It took time and it took water and patience, and prayer. But we persevered and Team Burger has succeeded beyond our initial goal of 600% growth. My burger is finally huge, and it wasn’t just the combination of water and time… WBUR gave me a shoutout on YouTube, in the description of their Pasta from Hell video featuring Bob Oakes wolfing down the devilish goo: “WBUR’s Bob Oakes does something really scary: try the “Pasta from Hell” at the East Coast Grill. And special thanks to Arthur, the waiter who served us this rather intense, but tasty, dish.” This corrects WBUR’s earlier assertion that the pasta was served by a waitress in a skimpy devil costume.
Now that I am living large with my wide burger, my vast burger, my Inland Burger Empire, I have the generosity to accept this correctional shoutout with open arms. I want everyone to know it was me who delivered Bob Oakes the ticket to ride the pain train, and I generously accept this much-needed correction with all the girth and pride of my ever-growing burger intact. Just finding out about WBUR’s semi-apology / correction to their YouTube video description made my already huge burger grow another 3cm.
Waiting for the burger to grow was like, in the words of my aunt, “watching paint dry, watching a baseball game.” It took forever. If I had to compare the experience I would probably employ a more personal metaphor: prepubescent me waiting for the onset of puberty. I really thought that one day I would wake up and be hairy and hung, with a deep voice and probably horrible acne on my face, back and butt. Well, fifteen years later I can certainly vouch for the ass acne. The rest of the changes came glacially. I’m still waiting to be a real man, but I did develop underarm hair earlier than my peers, which brings up a funny anecdote.
My friends and I used to hang out at the Ponderosa, which was the name we gave my friend Ray’s backyard. He had a pool and a trampoline. We were all set. I remember when I was about eleven years old, coming out of the swimming pool without a shirt on. That was kind of a big deal for me, because usually I wore a shirt. I went over to the trampoline with my friend Peter, and we began jumping on it. When you have two kids on a trampoline jumping simultaneously there is a special move than can be executed by timing one jumper to bounce the other high into the air. Its called a double jump, because the first jumper lands right before the second, adding extra tension for the second jumper.
I had just executed a particularly strong double jump for my friend Peter, and he rocketed up into the air and probably into the lowest level of branches from nearby trees. When he landed he was sitting down. Thats how high I bounced him; I was five feet five and weighed one eighty. Thats called portly, in polite society. So he is sitting down and looking up at me, shirtless, and I’m smiling, pointing down at him, probably saying, “Gotcha,” when he suddenly screams like a little girl. He points back at me and screams, “You have hair in your armpit!” My smile turns slowly askew into a look of blind terror and I run off the trampoline and make a beeline to the house.
Once locked in the bathroom I discover that yes, I am the first of my friends to attain underarm hair. It horrifies me, this mark of man. I think I am about to lose the ability to go into almost any restaurant in America and get chicken fingers and fries. The chicken fingers flash before my eyes. I want to be smooth and hairless like my friends and eat chicken fingers and feel comfortable, not different. If Ray’s mom is reading this, nows the time to stop. So what do I do? I take out my friend’s mom’s razor from the shower and proceed to maniacally shave my underarm hair off. I did this in a frenzy, and caused a lot of irritation. It was my first time shaving anything.
When I have calmed down, and feel comfortable that I am once again an innocent hairless child, I put my shirt back on and go back outside. Peter, and Ray, and other kids from the neighborhood are waiting for me. They want to see my pits. I show them hesitantly; will they believe me, insisting that it was only a shadow and not real underarm hair? No of course not. And when they see that I have shaved my armpits they immediately start making fun of me and don’t stop for the rest of the day. Now I am the fat kid with the first pit hair that tried to shave it off in shame and ended up bleeding from the armpits. And, scene.
Anyway, the burger growing is good news. My doctor said that my burger is healthy and large. Its my new pet. I am going to build it miles and miles of tubes like a hampster would enjoy, and then stick my giant burger into the tube and watch it run around. Eventually, it will be way too big for all that nonsense, so I will launch it into outer space so that it can be a new planet. It will be named, “Huge Burger,” and will eventually support all human life. Except for vegetarians like Liz and my sister who wouldn’t be caught dead stepping foot on a planet that is 99% water-soaked dead cow sponge… Maybe they can just live on the buns.
Prayer had no effect on the burger, cat-dog. There’s absolutely nothing worse than a superstitious burger-grower. Except a superstitious burger-grower who is not into metric units. I like that the 3rdarm is into laying it out in metric terms. A provincial American he is not.
as exciting as ‘watching paint dry/a baseball game….’ love it! i still don’t understand the metric system. but in the words of an old friend, ‘considering our early education, it’s a miracle we can read!’
dope shirt pumpkin pie!!
[…] And that, ironically, was the same summer I got called out, to my shock and embarrassment, as the first my group of friends to sprout underarm hair. […]
[…] And that, ironically, was the same summer I got called out, to my shock and embarrassment, as the first my group of friends to sprout underarm hair. […]