Christopher Fulkerson
When I was growing up, we never had a proper dining table. One of those long cafeteria tables with folding legs was perfect for my father, and therefore the rest of us, to eat from. In my father's case, I mean, to eat directly off of. Regardless of what was for dinner, he would pour an ounce or two of salt right on the table, next to his plate. He would then dip quartered onions into the salt and eat them raw. It always grossed us out completely. He always stank. We never got used to it. He did this in the mood of the greatest belligerence, in defiance of standards of taste and ettiquette he tried to pre-empt us from realizing. None of the family ever wanted to follow his example. His table was the court of Antichrist, and he exuded the most pungent hatred. Never was there hope that there would be someone who would "dip the salt" together with him at table. Jesus he wasn't.
But he did make teachings. "There is more Vitamin C in one onion than in a dozen oranges," he would say. We knew it was a lie, and had we been allowed to, would have of course replied that we would rather take our Vitamin C in the form of oranges. But our feelings were unimportant. Real men ate onions.
One day when I and the next oldest kid, David, were still rather young, we balked at some food or other, the way kids will do. We were sent to bed immediately - even though it was lunchtime. Dad - actually nowadays we call him Bill, not Dad - came into the bedroom and pounded on us, lifting us up and throwing us down on the bed. We were about ten and eight years old.
Bill loved hot peppers. Naturally we kids couldn't stand them. Nevertheless we boys had to be taught to be men. In addition to onions, real men eat hot peppers. As the oldest, I was expected to follow his example. Once when I simply couldn't, being aghast at the taste, he held me violently and smeared my lips with hot peppers - just to be sure I knew what the experience was like. The humiliation was incredible; the intensity and the emotional and physical pain reached asphyxiating, blinding levels; I cried in huge gasps, like a diver with the bends.
Bill used to love to go "mushroom hunting." We all loathed it, but he would force us to come with him. After a winter rain he would drive us for miles around Sacramento to "hunt" for mushrooms from the road. He called the largest, pan-sized fungi "mushroom steaks," and forced us to eat them as full meals.
There is a right way and a wrong way to eat at table. One wrong thing to do is to look at things like chicken, or corn on the cob, while you eat them. Bill remarked that with such bad manners, looking, as he described his children, like rats grasping and picking at their food, if we ever wanted to impress some girl's family at dinner, her parents would give us only fifty dollars, instead of $500. I marveled greatly at this. Until then, I had not known that any girls' parents gave boys money. Bizarre as it was, this was actually one of the only forward-looking thoughts Bill ever expressed to us. I wonder where in the world it is that he thought there are people to whom men go raising money and courting girls, and at whose home they, like real men everywhere, eat onions dipped in salt poured on fine dinner tables.
On another day Bill and Mom brought some fresh shrimp home. We kids had never seen shrimp before. Their weird legs and shells looked strange, truly alien, and to be told the contents of the vein of feces at the spine actually grossed us out. We watched in horror as they prepared the shrimp. We could hardly believe what we were seeing, and what was going to be forced on us. Science fiction like "Attack of the Crab Monsters" was nothing compared to this.
This time David didn't seem to have a problem, but I and my youngest brother Paul stubbornly refused to eat the shrimp. My mother offered a regrettable suggestion. "It's all right, they're just like little spiders."
That did it. They weren't going to get us to accept the "real men eat spiders" line. And "shrimps" or not, as spiders, they didn't look so little. By this time we were very frightened of the food, and screamed and hollered, big time.
It is known the world over that real men eat shrimp. So, since we were such sissies, Bill stopped the meal and violently forced me and Paul into some of our little sister's clothes. He began to force us to go outside into the neighborhood so everyone could see what sissies we were.
Bill's justice had been served, right there at the dinner table, and we were dressed as girls because we were unwilling to eat shrimp, and all the world was to know. Here we were, the Moses and Aaron of the family, being persecuted and expelled for being unwilling to eat shellfish, unwilling to thus violate our newly formed dietary laws, to which we had immediately and religiously adhered with unacceptable orthodoxy.
Playboy magazine recently published a cartoon of two flabby ill-humored looking business exectuvies dressed in women's two-piece bathing suits at the audition of the "Women of Enron" exposee. Naturally I identified them as me and Paul. So it is true, all the world does know.
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Revised and posted July 14, 2009.