The Eat-Off

I had this dream that our hometown would hold a restaurant eat-off where the fastest father/son combination on a burger scavenger hunt would win a trip to Wrestlemania. We totally would have won. I could eat two Big Macs in 12 minutes. With lettuce in my teeth and a timer in my hand, I nodded up the biggest smile I could muster, proud of the feat of beating my Big Mac record. Dad looked scared of the monster he’d created. "Son, you don't have to prove anything to me. I know you can eat."

By high school, conversations about what I ate never even came up around my parents. They had both gained considerable weight themselves, and we were one big, unhappy family, unless we were at the Rio buffett in Las Vegas.

Then I went off to college, and dad wasn’t there, but I kept the food dream alive, and on my own it seemed more shameful than ever. There were a new set of fast food restaurants I’d never seen. If I overslept and missed class I just had a free hour to hit up Chick-Fila. I hid my first crush on a guy and my Southern Baptist shame about it all behind a Cherry Limeade from Sonic. And finally at graduation, I got to take both of my parents to Luby’s so they could try the bread pudding that I discovered somewhere around the time I bounced out of the dorms the night my roommate caught me masturbating with a picture of the Ultimate Warrior taped above my bunk bed. They didn’t need to know about that last detail, though. The bread pudding was breath-taking.