It started out a great night. I was dancing fervently to hits from the 80’s until my knees wobbled and the bottom of my feet begged me to stop. I had struck out a few times with the ladies, but one (who incidentally looked a lot like Jean-Batiste Camille Corot’s “Lady in Blue” but with a tube top and half a mini-skirt on) started giving me the eye. She was drunk and giddy and thought I was a good dancer. We started talking in the bustling, banging club. Actually, it was more like she would lean in close to me and shout something, and I wouldn’t hear a word of it yet would smile and give her a knowing nod. This soon progressed to us leaving the club together. Bells and whistles were going off in my head as she stumbled next to me, clutching my arm like a life preserver.
“Let’s go get something to eat, so I can sober up,” she said.
“Of course, that’s exactly what I was thinking,” I lied.
Being a gentleman, I let her choose the place, and her choice was a greasy burger joint that I heard was good. I thought to myself, first, great dancing, now some good food with good, leggy company and maybe later a drunken roll in the hay.
We sat closely together in the booth, her bare leg burning through my jeans. She was pretty, especially if you like brooding brunettes with slightly large foreheads that remind you of old oil paintings. She ordered a Coke and a grilled cheese, and I ordered a burger. I always order the burger. Ever since I was a kid, if there was a burger option, I took it. To me, it is the world’s greatest food. You can hold it in your hand, it’s juicy and filling and has sesame seeds. How many meals have sesame seeds? You can get it rare or well done, with mustard or hold the mustard, animal-style or with extra bacon. How many things in life are so customizable? Not many, I’ll tell you that now before you go wasting your time on the internet researching.
Darla, the skankily dressed woman who was dining with me, tilted her face in a manner befitting deep thought. I asked her what she was thinking.
“Are you worried at all that the beef in your burger might be cloned? You know they passed that law and everything.”
She was talking gibberish, obviously drunk and incoherent. How on earth could you clone a burger? It’s just a delicious sandwich.
“No, really. They can clone a cow now and don’t have to label the meat as cloned. Freaky, huh?”
Now what the heck does a cow have to do with a burger? First she was talking about cloning burgers and then she switched to cloning cows? What a mess! I explained everything to her, and she looked confused.
“Are you serious?” she said.
She tried to tell me that a burger was once a cow, that my tasty brown beef is ground-up, dead cow. She wasn’t drunk; she was crazy. Luckily the waiter came by then and handed us our meals. I pointed to my scrumptious wonder patty in a bun and repeated what Ms. Oil Painting said.
The waiter glared at me, “I don’t have time for jokes.”
“See! It’s a joke; they don’t put cows on burgers, silly.”
That’s when the truth came barreling down on me like an avalanche, and I couldn’t move. It trampled on me, and I felt cold. The waiter weighed in. The couple behind us did, too. I asked the busboy, the line cooks, the homeless guy outside peeing into the USA Today newsstand. And they all enlightened me. That’s why I’m writing this to all of you.
It’s true. Your burger has cow in it. For me, it was hard to take. I tried to eat the thing and could only hear ghostly cries of “moo.” It was disturbing. And kind of gross. All this time I thought it was just beef. I had no idea they put other ingredients in a burger, especially ingredients that were animals. I couldn’t eat it. It was just too weird of an idea to be eating something that came from a big, fat animal.
So, I ordered some bacon and a milkshake instead.
Darla laughed at me and didn’t come home with me. She called me an idiot due to her intoxicated haze. I ended up masturbating to Corot’s “Lady in Blue,” so everything turned out pretty well in the end.
