a cautionary tale. presented to you by your local produce section

I was going to die. I was sure of it. This was the moment. My twenty-two years on earth had all led up to this, my final breath. I guess my fear of plane crashes was unwarrented. Who would of known that something so small, so every day, was going to be the death of me. Not even those with the wildest of imaginations could have predicted that tomato salad would be the catalyst of my untimely demise. Would a psychic have known? Would a palm reader look at my hand as be able to tell me, "You are going to die when you try to choke down a grotesque tomato salad, because you want to be polite and clean your plate?"

Luckily, I survived to tell the tale. Tomato salad did not do me in. It came awfully close, but I shall live on, perhaps a little wiser for the wear. But if I had died, I would have accepted full responsiblity. I am the soul person who is liabal for very event, every small moment, and every decision that led me up to the tomato salad of doom.

I needed a place to live in LA. As a full time college student with a decent but by no means spectacularly high-paying job as an office assistant, my piggy bank wasn't exactly overflowing. My lack of funds meant that I would never be able to afford the prestiguous Oakwood apartments. I had to resort to more economical opportunities. If I wanted to find a place, I would need to do something a little bit unconventional.

Which led me to Andy and Pam. A friend of mine had told me that their neighbors were looking to sublet a bedroom in their house, and the rent was reasonable. Actually, it was beyond reasonable. It was a steal beyond compare. I seized the opportunity, thinking only of the cheap rent and my sunny and fabulous life in Los Angeles. I did not, however, think about the fact that I would be sharing a house with completely strangers. Three, to be exact. There was Andy and Pam, the married couple, and Steve, the detective who lived in the basement but was never there. At first I thought that Steve was made up, and that Andy and Pam were insane and planned on killing me. The evidence started piling up for this theory. On my first day in the house, they put a plastic cover on my mattress. I was, of course, certain that this was to protect the mattress from stains when they snuck in my room in the middle of the night to chop me to bits with a hacksaw. I did, however, finally meet Steve. He was, in fact, a detective. I instantly felt better about living in the house with strangers. They couldn't kill someone under their own roof with a detective in the basement, could they? Well, I suppose if the detective was corrupt and in on the whole plot, they could. But I tried not to think about that.

The days went by and I still woke up every morning, all of my limbs in tact, in a squeaky bed. There were awkward moments, since these were complete strangers, even something as every day as packing a lunch can be a tad uncomfortable when you're doing it in someone else's kitchen. Someone who you have known for less than a fortnight. I kept to myself as much as possible. I'd try to eat big lunches so that I didn't have to leave my room for food in the evenings. Don't get me wrong, they were nice people, it was just an incredibly weird situation. You'd handle it the same way, I'm sure.

One day I got home from school early, and Andy was home for his lunch break. He had a colleauge from the office over and planned on grilling some bratwursts. Now, I hate bratwurst, so when Andy asked me if I'd like to join them for lunch, a polite decline would have been the best response. But I had barely taken the time to get to know these people and I felt if I was going to be staying in their home for three months, I couldn't rely on being a recluse at every moment of the day. Having brats with these business men was just a small step towards making this house a home.

I'm not a fan of tomatoes. I hate them. Sometimes, when I'm feeling lazy, I won't bother to take them off of my taco or hamburger, but for the most part I could definitely live in a world sans tomatoes. Andy apparently loves tomatoes. So much, in fact, that his idea of a salad is to cut up tomatoes and douse them in some sort of horrid vinegar dressing that I can only describe as the urine of death. I had gotten through the bratwurst just fine, but these pile of soggy, oozing tomatoes was staring at me relentlessly the entire time. Finally, I knew I had to knuckle down and get through this. I had to be polite, right? I couldn't just leave a whole serving of tomato salad on my plate. Not when he had made it from scratch just moments before. Had I been so opposed to the consumption of tomatoes, the moment he started cutting them up for salad would have been the most opportune moment to declare my distate for them. Alas, that moment had passed, and I had no other options.

A trick I learned from eating disgusting food when I was younger: swallow and don't chew. Chewing leads the food spending even more time on your taste buds, which, obviously, leads to tasting. What you want to do is get the food as far back in your mouth as possible and swallow it whole. This worked for a few bites of the salad. The problem was that the tomatoes were cut rather large, and so I was swallowing fairly substantial sizes. Each bite got worse and worse. My gag reflex began to kick in. But I had to keep going. I had to prove to these two people, one whom I live with and have to see every day, the other a man I've never met before in my life but still seemed rather judgmental (and that intimidated me), that I could clean my plate. I'm an adult and I can eat a plate of tomatoes, see?

It was the last tomato that did me in. My esophagus couldn't take anymore. It contracted and refused to let the chunk of tomato budge. I couldn't swallow it, I couldn't cough it up, and I sure as hell couldn't panic and let the others know I was choking. So I sat there politely, choking to death, tears beginning to well in my eyes, wondering how Andy was going to explain this to my parents.

"Well, we were sitting there eating tomato salad, which he seemed to really enjoy since he ate all of it, and then he just dropped dead into his plate."

Then I thought about my funeral, and how they'd probably serve tomato salad on account of the fact that I enjoyed it so much that I allowed it to take my life.

Somehow, let's just chalk it up to Deus Ex Machina, the chunk of tomato, which in retrospect was roughly the size of Jupiter, passed through my throat and I could breath again. Andy and the stranger never knew how close I was to death, and I learned a valuable lesson about eating vegetables.