The Purple People Eater

Note: Now that he’s passed on and can no longer sue me for slander, I’m now free to write about my brother’s follies as well as my own.

In the Summer of 1968, my older brother, Bill, got his first car. It was a 1957 Chevy Belaire, an automobile that had already become a classic among car buffs. My brother’s ’57 Chevy would have been the envy of his friends except for two issues.

First, it was the 4-door version which no hotrod freak would ever consider driving, and second, it was the butt-ugliest color of purple you ever saw. Even at thirteen years old, I was completely flabbergasted that GM would manufacture such an eye sore. I remain a Ford guy to this day.

All harsh judgements aside, it was a car, and it was street legal, and my brother had a driver’s license. That Summer, my brother was working part-time as a grocery store bagger. I was working three different part-time gigs as helper to a worm farm entrepreneur during the week, a donut fry-cook on weekend mornings, and an intermittent lawn mower to the few customers who hadn’t yet abandoned me for my lack of persistence.

We were rarely home at the same time but on occasions, Bill and I would both have the same day off. If we pooled our money for gas, we could come up with five or six dollars, and even though that old Chevy was a gas guzzler, regular gasoline (unleaded hadn’t yet been invented) was thirty-two cents a gallon, so we could cruise around town all day.

Besides lack of intrusive government regulations on the gasoline industry, they also hadn’t yet mandated seatbelts so the non-driver could easily hop over into the back seat and launch water balloons from either side of the car.

Another great thing about 1968 was that restaurants were exceedingly less expensive. The local Pizza Inn offered an all-you-can-eat lunch buffet for only $3.00 and that included a drink. One weekday in late June, while our parents were both away at work, my brother and I decided to go for that lunch buffet.

When the marketing geniuses at Pizza Inn came up with the $3.00 lunch buffet, I’m certain they envisioned working class folks coming by on their lunch hour and stuffing down a quick meal before rushing back to the office within the allotted sixty minutes. What they failed to consider were two ravenous teenage boys with unlimited time and zero social constraints.

Even though the weather was hot for June, the inside of the air-conditioned restaurant was cool and comfortable. And our young waitress was not bad to look at (although she paid far more attention to my sixteen-year-old brother than to me). We ordered cokes and the buffet, and then she said those magic words, “you guys help yourselves.”

What started off as a tasty pizza outing, soon degenerated into sibling rivalry and we began trying to outdo each other in the pizza volume consumption olympics. After a few trips to the pizza bar, I realized two things. First, the cook was scrimping on the amount of toppings, and second, the doughy crust was holding back my progress.

Consequently, I began scraping the meat off one or two slices of pizza onto a third and consuming that. My brother quickly caught on and we, in no time, amassed a large bone pile of empty crusts. That’s when the once-cute waitress made a real nuisance of herself. When she came to refill our drinks and noticed our massive discard stack, she ratted us out to the manager.

Needless to say, a snotty restaurant manager cut short our lunchtime adventure, which was no real issue because my stomach was beginning to hurt. We called the contest a draw, paid our $6.00 bill and left without tipping that uppity waitress who, come to think of it, was not that hot looking anyway.

As we returned to the Purple People Eater, I was already thinking about the nap I would have that afternoon. Unfortunately, in those days, my brother was not the forward thinker he would become later in life, and he had failed to maintain surveillance of the old Chevy’s gas gage. It was bone dry. Fortunately, there was a Gulf gas station only a block away (and slightly downhill).

Picture a thirteen-year-old and a sixteen-year-old pushing a twenty-five-hundred-pound car down the shoulder of a road, against oncoming traffic, in one-hundred-degree heat. Several people honked but none stopped to assist us. Twenty minutes later, I left my brother pumping gas while I went around beside the Gulf station and vomited up at least two Pizza Inn pizzas and four cokes on the cinderblock wall.

We finally made it home and both took long naps. My mother was a bit confused when I turned down her homemade chicken-fried steak for dinner that night but neither of us ever mentioned being asked to leave the pizza restaurant or pushing that stupid Chevy down the road to the gas station.

It makes me wonder how many dumb-ass stunts my own kids survived and never told me about. It also makes me wonder if either of our grandkids will ever experience as many beneficial life lessons as we did without getting caught. Wherever ya are Bill, I hope they have tasty pizza, cute waitresses, and better-looking automobiles.

A meeting of great minds who think alike