Life, on the Line by Grant Achatz (book club reads .txt) 📕

My mom headed directly across the street. Walking through the store, she bought the cheapest thing she could find, a single Twinkie. And that is how she met my dad.

My dad later owned a small diner, James Lunch, in addition to the grocery. But by the time I was born, he was nearly forty-one and his work revolved around Reliable Labor, a temporary labor office that he opened with his best friend from high school, George Karkazis. I never saw him work with food, although he cooked a mean omelette on Sundays.

My mom feared food. She had phobias about all sorts of foods. Olives stank. Chili was too spicy. Sushi or Thai food or even Mexican all had major issues. These dislikes were passed on fully to me. To say I grew up as a picky eater would be an understatement. I loved pasta, but only with a simple red sauce. I ate lots of chicken, lots of steak. Potatoes in any form were acceptable. Vegetables were to be avoided, with the exception of corn. Most vegetables that I had growing up were cooked in the fashion that my mom grew up with, which meant that they were soggy, gray, and mushy. Salt was the only seasoning used. Any others had a “funny smell” or were “too spicy,” according to my mom.

Her biggest phobia was cheese. Yes, cheese. According to my mom cheese is “rotten milk” and “smells awful.” “When your dad brings home the feta I don’t even want to open the refrigerator!” So when I attended a friend’s birthday party in seventh grade and all that was offered for dinner was pizza, I asked if they had anything else.

“Why, Nick,” my friend’s mom said, laughing, “don’t you like pizza?”

“Well, to be honest I’ve never tried pizza.” The look on everyone’s face was astounding. I was instantly embarrassed, so embarrassed that I put a slice of the pizza on my plate and pretended I was kidding. I took a bite.

“Wow, that’s fantastic!”

I gobbled down four or five slices. When I got home my mom asked me about the party.

“It was great. We had the whole gym to ourselves to play basketball, then they served pizza for lunch.” I knew that would get a rise out of her.

“Do you want something to eat, honey?” she asked, assuming I had not eaten the foul substance.

“No. I ate plenty there,” I said. My dad shot me a look.

“You like pizza?” he asked.

“Like it? It is the single greatest thing I have ever eaten. Delicious. Why don’t you guys eat pizza?”

My mom looked at my dad, and my dad looked at me and smiled. “Next time you want a pizza, Nick, just let me know.”

“How about tonight?”

A small fissure in the home cracked open, and nearly every Sunday during football season my dad and I would order a pizza from our favorite local place and enjoy it for lunch during the Bears game. Very occasionally, my dad would also have a beer, something I never, ever saw him do any other time. “Beer and pizza just go together. I used to have plenty of both before you were born.” And just like that, I learned that my dad loved food, all kinds of food.

My parents encouraged academic discipline over sports or any other outside activities. I went to high school at the same school that John Hughes attended and wrote about in his trilogy of now-famous 1980s movies. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was filmed at Glenbrook North, and yes, I was an extra and can be seen in the film. But I wasn’t Ferris or Cameron in real life. I was pretty much anonymous. In 1986 I headed off to Colgate University.

“Mr. Kokonas, where is your book?”

“I’m afraid I left it at my apartment, Professor Balmuth,” I answered. It was week four of my freshman year at Colgate University, and I was taking Introduction to Logic with the esteemed but highly feared Professor Jerome Balmuth.

As many upperclassmen told me, Professor Balmuth was brilliant but difficult. He was demanding one moment, belittling the next. He was Colgate’s answer to the John Houseman character of Professor Kingsfield from The Paper Chase.

“Well, Mr. Kokonas, a lot of good it is doing you there.”

“On the contrary, Professor, it appears that it is doing me some good. That is why I was able to whisper the answer to Jim, and why you immediately called on me.”The class remained silent, and Jim, an upperclassman who shared with me the secrets of his fraternity brothers’ notes on the class, shot me a look to let me know that he was not pleased that I had acknowledged the indiscretion.

“Mr. Kokonas, I called on you because you did not have your book.” Professor Balmuth’s back was to me and he was still facing the blackboard on which he had written a symbolic logic problem. He had not written my answer—despite the fact that it was correct—and he had somehow noticed that I had not put my book on my desk, despite the fact that I was one of about fifty people in class and sitting in the fourth row. “Please see me after class, Mr. Kokonas.”

My heart raced and Jim lifted a finger, shaped it into the form of a gun, and pretended to shoot me dead. It was no secret that in the first few weeks Professor Balmuth wanted to separate the “wheat from the chaff, as it were” and thin the class. Fifty-plus people was a huge class at Colgate, but Intro to Logic was a requirement for many majors, from mathematics to philosophy to economics. Eight students left the first week. He had more thinning to do. I was next.

A line formed at the front of the class and Balmuth answered questions calmly one by one. Another dropped out in front of me, and when I reached the front of the line, Balmuth asked me to go to the back of the line and