Bully-proof Fudge Stripes
Revenge is a dish best served at recess.
Just desserts
Updated 6/29/2018. The previous edition had a video demonstration of the false-bottom bag, which has since disappeared from YouTube.
The topic of bullying has encountered a resurgence in recent years. Or rather, I may not have been paying attention until it was time to place my own kid in school. The themes sound familiar, perhaps because the same problems existed when I went to school. Unchecked for decades. Except this one time in 1978.
Let me break down the hierarchy of bullies at the time: Fifth grade, there was Kyle, who parted his hair down the middle, Kim, the growling girl who yanked out clumps of her hair in front of you to show dominance, Justin, who was never the same after his accident with one of the first aluminum bats, and Tracy — the grade school answer to Rondo Hatton. Actually, when you’re the new kid, the ratio of established bullies to nice kids always betrays expectations, so let’s leave it at the majority of kids in that school being dickheads.
But I’d like to single out my time with Troy.
Troy was a third-level wanna-be. As anything in life, the third-level wanna-be’s are the worst, because they will scratch and crawl over anyone to try to get to the upper echelon. Troy was working out, growing out his mane, dipping Skoal, and came into the year thinking it was his year to make it. He knew it wasn’t mine, and I was the ideal pilot program for his brand of terror.
I’d moved around too much to inflict any damage on others. I was always a well-behaved kid, didn’t make waves. If I had to go to another school, it wasn’t because of anything I did, I made sure of that. I would leave that to my mom, who in retrospect was either chasing better jobs to support us, or outrunning the repo guys with a bounty on her Cutlass Supreme.
Now, one thing I’ve always prided myself on was my epicurean tastes, and Fudge Stripes were the appropriate pairing to baloney and cheese on white bread. The issue was, for the first week, I would never get to enjoy them. Every lunch, on cue, Troy would step onto the welded bench that fused the long lunch tables together, stomp down the empty row, vibrating my seat and stooping over to peer into the brown paper bag.
“What’ve you got for dessert?”
It was my first encounter with a rhetorical question. He didn’t want to know. He wanted it. He wasn’t going to ask for it. He wanted to see it, and take it. He took it for five straight days.
I was at an age where crying or whining over it seemed petty, but at a size where I had no real idea what my body image was, so taking matters into my own hands was a risk. The teachers and authority figures there were worthless. There’s a cruel paradox that as long as an institution sees assuring the safety of students as exposing themselves to liability, they will always be worthless.
No crying, no telling. I was on my own on this one. And I had a plan.
The bag
This was the first line of defense against Troy. Conceal the target. Employ a false bottom in the paper lunch bag, creating an illusion of scarcity until the threat had passed, then enjoy my cookies in peace, alone at the table, while everyone else retired to the playground for the ten minutes before the next class period.
One of the other things I always prided myself on was my studied application of magic tricks, one of my nobler pursuits between the third and fifth grades. If YouTube were around, I don’t know if I’d be sharing these masterful skills with other kids my age — that would give away the only advantage I had at the time. It was deceitful, it was clever, and it was the only way to keep everyone thinking the balance of power was unchanged and unchecked, but I had the sweet satisfaction of punching through the bottom to see every last morsel was mine.
That lasted over a month. My mom wasn’t the best manager of resources, but it didn’t take long for her to figure out we were running through lunch bags at twice the usual rate, and every penny counted. When confronted with this fact, I explained in detail the problem, the process and the results with a certain pride. I’d clevered my own way out of a conflict.
If my mom was impressed, she didn’t let on that day. She literally saw red. This was not solving a problem to her. This was prolonging a problem, and it was a problem that was costing her more money that she didn’t have. It’s like Troy had crossed the line, and not as much as he messed with her boy, but messed with our way of life.
That day, I learned there was a better way to deal with Troy.
The bottle
This was diabolical. This had all the earmarks of vendetta. This was a trademark family recipe, right up there with removing warts with snuff juice. Another thing my family was good at was inciting and ending conflicts. This was just one way.
Prep and Cook Time:
0 to 2 minutes, dry overnight
Ingredients and Supplies
- Six Keebler Original Fudge Stripes Cookies
- Approximately one teaspoon Tabasco brand pepper sauce. Flavor to taste.
- Plastic film or wax paper
- Two sandwich bags
Steps
- Lay out three of the six cookies on plastic film or wax paper, whatever’s on hand.
- Put the other three in one of the sandwich bags. These are the “clean” cookies for your consumption.
- The cookies on the counter get the treatment. Liberally dowse the cookies with the Tabasco sauce, but just enough to soak the cookie, not discolor it with the redness.
- Leave to dry overnight. They never fully do, but they’re less of a mess to scoop into the other sandwich bag. The “dirty” cookie bag.
- Don’t label the bags. You’ll be able to tell by smell which is meant for the mark.
- Enjoy your cookies in plain view, enticing your mark to make the move.
- Deliver the payload as a present. Continue eating yours calmly.
In Troy’s case, I saw him gingerly walk to the other side of the cafeteria, reach in to the bag, and gulp down one cookie whole.
Then he looked funny. Then he jerked. Then he yelled. Then he spit chunks everywhere, ran to the water fountain, and scraped his tongue in the pathetic stream. After a few minutes, he just slumped away down a hallway. There was no apology. There was none needed. I had just informed him to stop bothering me.
Honestly, I don’t remember encountering him again my entire time there.
The others, sure. I still got the wind knocked out of me by one kid or another. With that recipe, however, I knew that if I defended myself and lost one day, they could not sustain the onslaught. Their day would come. Either at my hand or someone else’s. Because I shared that recipe with younger kids as they came in. It wasn’t always effective, but for four years, everyone knew where it came from. It was a symbol of defiance. It was a tool for self-reliance.
Years later, it became the enduring evidence of a parent’s love for a child.
I pass this on to civilization in the hope that in some small way, people will stop fucking with each other.
CODA:
This is not an inspirational guide to being a better cook, or even a better parent.
This is a memoir in the guise of a recipe book, surreptitiously grasping at the threads of recollection to piece together wisdom. How do we raise future generations based on the well-intentioned missteps of our ancestors… and ourselves?
The advice inside is more of a celebration of the grasping. The earnest attempts. The half-assed failures. There is little I can tell you about parenting. The resulting dishes contain little to no nutritional value, should not be the staple of any human diet, and are usually containing the color brown.
