The Hungry Time

In my last year of college, my German Shepherd Hendrix and I moved in with a roommate who was barely five feet tall with long hair and a giant moustache. He made his living as a male dancer at a ladies-only club. I found the house and roommate on the for-rent bulletin board at school.

My new roommate referred to himself as “a student of the world”. Over time I also learned he possessed a mercurial temper. Between his height, his hair, his giant mustache, and his volatility, he resembled the cartoon character Yosemite Sam. When he got mad, he would start grumbling to himself and make noises, not unlike Yosemite Sam. It was simultaneously disturbing and humorous. He had a young dog that was half coyote. Within the first week of my moving in, she had chewed through a fair sampling of my possessions, including my prized 1917, first edition copy of The Son of Tarzan, by Edgar Rice Burroughs. 

I had a work-study job that made ends meet, but lacked discretionary income. My roommate was often a little short on cash as he was wholly dependant on tips. Food was an occasional issue. I learned some of his student-of-the-world tricks like how to fix cereal using orange juice when the milk was gone. The dogs had food when we had food; otherwise we suffered equally.

One time when I only had about $2, we went to the store to buy a can of beans and a package of tortillas. I bought the items and we left. When we got back in the car, he reached into the front of his pants and pulled out a giant steak he had shoplifted. I was appalled. A heated discussion ensued and basically he said he was happy to eat it alone if I was too good to eat a ‘liberated’ steak. In the end, hunger trumped my moral stance. We had steak and burritos for dinner. I never quite trusted him from that point forward.

About a month later there was an administrative foul up with my work-study job. My paycheck would be delayed two weeks. I resigned myself to eat rice and beans. With the last of my cash I bought a small bag of dry dog food so the dogs could eat. In a twist of synchronicity, my roommate was once again broke. Never before in my life had I been hungry. By hungry, I mean hunger without the promise of relief on the near horizon. The dogs polished off their food about the time we ran out of ours. The cupboard was bare. At first it seemed like an adventure, like Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, or Bilbo and the dwarves notching their belts tighter in The Hobbit. I fried up some flour and water paste and called it flatbread biscuits, shared by canines and humans alike until the flour ran out.

As you starve, you first become lethargic. A lassitude descends and you simply do nothing and conserve calories. A little further into the process you get an injection of slightly frantic energy that spurs you to go find food. After a week of short rations followed by not eating for two days, I decided to swallow the only thing I had left to swallow –my pride. It was beginning to feel less like an adventure and more like an emergency. I raided my penny jar for bus fare and took a bus to my father’s office to bum $10. My father had raised me to be independent, not stupid.

Flush with my father’s sawbuck, I arrived back at the house in an infectious, celebratory mood. With the dogs barking, we all piled into my car, put a dollar’s worth of gas into the tank and went to the grocery. We bought hamburger meat, beans, tomatoes, and onions. We went back to the house and made a huge pot of chili in my big cast iron pan. Another thing starving imparts is a keen sense of smell; and the chili simmering on the stove filled the house with a wonderful aroma. I don’t know if I have ever anticipated a meal more in my life.

It was then I noticed the dogs sitting expectantly, hollow-eyed and hungry, a mirror image of me. I had forgotten to get them food. While the chili finished cooking, my roommate and I jumped back in the car and got the dogs a bag of food with the last of the money. It promised to be a feast. 

Twenty minutes later we returned home. The cast iron skillet was lying on the floor; perfectly clean as if it had simply fallen off the shelf. During our absence, the dogs had knocked the skillet off the stove, eaten the chili, and licked the pan clean. There was not a speck of chili on the stove, floor, or walls. My newly acute sense of smell reported a lingering whiff of chili in the air; otherwise it was as if it had never existed. The dogs, bellies distended, looked highly satisfied and not the least bit guilty. In the time it took us to go to the store they had managed to consume an entire boiling pot of chili. They also showed no signs of being burnt or scalded. With sleepy eyes, they looked forward to a post-feast nap.

There I stood: starving, broke again, and holding an unopened bag of dry dog food. Predictably, my roommate started making his Yosemite-Sam noises like he was going to explode. Suddenly the whole scene struck me as funny. Just when I had hit bottom and fixed the problem, God pulled the rug out from under me. I couldn’t stop laughing. I put the dogs outside for the night –lest they compound the insult with a digestive eruption. Finally, with the phrase, “they were hungry too” talked my roommate out of killing them. 

I probably lacked enough spare proteins in my body to allocate any to the task of memory consolidation because I just cannot recall anything else about the event. Maybe I returned the dog food and got some beans, hard to say, it goes black from there. 

That night and that period of young manhood marked a tipping point. Prior to moving into that house, I had romanticized how a little hardship would be a character-building experience for me. Overall life had been relatively easy, I had never truly suffered or been tested to see if I could handle a rough patch. The hungry time cured that yearning for an adventure by trials. 

There is a saying that goes something like, ‘hard times don’t shape you, they reveal you’. The hungry time revealed me as a man with less of a rugged adventurer’s soul and more one that craved a life of basic comforts: family, food, shelter, hearth, and home. Of course, with that base in place, I welcome adventure.