"French Fry Free Throw", A Bite-Size Story
A new divorcee gets her groove back at the Santa Monica Father's Office
A two-week old newsletter that has so far just been a paella of (excellent, imho) pop cultural deep-dives hardly feels like the place to unpack something so painful as the ongoing targeted murder of Asian-Americans, but it also feels blithe to just ignore it, so I wanted to kick off this week highlighting a few orgs you can connect with and/or donate to, along with some articles I found both illuminating and embarrassing. We can have fun and be engaged, thoughtful human beings at the same, right?1
Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAJC) - National Chapter
AAJC fights for civil and human rights for Asian Americans and aims to build and promote a fair and equitable society for all.
Hollaback! Bystander Intervention Training
This anti-harassment organization has partnered with AAJC for free bystander intervention training that will provide tools to step in if you witness anti-Asian harassment.
Red Canary Song
Red Canary Song is a grassroots coalition of Asian and migrant sex workers that fights for justice and police accountability in cases of violence against sex workers.
📰 Some stuff to read 📰
“What This Wave of Anti-Asian Violence Teaches Us About America” - NYT, 2.21.21
“Why This Wave of Anti-Asian Racism Feels Different” - The Atlantic, 3.17.21
Next up: A quick lil’… short story, I guess, from 2018. I’m still not totally sure WHAT this is, but given the amount of time I spent on it, I always felt it deserved a better home than Instagram Stories (where, of course, it disappeared like a whisper on the wind). Some of you may have already seen this — in which case I apologize for already regurgitating material here — but hopefully many of you have not, and this is just #fresh #content.
(Oh, and because I wasn’t clear on this the first go-around: Rebecca is fake, I made her up, no one had sex in my bed2.)
It was the same night I told Carson I wanted a divorce that I found your Airbnb listing and three days after that that I drove down from SF, a 47-year-old woman spending $60 a night to crash in a four-person shared apartment. My own “Eat Pray Love”!
Do you know Carson Meyer? He’s a Big Deal burger chef (“big deal” insomuch as, like, you’ve read about him in American Way magazine on your last flight) and also an emotional child, which is why I left him. It’s hard to have a conversation when every sentence out of your husband’s mouth is “my creation” this and “I’m an artist” that, like either excuses you from being so goddamn difficult. Also his burgers suck. I came to LA to try every burger in town and rub Carson’s nose in it on Instagram. When you’re an “artist,” that’s worse than cheating. Ha!
So Tour de Beef 2K18 is going gangbusters, I’m hitting all the best spots: Everson Royce, Apple Pan, The Oinkster. Did you know Animal serves theirs with bone marrow? Holy moly- to die for. I feel like a woman learning about her body for the first time.
On my last night here I just want something straightforward so I think hey, perfect time to hit up Father’s Office (the SaMo original, NOT Helms Bakery; I know you made this distinction very clear, Henning) for their no-substitutions Office Burger. And it is, as promised, a triumph: dry-aged beef covered in grilled onions and gruyere cheese, this collage of seemingly disparate tastes and textures combined in such perfect proportion that it feels almost like a mathematical constant.
(So yes, fine, I geek out about burgers too. Tour de Beef wasn’t just about Carson! I’m a dimensionalized adult woman.)
I’m enjoying my Perfect Burger but nearby are these idiot kids, all 19-20 tops, lobbing French fries at people’s drinks and recording the whole thing on one of their phones. Because he keeps loudly narrating as much, I learn that the leader is named “Tito Milkshake,” some dumbass YouTube star who regularly pulls “stunts” like this with his “crew.” One of them, this mousey little turd wearing basketball rec-specs, walks around handing out cash to tables they’ve annoyed. “Thank you for letting us create,” he keeps saying. I want to strangle these kids. I want to throw their bodies in the ocean.
Tito Milkshake keeps missing, the bar growing increasingly pissed. Then he catches my eye, winds up…and sinks a fry right into my wine glass. “FRENCH FRY FREE THROW!” his whole crew howls, high-fiving and mugging for the phone. Rec-Specs comes over with a fifty dollar bill in his hand. “For your trouble, m’lady.” That’s when I just lose my fucking mind.
I leap from my chair like a puma and get in Tito’s face. The whole crew scatters, like flee the bar scatters. But Tito’s right there in my blast radius and I tell this little shit everything I’ve wanted to tell Carson for years, how CIVILITY and NOT ACTING LIKE A CHILD are actually the hallmarks of adult behavior and not “creation,” whatever that even fucking means, and how dare you treat these fine burger-loving patrons like props in your idiot experiment and not the vibrant, real people they are. Do you not understand that they have dreams, too? Do you NOT FUCKING SEE THEM?!
At this point I’m crying and now Tito is crying so I hand him my napkin and offer to buy him a drink with the money Rec-Specs gave me. We talk. His real name is Timothy Muirfield, he’s three quarters of the way through college, and he feels intense pressure to “monetize” while he can. He says he’s worried about all these 13-year-olds doing the same shit as him. I tell him if 13-year-olds are doing it then that’s a pretty good sign he needs to grow the fuck up. He smiles and tells me I’m really pretty when I’m angry. I tell him he looks sort of like this guy I dated in high school who turned out to be gay. He asks if I want to get out of there. I tell him sure, but we’re not going back to his place.
…All of which is a long-winded way of me apologizing for booking a room for one when, and I’m not ashamed of this, the bed was used by two. As of this writing Tito is still asleep but he knows where to drop off the key when he leaves. Thanks! Very chill spot and I loved the proximity to everything.
Love, peace, and burger grease,
Rebecca Meyer nee Demarco
Hope you enjoyed this week’s foray into Fiction Town! If you hated it, don’t worry, next newsletter will probably be 3000 words on the Snyder Cut.
Hell, maybe that’s a thing here, going forward? One positive contribution you can make to the world each week? I spend a lot of time feeling bad about my lack of active civic engagement when the easy solution here is…to civically engage, in whatever capacity.
ever lol