The Cheez-It Post

My mom packed my lunch until I graduated from high school--every day in a brown paper bag.

In elementary school, my friend Donna and I used to trade sandwich halves. She liked my sandwiches best because my mom made them pretty--filled with sliced deli meat and ruffle-leaf lettuce--and... well, I guess I liked mine best too. But I traded to be nice.

Anyway, I always had a sandwich and a fruit; I always had something salty and crunchy, like Cheez-Its, which will forever be associated with one of my--in retrospect--favorite memories from high school.

One day when I was a sophomore or junior and my friend Rick was a junior or senior, a group of girls who belonged to our high school drama department came crawling through the cafeteria in black spandex, promoting some new play they were putting on.

Rick, who takes pride on being able to ridicule most everyone and everything (in fact, he is a successful comedian now in LA), started calling them dykes (to be fair, he did not know then that I was gay, and, to be fair twice, the way they were crawling around was pretty easy to ridicule).

"Shut up," I told him.

All our friends stared. Not many people told Rick to shut up. What would he do?

He stood up on a chair.

"DYKES!" he screamed at the top of his lungs.

Hundreds of heads swiveled our way.

"You're an a**hole," I said.

Our friends gasped. Not many people called Rick an asshole--at least not to his face. What would he do?

Well, he reached over, took my sandwich-baggie of Cheez-Its, smashed them in his hands gleefully and dumped the crumbs in my lap.

We didn't speak to each other for almost a week. I recall stubbornly refusing to talk to him until he apologized. Our friends ran between us for several days trying to mediate. Of course, we eventually made up. It's one of our favorite stories.

Every time I eat Cheez-Its I think of that day.

And now you will too.