Do the Mashed Potato

Helping himself to another large spoonful of fluffy mashed potatoes Parminder smiled at his beaming hosts, Ricky and his mom, who encouraged him to eat more for he would need his strength. He was grateful for their concern but he could not understand the one puzzling thing about them that distanced their idea of normality from his own. He struggled to swallow the starchy forkfuls that no amount of fake-butter-like substitute made any easier to slide down.

Parminder absolutely, resolutely, definitely hated mashed potatoes.

But eating at Ricky’s house was part of the standard routine and that included the mashed potatoes. Every Wednesday night it was dinner at Parminder’s and each Thursday meant dinner at Ricky’s. Parminder wondered what he had done to ever deserve the mashed potato onslaught. He had no way of escaping it. One week, he cooked up a wild tale that it would be more convenient to reverse nights and the adults said yes that was fine. Parminder heard how families sometimes had certain dinners on certain nights, so maybe Thursday was mashed potato night for Ricky. As they sat at the table on that fateful Wednesday night, Parminder’s heart was crushed under a mountain of those stinking mashed potatoes. He dutifully obliged his hosts and never again did he try to switch nights.

Complaining at home to Mummy, Parminder wailed over the injustices of eating such horrid tasting food that felt as though it stuck to every part of his body from his throat on down. He was certain that if they ever did an autopsy on him they would find mashed potatoes throughout his body.

“Don’t be silly!” Mummy’s admonishment dashed his hopes.

“No one should ever be rude and refuse food unless there is a very good reason like an allergy or religious law. Since your are subjected to neither and you have been eating the potatoes all this time, you will continue to do so. Ricky’s mother works hard to make you a nice meal just as I do.”

He tried one last ploy but Mummy brushed that off as well.

“You have to learn to adapt and be strong!”

Parminder wasn’t really sure how potatoes were to make him feel any more like one of the rest but there were times when discussions with Mummy were closed. And by the way her eyes appeared to have flames in their irises he knew this discussion had run its course.

Up in his bedroom, he glanced up at the poster of his favourite boxing hero whose stern looking face looked a little friendlier when you looked at it from the left side. Today Parminder looked at it from the right side and saw the tough guy face that clearly stated that this was a man who would not eat anything he did not like, no matter what.

“I’ll be you hate mashed potatoes, too!”

But Parminder remembered his hosts and how they said mashed potatoes would give him much needed strength.

By the way, the potatoes were always mashed; never baked, French-fried, scalloped, roasted, sliced, diced or julienned like on t v. He knew there were different types of potatoes but he had yet to try them. Instated, Ricky’s family severed mashed potatoes by the truck full. He pictured those huge snow dump areas where the snow removal men piled the snow all winter and those huge piles remained well into the spring. Only by springtime, the piles were disgusting since all that was left was the dirt that held the melting snow together.

What the hell held the mashed potatoes together?

Mummy was cooking samosas tonight but not because it was Monday. She simply cooked where the appetite winds took her. Sometimes she consulted with the family but more often than not, the food was put on the table with a statement that wiped any looks of dismay off of your face.

“If I’m good enough to cook it, you will be good enough to eat it!”

But it was almost always, 99 percent, easier because Mummy never served mashed potatoes.

Parminder agonized over this coming Wednesday. He couldn’t not go, because Ricky was his best friend who accepted Parminder just as he was. Once when some fat-ass kid at school started shouting insults at Parminder about being Parminder the Paki or Parminder this and that, Ricky hauled off and drove the kid right in the chin.

Maybe it was the mashed potatoes? Could mashed potatoes give you enough strength to stand up to the bullies and life’s injustices? Parminder looked at the poster head on and he knew he just had to find a way to use those mashed potatoes to his advantage.

*****
Parminder’s son came home and sat at the table crying about how the kids in school were always picking on him. It was time to put an end to this bullshit. Parminder walked over to the stove where a baseball-team sized pot boiled away with dozens of peeled potatoes. The smell still nauseated him but it was time to be a man. He poured out the water and set to work, beating the living fuck out of the potatoes.

“It’s just you and me, punks. Let’s go!”

He pushed and plunged and slammed the potatoes to within an inch of their lives, then pushed and plunged and slammed some more. When one potato seemed to have the audacity (well, it did) to try to escape the wrath, Parminder savagely wielded the masher as if it were a sledgehammer.

“Stand still you cowardly little son-of-a-bitch! Where do you think you’re going?”
He demolished the little fucker until its smugness had been completely obliterated and looked far removed from its arrogant potato-ness. After a few more thrashings thrown in for good measure that left no doubt as to who was the boss, Parminder tossed the potato masher into the pot. Soaked in sweat, he leaned up against the counter and grasped for something resembling shallow breaths.

There, that was what it was all about! It was for Ricky’s mom and how she had only the potatoes to punish after her husband beat her. It was for Ricky who fought for what was right in the limited way a kid can. They found something in those mashed potatoes but even if they had never even eaten that slop hardly mattered. They needed to exert even the slightest authority over something.

Parminder had also remembered reading something somewhere but who remembers exactly where and when now? The important thing was to find strength no matter how insignificant. He called his son over.

“Ok, your turn, and don’t stop until you have nothing left.”

“And then what, Dad?”

“We will fry them up for supper. They taste much better that way.”

Parminder left his son to it and headed down to his little room in the basement where he conducted his private business. Hanging on the back of the door was his childhood hero who still looked a little friendly when you looked at his face from the left and not so much when you looked from the right.

Yes boys and girls, I got to be a big strong athlete by filling a pillow case with mashed potatoes and using it as my punching bag. If you want to grow up to be big and strong and fight the shit in this world, eat your veggies, do your homework and beat the living shit out of every fucking last potato for brains before it beats you.

There is neither confirmation nor denial that no potatoes were hurt either as the inspiration or in the writing of this story.