

“What you’re doing is illegal. I could have campus police arrest you. Now I suggest you leave at once.”

“No, not until you explain why I got a C.”

“We can talk about your grade in my office,” I said. “This is not the place.”

“You didn’t even read my essay about the orthopedic surgeon I work for, did you.”

“Actually, I did read it. Did you not read my comments?”

“You said you liked my example but that my essay was ‘larded’ with grammar errors. Why do you have to use the word ‘larded’? It’s such a demeaning word, and it hurts my self-esteem.”

“We can talk about this later.”

“I don’t think so.”

Mary’s track record was well known. A forty-year-old student, she had been attending the college for more than a decade and had filed so many grievances against the school that she was known as “Scary Mary.” But I never imagined she would break into the faculty bathroom and corner an instructor while he was doing his business.

“Mary, you need to leave now, before this goes on your record.”

“Not until you give me more feedback.”

She was now gripping the top of the stall’s partition so that I could see her thick, stubby fingers. Stacking her tote bag and backpack on top of her luggage cart to make a precarious stepping stool, she had elevated her three-hundred pound body. Her tight curly jaundiced hair peeked above the partition. Bathed in sweat, she glowered at me behind her black cat eye glasses. She blinked her eyes repeatedly while crinkling her pointy nose.

“You need to help me,” she said, barely able to catch her breath. “I can’t afford to flunk this class again.”

“Get out of here, Mary, before I have you arrested.”

“No. Not until you explain my grade.”

“You want me to explain your grade? Okay. Your writing is awful. Worse than a fifth grader’s. You have no business going to college. Is that enough explanation for you?”

“Just what I thought. It’s not my writing. It’s me. You’re letting your personal feelings against me to cloud your judgment. You haven’t heard the last of this.”

At this point, she lost her balance and all three hundred pounds of her crashed to the ground. Writhing on the tile floor, she screamed that she had broken her leg. I took out my cell phone and dialed 9-1-1.

The bad news is that Mary had indeed broken her leg. The good news is that Prospect College was finally able to expel Mary from the campus under the power of an indefinite restraining order. I thought I would never have to see Mary Beauregard again.

But I was wrong. It turns out that both of us, for different reasons, needed therapy, and our therapists worked in the same office. Our encounter at the therapy clinic was, believe it or not, even more dramatic than the one in the faculty bathroom owing to a 5.5 earthquake.

We were the only two patients in the Lomita Pines Mental Health Center when the earthquake occurred. The tremor wasn’t big enough to cause any severe property damage or bodily injury. The problem is that the quake started a fire at an adjoining Korean barbecue takeout place. The smoke was so thick that Mary and I had to wait until fire fighters could penetrate the door. By that time Mary and I had almost lost consciousness due to smoke ventilation.

To this day, I am still wracked with guilt and shame for the unfriendly and at times disdainful attitude I showed my former student who was under enormous distress during our entrapment. Mary was an obese woman, and she was eating constantly inside the waiting room before we got hit by the quake. Out of the corner of my eye I could see her shoveling celery sticks into a large tub of hummus and crunching greedily and I remember being annoyed at her constant smacking and then boasting: “I don’t eat lunch. I just snack on hummus.”

I was hungry watching her eat her creamy snack and remember experiencing a tinge of resentment when she didn’t offer to share any with me. Every now and then while looking up at her self-absorbed expression, her tight blond curls and her flamingo pink neck scarf, I would register a certain contempt for her and then return to re-reading Man’s Search for Meaning. In fact, Viktor Frankl’s book was the same one I was using when Mary was expelled from my class.

I had no legitimate reason to resent Mary for eating in front of me. In fact, in my messenger bag I had three chocolate peanut butter protein bars. I doubted I would ever eat them, but it comforted me to know they were there in case while I was waiting to see my therapist that if I get stuck in the waiting room for a longer period that I could handle (anything more than 10 minutes), I could comfort my hunger pains with something to avoid passing out, which was how I often felt when I was waiting beyond what I planned for an appointment.

The most common scenario for the therapist being late was that the patient before me would, because of his selfishness, exceed the allotted time allowance. But there were other scenarios that were cause for worry. There might be a widespread electric outage from a short-circuited power grid, or a lockdown due to a prison escapee or two on the loose; or a hostage situation. Because I look like a hardened paramilitary operative due to a lifetime of hardcore Russian kettlebell training, the hostage-taker would see me as the greatest threat and would very likely go to great lengths to disable me, the muscle-bound Alpha Male of the bunch, perhaps even injure me. During the lockdown in which I could be cooped-up in the waiting room for an indefinite period, I might find myself famished and wounded and could keep my wits about me only because I had the foresight to bring my duffel bag with my 32-ounce water-filled canteen, Eucerin “Soothing Repair Crème” (my skin cracks when I’m overcome with acute anxieties, which is nearly all of the time), a 2-liter plastic beaker (my anxieties also cause frequent urination and a toilet isn’t always handy) and the aforementioned protein bars.

And then the earthquake happened, and the fire, and the ear-crushing alarms, and the billowing smoke, and the screeching Mary Beauregard. Within seconds, I was hiding beneath a chair, cowering like a child, fearing my death inside my therapist’s waiting room and afflicted with the terrifying question: What would my hero Viktor Frankl do in a situation like this? Here is what he would do: He would risk his life and make sure he would do all he could in his power to so that anyone in his vicinity was out of danger. And contrary to my hero, I was trembling under the chair coiled up into the fetal position.

Nearby, Mary was standing up and screaming that our building was surrounded by fire. Wearing a lavender muumuu, she had pressed herself against the glass window and was trying to see signs of any rescuers behind the dark smoke.

“Mr. Severity?” she said.

“Yes?”

“I know we don’t like each other very much, but we’re in a crisis. We need to stick together.”

“Okay.”

“I think I’ve eaten all my hummus. We might not be rescued for a long time. Do you have anything I might be able to munch on before the fire department gets here?”

When she asked this question, she looked at my black messenger bag, on the floor beside me, with predatory eyes that suggested X-Ray vision.

Of course, I had the three chocolate peanut butter protein bars, but I had eaten nothing for several hours and Mary had just finished gorging on a tub of hummus, none of which she had offered to share with me. Plus she appeared insulated with energy reserves evidenced by her Michelin Man-sized fat rolls.

I said that, regrettably, I had nothing to eat while still curled up beneath the chair, making a mental note that Mary was too large to take cover in the manner I was doing, taking a lesson from earthquake drills in my elementary school days.

Then on impulse I grabbed one of my protein bars and turning my back to Mary so she couldn’t see my face I stuffed it down my throat. I must have looked like a primordial beast, hiding in darkness, a primitive cave, while operating under the grotesque instinct of unbridled self-preservation.

My concern was that Mary, outweighing me by a hundred pounds or so, could perhaps muscle the bar from me if things got desperate. Better to have the nutrition and needed calories in my body now before things got out of hand.

In the same manner, I ate my two remaining protein bars while listening to Mary, still staring out the smoke-shrouded window, whimper and whine about her food-related anxieties. She explained that an eating disorder made her eat incessantly. I decided to not tell her that I shared the same affliction.

“I really don’t eat meals,” she said. “I kind of just graze all day long. It’s a nervous condition.”

“I can relate to that,” I said.

“Then you know what’s it like to have those constant cravings,” she said, flaring her hungry eyes at me. “I’m surprised you didn’t bring any food with you.”

“I usually do,” I responded. “But I was late, I was in a rush. I feel so stupid.”

Her silence and skeptical expression suggested that my words didn’t ring true to her, that she knew I was lying, and that I was indeed hiding a tasty, nutritious morsel inside my travel bag.

She started to walk toward me, but before taking even two steps, she tripped over a turned-over coffee table. When she fell, she dropped her tote bag. A bunch of breath-freshening candies, tiny pale red hockey pucks, fell out of her bag and scattered on the beige carpet. I sniffed one that had rolled close to my nose and found its tangy watermelon aroma tempting but of course did not eat the contaminated candy.

Looking at her lying flat on her stomach, I said, “Are you okay?”

“Nothing broke this time, but I have to pee.”

She stood up on her own accord. She wiped some dust off her billowing stomach before disappearing into the nearby women’s room.

Without warning, I was overcome with hunger. I got up to examine the contents of her neon pink tote bag, which she had left near the turned-over coffee table. It was full of loose receipts, chewing gum wrappers, peanut shells, restaurant coupons. I scratched my fingers at the bottom and felt stale cookie crumbs, like gravel, collecting under my fingernails and then I felt a wrapper and heard a crinkling sound. I could discern the shape of a candy bar of sorts. I picked it up and saw that it was a protein bar in fact, similar in calories and nutritional information as the three I had eaten moments before.

Was Mary’s bag such a mess inside that she didn’t even know she was in possession of it? Was she in such a panic that she couldn’t think straight and had completely forgotten about it? Or, more deviously, did she know she had a protein bar but was not willing to share it with me in the event we were holed up in the waiting room for several days?

Whatever the case, I did not know when I would be rescued and felt the need for more nourishment. My gnawing hunger pains compelled me to unwrap the bar, which turned out to be half melted, and I ate the liquefied bar as quickly as possible before Mary exited the bathroom and caught me in the act. I had melted chocolate all over my fingers and face.

Mary walked out of the ladies’ room, and the first thing she noticed was the chocolate on my face.

“I thought you didn’t have any food,” she said.

“I found a protein bar in my bag,” I said.

“You lied to me,” she said. “You should be ashamed of yourself. You knew you had food to share all along.”

“Like you shared your hummus with me?”

“That was before we were in a crisis.”

“I get it. When things are fine, you can be selfish, but as soon as there’s a crisis, I need to step up to the plate. I need to be the bigger person. How convenient that must be for you.”

We were in a standoff. Not another word was said until the firefighters showed up and broke down the door. A billow of dark smoke shot inside the waiting room, and the rescue team dragged Mary and me out of the building and into an ambulance.

Strange, my first reaction upon seeing the fire fighters wasn’t the elation of being rescued but the embarrassment of being covered with melted chocolate. That was the last thing I remembered before nearly passing out, apparently from lack of oxygen when smoke entered the open door, and I was carried out on a stretcher. You could actually see me lying prone and being lifted inside an ambulance, a recurring image on many of the local news broadcasts for several days.

In the ensuing weeks, well-wishers approached me and asked how I got blood all over my face. I knew it wasn’t blood, but I wasn’t going to tell them I was eating a chocolate protein bar pilfered from my former student’s tote bag.

For me the marks on my face are neither blood nor chocolate. They’re stains, streaks of guilt and self-loathing that I’m trying to erase in my therapy sessions.

 

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Three. Life after Facebook 24-32

Four. Bodybuilder's Inferno 33-49

Five. Just Another Day at the Costco Apocalypse 50-

Six. What Happens When You Trap Two Gluttons in the Wreckage of an Earthquake

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Bodybuilder's Inferno

Bill Burr talks about religion in his standup. In one routine he talks about how disturbing it would be if he made it to heaven and he waited for his friends and family to join him, but they never made it. After he waited for hundreds of years, he explains he'd have to conclude that they had gone to hell. He imagined that he wouldn't be able to enjoy heaven anymore knowing that all those loved ones were being eternally tortured. 

I grew up without religious parents so I didn't spend much time thinking about heaven and hell. But then I had a common experience. I learned about heaven and hell in high school when some classmates invited my buddy Mario Alzone and me to start attending their church’s Wednesday night youth group meetings after I asked some Christians at school to explain to me the lyrics of the song “Supper’s Ready” by the band Genesis. The song is twenty-four minutes long and ladled with biblical verses about the Apocalypse. I had several questions for my Christian classmates: What are Gog and Magog? What is the significance of the numbers 666? What is the New Jerusalem? My classmates said the pastor could answer my questions at the youth group, and that there would be complimentary lasagna and Kool-Aid.

My friend Mario had no curiosity about deciphering Genesis’ quasi-religious lyrics. However, he loved free meals, especially since he was “bulking up” in his quest to be an international bodybuilding champion. Bodybuilding was our shared passion since I had met Mario during my freshman year of high school. Three years my senior and having hulking trapezius muscles that gave him the nickname “No Neck,” Mario told me he wanted to be so big and muscular that he no longer looked human. He aspired to be a horned monster with webbed toes and fingers that instilled fear and awe in the hearts of men. “To get really big,” he had said, “you have to eat the steak fat and throw away the meat. You have to drink the fruit cocktail syrup and throw away the fruit. And after your workouts you should have a nurse push you around in a wheelchair to allow your muscles maximum recovery.”

He wanted to prove all his doubters wrong by someday being so muscle-bound that when he took off his shirt people would fall to the ground, weep, and worship him as Lord.

After a few weeks of attending the megachurch’s youth meetings and being told that we “had to make a decision for Christ,” Mario was expressing doubt over the concepts of heaven and hell. “Truth be told,” he said, driving me to the Wednesday-night youth group in his candy apple red Ford Ranchero, “I need to see it all on film. Jacques Cousteau captures his underwater journeys in his documentaries. If I’m going to give up fornication, there had better be movies that show me that hell is a real thing, not just some scare tactic.” Mario would have to hear the heavy French accent of Jacques Cousteau, submerged in the bowels of hell, describe in detail its horrors before he gave up fornication, for Mario was a disciple of the flesh, a regular at the Moonlight Ranch and other such establishments where he could fulfill his ambition to be a Billy Goat.

As we wound up the hill and approached the giant three white crosses that towered over the nondenominational worship complex, Mario continued to say that renouncing the flesh would be especially hard during the summer when, as we were prone to tanning at the lake after working out at the gym, his lust meter tended to rise to unbearable levels.

To add to his doubts about joining the church, his favorite bodybuilder—and mine—1978 Mr. Universe winner Mike Mentzer was an atheistic, self-described existentialist philosopher fond of quoting Nietzsche and other likeminded thinkers in Muscle Builder magazine. “If Mentzer ever finds out we’re listening to these fairy tales with these sheltered little brainwashed children, he’ll laugh at us. He may even have us kicked out of the International Bodybuilding Federation.”

“He can laugh all he wants,” I said. “I for one don’t want to go to hell.”

Unlike Mario, I didn’t need the Jacques Cousteau footage to be haunted by eternity. I was having nightmares about burning in hell. One morning, I screamed out to Jesus to save me so loudly I woke myself up in a lather of sweat. One Sunday when Alzone and I were in the church’s private prayer quarters after a service in which we were invited to accept Christ as our personal savior, I told the pastor about my dream of burning in hell and how I screamed out to Jesus to save me. On the way home, Alzone scolded me for telling the pastor about my dream.

“I should kick your ass for telling him about that dream. Were you trying to make me laugh, or what?”

“What’s so funny about having a dream about burning in hell?”

“No one has dreams like that, asshole. You’re making that shit up. We’re in a prayer room, and you decide to be a comedian all of a sudden. I had to pinch myself to stop laughing.”

Ironically, I had to pinch myself to stop laughing when Mario, during the same meeting, asked the pastor if fornication was a sin. For Mario, accepting the Lord as Savior might be achieved if he could strike a deal with the pastor, persuading the minister to give him a special dispensation for the sins of the flesh, a kind of fornication allowance. But the doughy, double-chinned pastor with a green plaid suit, long bangs, and bushy mustache made it clear that there were no exceptions when it came to sex before marriage: Fornication was a sin. The pastor’s pronouncement made Alzone sink in his chair and pout like a dejected child.

That fornication was a sin and should be avoided at all costs was reinforced at a youth meeting when the pastor showed us a Josh McDowell film in which the evangelist lectures the importance of preserving one’s virginity before marriage. McDowell’s presentation was peppered with jokes that made Mario cackle like a drunkard, but when the message sunk in, that celibacy was a sign of obedience to God, he became sober.

On the drive home from the Sunday morning service in which I described my dream of burning in the flames of hell, Mario said he doubted he would be able to abstain from sex, which he said came as naturally to him as breathing, sweating, and going to the bathroom. It was, in his mind, a natural body function that could not be denied.

He and I had a conversation with his older sister Brenda, an attorney still living in the home, about his struggles with the Christian faith and his attempts at chastity. We were in Mario’s room when she told us abstaining from sex before marriage was not realistic. She was wearing a low-cut red halter-top and skimpy denim cut-offs, made popular by Daisy Duke from The Duke’s of Hazard. “In modern society,” she said sitting on Mario’s bed, “everything has been so sexualized there’s really no way of avoiding it.” She then looked at the wallpaper in her brother’s bedroom. It featured duplicate images of the same topless woman with features that reminded me of Sophia Loren. Mario was literally living inside a room with wall-to-wall breasts. His sister smiled at the nearby wall featuring hundreds of pendulous breasts and said, “Is this Christian wallpaper?” Then she looked at the cache of Playboys and similar magazines stacked on his desk next to his Incredible Hulk piggy bank and said, “Are those Christian magazines?” She had a triumphant smile as if her observation of Mario’s erotica was proof of religion’s futility.

I told Mario we should tear down the wallpaper and burn the magazines in his backyard. Mario wouldn’t let me touch the wallpaper, but he agreed to burn the magazines. We stacked the magazines on the grass in Mario’s backyard, doused them with gasoline, and threw a lit match on them. Soon, charred pages and ashes whirled in the wind making a huge mess, a sort of porno apocalypse, and Mario’s 260-pound, disheveled, squinty-eyed father emerged from the house presumably having been wakened from a nap. He was wearing nothing but white boxer shorts and black socks. His pale thighs were covered with thick black hair, but his bulging calves and shins were bald from the constant friction provided by his black nylon socks. He scowled at us and said, “Clean up the mess, dumb shits,” before disappearing back into the house.

Mario was in ill spirits after incinerating his private magazine collection. He decided we should wash his car, which was coated with ashes. We were in the front driveway when a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses approached us. Mario barked at them to leave the area, but not before he blasted them with the jet spray of his garden hose. Putting the kibosh on premarital sex and his illicit magazines was proving too much for him. As I recall, after the bonfire he had quickly replenished his private magazine collection and within a few months his collection had grown tenfold.

During one of our drives to the Wednesday-night youth service as we approached the megachurch’s parking area, Mario told me he was still struggling with his vows of chastity. “Take away sex,” he said, “and what’s left for young men in their prime like us?”

“Salvation,” I said.

“What if it’s not true?

“What if it is?”

Neither of us was familiar with Pascal’s Wager, but unknowingly I was operating on that principle. Better to be safe, and avoid hell, than be sorry. But for Mario, hell insurance wasn’t compelling enough to stave off the impulse for fornication. And he didn’t believe the young church members were abstaining from sex either. “Look at those women at church,” he said. “All made up with false eyelashes, mascara, short skirts, with their boobs hanging out. You don’t think they’re there to get laid? Shit. Everyone wants sex, my friend. Christian, Muslim, Jew, and atheist alike. It’s in our blood. It’s what makes the world go round. And guess what? God gave us the desire, so why should He condemn us?”

“No one said it was going to be easy.”

Once we discussed the sin of fornication with his mother in the kitchen. She was seated at the table having her 2 P.M. martini. Behind her was a wooden plaque her husband, the manager of a sausage processing plant, had nailed to the wall. It read, “The man makes the living, and the wife makes the life worth living.” Mario’s mom told her son he didn’t need to worry about sex before marriage. “We’re Catholic,” she said. “In our religion, we can have all the sex and alcohol we want from Monday through Saturday. Then on Sundays we confess our sins to the priest.”

“How do you get to Heaven?” I asked.

“Don't commit murder, don’t steal, and don’t cheat.”

Regarding the latter, I knew that Mario’s father was being investigated for income tax fraud, but I kept my mouth shut.

The giant three crosses cast a shadow over the fire red Ranchero as Mario looked for a parking place next to the youth center building. After telling me how much easier it would be for us to be Catholic, he said, “Screw these youth meetings. Screw chastity. We should go to my parents’ church. There’s more leeway.”

“The Bible tells us that God will not be mocked.”

“You take the joy out of life. Why I continue to hang out with you is a mystery, my friend.”

Giving up on the Catholic angle, he turned the discussion to atheism, bringing up atheist philosopher Mr. Universe Mike Mentzer again, and my grandfather, a socialist atheist, who believed sex before marriage was healthy and recommended it for men of our age, words that made Mario venerate my grandfather as his lifetime hero.

“Mentzer and your grandfather would both agree that young men like us should not be repressing our sexual desires. And believe me, it’s going to be harder during the summer. It’s bikini season. Do you know what that will do to our testosterone?”

“I don’t want to go to hell,” I said bluntly.

“But how do you know?”

“How do I not know? And what about the biblical prophesies?” While Mario was driving, I had been reading aloud excerpts of Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth and scaring both of us about The End of Times. “We’re entering the nineteen-eighties. We may be living in the age of the Anti-Christ, the Mark of the Beast, and the Rapture. Do you want to get caught with your pants down?”

“If she looks good, why not?”

“Shit, Mario, this is not a joke.”

To add to my fear of hell, I was spending a lot of time listening to the scariest Voice of Hell on Planet Earth, Family Radio’s Harold Camping. His cranky, humorless voice dripped with contempt for the “lovers of the flesh” who were doomed to scream for all eternity in the flames of hell. Listening to Camping’s voice on the radio, I felt like the trembling Cowardly Lion in the presence of the Great Oz. Camping specialized in damning the human race as if he relished in his position to be a spokesman for a God who saved only a remnant according to his own discretion. “I don’t know about you,” Camping once said on his radio show, “but the idea of going to bed at night unsaved with the fear of not waking up and your next moment of consciousness being in eternal damnation is enough to make the hairs on the back of my neck stand straight up. If I were you, I would throw myself at the Mercy Seat of Christ and say, ‘Oh, Lord, if it would please you to be saved from the hell that I deserve, please, Lord, save me.’ And then perhaps, Lord willing, you could find mercy.” Over and over Camping told callers to his radio program that being afraid of hell was the best thing that could ever happen to them because, after all, the fear of the Lord, Scripture tells us, is the beginning of all wisdom. Unbeknownst to himself, Camping seemed to take gleeful delight in talking about hell and how only “a remnant were chosen to be saved according to God’s private pleasure.” Whom God saved and whom He destined for hell were none of our business, Camping was fond of saying. It was all in His divine discretion. When callers protested Camping’s God that predestined a remnant to heaven and the overwhelming majority to hell, he would end the call with a passive-aggressive curse of politeness: “May the Lord richly bless you.”

Whenever my mother heard Camping’s radio show through my bedroom walls, she’d come into my room and tell me to turn that shit off. And I could take my Bible and throw it out the window, and if I didn’t do it, she’d do it for me.

Recently divorced from my father, my mother was a secular Jew who saw Christianity as being too often an anti-Semitic force as it accused Jews of being Christ killers. And the notion that our family members who had died in the Holocaust had to face an even greater hell, provided by the Christian God, after their death in the concentration camps didn’t sit well with her either. I agreed with her that this notion of hell was morally abhorrent, but unlike her I could not disbelieve in this doctrine that offended and tormented me.

In her concern for my fear of hell, Mother used her connections to arrange that I speak to a couple of liberal pastors, kind-hearted men whose formula for getting into heaven proved far more generous than Harold Camping’s, but their implied universalism, the belief that everyone eventually gets to heaven, never sunk in. Reading the words attributed to St. Paul and Jesus and listening to Harold Camping and others convinced me that being a Christian was about being saved from eternal hell. “Weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth” in the outer darkness was the result of knowing that you had the chance to get saved, but that you had told God to shove it. You were more interested in asserting your own will, your own selfish desires, and making yourself the Lord of yourself. You were the defiant Frank Sinatra singing “My Way” to God. The price to pay for loving the Darkness more than the Light was not just moral dissolution here on Earth but eternal torment in hell. The torment of the damned was to look afar at the believers ecstatically feasting at God’s table while the unsaved watched, outsiders looking in, forever banished from the things they longed for.

My mother accused the Christian faith of being a disgrace for at least two reasons. For one, in Judaism there was no such "sickness" as the belief in eternal hell. For two, the Christian religion was tinged with anti-Semitism. This became evident at the megachurch I attended when one night, around Easter season, a film was shown about Jesus, probably taken from the Gospel of Luke. In one scene as the dark-skinned hooked-nosed Jews threw rocks at the light-skinned blond Jesus, the white Christian audience gasped in disgust at the dark complexioned Pharisees, and a young woman sitting in front of me said, “Those people make me sick!”

During my high school years, I observed that disdain for the Jews was evident outside the church as well. Kids at school used Jew as a verb whenever they tried to get a price down on something during a negotiation. The story of Judas Iscariot, the greedy Jew who sold out Jesus for twenty pieces of silver, forever branded Jews as money-hungry scoundrels.

My senior year in high school I had a crush on a girl, Sandy Templeton, who worked for a Jewish doctor and one day at school, not knowing I was half Jewish, she told me working for this obnoxious Jewish doctor was too much for her, that she would avoid Jews for the rest of her life. Then there was my very best friend Mario whose father read the weekly newspaper The Spotlight, an ultra right wing anti-Semitic publication that denounced Zionism, accused the international Jewish community of crazy conspiracies, and denied the Holocaust, or at the very least, claimed it was an exaggeration. Mario told me when he was a little kid he had a Jewish babysitter who was so cheap she turned off the heat in his house and he almost froze to death. I imagined his parents re-told him the story over and over during his youth, so that he grew up believing, “This is what the Jews do. They kill their children—and others’ children if they’re given the opportunity—with their cheapness.”

When I told Mario my mother was Jewish, he said he knew it all along, that he “could spot a Jew a mile away,” and that the implication was that his accepting me, a Jew, as his friend was an exception, not a rule.

In spite of the anti-Semitism that he had absorbed from his father, Mario had been my best friend since I was fourteen and he ended up embracing my Jewish socialist grandfather as his own, being drawn to my grandfather’s warmth and wisdom more than his father’s disdain for his family that made Mario and his two older sisters walk on eggshells whenever they were in their father’s presence.

In spite of my misgivings about Christianity—my suspicion that it was anti-Semitic, my assessment that eternal damnation was an unjust punishment for the finite sins of the human race, and my sense that St. Paul’s writing style smacked of excessive, self-aggrandizing piety —my fear of hell proved too great to fight and one night at a youth meeting when I stood up to accept Christ as my savior, I was congratulated by Christians, many who attended my high school and who had been eagerly waiting for me to become saved.

Word spread about my conversion, and at the next day at school a classmate approached me, shook my hand, and looked into my sad eyes. “Why don’t you look happy?” he asked. I was in fact the saddest man in the world, joining a religion whose God damned people for all eternity, but I didn’t tell him this. Nor did I tell him that my Jewish grandmother, who had died a year earlier from leukemia, weighed heavily on my soul because some of my new church friends told me she was in hell. I had begged God to save me from hell, but there was nothing I could do about dead Jewish family members who didn’t know Jesus. The idea of them suffering in hell made it feel impossible for me to be happy or to experience the perfect love of God. And I was told if I questioned God’s perfect love I myself would go to hell. I told myself I didn’t need to have all my doubts and questions answered right away. The important thing was to get my hell insurance. Then I’d have some breathing room and could bide my time while I waited for God to answer the questions that continued to eat away at me.

During the summer, a couple months after my conversion, I left the San Francisco Bay Area to spend time with my grandfather in Los Angeles. He was still grieving the loss of his wife who had died from leukemia seventeen months earlier. I didn’t dare tell him what the church people had told me about her eternal fate. But I did tell him I was going to church. I knew he wouldn’t be happy. He was an atheist socialist whose favorite philosopher in college was Nietzsche, a man some of the church people called the “Anti-Christ.” He asked me why I had turned to religion, and I told him I was afraid I was going to hell. He laughed and said that once I started college and talked to history and philosophy professors they would set me straight; they would show me that religion was nothing but a bunch of fairy tales and a bogus creation designed to control the masses. He said that most religious people he had met over the years were weird. I didn’t want my grandfather to think I was a weirdo or a stupid person who believed in fairy tales, but I was hurting. My whole world had collapsed when I discovered the universe was ruled by a god who threw people into eternal hell. And I was commiserating with people who were telling me my grandmother was damned. I tried to explain my fear of hell to my grandfather, and he said, “If you want to be afraid of hell, be my guest.”

It was just like my grandfather to not argue with me about my beliefs. He must have known that arguing wouldn’t change my mind. When he and I spent time at the machine shop with his best friend and fellow socialist Forbes Sherry, he told him about my fear of hell, and Forbes, a small wiry man who worked over sixty hours a week in his machine shop and gave all the money he could to the socialist movement, said to me, “Don’t let them suck you into their cult. That’s all it is—a cult—just like the rest of them.”

Calmly, my grandfather said, “I think it’s too late.”

I felt wounded, perhaps even despair, upon hearing my grandfather’s words because I knew what he said was true. How could the idea of eternal hell, so powerful and so terrifying, once implanted inside someone ever truly vanish? Only a miracle would make it do so, or I would find a way to make a peace with the God of heaven and hell. For me, God was a real being to be feared, but for my grandfather, God was the product of fairy tales, ancient stories made up in the desert during tribal warfare, and were best discarded in favor of secular, practical strategies to help build a better world.

I envied my grandfather for having no fear of hell and for seeing the Bible as nothing but fairy tales. His life seemed so much easier than mine. The only thing he seemed to fear were birds—poultry in particular—because his siblings threw a headless chicken at him, the legend goes, when he was a little boy and he had a lifelong phobia to all forms of poultry, so that on Thanksgiving the hosts had to make him a special dish featuring a non-bird protein. Once when we were at someone’s house with a pet macaw perched outside its cage, my grandfather cowered and his whole body shook until the owner put the bird in another room. So there you had it. My grandfather cowered in the presence of birds. I cowered in the presence of the New Testament God.

If I had to choose between a lifelong fear of chickens and a lifelong fear of hell, I’d take the chickens.

I often long to have my grandfather’s point of view, that the Bible is a bunch of man-made fairy tales, but the fear of hell was so deep inside me I felt I couldn’t afford to be wrong because if I was wrong I’d be totally screwed.

One summer after a Sunday evening church service, Mario and I went to Tanglewood apartments because Mario wanted to have a late-night swim. He said he had a friend who lived at the complex, and this friend was supposed to meet us by the gate, but he never showed up and the gate was locked, so we climbed over the gate and went swimming. Hanging by its strap on the diving board was an orange fluorescent bra. It practically glowed in the dark. The sight of the bra excited me. Obviously a woman of great bounty had disrobed there. We had probably missed the glorious spectacle by just a few moments.

Mario grabbed the bra and twirled it above his head as if he were going to fling it. Then he stopped. "Shit on a stick," he said. "It's my sister's birthday tomorrow. I forgot to buy her a present."

He didn't even wrap it. He just gave his sister this orange bra, and she wasn’t even shocked. Using an abandoned bra as a birthday gift was just another crazy thing in the life of her brother Mario.

When I think back of the two or three years I attended church with Mario, I realize I was patently depressed. People who knew me said that I looked like I had given up on life and that if Jesus was as amazing as I said He was then why was I so miserable? The reason in part is that many of the church members had told me my grandmother had gone to hell. Most of them meant no harm. They were simply espousing their beliefs, the very beliefs that insured they themselves would not go to hell. In order for them to enjoy hell insurance, they had to tow the company line. 

In spite of being raised by an anti-Semitic father, not once did Mario ever say that my grandmother was damned. In fact, he was so offended when he heard it at church that one time he told me anyone who says that should be punched in the face, and if I didn’t do it he would. In spite of being raised by a Jew-hating father, Mario embraced by grandfather as his very own. The thing about Mario is that he was a crazy recalcitrant sinner, but he was the only reason I was ever happy during my “church years.” That guy could make me laugh like no other. Life without Mario was life with too little laughter, and life without laughter was hell on earth.

It doesn't surprise me that I grew up loving comedians, that my father and I had our best moments listening to George Carlin's "Class Clown," and that I find Bill Burr's theological critique both insightful and funny. 

Just Another Day at the Costco Zombie Apocalypse

The other night I consumed a tub of Greek yogurt with peanut butter and honey so I'd have enough energy to watch a documentary about world hunger.

I wasn't really hungry. I was anxious. Whenever I get anxious, which is all the time, I eat like a demon.

Comedians are sure to have bits about overeating. Louis C.K. talks about the forlorn people waiting in line at Cinnabon. They are all full of self-loathing because they know they are making a "bad life decision" and yet in spite of their self-awareness there is nothing in their being to prevent them from going down the road to self-destruction. 

Jim Gaffigan talks about his love-hate relationship with Hot Pockets, which he describes as "Pop-Tarts filled with really nasty meat."

Gaffigan doesn't pepper his standup with food jokes. He lards his standup with tales of gluttony because, as he has said in a Terry Gross interview, his comedy is based on the Id.

The Id is a tyrant. Knowing the Id lords over us makes us feel sad, depressed, and anxious.  

Anxiety throws fuel on the fire of my raging appetites. Anxiety propels me to stuff my face even when I’m not hungry. The mechanical act of eating, using my greedy hands to lift food to my mouth and then hearing my mandibles and molars crunch the food matter into mush, has a soothing effect on my anxieties—like giving a teething biscuit to a baby.

Anxiety compels me to engage in the practice of “preemptive eating,” the idea that I even though I’m not hungry in this moment, I might be “on the road” inside my car far away from nutritional resources so I had better fill up while I can. In truth, I’m not “on the road” that often evidenced by the fact that my nine-year-old car has only 33 thousand miles on the odometer. Clearly, then, my impulse for preemptive eating is indefensible.

But you see, my anxieties exaggerate the circumstances, so that I have ample food reserves in my car—cases of high-protein chocolate peanut butter bars and a case of bottled water. All that unnecessary weight in the trunk compromises my gas mileage, but my anxieties are a cruel dictator.

Anxiety is the reason that, in spite of my hardcore kettlebell workouts, I am a good twenty pounds overweight. Being twenty pounds overweight makes me anxious, and these anxieties in turn make me want to eat more.

Contemplating this vicious cycle is making me extremely anxious.

Good food makes me anxious.

Just thinking about good food can make me so anxious I’ll obsess over it in bed, so all night my limbs will flail all herky-jerky like a heroin addict.

When I was in my early twenties, I ate donuts that were so good I wanted to drop out of college, give up on relationships, and hole myself up in my mother’s basement where I’d spend the rest of my life eating donuts. I never shared this information with anyone, but in retrospect I believe I would have found many people who would be eager to join me in this Donut Cult. 

There’s one food I crave even more than donuts—chocolate brownies.

Chocolate brownies are the best delivery system for sending an explosion of chocolate into the brain’s pleasure centers. Chocolate brownies saturate my brain with so much dopamine that after eating a brownie platter it’s not safe for me to drive or to operate heavy mechanical equipment. When I was a kid, I took cough medicine laced with codeine, and there was a warning label on the back: “Not safe to drive or to operate heavy mechanical equipment.” Chocolate brownie mix should have the same warning on the back of the box.

The best brownies mix I’ve ever had are Ghirardelli Triple Chocolate Chip Brownies from Costco. I’ve purchased the same brand from other stores, but the Costco version is the best. Costco apparently uses its special powers to have Ghirardelli make an exclusive proprietary formula that is far superior to other versions. This fact has been corroborated by conversations I’ve had with Orange County housewives.

I don’t live in Orange County, and I don’t normally have conversations with housewives. That I talked with them about the superior quality of the exclusive Costco version of Ghirardelli Triple Chocolate Chip Brownies mix attests to the severity of my unhealthy dependence on food.

Costco does a good job of making you think about food. Before you even walk inside Costco, you smell the freshly baked cinnamon rolls, chocolate chip cookies, and cream Danish. The smell makes you run inside the store.

Chronologically speaking, I am supposed to be an adult, but like a kid I’m running toward the Costco entrance while pushing an empty shopping cart. I must be a scary sight. This 240-pound middle-aged bald guy aggressively pushing his battering ram into a giant food larder where he will pillage the spoils. I’m like an Old Testament warlord about to ransack a defeated city.

Whenever I get close to food, I get anxious, and whenever I get anxious, I must run toward the source of my anxiety.

I don’t just run toward Costco. I run toward restaurants. I don’t mean to say that I make a casual run to the restaurant after I park my car in the nearby lot. I sprint.

My wife Lara has been complaining about this compulsion of mine since we first started dating many years ago. I’ll park the car, get out, and make a dash for the restaurant. This compulsion to sprint full-speed to an eatery is rooted in three things. One, I feel this need to be ahead of the line. Two, I’m always hungry, and I can’t wait to eat. Three, I suffer this paranoid anxiety that the restaurant will run out of the ingredients necessary to make my favorite dishes.

To help remedy this compulsion, my wife has agreed that we can go to restaurants as early as 5 P.M. before the restaurant gets crowded. But this measure hasn’t abated my compulsion to sprint to the restaurant in which I often barrel my way past a throng of pedestrians who stare at me as if I were an oversized bat out of hell. My wife never runs with me. She shakes her head in disgust, and eventually catches up with me in the restaurant lobby before giving me a look of shame and admonishment.

Her displeasure with me doesn’t end there. When we sit at the table with our menus, I’m always quick to determine "the greatest dish on the menu" so that I can announce my decision upon the server’s first request for our order. My wife is never done studying the menu and must always ask that the server come back in five minutes or so to give her more time to decide. This always drives me crazy because I have a fear that the server will not come back or be delayed an excruciatingly long time. I have traumatic memories of servers not returning until a half hour after sending them away because people at my table weren’t ready to make their order, and these memories have convinced me that I must order my food upon the waiter’s first table visit.

I also have painful memories of the server leaving the bill on the table and not returning for forty-five minutes, so I always give my credit card to the server before he has time to lower the bill to my table.

This technique further reinforces my stressful approach to dining out. Restaurant dining is less of a relaxing, leisurely event and more of an obstacle course inhabited by dragons that I must slay with all the weapons at my disposal. My poor wife returns from our “evenings out” in a state of utter exhaustion because, let’s face it, my generalized anxiety disorder, a diagnosis my therapist assigned to me, sucks the energy out of people.

My poor wife will come, plop on the couch, have a few glasses of wine, and convalesce in front of the living room television. Peering at her glazed, tired eyes from the hallway, I have a deep pity for her. Lara looks like she just survived an invasive medical procedure that didn’t go as smoothly as expected, and she’s waiting for the pain meds to kick in. In those moments, I’m tempted to come into the living room and apologize for my behavior at the restaurant, but I know from past experience that she needs distance from me, and that the best thing I can do for her in those moments is to make myself disappear.

To my defense, over the years I have improved my behavior somewhat. I no longer order meals for both my wife and me, inhale all my food in a few minutes, and then hungrily take half of my wife’s entrée. You see, I have matured somewhat.

But I still sprint toward restaurants. Recently, my wife, our six-year-old twin daughters, Maggie and Ashley, and I went to the mall to eat at The Lazy Dog Café. When we got out of the car, I suppressed my urge to sprint toward the restaurant as I held my daughter Maggie’s hand. Fifty yards ahead of us, Maggie recognized a classmate from her kindergarten class. She wanted to catch up with her classmate and say hi to her. In my gut, I knew my daughter’s classmate and her parents were going to Lazy Dog Café, and I didn’t like that they had a head-start on us. You see, they were no longer pleasant acquaintances for me to get to know better. I now saw them as competition for restaurant seating.

Holding my daughter’s hand, I ran toward the family, and said to the father, “Are you going to Lazy Dog Café?” He said he was, upon which my daughter Maggie and I sprinted toward the restaurant, leaving my daughter's classmate and her parents in a cloud of dust behind us.

When my wife Lara and our other daughter Ashley caught up with Maggie and me in the restaurant lobby, Lara said, “You just embarrassed yourself. Now that family knows that you were racing to get a seat before them. You always have to have the advantage.”

My competitive nature at restaurants, not surprisingly, raises its ugly head when I shop at Costco. When I smell all those cinnamon rolls and chocolate chip cookies, I plow over the other shoppers toward the baked goods area. I feel I have to fill my cart with all the desserts before the other customers get to them first—as if Costco is going to run out.

I’m actually competing with the other customers as if living out some sick Paleolithic drama—only instead of hunting for animals, I’m filling my cart with fresh bagels and pastries. I have become like the lost souls described in Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. In my zeal to out-survive my fellow human beings, I have given up all of my values and individuality and have become part of the herd. At this point, I am no longer shopping like a rational human being. I am frantically loading my cart as if hoarding food provisions for the Zombie Apocalypse.

Then when I get all the food home, I suffer the two major anxieties. Anxiety number one: How am I going to fit all this shit in my kitchen? I now have the task of being forced to eat food in order to make room for the new Costco freight. You know how disgusting this is? There are millions of people starving in the world, and I’m force-feeding to make room for the new food cargo.

Anxiety number two: Costco sells everything in bulk. I’ve already packed the freezer to the max. How am I going to eat all this before it goes bad? I have to eat huge food quantities at an accelerated pace. It’s like there is this invisible stopwatch ticking in the background of my brain, and I’m a contestant in The Amazing Race. Being in this mental state does not make me happy. It makes me anxious and downright miserable.

When I consider how debilitating these anxieties can be, I wonder if I should stop shopping at this giant food warehouse.

Are you kidding? Costco is the greatest thing that ever happened to me. I’m an exclusive Costco member who enjoys the privileges of membership. These nice people greet me when I flash my Costco card at the entrance. I get the lowest prices on the highest quality food, clothing, and electronics that the world has to offer. Friendly people give me free samples of pizza, tamales, crunchy salmon sushi rolls, spicy quinoa chips, guacamole, mango smoothies. I’m eating a seven-course meal while I shop. As if in a dream, I’m wandering inside this huge consumer Shangri-La.

But like every paradise, there’s a dark side. The Costco employees who work the cash registers tell me fights break out every day for parking spaces.

Imagine an environment where the anxiety levels are so high that fights go unabated for parking. What kind of anger, desperation, and anxiety are roiling at that parking lot? Is that the kind of environment you want to go to? Of course it isn't but you go anyway because Costco is your Shangri-La. This is the only time you, an unrecognized, lowly member of the suburbs, feels distinctive and important. You’re greeted at the entrance like you’re some kind of consumer lord, and you enjoy the special privileges of shopping inside a shopper’s wonderland.

Shopping at Costco is like being Dorothy in the Land of Oz. It’s an escape from your boring life. And like all escapes, shopping at Costco can be an addiction.

There should be a reality show about shoppers who are addicted to Costco. Imagine their back-story. At Costco, they feel special, and they enjoy this temporary spike in self-esteem. But then they return to their cookie-cutter tract home or their prison-like apartment complex where their life has all the vitality of a mildewed dishrag.

I want to stop for a moment and thank Costco for giving a morsel of joy and self-esteem to the downtrodden souls whose dreams have been crushed for all eternity.

Costco, reliable enabler of the Id, we thank you, and we worship you. Promise you’ll never leave us because we really, really need you.

 

The Student Who Schooled His College Professor

Suppose you’re a college composition instructor, as I am, and you feel compelled to teach Viktor Frankl’s taut masterpiece, Man’s Search for Meaning, yet you wonder if you are qualified to teach the book.

I have several doubts about my qualifications. For one, I suffer from what you might call the Rodney Dangerfield Factor. When I was in my early twenties, I read a newspaper interview with one of my idols, the comedian Rodney Dangerfield, who said, in direct opposition to Frankl, you can’t really change who you are. You’re born a certain way and that’s it. I remember immediately agreeing with him. We are creatures molded at birth and we cannot escape who we are fundamentally. So why do we give a damn about our choices when the end result of who we are is going to be the same?

At the other end of the spectrum is Viktor Frankl. In his anti-deterministic view, you may reach a point in your life where realize you are trapped in a meaningless existence, but you don’t give up because you always have the free will to choose how you will react to your individual situation. You struggle to find what life demands of you and embracing your responsibilities you find a higher purpose and this purpose transforms your character. You become a dramatically changed person because you found meaning.

In my Man’s Search for Meaning course, I must neither be advocate nor adversary of Viktor Frankl. I must teach my students how to think for themselves. This means I must help them differentiate between informed opinions based on the consideration of counterarguments and bogus opinions based on the mindless habit of embracing the “herd’s” collective beliefs.

I must teach logical fallacies such as the either/or fallacy and show how arguments can’t always arrive at a black and white conclusion. When the world is no longer seen through a child’s black and white template, I explain to my students, we find ourselves in a world that is colored in gray and rich in nuance, paradox, and irony.

I must teach Aristotelian dialect, the back and forth between opposing views and show how opposing arguments can both have compelling points, making it impossible to say that one side of a debate will enjoy a “slam dunk” victory over another.

Having taught Man’s Search for Meaning for over twenty years, I find myself suffering a contradiction: On one hand, I’m very confident teaching Frankl’s book in the context of a Critical Thinking class. As an intellectual exercise, teaching Frankl’s book is something I can handle with a feeling of assuredness. However, as a book to apply to my life, I find I am somewhat lost and confused.

This befuddled state was underscored a couple of years ago when one of my students, Conner Patrick, showed an absolute disdain for my prized book. What made Conner’s objections to Man’s Search for Meaning particularly devastating is that in my close to thirty years of teaching he was by far my best writer. He was an English major who by his own admission had no career plans. Only eighteen years old, he had an immaculate prose style. He wasn’t one of those English major types who try to impress others by using “big vocabulary words.” Rather, Conner had this way of writing so that when I read his essays I imagined him walking happily through a boundless orchard of Language Trees, and he simply plucked the perfect word, like low-hanging fruit, as the word suited his writing purposes. His writing was vastly superior to mine. As I once said to him, “I have a V-6 under my hood. It serves me well enough. But you’ve got a V-12. I can’t match you.” I also told him I’d be shocked if he didn’t eventually become a published writer.

Conner was big, about six feet two inches and weighed well over 250 pounds. He wore faded jeans, hiking boots, flannel shirts, and a he had a scraggly beard that partially concealed freckles on his cherubic cheeks. He wore a wool herringbone golfer’s cap over his curly reddish-brown hair. Most of the time, he showed up to class with a guitar. He had a generally friendly persona and socialized with the other students though sometimes I’d catch his blue eyes narrow at others as if to reveal what I imagined to be contempt for the human race.    

He would often stay after class, and we’d talk about his essays or about his sister Jennifer who had taken the same class from me a year earlier. In one of his essays, he wrote a narrative featuring a bald football coach hanging out with his high school buddies in a bar. The vivid description of the coach and the manner in which he spoke made it abundantly clear that he was a variation of a younger version of myself. It was clear that Conner had gleaned bits and pieces of personal anecdotes I had told to the class, and he had synthesized them to create a character who was in many ways my younger doppelgänger. Other students read the essay and got a kick out of it. The point is that Conner knew I respected his intelligence, and he felt comfortable making a jibe at me in his essay. He was also comfortable disagreeing with me.

This became evident after my first Viktor Frankl lecture in which I outlined the final “capstone” essay assignment: Students were to argue that either Frankl made a convincing case that meaning was the answer to the human problem of the “existential crisis” or that his book failed to convince them of this claim. After class, Conner waited for the other students to leave. Still sitting behind his desk, he said, “You don’t really believe in this shit, do you?”

“What?”

He looked impatient with my inadequate response. “Come on, man. You know you don’t believe in this shit.”

To my surprise, I knew immediately that part of me agreed with him. But contrary to this understanding, I said, “Well actually, I tend to be more agnostic when it comes to the subject of meaning.”

“Seriously?”

He was holding Frankl’s book in his giant hands and flipping the pages while looking at them with a sneer. “Take out the impressive Holocaust narrative and what are you left with? Just a bunch of homilies about positive thinking. It’s a bunch of Chicken Soup for the Soul crapola.”

I didn’t mind Conner disagreeing with me or Frankl. What I minded is that he seemed to be questioning my book selection. I had, according to his judgment, selected tripe and was making the students write their final essay on a book full of clichés. I felt I had to defend myself and explain that I had a deep personal attachment to Man’s Search for Meaning.

“I’m not going to lie to you, Conner,” I said. “When I first read Frankl at the age of eighteen, the part where he is marching with the prisoners at dawn and he is comforted by the spirit of his wife, I wept like a baby for like five hours.”

Conner shrugged his shoulders, winced, and said, “I’m glad you got something out of it, and Frankl seems like a great guy. But all the stuff about finding meaning is bullshit. You know as well as I do there is no meaning.”

“Is that what I’m supposed to tell my six-year-old daughters?”

“You can tell them the truth or you can tell them lies. It’s your choice.”

“I want my daughters to grow up, get educated, find meaning, and find love in their lives. That gives me meaning. Does that make me stupid?”

“Except that you’re not talking about meaning. You’re talking about survival and self-preservation. The love for your daughters is instinctive. I get that. But there’s no meaning as Frankl writes about it.”

“So you think Frankl is delusional?”

“Of course he’s delusional. That doesn’t mean I don’t sympathize with him. Look, I get it. He went through horrendous shit, and he had to make himself believe that all his suffering was meaningful. I would have done the same thing. It probably preserved his sanity to make himself believe that, but at the end of the day his philosophy is just another mind-fuck. He had to make himself believe he had found meaning. Otherwise, he would have gone crazy. Most people do that. It’s a coping mechanism. It’s not meaning.”

It wasn’t just Conner’s blunt words. It was his expression as he looked at me, as if to say he was certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was Conner’s kindred spirit and therefore I had to be in complete agreement with him. His expression was so convincing that I felt I was being swayed by his argument by not just his words but by some invisible force that I could not resist.

If you could only imagine how disconcerting this was. As an instructor with three decades of experience, I feel I should be a rock, a man of solid conviction who can stand up to disagreement. And usually I am. But in the presence of Conner’s reproach, I felt I was standing on shifting sand.

Then he said, “Why are you teaching this crap? Does it make you feel better to stuff meaning down your students’ throats?”

“This is a critical thinking class. I want students to think for themselves.”

“But you’re a hypocrite. You tell us to think for ourselves, yet you can’t even do it yourself. You’re letting your emotions cloud your judgment here. Look, I get you love Frankl. He was a great man. But you love him so much you can’t think straight. You tell us that to be critical thinkers we have to be dispassionate and remove ourselves emotionally from whatever subject we’re addressing. But you can’t do that with Frankl. Take away your admiration for his heroism and your fond memories of crying for five hours when he talked about his love for his wife and what do you have left? A book full of clichés about finding meaning. And you know as well as I do there is no meaning. All the suffering we go through is meaningless.”

And then to make his point, he explained that his mother was very religious, and when he and his sister were little his mother felt called by God to be a foster parent for babies whose mothers had abused drugs and alcohol.

“Ever since I was a little kid,” he said, “there have been crack babies in my house. They don’t get better. They’re fucked up for the rest of their lives. They sleep all night with their eyes open. Some of them squawk like prehistoric birds. They’ve got permanent brain damage. It’s a nightmare. And what has my mother gained? The babies grow up to be permanently disabled. Many of them can’t even talk. And because my mother felt called upon by God to do this mission of futility, she neglected Jennifer and me. In fact, she relied on us to help her with these kids. That’s how we spent our childhood. Day and night, we had to tend to these squawking babies. To this day, Jennifer and I both resent our mother. We’re both dying to move out. Neither of us want children. Honestly, this higher purpose my mother has embraced is not something Frankl should be proud of. I always thought my mother either had this pathological need to do what she does, or it is part of her ego to show her religious friends that she is better than them. Or a bit of both. Bottom-line, I’ve grown up dealing with a bunch of bullshit in the name of meaning.”

I went home depressed and defeated. I had nothing to refute Conner with after class. I felt I needed to process what he had said and come up with a response the next time I saw him. Or better yet, without telling the students Conner’s personal details, I wanted to bring up Conner’s disagreement with Frankl and show possible ways to counter that disagreement. The next class meeting, I asked Conner if I could do just that, and he approved. So the next class I presented the argument that Conner had made.

“Conner wants us to ignore Frankl’s heroism for a moment and analyze his claims about finding meaning through embracing a life of suffering. One, Conner claims that much of the suffering in this world is senseless and meaningless. Two, Conner claims that we just make up meaning to make ourselves feel better. Let’s concede to Conner that much suffering in this world is indeed senseless, such as the Great Tsunami that killed a quarter of a million people. But let’s challenge Conner’s second claim, that what we call meaning is a delusion. What we’re really talking about, according to Conner, are coping mechanisms, not meaning.”

I looked in the back of the room at Conner. He was apparently enjoying his devil’s advocate role evidenced by the beaming smile on his face.

“Conner says there is no meaning, but I would argue we all exist on a Meaning Scale with spiritual decrepitude at one end of the spectrum and flourishing on the other. Let’s take an extreme example of an addict. If a man becomes a drug addict, he is in a condition of decrepitude or moral dissolution. He has burned bridges with his friends and family, and he lives only for himself. As an addict, he loves the things he’s addicted to more than he loves people. His life is without meaning. Everyone with me so far?”

The students nodded.

“At the other end of the spectrum,” I continued, “there are people who find a passion for their life work and this passion combined with discipline brings out their higher self. They have found meaning, or at least, relatively speaking, more meaning than the addict who lives holed up somewhere in isolation. So when we find something that we work hard at, we flourish in that discipline, and to flourish is to find meaning.”

I looked at Conner whose lips curled into a sneer. He said, “It’s great that people flourish, but don’t confuse flourishing with meaning. I know a young evangelist who is amazing at what he does. He’s only sixteen years old, and talks about God and makes people convert to his religion. That’s his so-called meaning. But this evangelist has an older brother, a former evangelist now atheist, who travels the world explaining why he converted to atheism. He helps lots of religious people disavow their faith and become atheists. Both of these brothers are flourishing in what they do, but they both can’t be right. They are diametrically opposed to one another. At the end of the day, they do what they do because it makes them feel good. Therefore, meaning is not some objective reality. It’s a fantasy that energizes people. In other words, it’s complete bullshit.”

His arms were crossed and he was grinning at me with triumph. After a pause, he made it clear that he wasn’t finished with me yet. He said, “There’s a second problem with your argument. Contradicting the very principles you’ve drilled into us all semester, your argument smacks of the either-or fallacy. You’ve presented us with an over simplistic black and white universe where people are either decaying into a state of mental disintegration or they are blossoming in their craft. In fact, both processes can occur simultaneously. I know of many famous writers who flourished in the craft of writing novels while suffering the effects of alcoholism. People are complicated, Mr. McMahon. You, me, everyone in this room. We can both self-destruct and flourish at the same time. You’re as smart as I am. You know this as well as I do, but you’re too emotionally invested in Viktor Frankl. Who wouldn’t be? Who wants to believe that against our own will we’ve been delivered into a world without meaning and purpose? Who wants to believe that all we can do is fiddle around with entertainments and hobbies that will keep us occupied during our lifetime before we’re buried into the ground?”

I had that dizzying sensation that I was on shifting sand again. I felt myself being pulled into Conner’s meaningless universe. In a panic, I relied on one of my canned arguments based on the 1971 movie Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. In the DVD extra, there is an interview with Gene Wilder. He explains that the movie is about teaching us boundaries. Flailing for life support, I said, “Boundaries give us meaning. Boundaries teach us discipline. Boundaries save us from excess. Children whose parents teach them boundaries are happier than children whose parents don’t. You see, Conner, boundaries point toward meaning.”

Conner shook his head. “Boundaries are important. We’ve evolved to learn how to create boundaries as a survival mechanism. But they don’t constitute meaning.”

Still flailing for life support, I said, “Take away meaning and what’s left? A nihilistic free-for-all? A Darwinian nightmare of survival for the fittest where the strong kill and cripple the weak?”

With an insouciant smile, Conner said, “Calm down, Mr. McMahon. Everything’s going to be okay. We don’t submit to raw Darwinism because that’s not in our self-interests. We’ve evolved to live in cooperative societies. That too is a survival mechanism, but it’s not meaning.”

“So we’re just products of evolution? Is that it?”

“Pretty much. Can’t handle it, Mr. McMahon?”

“If what you’re saying is true, the majority of the human race would go into despair and kill themselves.”

“Not at all. The majority of the human race delude themselves in a variety of ways, including the stupid belief that there’s meaning. Books like Viktor Frankl’s add to the human race’s collective delusion. I’m cool with it. If people want to believe in Santa Claus for the rest of their life, more power to them.”

“Can I ask you a personal question, Mr. Patrick?”

“Go for it.”

“Why are you going to college?”

“Something to do.”

“You mean you have no plan?”

“Not really.”

“Wouldn’t you rather have a plan? I mean, if you had to choose between having a plan and not having a plan, isn’t having a plan the better option?”

“Not necessarily. I know lots of students who majored in whatever, and just before they were about to graduate, they realized they hated their major. Their life sucks. A lot of plans are misguided. A lot of times, having a plan is worse than having no plan at all.”

I felt like Conner and I were engaged in the medieval sport of jousting back and forth, and so far he had stabbed me with his sword repeatedly in my midsection. I instinctively brushed my hand against the front of my moist shirt, but it wasn’t blood. It was sweat.

“But having a plan,” I said, “gives us a goal for our future. And goals help us live our lives more fully. As Frankl likes to quote from Nietzsche, ‘He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.’”

“He who has a Why may in fact be deluded. Fascist autocrats and despots have a Why, and they are patently evil. As far as living life more fully, that’s a good thing to strive for. But it isn’t meaning. It’s just living in the present. And who needs to read a book to know the obvious? Truth be told, Mr. McMahon, you’ve given us a book of platitudes and clichés.”

By this time, I could feel the other students were siding with Conner. They were smiling at their hero as if he were about to mount a mutiny against the captain of the ship. Conner, too, sensed what was going on. He stood up and addressed the class.

“Okay, guys, the party’s over. Mr. McMahon and I had this whole thing planned all along. It was a rehearsed script. It was to show you guys how Socratic dialogue really works.”

Students were chiming in by saying it was one of the most amazing classes they had ever been in. One student said he regretted not videotaping it on his phone and uploading it on YouTube. Another student said that Conner and I were remarkable actors who should make Hollywood movies, those comic buddy films featuring two guys who seem to hate each other guts but who in reality wouldn’t know who to live without the other.

The class ended. The students shuffled out of the room one by room. Conner remained in his seat.

“What the hell?” I said. “You had your teeth in my jugular. You were destroying my arguments one by one. But then you bailed me out. Why did you do that?”

“Look, man. I didn’t know shit before I took your class. You taught me all these critical thinking skills. I wasn’t about to take the weapons you gave me and throw you under the bus. I don’t like very many people, but I like you, so that’s just how it played out.”

“Thirty years of teaching, and I’ve never lost an argument. You changed all that. I had my ass handed to me on a stick.”

“Which means it’s time to confess the truth. I’m right, and Frankl is wrong. Come on, man, admit it.”

“I can’t. I mean, you make a lot of good points, but I refuse to give up on meaning.”

“Come on, man, I saved your ass.”

“What can I say, Conner? You’re one of the smartest people I’ve ever known. You’ll probably be published someday. You’ll probably live a life of glory I’ve only dreamed about. You’ll probably hang out with all those cool comedians I’m always talking about in class. And they’ll think you’re cool and hire you to write jokes for them. But I can’t say you’re right about our Viktor Frankl debate just because you spared me humiliation. I sincerely have a kernel of faith that there might be meaning. If I said anything else, I’d be a liar.”

“Fair enough. But watch what you say next time in class because I’m going to kick your ass.”