All Hail Grease!!

A love letter to candy, cheesesteaks, and the metabolism I once had.

Remember that Halloween column? Yeah, well...turns out I failed to mention the most important part of trick-or-treating—the freakin’ TREATS.

Whoa. There is no bottom to the quality and quantity of chocolate I’ll inhale. My wife refers to my chocolate habit as “breaking the seal.” I’m just fine having chocolate sitting around the house, but if I so much as take just one little piece, all hell breaks loose. The chocolate devil on one shoulder obliterates the commonsense angel on the other. One fun-size Snickers and I transform into the kind of man who can’t be trusted around anything labeled ‘fun-size,’ ‘bite-size,’ or ‘seasonal.’

In a subsequent Halloween, I fell onto Jensen’s shit list for my inability to stop pounding away at her treat bag. We had been going door to door, and I was holding the bag (Mistake #1). That one little Almond Joy was more than I could manage to look at, so I ate it (Mistake #2). Next thing she knew, after stopping at 20 or more homes, Jensen looked inside her treat bag and saw one lonely Skittles package rolling around like a tumbleweed amongst a whole lot of wrappers. She looked up at me and burst into tears! Fair.

That’ll cost me a few years of therapy one of these days.

“Youth is wasted on the young,” so said my mother—often—when I was a little one. She was quoting Mark Twain or Shania Twain, or some other celeb.

Pooh! says Curmudg.

You know what’s wasted on the young?

Calories.

Why is it that a 16-year-old can eat a Big Mac, fries, and a chocolate shake, then belch and be calorie neutral?

In college, I often ate at Greasy Tony’s, adjacent to the Rutgers campus. That wasn’t a nickname—it was the name of the business. One could stand outside, longingly gaze into the window, and watch Tony smear the grill with grease, add a slab of sliced “steak” (maybe it was, maybe not), toss on a few onions and green peppers, add more grease, pour grease on the bun and place it face down on the grill, then when everything was fully cooked, add more grease on top of the open face sandwich, close it up, and voila! Pure greased perfection.

During my Senior year, I lived two blocks from Tony’s. Daily, I faced two very important decisions—how many meals I would eat there, and whether I would accompany my cheesesteak with fries and a milkshake, or fries and a Coke. (And not that diet stuff, either). There was so much grease on my meal that by the time I settled into my apartment to enjoy, the brown bag my breakfast/lunch/dinner was in was nearly totally greaseified.

Cholesterol? Fuhgeddaboutit—it hadn’t been invented yet.

If I ate a Tony’s cheesesteak, fries, and a milkshake now, you’d need to call the paramedics. And if I made it through the cardiac event, I’d have gained 10 pounds simply from the guilt.

And speaking of cheesesteaks—why can’t you find a decent one west of New Jersey? Several years ago, my wife and I were eating at a local lunch place, and she asked if I thought they’d have good cheesesteaks. I looked at the menu and noticed mayonnaise. Mayonnaise. That’s not a cheesesteak. That’s a cry for help.

Pizza? Don’t get me started. The good news and bad news about where I live are exactly the same: the best pizza is at the Mollie Stone’s grocery market down the street. When the highlight of your local pizza scene comes from the same place you buy laundry detergent, something has gone terribly wrong. It’s your tastebuds sadly saying, “You’re not in Jersey anymore.”

Maybe that’s the real punchline of aging:

Taste buds and stomach expand, while your heart keeps yelling, ‘GREASE ROCKS.’

TL;DR: Candy, cheesesteaks, and the cruel math of getting older.

Photo credit: You know you’re from New Brunswick, NJ if…