Fletch sighs deeply. “Joanna nominated you, dumbass. She met some ladies from the Liberal Arts department at your last book event and they suggested she do so. She spent months putting together an essay and going through the application process. I assure you, and I tell you again, this is legitimate.”
Joanna and I have been friends ever since the vagaries of the University housing department saw fit to put us together freshman year. I cherish her for a variety of reasons but a big part of that is because we knew each other back before we had any idea of who we might be when we grew up. Author Laura Dave has the most spot-on quote in her book The First Husband, where she explains how her old friends “… knew each other in that honest, unmitigated way that people get to know you who meet you when you’re still young. Before all the rest of it. Before it becomes both easier and harder to know yourself.”
So, yes, we’re Laura Dave–kind of friends.
Joanna’s one of the most honest, straightforward people I’ve ever met, so the idea that she’d pull one over on me is difficult to comprehend. “She never once mentioned this to me!” I exclaim. I mean, secret things almost never happen around me because I’m so suspicious. I take great pride in that it’s almost impossible to catch me unawares.
Okay, a lot of times I see conspiracy theories in coincidences, and sometimes Fletch isn’t the only one around here requiring a tinfoil hat, but still. I even hate good surprises, and woe to anyone who tries. Like if Fletch actually had been able to pull off bringing my New York girlfriends Karyn and Caprice here for my birthday without my first cleaning and shopping and coloring my hair? You’d have seen me on the news.
Fletch nods. “Yeah. She knew you’d be mad but did it anyway because she thought it was important you were recognized. She’s very proud of you, so we kept the nomination under wraps until everything was official.” He points to my letter. “Now it’s official. Congratulations.”
Huh.
“What I fail to understand is why me? I had the least distinguished college career out of anyone I know.” I reflect for a moment, scanning the internal databases for someone who screwed up as much as me. “Oh, wait—I was friends with a guy named Hoff who was in chemical engineering so he could make his own drugs. So my college career was more distinguished than Hoff’s but that’s it.”
Fletch gives me the kind of indulgent smile one usually reserves for LOL Cats or toddlers with upturned bowls of oatmeal on their heads. “Jen, the award’s for what you’ve achieved as an alumna. Trust me, no one’s giving you anything for your undergrad career.” And then he snorts, which is kind of unfair. I mean, I didn’t even meet Fletch until well into my ninth year of college, so he never knew me when I was in my late-eighties Girls Gone Wild phase. Without the Kissing of the Other Girls or the Photographing of the Ladyparts, I mean. [That kind of stuff didn’t go down on campus until I was toiling away in corporate America wearing an ill-fitting business suit. Frankly, I’m relieved.]
Even so, although Fletch and I generally hit the bars together once we met, there were instances when I’d head out with my girlfriends and I’d turn into what Fletch described as “a handful.”
Fletch still gives me the business about the time his bar manager friend called him to come fetch my friend Sloane and me from the parking lot. Apparently after Sloane and I stole a bunch of steak knives, we attempted to use them like crampons to scale the building. Due to a flaw in the steak knives’ design and an unyielding brick wall (or possibly the three pitchers of Molson we imbibed), we abandoned our task.
Plan B involved going into hyperstealth mode, digging foxholes in the snowbanks outside the bar, obscuring ourselves by draping white cloth napkins over our heads in order to be completely camouflaged while we shouted obscenities at the snotty patrons who’d been shooting us dirty looks inside when they walked to their cars. [Listen, we can’t not sing along to “Love Is a Battlefield.” It’s, like, against the law or something.]
Once Fletch arrived and patiently explained that this was, in fact, not how Superman combated forces of evil, we grudgingly abandoned our Fortress of Solitude. Sloane caught a ride [Read: was wrestled into a car.] with other friends, but I refused to go home until I had a burrito. In an attempt to placate me—or out of concern that I might still be packing steak knife heat—we went to La Bamba, home of the Burrito as Big as Your Head. [And still one of my most favorite foods ever.]
Anyone who attended a Midwestern Big Ten school knows the magic of a La Bamba burrito. This is the only restaurant I’ve ever seen with a dinner rush that hits between two and four a.m. I fondly recall standing with all the other drunken students in lines that looped out the door and down the street, all of us waiting for the enchanted elixir.
There’s nothing particularly special about any of the burrito’s ingredients, outside of them being fresh, crispy, or nicely seasoned. Yet somehow the act of stuffing them all into a clammy white flour tortilla (that is literally larger than the circumference of my head) turns this innocuous concoction of lettuce, rice, and meat into a silver bullet of sorts, capable of stopping a speeding hangover, no matter how many Harry’s World Famous Long Island Iced Teas I tossed down my gullet.
The La Bamba burrito was and is a genuine booze sponge and is thus
