When I was a freshman at OSU I quit my job at the movie theater on Thanksgiving Day. I didn’t think that it would be March that I’d get another paycheck. I learned that winter what a bad idea it is to have put in my two weeks notice and call off work on a national holiday. Unemployment may be romantic in some settings, like bohemian Paris in the early 1900s or slacker Seattle in the early 1990s, but in Columbus in the year 2000 it was not romantic at all. I had to borrow money from my parents for gas to drive to school. Getting to school was all I could afford on this allowance, which meant that I didn’t have money to buy lunch. Back when I was gainfully employed I’d eat at Beakman’s Bagel Deli, a hip place run by indie rock kids. Its counters were covered in lacquered pop-culture trading cards from the Eighties, the kind with film stills and comic book characters on them. It was the first place I ate on campus as a new college student during OSU’s freshman orientation. They were playing a song I had never heard before but really liked. I was too shy to ask them what it was so, since my parents were with me, I had my dad ask for me. It might not have been the coolest way to find out about new music, but I remember it with a minimum of embarrassment because the Beakman’s was so cool and just being there, with the announcement of “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re floating in space” coming through the speakers overhead, made me feel cool too.
I continued to feel cool and satisfied everyday at lunch until I quit my job. I couldn’t afford Beakman’s anymore or food from anywhere else. My sense of being cool was replaced with a sense of being hungry, destitute, and totally lame. My mom suggested that I take frozen food entrees with me, little plate-shaped boxes of stir-fry with rice. It didn’t occur to my mom that academic buildings are not big kitchens with microwaves available for student use. I ate fruit for lunch on several occasions, breakfast bars and little cakes too, whatever was around the house that I could stuff in my bag before class. Once, I was sitting outside on a bench in winter eating a bag of dried fruit and a squirrel came near me looking for food. His little face and sprightly manner aroused my sympathy—I too had to sit out in the cold and eat what I could scrounge up—so I threw him some banana chips. He took one and jumped onto the bench with me to eat it. He ate about half and defiantly tossed away the rest before jumping off the bench. If I’d known he wasn’t going to eat the whole thing I wouldn’t have thrown it to him in the first place. My sympathy was replaced by jealousy, a bitter feeling of resentment at the squirrel for having such a great life that he could afford not to finish free food that people sacrificed for him out of the goodness of their hearts in the dead of winter.
Being hungry doesn’t bother me. There are times when I like the feeling of an empty stomach. And I think that I am like most people in that when I am deeply depressed I stop eating. There’s something about light hunger that helps those in despair get through periods of emotional duress. Early this summer my depression over a bad breakup kept me from eating much, which helped me emotionally somehow, as well as getting rid of a few extra pounds I picked up from eating at the Miami University dining halls for three years. Going hungry has its benefits, but when I haven’t eaten I get headaches before I get a hungry feeling. These headaches dominate me and the only cure is food or painkillers. Towards the end of my freshman year I got to a point where I found it more convenient to eat pills for lunch than going to the effort to pack a Nutrigrain bar or compete with squirrels over dried fruit. Depending on my schedule and when I was used to eating I would either take a dose of Tylenol before driving to school or take a few ibuprofens for lunch. Under the influence of over-the-counter pain medicine I could go without eating for up to six hours at a time without feeling the slightest bit of cranial discomfort. I kept a travel-size bottle of pills in my school bag that I refilled at home whenever my supply got low. There were days when my little bottle was empty at lunch time and I would tear apart my bag looking for enough loose change to buy another three dollar supply at United Dairy Farmers. With just a dollar I could’ve bought a sandwich at Wendy’s, but that’s the nature of addiction. A burger would feed me for a day; a supply of pills would not feed me for a whole week.
When I finally got a job I broke from my pill-popping habit and started eating modest lunches at Wendy’s, but I never felt right going there. It didn’t feel healthy. At least painkillers are medicinal; greasy french fries will give you a heart attack. Beakman’s used steam to heat their sandwiches and, while they were massive and sort of sloppy, were composed of cold cuts that I’m sure had much less fat in them than the cheap ground beef used in the recipes of Dave Thomas, who had more personality than the décor of his restaurants. The person who did the interior design at Wendy’s must have been some kind of sadist eccentric, for only such a person would cover the interior surfaces of an entire restaurant in beige. The Wendy’s palette of off-whites was the antithesis of the giant mural of Cheryl Ladd in rodeo gear at Beakman’s. I did not feel cool eating there, but it was better than eating pills on the steps of Sullivant Hall.
It’s taken me three years, another school, and a move back to Columbus to finally afford another bagel at Beakman’s. When I went back a few days ago I saw that it was closed. The counters were removed, the indie kids with their music both gone, the elaborate menu of oddly named sandwiches dismantled. A sign made with an inkjet printer was taped to the door. It was a logo with a zany dog invigorated by the chicken fingers the new store will be selling. Chicken fingers. A whole store for chicken fingers, a food that has no business being sold exclusively by anyone not operating a trailer parked on a fairground. So much changed while I was away at another school. It’s like they tore down Tara, and I was Scarlet O’Hara returning to the ruins of my past. When I see the bombed-out wreckage that is Cane’s Chicken Wings I become irate and exclaim “Fuckin’ chicken wings!” People who know me think my reaction is silly or amusing, but in my way it’s like turning to the sunset and shouting “As God as my witness, I shall never be hungry again!” As things in my life change I may not prevail or succeed, but I will always know that I will never again have to eat painkillers for lunch, as God as my witness.
previously in 'Pocket' 1, 2004
(written summer, 2004)
go back
© 2006 Damion Armentrout. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.