Man v. Nature, Man v. Self, Man v. Food
There were many things I hated about my childhood, but there was nothing worse than the way the living room’s shag carpet would stick to my legs whenever I tried to watch television. I hated feeling sweaty, but the heat was something that being a child of New Orleans forced me to get used to.
Loving television as much as I hated the ceaseless warmth, I would brave the thickly coarse floor for thirty minutes every day so I could bask in the joyous distraction of flashing images across the television screen. For that one half-hour, I would forget how badly I wanted my parents to purchase an air conditioner and I would forget that the weather forecast in the newspaper that my neighbor let my father borrow called for a steady increase in temperature as the week barreled forward. For that one half-hour, I was free to watch my hero, Adam Richman.
Richman, who hailed from Buffalo, New York, was the host of Man v. Food on the Travel Channel and, since that was the only station our fraying antenna was able to pick up, he became an icon in my mind. The purpose of the show was to send Richman to various American cities and see if he could complete their most famous local food challenges. The first episode I saw featured my own home city as Richman tossed back 180 oysters and conquered the challenge. I was immediately hooked.
Every day at 5:30 in the early evening, I would hear the familiar sound of a wrestling match bell signifying the beginning of the re-run and I would race into the living room to feast my eyes on the food in store for Richman.
The episodes were often repetitive, but I found myself endlessly drawn to the charms of Richman. His jokes were corny, but when you’re eight years old, you don’t really notice that sort of thing. You don’t notice a lot of things. I only noticed the bags under my mother’s eyes when my teacher pointed them out during a parent-teacher conference, but I was too busy watching the clock inch closer to 5:30 to care too much about it. My heroes didn’t need to have good jokes or spry corneas. They just had to be charismatic and I was drawn to them instantly.
For my birthday, my mother gave me a blank video tape that I immediately used to record that night’s episode of Man v. Food onto. It was an episode that saw Richman travel to St. Louis, Missouri to try to drink five, twenty-four ounce milkshakes. He lost, of course, but I didn’t care. The appeal was in the effort and in the challenge. I’d seen the episode before anyway, but I never lost the thrill of suspense whenever the show would go to commercial on a cliffhanger. Maybe this time, he would finish the milkshakes! Maybe this time, things could be different.
Maybe it was just the way I grew up, but I never got sick of hearing the same story told over and over again. I guess that’s why I wasn’t too broken up about it when my mother picked me up from school and told me that the television antenna had finally snapped off. It was the fourth antenna we’d gone through and we were frankly lucky to have had that one for as long as we did.
Patting my neck with my wet face cloth that I always kept on my person, I shrugged my shoulders. “It’s okay,” I told her.
“I know you liked that show of yours,” she said back to me as she turned on her directional to leave the parking lot.
“It’s okay. I still have that video tape, I guess,” I told her, forcing a smile because I knew the right way to act.
She glanced over at me quickly and smiled, too. “Well,” she said. “We still have the VCR.”
I wore that video tape down from black to gray to ashy white. In the back of my mind, I always assumed we would eventually get a new television, but we never did. Instead, we just watched the milkshake episode of Man v. Food endlessly. It was partly because there were no other episodes to watch, but it was also partly because I was obsessed with the episode. Completely infatuated with the idea that a diner like this existed somewhere in the world, I vowed that I would one day take on the St. Louis milkshake challenge for myself.
My mother always entertained this lofty dream. She even fashioned me a button-down flannel shirt out of her old outfits from when she was a teenager. I wore the shirt with the buttons undone and with a t-shirt underneath so I could look just like Richman. When we had “Career Day” in school, I dressed like him again to tell everyone that I wanted to be a professional food eater when I grew up. Most people laughed, but I thought nothing of it. I laughed at him, too.
By the fortieth time I watched the episode on tape, I began to pick up on elements I’d never noticed before.
“Mom, Mom, Mom, come look at this,” I said exasperatedly as I rushed into the kitchen, tugging at her arm. Sitting her down in front of the paused television, I pointed at someone standing behind Richman to the right. He was wearing a t-shirt that read, “Prosperity and Progress: Gore 2000.” I asked her what it meant.
“That was the campaign slogan for Al Gore when he ran for president in 2000.”
“Who’s Al Gore?”
“Well, he ran for president in 2000.”
“Did he win?”
“Yes and no.”
Mimicking the television screen, I paused for a moment. “What does prosperity mean?”
“It means success.”
“I know what progress means.”
“What does progress mean?” my mother asked me.
“It means to keep going forward and trying new things.”
“That’s right,” she smiled and stood up, holding the small of her back and returning to the kitchen.
The more I watched the milkshake episode, the more I began to notice the people in the background of Richman’s scenes. None of them were as eye-catching as the man with the once unfamiliar t-shirt was when I first noticed him.
Years passed and I began to watch Adam’s milkshake challenge less and less. A daily routine of it became weekly became monthly became sporadically. By the time I reached my senior year of high school, I didn’t really have much time for watching television anymore. Instead of a daily routine that consisted of going to school and coming home to watch the same episode of Man v. Food, the routine became working at school during the day and working at our local McDonald’s during the night. Of course, I always made sure to kiss my mother goodbye in the morning when I left for the day and I made sure she had the video tape for the Man v. Food episode in case she felt like watching it in bed. After all, it was the only form of entertainment we had in the house aside from some magazines that were still gushing over Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston’s relationship.
Whenever I rewound that tape in the morning, I would see the images that so permeated my childhood flash across the screen briefly, jogging my memory in the process. Of the Adam-narrated intro, of the man in the Al Gore t-shirt and the dream of progress, of the mythical diner in St. Louis that actually served five milkshakes for free if you could finish them. I was still able to recite the episode from memory, but I just didn’t have any free time to prove that.
On the night of my graduation, I was scheduled for a shift at McDonald’s and I had to forego the ceremony for my job. My manager didn’t leave me much of a choice as my coworkers and fellow students had requested the time off far in advance. As someone who couldn’t afford to request time off, I obliged and carried out my shift.
To many, a job at McDonald’s might seem like a pointless summer job to make money, but I saw it as a stepping stone. McDonald’s wasn’t a diner in Kansas City or a seafood restaurant in New Orleans, but it still served food. I wanted to learn everything I could about the fast food industry and prepare myself for what life would be like outside of Louisiana. I probably wouldn’t have my own food show on Travel Channel, but at the very least, I could begin to expand my knowledge of how to cook and how to eat.
I needed every bit of experience I could get. I didn’t mind missing graduation so much. I mean, school was already over with. My focus had to be on my job anyway. Might as well get a one day head start on the rest of my classmates.
As I stood at the register that night, practically zoning out from the monotony, I played a game with myself where I counted all of the individual sauces in the drawer below me, placing mental bets on which sauce would be the most prevalent.
I’ve always been pretty good at keeping myself entertained and this seemed to be an effective way to pass the time on a slow shift.
While squatting below the register, I sheepishly rose to my feet again when the sound of throat clearing occurred above me and I heard a charming Buffalo accent say, “Can I get five strawberry milkshakes, please?”
Rising to my feet, I gaped and pointed at the customer in front of me. “You’re Adam.”
“Yup,” he laughed. “Yeah, I’m Adam.”
“What can I get you?” I asked, unblinking.
“Five strawberry milkshakes?”
“I mean, how are you?”
“I’m good.”
“What would you like?”
“Five strawberry milkshakes?”
“Right. We don’t have those,” I said to him.
“You’re all out?”
“How are you?”
“Yeah, still good. Do you have vanilla?”
“We have strawberry milkshakes.”
“Oh.”
“I’m sorry. Do you want to talk to my manager?”
“Talk to your manager? No, I came here to talk to you. Well, that and to have five strawberry milkshakes.”
I slowly began to snap out of my star-struck attitude. “Oh, milkshakes! Right, right. Let me get those for you,” I said, waving off his credit card. “No charge. You’re a hero here.”
“At McDonald’s?” he asked.
“Here,” I said again, pointing to the left side of my chest.
When I finally fixed his milkshakes, the restaurant was still empty. Taking the opportunity, I sat down next to him at the table he chose. “You said you wanted to talk to me?” I asked him.
“Yeah, I wanted to talk to you so I could order my milkshakes.”
“Oh, right. Right, of course,” I said. “Are you going to drink them all like you tried to do in St. Louis?”
“You’ve seen that episode?”
“Yes, I have seen that episode,” I said.
“Tell ya what,” he said. “Why don’t you make five more milkshakes and we’ll have a competition? Just the two of us?”
I nodded and stifled a contained smile before rushing back to the kitchen, operating the machine much faster than I would have during an average shift. By the time I finished, I turned around to see a line had formed at the counter.
“Yeah, let me get a Big Mac,” the first man in line said to me. I looked over at Adam and he nodded, waving me off. I watched as he began to drink his first milkshake and I looked back at the line in front of me. The man spoke again, placing a ten dollar bill in the tip jar, “Hey buddy. That gonna make you go any faster?”
“That’s a big tip,” I said, apologizing. I took the orders of the people in line, watching Adam leave the restaurant with a wave about halfway through the process. With the rush of families leaving the graduation ceremony, I didn’t have any more free time for the rest of the night. I barely had any free time to wallow and bemoan the loss of the opportunity to toss back milkshakes with my personal idol.
When my shift ended, I plopped down on the curb outside of the restaurant, waiting for the Lyft I ordered. I placed two milkshakes on the curb next to me and with exhaustion, I laid back down onto the grass and closed my eyes.
Feeling a shoe kicking my leg, I sat back up and saw my manager, who gestured for me to remove my headphones. “I just wanted to thank you for coming in tonight,” he said, handing me a fifty dollar bill along with my regular weekly paycheck. “I thought maybe you deserved time and a half for that shift,” he said with a smile before getting into his car and driving home.
When I finally arrived home myself, I excitedly approached my mother. “Hey, Mom! I got an extra fifty bucks tonight,” I said, handing her the bill and her milkshake while I sipped my own.
“Your money from work is your money,” she said to me. “Put it in your Kansas City jar.”
“No, Mom. I already put my check in there. This is extra money. You know, for us,” I explained.
“Isn’t that fortunate?” she remarked, smiling and handing me the remote. “Now, would you be a dear and rewind the television?”
Image Source: Mashed