I've never been one for emotional eating. I much prefer to pacify my loneliness with vodka or a tightly rolled dubber and maybe a muscle relaxer now and then. I once pacified myself with all three and convinced Jen I was going to puke to death while I draped myself over our bear claw bath tub. Lately, a strong drink or five, simply is not doing the trick.. So now I've had no choice but to take up emotional eating, which as it turns out, is also not very healthy.
The coffee shop I work at, has the most indisputably delicious array of pastries ranging from an almond tea cake to a fucking cookie with candied almonds poured over a layer of thick dark chocolate. Sometimes if there are no customers in the shop and my boss is doing inventory in the back, I stand in front of the pastry display and stare at the glistening sugar crystals in the icing of the carrot cake or the swirls of cream cheese in our spicy pumpkin bread. At the end of the night someone throws them into a black trash can for the morning crew to throw away. It's devastating to witness.
Customers, if they see you dumping the pastries in the trash, will stop their conversations, look up from their lap tops and stop mid sip, and glare at you. I think it's interesting to watch the people's faces though, they all look confused, shocked and sad. I think it's been so ingrained into our minds and our DNA that discarding edible food is wrong, that people's minds short circuit when they see it happen. I once worked with a man named Perry at an organic grocery store and every time he would return from the baler, after dumping hundreds of pounds of food, he would look mortified. He would mope around for a short time after doing it, thinking, "what a waist."
The food industry is a disgusting place to work when you are hungry, because every food establishment I have ever worked for, throws away more food in a day than I could possibly eat in a year; and yet I'm pulling quarters out of my ass to buy a piece of shit cheeseburger off of a dollar menu. In small spurts of retaliation, I have eaten out of my employers garbage more times than I can possibly even imagine counting. If I have to throw away 26 rotisserie chickens because they've been sitting for two hours and legally they are no longer considered food, then I am going to do so while furiously eating 26 chicken skins by a trash compactor.
Usually, when no one is looking I will bury my face in the trash and dig out something delicious. Last night I went on a baked goods bender. I was shutting down the coffee urns and burned myself on the hot metal. Suddenly I was fighting tears so hard my face became flushed from holding my breath. My mom told me when I was a little boy that the only way to get rid of hick ups was to either eat a spoonful of peanut butter or hold your breath. I found out quickly that they only way I could stop crying was to hold my breath.
So there I was, leaning against a coffee maker holding my breath for as long as I could bare. I knew it wasn't the mild burn that I was holding back tears for, it was the fire raging in my head. It was like the burn jolted out of the mussel memory, mundane tasks of closing a coffee shop and brought me back to me. All of the uncertainty of California and of my decisions that have lead me here crept up and all it seemed I could to to keep from collapsing was to fill my lungs to their max capacity and freeze.
Luckily the trash can was over flowing with baked goods and I soon found myself violently shoving a fearful amount of carbs into my body. I was breaking cookies in half and biting the center of them, the center being all I'm really after when I eat a cookie. I was ripping open almond pastries, scraping out their marzipan centers into my mouth and discarding the buttery leftovers to the side like clam shells. I heard the door open and customers footsteps walk to the counter. I brushed the crumbs off of me, swallowed, dried my eyes and walked out to great them with an enthusiastic smile, a smile I have trained to look sincere in the face of customer service.
Holding my breath, I asked, "what can I get started for you today guys?"
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