Go to Town

It's been six years since I graduated from college. Last month, I found myself reunited with a good friend from those days - LaDow - when I traveled up to Chicago, and we both blurted out a few times, "Crap, man, it's been six years," or "can you believe it has been six years?!"

Well, mentally I try to pretend that no time has passed since then, but the more I come back around these parts, the more I can't get away from Father Time who seems to have grown wider and taller - creating an imposing force to my attempts to make my early 20's seem conviently close to my later 20's.

But today I told Father Time that he could go down town, buy a pogo stick and, well, you know. Meanwhile, I was going to eat a GCB and cheese fries. Okay, okay. I wasn't that brave ... just a 1/2 GCB.

Marvin's is a college eating establishment, which is to say that once you take it away from the nastalgia and mystique that has developed through the years, it's really nothing all that special. You could make Marvin's food in your own kitchen for half the cost. But, really, you can't because you clean your grill at home and at Marvin's I don't think they've ever cleaned their grill and that is precisely where that extra level of flavor comes from.

So Marvin's special is the GCB. For who knows how long, Marvin's has been serving up industrial burgers (thick 1/2 pound chunks that end up more like bricks than patties) on plain-jane white hoagie rolls cut in half. American cheese slices end up plastered to the burger and sticking to the wax paper. Then to top it off, garlic salt douses the top of the hoagie rolls.

The cheese fries are also ordinarily simple and extraordinarily good - simple school fries in a basket with gellatanous cheese oozing through cracks and onto the same paper. Very similar to Steak 'n Shakes' cheese fries only the fries and cheese are both more endowed and generous at Marvin's. Although served with a fork, you'd be stupid to eat them that way. First of all, Marvin's is no where near that elegant. Secondly, you'll only curse yourself for breaking the natural chain of fries in fingers to face.

I use to eat a whole GCB (about 3/4 lbs. of beef), cheese fries and a Coke about once every other week in college. To top it off, I would order a side of cheese or ranch dressing to dip my GCB into. I'd eat it and then succumb to waves of pleasure and guilt, sickness and satisfaction, the same experiences any other ingested material of such toxicity would illicit in my overtaxed biological system.

"How did I ever do that," I thought to myself today - enjoying my jr. size frat-tastic meal. And I also found myself doing what I am doing now - trying to critique and capture the meal with my head as well as my gut. Maturity is the ability to do stupid things with a critical mind. But the vain glory of youth is the ability to do stupid things that your body can still forgive and that your mind need not critique.

Wes