That's What You Think: In Search of All The Cheese

Published 03.19.02 in The Heights, Boston College


By Annie Barrett

You sit down in your favorite crappy American food restaurant with three friends. After glancing at the menu for .03 seconds, you and at least one other person suggest in unison, “Hey, wanna all share nachos?” Oh, phew. She said it, too. I’m not the only nasty pig.

The other two breathe a sigh of relief. “Uh, sure,” says one. “Whatever, man,” pipes in the other. Do they buy our fake apathy? We really, really want nachos. Like, obviously.

And so the unacknowledged war begins. Each time groups order a huge plate of nachos, usually deemed “supreme,” “jumbo” or the TWYT favorite – “loaded,” the platter becomes a battlefield for one thing: all the cheese (ATC).

Each person of the quatrain maps out an invisible square on the table long before the nachos come, which isn’t really hard, considering the shape of most dinner tables.

You imagine a variety of possible platter angles at which the nachos could be laid down. What if the server favors your more attractive friend and places ATC right in front of him? At which exact angle should you make your first attack? Should you incorporate silverware into the pounce?

One of you reaches into your bag, looking casually around the room. I don’t want to injure anyone with this giant spork I keep in my bag for when I order nachos. Actually, maybe I do. Or at least just stun them, like temporarily, with my surprise weapon.

The two people facing the kitchen see the server emerge, tilting significantly to one side due to the weight, or more appropriately, the load, of the nacho platter. They suddenly whip out a batch of recently developed photos featuring the opposite two cheese-yearners. “Oh, I forgot I had these!” We can see the nachos and you can’t. Look at these photos. Before you realize they’re of my family, I’ll have scooped up ATC.

The platter is being lowered gracefully, majestically. Eight hungry eyes calculate the position of plate and concentration of cheese. One of you grabs that top chip, deliciously smeared with eight ounces of sour cream and beef, before the plate’s even set down. Dammit! No cheese. Just goop. Try again.

Over the next 10 minutes, not a word is uttered. You can’t even remember who those people are. You just want ATC and they are the evil factions standing in the way.

What an outsider might call “petty infractions” enrage you about each other. She just hid a giant puddle of cheese under that small plate. You saw it. Someone spins the platter 90 degrees – the cardinal sin in the conquest for ATC. Each person keeps smearing onto a single chip an amount of cheese severely disproportionate to her chip’s thickness and surface area. Unheard of!

The worst feeling in the world is when someone steals from your rightful portion of ATC. She acts like, oops, she was dealt a cheeseless chip. Pity me. Please. Even though I just stored a sizable glob of cheese in a napkin on my lap. She deliberately just grabbed a load of YOUR cheese with her grubby little chili-bean-and-Comm. Ave.-bus-handrail-grime hands.

You bitch! You promptly delve into one of her section’s hidden deposits.

Eventually, the stomachs tighten around the nacho overloads and everyone pauses for one breath.

And then you see it.

A giant cheese deposit in the middle, buried under a thick layer of guac. It’s beautiful. It’s gleaming. It’s All The Cheese.

What follows can only be left to the imagination. Between four and eight hands – and possibly the giant spork – jut into the pile, razing the once-immaculate bulge of ATC into tiny, tragic little grease spots.

When it’s gone, you look at each other, too embarrassed to admit that during that entire 10-minute stretch in which you were pretending to still be friends, you actually intensely hated each other and only cared about getting ATC.

You stare into each other’s eyes, not even wanting to think about what went in your mouths. I just know she got more cheese than me. If only there was some way to inject it into me via IV. A steady drip of ATC would be heavenly.

With a strong sense of defeat, even if you’re the one that did get the majority of ATC, you move on to dinner, already stuffed. I’ll bet my main course has more cheese than all of yours.

Next TWYT: The Door-Swipe Process