Johnny & The Floor Burgers
Hello and good day!
Johnny didn’t have too many friends.
He was a very whiny kid with a very loud voice.
Everything he said came out as a yell.
When we played basketball, he’d call a foul on almost every play.
When we played hide and seek, he’d accuse anybody who made it back to base untagged of cheating.
The loudness of his voice and the constancy of his complaining doomed him to a mostly solitary childhood.
He was my friend though.
Somehow, he ended up latching on to me and I didn’t mind.
He was athletic enough for us to play a good game of one-on-one basketball.
A couple of times per week, for several years, Johnny would come knocking on my door.
My parents owned our house and the duplex next door.
On the far side of the duplex, there was a long thin concrete driveway that ended at a garage.
We didn’t use the garage for cars.
We didn’t use the driveway for cars either.
My mom turned half of the garage into her office, and she ran a little business out of there.
The other half of the garage was storage.
Our family parked on the street.
Over the storage half of the garage, I had a basketball hoop.
When Johnny knocked on our door, I usually invited him in.
If he was in the mood for a snack, I pulled something for him from the fridge or pantry.
“Thank you Adam!” he’d yell involuntarily.
Then we’d walk out my back door and down a wooden flight of stairs into my small, dry back yard that was filled with scorched dead grass.
My back yard connected with the duplex’s back yard.
I’d pick up my basketball from wherever it was laying in the yard and then Johnny and I would go to war for a couple of hours.
When we were done playing and all sweaty and it was time for Johnny to go home, I usually walked with him back to his apartment, to keep him company.
Our neighborhood was a tough neighborhood.
There was trash on the ground, graffiti on the walls, and drug addicts wandering the streets.
Johnny lived alone with his dad in one of the poorest apartment complexes in town.
It was very rare to see a kid with a single father.
There were a lot of single mothers, but not many single fathers in those parts.
Johnny’s mom was a drug addict who left home to live the street life.
Drug addicted moms were common.
My very best friend’s mom was a drug addict too.
But it wasn’t common for a mother to leave her child.
Johnny’s father worked as a janitor in a hospital, and he wasn’t around very often.
I could never go into Johnny’s apartment because his dad had a rule that nobody could come into the apartment when the father wasn’t around.
I said goodbye to Johnny on the sidewalk most days.
The apartment complex was two stories tall and had three sides.
The back side was the longest and ran straight.
The adjoining sides were shorter and squared up perpendicular with the back.
The paint was light brown, and the doors were dark brown.
The roof was flat and tarred black.
There was a locked chain link fence around the entire complex.
Johnny carried the key to the pad lock and the key to his apartment door.
On top of the fence, there was barbed wire.
In front of the complex, there was a busy bus stop where people were always lined up waiting for the bus and where drug addicts slept on metal benches inside the small, covered station, to protect themselves from the hot sun.
One day, Johnny shared some exciting news with me.
“My dad says you can stay the night Adam!”
My parents were very liberal about letting me stay the night places.
I received permission easily.
That evening, after playing basketball, Johnny and I walked through our neighborhood to his apartment.
Johnny unlocked the chain link fence and relocked it once we were inside.
His apartment was very small and very unkempt.
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It looked like a couple of bachelors lived there, one of whom, the grown one, worked all the time.
It was a tiny one-bedroom apartment, with a tiny dirty kitchen, a tiny bathroom, and a tiny living room.
Johnny slept on the couch and his bedding was already there.
I was to sleep on the floor in a sleeping bag.
They had a small TV on a table at the front of the living room.
I met Johnny’s father.
He was a strong, lean, serious man, who chain smoked.
“Hello Adam. Johnny’s been telling me about you. Thanks for coming over,” he said.
He had a cigarette in his mouth and the smoke drifted while he talked.
“Thank you for having me,” I replied.
“I hope you like cheeseburgers,” he said.
“They’re my favorite,” I said.
“Go ahead and watch some TV while I cook,” said the father.
I sat on the floor. Johnny turned the knob on the old TV set until he found cartoons.
After a few minutes, I needed to use the restroom.
I walked past the kitchen and saw Johnny’s father in there frying up burger patties in a pan on the stove.
His back was turned to me, and I know he had a cigarette in his mouth because smoke was floating up while he cooked.
After I used the restroom, I walked back by the kitchen and saw Johnny’s father assembling the burgers on a small strip of counter.
There were three plates and it looked like the burgers were just about put together.
A second after I stepped into the living room, I heard plates crashing on the ground in the kitchen.
“Aw hell, damn it!” said Johnny’s father.
Johnny was so wrapped up in cartoons that he didn’t hear.
I stuck my head back in the kitchen to see what happened.
All three burgers had fallen and splattered on the filthy, yellow, linoleum kitchen floor.
There were ketchup and mustard stains all over the place.
The buns had flown in every which direction.
Green lettuce, red tomatoes, purple onions, and brown meat patties with melted orange cheddar cheese on top laid in grime on the linoleum.
And there was Johnny’s father, cigarette in mouth, crouched down, cleaning it all up, putting the components back together on the plates.
He didn’t know that I saw what happened and I went back into the living room.
A couple minutes later, he called for me and Johnny to come eat.
It wasn’t anywhere near long enough to have cooked new burgers.
The three of us sat at a small wooden table pushed up against a wall in the tiny little kitchen.
I saw small splatters of ketchup still on the ground where Johnny’s dad hadn’t cleaned thoroughly enough.
We ate our burgers.
They were pretty dang good.
After that, Johnny and I watched TV until we fell asleep.
In the morning, we ate cereal.
When I left to go home, Johnny’s dad thanked me for coming to stay with them.
It was early and he was already smoking.
My dad is from Fort Wayne, Indiana.
When he was growing up, it was corn and wheat country out there.
He was brought up by parents and aunts and uncles who lived through the Great Depression on their farms.
Turning your nose up at food was considered a grave sin.
And so was whining and complaining, especially if somebody had gone through the effort of doing something nice for you.
I was brought up that way by my dad and it has served me well in life, especially doing business in Peru.
One of the worst social miscues that you can commit being a gringo in Peru is to turn your nose up at food.
Peruvians are very proud of their cuisine and some of their dishes seem pretty exotic and strange to an unaccustomed American.
But if you eat heartily and savor what you are served and ask for seconds, you will become a cherished friend forever in the eyes of the cook.
As a general rule of thumb, it is good policy to savor, admire, and appreciate any good deed that somebody does for you, even if their effort doesn’t square perfectly with your normal desires.
Thank you so much for your time today.
I hope that you have a truly blessed day!
Adam