Jason Rodriguez - The Moose in the Closet: Taxed!

Taxed! – Good Eatin’

Tired. Pushed the novel over 28,000 words. It’s at the point where I’m writing more than thinking so it’s coming out sloppy. I like the structure but huge rewrites will be needed. I also want to go back and insert some chapters, there’s a few things missing, and I need to hit on some of the themes I let lapse too much. As I write I take notes on what needs to be changed and then I just post the chapter without even looking over it. I’m going to do some more before going to bed and hopefully push it to 30k.

On an administrative note - I had 18 people come to my site through Yahoo yesterday looking for “gang fights”. I investigated and, according to Yahoo, I’m the definitive authority on gang fights. Me.

Here’s this cat Joe Lalich’s site. There’s some good sketches and good sequentials there, stumbled across him tonight – haven’t looked around for potentially up-and-coming artists in some time. Worth a gander, I’d say.

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Food was a precious commodity in college – especially junk food. It was like cigarettes in jail – a form of currency oftentimes more valuable than cash, especially when it was late at night and the convenience stores were closed; “convenient” to the average working adult maybe but no the dope-smoking college kid. A well stocked dorm room contained twizzlers, pretzels, chewy Chips Ahoy, Mountain Dew and at least a half-gallon of milk.

Then there were the more precious commodities – the items that were usually specific to the room. Eric always had Mellowmars, Andy had Charleston Chews and Neil had Pocky Sticks. These were the specialty items, the ones that you normally wouldn’t spend your own money on but at times they were the perfect food and you occasionally found yourself hankering for a Swedish Fish or some Junior Mints. In order to obtain these specialty items you needed to trade up, swapping a miniature Hershey Special Dark for some Crispy M&Ms. You needed to have something worth trading for. I was always able to trade because when it came to specialty items I was fucking king.

I worked in the dining hall. Late Night Café, no less, which meant I was responsible for closing the place up. By the time sophomore year rolled around I was the weekend manager which means either Friday or Saturday night I shut down the dining hall, I had keys for the whole joint and was the last one to leave. And I made sure to steal stuff that everyone wanted but no-one would stock on their own.

I had a system, too, in case I had to sneak the food out, like my boss was around or something. I’d be the one that would take the trash out back; I’d put the food I wanted in a garbage bag and bring it up to the trash compactor with me (it was behind the dorm). I’d leave the garbage bag filled with food in a milk crate and then after my shift go around the back of the building and pick up my booty. In four years of working in the dining hall I never once got caught stealing food.

As I started stealing larger items my room fridge was not capable of holding them. That’s when I learned about the secret kitchen in my dorm. When I became an RA (halfway through sophomore year) I had access to this kitchen that hasn’t been used since 1973. It was hidden behind this wall and the key to open it was in the RA office and collecting dust. The fridge inside this kitchen became my personal storage room for all the food I stole – no-one ever knew that was where I stashed because no-one knew the kitchen even existed. It was luck that I found it.

As for what I stole, well…

Boxes of cookie dough, for starters. When you’re up late studying or coming down from a particularly good high, nothing beats cookie dough. My freezer was always well stacked with a box of cookie dough. Chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin, sugar cookies – I’d mix and match between the open boxes in the kitchen’s freezer and bring up about a hundred pieces of frozen cookie dough goodness.

Cakes where also a good call –especially chocolate cake (the pecan pie was a bit more difficult to move). Giant tubs of ice-cream to put on the cake was clutch, especially once we started getting Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream. Some stoner might have had a pint of Phish Food but I had five fucking quarts, guess where the party was at on a Saturday night in my dorm?

Plenty of cereal. Rice Crispy Treats. Jello. Fruit cups. Pudding.

I had this humungous tub of Fluff. People hardly buy little jugs of Fluff but I had a tub like you wouldn’t believe. And combined with my tub of peanut butter, bunch of bananas and loaf of bread I was the only fluffanutter source in all of Towers. Do you know what you can get in a college dorm for a fluffanutter at two in the morning? It goes beyond food, I’ll tell you that. Nobody made a fluffanutter in Towers without me knowing. Two towers, nine floors each and every fluffanutter went through me.

Drinks were easy to steal, too. I bought a bunch of Tupperware-like drink containers and filled them with various sodas, milks and juices. People would ask me for some milk and I’d ask them if they wanted whole, 2%, skim or chocolate.

I never sold my food, though. It just never occurred to me. I traded it, sure. Got some junk food the dining hall couldn’t supply me with – maybe got someone to lend me their N64 for the night so I can play some Mario Kart. But never sold it. Being the food guy just sort of became my thing and I liked having a thing. Some guys always have dope, some guys let you copy their homework – I was the guy that supplied you with a Banana Cream Pie at 3AM. Being able to supply food to people made you king shit, no-one would deny your requests for help when you asked – it was like everyone always owed you a favor.

Once I got to senior year I was a manager for the earlier shifts, it was a little harder to steal food but every shift needed to take the trash out so my plan carried over – I just needed to be more cautious of prying eyes. Senior year I had my own kitchen so in addition to junk food I was smuggling out hamburgers, chicken breast – keeping my kitchen well stocked and cutting my grocery bill down to practically nothing.

Towers Dining Hall was so out of whack with keeping track of their food that I never even heard of any suspicions. No-one ever came up to me and asked me if I know what happened to the tub of jelly or the industrial sized can of corn.

And yet despite all of the food items and the drinks, the craziest thing I stole over four years of working in the dining hall was a fucking Belgian waffle maker. A hot waffle with a scoop of ice-cream, some whipped cream and chocolate syrup at three in the morning? You could trade that for someone’s virginity in college.

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Taxed! – Good Eatin’

Thursday, November 17, 2005

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