I was promised a personal favorite Jack in the Box but instead received Pizza in what was suppose to be a climactic ending point for the King and Queen line of eating establishments facing west. Tired of burgers and ice cream, I finally caved in and got over my grudge with them in a situation that really wasn’t their doing and gave Luigi’s a call at 11:00 on September 11, PM not AM. I couldn’t afford morning food by this time. Ordered the house special banana, attracted by the low cost and also, a bit, the potential exotic flavor. Never had that topping before, hmm. Imagine my surprise when it didn’t come with the pizza but instead showed up several minutes later at my door all anthropomorphized and shite. “You’re late!” I decided to jest at this uncanny intersection of Meat and Fruit.
Thoughts of slicing him up then and there and putting him on my pizza to close the raw deal I felt I got were quickly set aside as he turned out to be quite the intelligent yellow dude with a strange tale to tell indeed. Settling back on the couch he eventually wandered over to, it began thusly:
“I had to divide off from the rest of your meal in order to gain a mouth, eyes, brain. The house special was just a ruse to get you to order me, here, now. We know that you are poor, perhaps abjectly so.”
“Banana… split?” I said, still not quite over the slicing inclination at this point and eyeing the case of knives on the counter out of the corner of my eye.
“Precisely. I know you think we’re merely bananas, me and all my associates, but when we bunch together we become larger than ourselves individually. I am the end product of that transmutation.”
“Just… bananas?” I uttered in a similar vein, stuck in idiom mode. I imagined them altogether in a darkened room conspiring to drive me nuts in the end. I had to avoid that conclusion. I edge closer to the counter, clandestinely select the largest one to get the deed done quickly.
“We hope to make you think otherwise,” and it is here he introduced himself properly and it is here I decided not to end his life with a cut cut cut.
“I am more than Banana now, the sum of my parts,” he declared proudly, sitting up straighter on the couch in front of me and even seeming to grow larger with the action but maybe that was just my perspective. “I am *Band*ana, a whole band of entities.”
“Like the borough?” I say. “Like the borough we’re in?” I followed, waving all around with my free hand.
“Precisely.” I put back down the knife behind my back. Being in a borough band myself right now, I had to hear this out. tbc
