Killing bison at the Friday burger club

DAVID SILVA

Shortly after I broke up with my girlfriend Angel, I took a job as a

clerk at a health food store in Costa Mesa. The job paid slightly

above minimum wage, and my weekly hours were always kept slightly

below the number at which the owners would have to provide me

benefits. But the store was just a couple of blocks from my apartment

and offered me a big employee discount inside its full-service

restaurant, so I was happy.

I’ve never been a big fan of health food, and never less so than

when I was in my early 20s. Raised in a Puerto Rican household, I

found the very thought of putting anything in my body that wasn’t

fried, pork-based or heavily salted almost offensive. My culinary

sensibilities had been a constant source of annoyance to Angel, a

lapsed vegetarian who pined for the lost days of falafel and

pineapple-tofu boats. She would blanch every time she came home and

found me happily slicing away at a bloody-rare steak, and would

shriek every time I would sprinkle salt on her vegetarian dishes.

“Why are you pouring that heart poison on my Afghan potatoes?”

she’d shout. “You haven’t even tasted them yet!”

“I’m sorry,” I’d say. “They just -- looked like they needed salt.”

On the day Angel finally moved out, I celebrated with a plate of

prime rib and a side of pork rinds.

But my gastronomic excesses changed the day I took that job at the

health food store. Compelled by economic reality to make liberal use

of my store discount, I waved a tearful goodbye to beef ribs and hot

dogs, and bade an even more tearful hello to the world of soy “Whibs”

and “Not Dogs.”

If my new diet hadn’t been so bland and unappealing, I would have

found the restaurant’s reliance on meat substitutes hilarious. It

seemed almost hypocritical that in an establishment that catered to

vegetarians, every other item on the menu was designed to look -- if

not taste -- like the very foods vegetarians considered unwholesome.

“Why the ruse?” I complained bitterly to my co-worker, Pete, who

was himself a vegetarian. “Why do you guys torture yourselves like

that? If you’re so fascinated with meat, just cut out the middle man

and have yourselves a nice pork chop!”

“Meat’s an addictive substance,” Pete replied. “People find it

difficult to just give it up entirely.”

“Well, I’m not buying it!” I snapped, bitterly chewing on a

toothpick. Soon after switching to a meatless diet, I picked up a bad

habit of nervously chewing on inedible objects. Toothpicks, gum,

straws, pencils -- anything to help my canines and incisors feel like

they still had a purpose.

“Look, Dave, it’s tough -- I know what you’re going through,” Pete

said gently. “Right now, you’re moody because you’re ‘detoxing’ from

all those cancerous steroids they put into beef. Try to think

positively about it. You’re feeling better, aren’t you? And you’re

losing weight and looking better, right?”

I took the toothpick out of my mouth and pointed it at him

menacingly. “Don’t you ever put down beef to me again!”

Yeah, I was moody. For weeks, I groused and complained, providing

no end of amusement to Pete and the rest of my co-workers, all of

whom were more or less on the wheat-grass wagon. One day, when I was

working the register, I launched into a 15-minute dissertation about

how beef and pork were necessary for a balanced diet.

“If it doesn’t have meat,” I solemnly intoned to my shift partner,

Jennifer, “it’s not a meal.”

This was a statement one often heard in the home of my youth, and

in repeating it I felt I was somehow paying homage to the spirits of

my ancestors. Of course, this ignored that many of my ancestors

became spirits by way of congestive heart failure.

Jennifer laughed. “You make eating smart sound so stupid,” she

said. “Just stick with it, Dave. You’ll start to like it after

awhile.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” I replied, nibbling on my name badge.

And, truly, I was. Stationed at my register, I would watch the

customers walk through the front door, and the thought of sharing a

common diet with them alarmed me. Looking back, I’m sure I was just

focusing on the negative, but at the time I found myself wondering

how it was that patrons of a health-food store seemed so --

unhealthy. Men and women as pale as paper would shuffle up to the

counter and ask in ghostly voices where to find the dietetic tea

section. And every time, it would be all I could do not to reply,

“It’s to your right, but if I were you, I’d skip that and check out

the burger joint down the street.”

After six weeks of smoked tempeh and alfalfa sandwiches, I found I

just couldn’t take it anymore. As soon as Friday -- payday -- came

around, I sneaked out the back door at lunchtime and hurried over to

the aforementioned burger joint. Huddled over in the darkest booth as

far back in the restaurant as I could go, I bit into one of the

greasiest and most nutritionally unadvisable cheeseburgers on the

menu. My stomach did a double-take, convulsed epileptically for five

seconds, then screamed and shouted for more. I finished the entire

burger and a bag of fries in five minutes.

Thirty minutes later found me back behind the register, happily

ringing up sacks of wheat germ and organically grown polenta. And

just when I thought I’d gotten away with it, Jennifer suddenly leaned

over and whispered in my ear, “Someone’s been eating hamburgers.” My

eyes went wide.

“That’s a serious allegation,” I replied evenly. “I’d wait until

all the facts were in before making such a charge.”

“Oh, don’t act so innocent!” she said. “You can smell it across

the room!”

“You’re paranoid,” I insisted.

Just then, Pete looked around and sniffed the air. “Has someone

been eating hamburgers?” he asked.

I kept my mouth closed for the remainder of the shift.

Since that hamburger meal was the only indulgence I could afford

for the pay period, I stayed clean for the next six days. But as soon

as Friday rolled around again, off I went to the burger joint. I

bought a double-bacon burger with cheese and hurried to the back of

the room. And there, sitting in the very dark booth I had occupied a

week earlier, were Jennifer and Pete. Sitting in front of them were

two enormous, half-eaten burgers.

“This is all your fault, you know,” Pete said.

“Sure it is,” I said, and sat down next to him.

So began the days of the Friday lunchtime burger club. Every

payday, Jennifer, Pete and I would meet in the back of the greasy

fast-food restaurant, dine on greasy hamburgers and fries, and make

fun of all the weird customers we had run into earlier in the week.

Eventually, we were joined by two other store employees, both of whom

had caught a whiff of red meat when we walked by and had demanded to

be let in on the conspiracy.

As the unofficial ringleader of the group, I couldn’t help but

feel responsible for leading a bunch of vegetarians astray. In a way,

I was like that caveman from “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the one who

teaches his fellow Neanderthals to quit starving on grubs and lichens

and just kill a bison or two. It certainly wasn’t one of my life’s

proudest moments.

But never since that time has a hamburger tasted so juicy, so

satisfying, so wonderfully subversive!

* DAVID SILVA is a Times Community News editor. Reach him at (909)

484-7019, or by e-mail at david.silva@latimes.com.