Sometimes the days are so short and so long, they feel like rubber bands; stretching and shrinking in the same direction.

Lately my days are like that, and it doesn’t make good fodder for the typewriter…eh, keyboard. I could write about a busy day at work in which I shifted the position of my posterior perhaps three times, but you could read Dilbert and get the same thing faster (and funnier). So, because the present is only interesting when in retrospect, here’s a story from the past.

Part 1: Qualifying

The Uptowner was not uptown. Saint Paul has no “uptown”, as far as I know. For that matter, it barely has a downtown, and the Uptowner wasn’t there, either.

The Uptowner was a greasy, smoky late-night diner in a nondescript commercial neighborhood at the intersection of two main streets. If anything, I’d call it mid-town. It’s still there, under different ownership, under different colors of paint, smokeless and family-oriented.

It still goes by the name “The Uptowner”, but less convincingly. Like a deceased pet’s name that has been transferred to the replacement animal.

The (old) Uptowner, which bit the dust a few years ago, was a mangy restaurant. It had yellow walls, vinyl bench seats, and a seriously overworked stereo sitting high above the stove-vent. You never knew what kind of music you’d hear when you went in, but you always knew it’d be loud.

That, plus the LA-smog-like cigarette smoke made it a horrible place to relax and hang out with friends. And yet, that is exactly what we did. The summer after my second year in high school, I found myself at The Uptowner upwards of four times a week. And I never recall being in there earlier than midnight.

I had no job. I had a 1984 Honda Civic with a faulty frame. And I had no curfew. My days were spent in slumber, my life began after dinner and continued until just before sunrise.

My car’s marginally functional tape deck played only one album: “Live from the Studio”, the first release by Heiruspecs, a hip-hop group from my school. I still get the lyrics stuck in my head every once in a while:

Rhymes that hit hard and leave fake MCs in awe/
Straight flippin’ off the tongue like Dominic Dawes/

When you’re 16 and it’s after midnight and you’ve been driving around collecting stray traffic cones for three hours, you work up quite an appetite. And if you are anywhere in Saint Paul then you’re close enough to The Uptowner to start thinking about devouring one of their greasiest, heaviest, enormousest meals, and the Uptowner had plenty of them.

The Cajun Breakfast was a favorite. A three-inch thick pile of hash browns soaked soggy in Hollandaise sauce. The Farmer’s Breakfast was your typical eggs-n-hash-n-bacon thing, but you knew it was thee real deal when you looked over and saw the cook ladling liquid fat onto the meal as it cooked. Not just the eggs. Not just the potatoes. Not just the bacon. The whole meal, as if to rinse it of any non-saturated elements.

But those were orders for spineless, repugnant people. People who gagged at the thought of drinking fifteen warm creamer cups in order to stack the empties into an elegant creamer-cup-castle. People who thought whipped butter was meant to be applied with a knife, onto one’s toast, not with a spoon, onto one’s trachea.

I was not one of them. I didn’t order the meager Cajun or the paltry Farmer’s. I looked the hairy-armpit-waitress right in the eyes and said, “Tex Mex.”

Imagine a tortilla the size of a pizza. Inside this tortilla is a mound of food that looks like it is covering the fresh grave of a mid-sized animal. Sausage, hash browns, onions, peppers, eggs, pools of cheddar cheese, salsa, hot sauce. Bacon? French fries? I lose track. No one can really say for sure.

This much is certain: it’s the most appallingly unhealthy combination of edible items I can describe. Just finishing it was a feat. And the feat that came about six hours after finishing it is better not to describe.

Today, under normal circumstances, there’s no way I’d eat one. Maybe if my blood-sugar levels were low and my blood-fat levels were really really low. Or if I was trying to turn myself into a statue made of cholesterol.

But none of those things concerned me then. Eating was something you did to win the respect of your friends. And if their respect proved detrimental to my health, so be it. Back in 1996 my metabolism was just coming down off a growth spurt, and not even the biggest, greasiest meal, eaten at a reasonable pace, could kill me.

Ah, but what if it wasn’t eaten at a reasonable pace?

Tomorrow, Part 2: Racing, chanting, gagging.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 19th, 2004 at 8:57 am and is filed under General, Minnesota. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.