angels don’t wear dolce & gabbana – or do they?

Someone stole my bike. Again. My new bike. I guess it’s time I invest in a lock.

I was on my way home when I heard gunfire again. No gunfire. It was You Know Who. Instead of taking me home, however, we made a beeline for the grocery store.

Why the grocery store?

“It’s Wednesday,” he said. “Time to saddle up.”

I couldn’t believe he remembered. Like I said, TJ’s a lot smarter than he looks.

Apparently, besides hanging out at the county jail and the laundromat, another TJ hotspot for picking up chicks involves hunting down women shoppers at the grocery store and crashing his shopping cart into theirs. He calls it the Fonzie Technique, and TJ got it from an episode of Happy Days. In today’s episode, apparently I was Richie Cunningham. TJ, of course, was the Fonz.

Immediately upon arrival, TJ grabbed the first shopping cart he could find. The only word of advice he had for me: “Go for baskets that have eggs in them. Or wine. Anything breakable. It’s the perfect In.”

Is that it?

“Make sure it’s a chick.”

Meaning?

“Stay away from the Polska Kiełbasa.”

No kidding. A German study shows that ESBL (Extended Spectrum Beta-lactamases), like Escherichia coli and Klebsiella peumoniae, were found in several types of sausages. The bacteria produces an enzyme that causes humans to become resistant to antibiotics like penicillin and Monobactam aztreonam.

Stay away from the Polska Kiełbasa. Good advice. Then I realized, he wasn’t talking about Hillshire Farm.

TJ then went speeding off toward the sushi display.

I, on the other hand, avoided that shopping cart like the plague. The average shopping cart has more than 75,000 colony-forming units per square inch: Salmonella, Shigella, Moraxella, as well as innumerable antibiotic-immune bacteria. 75 Thousand! Compare that to just 30 CFU for your average toilet-seat handle.

I can’t stand going to the grocery store, but it has nothing to do with germs. It’s not because I’m a Cibophobe, either. It’s just because I know all the Frankensteinian things they do with food these days, like fattening-up chickens with hormones and genetically modified feedstuff to make them grow twice as big in half the time. So much so, their legs cannot even support their weight and they wind up wallowing in their own shit.

Or infusing cattle with synthetic growth hormones (rBGH) to beef them up, pumping up dairy cows with a genetically-engineered form of E. Coli (rBST) to increase their milk output. I wish I didn’t know that these things cause adolescents to reach puberty prematurely, and some adults to die of breast and prostate cancer.

It was a dumb idea, anyway. I’d seen that episode at least a dozen times: Season 3, Episode 10: A Date with Fonzie.

To begin with, it wasn’t Fonzie’s idea to go around crashing into women, but some old geezer’s. Making matters worse, Richie wound up crashing his shopping cart into Fonzie’s, not some lovely lady’s. If I wanted a date with TJ, all I’d have to do is gain a hundred pounds, and switch out my Johnson for a jelly roll.

Oh, well. Back to the task at hand. Even though I wasn’t going along with TJ’s whole hit and run scheme, I could still do a little browsing. Revitalizing my interest in the ladies was a great way to make sure my prostate was still good. Beats Dr. Nikolas Van Helsing shoving his finger up my ass.

I kept an eye out for my neighbor from across the hall, but the odds that we would be at the same supermarket at exactly the same time on exactly the same day were about as good as Fatty Arbuckle showing back up at the Hacienda Palms. Buster Keaton, too.

There were a few other ladies, however, in the store today. There was a woman in a wheelchair, but I’ve never been one for charity. There was an old granny, but I’m not sure how that really works. Does it? There was even an Asian chick. I thought she looked especially lovely, although I’d never admit it.

I dig Asian women. They’re so exotic. Elegant. But admitting I like Asian women would be the same thing as admitting I was a single, slightly balding and pot-bellied, middle-aged man. Which I was, but I wasn’t about to admit it. I’d rather willingly consume large quantities of Propylene Glycol Alginate, or Polysorbate 60, than come to terms with all of that. Too bad, though. She was really pretty. She even smiled at me.

But the chances of me actually meeting a woman were about as good as me taking a bite out of someone else’s sandwich. I mean, come on; how’s a guy like me supposed to get close to someone when he knows that the human body has more than 100 trillion bacteria? That’s a thousand times more than the total number of people who have ever lived on planet Earth.

I did go out on a date once. ONCE. In high school. It not only ended up in disaster, it began the rumor around school that I was a drug addict­—a cokehead—and hastened my return to the therapist. Here’s how the whole thing went down.

Her name was Meegan Mannefield, and I’d known her since we were in kindergarten. Back then, everyone called her Monster Face Meegan. Kids can be so cruel.

She wasn’t ugly, though. Not by the time we hit high school. She wasn’t cute, either. She had one of those uninspiring faces, like something right out of a clearance bin. But she was the best I could do. And anyway, she was the one who asked me out.

It was Senior Prom, and my parents were just happy that I was going. “At least,” I heard my dad whisper, “now they won’t think he’s gay anymore.” And by They he meant all his friends and business associates. Himself? He still wasn’t sure.

So how did cocaine get all mixed up in this? I had never done drugs in my life. To do drugs, first you need drugs. Or friends, at least. I had neither.

It all started with a little piece of chocolate, believe it or not. My grandparents were in town and Grandpop loved his chocolate. I remember ever since I was a kid, he had his chocolate bars in the fridge all wrapped up in aluminum foil. Bunches of them.

I decided I could use a quick energy boost. He wasn’t going to notice just a few of them missing. Little did I know, they would soon turn me into a cokehead.

Everything was fine until about ten minutes after we got to the dance. I felt something stirring down below and made a mad dash for the bathroom. It was quite a scene: my very own dumb and dumber moment.

I must have shit fifty bricks. But it didn’t stop there. Every fifteen minutes I was back in the bathroom. All night long. When the dance was over, Monster Face, I mean, Meegan, told me she would get a ride home with her friend. When I asked her why, she wouldn’t tell me. All she said was I needed help, and that being addicted to cocaine was a serious problem.

So that’s how it all started. I didn’t even get the joke until the next day: that cokeheads spend all their time in the john. But the truth wasn’t going to be much better. What kind of defense would that be, anyway: “I’m not a drug addict, I was just in there shitting my brains out like Jeff Daniels in Dumb & Dumber.” Either way, I was a loser.

Oh, yeah; and what was in those chocolate bars that turned me into a human sewer pipe? Those weren’t chocolate bars; they were Granpop’s laxatives. Ex-Lax, to be exact. Thanks a lot, Grandpop.

Lucky for me, it was a short-lived rumor (my being a drug addict and all) because school let out the following week and I never saw any of those f’ing people again.

Still, word got around to my parents and Yep, you guessed it, there I was back at the therapist. Instead of explaining the whole thing to him, I thought Ah, what the hell. He’s never going to believe me anyway.

But that’s all in the past now. I don’t do cocaine. Never did. I don’t eat chocolate, either. Not anymore.

So there I was back at the grocery store, on safari with a laughing hyena out crashing his shopping cart into unsuspecting housewives, all the while thinking he’s Fonzie from the 70s hit show Happy Days. And me? Was I really Richie Cunningham? Not even close. More like Mork from Ork.

I only go to the grocery store a few times a year to stock up on supplies, anyway. You may not know this, but three quarters of all foods in today’s supermarkets have some type of processed chemicals in them. In all, there are more than three thousand food chemicals in use today.

Like Benzoic Acid, commonly found in most meat and milk products and known to inhibit the digestive system, cause headaches, stomach aches, asthma attacks, and hyperactivity in children. Or Canthaxanthin, the chemical used to make egg yolks so golden yellow, and known to cause damage to the retina.

I wish I didn’t know about Astaxanthin, a chemical added to farm-raised Salmon to give them that natural, pink look, and manufactured from coal tar.

I wish I didn’t know about Olestra, a fake fat commonly found in hundreds of snack foods and known to cause anal leakage. Anal leakage?

I wish I didn’t know about all these things, but I do. The awful truth is, once you know something, there’s no going back.

I wish I could just turn my stupid brain off and enjoy the fact that food costs only a fraction of what it did fifty years ago when compared to the average paycheck, and is readily available on every street corner.

I wish I could stop thinking about everything and just enjoy my dinner, like everyone else. I wish I could, but I can’t.

But I gotta eat. Everybody’s gotta eat. So I stick to canned goods like Deviled Ham, and Spam, feedstuff I know has been sterilized and sealed airtight; items that could survive a nuclear war, even. Certain dried foods, as well.

Still, I do like playing the tourist now and again, and sometimes I find myself wandering down the fresh produce aisle, daydreaming, wondering what it would be like to taste food the way God made it. On this day in particular, I happened to be traveling past the apples and oranges when suddenly I slipped on a nim-nim peel. I hit my head something awful on the floor, enough so that I even lost consciousness.

When I awoke, it was to the sight of an angel. Was I in Heaven? Not exactly.

The angel placed her hand on the back of my head. “Don’t get up,” she said. “You’ve got a nasty little bump, but you’ll survive.”

An angel? There was that smell again: Dolce & Gabbana perfume. How do I know what Dolce & Gabbana perfume smells like? Magazines, of course.

But angels don’t wear Dolce & Gabbana. Or do they? Before I had time to get my head straight, I lost consciousness again.

What was her name: my neighbor from across the hall? Bonnie? Erma? Emma? None of those were right.

When I awoke a second time there were all these men huddled around me, like some goddamn football team. I hate football. But they all seemed to be genuinely concerned with my well-being. One man, who looked like one of the cashiers, asked me if I was okay. Another man, the store security guard, told me to take it slow. And yet another, apparently the store manager, asked me if I wanted him to call an ambulance.

There was a woman in the background, and even though my vision was still quite blurry, I’d swear it was my neighbor from across the hall. Was she really there, or was it just wishful thinking?

It all happened so fast, I didn’t even notice how much my head really hurt. And then there was TJ. All of a sudden he was standing over me saying, “Dude!”

I got to my feet, and as the ringing in my ears began to die down, that’s when reality kicked back in.

That’s when I realized I had just been lying on a floor with as many as a thousand different types of bacteria per square inch. I had just been surrounded by people, all standing over me and breathing down with the force of billions of germs in their combined breaths. And someone grabbed me by the hand. The common handshake contains more germs than a sneeze, billions of microscopic bacteria, and now they were crawling all over me.

Still, all I could think of was that woman. Who was she? Was she an angel? I wasn’t sure. But one thing I was sure of: that simple human contact, with a woman, for me it was a huge deal. I had never been touched by a woman before; at least, not by a Real woman. Sad truth is, the last woman who touched me (who wasn’t my mother) told me to cough, then stuck a thermometer up my ass.

When I got home, I sprayed myself with Lysol, doused myself with Clorox, scrubbed myself with Ajax, and soaked myself in a tub of scalding hot water. You know: the usual.

What the hell was I thinking, letting those living, breathing, bacteria traps fawn all over me like so much black death? I’d be lucky if I survived the night.

But that woman, that was a feeling I simply could not shake. I wanted that feeling again. But how? As you might have guessed, germaphobes don’t exactly have a lot of physical contact with the opposite sex.

My neighbor from across the hall. Was She my angel? Was that really her? While I wasn’t sure about a lot of things, one thing was for sure: there was no going back.