On Worm Worship
One afternoon, after a brief and unexpected rainstorm in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts, I settled down to dinner with Samantha and her family. Joining us were Sam’s mother and father, two uncles, two aunts, and one young cousin. One of her uncles, JR, I had met long ago and thought might remember me. I stood to shake his hand as he ascended the half-staircase to the living room.
Samantha introduced me. “This is my boyfriend, Plebz,” she chirped, bird that she is.
I extended my hand, ready to impress—even overwhelm—JR with the firmness of my handshake and the worn, working-man’s roughness of my young hand.
“Is he clean?” JR recoiled in horror.
I forced a chuckle, and chalked the underwhelming greeting and subtle racism up to some friendly ribbing.
“Yes, he showered,” Sam replied.
JR released a tepid hand to meet mine, which had been wavering anxiously between extension and retraction throughout this encounter.
I followed Samantha’s family out to the back deck, where dinner was being served. Dishes began to fill in the empty spaces at the table like the sections of a paint-by-number pastoral still life—a fleet of steamed lobsters, roasted turnips, fresh haricots verts, butter and sugar corn, zeppelin squash, home-brewed beer, and white sangria formed a miraculous pilgrim’s feast.
Samantha went inside to retrieve her drink, and I sank comfortably into my chair and looked out onto the field just beyond the deck.
“So what religion are you?” The question startled me from my thoughts.
Sam’s uncle JR was looking at me inquisitively.
“Whatever… religion… I need to be?” I replied foolishly.
“Huh?”
“Now why does he have to be religious?” JR’s wife chimed in. I appreciated her effort to intercede and the time it bought me to come up with a less insolent answer.
“I’m just trying to find out more about him.”
At this point, I may have said, “I’m not religious,” but I can’t be certain.
Thankfully, Sam returned from the kitchen and the conversation tapered off. Sam’s mom placed lobsters on each of our plates. In my younger years, the prospect of cracking, slurping, splitting, and sucking on a lobster carcass with Samantha’s family would have been far too daunting. I’d likely have sat meekly, trying my best to eat silently and without fuss. I’d probably have refused the second lobster I ate, as well as the unwanted tails and lobster bodies that were offered to me after I had dispatched of lobster number one.
But here I was, quite sure that if my eating habits hadn’t driven Samantha and her salt-of-the-earth Polish family away by now, they weren’t about to. Besides, with the heavy fog of religious privacy lifted from the table, I was feeling free. Free to finger into the deepest regions—the Asians-only bits—of the shell and scoop lobster tamale from the lifeless head into my waiting mouth.
“So what did you guys do in New York?” someone asked Samantha.
“We ate and drank nonstop. We went to this underground Russian vodka bar and Pleb had a cocktail with a pickled quail egg. Oh, and we went to this crazy Romanian restaurant. People were dancing in between all of the tables.”
“A Romanian restaurant?” one of Sam’s aunts asked. “What kind of food did you eat?”
“Romanian Jewish food, like latkes, and stuffed cabbage, and garlicky steak,” I interjected.
“And we ordered a bottle of vodka that came frozen in a block of ice,” Sam added.
“Why does everyone think that the Russians invented vodka?” JR demanded.
“What’s that?”
“She said they went to a Russian vodka bar, didn’t she?”
“The Russians invented vodka,” Sam’s other uncle replied.
“Everyone knows that the Polish were the first people to use potatoes to distill vodka,” JR retorted.
Trying my best to wheedle my way into JR’s good graces, I added sycophantically, “I had some Polish vodka in New York. It was made from bison grass.”
To my dismay, JR was slackjawed. “It was made from bison ass?” he asked.
At this point it became clear that while JR might have been hard of hearing, he had learned to shape this into an advantage in his pursuit of giving Asian boyfriends as hard a time as possible.
“Yes. I drank Polish bison ass vodka,” I conceded weakly.
Dinner carried on this way for some time. Attempts at ingratiating myself were met with headstrong and clever resistance. I soldiered on, certain that my perseverance would be rewarded in the end with a warm pat on the back and a “You’re welcome to come back and visit us anytime.”
Then, as I was halfway into lobster two, JR caught me again. A flush left hook to my temple that I never saw coming. I was too engrossed with eating lobster in boxing gloves.
“So you worship worms?”
A collective “What?”
“Didn’t he say he worships worms?” JR said matter-of-factly, “I asked him what religion he was and he said he worshipped worms.”
“He asked you what religion you are?” Sam giggled.
“You’re asking if he worships worms?” Sam’s aunt sputtered.
“He said he worships worms!”
“I worship worms. I disapprove of fishing and I pray nightly in the fields to my worm gods,” I said.
“Is that why you like bison ass? You wait for the worms to come from the bison ass?” JR inquired with not a little earnestness.
“Yes,” I answered plainly.
And thus it came to be that my worm worshipping became public knowledge. For the rest of dinner, Samantha’s cousin would periodically exclaim, “What is wrong with you people?!?” in response to a new and more ridiculous line of questioning aimed at yours truly, or, other times when she would remember that I was a worm worshipper.
At the end of the night, I did get my handshake and some warm words. But at what cost? I had let my worm worshipping become a cheap joke. My fourth, fifth, and sixth lobsters had been tainted with the acrid taste of betrayal. I could feel my worm underlords writhing and twisting underfoot, their shame palpable through the vibrations only I could feel passing up through the wooden columns of the house and into the very core of my putrid heart.
“Fatsos: They’re Just Like Us!” (Us Weekly, August, 2009)
But anyway, on to the Rankings!
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