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By Root 255 0

but I’d feel worse if I lied—I initially went out with her because she was very large-breasted and I wanted to feel her up. A month or so into the relationship, we were ready to have sex. Then I learned that she was a virgin. I knew from my own unfortunate experience with Pam that people usually fall in love with the first boyfriend or girlfriend they have sex with. But I was such a horndog that I decided not to care. The first time happened in her bedroom when her mom was gone. I wasn’t too far removed from my virginity either, so it didn’t last long. After that, we would have to sneak around different places to have sex and sometimes we’d do it in my Volkswagen Rabbit somehow, once in the parking lot of the community college. When I decided to break up with her a month later, I was suddenly the scum of the scene. All of Holly’s friends at the Palace sneered at me, called me an asshole, or just put their noses in the air when I walked by. Holly ignored me as well, but she did so with a face full of disappointment and regret.

The next year, Holly went to her prom with Chuck, a guy I was sharing a small trailer with. It felt like a taunt to see their picture—her standing in front of Chuck, his arms around her chubby waist—displayed on the shelf next to our small TV. This was my punishment for screwing over a virgin.

Taternuts

This is how I learned about cunnilingus from a policeman’s wife and became a legendary fryer at the same time.

First off, I was a graveyard waiter at a place called the Top Hat. It was an all-night diner in Pasco, just down the street from where the prostitutes walked around. They’d sometimes come in with their johns and I had to serve them coffee and pie.

On my way home from work, I stopped at a doughnut shop called Taternuts. The reason being, of course, because it was there. And because it was open, which many places weren’t at five thirty in the morning.

A man wearing an Ocean Pacific shirt and graced with a mustache as thick as Gene Shalit’s was strong-arming a blob of dough on a floured surface near the entrance. I checked out his action over the plastic sneeze guard.

“Whatcha up to?” he asked me. I was wearing a tie and probably looked like I had been out all night drinking.

“Uh, I just got off work. I wait tables. The Top Hat. Graveyard.” I moistly chewed out the words, amid cake doughnut debris. “These cake ones are awesome,” I said.

“They’re called spuddies,” he enlightened me.

“What the—”

“We don’t make doughnuts here. These are made with potato flour mix. The cake ones are spuddies and the raised ones are taternuts.” He folded up the flattened dough three times and then plopped it atop a machine that fed the dough into a cutter-type roller. “This is taternut dough. It has yeast, so it rises in here.” He opened a metal door and showed me some hot racks near his feet. “The spuddie dough doesn’t have yeast, so it stays cake.” He let me think about this. “Want a job?” he asked me.

A few days later, I went from graveyard-shift waiter to early-morning taternut fryer. It was closer to home, there were free taternuts, and the pay was better. The man I worked with was called Big K. He was about thirty and built like a tight end, about six-three, 240 pounds. Big K’s sister was a large woman named Debra and she was real bossy sometimes and real funny at other times. Whenever we got busy, which we did a lot it seemed for just a doughnut—I mean taternut—shop, Debra would say things like: “Shake yourself” and “C’mon Kev, you want me to take over back there? Gotta get crankin’!”

It was easy to get pissed at her but she knew how to make you work harder. She would have made a great basketball coach. Maybe it was the fact that she was getting married to a cop who came in all the time. You know, it’s funny; I never really thought about it until now: a cop marrying a woman who runs a doughnut shop. I mean taternut shop.

Most of the people who came into the taternut shop were people who worked a couple of miles down the road at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Also there were lots of teachers,