– An Easy Spread –

I’m in the first grade. It’s lunchtime, and I’m at the table with my classmates, eating a hamburger. We are daring each other to eat the most disgusting things we can think of, and squealing in delight when someone does it. Gabe wolfs down a horrendous mountain of chocolate milk, mashed potatoes, and canned peas. We shriek with six-year-old glee as he shovels the mound into his gaping maw. Nathan, in turn, eats a ketchup-and-succotash slurry, with half of Julie’s Tastykake cupcake as a garnish, in one bite. He smiles with the bitter triumph of someone who’s just scaled a treacherous ice mountain and gotten frostbite.

It’s getting competitive, and I want to join in the fun; to make a name for myself. What do I do?

I take a big bite of my hamburger, chew it, spit it out onto my tray…and re-eat it.

As the rest of my classmates screech in horror, loud enough  for us to be reprimanded by the teachers, I realize, as I’m finishing off the disgusting, grey lump of half-masticated beef, that it’s not half bad.  In fact, I secretly enjoy it. It still (sort of) tastes like hamburger – and, given that the day’s lunch consisted of government-regulated, public school frozen beef patties, who was to know the difference anyway?

The bun is wadded into a wet, gummy, white-bread glop around the hamburger…and, in its crowning glory, there are little globs of orange American cheese to savour, drowning in a divine, bright-yellow pool of French’s mustard.

Oh, the beautiful irony of bovine gourmandizing, in hamburger form! But it somehow pleases my puerile palate. I feel only a small sense of shame at this culinary hedonism, mixed with the glee that I had grossed out my class.

I win. I’ve succeeded in being the most disgusting person at the Grade One lunch table. But at what price?

This horrible story of how Alice Ate The Chewed-Up Hamburger floated around my school for years; and was even brought up again sometime in high school, much to my embarrassment.

But Oh! if they only knew my deep dark pleasure from that grotesque paté.

For, you see, I didn’t stop my birdlike eating habits in the first grade. Oh, no. Though I never ate a hamburger in this fashion again, I did take the idea to new, furtive heights in the land of saltines.

I would chew up one or two crackers, spit the saliva-soaked cracker spread onto another cracker, plop a saltine on top, and eat it like a sandwich.  It tasted quite good, actually. The mixture of moisture and dry made eating the saltines more pleasurable without the unnecessary addition of, say, more traditional spreads, like peanut butter. But, yes, it was disgusting. Utterly disgusting.

My secret shame lasted well into high school. I taught my sister the pleasures of eating spit crackers one day. Surprisingly, she has continued the tradition…but I have since given up eating saltines.

I don’t judge.

Guest writer Alice Teeple lives in State College, PA where she hones her skills at improv comedy and posts religiously at her website, The Mad Vortex.