CRISPY CURLY FRIES

I have this evil feature programmed into me – laughing at people who fall down and hurt themselves. 

I haven’t figured out what is hardwired in me which makes me stop whatever I am doing and just break down into an uncontrollable laughter when someone has fallen down. When I was a teenager the funniest commercial on television was of that damn little old lady laying on the bathroom floor screaming, “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.” Tears would stream down my face as she sat there, probably with a broken hip, and I couldn’t do anything. Sure, I wanted to help her, and I kind of felt bad, but I just couldn’t stop laughing.

Yes, I'm the dick who laughs at people when they fall. I am not the only one. When I search - laughing at people who fall – online there is a plethora of links that pop up. Some of the links encourage the laughter, some condone it, and others show extremely entertaining videos of people diving into the pavement head first. Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t laugh at all people who fall. If a three year old runs by me tripping on their shoe-lace and smacks their face on the floor, I am the first to pick them up and dust them off.  I may be evil and hateful but I am not downright cruel. Well, that is unless the person who has fallen is elderly. I don’t know what it is but the older the person that lands face first on the ground – the funnier it is. Witnessing a 14 years old on the floor is pretty funny and it would garner a couple of chuckles but if I visually see an 80 year old defenseless senior citizen go headlong into the floor board – someone better call 911 because I will need oxygen to survive.

I don't know what is in me that causes me to react in such a horrible way. I really don’t want to be THAT person but it is something that I am a prisoner to. In a perfect world I would want to be the guy who keeps a straight face and runs over to aid the poor person on the ground but that could never happen because I am usually picking myself up off the floor next to them.

“Sir, are you ok? Can I get you some help?”

 “No. No. – Please go help that old lady who is picking up her dentures off the floor because if she falls again trying to stand up – I may go into cardiac arrest.”

This affliction doesn’t happen everywhere. I have been a nurse for 13 years and when I worked in the hospital, and even the long-term care facility, I would never laugh or even find it funny if one of my patients was unlucky enough to injury themselves. I may have giggled a little after the fact but when I initially witnessed them skid across the cold linoleum floor and head butt the fish tank – I was there quickly to help them back up and into their wheelchairs. It was almost like they were testing me, sneaking fucking old people. Would I laugh if this person fell in front of me when I was work?. I never failed the test but sometimes it was extremely difficult. I just couldn’t help it. I would quickly get the assistance of another nurse or an aid and we would secure them in their room – it was almost punishment for trying to make me laugh.

Oh – you wanna make me laugh in front of all my employees – ok well I hope you enjoy being in your room watching General Hospital and spitting up an Ensure.

Once I stepped outside the building, the switch was flipped off and nobody was free from my onslaught of laughter. You wanna trip over your shoelace, I am going to laugh at all of it. Fall over your dog, trip out of your car door, miss a step and land in front of a moving vehicle – priceless. I could sit outside a retirement village with a bucket of popcorn and enjoy the entertainment. I truly don’t want them to hurt themselves but the pain of holding in my laughter when someone hits the pavement is unbearable.

My ruthlessness usually doesn’t project farther than people falling. There are just some things that are not funny. It is not entertaining If someone shocks themselves in an electrical outlet, gets hit by a truck, or falls out of a tree. Let me correct myself, someone falling out of the tree is beyond funny and I wouldn’t be able to hold back the tears, but it isn’t like I would laugh at someone who lost a hand.

This past week I was back in NYC working with the group of co- workers that I spent the entire summer with in 2009. Lunchtime has always been a challenge for the seven of us. We want to spend lunch together but we usually have different lunch agendas. Chinese, Thai, Italian, and McDonald's gets old fast so we usually default to this small deli directly across the street. It's a small eatery with enough seating for probably 20 skinny people but in all the months we have eaten there we have always been lucky to obtain seven seats together. People may see us coming in and say, “OOOOH these loud bitches are coming in – I am out,” which provides our little team a place to camp out and eat our food.

Most of our lunchtime is spent bitching and complaining about the service. If we spent as much time eating as we did complaining we would all be 100 pounds heavier. The service sucks and it hasn’t gotten any better in the last eight months. The wait time for a roast beef sandwich takes as long as a sit down dinner in the city and sometimes it would make more sense to take the E train to Manhattan and have lunch downtown.

Customers are sandwiched in between the cold meat deli counter and the soda coolers waiting to place their orders. The time we wait to place our order is absurd and if I did this for seven days straight I would be able to recite their larger than normal menu like I can at McDonald’s. My mind changes so many times while squeezed in the order line that it is not out of the ordinary to walk in craving a meatball sub and being handed a Cuban sandwich when all is said and done.The employees run around behind the counter like chickens with their heads cut off and the process is so unorganized that I have thought about just stealing a sandwich from the cooler and taking my chances on getting arrested. It is all about nourishment and I think the people on Survivor get food faster than in this fucking place.

We all waited at the counter and calmly waited for the whirlwind before our eyes to settle down. They were chaotically running around and I was hoping the dust they were stirring up wouldn't land in whatever sandwich I decided to order – even though I changed my mind twice already.

"Who can I help?" the young latin girl says staring wide eyed out at the sea of faces staring blankly at her. Nobody moves or says anything. There is no number system or line sequence so we all stand there like puppies waiting to be picked up and taken home.

After a five second pause, the girl gives a look like she is going to put down her pad and say, "Come back mañana," when Gina steps forward to place her order.

Once Gina gives her order I take my position behind her and take the role of next in line.  Nothing directs me to this position but because everyone is standing there in a gaze staring up at the menu I take action and control of my lunch destiny. There is only so much you can do with an hour lunch break.

"Chicken Parm sandwich on a roll,” I yell out while I step aside and move over to the cash register line. There is only one line but I have to move fast to let the next person order. I am grateful the lines are the same because if I they weren’t I would have to yell my order from across the deli so I could order and pay at the same time.

The owner rings up the person standing in front of Gina and she tells him politely, “Please have a seat – we will bring it right out to you.” This is just a sick joke and I want to dial 911 and have this bitch arrested for verbally abusing her customers. Have a seat! We will bring it out to you! I have heard that so many times here and that is never the case. You sit for thirty minutes and eventually have to get up and ask them for your hot sandwich which is sitting comfortably on the cold counter.

“No – that’s ok – I wanted a cold fucking meatball sub!”

These are mind games that my therapist can’t even talk me through.

After I give chica my order and she scribbles it down on a post it note she asks my name and when I answered, “Joe,” I swear she writes down, Spit on white boys shit.

The steady stream of paying customers that pay and receive their lunch comes to a screeching halt and Gina, Mike and I are left standing their waiting to pay. Sandwiches are being tossed around like salads and I can’t help but to wonder where in that nightmare mess of lettuce, pickles, and marinara sauce is my foot long. There are two registers and normally both are ringing away but today the owner was the only employee ringing up orders. The other register was collecting dust like the three sandwiches sitting next to it. She got Mike's order rung up and asked him to have a seat to where he responded, “I am good waiting right here.”

I looked at Gina and said, "Why is it they haven’t mastered the lunch rush by now?”

Gina shook her head to agree with me but it did nothing for out wait time. The owner walked back over to the register to ask us to step aside so she could ring up people who had ordered after us but whose lunch was ready. How was that possible? What kind of crazy ordering system do they have in here? I ordered a fucking Chicken Parmesan sandwich on a roll not Beef Wellington.

Gina and I patiently waited and then I saw it. At first, I thought my mind was playing tricks on me, which it usually does, but this was right there in my face. BAM! Smacked me once on the left side of my face and then came back to sweep across the right. How did I miss this after coming to this deli for over nine months?  I don’t know if I was just ignorant to the obvious but now that I saw it - I couldn't believe I had missed it.

Her right wrist had a beautiful hand attached to it. It was adorned with a ring, a watch, and her nails were painted with the prettiest shade of red that I had ever seen. Her perfectly designed digits were created to push buttons, count cash, and answer telephone calls.  The left hand was a totally different story. This hand must have pissed off baby Jesus in a really bad way because instead of an equally beautiful hand she was housing a claw with appendages that resembled Arby's curly french fríes. It was like the answer that I had been waiting for. It was like I just finished watching the final episode of LOST and everything was answered. The only problem with this fucking deli was it had Captain Hook running it.

"If she had two good hands we'd already be at the table eating our lunch," I whispered to Gina.

"Joey, you are terrible," she quietly reprimanded me with an increasingly growing grim upon her face.

 My patience were running thin but there wasn't much that I could do.

"Well she need to learn how to work one of them feet so she can speed up this process.” I said to Gina and we both laughed.

She walked back over to the register and after nubbing a sandwich into a bag and taking payment for it she looked up at us and said with all honesty, "I'm sorry it's taking so long - I'm short handed today."

I was looking down at the Kit Kats and Snickers when the words reached my ear canal and vibrated off my eardrum

Short handed today? I'm gonna throw it out there and guess that them curly fries did not just sprout out when she woke up this morning. I will not deny that she could have slipped and instead of falling, which would also make me laugh, she tried to grab onto the counter inevitably placing her perfect hand into a vat of grease and sizzling them up like a small order of fries. The only thing though was these finger fries were cool to touch and had no trace of redness or burning. They had been cooling off for a very long time. It was so shocking to hear her say that and I wondered if she realized she actually said it. Maybe she said that everyday? I bet that was her excuse for running such a shitty operation. I can just imagine her in the back office counting all her cash and credit card receipts. “I got fucked up fingers – fuck their lunch.”

When she said it everything in my brain went into slow motion. My lunch was the last thing on my mind. I actually forget what I was doing there. Maybe being hungry didn’t bring me to this deli for lunch, perhaps I was guided to this exact spot so that I would actually hear these words said by someone who in fact WAS short handed. I slowly turned my head to make eye contact with Gina because I couldn't help but wonder if she heard what I heard.

When I looked over, Gina was shaking up and down like a jackhammer and from the brief squeaks emerging from her puffed up cheeks and the tears building up in her squinted eyes, I knew immediately that she heard what I had and she was holding back the loudest laugh she could muster up.

"Did you hear that?" I said to her while imagining dead kittens hanging from tree limbs in my back yard – anything to keep me from laughing and screaming outloud.

She couldn't speak. All she could was nod and smile. That didn’t last long and within a few moments we both erupted with laughter and it didn’t matter how many dead kittens flashed in front of my eyes we couldn’t hold it back. When I finally got my lunch and sat down to retell the story to the other five people in our group, I thought for a moment. Here I was laughing at this poor unfortunate women who was stricken with such a horrific deformity that was obviously not her fault.

I quickly realized - NO - why should I feel guilty - she's the one who said it.

 

  


 

Comments

[tinnitus cure]

Here's one that belatedly came to mind: "GREAT"!