I went to a framing store in Arlington with The Girlfriend on Sunday. She wanted to get a couple of artist-signed concert posters framed to hang in the house. She bought them online a couple weeks ago when I was out in L.A. and called me from D.C. excited about her purchase. I forget what one of them was, but the other was a Death Cab for Cutie poster. I responded with silence. "I know what you're thinking," she said. I don't think you do. "But they make great music. They're just one of those bands that suffer from having an awful name." That was not what I was thinking. When I think of Death Cab for Cutie, I think about narrow, rectangular glasses and ugly, undersized wool sweaters worn in inappropriate places (public).
When we got to the frame store and she unfurled the poster so the framer could take its measurements, I was pleasantly surprised. The artwork was sleek and cool, and the concert the poster was from took place at the Greek Theater in Berkeley. That alone gets it a pass, I suppose. What does not get a pass is how fucking expensive framing is. I honestly had no idea. Somewhere in my mother's basement I still have a couple dozen movie and concert posters from college rolled together with their corners torn to shreds by scotch tape and thumbtacks. Hell, the last thing I tried to frame was my sister when she was 11, for flinging plastic bags of dog shit onto our neighbor's roof (there's no way an 11 year-old girl has that kind of arm).
Admittedly, the frames The Girlfriend selected were awesome. One beveled black. One almost scalloped and rustic gold in color. No matting, just frames. And it cost more than Robert McNamara paid for his entire education at Berkeley in the late '30s. Is that a fair comparison? Probably not. I don't really care. The point is, it wasn't cheap. Once The Girlfriend finished signing away her pound of flesh to Shylock the Framer, we stepped out into the bright, breezy spring afternoon and decided on The Cheesecake Factory as a good enough place to stop for a late lunch.
Here's the problem with The Cheesecake Factory; you have to go into that place with a taste for something specific. If you don't, you risk spending an untoward amount of time flipping back and forth between the laminated pages of their spiral bound menu like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, trying to figure out which path won't leave you in the back of a cave with your lower intestine twisted into a balloon animal.
With the wait for a table near half an hour, we elected to sit at the bar. Immediately, we realized it was the right choice. The 4th quarter of the Nets-Cavs game was on the TV behind the bar and the bartender, a short young gregarious fellow, was in no hurry to flip our spots like most waitresses are with their tables. Good thing too. While The Girlfriend knew going in that she wanted a salad and could thus confine her perusal to two pages, I hadn't the first clue what I wanted to eat. "What are you in the mood for?" she asked. Well, I said, maybe something tangy, or something spicy. Something hearty, but healthy too. That description covers at least 70% of the menu, including the drinks.
I flipped through the book-sized menu like a multiple choice final I hadn't studied for, hoping, praying I could find a question I actually knew the answer to.
Ugh. There was something good on every page. Tex Mex Eggrolls? Yes, please. Beef ribs? Uh-huh. Double B.B.Q Bacon Cheeseburger? Splooge. By the time I'd finished ¾ of my giant mojito and narrowed my selection criteria down to tangy and/or spicy, two items stood out from the rest: 1) Spicy Chicken Chipotle Pasta, and 2) Bang-Bang Chicken and Shrimp.
I liked everything in the pasta dish. Grilled chicken breast, shitake mushrooms, asparagus, yellow and red bell peppers, chipotle cream sauce, linguini. Unfortunately, too much dairy tends to increase the volume and intensity of my snoring at night, and asparagus makes the fluids coming out of my wiener smell bad. If I was going to take full advantage of the enormous mojito The Girlfriend was sucking down next to me, I should at least be smart enough not to turn my penis into a repellant.
Bang-Bang Chicken and Shrimp it would have to be. Another wise choice. This is how it's described on the menu:
A Spicy Thai Dish with the Flavors of Curry, Peanut, Chile and Coconut. Sauteed with Vegetables and Served over Rice.
That's one way to put it. A better way might be to call it
An enormous lake of meat-filled curry with a peak of rice rising skyward from its center.
When I looked down at my plate, I felt like I was looking at an aerial shot of Crater Lake if it were situated at the mouth of the filthy brown Ganges, rather than the crystal clear mountains of southern Oregon. Regardless, I ate every last morsel. The plate was the size of a baby (and probably as heavy) and it was fucking delicious.
The only confusing part was the name of the dish. "Bang-Bang Chicken and Shrimp." For all it had going for it flavor-wise, it wasn't even remotely spicy. Now granted, I have an incredible tolerance for spicy foods thanks to five years in a kitchen with a bunch of Mexicans who like to torture the pinche gringo by daring him to eat raw jalapenos like carrot sticks. But still, even butter-chugging Minnesotans would have been unfazed by the spice-level of the curry. Taco Bell has spicier stuff.
After seriously contemplating (and declining) a giant piece of artery-stuffing chocolate cheesecake for dessert, The Girlfriend and I stepped back out into the lazy late afternoon. A quick stop into Crate & Barrel for a desk lamp and we were on our way home to do nothing for the rest of the day. We weren't five minutes in the car before I began to understand from whence the name of my lunch came. The soupy kaleidoscope of flavor I spent much of the meal and this story raving about had shot through my GI track with unprecedented speed and was packing itself into my large intestine like shot in a musket.
It was time to floor it.
We got home with more than enough time to spare, but when I finally settled onto the toilet my colon became an ass grenade; my tightened sphincter, the pin. If I pulled it there would be no going back. I let go thinking soldiers get purple hearts for shit like this. It was only seconds before the force of my over-stuffed bowels shotgunned a stream of shit against the back of the porcelain bowl and down into the standing water below. It was one of those instances when the velocity of the bowel movement practically cleans your ass for you--like a power washer, almost. A couple quick, spotless wipes and I was up to survey the damage.
Remarkable. I covered every inch of the back rim of the toilet bowl with an even spray. It reminded me of the scene near the end of Boyz n the Hood when Ricky gets gunned down with a double barrel shotgun by the banger in the back of that red Nissan Sentra. The spread of the shot from the shells covered his entire back and soaked his shirt completely through with blood in mere seconds. That's what I'd done to the back of the toilet. I'd Ricky Baker'd it.
Washing my hands, I looked at myself in the mirror trying to figure out what had just happened. One minute I'm having a delicious, filling lunch with my girlfriend, the next I'm re-enacting the Witches of Eastwick cherry-vomiting scene with my butthole. For some reason, I couldn't wrap my head around it.
I guess it's just one of those freak things that hits you, like bang-bang....
Posted by nils at 12:30 AM