SPEAKING OF SACRIFICE, HOW ABOUT A TORNADO SANDWICH?

Sacrifice visits all our lives in many forms. One may think, for example, of Kurt Vonnegut's famous character, Billy Pilgrim, slipping in and out of time: One moment, like everyone else around him, Pilgrim is living a conventional life, with conventional mores, along conventional routes governed by conventional laws. Suddenly everything changes and Pilgrim is thrust into a sort of cosmic blender in which past, present and future all collide. He is greeted by the Transfamadorians, little aliens that look like plumber's helpers, except they have hands on the tips of the helper handles, and in the middle of the hand sits an eye. He drifts back in time when he and his fellow prisoners were held fast by the Nazis in a Dresden meat locker as Allied forces created a firestorm above them in the fiercest bombing campaign in history. He's imprisoned on the moon with the most beautiful woman on earth and is seen having sex with her inside a lunar zoo.

This, in my life at least, is called a tornado sandwich.

The year is 1987. Like old Mother Hubbard, my cupboard is bare. Nothing but spiders in the old pantry. In fact, as I stand there staring at nothing but bare shelves, I note that the only things I have to eat may indeed mix together to form a halfway palatable recipe: one envelope of powdered milk and about half a pound of white flour. Mmmmmm! Sounds good!

Add some spices, a little salt and pepper, and wow! I'm a white trash gourmet.

I get to mixing the concoction in a nice plastic bowl. The bowl is pink. It looks like a Tupperware knockoff. Using a baker's spatula, I knead the material until it is next to lumpless and then I try to form it into little patties. But that's no use. The stuff is too runny. What I have left is nothing but flavorless mush.

Oh yeah. Flavorless mush. Sounds a lot like my life. Drifting backwards in time, I stand there in the kitchen and dream of the State Fair of Texas around 1982--when a buddy and I visited the freak show. One of the famed freaks was purported to be the world's fattest woman, and from the freak show picture, one of those over-dramatized and cartoonish likenesses, she's got to be at least six or seven hundred pounds.

We threw down our dimes and ducked into the steamy tent. There was some guy sticking a six inch nail into his nostril. While most people were exclaiming things like, "What about his brain?" and "Shut up! He's got it in his sinuses!", I was thinking, "Man. I'd hate to be the one to clean the snot off that nail, dude."

When the big moment came, when the fat lady appeared, the crowd gasped. Out strode the fattest, grossest woman I've ever seen--and to make it even worse for all of us, some idiot in the freak show's corporate office had forced the poor woman to wear a teeny-weeny yellow polka dotted bikini. That was sick. I told my buddy exactly that.

The woman's skin was sallow and pale. She didn't look either healthy or happy. She looked numb. Perhaps she was on drugs. And when she plopped a humungous behind down on a simple wooden chair, the chair squealed like a kicked dog. The legs even bowed as if to break. Of course, I figured that was a calculated effect. Fingering the change in my pocket, I imagined at the time I had made a good investment in coming to see the world's fattest woman. This was priceless.

The woman held a tupperware bowl in her hand. In the bowl was some kind of mush. As the announcer talked up the audience about the woman's weight and her obvious pathological condition and the fact that she hadn't been able to hold down a conventional job for years on account of her weight, the woman would leer at the audience and slurp up white, floury mush with a wooden spoon. The spoogy stuff would drool down her chin and onto her breasts. Had I been some kind of pervert, this would have been literally sexual.

Now, in 1987, I am standing in my kitchen, looking out at Central Expressway, slurping mushy flour and milk out of a pink tupperware bowl. I am stripped to the waist. The stuff has dribbled onto my chest. The scene must be priceless. But it is the only thing I have left to eat. What else can I do but re-enact the freak show fat woman's horrific occupation right there in my kitchen?

Later that evening, an old friend stops by. He tells me, "Gordon, I know you've been having a rough time. I think you need a night out on the town."

"Great," I tell him.

"I think we ought to go down to Deep Ellum. Wanna do that?"

"Sure."

So we jump into his car and drive down to the Video Bar, a hopping nightclub in 1987-era Deep Ellum. Once there, my buddy begins buying me shots of tequilla. Naturally, having so much pride, I've neglected to tell him I haven't eaten anything but flour and milk. What my stomach is thinking as it is getting dousing after dousing of straight alcohol more than likely has something to do with priorities, something like, "Try eating first, then celebrate."

But apparently I have it backwards that night. I don't know what's wrong with me. I'm pretty unresponsive. When Mary, an aspiring girlfriend, arrives, I'm not too cheerful, at least not from her viewpoint. From my viewpoint, Mary's pretty brown eyes and blonde hair are starting to blur and make tracers. But my buddy oblivously continues to buy me shots. He doesn't know I haven't eaten in days.

"I think I'm gonna dance," I slur.

"Go dance. Have a good time, Gordon."

On the dance floor, I think I am Fred Astaire, but I'm actually staggering. People are laughing at me, but I'm thinking they are laughing because I am so much fun, not because I am so drunk I look like a fool. Finally, with a flourish, I pirouette, and, like a tornado, go down to the floor. Mary and my buddy wade through the crowd to fish me out.

The next thing I know, however, is my buddy picking me up off the pavement outside: "Gordon? Gordon? What are you doing out here? You're taking up some guy's parking space!"

I awaken spread-eagled and face down in the middle of Elm Street.

Sometimes, I wonder about the fat woman at the freak show, how she actually came to that conclusion in her life. What brought her to a circus? What moment in time was so offensively bad that it looked like an opportunity to dress up in a teeny-weeny yellow polka-dot bikini and eat floury mush in front of gawking freak show geeks? She, like me in the street that night, like Billy Pilgrim awakening in that Dresden meat locker, had been hit by a tornado sandwich.