Free Hyper-chondriac by Brian Frazer Page A

other kids in my neighborhood had a different routine. At a preordained time each night, they’d rush home so they could sit around a table with their families to discuss their lives as they ate delicious home-cooked meals. What losers! My dad came home from work, took our orders and forty-five minutes later we’d be handed a paper bag with our burgers, drumsticks or roast beef sandwiches. Then off we’d go to our respective rooms to sit alone in front of our respective ten-inch black-and-white TV sets and chow down. No forks, no knives, and often the only napkins would be what we were wearing. We didn’t even use spoons for our occasional soup—instead we just tipped the bowl backward and funneled the broth down our throats. I didn’t think of us as barbarians; we were just cutting out the cutlery middleman.
    The only time we ever sat down and ate together as a family was on Thanksgiving. My dad and I would drive down and pick up a precooked turkey and stuffing from Zorn’s, which not only had live turkeys roaming around in the gated area out back but had live peacocks as well—but not to eat, apparently just to make the turkeys feel less attractive.
    We’d then pick out some premade stuffing and a prekilled turkey and warm them up in our preheated oven, which was so seldom used we could have just left the door open and let my little sister use it as a desk. Regardless of our diligent preparation, we never made it through the entire meal intact.
    Family dining was like playing the game Ker-Plunk: a group of marbles are supported by a series of plastic sticks inserted into a clear Lucite tower. Each player then removes one of the sticks in the hope that it won’t be the one to send all of the marbles spiraling to their deaths like a group of handcuffed lemmings. No matter how carefully we watched our words or actions, one of us would invariably end the game of dinner by saying or doing the wrong thing.
    â€œBrian, leave all of the dark meat for your mother, please.”
    â€œThere’s plenty here. She’s not going to eat all of it.”
    â€œI asked you to please leave it!”
    â€œForget it, Sam!”
    Ker-plunk!
    Then my mother would storm off and go hobbling upstairs, which would take quite a while and give us plenty of time to try to persuade her to return to the table.
    â€œMa, come sit down! I put all the dark meat back!”
    â€œMom! We never get to eat together! Mark drove all the way from Oswego for this!”
    â€œMaw, cool yer pitz and sit back down!”
    But our fake peals of protest were ignored. The meal as we knew it was over and we’d have to wait another twelve months for our next food reunion. Anyone who was still hungry would finish in the privacy of his or her own bedroom while watching Tim Conway and Harvey Korman giggle on The Carol Burnett Show.
    Basically, those truncated Thanksgiving Day meals were the only non-fast-food meals in our house. Which explains my seamless transition into the world of college cafeteria cuisine. While all the other freshmen were incessantly bitching about the food being unhealthy and bland, not only was I pleased with the quality, I was ecstatic about the quantity. It was a veritable two-semester all-you-can-eat buffet.
    For me, the Emerson College cafeteria was the happiest place on earth. And I was all for taking advantage of the system. I’d get a large plate of eggplant parmesan, rice and potatoes and then tear into it with the planet’s oldest utensils: my hands.
    I had no idea this was odd. I thought other students were staring at me because they were just looking around and randomly stopping their eyes at each eater. Instead, they were enjoying the spectacle of my prehistoric dining methods as I violently tore apart food with my fingers. I later learned that the speed at which I ate was astonishing, too. I could go through three plates of food before people sitting near me had even