The Slim Jim

by Brock Clarke

My husband and I took our son out to dinner for his fourteenth birthday. We’d taken him to dinner at same restaurant for his fifth birthday, a five-year-old who had five-year-old tastes going to a very fancy adult restaurant for his fifth birthday and it could have turned out badly but it didn’t and he had loved it, and we had loved him, and he had loved us, but lots of things can change in nine years, and lots of things had, including, least importantly, my husband’s eyesight. He was wearing glasses now. He put them on to read the menu, took them off, held them away from his face, put them on again, brought the menu closer to his face, held it away from him. Our son, Craig, was also reading the menu, squinting angrily at the thing like he needed glasses, too, although he didn’t. He always squinted angrily, at everything and everyone, except when it was pointed out that he was squinting angrily, and then he would bug his eyes, also angrily.

“Why is everything in French?” our son wanted to know. Because it’s a French restaurant, I could have said, but didn’t, knowing that my husband would, and soon he did. Instead I said, “So beautiful.” I wasn’t talking about any of us; I was talking about the restaurant, which, before it became Le Miracle, had been a Catholic church. The ceiling soared. The stained glass glowed. The grand pipes of the organ…didn’t do anything. I was afraid for my son to notice it. Because he would then ask, “Does that thing even work?”

“Why is everything on this menu written in French?” Craig wanted to know.

“What a good question,” my husband said. His dead pan was so dead that it really did sound like a corpse might have spoken. I tried not to look at him. I wanted this to be a nice night. I needed it to be a nice night. We all did, I think. It had been a long time since the three of us had had one. It had been a long time since even two out of the three of us — any two out of the three — had had one. How bad had it gotten? I sometimes flipped through photo albums, looking at the pictures of us, say, say four years earlier, fondly remembering that as the time when we actually used to say goodbye to each other before leaving the house.

Craig closed the menu, loudly, like a door. There was a mountain range of pimples on the left side of his nose, and one enormous zit that might have also been a cold sore on the right corner of his mouth. He rubbed his nose, opened and closed that side of his mouth, open and closed it, doing his very best to crack the scab.

This was one of the many things my husband nagged Craig about: his face, how he wouldn’t leave it alone. I could see that my husband was fighting the urge to say something now, too. To his credit, I guess, he didn’t end up saying anything, but Martin — that’s my husband’s name — did take off his glasses, possibly so he couldn’t see our son’s face anymore.

In addition to his failing eyesight, Martin was going bald. He’d already gone gray. He sometimes wore cardigans. He was wearing one now, a gray one, under his blue sport coat.

For years I’d been exercising constantly, fanatically, trying to keep somewhat in shape, and it was only just barely working, and I had started looking forward to the day when I would decide to give up and get fat, and in fact, when I’d admitted that to Martin, just a day or two before Craig’s birthday dinner, in the hopes that he’d say something like, Go ahead and get fat, I’ll love you anyway, Martin instead looked at me shrewdly, over his glasses, and said, “Hey, good plan.”

We saw the worst in one another other, in other words, and when we weren’t seeing the worst in one another other, we did everything we could to bring out, and then see, the worst in one another. I was so tired of it, and Martin and Craig must have been so tired of it, too.

“What’re you going to have?” I asked Craig.

“I don’t know,” Craig said, and it sounded like I was going to cry and he must have heard it, too, because he picked up the menu, raised it to chin level, then dropped it on the top, bang, loudly enough so that I’m sure some of the other diners heard. The waiter had already brought over red wine for Martin and me, a Coke for Craig, and I could see him heading toward our table again, probably ready to take our order, but after Craig had dropped the menu, I saw the waiter raise an eyebrow, turn, and retreat to the kitchen. The restaurant had been loud a second earlier, but now, after Craig had dropped the menu, a funereal hush had fallen over the place.

When we’d asked Craig a week before this where he wanted to go for his birthday dinner, he’d said “Nowhere.”

“We’re not going nowhere for your birthday,” Martin had said, and I’d agreed.

“That would be depressing,” I’d said then.

“Why does everything have to be written in French?” Craig said now.

“Because this is a French restaurant,” Martin said. He said this in French. My husband was a French major in college, and so was I: we had first met, and fell in love, during our semesters abroad in Toulouse. We had been fluent then, and we were pretty close to being fluent now, too. I’d understood what my husband said, but of course Craig hadn’t: he was studying Spanish in school. “Because this is a French restaurant,” Martin said again, in French, and I saw Craig’s face turn even more murderous and I thought of how years later when people would ask their questions — why did your son kill your husband? Why did Craig kill his father? — I would think of this moment as one of the main reasons.

But no one ended up killing anyone. Instead, my husband sighed. He closed his eyes, leaned back in his chair, and told this story:

Two years ago I decided I was going to move out of the house and into an apartment. It was an apartment right off the interstate, in one of those buildings with a billboard on top that announced that if you lived there you’d be home by now. It was just after five o’clock. I had been at work. I was coming home. And I realized, when I saw that sign, that I didn’t want to come home. That I would rather go anywhere than go home, or at least the home I already had.

So I got off the interstate, drove on the frontage road to the apartment building. It was a brand new building. There were no lights on in it except for the lights in the rental office. There was a young guy in the office, a young fattish guy with a goatee. He was wearing a suit, a shiny gray suit with the double-breasted jacket fully buttoned even though the jacket was way too tight and the guy was sitting down, behind his desk. I asked the guy — he was the manager — if there were any apartments available, and he laughed. “They’re all available,” he said.

I took the first one he showed me, on the third floor, the top floor. “The penthouse suite!” the manager said, and laughed again, and then he took my check, covering my deposit and first and last month’s rent, and then he told me that water and utilities were included, and then he left. I listened to him walk down the stairs. The apartment walls and door were so thin that I could hear, three floors down, the office door open, close, then open, then close again. Then, the sound of the guy’s car starting and pulling away. I never saw, or heard, him again.

After the manager drove away I walked around my apartment. It wasn’t a long walk. It was a one bedroom apartment, with a bathroom, a living room, a kitchen that was basically just a corner of the living room, with a mini-refrigerator, a counter, a stovetop (no oven), a sink. On the nights when Craig stayed with me, I thought, I’d sleep on the pullout couch (which I’d have to buy) in the living room and he could sleep in my room. But being honest, I knew Craig would never sleep there. The whole place smelled like chemicals, like dry cleaning. I’m sure the walls, the ceilings, had just been painted, but already they were starting to crack and peel. There were soft spots everywhere in the Pergo floors, in the linoleum. I could see Craig’s face when, in the near future, I showed him around the apartment. “This is where you’ll sleep,” I’d say, and then point to my bed (which I’d have to buy) and I was sure he’d say, “Dad, no offense, but I’m never going to sleep here.”

And I knew that. That’s why I’d chosen the place: because I knew no one would ever want to be with me there, and so there would be no one to fight with, there would be no one to criticize, to nag, there would be no one to hate me, no one for me to hate, except for myself.

I imagined myself coming to the apartment at night, after work, sitting at the table (which I’d have to buy), eating dinner and having a drink (I’d have to buy the plates and utensils and glasses, too), in complete silence. I wanted that so badly. I was so hungry for that.

I was so hungry, period: it was dinnertime by now. There was a convenience store, a Red E Mart, across the frontage road from my building. I walked there, bought a microwavable chicken burrito from the clerk, brought it back to my apartment. My apartment! I’d never had my own apartment before. I’d lived with my parents, and then with my roommate in college, and then with you right after college, and then us with Craig after that. But this was my own apartment! My first meal in my own apartment!

Except my own apartment didn’t have a microwave. I remembered that only when I got back there and took the burrito out of its plastic wrapper and slipped it in into its cardboard sleeve and then realized I had nothing — no microwave, no stove — to put the burrito into. No frying pan to cook it using one of the two burners. No plate to put it on, either. No utensils to cut it up with and eat that way. No, if I wanted to eat the burrito, I’d have to eat it cold, with my hands.

So I did that. I did it to prove that I could. Because I had thought so many times of doing what I’d just done, of leaving both of you, just leaving and starting over again, but always something stopped me, always I let something — guilt, money, love — get in my way. The cold burrito was another one of those things. And I knew if I let it get in the way, if I decided that the prospect of eating an unmicrowaved microwavable burrito was too gruesome, too depressing, and that I should go home and then try again some other time, when I was better prepared, then I’d never move out, then I’d go back home and we’d all keep on making each other miserable, forever. Because we were making each other miserable. We’re still making each other miserable. I wanted that to stop. I still want it to stop.

So I ate the burrito. I removed the cardboard sleeve and ate the burrito. It was disgusting. It tasted more like a cardboard sleeve than food. I ate it anyway. To prove that I could. Which is not to say that I enjoyed it, that I lingered over it, that I savored it. No, by the end of the burrito, I couldn’t even stand to chew the thing, and instead just swallowed it, or at least I tried to swallow it, but I didn’t, or couldn’t, the piece was too big to swallow and instead it got stuck in my throat.

It got stuck there, halfway down my throat. But I wasn’t choking to death on it, not exactly. I mean, I could feel the chunk of burrito in there, it was definitely there, lodged halfway down in my throat, and while I couldn’t speak (I tried to yell “Help!” but I couldn’t get the word out, couldn’t even make a sound loud enough to be heard by someone else in the building, not that there was anyone else in the building to hear or help me anyway) I could breathe. I stood, there, in the middle of the kitchen, or kitchenette, or the part of the living room where the kitchen stuff was, breathing and breathing, just to reassure myself that I could. I could. That’s why I didn’t panic, at first: because at least I could breathe. Although my breathing did make a strange whistling sound, a sort of musical whistling sound as it went past, or maybe even through, the burrito.

OK, so I wasn’t choking yet. But still, I didn’t feel like I could just stand there forever, not choking, breathing, but not breathing fully, not breathing right. Of course, I could have driven to the hospital. But that seemed a little dramatic, and also like a surrender, like not eating the burrito because I didn’t have a microwave would have also been a surrender. No, I’d eaten the burrito, or tried to, and now I was going to have to get the burrito out of my throat, with no help, by myself, on my own.

So I pounded my chest. I don’t know why I pounded my chest — that’s not where the burrito was stuck — but I did: I pounded and pounded. I don’t know how long I pounded, but it was long enough for my arms to get tired, long enough for my chest to hurt the next day. Finally, I stopped. I was feeling exhausted, from all the pounding, but also, it occurred to me, because maybe I wasn’t getting enough oxygen, maybe enough oxygen wasn’t getting to my brain because of the burrito. The overhead florescent lights were buzzing and flickering. Maybe they’d always been buzzing and flickering but I only noticed them then, and the buzzing and flickering and maybe also the lack of oxygen were making my head hurt, so I turned the lights off. Then, except for the light from the tall light towers around the apartment building’s parking lot coming in through my one window (I had one window), the place was completely dark. That felt better. More peaceful. Which made me wonder whether the pounding has been a mistake, and whether I should try something less violent.

So I began massaging my throat. Just sort of gently rubbing it, like you would a child’s back when he’s sick upset, the way I used to do to Craig until that time, I forget how old he was, I forget whether he was sick or upset or both, all I remembered was that I started to rub his back and he said, “What do you think you’re doing?” and then he reached back and tried to slap my hand. At least I assumed that’s what he tried to slap. Maybe he didn’t care what he slapped. Or maybe he actually wanted, intended, tried to slap my face. Because that’s what he slapped. And then we had a big fight about it, and finally, at the end of the fight, I said, “How would you like it if I slapped your face?” And Craig said, “I’d like it, go ahead,” and so I did, I slapped his face, not hard, not hard enough for Craig to cry, not hard enough to hurt him, in fact the slap seemed to make him more defiant, more determined to fight, but still, I slapped his face, and then you said, “I can’t believe you just did that,” and I couldn’t believe it either, I felt so ashamed, but I didn’t say that, instead I said, “You would have done the same thing,” and then you slapped my face. That was the end of that particular fight. It was the only fight where anyone hit anyone else. But sometimes, during the fights after that fight, I actually wished someone would hit someone, because otherwise, the fights never seemed to have any logical endpoint, and without one they seemed like they might go on forever.

Anyway, I massaged my throat, in the dark. That didn’t work, either. If anything, it seemed to make things worse: instead of relaxing my throat it seemed to make it tenser. I could feel my throat tightening, could feel the chicken burrito expanding, somehow growing right there in my throat. There was less and less air coming out, and the whistling was getting quieter and quieter. And then the big lights over the parking lot went off — they were probably on a timer — and the room got darker. So, it was quiet, and dark. The way it gets right before the end of something. And for the first time, it occurred to me that I really might die.

So I walked to the sink (it was a one step walk). I turned on the faucet. But remember I didn’t have any cups or glasses. So I stuck my head under the tap and drank. Or tried to. But the tap was too long, or the sink was too shallow, and in any case I could barely get my head in there and turn it so that my mouth tipped up toward the faucet, could barely get any water in my mouth, only enough to get my mouth wet, only to get just a taste of how rusty the water was, and definitely not enough to dislodge, or wash down a large piece of chicken burrito that was stuck in my throat, that I was choking on.

Because I was definitely choking on it, now. Almost no air was coming in and out at all. The whistling sound had stopped altogether and the only sounds I could hear were the traffic out on the interstate. I was still leaning over the sink, and things were bad enough that I sort of left my body, and was hovering over it, examining this body that was bent over the sink, looking like someone about to throw up, and then I had an idea, and so I re-entered my body and stuck my finger down my throat so that I would throw up the burrito. For a few seconds I thought this was actually going to work. My body started heaving and I could feel my throat catching and releasing and my eyes started watering and then….I could feel the burrito drop, even deeper in my throat, so deep that there’s no way I could gag it up. I took my finger out of my mouth. My cell phone was on the counter, next to the sink. I thought about calling you and Craig, but even if I could talk, even if I could make myself heard, what could I say? That our life together was so unhappy that I’d decided, without even telling you first, to rent a terrible apartment, a terrible apartment that had made me happy because neither of you were in it — happy that, is, until I started choking on a cold unmicrowaved microwavable chicken burrito and now I needed you and would you come save me?

The thought of making that phone call seemed more impossible than dying. And driving to the emergency room, or anywhere, seemed impossible now, too: just the thought of turning the key in the ignition made me feel exhausted to death. I put the phone down on the counter. It seemed important to get out of that kitchen area. So I walked into the middle of the living room. I lay down, on the Pergo floor, to die. I lay there for who knows how long, the burrito growing bigger and harder and rounder in my throat, like a giant egg, it really did feel like that way, like the chicken in the burrito was going back in time, back before it was large chunks of chicken to be microwaved, back before it was a whole live chicken, back to when it was just an egg, and then I went back in time, too, walked myself, in my mind, back through all the attempts to get the burrito out of my throat, back to when I started first started choking on it, back to when I took it out of the plastic wrapper and realized I had no way to microwave it, back to when I bought the thing from the clerk in the Red E Mart.

I scrambled to my feet, feeling woozy in the dark, woozy and tired, but also superhumanly energized, the way I guess you are by last chances. I stumbled down the stairs, across parking lot, across the frontage road, into the Red E Mart. There was only one person in the mart, the clerk, who I knew, from when I’d bought the burrito in there earlier, didn’t speak English. I walked up to the counter, gasping, gasping, and tried to make myself understood in sign language. I grabbed my throat with both hands to show that I was choking, but I could see the look of alarm on the clerk’s face, could tell that the clerk thought that I was threatening him or something. So I took my hands off my throat and started pounding on my chest, again. That made the clerk look less afraid, but more confused. I then made the traditional of signing of wanting to write something down on a piece of paper, and that the clerk understood: he handed me a pen, a piece of paper. I wrote I AM CHOKING!!! But of course the note was in English and clerk couldn’t read it. In fact, he seemed more alarmed than ever. I didn’t know why until I urgently tapped the note and the clerk raised his hands and I realized that the man thought I was trying to rob him, that the note was a note demanding money, demanding that he open the cash register, the safe. “No, no!” I said, or tried to, waving my hands wildly, and in doing so I knocked over a display of Slim Jims, knocked them right off the counter, and onto the floor, all except one Slim Jim. I’d never eaten a Slim Jim before. I’d never really even looked at one before, but I looked at it now. Like the name said, it was slim, and also long. It was like the world’s slimmest, longest finger, encased in a bright yellow and red wrapper. The wrapper was so bright that it seemed to glow, like something there to guide you in the dark, something there to help you through rough times.

I grabbed the Slim Jim and without taking it out of its wrapper I jammed it into my mouth and down my throat, jammed it once, twice, and the third time the burrito came loose and I swallowed it. Then I put the Slim Jim back on the counter, thanked the clerk, left the Red E Mart, crossed the frontage road, got into my car, and drove home to you.

Martin told this story, almost every single word of it, in French.

After I realized that the story was going to be about the time he tried to leave us, I stopped looking at him. I looked at the table, looked at the menu, looked into my wine glass, looked at the ceiling, and finally, having run out of other places to look, I looked at Craig, who was looking at Martin, first in anger and annoyance, of course, but then, as the story went on and on and on, in curiosity, and then amusement, and then wonder. It was like watching Craig go back in time, to the time where the world was there to amaze him and not only to make him look bad. “I’ve missed you so much,” I wanted to say to him, but I didn’t want to break the spell. And I didn’t want Martin to stop telling the story, either. But he did, of course. He finished the story I’ve just relayed to you. He’d been leaning back in his chair the entire time, but now he leaned forward, took up his wine glass, took a sip, smiled at me, and Craig, and then said, “Dieu merci pour le Slim Jim!”

Craig laughed and laughed, laughed even harder than when he was a happy kid and laughed all the time. I think it was hearing all that French, all at once, which must have sounded like so much gibberish to him (as far as I know, Craig thought it was gibberish: he’s never asked what the story was about, if it was about anything, and I’ve never told him) peppered with and then punctuated by the stupid English words he knew: “Slim Jim,” “Red E Mart.” Craig laughed until I thought he was going to hurt himself, laughed until other people in the restaurant were noticing, the way they’d noticed him dropping his menu earlier. I cared then; I didn’t care now. I thought, let them notice; let Craig keep laughing forever. Finally, when he’d gotten a hold of himself, Craig said, “Sleem Jeem,” in a cartoonish French accent, and then Martin and I laughed, too, laughed almost as hard as Craig had been laughing. This seemed to please him. The waiter came over to take our order, and Craig asked Martin, “What’s the French word for hamburger?” Martin told him — “Hamburger” — and Craig laughed at that, too, and then asked the waiter, very politely, if he could please order a hamburger, even though it wasn’t on the menu. The waiter said sure, and then Martin and I each ordered whatever it was we ordered, and whatever it was, it was good, and Craig’s hamburger was good, too, and all in all I think it was his nicest birthday since he was five years old and we’d first gone to that restaurant and were all so in love with each other.

Two hours later, after we were home, after Craig had said goodnight and we’d said, “Happy birthday, we love you,” and he’d said, “Me, too,” Martin and I decided to split a beer before we went to bed. He’d taken off his sport coat (he was still wearing the cardigan) and I’d taken off my high heels. We were in the kitchen, with its fully stocked shelves and cabinets and refrigerator and its restaurant quality gas stove and oven and in the middle of the room the island with the bar stools around it. I wondered if Martin had been seeing all these things two years earlier while he was lying on the floor of his empty apartment, choking. I’d thought about that apartment a lot over the previous two years. Because I was the one who did all our bills, and balanced our checkbook, and of course I’d noticed that some real estate company I had never heard of had cashed his check, and of course I’d called the company, and of course the manager of the apartment complex had told me that Martin had rented the apartment, and then abandoned it. I never mentioned this to Martin. His near-death experience must have made Martin forget that he’d ever written the check in the first place, because he’d never mentioned it to me, either, not until he’d told the story in Le Miracle. But often, when Martin was either being made miserable by me or Craig, or when he was making us miserable, I wondered why he bothered to come back, why he hadn’t just stayed in the apartment. And now that he’d told the story, I also wondered why he’d bothered to get up off the floor on which he had lay down to die. Because in my heart, Martin was already dead. He had died when he’d slapped Craig and when I then slapped Martin. And then he died some more when I found out he’d gotten the apartment, when I realized he didn’t have the guts to move out, didn’t even have the guts to tell me that he’d rented the apartment in the first place. And now that he’d finally told the story, and seemed to think the story should make me forget all of that, I was sure that Martin was finally and truly dead to me. You’re dead, I wanted to say to him. Why don’t you just go away forever? Why did you come back? Why didn’t you just stay in your apartment? Why didn’t you just stay down on that floor in your apartment until you died? “Why…” I started to ask, in English, but before I could finish Martin kissed me. I kissed him back. We kissed for a long time. We might still be kissing if I hadn’t accidentally knocked Martin’s glasses off his face and onto the floor. We stopped kissing. Martin leaned over, picked up his glasses, put them back on his face, and I thought the moment was lost, ruined, but then Martin looked at me through his glasses, shrugged — a very Gallic shrug, I remembered it from Toulouse — and said, in French, “I wanted to live.”