Back home in Seattle, the hip joint for fast food is Dick’s Drive-In, with five convenient Seattle locations all conveniently located very far from my house. The equivalent burger joint down in California is the infamous In-and-Out burger, which is fortunately (for my colon et. al), far from the USC campus, and whose claim to fame is making things animal style, which, if our dear Dick’s back in Seattle did, would result in far more crude jokes involving the male member and the term "animal style," and variants thereof.
But a ten-minute drive from USC yields a suitable, heart-stopping alternative for cheap, fast eats. I am referring to the Original Tommy’s and his World Famous Burgers on Beverley and Rampart, the first of the Tommy’s locations, opened back in 1946.
This place is a little shack on an intersection stuffed with Mexican workers who barely speak English, and cook up a mean burger. Tommy’s particular claim to fame is slopping chili and cheese on every single menu item, instantly increasing your risk for colon cancer or heart attack by a factor of fifty in one fell swoop. I’m talking chili cheese fries, chili cheese dogs, chiliburgers, the excessive double chili cheeseburger, and the simply suicidal triple chili cheeseburger.
For those with a history of heart disease, ordering the last menu item is tantamount to ordering up a fresh plate of grisly, greasy suicide. If you asked them to, I bet you could take a soda from the fridges by the counter and they’d melt some cheese, heat up some chili, pop open the can, and stuff it full of chili cheese too. When it comes to chili and/or cheese, Tommy is a man who refuses to dick around. Rumor has it that when he died in 1992, he requested to be chopped up and introduced piece-by-piece back into the chili that made him famous, but those are just rumors.
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That guy is dressed in uniform. His job consists of directing cars into parking spaces around the Tommy’s shack
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Tommy Koulax, the founder of this chain of fast food joint, was truly a giant among men. Back in 1946, he basically proclaimed to the world “Screw this Greek opopopopolous gyro stuffing bullshit! I’m making burgers 24/7! And I’m making them good and cheap!” This he did, expanding to twenty-seven locations throughout Southern California. The website is stuffed with people begging for Tommy’s to be opened up in San Fransisco, Las Vegas, and San Jose, with the stern moderator simply replying "We’ll expand when we damn well feel like it."
The entire process of ordering and receiving your food has been honed and streamlined like a military jet fighter, and the average wait during peak hours for your food is fifteen seconds. Most people can’t even decide what they want in fifteen seconds. The Beverley and Rampart location we USC students frequent serves fifteen-thousand customers a week. It is unknown how many customers they “lose” every week from cardiac arrest, however.
Tommy’s website is a cagey piece of work. Under “Nutritional facts,” they only list the facts for their chiliburger. That’s it. They sell a multitude of other items, but you can only know how badly you’re killing yourself with the chiliburger. That bad boy has whopping 490 calories and 22 grams of fat. Despite all the stuff they load on it, it’s still healthier than a McDonalds Big Mac, as well as having 60 g more for its serving size. You can eat your way to an early grave with a clear conscience at Tommy’s.
Of course, after a meal you sit in your seat and survey the damage before you, wondering what the hell were you thinking when you bought all that grease and consumed it. The feeling post-Tommy’s is among the worst of all the fast foods, but among the best while you’re actually eating it, which makes it an ideal last meal for death row inmates. Part of the problem comes from the fact that you are downing what is basically solidified grease with ice-cold soda beverage, which results in internal coagulation and your stomach sending signals back up to your brain demanding to secede from the rest of your body. Tommy’s is enigmatic like that – you at once want to throw up everything you just ate, and at once want to order some more because it was so good. This is the mark of a great fast food joint.
Human beings and their notoriously short memories easily forget discomfort like that, so we line up night after night. When several floor mates made the journey a few weeks ago, the line curved around the shack, back along the sidewalk, and reached the intersection. Across the street, there’s a Taco Bell drive-thru chain that is lucky to get any business at all, considering what they’re up against. The decision between food where you add water to make it a solid versus the greatest, greasiest affair since that movie with John Travolta is no decision at all. And the decision between on-campus mashed potatoes and meatloaf four days a week and a fat Tommy’s stomach nuking chiliburger is no decision at all.
So when I go home for Thanksgiving in a few days, I’m going to recommend my parents take out a life insurance policy on my self, in light of my newfound eating habits. If these off-campus grease joints don’t get to me, the on-campus food certainly will, and if it sudden cardiac arrest is inevitable, somebody might as well profit off of it, right?
I’ll probably be too huge to fit into a standard coffin by then.
-f.w.
Short post this week because I’m still working on the India travelog. If you’re interested in getting the first look at it, in exchange for going through the whole thing and proofreading it for me, please let me know.
Note: This story is true. The names have been changed to protect the innocent and most definitely guilty.
Chapter 1:
The Job and a Whole Lotta Mountain Dew
It was late Saturday afternoon, October 30th. One of those days that stretched like cheap gum on the boardwalk, and you step on it, and it sticks and stretches out, and you gotta find some damn scissors to cut it off or a damn Foot Locker to get some new shoes. The room was hot, and the oscillating blades of my Honeywell commercial grade fan did nothing but blow in more hot air. Hot, stinking Los Angeles air that was giving me cancer, which would kill me a lot faster than any product of the tobacco companies could. There’s a price to pay for every city you live in. Los Angeles is no exception.
I was on my way out when I heard an urgent knock on the door.
“Who is it?” I yelled.
I don’t yell very often, but my door is thick, and you gotta yell. The guy on the other side didn’t know that, and just pounded harder. I checked the peephole. Some geekish looking Asian kid sweating bullets and taking boxing lessons on my door. Some people just don’t know when to quit.
I waited until he started his flurry of knocks before I yanked the door open. He stumbled in sheepishly, shaking his hand off. He obviously didn’t know that if your fist ever gets into a boxing match with a door, the door usually wins. That’s because a door doesn’t have feelings.
“I’m, err, sorry about the knocking,” he said coyly, “I didn’t think you were in.”
“So knocking harder would magically teleport me in the room, is that it?” I retorted.
“Err, no. I guess not. I’m sorry.”
“You damn well should be. I was on my way to get lunch, and then you bust in outta nowhere.” I was getting impatient.
“You eat lunch this late in the day?” he asked, genuinely surprised.
“I get up late, alright? I’m a nocturnal guy. That’s just how my circadian rhythms go. If you wanna lecture me on my sleeping habits, then scram. I don’t need it. My mom does it for me.”
“No, let me explain. I need your help,” he said.
“Sure ya do.”
“My name is Freddie. I’m a freshman here,” he explained.
“No kidding. My name is Freddie too,” I told him.
“I know. That’s why I came. I’ve lost something of mine. Something valuable. I mean it was stupid, I shouldn’t have…”
I pulled the brakes on the stammering bus before it drove clear off a cliff and killed everyone riding it. “Shut up and sit down. Start from the beginning.”
He pulled a seat by my desk and sat on it, hunched over, running his hands nervously through his hair. I leaned up against my bed.
“Yesterday night… well, this morning at around 1 AM, my friend Max and I were shooting pool in the Birnkrant building lobby next door.”
I knew Max. He was a friend of mine, too. I had shot with him a few times, too. Small world.
“Anyway, we were tired, so we left, but I left my coat behind, on a chair by the pool table. I woke up today, and just remembered it, and I ran down to get it.”
He was wearing a silver coat already. “Is that the coat?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“The coat was still there. It’s what was in the pockets that’s missing,” he said.
“And what was in the pockets?” I asked. Probably something embarrassing. Or highly personal. That’s how most private dick jobs were in the movies. My instincts screamed “naked pictures,” but he didn’t seem to be the type. Maybe “semi-naked pictures.”
“I had my cell phone and my iPod in there,” he said.
I let out a low whistle. The iPod was worth a cool $400. That could buy you a lot of Mountain Dew. I could used a cold Mountain Dew right about now.
“Did you have any naked or semi-naked pictures of yourself on that iPod,” I asked.
“No! Why? That’s disgusting!” he said, terribly offended.
“Kid, that stuff is as good as gone. It doesn’t matter what you have on there, you ain’t getting it back,” I told him.
He sighed. “I know. It was a stupid thing to leave lying around, and I’m an idiot for wanting it back. But I want you to do what you can.”
I rolled my eyes. “Alright, alright, I’ll look into it, but only because you’re a friend of a friend.”
He looked thankful. “I’m very thankful,” he said.
“I know. You looked that way,” I told him. “Now I’m going to need all the information you got. Anything that might help me out.”
He handed me a sheet of paper with a bunch of information on it. Passwords, serial numbers, the works.
“That should be enough,” he said.
“Alright, now scram. I gotta eat,” I said. He stayed in his seat.
“How… will I get in touch with you?” he asked.
“I’ll get in touch with you,” I said, as a grabbed my coat, walked out into the hallway, and closed the door behind me.
About halfway down the hall, I remembered something and turned around. I ran back to my room and opened the door. Freddie was still inside sitting, like I had left him.
“I’d also appreciate it if you’d get out of my room when I’m not in it,” I said.
Chapter Two:
Food for Thought and Stealing Laptops
Everyone’s Kitchen was a ghost town. Or a ghost kitchen, because it wasn’t really a town. Either everyone had died because of food poisoning, and they were chopping up the bodies in the back to make tomorrow’s meat loaf, or people don’t eat lunch at 4:30. I guessed the latter.
There were some scattered insomniacs chowing down on cheap Mexican food around the room as I grabbed a tray and sat down facing the door. I had seen a Discovery Channel program on how you should always face the door just in case mad gunmen came busting in and spraying lead like water from a garden hose. I can’t remember why, but I think it’s so that way, you take the steaming lead slugs right in your chest like a man, and not in the back, like some wussfaced ninny. You can always trust the Discovery Channel for good advice like that.
As I dug into my bland meal, I took out the sheet of paper Freddie gave me and took a closer look. It had a little diagram of the pool room, and where things were, and a brief sum up of what went down when. The serial number and part numbers of the iPod would only be useful if he had to file a police report, but I knew how LAPD worked. Unless you had some grease to smear all over the gears, nothing would turn for you, especially not in a case like this. And I’m not talking about real grease either. I’m talking metaphorical grease. And that metaphor stood for money.
There was a username and password for his T-Mobile account. I stored it away in the back of my memory. It might be useful later on to check up on that phone of his. I committed the contents of the paper to memory, and tore it up and mashed it into my mashed potatoes. They tasted a little better, actually, and I know fiber is good for you in any case. I put my tray away and headed out. It was time to check out the scene of the crime.
The bright hot Los Angeles sun slapped me right across the eyes as I stepped outside. All the damn detective movies set in L.A. had perpetual rain and fog. Not in Southern California. It was sunny twenty-four/seven down here. Well, not literally. The sun set and all. We weren’t insane, like those poor saps in Alaska or some other craphole. But it was pretty sunny and hot, pretty much all the time. This was not the kind of weather suited for the Byronic detective. It was more suited for ditzy girls in pink mini skirts and Ugg boots, and guys on long boards wearing surfer shorts.
Birnkrant was less than a minute away. There were two entrances, a main entrance, and a smaller single door to the right. I tested it. No way you could enter from here unless somebody let you in. The main doors were locked up like precious pirate booty. You needed an I.D. card to get in, and I didn’t have one. Luckily, somebody happened along and I followed her through. She eyed me suspiciously. I eyed her back.
“Do you live here?” she asked.
“No,” I replied, “I’m only here for the laptops.”
She ignored me, and disappeared around the corner where the elevators were. Immediately to the right of the entrance was the door into the lounge. It was a long room, with a row of chairs on the right side next to the large windows with vertical blinds drawn. No way anybody could see into this room. There was a TV on the left desk, flanked by two garbage cans, and a red pool table at the far end surrounded by some chairs. I walked over to it.
I sat down on the chair the coat was on, according to Freddie’s diagram, and looked around. There was no chance anybody walking in the lobby back and forth from the main entrance to the elevators could see it. Nobody from outside could possibly see it either. Whoever took it either knew it was there, or regularly canvassed the room for stuff to pick up.
I left the building, and bumped into Freddie as he was heading to a class.
“Was there anybody else in the room that night?” I asked.
“There was a group of people earlier who watched a movie while we shot pool. This other guy played with us for a bit after the movie, but everyone was gone by the end. Why?”
“Just curious,” I said. I left him and headed back up to my room. Time to check up on his T-Mobile website.
Chapter 3:
A Sloppy Doofus
“It would take a phenomenal idiot”, I thought as I turned the key and opened my door, “and a great deal of luck if this turns up anything.” Most of the time, when somebody steals a cellphone, they sell it, or strip it down and sell the parts. Sometimes they rip out the SIM card and reprogram it. I knew that most T-Mobile stores in particular kept the SIM cards underneath the stack of bills in the drawer, alongside the fifties and hundreds. There’s no trace of your phone, and it’s as good as gone. So I was pretty pessimistic about my chances when I fired up my laptop and logged onto the website.
Imagine my surprise when the log showed calls made after the phone was stolen. This was a huge break. It took a huge proverbial piece broken off from a massive sized Kit-Kat Bar of crime. Not only did the person keep the cell phone, they were using it, and from here on out, I could see who they were calling. The first call was made this morning at 7:46 AM to a Long Beach number. At 12:00 PM, there was a long sixteen minute call made to an Inglewood number, and at 4:30 PM, another long fifteen minute call to the same number. I checked my watch. It was 4:56.
It must be a student, I thought with grim satisfaction, as I headed over to Max’s room. He or she must’ve been in the lounge that night, noticed the coat, and returned when Freddie left. But the nature of the calls was a bit odd. They were all being made to residential phone numbers in the Los Angeles area. The person must know the area well, or have friends around.
I had Max do some quick reverse phone number lookups for each of the numbers that were called, while I wrote down the information. Random women’s names popped up from what was previously nothing. What was their relation to the theif? Relatives? Friends? No way I could find out unless I called those numbers myself, but I wasn’t quite ready to let the thief in on my secret. This call log would be one of my only leads, and I wasn’t going to start hounding and barking at the numbers until I had more information.
Max ran each of the last names of the reverse lookup through The Facebook and USC’s student directory, filtering out only those who lived in Birnkrant. One of the last names hit a single match, a girl named Erin Jones. Her Facebook profile revealed she was a member of the “Birnkrant Monday Night Movies” group. Problem was, yesterday wasn’t a Monday. It was a Friday. That is about as far away from Monday as you can get, unless you start talking crazy talk about extra days of the week or some quantum scientific mumbo jumbo like that. I never liked that stuff. Still, maybe the group rescheduled their showing that week.
“What’s this for,” asked Max.
I filled him in quickly. “This Freddie guy, he’s kind of a sloppy doofus, isn’t he?” I asked.
“Yeah,” said Max a bit too quickly.
In any case, I had my first suspect. I totally gave myself a high-five for a job well done, and wrapped up work for the day. From here on, it would be a waiting game as the thief continued to make calls, and I continued to watch them for clues. I never liked waiting games much, but sometimes you have to wait. For example, in chess, if you start moving your pieces while your opponent’s thinking, he’d probably reach over and rip your face off. You have to wait your turn to move, and then move.
It’s the same in detective work, really. Except less face ripping.
Chapter 4:
Something to Throw
As the week rolled on, the calls kept being made, but doubt was beginning to fill my mind about Erin Jones. Quite frankly, the more I mulled it over, the less it seemed possible that she, or for that matter, any other student could have stolen it.
The first clue was that the first call made when the phone was stolen, the Long Beach number, was getting called every day, at around 6:30 in the morning, first thing. Maybe she was calling a friend to wake her up? Not likely. Birnkrant housed mostly freshman, and freshman wouldn’t have off-campus friends that required wake-up calls. And no self-respecting student would ever get up every day at 6:30 in the morning, either. The earliest classes started at USC was 8:00. Nobody is up at 6:30, unless they stayed up the night before drinking away their troubles and tuition, or were secretly robots. And if it was a robot who stole the stuff, than I had a whole lot more troubles on my hands than I had anticipated when I took this job.
The worst-case scenario would be a drunk robot. Only lightning quick reflexes and a hot soldering iron could take those suckers down, if they were a mad violent drunk. If you got lucky, the robot would be a sad drunk, so you could attack him while he was sitting by the bar, glumly telling anybody who’d listen how life as an artificially sentient being controlled by preprogrammed inalterable processes was such a drag. And believe me, after about thirty seconds of that, you either take him out with the soldering iron for his sake, or jam the soldering iron into your ears for yours.
The final nail in the logic coffin was that, quite frankly, no student at USC would ever have the need to steal a cell phone and use it in the first place. They don’t call it the University of Spoiled Children for nothing – you can’t walk three feet without bumping into or getting bumped into by some doofus yapping away on their cellular phone. USC housing also provided phone service for free in rooms anyway. Who would want to steal a cell phone and use it, and moreover, who would be stupid enough to keep using it at all? Again, the compass seemed to swing towards the robot direction, but common sense tells us that robots didn’t need cell phones. Or did they?
I buried the “student” theory in the graveyard at the back of my head. Rest in peace, I thought, as I simultaneously summoned a thunderstorm to revive the “robot” theory.
It was a Wednesday, when Freddie pounded on my door again. I let him in.
“Tell me, kid, do you know any robots? Ever make any android enemies?” I asked.
“Uh… No.” He seemed a bit confused.
“You sure about that?” I said desperately.
“Pretty sure.”
“Damn.”
“Why?”
“That was my lead. Looks like I’m going to need another funeral plot in my head…”
“What the hell are you talking about?” he asked.
“None of your damn business!” I shouted, “Get out of my mind!”
I stumbled over to my desk and sat down, pissed. Who would be in that room at that time, I wondered. Then it hit me like fat beats dropped by a DJ from a twenty-story tall penthouse. The cleaning staff.
As I was wondering how to pursue this newfound information, Freddie chimed in. “By the way, I hate to tell you this, but my mom called me just now. She’s killed the account.”
By this point, my fantasies had progressed to the point where I was receiving an award from the mayor of Los Angeles himself for my excellent service to the community. Terminated account meant no more phone updates. “What!?” I shouted, “That was the only lead we had!!”
“Sorry,” said Freddie, “that’s just my mom I guess.”
I started a long string of expletives and didn’t stop until I had knitted a sweater out of them. A sweater of profanity. Sam Spade never had to deal with their respective mothers getting in their way and screwing up with their cases. Just when I was about to get some answers, my only source of info gets cut off.
“And, well it gets worse,” said Freddie in-between my swearing, “She, uh, called a few of the numbers and asked about the stolen cell phone.”
At this point, I was well on my way to weaving a Guinness Book of World Record sized profanity quilt.
“What!? So these people know the jig is up!?”
“Pretty much,” said Freddie.
I grabbed the nearest throwable item (my phone) and proceeded to throw it through my screen window. Somewhere in the street below, someone yelled something.
“This means that they’ll know, and that they’ll talk to the thief, and the thief will freak out,” I said. “The slim chance you had of getting your stuff back is basically zilch now,” I told him.
“Yeah, but I trust you’ll do fine,” he told me optimistically as he left the room, “Good luck.”
I wish I still had something to throw at him.
Chapter 5:
An F in Social Engineering 101
I had no choice now but to call these numbers and pull some social engineering to see if I couldn’t trip up the party on the other side into dropping a name. The odds were terribly against me – the people on the other end would be on their guard and be waiting for my calls. I decided to go the straight route. The first number on my list was the one the thief called at 6:30 every morning. I set my alarm for 6:30 and settled in for a night of uneasy rest. Although I can’t remember exactly what I dreamed about, I recall that it was very symbolic of my current case. Also, I think at some point, I was biking around World War II-era Germany on the side of the Allies and thinking, “The bicycle is an awfully inept war weapon.” I woke up wondering exactly what that was all about as I stumbled downstairs into the lobby, picked up the payphone, and dropped fifty cents into the coin receiver and punched the number. The recorded voice on the other end politely informed me that, because this was a number in Long Beach, it was going to cost fifty cents for five minutes. I had better keep it quick.
The phone rang a few times before a Hispanic woman picked up the phone.
“Hello?” she said.
“Hi, my name is Freddie,” I told her, “I’m investigating a missing cell phone. I have a list of phone numbers that have been called after the theft, and this number shows up every morning at around this time. I was w…”
She cut me off immediately. “No, I don’t know what you are talking about.”
This was going to be like pulling teeth. I could tell right away. This went back and forth for a while.
“Somebody calls this number every morning at 6:30 in the morning. Every day this past week. I want to know who is calling,” I told her.
She was taken a bit aback. “I don’t know what you are talking about. I don’t know who would be calling.”
Finally, I asked her, “Is this a residential number?”
“No, it is a group home. I work here a few days a week. I don’t know who is calling.”
If she was telling the truth, I was wasting my time with the wrong person. If she was lying, there was no way around it. I sighed, “Could you put the person in charge on the line, then?”
“Ok, hold on.”
Now I was getting somewhere. Just as I thought this, the phone beeped, and asked me to insert a nickel for another three minutes. I cursed, digging through my empty pockets for a damn nickel and coming up empty. She heard on the other end.
“You know, man, I think you are lying. Why are you calling from a payphone?”
“Because if I had a cell phone, I’d call you on that!” I snapped back. Then the line went dead. I was frustrated. From now on, I’d keep more spare change in my pockets, I thought, as I ran up to my room and roused my roommate Brett. He was sleeping.
“Brett! I need to borrow your cell phone!” I said.
He grumbled a bit. “What? Uh, sure…?”
“Thanks.”
I grabbed it and keyed in the number again. The same woman picked up.
“Listen,” I said, “is this the same woman I talked to earlier?’
“Yes,” she said, “but I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know about no cell phone or anything.”
After a minute more of this, it became painfully obvious I was wasting my time. I thanked her through my teeth, hung up, and crossed off that number from my list. Next up was the number with the longest call times, an Inglewood number. I punched it in, and an elderly Hispanic woman answered.
“Hello?” she said.
I gave her my spiel, and got the same response as the first woman. Repeated denial.
“I can’t believe you don’t know anything,” I told her, “I mean, you talked to this guy every day this week for twenty minutes.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t talk to nobody here, nobody knows my phone number.”
“You mean you spend twenty minutes talking to absolute strangers on your phone every day? I don’t believe you.”
She considered this for a moment, before going back to the tried and true response “No, I don’t know. I don’t know.”
I was getting frustrated. These people were lying to me through their teeth, and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. I grudgingly thanked her for her time, and hung up. Here I was again, right back at the beginning with absolutely nothing. The other numbers led to indefinite ringing, or answering machines.
The women’s repeated chorus of “I don’t know” rang in my head like Quasimodo going apeshit on the church bell. They don’t know anything. I don’t know anything. Nobody knew anything.
Chapter 6:
Bright Ideas
I got breakfast and walked around a bit. It was very early, around 7:00 AM. The cleaning staff was beginning their jobs. The timing matched up with my theory that a member of the cleaning staff was responsible for the thievery. I walked into Birnkrant again. A guy named Andre was cleaning the floor. I stopped him to ask him some questions. I explained my situation, and he told me that only one guy, Pedro, came in on weekends to empty the trash. Everyone else had weekends off. The cell phone was stolen on a Saturday morning. He told me to talk to Luigi, his supervisor.
I checked with Luigi, the cleaning staff supervisor. He confirmed the information I got from Andre. Pedro is the only guy who came in on weekends. He started his shift at 8:00, and left at 4:30. The first call was made at 7:46 in the morning, which made sense if Pedro got in a little early, and the longest call of the day happened right when he got off work at 4:30. All the signs pointed to him, as if the signs were all magnetic compasses, and Pedro was the north pole, or like in those old Warner Brothers cartoons where Bugs Bunny popped up under a sign pointing to a bunch of cities, except here, all the signs pointed to Pedro City, USA.
Later that night, I tried another number, pretending to be looking for somebody else. A Hispanic man picked up.
“Hi! Is Jonathan there?”
“Who?”
“Jonathan? Is that you? Quit kiddin’ around buddy!”
“No this is not Jonathan.”
“C’mon.”
“I think you have the wrong number.”
“What? Who is this?”
There was a brief hesitation. “John.”
“You’re a terrible liar, John. Who is this, really?”
He hung up. Nobody would naturally lie to a stranger if they called the wrong number. People tend to trust the voice on the other end. He had been coached too to keep cagey.
I tried the last number on my list, a number that was only called once. It belonged to an adult day health center. Whoever stole my phone was looking for a daycare for an elderly person in his family. I guessed the old woman. Checking the addresses based on reverse phone lookups, the daycare center was less than a mile away from the old woman’s listed address. There was definitely a connection, but without a name to use, I couldn’t call either of them and use this information. It would be no use at all to call these numbers anyway, it seemed. Pedro had been tipped off, and got there first.
I exited the phone booth, disgusted. I was running out of room, fast.
On a whim, I checked the pool room in Birnkrant. The chair that the coat was on was directly in the line of sight of the right most trash can. I had a suspect, and a strong case against him. All the evidence I had was circumstantial, but overwhelmingly so. Still, it couldn’t do anything, and if I went to police with what I had, they’d laugh me straight into next week. I had to tie the numbers with this name, or use the numbers to get Pedro to return my stuff on his own accord.
I tried the first approach. I drafted up a fake script for Max, one time telemarketer himself, and he tried calling the old woman again. We assumed she was perhaps Pedro’s mother, seeing as nobody other than close relatives calls elderly women that often. No dice – she didn’t respond to the last name.
I had no choice but to try and put the heat on Pedro to return the stuff on his own accord. Reed suggested I give him a letter with his name on it to try and scare him, and it sounded like a good idea. I drafted a somewhat threatening letter, telling him to drop it off at the Taper Hall lost and found, or suffer the consequences of a police theft report. I attached a copy of the numbers called, and gave him a nice map to Taper Hall. I gave him one day to return the iPod. I let him keep the phone as a “token of goodwill.” I also knew that, if he were like me, he would’ve tossed the cell phone as soon as it stopped working. That would mean that if I demanded both the iPod and the cell phone, he would figure that since he can’t satisfy my requirements, he might as well keep the iPod and take his chances. I didn’t want that.
I knew that if I told him to give it to our building’s lost and found, he wouldn’t go for it, because that’d risk getting caught. The official Department of Public Safety lost and found was too official and too far away from Birnkrant. The Taper Hall location was one I used before – it was really the room for computer and equipment checkouts. They just happened to handle lost items for the building. It was run by students. It offered me the greatest chance of getting the iPod back.
The next day, I woke up early and gave the envelope to Andre, to give to Pedro when he came in that day. This was the second time I had gotten up way early for this damn case, and I intended it to be the last. Too bad Freddie couldn’t pay me back in lost sleep. It was Thursday. He had until 2:00 Friday to comply. The only thing I could do now was wait and hope. And play Halo 2. I did a little of all three.
Chapter 7:
The End of the Beginning
Taper wasn’t open on Friday, so I waited all the way until Monday to check. I busted into the lost and found, and sheepishly asked the man sitting at the desk if anybody had turned in an iPod in the past few days. He said no.
Damn.
I had no choice but to compile everything and go off and file an official police report at the Department of Public Safety building. I asked the lost and found desk located there if they had an iPod in their database. She gleefully pounded some keys and stared off into her computer monitor.
“Well, could you describe it?” she asked. She was looking at something.
“It’s white.”
“Was it in a case?”
“Don’t think so.”
“Oh, never mind. This isn’t it then.”
If there weren’t a desk separating us, I would’ve taken her computer monitor and introduced it to her cranium. Multiple times.
I filed the paperwork for the theft report, turned in all my information, and headed out into the oppressively bright Los Angeles sun, defeated. It was two weeks from when the iPod was stolen. I was simply too slow, and I wasted too much time. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that if I had been a week quicker, I would have the iPod in hand. But unless I could find a time machine, such sentiments were useless. There was nobody else in the world that could have stolen the items but Pedro, but I had no way of ever nailing him for it. Sometimes, the world blew chunks.
I ran into Freddie on my way back to my room.
“What about the case?” he asked, “any luck?”
“None whatsoever. You paid a $500 fee to enroll yourself in ‘How Not to Be an Idiot 101.’”
“Does that mean I’m not getting my stuff back?” he asked.
I could tell he hadn’t graduated from the course yet. “No, unless you get phenomenally lucky.”
“But that’s a terrible way to end this! You should be able to get the stuff back!” he protested.
“Sorry,” I said, “This is real life. This is Los Angeles. Not Fakesville, USA.”
He walked off crestfallen. I closed my door behind me and sat down. Nothing to do now but wait for the organized police to figure it out, but I knew how well the organized police did things. They did them terribly, like a retarded preschooler learning how to finger paint. But I had been too slow, and sometimes that’s just the way the world works.
And sometimes, the world works a bit like a retarded preschooler trying to finger paint.
TO BE CONTINUED?
I am an idiot.
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Even if you don’t know what war this is from, your vote still manages to count the exact same as mine. That is what is wrong with America.
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Granted, I’m not as huge an idiot as some people who have managed to drag themselves out of their idiotic miasmas everyday to attend classes at USC. For example, during a Philosophy lecture on Aristotle’s ethical viewpoints, I didn’t raise my hand and ask the professor “Wait, if how can Aristotle be talking about ethics and stuff like this, because they were like doing gladiator battles at the time. Isn’t that, like, being a hypocrite?”
For example, when asked to do a report on a cultural artifact of 9/11, at least I didn’t raise my hand and ask if I could “you know, maybe do firemen, and how everyone viewed them as like heroes after 9/11. Or, you know, could I do the president or something?”
For example, in response to the same assignment, I didn’t raise my hand and announce proudly to the class that I would “do that picture of the firemen raising the American flag over the rubble because it’s a lot like that other picture of the soldiers doing that flag raising. You know, during that one war. I forget which one it was.”
At least I am not as unfathomably stupid as these people. The first case was one of my experiences. The ever-vigilant Max Geiger experienced the latter two cases during a single class period – a veritable one-two punch of absolute ludicrous idiocy compacted into fifty minutes. Exposure to this degree of saturation of pure idiocy is so far above the maximum daily exposure limit that I’m surprised that Max’s isn’t babbling maniacally, rocking back and forth in his room, and drooling all over himself. The proximal effect of this amount of idiocy causes IQ points of those unlucky to be within earshot to drop and birds to bust themselves by flying straight into windows.
Nevertheless, I am still an idiot.
My idiotic habits can be linked to the class I take. I feel woefully, woefully underchallenged. Of course, I do not intend that to be read as “Hey, I’m so smart! Look at me! Mensa is just about falling over themselves, asking me to join!” but rather as an indication that Lakeside prepares you for college excruciatingly well. As such, I am bored to tears in half of my classes, and when you’re so bored you’re crying, you’re bound to start doing some stupid stuff.
Some may remember the fiasco back when I was taking the USC placement exams during the Pacific Northwest orientation session, in which I took the Chinese language placement test, which was full of the type of characters I had never learned. Nonetheless, I still managed to place into the 3rd level class, the last level needed to fulfill the major requirement, thus meaning I only have a single semester of Chinese to worry about.
At the time, I had believed that perhaps this placement was mere luck, because I didn’t even know what I was doing on the test, and that the class would be way over my head. And as time proves again and again, my initial assumption was so far off-base that it was all the way in the back of the stadium getting a hot dog.
During the first two months of class, much of the material consisted of things I already knew. This was the case for about half the class, with the other half desperately trying to figure out what the sounds coming out of the teacher’s mouth meant. This is perhaps due to the nature of the Chinese language, and the sheer variety of skill levels found among its students. Naturally the teacher has to teach to the low end, at the expense of the other students being simply bored out of their minds.
I had stupidly picked the Chinese class which met only twice a week, but for two hours at a time. These two hours would soon prove to be the longest two hours of my life. There is no clock in the room. Our cell phones had to be off. Time stopped, yeah, and wiggled with it in that room, and it was all you could do to not throw your desk out the window and take your chance with the two-story drop onto concrete. "Two broken legs for your sanity is a small price to pay," you’d think to yourself as you drag your shattered limbs across broken glass with a broad smile plastered across your face.
In high school, I spent several weeks of Chinese class learning how to cascade a quarter down my knuckles like the bad guys in movies. I also doodled all over my textbook. The latter was the activity I pursued to ensure my sanity, except this particular brand of textbook lent itself to hilarious comics, captions, and additions. In the past, one of my doodles in a high school Chinese textbook was so laugh out loud funny, that it famously got Jimmy Wong, who has the misfortune of receiving my marked up hand-me-down textbooks, in trouble for cracking up in the middle of class when he saw it. I hoped this tradition would continue when I sell my book used and itgets picked up the next year by an unwitting student.
The following is an example of my work, taken from two opposing pages. Read it sequentially. If you don’t find it funny in the least, try staring at static for two hours, and then reading it, so that you are in the proper mindset to receive it.
The title of this chapter is "Chapter 7: Boyfriends"
Besides goofing off during class in an institution that my parents pay forty thousand dollars a year for me to attend, I’ve also engaged in the vice of gambling with my fellow floor mates. Normally, this would only be idiotic if I lost a lot of money, or played with the folks on the business floor, where the buy-in is a scant $50 (and something about signing over something with your own blood).
No, these four-hour marathon sessions of poker are idiotic simply because our buy-ins are always less than five dollars. Less. Than. Five. Dollars. Even if you win it all, if you factor the amount of money you’re making an hour, you’re still not even approaching minimum wage. With up to two loads of laundry on the line, you’d think that people would take far more risks because less is at stake, but this is completely false. Everybody plays annoyingly coyly, and the hours drop like flies as each person greedily guards their massive stacks of chips that, if added up, would represent $1.84.
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Only complete idiots shoot pool in zero gravity!
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But the worst, most idiotic activity I partake in is shooting pool.
Our dorm lobby happens to have a table, so Max and I, at the beginning of the year, decided we’d become hustlers and get bitchin’ good at pool, and take everybody’s money. As the cash rolled in, so would the fly hunnies, until we would eventually become the baddest of the bad asses on the USC campus. We’d enter the dining hall, and the room would hush. Food would be given to us for free. Grades would be all but assured. All this because of our legendary pool skill, and our propensity to hold the cues suggestively around our crotches, subliminally suggesting to all passers-by that these two guys are, well… you know.
To this end, Max and I each blew fifty dollars (or more than forty poker hours) for pool cues and cases. The day the shipment arrived, we giddily ripped open the package and assembled our cues. After a moment, I noted “These don’t look like they have tips…” Indeed, they lacked the little white plastic tube and leather tip present on most cues. “Aww, shit,” Max said. We had spent, or rather invested, all this time and money, and we still wouldn’t be able to shoot. I fired off an email to the customer service, and we unscrewed our cues and put them away shamefully. We spoke nothing of our folly that day.
The reply the following day basically said, “They do have tips. You guys are just huge idiots.” Closer inspection revealed that, lo and behold, those little nubs at the end of the cue were cue tips! The initial rush of glee was soon replaced by a deep sickening feeling. “How are we going to become hustlers,” I thought, “if I can’t even tell that my cue has a tip on it?” Slightly shaken, we checked out the dorm’s set of balls and started our long journey towards pool mastery.
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Max sinking the 8-ball, caught on film, a rarity ranking with the likes of Bigfoot and Nessie.
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Both Max and I have family who played. Max’s grandfather was an honest-to-goodness pool shark, and one of my uncles competed in a national tournament held in China. Skills, unfortunately, did not translate down the generations as we soon found out. Max and I were laughably bad at pool, and in may ways, still are. Shots went in by luck, attempts to look cool with behind the back shots or one-handed shots ended in tragedy or injury. Several times, balls have flown from the table and narrowly avoided shattering the large glass window by the table. When we play pool, it’s hazardous for everyone’s health. To this day, I am thankful that I have managed to survive serious harm to both my body and my social life.
Well, check that about the "social life." While most kids are off getting wasted, getting prepared to get wasted, or getting prepared to get prepared to get wasted on a Friday or Saturday night, Max and I are usually found in the lobby trying to comprehend the nature of spherical physics. This activity has afforded us an interesting view on the social habits of the typical college frat boy. They parade around the halls with their shirts off, lowering their voice, and flexing their muscles in a feeble attempt to attract members of the opposite sex. Unbelievably, this behavior manages to attract an occasionall stray female (likely with a terrible home life), which only serves to encourage their ape-like mating calls. Noted observer of ape behavior Jane Goodall was at USC giving a speech, but I was unable to ask her about this, and why frat boys seem to think it’s effective. To anybody else, their attempts are funny and pathetic, like a crippled bunny rabbit asking its daddy if it will ever hop as high as the other bunnies. Father Bunny lowers his Wall Street Journal, takes his pipe out of his mouth, thinks for a moment, and replies "Hell no."
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The break. The blur makes it more impressive than it usually is.
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After practicing for a few months, I had the opportunity to demonstrate my skills to great effect when we were approached by a group of drunken frat boys. I racked up the balls, and one member of the group declared loudly “Hey if you make two balls on the break, I’ll give this guy here a blow job.” Max and I looked at each other. I was on fire that night, I had sunk two or more balls on the break on several occasions. I picked up the cue, lined up the shot, and let loose a massive drive at the rack. The balls exploded, and the guy who made the wager looked very worried for a moment. But as they settled, they remained all on the table. There would be no oral sex, no embarrassing pictures posted on the internet, and no sudden inflow of blackmail money that night. I had failed the only test of my skill since we started this idiotic crusade. Of course, I could very well argue that it was a damn good thing I had failed it. But on principle alone, it was a great disappointment.
One of the other reasons for pursuing pool mastery is so that I can face Ryan, the noted pool master of our class, and soundly beat up on him. This goal of mine is becoming ever more unlikely, because based on my recollection of Ryan, he’s damn good, and way better than I am now. He can position the ball, and make almost all the shots he attempts. In my case, many of the shots I make are because there is a slight downward slope on the table, which basically guides balls into a corner pocket as long as they are hit lightly. I speculate this sight depression in the table can be attributed to a fat girl I saw sitting on the table’s edge during a football game. Ryan can think several shots ahead, while I am lucky if the cue ball doesn’t fly up and hit somebody in the crotch. It’s going to take a whole lot more pool playing if I’m going to even begin to fantasize about winning.
Perhaps the most idiotic thing about our pool playing is that it leaves us mentally exhausted afterwards. Very tired. So exhausted, that I forget things. Important things I try to get back.
And depending on how things go, next week’s post might prove to be the most interesting I’ve ever written…
-f.w.
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It’s the hallway of doom!
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Sunday was Halloween, and here at USC, that made this weekend a little bit different than most weekends – this time, USC students can blame a holiday for their hangovers come Monday morning.
But besides the inevitable dress-up and drink-up charades, there’s another major thing USC does for Halloween. New Residential College, my dorm, is one of the buildings that hosts “Spirits of Troy,” a haunted house, trick-or-treat deal for the kids in the surrounding neighborhoods. This is because the surrounding neighborhoods are, as I’ve probably established by now, not quite conducive for young children to be running around at night in. Trick or treating at some random house would probably net you a belly full of buckshot, or some other potentially deadly and not at all treat-like reward for your efforts.
Our floor was quite jazzed up for Spirits, because it’s an excuse for us to go ape and decorate the hall into a haunted house. We put garbage bags to dim the unearthly fluorescents that can apparently never be turned off. People got up on chairs and streamed long strings of spider webs and the like to sufficiently frighten little children by vaguely irritating their face with invisible thread. The themes to scary movies (C’mon, this is the Cinema Floor, after all) blared from speakers. Overall, it was fairly spooktastic, and the stage was set for some massive scaring later on that night. Some people dressed up as characters from the Japanese phenomenon, Battle Royale. Others went more conventional routes, including but not limited to tall German butchers, hobbits, and probably even hobbit butchers (hobbits that ran the deli in the Shire, not people who went around and speared hobbits for sport).
Needless to say, although impressive, the haunted house we came up with could not match the sheer terror offered by Alex, Ryan, Kevin, and the gang back when we were doing YMCA’s for Halloween at Lakeside. These guys were veritable low-budget haunted house craftsmen who would build elaborate cardboard box mazes, which basically forced kids to crawl through them so that they could be assaulted and grabbed through secret compartments. In many ways, it was the Neverland Ranch that never was. While I palmed coins and the like, Kevin donned a depraved old man mask and would play the "dead body" in the Haunted House that would grab ahold of little kids as they walked by. They either screamed their little kid heads off, wet themselves, or bit Kevin as hard as they could. I’m sure Kevin would agree that any injuries sustained in the line of volunteer duty were well worth it.
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It’s the doorway of doom!
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In mid-afternoon, Max and I loaded into the Wongmobile and headed to the La Cienga Walmart to pick up much needed spooking supplies (Scary masking tape, and scary tinfoil). If you’re ever on a nationwide tour of “Most Depressing Stores,” be sure to check out the La Cienga Walmart, which is three floors of fluorescent depravity rolled into a nice package of discounted goods and employees hiding between shelves trying to avoid working (a couple of them were in the shoe aisles. A supervisor came by and yelled at them in both English and Spanish. I guess to have to be bilingual to be a supervisor at Walmart). We headed over also to pick up the new Grand Theft Auto game for Ryan on the 2nd floor. Max pointed out the irony of driving around the unsavory part of Los Angeles to pick up a game where you drive around the unsavory part of Los Angeles, but we chose to pay it no heed and pressed ever onwards.
We got back with the needed supplies and the floor was ready to go. At about five-thirty, kids starting filing around and trick-or-treating on dorm doors, and things were starting heat up.
Then the damn fire alarm went off.
Its ear-piercing shriek gave the kids on the floor a good jump, but delightful fright turned to downtrodden disappointment as the building evacuated into the cool Los Angeles night. We stood around idly demanding who had, in fact, ruined Halloween. Adam, the RA for the first floor, noted that the fire department was a lot slower this time in responding.
That’s right – the fire alarm going off has happened three times this year already, and we’re hardly halfway through the first term. Last time it happened (a few weeks ago), some idiot decided that three in the morning was a great time to pull it, and we froze our asses off outside for one and a half hours as the firemen went to each and every door, unlocked it, checked for people inside, and wrote up anybody who was still there (they prefer to be asleep when they burn to death). To add insult to injury, they didn’t even reach the third floor because they figured that doing the entire building (there are many many people) was impossible, which means I could’ve slept through it just fine. If this fire alarm thing keeps up, the LAFD will probably eventually ignore the inevitable massive firestorm kills a quarter of the freshman population of USC. Needless to say, the entire building has been itching to find out who’s been pulling these alarms so we can exact glorious revenge.
But this time, it was apparently some moron on the first floor who thought “Hay guys! I know what is a great way to spice up a party! Let’s use a fog machine! No way those will set off the alarm!” Even worse, the same thing happened several years ago, exact same circumstances with the fog machine and all. And to add the diarrhea icing to the shit cake that’s been built up, the fire department told us that all the decorations we’d spent the entire day putting up had to be torn down because they were fire hazards, else we’d face stiff fines.
So the hall was torn down back to it’s former, bland, soulless glory, and there were far fewer kids parading around for Halloween tonight (they figured that they might as well go to the other buildings). This is especially a shame because of the effort the fourth floor placed on their haunted house. They had a whole routine set-up and everything, and I know that if I was a little kid going through it, I’d probably would have plopped my ass right in the middle of the hallway and started bawling, or perhaps if provoked bit my way through to the exit.
Basically, it was pretty much the worst Halloween ever.
But let us not dawdle on these depressing matters. Would Tommy Trojan sit around and sob about ruined Halloweens? Hell no – he’d be up raping and pillaging with the rest of them. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me introduce USC’s mascot to you.
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It’s the USC Mascot of doom!
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Our mascot is the Trojan Warrior, affectionately dubbed Tommy Trojan. Most colleges go with animals, but we decided to go with an ancient warrior with a penchant for falling for a big wooden horse that couldn’t possibly be hollow and filled with soldiers. Seriously, what the hell. Are you going to tell me none of the Trojans, upon seeing the massive horse, tried tapping it? When they were wheeling it in, nobody said “Hay guys! If dis horse iz hollow, den why iz it so heavy?” Basically, our mascot is a huge moron. Also, a condom is named after him.
Which is, of course, an interesting parable if you choose to pursue it. If going by history, I can’t see why anyone would use the Trojan condom. It implies that you’re going to enter the city gates, and when she least expects it, hordes of sperm will bust out and go apeshit. I’m sure that’s a pleasant thought in the midst of passionate lovemaking. Some of the folks on campus have capitalized on this relationship between the condom and our mascot, printing T-shirts that say, on the front “Practice safe sex,” and “Make love with a Trojan” on the back, which, if a girl is wearing it, is like an open invitation for roofies.
The Trojans, USC’s football team, is the #1 ranked team in the Nation, and according to many, expected to have an undefeated season. Basically, they’re expected to deliver cans of whoop-ass like the Salvation Army delivers Campbell’s to the hungry. Despite a few close calls, this has been the case throughout the season. The Daily Trojan dedicates several pages to talking about the game, what could have been better, what should be done next time, and why the Trojans are the best team ever.
The Trojan marching band (also among the best in the nation), accompanies the football team wherever they may go. The band had an impromptu demonstration at the beginning of the school year. There were a lot of people playing clarinets in that band. Too many for any respectable band to have. I’m talking rows upon rows of clarinetists here. I have difficulty deducing where the humble clarinet fits in a school brass marching band, but I suppose when you’re #1, you can have whatever damn instruments you damn well want in your band.
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Trojan fans line up for games like it is nobody’s business!
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The end result of this is a wholesome amount of school pride. Our school chant is “fight on,” which has been perhaps an unsportsmanlike chant when half of the football stadium is shouting it when the score is 49 – 0 in our favor. “Fight on, even when the enemy is dying on the ground,” perhaps. Of course, in that situation, the slogan may have very well been directed for the other team, “Fight on, because if we beat you 49-0, it’d be a damn boring game and a damn shame for your football program.”
“Fight On” is accompanied by a hand signal. The V for victory is proudly flashed and rocked out. Or the peace sign. Or the bunny ears symbol. Whichever you choose to see the USC Hand Signal as, anybody can derive an inordinate amount of glee when half the stadium is making peace signs, and if one assumes that the all these people are, in fact, disguised picture-happy Japanese tourists.
Despite Trojan Pride being a necessary requirement for enrollment at USC, I regret to say that I do not have much of it. It’s hard to get behind a mascot that basically wears a skirt and a fruity helmet. The school colors, cardinal and gold, are not far off from Lakeside’s maroon and gold, except that, of course, cardinal is a significantly less fruity and easier defined color than “maroon.” Seeing as the school’s entire life force revolves around the pigskin, I can’t say that I’m into it all that much.
I mean, I enjoy sweaty guys bumping and getting all over each other as much as the next straight guy, but the investment most folks put in the game is substantial. On the pirate music networks on the campus subnet, you have people who are sharing the recorded albums of the marching band. They probably all have season DVD’s or something that they can play between games, and sleep on huge, USC football themed bedsheets, and wear USC sweatshirts and pray every night before they go to sleep to a large framed picture of the USC tight ends or something. Honestly, I’m not ready for that level of commitment to a group of people that, if provoked, could all equally kick my ass soundly into next week.
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Sometimes, even Johnny Law needs to step in with his deadly index finger gun.
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This loyalty to the school colors and mascot extends beyond just sports. Our meal plans are given “Cardinal” and “Trojan” monikers. The Cardinal Plan, which is what I have, is decidedly a rip off by all means, but gives you just enough food to make it through the week. The Trojan plan, which is even more of a rip off, gives you enough food to feed a small, starving African country. Unfortunately at USC, there is nothing in between “almost starving” and “pure gluttony.”
Most people who go for the Trojan Meal Plan either have to have Maintenance come by their dorm room and enlarge their door for them and install structural supports on their beds, or have parents who want them to be well fed, and don’t mind shelling out twice as much money. The Trojan Plan allows unlimited cafeteria visits (The Cardinal plan gives you 10 a week), and an absurd amount of Dining Dollars, which can be spent at retail food locations around campus.
I have heard that most of the time, it is nearly impossible to get rid of those Dining Dollars, and since they don’t roll over from semester to semester, it is in one’s best interest to spend as much as possible whenever one has the chance. As a result, during the week before the end of the semester, it is not an uncommon sight to find students rolling massive cartons full of bottled water, or buying every flavor of Sobe (even the gross ones!) in the refrigerator in an effort to get their money’s worth. I have yet to witness this phenomenon, but when I do, I’ll be sure to bum some free food and beverage off these poor, poor children and their surplus money.
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Everyone’s Kitchen. Really. Sucks.
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There are two main cafeterias on campus that you can visit with the meal plans. Parkside is all the way across campus (a ten minute walk). Everyone’s Kitchen (EVK) is right downstairs. Parkside is miles above EVK in terms of food quality, but it’s not ten-minute walk better, which means most of the folks on our floor end up eating downstairs.
The food at EVK can be summed up into two kinds: insipid or nauseating. Very occasionally is there truly good quality food. At the very least, you can’t fault EVK’s variety. It is a fairly large room. Immediately on your left is the Mexican cart, with nacho cheese and soy chicken and chips for making nachos or disgusting vegetarian Mexican cuisine (which, in all honesty, should not exist, seeing as con carne is a staple of any respectable Mexican’s diet). In front of that is the We Hate Atkins cart, full of pasta and a pile of stale baked potatoes. To the right is a sandwich cart that is full of sandwich making ingredients with unknown expiration dates. One of these days, I’m sticking a fork in the tuna to check if they even bother changing it from day to day. I’m betting no, because nobody eats sandwiches here anyway.
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Two resting figures with sombreros and a string of chilies. Guess what kind of food is served on this cart!
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In the far corner, there is the indulgent waffle cart that makes high quality waffles with “USC” stamped right on them. Who knows what percentage of our tuition funds customized waffles, but I wasn’t kidding when I said these people have a lot of pride in those three letters. Along the back wall are cereals and breads. It is with profound glee that I am able to mix and match cereals at will here at college. The unholy matrimony of Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms and Dr. Pepper can finally be consummated in my little fizzing bowl. The ability to mix cereals is almost worth the asking price alone.
There is a standard Pizza cart (read: Bread With Some Cheese Cart) and the daily entrée cart, which is hit or very often miss. The fine chefs at EVK make some decent fare, but it’s not so good that you don’t get sick of it. They serve mashed potatoes so often, it’s a wonder that the entire farming community of Idaho doesn’t grab their spades and hoes and march down to So Cal to settle things.
They also always miss the most obvious food combinations, as if they want you to not enjoy your dining experience. Fish and Chips are rarely accompanied by tartar sauce. If some P.O.W. camp pulled that shit, they would find themselves smack in front of a U.N. war crimes tribunal. French fries and Chili as a soup of the day have only once coincided, and my buddy Max and I took quick advantage of this to craft artery-clogging heart-stopping chili cheese fries. The chefs must have seen us, because this coincidence has never occurred again.
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This is what $40k a year buys you. Picture by Max
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And, as a side note, I might add that USC is a Pepsi school, which means I have to go off campus to get my fix.
On the EVK tables, there are little placards written by the school’s nutritionist. Most of the time, the questions are unbelievably stupid, but the answers are well researched and informative. I must commend our nutritionist for her patience. It must be a difficult job having to deal with emails drunkenly pounded out by ditzy sorority girls asking you “will pasta n stuff make me fat cuz I want 2 be able 2 fit in my miniskirt & ugg bootz next season lol!” The question this week asked about healthy snacks to stave off the “Munchies” during all-night study sessions. I can imagine a smoke filled room full of giggling stoners as they typed this particular email. Max, my partner in crime, and I have printed out replacement answers:
Granted, I have too much time on my hands, but I wonder what the errant student reading that would think? Would they be dense enough to fire off an angry email to our innocent nutritionist? Time will tell.
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That’s Jamba Juice. They don’t actually serve jambalaya, although you’d think they would.
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The dining situation, is of course, nowhere near as dire as I romantically pretend it is. USC’s big enough of a school that they have Krispy Kreme and Jamba Juice commercial venues actually on campus. My newest dig is at the basement of commons, a franchise called La Salsa, which provides extremely affordable, high quality Mexican fare, which is where Socal is proverbially at. The culinary options that I have available compared to NYU (the other contender of my higher education fancy), are of course far worse than what I would’ve had in the Big Apple, but Max showed me the original Tommy’s (ten minutes from campus by car, half an hour if you were lost like we were), a local California grease joint which serves chili and cheese on every possible food, and is artery-stopping, drop-to-your-knees-and-thank-God-for-tastebuds good. The ready availability of In-and-Out burger is great, but the truth is, there are times I prefer good ol’ Dick’s back home. The burger joint, you sicko.
Indulgent times calls for the ten-minute walk to Parkside, which according to a newspaper article hung proudly by the Sector 9 Skateboard/Longboard rack, is one of the best college dining experiences in the country, save for the “watery coffee.” Those posh ninnies at Yale have the best cafeteria, but I know for a fact those wimpo losers definitely don’t have an awesome skateboard rack. Stepping into Parkside is like entering an entirely different world. The floors are marbled. The ceiling is raised. There are carts with high quality food and there are professional touches on the food, such as little garnishes of some random small green vegetable. You could throw a bit of that stuff on the fries on your Big Mac meal at McDonalds, and people’d think you have a gourmet burger there if it wasn’t for the cardboard appearance, taste, and smell, such is the power of such small vegetables. They truly are the staple for the professional gourmet feel in the culinary world, second only to embedding gold bullion right smack dab in the mashed potatoes.
The myriad of food options, all-you can eat buffets, lack of exercise and the stresses higher education places on feeble freshman minds results in the mythical “Freshman 15,” the mysterious fifteen pounds that freshman complain about gaining upon entering college. I have no idea how it is mysterious, as its origin should be readily apparent – it’s because you don’t have the control to put down the damn fork, fatty! The fact that people treat this as an inevitable mystery, while they pile on another helping of bacon and nacho cheese astounds me.
Given my propensity towards staying the exact same weight for all four years of my high school career, I should therefore have little to worry about. However, at the insistence of my parents, as well as the genetic predisposition towards high blood pressure, they nearly begged me to do some exercise lest I idle myself to death while I’m over here. I promised I would, and I intended to fully follow through on this promise.
In high school, I tried the Navy Seal workout routine, mainly because it had one pull up exercise that simulated climbing hand-over-hand down a rope and pulling yourself up as an unknown enemy walks under you deep in enemy lines. Often, I would add an additional movement, removing a five-pound weight simulating the standard SEAL issue firearm from my pocket while in the air, and silently eliminating said enemy below me. The SEAL book had a picture of a shirtless guy in sunglasses and ripped out his mind running along a beach. What the picture probably didn’t show was that he was really running behind enemy lines.
It was with this Rambo imagery in mind that I set out upon this routine, and as past experience probably reveals, any aspirations I have towards becoming America’s greatest Vietnam War vet John Rambo himself is fated to end in tragedy. Besides, I tried this stuff out during Track season, and I don’t think John Rambo would ever be found with a sissy pole vault in hand, vaulting his rock-hard abs over enemy barbed wire. Hell no – John Rambo is the guy that hangs onto the helicopter as it ferries goods back and forth.. Not the bottom of the helicopter, but to the spinning blades. He probably would be dizzy, but John Rambo is the kind of forward thinking, "Army of One" soldier who knows how to go to Rite Aid and get some Dramamine before such a critical mission.
Furthermore, I was egged on by, of all people, my brother Jimmy Wong. He has the unhealthy reputation of being a skinny lil’ guy for his entire life, and all that Freudian repression leads him to overcompensate now and try to become huge. I’m talking about a weight lifting, book buying, creatine mixing, protein counting, steroid injecting, Ahnold worshipping, mirror checking, bicep flexing, pull up attempting, all-out extravaganza here. This kid has gone ape in trying his hardest to make me look like a puny man. He walked around the house like it was shirtless o’clock twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, flexing his slowly developing abdominal pack whenever I was nearby.
Couple this with my friend Alan Kwan’s patient, silent, and steady trips to the weight room at Lakeside until, at Beth and Ilana’s birthday party, he busts out of fucking nowhere and starts doing windmills in the dance circle, shocking and awing every single person in the room. I’m talking so much shock and awe, that Fox News itself took notice and ran an entry on the ticker for a few hours “Alan Kwan serves entire Lakeside senior class: ‘He came out of nowhere!’ witnesses report”. The occasions he took to change his shirt or something caused people to drop whatever drink they were holding because of his dramatic physique.
With these two together, it is basically clear that I am losing out in stature, physically and metaphysically, in the old Lakeside Normandy Park Carpool Azns.
Luckily, I hardly needed to try, because summer came and India did wonders to my physique, primarily because the vegetarian diet and constant movement caused me to drop ten entire pounds. I entered USC with this deficit, ready to keep it that way. For the most part, I believe this has been the case all the way up to today.
But something kept nagging at me to exercise in the back of my head. Put it this way – I’m not winded when I climb the three stories to my room, but I’m glad if somebody’s there to open the door for me. I am pathetically out of shape, and speed walking to class doesn’t solve this dilemma. When I happened to catch up on Alex C-W’s LiveJournal, which basically reads like the detailed day-to-day account of a damn Olympic marathon runner, I knew that I had to get moving, and soon. If not for physical appearance, then for being in shape when the inevitable shots are fired at me when I’m off-campus walking to my car.
The solution appeared to be in the most inappropriate and ironically named McDonald’s Swim Stadium, which boasts an Olympic sized lap pool open to everyone. One particularly optimistic Friday afternoon, I grabbed my trunks and goggles and biked off to attain the legendary swimmer’s physique. Hopefully, this would also drive the ladies wild (not that my luscious form doesn’t already. Just more wild). I changed and showered quickly while fat seniors with their ding dongs hanging out toweled themselves off.
The pool was remarkably empty, and I only had one other person in the lane I was in. Back in the day when I was a little kid doing swimming at the Normandy Park Swim Club (NPSC 4 Lyfe), I was a fiend at the breaststroke. I remember one event where I dove in and somebody false started. They lowered the rope at the halfway point to signify to the swimmers that they needed to start again. When I reached it, I confusedly tread water for a moment while another NPSC buddy and I made eye contact across two lanes. Reaching a subliminal agreement, we dove under the rope and continued our lap, to the profound chagrin and embarrassment of our parents. My mom might have just up and left at that point, I can’t remember for certain.
Another fond memory I have of the NPSC Swim Club days was pigging out on ice cream sandwiches before my event. Alan noticed this, and told me “Dude, you aren’t supposed to pig out on ice cream sandwiches before you swim,” to which I replied “Bitch, I’m not that good at breaststroke anyway.” That’s why Alan can windmill, and whenever I try, I stub my toe on the floor and limp around for a whole damn week. But I digress. With the knowledge of my swimming background, you’re probably expecting tragedy. So was I.
The first thing I noticed, half-way through my first freestyle half-lap, was that this pool was long. Really long. Fifty yards doesn’t look that bad when you’re on the land and still breathing air. But throw your fat self in deep water and try to make that distance, and you immediately perceive the cruelty of distance. The U.S.’s victories at the Olympic Games were fresh on my mind. Those jerks made fifty-yards look like child’s play.
I reached the other end gasping. I couldn’t get out now, because that would be too embarrassing, so I rested a moment before heading back, this time using the breaststroke. Again, I barely made it. Each time, I had to take longer and longer to recoup, the whole time thinking to myself, “What the hell have you gotten into this time, Freddie?” Every time I turned my head to breath (every two strokes) during my freestyle lap, I would try and make eye contact with the lifeguard, pleading to be freed from this torment. Not for her to rescue me, because that’d be embarrassing, but to take out the whaling harpoon that they must have (for the fat seniors, obviously) and shoot me with it, ending this whole fiasco as honorably as possible.
Luckily at the 250-yard mark, pride lost out and the survival instinct won, and I got out at the opposite end of the pool. “Got out” perhaps is a bit too graceful a term. Stumbled out and damn near fell right back in is more like it. My legs were jello. My head was swimming around wildly and I had trouble balancing. As gracefully as possible (which is to say, “not very”), I walked to my towel defeated, and stumbled into the shower room. My brain was pounding to be let out, and every muscle was loudly protesting “What the hell were you thinking back there!?” as I rinsed off. Getting back in my jeans was most embarrassing, as I could barely move my legs and force them into their respective holes. I told myself I would rue the day I would have difficulty putting on pants, and that day had come. I stumbled out of the Lyon Athletic Center, got on my bike and rode home on the slowest possible gear (the one reserved for the steepest of hills and the wimpiest of wimps) thankful I was alive. Back at the dorm room, I sat down, chugged a Gatorade (I earned it, I told myself), and spent the next hour on the verge of upchucking my EVK lunch everywhere. How people find exercise fun and invigorating is simply beyond me.
The next day, the Daily Trojan ran a small side-story about how lifeguards at the McDonald’s Swim Center rescued a freshman at the bottom of the diving pool (which is only half the length of the swimming pool).
A lifeguard at McDonald Swim Stadium rescued a student from the bottom of the diving pool at approximately 3 p.m. Sunday, said Andrew Worley, a lifeguard instructor at the Lyon Center.
The lifeguard administered CPR to the male student, who was later taken to the hospital by Los Angeles Fire Department paramedics.
At the time of the incident, the diving pool was open for lap swimming only. A swimmer pointed out the drowning student to the lifeguard on duty.
If a mere twenty-five yards is enough to hospitalize some freshman, then I was damn lucky that fifty yards and too much pride didn’t just kill me outright. That could’ve been me, except the article would have ended “died on arrival. Nobody knew what the hell he was trying to prove.”
Needless to say, I haven’t swam since.
-f.w.
