The Brains Challenge

Unusual as our being out in the middle of the afternoon may have been, several aspects of our togetherness on that particular day were quite typical for Brahm, Kelly, Carol, and me. Perhaps most obvious to an outsider would be that all four of us entered the diner wearing head-to-toe black, but this was irrelevant, save for in its scene-setting value to a lazy writer (who does not now need to provide you, his reader, the ages and various descriptive particulars of his friend, girlfriend, girlfriend’s friend, nor himself, since you will have taken this shorthand, perhaps rightly so, to mean that these were the sort of kids sometimes seen in public spaces, like ink spots on a nice shirt, where “normal” citizens give them a wide berth while simultaneously pretending to ignore them, as if averting their eyes might keep them from catching whatever sickness causes the kids to mutilate their deathly pale skin with all those silver piercings). The diner was just a diner, as diners all looked, thirty years after their last renovation. Of course, there’s no extraordinary relevance in telling you these things; what I think was extraordinary was how a sort of third-rate local tradition was born at our faux-woodgrain Formica table mere minutes after our dark foursome was seated.

It happened something like this. Inveterate cheapskate that he was, my friend Brahm perused the diner menu not from left to right, like most people in the Western world, but from right to left — price then description. Whether or not he did this every time we went out to eat, I can’t be sure, but he always had his eyes open for a bargain. He was still scanning for agreeably low figures on the menu when the waitress came to take our orders. After Kelly and Carol had placed theirs, he said, “I mean, I’m hungry, just not three-dollars-and-forty-cents-for-three-pieces-of-fried-chicken hungry, you know?”

Carol, installed beside him in our booth, rolled her eyes — often the only part of her that moved. She laughed with Kelly, my girlfriend, however, because Brahm’s pathological unwillingness to part with money frequently took strenuous efforts that never stopped being comical. Our waitress was less amused, almost certainly wishing we’d wandered instead into a Denny’s, or at least into a different server’s section. She nevertheless stood by, armored with the thick skin formed from decades of table-waiting in shabby establishments, her ballpoint pen hovering steadily above the pad, while the long-haired tightwad made up his mind.

In an effort to prod Brahm along, Kelly floated a couple of suggestions. “What about an omelet?” she tried. “That’s only two eighty-five.”

Brahm pursed his lips. “I’m not really in an omelet mood, though.”

“Pancakes, maybe?”

“Hmm,” he mused. “Yeah, except they probably use a premade batter mix, so their markup is huge. Besides, I’ve got Aunt Jemima at home.”

Brahm and I knew the patterns of this diner’s brown-and-orange tile work and drop-ceiling stains by heart, yet until that moment, somehow, one item on its menu had escaped our notice. Spotting it was a revelation. Wide-eyed, I looked up at my friend and said, “What about brains and scrambled eggs?”

The waitress leaned in, causing an intensifying of the odors of stale cigarette smoke and onion rings in my airspace. “That’s not really on there, is it?” she asked, as though I was the sort to just make up menu selections, as though I’d further delay, for the sake of a jokey hypothetical, the placement of my order. I pointed her to “Eggs and Such” on the laminated sheet. She said, “Well, I’ll be damned!”

Brahm responded, “I’ve never eaten brains before.” Grinning, he was visibly intrigued. “But if I won’t pay three forty for the fried chicken, which I’m sure I’ll like, then I’m certainly not gonna gamble three thirty on brains, which I’m pretty sure I won’t.”

Carol elbowed him. “Oh, come on, be adventurous! Look, they come with toast and hash browns.”

Turning down a novel meal ran as counter to Brahm’s values as did expending personal funds. Kelly made his choice easier by producing a few folded bills from her purse and asking, “Okay, so how about if I’m buying?”

“Buying me brains and eggs?”

“Yeah, sure. Except you have to eat the whole thing,” Kelly said. “Otherwise you’ve got to cover it yourself.” This reminded me of the time, in a different, far nicer restaurant, Kelly offered five dollars to the young women at a neighboring table to stop giggling so obnoxiously — a confrontation that evolved into a near-brawl between myself and the women’s angry boyfriends in the parking lot. Fortunately, Kelly’s pet cruelties could also be funny.

“What about a drink?” Brahm asked. Haggling now, she had him on the ropes.

“No drink.”

“Sides?”

“You’re already getting hash browns and toast.”

“Yeah, but what if brains turn out to be, like, completely unpalatable?”

Kelly reached over me for the condiments. The bottles and shakers in the wire caddy rattled to a stop directly in front of him. She fingered each container in turn: “Salt, pepper, mustard, ketchup, A-1, syrup — that ought to be enough to get you through.”

The order was placed. If the anticipation of seeing this mystery meal came close to killing us, the smell of it traveling across the diner came even closer. A light stink, like warm pond water, wafted over our table before the waitress was halfway from the kitchen. Then the plate of brains and scrambled eggs was set down, and Brahm said, flatly, “I was hoping somebody had ordered fish sticks or something.”

The waitress set our table’s other, better-smelling plates before us; though, it was the brains and eggs that held our collective attention. Chunky and gelatinous, with an oily sheen, they steamed like the remnants of a disintegrator-blasted alien in a cheap sci-fi film. The waitress, departing, said, “Enjoy.” She laughed. No food-service employee should ever laugh that way on the job — it does not instill comfort.

Poking and prodding the pale yellow-gray mess before him, Brahm sniffed, then hefted a forkful to his mouth. He made a spasmodic shrugging motion and put the back of his hand against his lips. He chewed with his eyes squeezed shut. “Oh man,” he finally managed to moan. “This is awful.”

We each sampled a tiny bite; we each gagged and spat into a paper napkin. It was agreed that Brahm faced a challenge.

Spectators turn out by the thousands to watch people eat competitively — hot dogs, watermelon, pie, anything — and in the coming years I would see the debut of TV shows like Fear Factor, on which contestants ingest bugs, blood, and bull penises for a chance at a cash prize. But we four teenagers were mostly oblivious to food’s potential as vicarious entertainment until Brahm gave us an epic dinner show. Gagging, gasping, blinking back tears, taking frequent breaks to drown the squishy mass of befouled eggs with sluices of steak sauce, picking out fragments of skull, then tucking back in with soldierly resolve, he put on such a performance that a bystander would have been forgiven for thinking there was far more at stake than three dollars and some change.

The fork clattered noisily as he dropped it on his plate, a kind of victory gesture, and belched. His face immediately twisted. “Ugh, it tastes even worse coming up.”

“I can’t believe you finished it,” said Carol, long since having forked up the last of her French fries and retouched her blood-red lipstick.

“It was like eating mushrooms and cartilage… marinated in fish sauce.”

Belying her usual poise, Carol’s hands flailed, as though to shoo away the sensory memory of her sample. “God,” she said, “that’s so gross.”

Brahm belched again. “Hey, you asked.”

“Braiiiiiins!” I groaned, zombielike, but no one else laughed at how it sounded just like Brahm’s burp. Perhaps mockery was in bad taste, considering how my friend was suffering.

With the matter of indigestion relief foremost on Brahm’s mind, and with a change of venue on everyone else’s, we paid our bill to the smirking waitress at the register and left.

The interesting thing about rituals is always their origins. All the best ones develop naturally, gradually, as the events that inspire them marinate in people’s minds, like so much cartilage and mushrooms in fish sauce, over a period of days, weeks, or months, until someone gets the bright idea to stage a re-enactment and recapture the spirit of the earlier events. In the case of the brains and scrambled eggs, the catalyst was a night visit to some friends’ house, regaling them with a vivid retelling of Brahm’s heroic overcoming, when naive young Robert took a long drag from his cigarette, scratched his four-day stubble, tipped back his fedora, and said, “I think I could do it; I think I could eat the brains.”

Within the half hour, Robert, his two housemates, and Brahm packed themselves into my car and we sped off, diner-bound. To cheers and claps, Robert retched his way through the plateful of gray matter — beef or pork, no one knew — and unfertilized chicken ova. A good time was had by all. Except, of course, by Robert. But even he attained a state of joy the next week, when he witnessed one of his housemates attempt and fail to complete the Brains Challenge (as it had come to be called), as well as the week after that, when Tara, Brahm’s ex-girlfriend, chewed her way through the disgusting dish like a veritable garbage disposal before chugging a full glass of ice water, cubes and all, offering as her only comment on the experience an understated “Ick.”

The Brains Challenge became an institution. Rules were established. Someone thought to print and frame certificates that read, This Is to Certify That _______________ Successfully Completed the Brains Challenge at Nichol’s Lunch, on _______________,1999, in the Esteemed Presence of the Previously Challenged Witnesses _______________ and _______________. Take Pity. Many of those challenged, myself included, failed to clean their plates, but none ever demanded a rematch. Pride is only worth so much.

An occasion arose, more than a year after Brahm was fooled into thinking he was getting a free lunch, on which it occurred to me that someone enjoyed the diner’s brains and scrambled eggs, or else why would they be on the menu? I happened to make this observation aloud in the presence of Mike, a mutual friend of Brahm’s and mine, while the three of us were whiling away another evening at the coffeehouse. To this, Mike responded, “Oh, brains and eggs aren’t bad. I’ve eaten them lots of times.”

We doubted. (Who wouldn’t, honestly, after eating that phlegmy mush?) However, we did wonder: might the diner’s brains and eggs be representative of all brains and eggs, instead of being the aberrance we believed them to be? We challenged Mike then and there. His acceptance of the Brains Challenge, to be taken on the following night, would prove to us that the brains in question were empirically worse than just about any other foodstuff, thereby validating our bravery and endurance.

The next evening, Mike and his girlfriend joined Brahm and I in a booth, squeaking across the vinyl bench cushion too casually, in my opinion, for the momentous adversity about to be met. The orders arrived. Mike’s girlfriend scarcely watched as he took up a fork and ate of the infamous entrée, chewing without effort, swallowing without histrionics, biting a corner off one triangle of toasted wheat bread, sipping his water, and obliterating our tough-guy pride with three little words: “Not too bad.”

The Kids Give Gutter Ball a Whole New Meaning

One temperate evening in late spring of my seventeenth year, I sat smoking with my friends Brahm and Tara on Paul's quaint concrete front porch. The house was small, a remnant of an era when that part of the city was still suburbs. Even Paul, oldest among us, couldn't have known a time when traffic noise and sirens did not reach his rented home. Around the city's haze, darkness was creeping into crevasses, and we were idly contemplating a plan of action, in the way of many Midwestern American youth, when I noticed a wheelbarrow on the neighbor's curb — a wheelbarrow full of bowling balls.

The narrow street's residents had set their trash out for morning pickup, but Paul's neighbors obviously expected a bit more than the usual performance out of their sanitation engineers. Nine bowling balls! Of all the things to throw away. And what a way to get them to the street: in a perfectly serviceable garden implement. As with much curbside trash, the juxtaposition was humorous while also being baffling.

Nine bowling balls... in a wheelbarrow.

Brahm asked the sanest question. "What garbage man's going to expend the time and effort to lift a bunch of heavy balls into his truck?"

"It's not a bunch," I said. "Bananas come in bunches; bowling balls, plural — that's called a passel."

Unsmiling, Tara took a drag from her Camel, flipped her hair and deadpanned, "Oh, yes. Funny."

My humor is of a singular brand, but Brahm was right. No two men, however hale and fit, were going to take away the balls, by either picking them up one at a time or by heave-hoing the entire wheelbarrow. Our pal Paul's neighbors were asking too much.

"Someone could still use these," said Tara upon inspecting the mound. The balls were of all different colors and weights, some in solid colors, some with eccentric swirly patterns. Two were flecked metallic, like Hot Wheels toy cars. Only one appeared damaged, with a big sidelong split in its pearly shell. "I guess they just didn't feel like playing anymore."

"I wouldn't mind a game," I said, looking up and down the street. "Too bad they didn't throw away a set of pins — we could play right here."

Sometimes when you're with friends and someone has a fantastic idea, the way the idea surfaces seems, when reflected upon later, to have been born of the combined consciousness — groupthink. This was the case at that moment, standing under a buzzing yellow streetlight with two of my best friends, when we decided to go street bowling.

A surprisingly large percentage of homeowners are funny about others making off with their trash. Having dumpster-dived and scavenged a good deal in my limited years, I had learned how some people's paranoia could turn innocent salvage operations into scary dressings-down ("Get outta there, you parasites!") or worse. So we asked for, and received, Paul's okay to load the spherical contents of his neighbors' wheelbarrow into the trunk of my busted-up Pontiac and head for the hills.

We figured the best pins available would be empty bottles, and that the best place to turn into our personal alley would be an out-of-the-way stretch of road where some broken glass wouldn't make a whole lot of difference to anyone. Step one was easy and could also technically be considered neighborhood beautification. Anywhere with liquor stores, pawn shops, and mobile phone depots will do for finding a slew of discarded bottles. By picking them up, we'd be doing a public service. Conveniently enough, a sketchy midtown strip wasn't far away.

We drove slowly, in the far-right lane, eyes peeled for cast-off forty-ouncers glinting in the grassy median. Each time we stopped at the curb to retrieve some, my friends leapt out, laughing at the silliness of what we were doing then dropping another stinky armful into the trunk to acquaint itself with the balls. Reports from the back seat each time were that more bottles had been crushed; we hadn't even thought about keeping the balls from rolling around freely.

"Your trunk is full of glass dust," Tara told me with a smirk.

For fun, and to emphasize how little I cared about the state of my battered wreck's little-used stowage compartment, I gave the steering wheel a slight tug. Behind us was heard a muffled thunk, ka-thunk! We all giggled like schoolchildren.

We ended up on Cliff Drive, a twisty-turny route in woodsy northeast Kansas City that, in spite of being officially historical, was pretty shabby. Pull-offs had, in some distant era, offered motorists fine cliffside views of a wealthy part of the city, but were now litter-strewn, overgrown, and under-trafficked — in other words, perfect.

I pulled in at one of these ill-lit roadside crescents, crushed glass from parties of yore crackling beneath my tires. A six-inch retaining wall on the cliffside wouldn't have prevented incautious drivers from rolling right off, free-falling through trees and a dense overgrowth of vines, into a carpeting of litter — empty bottles, plastic cups, cigarette packs, and who-knows-what-all — thirty feet below. The lack of guardrails or wire evidenced the location's bygone relevance. It had been all but abandoned by the city. I cut the engine and popped the trunk, announcing, "Welcome to Cliff Drive Lanes, people!"

Brahm and I agreed to let the lady bowl first. We crouched to set up a triangle of ten bottles away from the road, near the retaining wall, while Tara picked a blue ball from the trunk. She put the road between us and rubbed her hands vigorously, preparing for action. (Some distance from the pins was necessary to approximate actual bowling; we were determined to preserve a little authenticity.) As soon as we were clear of the estimated glass shrapnel radius, she let fly. The ball rumbled past me and Brahm like a blur — the girl had a good arm — smashed through seven of our makeshift pins, bounced with a hollow pok! off some hitherto unseen ripple in the asphalt, and disappeared into the blackness without a sound.

"Damn," Tara said. "Did it go over?"

Brahm shot to the edge, his long hair flying, and peered down over the low wall. Whatever he expected to see wasn't there. "Oh yeah," he chortled. "It's gone."

"Should that be a penalty?" I wondered aloud.

"Hey, way to make up rules as you go along," said Tara, genuinely upset. "I should get a pass if we're playing that way."

"No rules, just play," Brahm said. He stooped into my trunk and chose a ball. Tara and I crowded him as we retrieved replacements for the obliterated "pins." When he took a long-legged running start, I knew my mischievous friend intended to send his ball the way Tara's had gone. This was understandable. There's something kind of funny about launching a sixteen-pound composite-plastic piece of sports equipment off a cliff. When only three pins shattered, Brahm didn't mind. He was too preoccupied by the pok! that sent his brown orb into oblivion. "That was great," he said. Of course Tara and I agreed.

Not all our balls went over. Our fun wouldn't have lasted very long if they had. Street bowling quickly became a sport of some finesse as we worked to find the sweet spot — that ideal inertia for breaking as many pins as possible without sending the balls down to a wooded grave. Recovering the ones just bowled became an even bigger challenge than bowling itself, because the road's incline often sent them caroming to the right. We laughed to watch whoever was on fetching duty scuttle downhill after a runaway. The posture required was a through-the-legs-backwards catch that stripped the fetcher, hilariously, of any possible dignity. All this was worth the road grime and pulverized glass that clung to our palms.

When the last ball, already cracked almost in two before I bowled it, rolled erratically away from me, completely missing the final remaining pins, and, with a grrrr, pok! vanished, the three of us brushed our hands on our clothes.

"Hey, I sparkle," exclaimed Tara, grinning and holding her tiny palms up to the light. We all looked. They glimmered like fairy dust.