Triple Hug

A lunch time adventure in the boonies

Drive out from the center of a typical population center and you’ll first pass landfills and dumps, then prisons and asylums, and finally perhaps, the local nuclear plant. Society, it seems, has more tolerance for filth and danger than for the unknown. The stigma of a cooling tower banished us to the boonies where there are no restaurants, so when we chose a lunch spot, ZZ country store won by default … again. It was an easy choice - the other options are, in order of preference: vending machines, road kill, and the plant cafeteria, The Stomach Pump Cafe. The Pump is run by the only food service that comes out this far: the one that serves our closest neighbor, the state penitentiary. They took the contract, but reserve the best food for the primary customers. Even engineers shun "The Pump" and besides, this was a celebration. One of our own had jumped the fence - Randy Dan landed a job back east.

It was a bittersweet occasion that presented us with an emotional problem, so we devised an engineering solution - we reverted to adolescent behavior. I pulled the lead car through the security gate and turned onto route ZZ with a group of grown-ups bantering like tenth-graders cutting class. We were passing gas and appending each remark with sexual innuendo when our companions passed with horn blaring. I looked left in time to see a pair of buttocks pressed against a window and looking back at me. Both vehicles pulled into a gravel lot down the road and seven of us spilled out and went inside, still howling over the midday moon. A few farmers waiting for the planting season sat at picnic tables down at the service bay end, past the shelves stocked with motor oil and beef jerky. We joined them.

The waitress/head mechanic came up, pulled menus from her coveralls, and passed them around. They were actually red paper windshield wipes marked with smudged and hand-scribbled selections. Randy Dan, sitting across from me, silenced the room with his order.

"Triple hug."

ZZ country store is locally known for the hug burger. Its name originated from a semi-literate misspelling of "huge", and it has a simple recipe: squash a double handful of ground beef into a plate-sized circle and drop it in a vat of boiling lard. Cook for two minutes; nestle between slabs of bread, and slather with mayonnaise. Finally, serve it on a hubcap with a shovel full of potato wedges.

A double scares off most diners; a triple is insanity. The waitress’s jaw dropped and her gold tooth gleamed. (She may have been just showing off.)

"You’re joking?"

She didn’t know RD like I did. She twice offered him a chance to back down and then, with a shake of the head, hobbled off on her trick knee muttering something about his next bowel movement. Table talk resumed and betting broke out.

When the waitress heaved RD’s order up on the table, the triple Hug peak obscured everything but the fair hair atop his big mid-western mug. I gnawed on my burger and watched RD’s face rise slowly above a diminishing mountain. A hush fell near the end - like a bowling alley when someone is closing on a 300 game - and a roar arose when he downed the last bite, but he was too smitten to celebrate. RD looked fragile. I collected his winnings - afraid he’d erupt if he moved.

The waitress took our hubcaps back to the carwash, but we stayed to let our hero recover and spent the time building his legend (and arguing over who had to ride back with him). Though RD trembled like Vesuvius, he never blew, and we all finally went back to work.

Later, I stopped in his cube with the winnings, but a toxic cloud drove me back out. I tossed the cash on his desk and shouted. RD sat unconscious at his computer - victim of a food-induced coma.

"Hey man– you’re making a big carbon footprint."

The lids flickered. RD yawned and chuckled.

"There’s your cash." I pointed to the desk. "Was it worth it? That thing could’ve killed you."

He leaned left and grimaced before answering. I backed further into the aisle.

"You know", he said, "… when it’s your time to go, what better way than in the grips of a big hug?"