You Say Tomato, I Say...

I don’t sleep much. Four or five or six hours is just fine, which is good because I couldn’t sleep longer if I tried. But when I do crash I go down hard. Think dead man sleeping.

One night I was already asleep when Allison got home, sometime late after midnight. She sat next to me on the bed and gave me a nudge. I didn’t move so she added some force. Still nothing. The nudging quickly evolved to shaking and this time it had some effect.

I managed a firm, albeit groggy couple sentences. “Go on. Beat it, will ya?” I said and crashed back to Neverland.

She shook me again, harder, to even greater effect. I was kind of awake now, but not totally lucid. Turning to her, I noticed a medium sized grocery bag sitting beside me on the bed. It was clearly full, the contents almost busting out.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Tomatoes,” she said.

“Why do you have a bag of tomatoes?”

“I’d like to throw them at you,” she said. “Drink this,” she added, handing a shot glass full of tequila.

Having dated several years, she knew just the thing to make me the most agreeable. This was it. I wasn't sure what I did wrong, but didn’t protest. “Okay. Let me go cut ‘em up in quarters to ease the blow,” I said.

“And you better put on a shirt you don’t like,” she said.

But I liked all my shirts. Fortunately it was a hot summer night and tops are optional for a man.

While I cut them up, Allison freshened up. I’m not sure what she did exactly, but I imagine it was the kind of pre-game ritual that major league pitchers do before big playoff games.

We went out to the park in front of our house. I paced off a dozen or so feet and turned to face my fate.

As luck would have it, Allison wasn’t a pitcher in any league. The first shot: a miss. Not even close. The second shot: a miss. Not even close. I started to believe that maybe karma was on my side, that I didn’t do anything wrong at all. Maybe the bad juju was hers. Perhaps she was stuck in some tragic Greek hell where she wouldn’t ever land one, but continue to throw from an endless supply of romas. This was her boulder to push up the never-ending hill.

I was Zeus. She was a sucker.

And then it came. The third shot was a direct hit and exploded all over my chest.

“I’m hit!” I yelled.

This was a big mistake because it gave Allison confidence in her aim, and a pep in her throw. The barrage was ruthless. The red veggies rained down like the 40 day storm and all I could do was hold my breath and pray for the arc to arrive. But it didn’t come. And it’s a good thing we weren’t near a spaghetti factory because I could have been jarred as a fine boutique sauce and sold in an over-priced specialty store on Main Street.

The best part was a pack of teenage hooligans were loitering around the park, up to no good. For them, this was great sport and they laughed and laughed. Who knows what kinds of deviant behavior it inspired in them. When it was over, I spent the next 30 minutes in the shower washing tomato from places I didn’t know tomatoes could reach.

After cleaning up, I found Allison half asleep. “What’d I do to deserve this?” I said.

“Spain,” she said. “You said you always wanted to go to the tomato fight in Spain.”