Tongue-In-Cheek … Foot-In-Mouth

There was a time I would enter a gym and dive right into my workout WITHOUT warming up.  I could bench press a bison without worry of pain, strain, or being maimed.  But nowdays I have to stretch out BEFORE I go to the bathroom, and if not, I risk being stranded on the toilet in traction.  And I never needed to take as much as a ¼ of a Tylenol tablet before.  But now I’m popping pills out of a Pez dispenser, and I have a certified CVS pharmacist living in my medicine cabinet using an oversized shovel to dispense the piles of pills needed for my plentiful pelthora of aches and pains.

What’s worse, I’m more confused than ever, if you can believe that.  And doing the simplest things like trying to figure out if Ted Kennedy would make a good lifeguard or how to order fast food fast has become a whole perilous process.  And that is why, when it comes to ordering fast food, I’ve implemented my Neanderthal point-and-grunt ordering technique, whereby I drag my knuckles up to the counter, point at a picture of a sandwich, grunt, get my food, and eat it.  This procedure is so easy a caveman or Bill Drury could do it.

This is unlike my wife’s meal gathering method, because she not only can remember what goes on a every sandwich, she can modify her meals, and by telling the person taking her order to “hold this, not so much of that, and put the patties on the side,” she is able to take a Double Whopper with cheese and transform it into a plain fish sandwich.  The woman is haunted.  She’s an alchemist extraordinaire who could teach Merlin the Magician a few “look,-nothing-up-my-sleeve” presto-chango pranks.

Look, I admit it, I don’t know from “special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, and onions on a sesame seed bun.”  So I continue to point-and-grunt like an Australopithecus, which is fancy fast food talk for “pick your knuckles up off the ground and stand up straight!  You’re giving us orangutans a bad name!”

Sadly, my point-and-grunt primitive practice does not always pan out.  Take last month for instance when I was in south Philadelphia doing some stand-up.  In-between sets I decided to grab some grub, and when in south Philly, much like when in Rome, you do as the south Phillies do: you take a gondola ride and get yourself a pizza.  ONLY KIDDING!  You get yourself a “Pat’s” cheesesteak sub.

At “Pat’s” they expect you (get this) to order in a specific way—their specific way.  Ha!  And if you do not follow their strict ordering regime they will kick your butt to the curb, and they do not care if you plead or grovel, as evidenced by the fact that fannies were flying left and right to the back of the line.  And if you don’t order correctly, for all they care you can starve to death on the sidewalk.  Trust me; these guys were so serious they made the ‘Seinfeld Soup Nazi’ look like a delicate dictator by comparison.

I did not want to starve on the street.  All I wanted was a stupid cheesesteak sub.  But in order to get one I had to first master this vendor vernacular.  And from what I could muster, it all had something to do wit the words and phrases “whiz-wit,” which I think stood for “a cheesesteak with onions, peppers, mushrooms, and you can’t forget about the cheese-whiz, hence the word “whiz,” or “whiz,” which I think stood for “plain cheesesteak with cheese whiz,” or “whiz-wit-out,” which I think stood for “a cheesesteak without onions, but you kept the peppers, mushrooms, and of course cheese whiz.”

BUT I could not be sure what was what with all that “whizzing” and “witting” going on.  And short of swapping my brain with that of a donkey, moving my IQ up two points, I would never be able to get the whole “whiz-wit” thing down in time to place my order.  So I did the only thing I could do: cheat by way of scribbling “whiz-wit-out” on the palm of my hand.  And then I studied my order using the same level of intensity normally associated with one parent pretending like they do not hear the crying baby, and instead continue to fake like they are asleep so the other parent, who is also pretending like they do not hear the crying baby, and who is also continuing to fake like they are sleeping, will have to get up and administer the 2 o’clock feeding.  And both parents must concentrate real hard, because the first one who twitches is assigned the responsibility to climb out of the nice warm bed and feed the nuisance never-sleeping newborn.

Anyway, I hadn’t studied that hard since my SATs, but I’m glad I did, because before I knew it I was at the front of the line, and it was my turn to order.  I gulped a mighty gulp and stepped up to the window only to come face-to-face with a guy wearing a stone-face chiseled from granite, only slightly stonier.  Instinctively I wanted to scream and run away, but instead I blurted out: “WHIZ-WIT-OUT!”

The good news was I had passed the test, and was told to “pay up, step aside, don’t move, and wait for my order.”  The bad news was even after all that studying, I had no idea what I just ordered.  I could have requested a frog skin, maggot, and marshmallow manicotti.  But luckily, instead, I had correctly requested a large cheesesteak without onions, but with peppers, mushrooms, and of course, cheese whiz, which tasted out of this world.

Well, anyway, I have to go.  My witchcraft wife just turned a Wendy’s single with cheese into a hotdog.  Now if I can only get her to turn that hotdog into a winning Power Ball lottery ticket.  Just imagine the prestidigitation possibilities.

Copyright 2009 Billy Drury.  All Rights Reserved.