The Little Ketchup Incident

by Brandon D. Christopher

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In this latest entry of his Being 13 series, Brandon discovers his grandma's deep, dark, flavorful secret.

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It seemed like grandparents were just born old — they never could have been young. The idea of them without silver hair, wrinkles, and brown spots was just unfathomable. Grandparents were simply constructed from ether, lived forever, and walked with a slight limp or with the use of a cane. They ate strange food, pinched their pennies, had poor hearing, and drove the same car for a hundred years. Even though they talked about “the old days” back in Nebraska and riding a horse to elementary school in the snow, they were never children — they were never my age. They had always been rickety old senior citizens, maybe just in kids’ clothes. “The old days” was just something they dreamed up after watching Matlock or Simon & Simon.

My grandma drove a shiny gold something-or-other, and she practiced ways in which I was unaccustomed to at the time. On weekends she would pick my little brother and me up in her shiny gold something-or-other and take us to her retiree apartment for the night. It was our parents’ night off, she would explain to us. “Your folks just need a night away from you guys.”

Almost all of the aforementioned unaccustomed ways I spoke of earlier dealt with food or the act of eating. It wasn’t like she would shove lunch into her rectum instead of in her mouth, but her acts were just as bizarre to a kid.

“Go ahead, order what you want,” she would tell my little brother and me as we approached the cashier at McDonald’s.

“I’ll take a cheeseburger and fries and a coke,” I would tell the towering teenager in the goofy red and yellow hat. My little brother would order the same.

“Just make them hamburgers … no cheese,” she would lean over and whisper to the side of the cashier’s pimpled face.

The digital price on the cash register would lessen by 30 cents. My grandma would smile, but try her best to hide it. It was her way of stickin’ it to the man. We’d take our tray of food over to a discreet table behind a small plastic bush, where she would proceed to pull out two individually wrapped slices of American cheese and put them on our bare burger patties.

“There, let that melt for a sec,” she would pat the bun and say. “Mine tastes better than the cheese they use.”

By the end of lunch at McDonald’s, my grandma would have already “suggested” to both my brother and me that we each go up to the counter and ask for five packets of ketchup apiece. We would return to the table with our combined ten packets of ketchup, and she would then open her purse, pull out a small plastic bag, and place the packets inside. On her way out she would ask the cashier for a handful of ketchup packets herself, then she’d pop them in her purse and proudly drive us back to her place. No one ever knew what she did with all those ketchup packets.

Now, grandma usually made dinner, which was both good and bad for us. Feasts at grandma’s were hit-or-miss most of the time — some nights you got some kick-ass pork chops, with soda pop, mashed potatoes, and a homemade chocolate cake; other nights she handed out TV dinners, always choosing the pig-themed oven mitt instead of the flowery one I’d gotten her for Christmas to carry the aluminum containers out to the den.

You would think that my little brother and I would get excited about the pork chops and cake, but you would be wrong. It was the latter meal, the pre-made and frozen version, which appealed to us most, because there would be no dishes to be done after eating. It was a simple trip to the trashcan, with a “bye bye” as the empty aluminum container dropped from your hands into Relaxville. It was a swift 5-second trek through the kitchen before we were all back watching Rick and A.J. be the best damn detectives there were on evening TV. Sure, we didn’t get a nice warm slice of chocolate cake after, but those TV dinners did come equipped with either a cherry cobbler or brownie treat, and they were quite delicious. Not to mention, that was four less dishes to wash.

On this particular Saturday night my grandma decided to make us cheeseburgers for dinner. The fact that we had also had cheeseburgers for lunch didn’t cross any of our minds, because homemade burgers were considered by us a real meal while fast-food places served only lunch-worthy rumors of what a home-prepared patty of ground beef could be like.

We finished off our feast of humongous cheeseburgers and homemade fries with a couple slices of handmade cherry pie (with a store-bought crust). Colin and I got drunk two colas apiece and must have eaten thirty fries each during dinner’s peak.

“Did you boys buy stock in Heinz?” Grandma asked us under threatened eyes.

“Huh?” My little brother replied.

“Frankenstein?” I asked.

“Did you buy stock in Heinz?” She clarified, “The ketchup company. You went through that bottle like water.”

We stared down at our plates and realized that beside a large grease mark from where the burger once sat was a mountain of untouched ketchup. All of the French fries were gone, so we couldn’t even try to bullshit like we were just pacing ourselves for more.

“I truly thought there would be more fries, grandma,” I explained to her. “Everything was delicious, though.”

“Yeah,” Colin agreed, his eyes already fixated on the beginning credits of Magnum P.I. on the screen behind her. “Really good.”

“Brandon, why don’t you and your brother go ahead and take care of the pans in the sink now,” she suggested and violently pulled our plates off of our TV trays. “I’ll take these in.”

My brother and I had a post-dinner routine: We’d first fold up our TV trays and put them away, then he’d wash and I’d rinse and dry the dishes. As we finished the pans and started in on the cups and silverware, my grandma periodically handed us our plates, but with the mountains of ketchup magically gone from each. Upon receiving the first plate, I just figured she ate the ketchup or used it on some French fries that she had tucked away; but by the second one magically clean, I was starting to catch on.

I pretended to lean over and put a glass into a cupboard but I sneaked a peek over her hunched posture to find that she was surreptitiously scooping the ketchup from the plates back into its bottle with a dull knife. I watched in shock as she picked away pieces of ground beef and French fry debris from the red puddle and proceeded to angle the thick liquid into a miniature wave at the rim of the plate for easier inspection, then a tap-tap and a push into the glass hole.

She sensed my presence and quickly turned around and caught my eye with a triangular brow. She appeared both livid and humiliated once she realized that I had caught her. “I…didn’t want ants,” she hastily replied.

“We could use the garbage disposal,” I offered.

“Oh, it’s done now,” grandma sighed, twisting the cap back onto the bottle. “I’ll just put it away till I go to the trash later.”

She opened the refrigerator and put the near-empty bottle of ketchup back into the door of condiments. The load she had just scooped back into the bottle sat at its sloping neck like a bell on a dome. “Remind me later on, all right?”

“Yeah, all right.” I played along.

We watched the remainder of Magnum P.I. in silence until Colin and I pulled out the retractable bed from the sofa and grandma went into her bedroom, and we all slept like cautious rattlesnakes on the cold desert ground.

This weekend excursion went on for the next few years, only we never had to do dishes again. It was like we had seen behind Oz’s curtain and now knew the secret of grandma’s frugality. Whether never having to do dishes again was like hush-money for not telling our parents about the little ketchup incident, or merely a clever guise for her to continue recycling our wasted condiments we never figured out, but those meals tasted a whole lot sweeter knowing we could go right back to the TV after closing and putting away our trays.

It wasn’t until 20 years later when, because of poor health, we had to move grandma out of her retiree apartment to live with my parents in Arizona that we figured out the mystery behind all those ketchup packets.

Too fragile to leave her recliner chair, it was up to my mother and me to clean out and pack all of her belongings. After the bedroom, den, and bathroom were boxed and bagged we started in on the kitchen. Mom got the refrigerator and I got the cupboards, and I think we both got a little nostalgic by seeing things we hadn’t seen in 30 years, including a whole shoe box of sleeping medications that were my grandfather’s, who passed-on some 25 years earlier. Nostalgic or not, a lot of memories went no further than a big white trash bag by the door.

And then — “Oh, my god!” My mother was kneeling in front of the opened refrigerator, nestled between the condiment-filled door and the crisper drawers, a trash bag held firmly in her hand. I turned from the Tupperware cupboard to see what had gotten her so spooked, and that’s when I saw the thousands and thousands of fast-food hot sauce and ketchup packets filling the two crisper drawers up to their handles. It was amazing — massive! It was more hot sauce and ketchup than one person — than one family! — could use in a lifetime.

My mom pushed her hand down into the sea of individual sauces and came up with a handful of Taco Bell mild-style hot sauce and McDonald’s ketchup packets—maybe 25 of them, yet barely a dent in the mass. Grandma had literally been collecting these condiments for two decades, pilfering two to three away at a time, like a pragmatic squirrel with a thousand-year lease on life. If you dug your hand down deep to the bottom of the drawer you could actually find some of Taco Bell’s earliest salsa conceptions — it was a virtual museum of complimentary condiments.

We both laughed while dumping handful after handful of the packets into the trash bag, practically filling it up. I felt almost bad destroying such a dedicated collection, but there wasn’t much you could, or should, do with two thousand packets of sauce. We didn’t tell grandma about tossing her 20 years worth — her collected works — of complimentaries, and she didn’t ask. It was like the Wizard of Oz’s curtain again; we sneaked a peek at the machine that made the magic happen, and the mystery that took two decades to uncover was immediately solved. There was no futuristic device that ran solely on fast-food ketchup, no caged leprechaun in the closet that granted wishes of longevity if fed hot sauce — just an old woman with a taste for drive-thru’s and an obsessive fondness for individually packaged sauces.

It was just nice to know she hadn’t gotten rusty after all those years.

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A native of Los Angeles, Brandon D. Christopher has survived 41 jobs, 7 cars, 4 days in jail, and completed a 3-hour Learning Annex seminar to become a private investigator. He is the author of several published essays and short stories, and is currently searching for a publisher for his latest novel Dirty Little Altar Boy. He can be reached at BrandonDChristopher@hotmail.com.