When I first started to write this, it was called “Mayo Shrimp at the School Shooting,” since I knew there had been a shooting – that’s what the topic is, obviously – but my memory had failed me and I’d naturally assumed and falsely remembered it was a school shooting. An understandable enough guess.
Seven of my friends and I – all of us comedians – had just finished up a weekend Saturday game of basketball. I’ll leave it up to your imagination to guess how well that went, but a fun time was had by all, if a comic’s idea of fun is to make fun of their friends. Which it is, so it was.
Being the mind shattering examples of perfect physical specimens we naturally were, we decided to convene for an after game lunch at that pinnacle of health conscious cuisine known to athletes everywhere as the Chinese Buffet.
The Chinese Buffet is a particularly American Masterpiece of theater. It’s three to four long heat lamped tables, with one long sunken rectangle shaped hole filled with water, going down the middle almost the whole length of each, west to east. Placed in 2 by 3 or 4 batches of smaller steel rectangle bins suspended on top of that water within these tables is whatever steam heated semi-sustenance can survive for the longest amount of time – chicken fingers and wings and wontons of some sort with vaguely Chinese names written in English hanging over all of it, low rent old fish, basic Midwestern supplies of roughage vegetables like corn and potatoes, and any other small, easily, and cheaply mass produced starch, cheese, vegetable, protein, or combination thereof. If you find one that offers pizza slices and French fries, that’s how you know you’re at a good one. In front of these long beds of decadence that would make a feasting hall ancient Viking weep with joy, you see every beautiful version of the American humanity that you think is just made up for cartoons.
Hipster 20 to 35 year olds, eating there because they don’t know how to cook, or don't want to cook, or don't have the effort to cook after mutually embarrassing themselves in synchronized basketball goofery, making the most of the Actual Human Interaction they’ve happily fallen into (since being a comedian and spending every night at a different bar doesn’t really count as hanging out with your friends like a real human being). There are day laborers getting as much unstoppable all-you-can-eat last-all-day sustenance as they can on $18.95 and try to make it until they fall asleep that night and make it to tomorrow. A mother and father on their third marriages – their second try with each other – and their 3 to 5 children, from one or some of the other previous couplings, either sprung from a by-the-book matrimony or not, but most likely not. All of them being lit softly by the reflecting light coming from inside the table above the food, bouncing off the surface, coming filtered up through the glass of the sneeze guard, making each customer look like an undershone god who’s either about to tell the food a campfire ghost story, interrogate it, or both at the same time. All of it basked in the wet steam heat.
Asian-American citizens that run the restaurant who, statistically speaking, are quite possibly not Chinese at all, but know that American’s wouldn’t have any appreciation about the subtle differences between the separate cultures and would probably be scared away anyway so they just picked the easiest foreign adjective to paste on this empty building where they’ll be serving cottage cheese right next to the soft serve ice cream. The employees come and go as great muscled but invisible specters, lifting an enormous and full metal bin of wings or fish for the 8 millionth time of their lives into the formerly empty spot, paying no mind to the slippery burning heat on their fingers since the callouses have all grown into some kind of new Uber-skin. You fool yourself into thinking that this “new” bin of food must be “fresher,” so you rush to get the first portions, since that’s how you believe the rules of time work. Not knowing that since things run differently in a Chinese Buffett all the food is always and forever at the exact same temperature – just short of peak “comfort food” warmth yet somehow always still warm enough as to be bland on the tongue – whether it’s just come straight out of the kitchen or has been sitting on the buffet table for several minutes, hours, or perhaps days, who can tell.
There is usually no table service, and since you’ve already paid the full buffet price before you sat down, you can go your entire meal without having to interact with another employee for as long as you live, for all they care. It’s what I think Libertarians imagine the country would be like if their philosophy actually worked: “Here’s your money up front, don’t talk to me ever again about anything." There are no birthday songs brought to customers at the tables, no small talk, nothing besides the sacred quest of paying, taking, and leaving. It’s what Ford could’ve only imagined, only instead of building cars it’s an efficiency of human intake, and only intake, as much as they could want, so that the subjects can return to work, and only work, as much as they can manage, before being rudely forced to eat or sleep again, at the behest of their weak human bodies. Compared to a Chinese buffet, a McDonald’s has atmosphere. I heard if you look for Chinese Buffets, Golden Corrals, or Shoney’s in groups of five on a map they always form a pentagram.
I was so excited. My group of wannabe professional clowns paid for our meals-to-be, all jacked up pretty well on endorphins from more exercise than we were likely to get for the next 6 days and 22 hours. We were all in a good mood. The ironic thing is that we stayed in a good mood even after we had sat down and saw on TV that there had been a gun nut maniac in El Paso, Texas who had shot up a Walmart earlier in the day while we were holding our own dramatic reenactment in Minneapolis earlier that morning of “White Men Can’t Jump.”
It didn’t affect our meal in the least. And that’s not even to say we were the callous ones at the restaurant; we were the only one’s watching the TV. Not that we didn’t care – we felt like the only ones who cared – we were just bored with it, more than anything. Other than the obvious joke that the shooter probably bought that gun at the same Walmart he used it, there was nothing inspiring about it. Shootings had entered into that fetid and dismal hall in the mansion of standup comedy known as the Basement Wing of Hack Premises. Right alongside airline food & the deal thereof, shootings are something so pervasive in America that the vein of creativity has dried up. There’s nothing special about them anymore. You’d sooner find a comic with a hot take on the sun rising before you found someone who thought mass shootings had any surprise left in them. And without a surprise in a joke, it’s not a joke anymore. Now all you’re left with is just someone’s opinion about something. Gross.
Luckily, soon after we sat down, someone came back with their second plate of food and had stumbled upon a magical wet white glob of buffet tadpoles that the sign above the bin claimed was called “Mayo Shrimp,” and it immediately had our full attention. This looked like a horror movie monster had budded asexually with placenta like white paint. I felt I was looking at the pinnacle of culinary “fuck you who cares you’ll eat it” in the history of Chinese Buffets, and that’s saying something. It was a work of multicultural, amoral, post-modern art, like something Andy Warhol dreamt up during a heroin nap. No pretense to Chinese or even Asian cuisine was made or expected. It was the funniest thing we had ever seen.
Immediately, of course, there were challenges thrown around the table about who would eat it. I leapt at the chance – which I assume you had already guessed, since you’re reading this; eating it was my payment that meant I earned the right to make some kind of work of art out of the experience, all my friends having respectfully creatively restrained themselves since that day – and I took a forkful simultaneously with my girlfriend.
It tasted, felt, crunched, squished, and smelled like a fat, half pre-chewed stick of gum covered in sweat, like the boneless finger of a 400 pound dude who’d just been on the treadmill for an hour and a half on January 2nd. It was soggy. It was the pure crunch of wet soggy. It was a sick lump of skin with a tail aglet at the end, like a shoelace has, but crustaceanal, all of it covered in mayonnaise. Mayonnaise that had been sitting out, under heat lamps. I saw god. A vengeful god. It was the most fun I’d ever had in a restaurant that makes you serve yourself.
Lots of other cultures – all of them, I’d venture to guess – have some kind of pride for their food. Local customs and cuisines, ancient recipes handed down from 300 year old matriarchs who know the trick for “good cow tongue.” America does not have these recipes. I would even venture that it doesn't want them. Recipes and traditions are something that can only be Done Correctly. They involve rules. That’s not really our style. We don’t want to get Something Right According to How People Did It Before Us, we are only searching for the other direction. We want to swing for something so unabashedly weird that our ancestors can’t even stay mad at us when they see us eating it, simply because of the fact that what we’re making doesn’t even fit in their culinary morality. It’s literally incomprehensible. Like trying to get a round octopus through a square hole, but with your mouth.
Try a quick thought experiment with me: Where is the best place in the world to get Vietnamese food? The obvious answer being, Vietnam. That’s how accuracy works. The best Russian food will be in Russia, the best Polish food will be in Poland. Columbian, French, Somali, Indian, for the best kind of food from each country, you’d have to go to that country. That’s simple logic. Every country has the first place winner of that country’s food. America does not have its own food. America does not have the first place winner of anything. But what it does have – that no other country has – is the second best of everything. You can’t get better Vietnamese food in America than you would in Vietnam, but you can get better Vietnamese food in America than you would in Italy. You can get better Ukrainian food here than you would in India. You want a quesadilla in Poland? Go fuck yourself. It won’t happen. Or it’ll be such an abomination of mistranslation that it’ll give you nightmares for a decade, like the hotdog I had in Athens, Greece. Don’t ask. Suffice to say it was even worse than Mayo Shrimp. Believe me.
That is our American exceptionalism: everyone from every country that each homeland was stupid enough to let escape into our warm, weird bosom. Their loss. Tough nuts great leader, we got the guy over here who invented Mayo Shrimp. You decided to chase him out and try to kill his whole family because his shirt was the wrong color. Now you get boring food. You can keep it.
There is no crime more cardinal in America than being boring. Nothing worse than expecting things to stay the same. It’s the one thing that is anathema to everything that America stands for. It is the absolute zero on the bill of rights, the unwritten rule. The number before the numbers. It’s not even against the rules to be stupid, as long as you’re not predictable. Then you deserve whatever happens to you. You will be judged and found guilty by your peers, left to rot in a sad gray room with no windows and only your mind – who also happens to be your worst enemy – forever, you sad, mentally dented goofball, for doing the same thing that every other boring dude with a boring gun wants to do – keep things boring. I might be willing to admit that maybe guns don’t kill people, but I know boring people with guns sure do. Those are the two key ingredients.
I am a big fan of this country. Most of it. Almost all of it. All the weird parts, and even most of the stupid ones. That category includes me, since being a comic is definitely a pretty weird, dumb way to try and make a living. No one is safe. Anyone dumb enough to stay, or at least stay living in a major metropolis, farm land, village, township, cult, planned utopia, or live in a treehouse in these 50 states has definitely got something going on upstairs. There are plenty of countries elsewhere, why not try one of those? I’ve even been to a few. I’ve got family there, why don’t I try somewhere else? Somewhere that saying the word “free” in front of normal human economic rights doesn’t start a fight in a bar. Never mind the guns, anywhere that just doesn’t have Walmarts would definitely be a step in the right direction.
I stare at that paragraph, and I know I could never do it. I couldn’t leave. Not now, not for at least another 30 or 40 years. Once I’m old and boring and useless, I’ll kick off to some other country who wants to take care of me. Someplace else where everything makes sense, the day has a natural flow to it, cause and effect have a natural progression to themselves, and if you want to know what happened you can just read the newspaper, because it’ll all come to your door. How nice and quiet, just like our grandparents used to do.
I couldn’t do that right now. Not God’s waiting room, every other developed country in the world. I like it too weird. It’s a brain drug now. Anywhere else would feel like being stuck at a bad county fair for the rest of your life. The only place I happen to arbitrarily draw the line is that no one deserves to die. I don’t think that’s too much to expect. Mass shootings of innocent people are not an American requirement for America to stay America. Mayo Shrimp might be, guns might be, even violence might be. But every other spot with expected demolition – NASCAR pileups, football concussions, airshow combustions, even Walmart Day After Thanksgiving tramplings – can’t be called a random act of god. You knew what you might be in for. You bought your tickets for a front row. Unless you can’t read, or you were kidnapped and brought there, you knew your Vegas odds. But some unkissable sad boy using a gun just to shoot anybody who walked in front of him is an insult to America, gun owners, the founding fathers, and Evil Knievel. Boo. I’d rather drink Nighttime Robitussin and watch a magician perform at an old folk’s home. Back in high school, my friend Clint left a dozen eggs hidden in the shelves of the giant Shopko store near my house. No one found them until they’d gone bad and started to smell, AND he had written a dozen random numbers between 1 and 18 on them, so that even after they found all twelve, they’d always wonder if there were some left behind. Those are mind games I can get behind. That’s my kind of terrorism. Something with a little flourish, some panache. I’m still talking about him now. Does anyone remember even one of these shooter’s names at this point? I don’t. Certainly not this El Paso dink. I remember Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, but that was over 20 years ago at this point. And you always remember your first, unfortunately.
Everything these kinds of people have done since then is a hack premise now. And obviously, everyone hates them when they’re doing it. Out of all the insane ways people hurt themselves for fun, you’d think a would-be killer would have no problem finding victims to play along with his thrill crazy rampage. Just put up a flier a week beforehand and say, “Hey, I’m thinking of turning the VFW into Swiss cheese next Tuesday. Any takers to be my huddled praying masses hiding in the coat closet?” It’s the first sign of failure: no one wants what you’re selling. They’re always running away from you. Mass shootings are like when you go see a play, and at the end the actors come down into the audience to try and get you to sing with them; no one signs up for that bullshit voluntarily. And believe me, people will subject themselves to some weird stuff just to have a story to tell.
That’s what America is; everyone’s one weird story they get to have that they bring home and annoy everyone in their family with, telling them about how it happened, at every social gathering for the rest of their lives. We give that gift. Except someone’s one story is happening somewhere in America every day. Everyone in the world comes to America to get their story, and that can be tough for us to provide. It’s a lot of responsibility, being circus for the world. Being that weird, day in and day out, just so the rest of the world has something interesting to tell strangers back home. Luckily, America is a strong, weird country. It takes in everyone that all the other countries couldn’t handle, that’s our secret. We are stronger for being so weird. It can support all those dreams and weird fetishes and strange odds and close calls. We just have to stop killing all the customers. Otherwise, there’ll be no one left to brag about us.
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