The Topical Autobiography of Mark Dorset

Shame

     When I turned eleven, I asked my closest friends to come to a party. I think that I had six friends at that time, and those six would have been my only guests if the party had been organized as I wanted it. However, my mother insisted that I invite a boy who was no friend of mine. In fact, I despised him. My friends despised him, too. The only reason we pretended that he was a friend of ours was that he had a toy version of a Winchester lever-action carbine that when fired emitted a puff of smoke. Because my mother had seen him in my group of friends, she felt that he would feel left out if he were not invited. She may have been right. He arrived wearing his Boy Scout uniform, of which he was extremely proud.
     The party was held in the back yard of my parents’ suburban house. After the eight of us had played some games, we all sat at a picnic table to have lunch. I had requested hamburgers, and hamburgers I got. My father grilled them on a small charcoal grill, and my mother served them to us. I sat at one end of the table, the head, since I was the host. Three friends were arrayed along either side of the table; and at the far end, opposite me was the despised boy. Why he was sitting at the other end of the table, which should have been a place of honor, I don’t recall, but he may have recognized the seat as a place of honor and seized it before anyone else could get it.
     There was one bottle of ketchup for the table, a tall glass bottle with a long neck and a screw top. The bottle had reached me, and after I had slathered my hamburger well, I heard the despised one calling for ketchup from the distant end of the table. I picked up the open bottle, aimed it in his direction, angled it up to allow for the effect of gravity, and smacked the bottom smartly. To my astonishment, a blob of ketchup the size of a walnut issued from the muzzle of the bottle, flew the length of the table, and struck him in the middle of his chest.
     I can see his face. I see his surprise. We were all silent for a moment. Then my friends began to whoop and cheer, and I began to laugh, and the despised boy began to cry, because he had been made to understand that he was despised, that not a single one of us was his friend.
     About twenty-nine years later, after I had gone without a hamburger for more than a year, for health reasons, the hunger came upon me. Margot and Martha and I were living in East Hampton, on the East End of Long Island, at the time. It was a spring day. We were riding our bicycles, and lunch time was approaching. I suggested a mediocre restaurant in the village because I knew that they served a double hamburger there. I had lusted for one when I had seen it on its way to another diner.
     We rode to the restaurant, and I got my double hamburger. The roll was dry and the hamburgers were thin, bland, and gray. If I hadn’t asked for fried onions the experience would have been entirely disappointing. Fortunately, the onions were good. I ate the thing without betraying my disappointment.
     After lunch, we mounted our bikes and headed for home. Halfway up the only rise that could even laughingly be called a hill, I began to sense a numbness in the pit of my left arm. The numbness extended itself down the arm, and when it reached my fingers I began to feel a flintiness in my chest and an ache in my back behind my heart. I began to sweat the cold sweat of panic.
     “I think I have to go to the hospital,” I called out, as calmly as I could manage.
     “Are you having indigestion?” asked Margot.
     “No,” I said, “a heart attack,” and I was right.
     I survived, but I didn’t eat another hamburger for years. Margot and Martha made mock hamburgers out of beans, and I learned to enjoy them. At times, I even craved them. Then, not long ago, in Napa, I watched Margot and Martha eat beautiful hamburgers at a restaurant called Farm, and I felt the hunger come upon me again. I resisted it for months, but when my birthday drew near I decided to treat myself.
     I had heard of a restaurant called 5 Napkin Burger. That sounded like the place, and so it proved to be. The hamburger—topped with comté cheese, caramelized onions, and rosemary aioli, and served on a roll so buttery that it felt slick—may have been the best that I have ever eaten, but it came with a serving of shame and rue, because ever since my eleventh birthday I have not been able to eat a hamburger without recalling the moment when I taught that boy that he had no friends.

 
A Hamburger at Farm, in Napa
(This was eaten by Margot or Martha, not by me.)