It’s September, everybody, it’s time to check your Gophers schedule if you want to maintain your soul’s healthy, lustrous coat. Today, I made the mistake of venturing into Dinkytown without first consulting the college football schedule and found I had no fucking way out because the police - who should have been arresting and beating the shit out of everybody but me - had closed off all the exits. It was like they corralling us toward the stadium like some nightmare “Down In The Park” scenario; since this is Dinkytown, the presence of “rape machines” is totally plausible.
Please, tell me you get the Gary Numan reference.
Anyway, there is only one way out of this labyrinth of douche-sluices clad in gold and maroon vertical striped overalls - yes, that’s a thing. That everybody was wearing. Five hundred thousand Clearisil’d goddamned teenage date rapists walking around dressed like Pogo protégés and don’t act like you don’t know who the fuck Pogo is with their Dads behind them wearing cop shades and cop ‘staches, and their main squeeze walking in front of them with her skirt hiked up to her titlets and her chicken cutlet ass cheeks hanging out, not having graduated junior high yet, and not one of these doofus Brock-bros, their apologist dads, or their underaged girlies can pay attention to a crosswalk signal WHERE THE FUCK WERE THE COPS TO BEAT THESE FUCKERS TO DEATH!?
So, as mentioned, I, the lone Argonaut, my brethren slain, surrounded by the gold and maroon gophertaurs, found my one exit from the labyrinth: Just book a straight line on SE 4th to Bullshit Central, the confluence of Hennepin, University, 1st, and some other streets, too. It’s where my union hall is, I can take refuge there. There’s also a White Castle if I need a colonic and the Gopher Bar which nobody can remember if that’s racist anymore after the whole Club Jager thing a week back but the art on the wall is still creepy. Kramarczuk’s is in Bullshit Central, so is Brathaus. There’s that Japanese joint that Ron and Jo took me and Tosha to. Nye’s, god rest its overpriced soul, was over there. Bullshit Central really isn’t a bad place to be if you have fifty dollars and absolutely nothing responsible you have to do with it. If I take SE 4th all the way to Bullshit Central, I can make it home, alive, unscathed. I’m feeling pretty good about this, actually. Two Jehovah’s Witnesses buzzed my apartment while I was jacking off this morning and I just powered through that. I think I can make it.
And that’s when I see it.
Frank From Philly.
Cheesesteaks.
Real cheesesteaks.
I love cheesesteaks.
I have nothing else to live for. I mean, I did make a half dozen jars of pickles today but I don’t think I’ll live through the next ten days, let alone the next ten minutes, given that I’m in The Land That Consent Forgot.
So, that was it. Frank cast out his line. He hooked me. I went inside.
My previous review of Frank’s is a far different animal. I told a tale of suburban gym surrounded by antiseptic teens who’d never touched a cigarette or their own clits. Affable lil’ duders who could sell you a Xanax come midterms. A bunch of kids who looked like they did safe things like check in with their roommates if it got late, dipped their bread in milk, had no intention of ever fucking bareback. But that was summer time. That was when the Hitler Youth’s Townie Division was in full force.
This?
Heh.
This is fucking football season, bitches.
Everything I’ve ever told you about Dinkytown is like something from Bizarro world.
I have never in my life seen so many absolutely sinister looking white kids gathered in one place in the day light. They looked like they want to beat me up just for being old and better sexed. They looked like their genital warts were burning. They looked like they did abortions the way their grandparents did them: a couple kicks to the stomach and a straightened out coat hanger up the kid shitter. And there were about two hundred billion of these absolutely psychotic looking fucks in Frank’s today. My god, the terror.
Fucking football season.
Little Asian lady greets me at the register and asks me how I was doing. I didn’t go into any elaborate detail over how panic-stricken I was at the moment because one: she wouldn’t care. She has to work in this environment and I bet she carries a firearm of some sort. It’s football season. And then two: She’s hot and I want her to think I am strong and capable so she will like me and ask me to stick around until she clocks out so we can go to a bar, have a few drinks, and then she takes me back to her place and her and her identical twin sister roommate take turns pegging me until the sun comes up. So I said, “Good.”
“What can I get you?”
“From behind,” is what my sick man devil brain wants to say but what comes out of my mouth is, “Yeah, I was looking at a cheesesteak. Can I get that with cheezewhiz, peppers, and onions?”
She starts typing on the register, muttering what I think is, “God, this customer is so fucking good looking and refined, not like these short-dicked boys that always come in and out of here,” but turns out to be, “OK, cheesesteak… pppeeepppppeerrss… oooonnnnions…” She looks at me and does not tell me, “You’re everything I’ve ever wanted in a sexual partner and I would like to give you a tour of our walk-in cooler,” opting instead to say, “You said cheezewhiz?”
I want to say, “Take me to bed and lose me forever,” but I said, “Yeah.”
She asks, “Is that for here or to go?” because you know I’ve beaten this joke to death when I break out a Top Gun reference.
“For here,” I tell her. I’m not going to bike with a sloppy ass cheesesteak in my bag.
And, unlike the last review where there was nothing going on and I had to wait a week and a half for my cheesesteak, in the middle of this crowded, hectic scene, she walks by a guy coming from the back and yells in his face, “CHEESESTEAK!”
I expect him to make it but he looks confused. She starts making the cheesesteak. She’s not wearing an apron or plastic gloves or nothing protective. She just gets right on the goddamned grill like its her fucking personal grill from home and starts chopping fucking steak on the grill.
I go to Trieste for two specific reasons: They have the best gyros in all of Minneapolis - I’ll put money on that statement until someone brings me to a better gyro shop - and I love watching the Greek guy in the kitchen work. It’s like watching Michaelangelo paint the Sistine, this fucking guy. And he wears an apron and gloves.
And here I’m watching this little Asian lady do the same thing on this grill, just -
“Hey, Dustin!”
- just rocking the fuck out of -
“Hey, DUSTIN!”
Sorry, she’s working this grill like -
“Dude, I’m going to sit over here!”
Anyway, she’s -
“Did you already grab your drink!?”
Goddamnit.
See, I can’t even enjoy watching her work the grill because whatever this shit head’s name is is yelling right next to me to let Dustin know he’s going to sit over wherever. I’ll give you three guesses how they were dressed and the first two don’t count.
The Asian lady yelled “CHEESESTEAK!” at the dude from in back again and he kind of ducked as he walked to the back.
Within minutes, however, my cheesesteak is ready. A lot faster than last time. The Asian lady struggles with the cheezewhiz pump and looks at me, handing me the plate. “Cheesesteak?”
I say yeah, thank her, and find the cleanest table for one that I can, with a window to my right and a beam directly across from my chair. To my left, an angry young black man glowers at me over his girlfriend who is unconcerned with anything but her phone and I’m afraid I might have just done something racist.
Did I do something racist?
Oh, fuck, was I being racist?
Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck, Jesus Christ. These fucking college kids, man, they’re all fucking football crazy and they’re woke “AF”. It’s bad enough I’m twice their age and I don’t rape people, I’m also fucking racist or something, too. Did I not check my privilege? I came in here and ordered a fucking cheesesteak. With cheezewhiz. And peppers. And onions. Why was this angry young black man glowering at me? Did I just unknowingly do some alt-right shit? Because those guys change their memes all the time. Did they pick up cheesesteaks and nobody told me? Is the cheesesteak the new sandwich of white nationalism? I mean -
Then he looked at his table of white friends and returned to his pizza.
One of the clown-suited white kids got up and said, “Dude, call me,” as he left, presumably to assault somebody and do debit card frauds, and the young black man nodded.
The place was packed with a lot of little white fuckers. White boys, white girls, all straight or straight-seeming. Maybe the dude who glowered at me felt underrepresented. Maybe I did something racist without knowing it. Maybe his pizza tasted like shit.
Anyway, I picked up my sandwich as the conversation behind me turned to the straightest white dude shit you could think of: Hugh Hefner. I looked out the window and saw a dude try to hold another dude’s hand and thought, “Oh, maybe football season isn’t so -”
NOPE! He was just trying to ball-tag him.
Goddamnit.
I was in the nucleus of white jock bros doing white jock bro shit, like picking up kegs and getting young tight strange on the reg. I was the odd man out here, the stranger in the strange land, in my high-cuffed jeans, Frank Sinatra mug shot t-shirt, four week old beard that none of these kids could grow. Not a stitch of U of M color on me or a wisp of alcohol on my breath - it was five thirty, ferfucksake. The angry young black man wasn’t glowering at me. He’d been looking me over. I looked different. I was a white dude but not a white dude from around here.
Or maybe I had done something racist and hadn’t known it.
Still, though, he was probably checking me out and I just caught him at the wrong moment. Like when I saw Todd Trainer coming out of a Dunn Bros and I made my “Is that Todd Trainer?” face right as Todd Trainer looked up at me and saw my “Is that Todd Trainer?” face which, from the way the muscles in my face feel when I recreate it, must look an awful lot like my “Well, my IBS is fucking flaring up again!” face. It’s not a good look. That’s what Todd Trainer saw.
Anyway, I let it go because I had bought the ticket, I had to take the ride. It was time to eat my goddamned cheesesteak.
You’re probably wondering how it was.
I hardly remember the last time I was there, a little over a year I should think. So I can’t really compare it to last time. My meat was cooked, not seasoned, didn’t need it. (Note that, PepperJax. “America’s Favorite Cheesesteak” my sexy Black Irish ass. Lay off all the goddamned Lawry’s.) The peppers were nearly goddamned fluorescent, the onions translucent. The cheezewhiz looked like something I should not be eating, like it was really just plumbing caulk and annatto, but I’ve got a fucking deathwish, like that L7 song, so yeah, fuck it. Little Asian lady, because she was trying to send me signals, doused the goddamned sandwich with it. Like she was happy about it. Like she had a plan that day. She had woke up to kill round eyes and this was her first shot all day long.
It was fucking delicious. It was savory. It was heaven. All that beef grease and cheezewhiz dripped on my wax paper and I just sopped it right back up with the sandwich. As I did, the loud conversations turned to nothing but a gentle thromming around me, like the sound of my mother’s heart while I was in the womb. I had returned to the gentle place, the place before pain, the place of tranquility and security. I was home, my droogs, I was home.
Not around these bros, no. In the sandwich.
I pounded that fucker down in about four minutes.
Then the world came rushing back at me. Saturday. Dinkytown. Sun close to going down. Football season. Jesus Christ, I had to go.
Connors and Bethanies everywhere. A new throng of Bethanies entered as I got up to throw my wax paper away and all their ponytails were tied so high and tight that their eyebrows were in a constant expression of surprise, tight little non-cheeks poking out of skirts. I threw away my wax paper and tried to avoid physical contact, hell, eye contact and I SAW A GUY WITH AN UNDERCUT OH GOD DEAR JESUS HELP YOUR SERVANT PLEASE GOD MOTHERFUCKING JESUS AND MICHAEL THE ARCHANGEL DELIVER THIS SINNER DELIVER THIS SINNER OH LORD SONOFABITCH THEY’RE MULTIPLYING! THEY’RE MULTI- DID SOMEBODY GET ONE OF THEM WET!? OH MY GOOD LORD IN HEAVEN BABY JESUS PLEASE I SWEAR I WILL NEVER TOUCH MYSELF AGAIN JUST DON’T LET ANYBODY FEED THEM AFTER MIDNIGHT!
I begin hyperventilating. I need air. I need a pink lemonade. With some Hennessy. And a cigarette dipped in embalming fluid. God sweet lord baby Jesus get me out of here. The exit! I see the exit! If I can just make it to the exit!
I make it! I’m out! I’m free!
I unlock my bike, put on my headphones, and hit start on my phone. Public Enemy. Classic cut. “911 Is A Joke”. I straddle my bike, look briefly through the windows at Frank’s Football Season Patronage. They’re. All. Staring. Back. At. Me.
I swear to god. They’re all staring back at me.
Shit was unnerving.
I got out of Dinkytown before sundown. Came back to the apartment. Slammed back a grape pop.
If you go to Frank From Philly’s, go during baseball season.
Please, tell me you get the Gary Numan reference.
Anyway, there is only one way out of this labyrinth of douche-sluices clad in gold and maroon vertical striped overalls - yes, that’s a thing. That everybody was wearing. Five hundred thousand Clearisil’d goddamned teenage date rapists walking around dressed like Pogo protégés and don’t act like you don’t know who the fuck Pogo is with their Dads behind them wearing cop shades and cop ‘staches, and their main squeeze walking in front of them with her skirt hiked up to her titlets and her chicken cutlet ass cheeks hanging out, not having graduated junior high yet, and not one of these doofus Brock-bros, their apologist dads, or their underaged girlies can pay attention to a crosswalk signal WHERE THE FUCK WERE THE COPS TO BEAT THESE FUCKERS TO DEATH!?
So, as mentioned, I, the lone Argonaut, my brethren slain, surrounded by the gold and maroon gophertaurs, found my one exit from the labyrinth: Just book a straight line on SE 4th to Bullshit Central, the confluence of Hennepin, University, 1st, and some other streets, too. It’s where my union hall is, I can take refuge there. There’s also a White Castle if I need a colonic and the Gopher Bar which nobody can remember if that’s racist anymore after the whole Club Jager thing a week back but the art on the wall is still creepy. Kramarczuk’s is in Bullshit Central, so is Brathaus. There’s that Japanese joint that Ron and Jo took me and Tosha to. Nye’s, god rest its overpriced soul, was over there. Bullshit Central really isn’t a bad place to be if you have fifty dollars and absolutely nothing responsible you have to do with it. If I take SE 4th all the way to Bullshit Central, I can make it home, alive, unscathed. I’m feeling pretty good about this, actually. Two Jehovah’s Witnesses buzzed my apartment while I was jacking off this morning and I just powered through that. I think I can make it.
And that’s when I see it.
Frank From Philly.
Cheesesteaks.
Real cheesesteaks.
I love cheesesteaks.
I have nothing else to live for. I mean, I did make a half dozen jars of pickles today but I don’t think I’ll live through the next ten days, let alone the next ten minutes, given that I’m in The Land That Consent Forgot.
So, that was it. Frank cast out his line. He hooked me. I went inside.
My previous review of Frank’s is a far different animal. I told a tale of suburban gym surrounded by antiseptic teens who’d never touched a cigarette or their own clits. Affable lil’ duders who could sell you a Xanax come midterms. A bunch of kids who looked like they did safe things like check in with their roommates if it got late, dipped their bread in milk, had no intention of ever fucking bareback. But that was summer time. That was when the Hitler Youth’s Townie Division was in full force.
This?
Heh.
This is fucking football season, bitches.
Everything I’ve ever told you about Dinkytown is like something from Bizarro world.
I have never in my life seen so many absolutely sinister looking white kids gathered in one place in the day light. They looked like they want to beat me up just for being old and better sexed. They looked like their genital warts were burning. They looked like they did abortions the way their grandparents did them: a couple kicks to the stomach and a straightened out coat hanger up the kid shitter. And there were about two hundred billion of these absolutely psychotic looking fucks in Frank’s today. My god, the terror.
Fucking football season.
Little Asian lady greets me at the register and asks me how I was doing. I didn’t go into any elaborate detail over how panic-stricken I was at the moment because one: she wouldn’t care. She has to work in this environment and I bet she carries a firearm of some sort. It’s football season. And then two: She’s hot and I want her to think I am strong and capable so she will like me and ask me to stick around until she clocks out so we can go to a bar, have a few drinks, and then she takes me back to her place and her and her identical twin sister roommate take turns pegging me until the sun comes up. So I said, “Good.”
“What can I get you?”
“From behind,” is what my sick man devil brain wants to say but what comes out of my mouth is, “Yeah, I was looking at a cheesesteak. Can I get that with cheezewhiz, peppers, and onions?”
She starts typing on the register, muttering what I think is, “God, this customer is so fucking good looking and refined, not like these short-dicked boys that always come in and out of here,” but turns out to be, “OK, cheesesteak… pppeeepppppeerrss… oooonnnnions…” She looks at me and does not tell me, “You’re everything I’ve ever wanted in a sexual partner and I would like to give you a tour of our walk-in cooler,” opting instead to say, “You said cheezewhiz?”
I want to say, “Take me to bed and lose me forever,” but I said, “Yeah.”
She asks, “Is that for here or to go?” because you know I’ve beaten this joke to death when I break out a Top Gun reference.
“For here,” I tell her. I’m not going to bike with a sloppy ass cheesesteak in my bag.
And, unlike the last review where there was nothing going on and I had to wait a week and a half for my cheesesteak, in the middle of this crowded, hectic scene, she walks by a guy coming from the back and yells in his face, “CHEESESTEAK!”
I expect him to make it but he looks confused. She starts making the cheesesteak. She’s not wearing an apron or plastic gloves or nothing protective. She just gets right on the goddamned grill like its her fucking personal grill from home and starts chopping fucking steak on the grill.
I go to Trieste for two specific reasons: They have the best gyros in all of Minneapolis - I’ll put money on that statement until someone brings me to a better gyro shop - and I love watching the Greek guy in the kitchen work. It’s like watching Michaelangelo paint the Sistine, this fucking guy. And he wears an apron and gloves.
And here I’m watching this little Asian lady do the same thing on this grill, just -
“Hey, Dustin!”
- just rocking the fuck out of -
“Hey, DUSTIN!”
Sorry, she’s working this grill like -
“Dude, I’m going to sit over here!”
Anyway, she’s -
“Did you already grab your drink!?”
Goddamnit.
See, I can’t even enjoy watching her work the grill because whatever this shit head’s name is is yelling right next to me to let Dustin know he’s going to sit over wherever. I’ll give you three guesses how they were dressed and the first two don’t count.
The Asian lady yelled “CHEESESTEAK!” at the dude from in back again and he kind of ducked as he walked to the back.
Within minutes, however, my cheesesteak is ready. A lot faster than last time. The Asian lady struggles with the cheezewhiz pump and looks at me, handing me the plate. “Cheesesteak?”
I say yeah, thank her, and find the cleanest table for one that I can, with a window to my right and a beam directly across from my chair. To my left, an angry young black man glowers at me over his girlfriend who is unconcerned with anything but her phone and I’m afraid I might have just done something racist.
Did I do something racist?
Oh, fuck, was I being racist?
Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck, Jesus Christ. These fucking college kids, man, they’re all fucking football crazy and they’re woke “AF”. It’s bad enough I’m twice their age and I don’t rape people, I’m also fucking racist or something, too. Did I not check my privilege? I came in here and ordered a fucking cheesesteak. With cheezewhiz. And peppers. And onions. Why was this angry young black man glowering at me? Did I just unknowingly do some alt-right shit? Because those guys change their memes all the time. Did they pick up cheesesteaks and nobody told me? Is the cheesesteak the new sandwich of white nationalism? I mean -
Then he looked at his table of white friends and returned to his pizza.
One of the clown-suited white kids got up and said, “Dude, call me,” as he left, presumably to assault somebody and do debit card frauds, and the young black man nodded.
The place was packed with a lot of little white fuckers. White boys, white girls, all straight or straight-seeming. Maybe the dude who glowered at me felt underrepresented. Maybe I did something racist without knowing it. Maybe his pizza tasted like shit.
Anyway, I picked up my sandwich as the conversation behind me turned to the straightest white dude shit you could think of: Hugh Hefner. I looked out the window and saw a dude try to hold another dude’s hand and thought, “Oh, maybe football season isn’t so -”
NOPE! He was just trying to ball-tag him.
Goddamnit.
I was in the nucleus of white jock bros doing white jock bro shit, like picking up kegs and getting young tight strange on the reg. I was the odd man out here, the stranger in the strange land, in my high-cuffed jeans, Frank Sinatra mug shot t-shirt, four week old beard that none of these kids could grow. Not a stitch of U of M color on me or a wisp of alcohol on my breath - it was five thirty, ferfucksake. The angry young black man wasn’t glowering at me. He’d been looking me over. I looked different. I was a white dude but not a white dude from around here.
Or maybe I had done something racist and hadn’t known it.
Still, though, he was probably checking me out and I just caught him at the wrong moment. Like when I saw Todd Trainer coming out of a Dunn Bros and I made my “Is that Todd Trainer?” face right as Todd Trainer looked up at me and saw my “Is that Todd Trainer?” face which, from the way the muscles in my face feel when I recreate it, must look an awful lot like my “Well, my IBS is fucking flaring up again!” face. It’s not a good look. That’s what Todd Trainer saw.
Anyway, I let it go because I had bought the ticket, I had to take the ride. It was time to eat my goddamned cheesesteak.
You’re probably wondering how it was.
I hardly remember the last time I was there, a little over a year I should think. So I can’t really compare it to last time. My meat was cooked, not seasoned, didn’t need it. (Note that, PepperJax. “America’s Favorite Cheesesteak” my sexy Black Irish ass. Lay off all the goddamned Lawry’s.) The peppers were nearly goddamned fluorescent, the onions translucent. The cheezewhiz looked like something I should not be eating, like it was really just plumbing caulk and annatto, but I’ve got a fucking deathwish, like that L7 song, so yeah, fuck it. Little Asian lady, because she was trying to send me signals, doused the goddamned sandwich with it. Like she was happy about it. Like she had a plan that day. She had woke up to kill round eyes and this was her first shot all day long.
It was fucking delicious. It was savory. It was heaven. All that beef grease and cheezewhiz dripped on my wax paper and I just sopped it right back up with the sandwich. As I did, the loud conversations turned to nothing but a gentle thromming around me, like the sound of my mother’s heart while I was in the womb. I had returned to the gentle place, the place before pain, the place of tranquility and security. I was home, my droogs, I was home.
Not around these bros, no. In the sandwich.
I pounded that fucker down in about four minutes.
Then the world came rushing back at me. Saturday. Dinkytown. Sun close to going down. Football season. Jesus Christ, I had to go.
Connors and Bethanies everywhere. A new throng of Bethanies entered as I got up to throw my wax paper away and all their ponytails were tied so high and tight that their eyebrows were in a constant expression of surprise, tight little non-cheeks poking out of skirts. I threw away my wax paper and tried to avoid physical contact, hell, eye contact and I SAW A GUY WITH AN UNDERCUT OH GOD DEAR JESUS HELP YOUR SERVANT PLEASE GOD MOTHERFUCKING JESUS AND MICHAEL THE ARCHANGEL DELIVER THIS SINNER DELIVER THIS SINNER OH LORD SONOFABITCH THEY’RE MULTIPLYING! THEY’RE MULTI- DID SOMEBODY GET ONE OF THEM WET!? OH MY GOOD LORD IN HEAVEN BABY JESUS PLEASE I SWEAR I WILL NEVER TOUCH MYSELF AGAIN JUST DON’T LET ANYBODY FEED THEM AFTER MIDNIGHT!
I begin hyperventilating. I need air. I need a pink lemonade. With some Hennessy. And a cigarette dipped in embalming fluid. God sweet lord baby Jesus get me out of here. The exit! I see the exit! If I can just make it to the exit!
I make it! I’m out! I’m free!
I unlock my bike, put on my headphones, and hit start on my phone. Public Enemy. Classic cut. “911 Is A Joke”. I straddle my bike, look briefly through the windows at Frank’s Football Season Patronage. They’re. All. Staring. Back. At. Me.
I swear to god. They’re all staring back at me.
Shit was unnerving.
I got out of Dinkytown before sundown. Came back to the apartment. Slammed back a grape pop.
If you go to Frank From Philly’s, go during baseball season.
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