My Break-up with Wendy

cold chili ain’t cool

There’s been so much going on lately. Like crazy busy times all over the place. I’ve got this other place—maybe you’ve heard of it… SmallStack?—it’s like HOPPING over there. The kids are officially done with school, so it’s summer. But the weather hasn’t been summer for more than a few minutes here and there. We’re doing our usual summer activities like camping, which means swatting mosquitoes, bathing in campfire smoke, wondering why sleeping bags always feel so awful against sweaty, deet-laden skin, and knowing that the car will be full of wet gear on the way home. The dog is… well, he’s exactly the same goldfish-in-a-dogsuit he has always been. We got a new roof on the house, new solar panels are on the way. Friends have been in the hospital. The crow keeps dropping peanut shells in the pool.

Life is just full of everything.

So for just a moment, I have this stupid, funny, lighthearted, possibly relatable story to entertain you with.

It wasn’t actually in Chattanooga, Tennessee, but rather a suburb of a suburb, if the map was even slightly correct. We had been driving for hours. In a Chrysler. Should I explain just how flat my butt was from all that sitting? I shouldn’t. It’s not flattering. It’s flattening. And there is pretty much never a point in life when I am not hungry. But in the interest of getting to the hotel that was booked, we were forced to keep going, sustained only by the box of peanut butter pretzels and six packets of Big League Chew.

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Okay, I have to digress here. For those of you who are new to this publication, I would apologize if I actually felt bad about my habit of mid-story tangents. Thing is, my brain is wired this way, and I like it. Try to keep up.

When I was a kid, I chewed Bazooka bubble gum and Bubble Yum, I choked down Pixie Stix, I really hated those rocket pops the ice cream truck had, Lick ‘em Sticks were a hot item (grape was AMAZING), and my fingers were regularly sticky from ring pops. Oh, and candy necklaces. Or bracelets. I mean, wearable candy? Yes! But the off-limits items were clear—no candy cigarettes, and no Big League Chew bubble gum. Because we all know that eating candy leads to tobacco addiction.

the gum of my childhood dreams…

Now I wasn’t in little league, I was never sporty, and I didn’t even care about baseball. But deep down in my tender little heart was an untamed lust for Big League Chew. I dreamed about it. I fantasized over how I would pack my lip with it just like the cartoony picture on the bag. The soft, pink threads of gum in the fingers of every other kid on the playground who was *allowed* to have such contraband was pure agony to watch.

Fast forward to adulthood, and my friend—who asked me to go on this road trip—suggested that we could indulge in some *missed opportunities* from our youth. It was a great idea. As trans adults whose childhoods contained a lot of trauma over our repressed identities, we shared plenty of wish list items from the pages of “what my life would have been like if I’d been allowed to grow up as a boy.” He asked what candy I had wanted as a kid, and it leapt out of my mouth…

“BIG LEAGUE CHEW!”

He brought all six flavors.

Hey, while we’re on this little side-trip, I feel obligated to mention that the original flavor and the grape were epic. The sour apple was appallingly chemical tasting, the berry flavor turned my whole mouth purple, and I think my kids consumed the rest of them. It was, however, incredibly thrilling to pull those little pink strands of deliciousness from the foil pouch, stuff them against my gums, and drool. It was everything I’d pictured as a child.

They say not to meet your heroes, but this is one case where it absolutely lived up to my expectations.

But no amount of gum can keep you from feeling that gnawing edge of hunger for *real food* after hours and hours of freeway gloominess. We found the hotel, hauled our bags up, and set off to look for dinner. It was late, easily after 9pm local time, and some suburbs of suburbs shut down pretty early.

Lo, on the horizon, a familiar and friendly face, framed with two perfect red pigtails, glowed with a welcoming aura. Wendy and I have been seeing one another for decades. Heck, I think we grew up together in some ways. My parents thought it was cool to have a fast-food place with a salad bar, so we went regularly when I was young. Even in my vegetarian days (come on, it was a phase) I frequented her establishment for fries or a chicken sandwich (which tells you how loyal I was to vegetarianism). It was a beautiful relationship; I went to her place for dinner, sometimes she came home with me, we both loved salty French fries, I learned how to dip them in a Frosty for fun… I’ve been to Wendy’s in quite a few states. She really knows her stuff. No matter where I go she seems to know just how I like my Dave’s Double Combo (with a chocolate Frosty on the side).

So when I saw her sign, it was like………. a sign.

We pulled into the parking lot and went in. We didn’t want to eat in the car or the hotel. We could just sit down, chill there while we ate, and head back when we were done. It should have been so simple.

“Yeah, it’s to go only. The dining room is closing,” said the bored attendant at the register.

“Right. Okay,” I tried to recover. “That’s fine,” I turned to my friend. “We can take it to go.” My friend didn’t look too pleased.

I ordered my usual. I mean, I feel like Wendy should have known, what with our bond throughout time and distance and all, that I was going to keep ordering the same thing almost every time I visited her place.

“Yeah, what number combo is that?” the attendant asked.

“It’s…” I had to look up. “It’s the Dave’s Double combo. I mean… Dave named it. So…”

“The number?”

“Um. It’s a number one. The first one. Because… Dave. And all.”

“So you want a number one combo?”

I cleared my throat, wishing I wasn’t feeling so internally squishy about what was happening. “Technically, I still want a Dave’s Double combo. Which happens to be next to the number one.”

“Bro,” my friend nudged my shoulder, “I don’t think she thinks you’re as funny as you think you are.”

“It’s like a grenade,” I whispered back. “Sometimes you gotta throw and then wait.”

Nope. It was a dud.

“Did you want a number one combo then?”

Both of my lips sandwiched themselves in between my front teeth so that I could bite down on them. I nodded. “Mm-hm.”

She turned and looked over her shoulder, “Can I get a Dave’s Double on four?” to which I wildly mimed to my friend the sum total of my frustration. “Did you want something?” she said to my friend.

He eyed her with skepticism. “I think I want a baked potato. And do you have chili?”

“We got any potatoes in there?” she barked at someone in the fry station.

A burly guy with an apron on turned around slowly, squatted low, opened a metal cabinet, and proceeded to climb bodily into it to inspect the furthest corners of the dungeon it contained.

His echoey voice vibrated through stainless steel, “Think there’s one back there. Might be able to reach it.”

“So a baked potato,” the attendant keyed something on the little computer.

“And chili. If you have that,” my friend added.

“I’ll have to go look.”

She abandoned her post at the register and walked to the other side of the kitchen, the part that looked like the entire days’ worth of work had already been disassembled in preparation for closing down for the night. At 9pm. Because I guess nobody in Chattanooga eats fast food after 9pm. She leaned over the industrial sink and stared into the bottom of a massive bucket. Beside the bucket was a ladle. And before either of us could say anything, we watched her pluck a little paper cup from the shelf in one hand while she scraped the literal bottom of the bucket with that ladle, tipping it sideways to get out barely enough chili to fill half the paper bowl.

If you have not worked in food service, allow me to illuminate one of those food safety pop quiz items we all had to know about to get our food handlers permits: hot stuff like chili has to stay hot to serve it. And then when service is over, you pour it into a container and stuff that container into a sink full of ice to rapidly cool it for refrigeration. This process is designed to prevent yucky things from growing in the food that will make customers sick. Please believe me when I tell you that nowhere in that food handlers manual does it say it’s okay to fish out the tattered remains of chili from the bottom of that cooling “bucket” to serve to a live human.

Honestly, just saying “bucket” when referring to food a person wants to eat feels like I’ve sacrificed something important about my own humanity.

She handed the cup to my buddy. There was a sound that came from him at that point, a kind of cough that could have been a wretch. I’m still unsure.

The guy on the other side of the kitchen had scrounged up a pathetic little spud in foil. I watched him toss a handful of two-hour-old fries into a box for me. A few dropped to the side, so he picked them up with bare hands to stuff them all back into their container. Three swift plops of “food” dropped into a couple paper bags, and we were walking back out to the car.

“I’m… not sure what just happened,” I said, my voice trembling. I felt betrayed. Lied to. Neglected. Abandoned. Grossed out.

“Your girl did not come through for us tonight,” my friend said back.

We promptly retired to the hotel room to eat some Big League Chew before a restless night of dreams containing fragmented images of buckets and shadowed cabinets of lonely, abandoned potatoes. It was the result of true heartbreak, of loss.

Wendy and I are currently on the mend after that little break-up. It was hard on both of us. She finally got through to me with an ad that my 8-year-old brought me for a summertime berry-flavored Frosty he couldn’t live without trying. In some ways, it’s a cheap move to send a message through my kid. In other ways, I think I was hoping for an opportunity for us to talk again over a cherry Coke and some chicken nuggets. We’ve seen one another at our worst now, and I know Wendy didn’t give up on me that time I showed up at her place drunk and partly hung over. Maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to give up on her.

Your trans friend,

Robin