Attack of the Gag Inducing Tomatoes

May 3rd, 2008 at 06:26am Keith Hemstreet 8

I have a problem with tomatoes. It’s nothing personal. A tomato has never intentionally harmed me and I am well aware of their nutritional value. However, in certain circumstances, I react poorly to the presence of a tomato. It is one of those bizarre personal issues that would require a session or two of psychoanalysis to get to the bottom of, but I will do my best to explain the problem by citing a recent tomato encounter.

This week I flew from Aspen to Jacksonville, Florida, with a lengthy layover in Denver. While aimlessly strolling through the Denver Airport, I came across a  restaurant and decided to pass some time over a meal. The establishment was nice enough, with sturdy high-top tables, a surprisingly wide array of menu items, pints of beer served in chilled mugs, and a pair of over exuberant waiters that hustled from table to table like caged mice experimenting with speed. Scanning the vast menu, I considered for a moment the eggplant parmesan, thought better of it, and finally settled on a cheeseburger and fries.

Decision made, I opened the book I had bought for my trip, “A Writer’s Life” by Gay Talese. I hadn’t finished the first page when I noticed a young woman staring with unusual interest at the book’s cover. She squinted, as if trying to pull focus on the title. After doing so, she looked me in the eyes and offered an awkward smile before finally looking away at nothing in particular. Curios, I flipped the book closed to inspect the cover for myself. What stood out was how prominently the writer’s first name had been displayed by the publisher. It looks something like this:

GAY!!!
TALESE

“A WRITER’S LIFE”

I realized that the woman must have thought I was troubled gay man reading a gay man’s book about how best to cope with being gay in a world that generally misunderstands the whole gay thing. Knowing I had to right the situation immediately, I did the first manly thing that came to mind, which was to chug the remainder of my beer, belch loudly and order another.

“Garcon, another Budweiser, por favor! That’s right. Budweiser! A gay man would never drink Budweiser. Too many unnecessary calories.”

Pardon the digression. Back to the tomato story.

After proudly declaring my straightness to the entire restaurant, my meal was placed in front of me, a piping hot slab of beef decorated with a slice melted cheese and a bun piled high with lettuce, onion, and my on again, off again friend, the tomato.

To this point, I’ve provided little detail concerning my issue with tomatoes, so here I will take a moment to better educate the reader. I eat and even enjoy tomatoes in some forms, despise them in others. For example, I eat spaghetti sauce. Spaghetti with marinara is one of my favorite meals on earth. However, if the spaghetti sauce contains visible chucks of tomatoes or is served in any way other than completely liquefied, I can’t eat it. Here’s another twist. I can eat tomatoes on sandwiches or burgers and often ask for tomato slices to be included if given the choice, but a tomato served in the naked form, such as sliced and presented on a plate with salt, pepper and balsamic vinaigrette, well, that could bring on a bout of vomiting.

I sat for a minute, debating whether to include the tomatoes on my burger. These tomatoes were quite pathetic, even for tomatoes, small and withered, each wearing a full side of skin. It was as if the chef had pulled an overripe tomato from atop the dumpster, sliced off the two ends and placed them on my bun, laughing.

Mistakenly, I included pathetic garnish because I was flying all the way to the east coast on a red eye and concluded that my body could probably use the nourishment readily available to one who chooses to feast on the antioxidant laden fruit (yes, tomatoes are a fruit, this despite lacking even the slightest hint of sweetness, which, in my mind, should be a prerequisite, along with deliciousness, to being considered a fruit.)

I was thoroughly enjoying my cheeseburger, when one of the small tomatoes got stuck on the roof of my mouth. Using my tongue, I tried desperately to dislodge it without gagging, but it was attached like a slug. Desperate, I reached for a knife and tried to pry the tomato away. After several attempts, I succeeded. The tomato fell back onto my plate with a splat. I turned away, closed my eyes and took several deep breaths. Finally able to regain my composure, but unable to continue eating, I covered my meal with a napkin and went about people watching.

Sitting on a barstool, watching thousands of people pass through the Denver International Airport, I realized something. There are a lot of beautiful people on this planet, but there are far more ugly ones.

One ugly guy walking past with a bag of McDonald’s reminded me of an old college friend. This friend was the type of guy that would show up at your apartment and lie around all day, eating your food and drinking your beer without ever once acknowledging that he might very well be an annoyance, which he was, or offering any sort of reimbursement for consuming hundreds of dollars worth of food and drink that was not his own.

One day we learned a valuable piece of information.  Our friend, we were told, had a phobia of pickles. Not only would he gag and feel nauseas at the mere sight of a dill, but pickles had, in the past, sent our friend into convulsions.

Knowing this information was our ace in the hole. It gave us leverage against his pandering. During the next grocery run, we made a point to buy the industrial sized jar of Vlasic extra crispy slices. The ammo was hidden in my roommate's desk so that our loitering friend would not discover the jar and anticipate our attack.

Like a well trained battalion, we waited for just the right moment to strike. It came one night after the fat mooch had taken a few too many hits off his pocket pipe and passed out on our futon. We stripped him to his shorts and covered his naked body with pickles. The act of covering a man in pickles was hilarious enough, so we decided not to wake him. After snapping several photographs, we went to bed.

Have you ever heard Ned Beaty squeal like a pig in the movie Deliverance? If so, you have a good idea of the disturbing sound that woke me from my slumber later that night. I thought someone in the house was being murdered with an ice pick. But, it wasn’t a ice pick murder at all. It was our pickled friend, realizing that he had, in fact, been pickled.

“How could you do that to me?” he cried. “I have an terrible reaction to pickles. You could have killed me.”

My roommate was in no mood to entertain sympathy. “Shut up, dude!” he said. “That’s what you get for taking all of our shit. Get the hell out. I’m sick of your whining.”

And so he left, a few pickle slices still stuck to his back. Lucky for me, he never retaliated with tomatoes.

Entry Filed under: Food, Aspen, Colorado, Comedy, Denver