Andrew Fanow and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Play Date

Andrew Fanow had a bad reputation in elementary school, mostly due to his infinitely poor hygiene. He routinely brought SpaghettiO's to lunch in a thermos, always getting half of that rancid, mass-produced, 5-hour-old tomato sauce encrusted on his lips for the remainder of the day. The other half made its way to its intended destination, but only served to give him near-fatal levels of Bagel Bite breath.

Athletically, he was a large, uncoordinated oaf who made baffling decisions on the field of play. In second grade we were on the same flag football team. I was the first running back on the depth chart and he was the second. On the few plays we ran for him, I invariably found myself blocking for nobody as Andrew had decided to turn the sweep right into a sweep left, usually losing three to five yards in the process.

Andrew was also the first kid I knew to get really into minutiae. When our borderline psychotic fourth grade gym teacher recruited student referees to preside over the four square games played at recess, Andrew was the first one to sign up for the multiple training sessions that would take place while the rest of us were playing Kill the Man With the Ball and calling each other fart knockers. He also had a quasi-encyclopedic knowledge of baseball statistics, and was able to tell you, for instance, who won the World Series in 1936. This infuriated me and my friends to no end, mostly because Andrew was a tremendously unskilled baseball player. It is only later in life that one begins to begrudgingly accept the John Claytons of the world.

Despite being acutely aware of the numerous negative attributes that Andrew possessed, I was forced to endure a handful of play dates with this creature in first and second grade. Andrew's parents were friends with my best friend's parents, who happened to be pretty good friends with my parents, so we were repeatedly thrown into the same social situations despite our well-cataloged mutual disdain for each other.

Even when I tried to put aside all the things that disgusted me about Andrew, I still had a horrible time with him. He liked to play shitty, conceptual, proto-hipster video games like Burger Time. I liked to play video games that required quick reflexes like Super Mario Brothers or Blades of Steel. As if that weren't enough, his house annoyed me. His room was a revolting mess, offending even my 5-year-old boy sensibilities, and his kitchen smelled like my grandmother.

Perhaps mercifully, it was in this moth ball haunted domicile that I suffered one of my most retroactively mortifying childhood experiences. Andrew and I were sitting at his kitchen table in silence, waiting for his mom to boil a few hot dogs. I was already in a heightened state of fear as Andrew was at his grossest during meal time. I had no doubt he would leave the table with mustard-coated lips, ready to send heatwave after heatwave of hot dog breath into my face as he recited baseball statistics I couldn't care less about while playing a Nintendo game that I hated. But in addition to that very specifically Andrew-based anxiety, I was on edge due to a neuroses inflicted upon me by my mother, who had convinced me that hot dogs were one of the most dangerous substances on the planet Earth.

To this day, I am reminded on a roughly semi-annual basis of the time I almost choked to death on a hot dog at Sid's, a non-chain fast food restaurant in my hometown. Sid's is the kind of disgusting, greasy shit hole locals manage to convince themselves is a guilty pleasure, but in reality is far too foul for even Guy Fieri to touch. During one of our meals at Sid's, about a year or two before the play date in question, I wolfed down a chunk of hot dog so quickly that it lodged itself in my tiny, post-toddler esophagus. When my mother saw me gasping for air, unable to speak, she quickly gave me the Heimlich maneuver, sending a slimy piece of one of Sid's Famous Hot Dogs hurtling through the air. I made it. Barely. But my hot dog eating experiences would never be the same.

After that episode, my mom made sure to cut every hot dog I ever ate into at least two pieces. That, however, only accounted for one of the hot dog's many dangerous qualities. In addition to this fairly reasonable precaution, we were also given one vitamin C for every hot dog we ate, the idea being that these citrus-flavored discs would counteract whatever damage the hot dogs were sure to inflict upon our general well being. I'm not sure if my mom specifically said this to me or not, but I was under the distinct impression that if I didn't eat vitamin C with every hot dog, I would get cancer. Two hot dogs? That's two vitamin Cs.

So there I sat, in the feeding cage of my arch nemesis, about to down one of the most dangerous food stuffs known to man. Having already cultivated a paralyzing fear of death, and not wanting to die in the presence of a sworn adversary, I asked Mrs. Fanow to cut my hot dog in half for me.

"Sure," she said, mildly amused. I might have seemed a little neurotic -- precocious if you're feeling generous -- but cutting a hot dog in half wasn't completely unheard of, even in those considerably less litigious times.

Emboldened by the success of my first request, I asked Mrs. Fanow for vitamin C.

"Excuse me?" said Mrs. Fanow.

"Vitamin C," I said, "My mom always gives us vitamin C with our hot dogs so we don't get cancer."

She reacted as one might suspect an adult would react in such a situation, with a mixture of bemusement,  confusion, and impressively restrained derision. But, ever the dutiful host, she rustled up a Flinstone's chewable and that was that.

At the time, I thought Mrs. Fanow's perplexed manner was further evidence of the bizarreness of the Fanow clan. "What is wrong with these people," I said to myself, "It's like they want to get cancer. Hasn't anybody told them about hot dogs?" With the passage of time, however, it has become increasingly clear to me that it was not the Fanow clan that should have been embarrassed, but me and my ilk.

Luckily, it was only the mother who knew that anything was askew. Andrew was too absorbed in his private world of baseball stats and Ragu to care about what I was doing. And even though I hated him with the furious, naive passion of a child unfamiliar with any of the world's real evils, the fact that I had requested vitamin C at his house and his house alone meant my social life would momentarily avoid irreparable damage. I still had time to make that nightmare a reality, but for at least a little while longer, my secret was safe with that vile, stinking, know-it-all Andrew Fanow.