Once upon a time, when I was younger and even more naive than I am now, I got a job at Taco Bell, where I learned that any conversation that starts with "look bitch" is not a conversation worth having.
A couple of years prior to my ill-fated appointment with destiny working the drive-through window to someplace worse than Catholic-imagined Hell, I was vacationing in Panama City with my family. It was a magical time in my life; my teenage body had finally stopped going through the strange and involuntary changes that had, at one point, left me convinced that I was going to grow a set of boobs that would by the envy of my less fortunate and flat-chested platonic girlfriends. After years of feeling ostracised by my classmates, I'd finally made friends at school, all a couple of grades ahead of me, and therefore old enough to regale me at lunch with tales of lost virginity and hard partying at an annual ritual they referred to as Spring Break in Panama.
My high school was middle class at best, so I was baffled that so many of my peers managed to venture to an exotic South American destination every year to try to get one another pregnant and act out gay fantasies while drunk that I had while sober. When I wasn't imagining orgies featuring half the varsity basketball team in a human pyramid atop the twins from Algebra 2, I strained under the hot water during very long after school showers I'd come to indulge in on a daily basis. I was still a devout Muslim at the time, so it was important to wash away all the dirty thoughts in my mind to make room for more just like them. I struggled, as the water heater ran dry and my brother banged on the door for me to hurry up and finish so he could have a bowel movement, to figure out exactly how said orgy might transport itself to said epicenter of debauchery by car. I was a keen little investigator, and it hadn't escaped me that my lunch buddies always talked about driving to Panama. And though I fancy myself no geography wizzard, I hadn't yet become aware of an underwater freeway that might make such a trek from our Atlanta suburb possible.
I remained confused until months later, when my parents announced that we too would journey to Panama City Beach for a proper American family vacation that was cheaper than going to Disney Land.
"But Mom, we're immigrants in a land that isn't yet our own!" I bellowed. "I don't even have an American passport!"
My mother looked at me the way she often did when she wondered what life might be like if I hadn't so stubbornly insisted on surviving infancy.
"Um, you don't need a passport to go to Florida." She might have called me a jackass too, but she was muttering so I can't be sure of the exact verbage.
And so it was that I travelled in the back of my parents' white Cadillac Cimmaron, passing the time passing gas in my sleep while they suffered the putrid stench and cursed my name and my teenage bowels all the way to the land of teenage premarital sex, none of which I would actually get to indulge in. For starters, my parents were in the next room, along with our family friends who'd joined us on the trip. Second, it was the off season and there wasn't anybody my age to get it on with. And, oh yeah, I had no interest in gettin' bitches, because even though it terrified me, I got it up regularly and often at the thought of their older brothers stepping in to join me in one of the countless hot showers I needed to take even though I was a stone's throw away from the ocean...er, gulf thingie.
One fateful night, the adults decided not to cook anything for dinner, and rather than let us starve in true Draconian fashion, they took us to a new fast food restaurant that had become all the rage among future gastric bypass surgery candidates. Sure, I'd had tacos for school lunch about once a month, and I took extreme pleasure taking out the little teen angst I could muster on the tasteless, crunchy corn-product shell that became delicious through magic when combined with 85% ground beef and processed cheese slivers. But this place, this magical mecca of South Western deliciousness my parents introduced me to was no school lunch depot. No, this was Taco Bell, and it was staffed by hot Floridian teenagers who surfed by day and rolled burritos by night. One look at their shaggy blond hair, unkempt and unwashed for days, and my fourteen year old mouth watered for Meximelts and Nachos Bel Grande.
Fuck McDonald's, and fuck Burger King - they supplied food for peasants, and though I was one, they would provide me with sustinence no more! I had touched greatness, and for fifty-nine cents, I now had reason to talk to hot guys, even if they were dressed in hideous mauve and pants that sagged to their ankles...
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