Tom had quit while the getting was good, so to speak. He’d won every contest in the tri-county area, and had even had a shot at an international belt. He’d been flying high for twelve straight years, and yet, his feet had never quite left the ground—airplanes refused to seat him. He was, after all, 400 lb. and some change.
So for the most part, he stuck to the area where he’d grown up. The people of Steuben knew his name, the people of Livingston knew his face, and the people of Allegany knew his mother (also, the people of Onondaga County knew exactly how many hot dogs he could fit into his mouth at one time). He was a master of mastication, a champion of chewing, a sultan of swallowing. A living legend until the “Allegany Spaghetti Sauce Fiasco of 2006.”
It was the Tri-County Fall Classic—the appetizer to the Steuben County Blueberry Pie Invitational. The event began. Tom started strong; taking several savage bites, but soon he began to slow down, chewing with a troubled look. He then stood up, and with every eye on him, walked the mammoth bowl of pasta over to the MC of the event, and headed home, face covered in tomato sauce.
When asked about it, Tom claimed his taste buds had noticed a distinct change in the flavor of the tomato sauce used in the competition. A subsequent investigation discovered that they had in fact stopped using Allegany’s own Jones Family Spaghetti Sauce in favor of a Costco-bought economy-size jar of Ragu. As it turned out, Townsend Jones, the long-time proprietor of the local spaghetti sauce empire, had passed away, and the factory had shut down for good.
The morning after his retirement, Tom woke from a dreamless sleep, and went to the kitchen for breakfast. He fried seven eggs sunny-side up, cooked two frying pans of bacon to crispy perfection, buttered a full loaf of sliced bread, squeezed a branch of oranges into a pitcher, and sat at the kitchen table, blinking. Something was wrong.
When he bit into the eggs, the warmth of the egg yolk didn’t slide down his throat the way it usually did. When he chewed a strip of bacon, his mouth didn’t salivate with each crunch of the crispy, grease-laden treat. When he pressed the sweet cream of the buttered toast into his plate to soak up the leftover salt-and-peppery-yolk, his eyelids didn’t greet one another in ardent delight…
The eggs tasted like runny gym socks, the bacon was crunchier than the Teflon of the pan he had fried it in, and the buttered toast just sort of tasted like, well, buttered cardboard.
Tom shut himself up, and the town of Dansville took notice. When he missed the annual Bourbon Hall Beef Steak for the first time in 15 years, nobody really said anything. When he wasn’t at the Danville Scoop on Thursday night for dollar scoops, licking his trademarked “TommyCone” (one scoop of every flavor—38 scoops high), people started to talk. But it wasn’t until he’d missed his fourth Saturday Breakfast at Route 390 Diner—a tradition he’d upheld ever since his Father had taken him there on his 12th birthday—that someone finally said, “Where’s Tom?”
*
Tom was in his room. He’d dreamt about steak again. Fire-grilled meat, with a charred outer later, and a cool, red center—the kind that makes your tonsils jump, and your teeth drip. He woke up, cheek damp, on top of a sopping-wet pillow. The same thing had happened the night before, when he’d dreamt about swallowing a rich oxtail stew, and the night before that, when he’d dreamt about a fluffy shepherd’s pie melting on his soft tongue.
In the dreams, he could taste every morsel of food. But as soon as he placed an actual forkful into his mouth, his taste buds couldn’t even tell where the food ended, and the metal tines began.
The people of Dansville didn’t know what to do. They held town-wide cookouts, pig roasts, and banquets to try to coax him out. He wouldn’t budge. They brought plates of food, baskets of bread, and trays of desserts to his porch. The food just spoiled in the low autumn sun.
One morning Tom woke with a start to a clattering coming from his kitchen. It took him a moment to peel himself from his mattress, and launch himself onto his feet. His thick legs rubbed as he raced through the hallway.
He entered the kitchen, mouth still full of sleep, and rubbed his eyes. Maureen Jones, Townsend’s widow, was standing in his kitchen, hovering over a pot of boiling water.
On the table to her left sat an overflowing paper bag. Peaking over the top of the bag were six blood-red tomato heads. She plucked one of the bag’s perfectly round tomatoes, as if fresh from the plant, and bit into it like an apple. “Just taste it,” she said to Tom, extending her hand toward his own. He took the fruit, as Maureen turned back to the stovetop with a delicious smile.
Tom’s mouth began to water.
