Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Cool Ranch Doritos.

My mama did the best she could raising and providing for three greedy and seemingly ungrateful ass kids. And while I finally was able to realize and appreciate her struggles and sacrifices when I became an adult raising my own ungrateful ass kids, I really didn’t understand any of this when I was a nappy-headed little boy — particularly as a 12-year-old.

If anything represented the economic hierarchy of 7th-grade social life, it was lunch period.

And for lunch, my mom had to get super creative daily with what and how I was going to eat at school. There were times when she fried a burger the night before, wrap it in cheap ass aluminum foil, only for the bread to be soggy and greasy by the time I took it out of my Jewel grocery bag for lunch.

Other times, though, I would get a rare, unexpected treat.

Like this one time, my mom bought me lunch from a coffee shop she worked at. Inside there was a turkey sandwich on a croissant, chips, and a delicious strawberry frosted donut. I had dreamt of eating that lunch all damn morning, so when the time came to grab my lunch off the lunch cart, you can imagine how pissed I was to find my dream lunch was gone.

One by one, I watched kids grab their lunch, while I was looking all over that cart trying to figure out where mine disappeared to. At the precise moment I gave up hope of finding my missing lunch intact, I spotted this girl at the lunch table stuffing her fucking face with MY lunch that MY mother had bought me!

Of course, I did the obvious. I told the little heifer that it was my lunch she was scarfing down and demanded she give it back.

But when that didn’t work, I straight up snitched to the teacher that the chick had the audacity to gank a lunch that was not her’s and now I was left lunchless with a growling stomach. I don’t know if the teacher didn’t believe me because my normal lunches consisted of shit like boiled neckbones wrapped in foil or if the teacher just couldn’t prove either way who the lunch belonged to. I just know I sat there — with no lunch, pissed beyond belief while this little grade school hoodrat ate MY lunch. And if you can’t tell, I’m still pissed — 30 years later.

**Whoo sah!**

The overall point is that lunch was usually a traumatic experience for me because my social status (at least in my head) depended on what was in my lunch. And while it seems ridiculously trivial, one of the most important events of my life happened during one of these infamous lunch periods so many years ago.

On this particularly memorable day, lunch period arrived as usual. And to describe the scene, the first 5 minutes of lunch normally involved a gagglefuck of 12-year-olds haggling over potential lunch trades. There was always lots of hollering and screaming from little snot nose fuckers waving bags of fruit snacks and yelling out barter prices for peanut butter & jelly sandwiches. It’s basically like Wall Street for 7th Graders. And since my mama had packed me a pretty decent lunch that day, I decided to get in on the action and see what I could get for my cool ranch tortilla chips.

“I’ll trade someone for my Doritos!” I called out.

I figured I could get a pretty good return on Doritos. It was a popular item. But before any likely trade could happen, some punk ass boy sitting at my lunch table killed any potential deal by saying my chips weren’t “real” Doritos. And truth be told, he was right, my mom wouldn’t spend an astronomical amount on a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos when she could get a couple of bags of the generic brand for the same damn price. I mean, they were just as good in reality, but they simply weren’t Doritos and therefore, considered subpar. Which meant I wouldn’t be able to find a good trade.

Still. I stuck to my guns.

“Yes, they are!” I shouted back.

“Let me taste one then,” he rebutted.

And there goes Checkmate. He got me.

I had really no other hand to play other than allow this arrogant little piece of shit to taste-test one of my cool ranch chips. And playing the last card in my hand, I forked over a chip in hopes that perhaps he couldn’t tell the difference.

He snatched it, leaving powdery cool ranch still stuck to my fingers.

He took a curious nibble while the entire lunchroom gazed at him looking upward while thinking to himself and calculating a final decision. And with what seemed like hours going by, we all waited for his judgment to pass.

“Nope!” He declared proudly with a tinge of asshole in it, “Definitely not Doritos!”

My heart sank.

The kids laughed. And this memory is burned into my brain for the remainder of my days on this God-foresaken planet. In fact, I am probably going to die at home surrounded by my grandkids and great-grandkids and be thinking about how humiliated I was at that very moment and how it was my duty to never allow such dishonor to be bestowed upon my posterity.

Yes. That’s how crappy I felt.

After junior high, high school lunch didn’t get much better as my family qualified for free lunch — even after the school district raised the standards, which basically disqualified all of my friends except me. I still remember feeling like easy baked shit and a welfare case. I would wait in line at this ticket booth in the back of the school every month for my free lunch ticket to be punched. It really set a fire inside of me that could have been taken a number of ways. But for me, it made me determined to re-establish my sense of pride. And when I hit 14 years old, I got my very first job: a caddy at the local country club.

The very first day at the country club, I made about a hundred bucks in tips. But the most valuable thing I earned was the confidence in the fact that I had the power to generate my own income.

As soon as I got back home, I gave $20 to my mom so that she could grab of couple things from Aldi — a discount grocery store. And when she returned home with a small bag of groceries to toss in the fridge, the feeling I felt was better than any drug I might imagine. I got a high from simply being able to control my destiny. And the first thing I did with this new found buying power was purchase me a king-sized Snickers bar, one liter of Pepsi...

…and a big ass bag of Cool Ranch Doritos.

At this point, the brand of tortilla chips didn’t mean a damned thing to my standing in the social heirarchy — 7th Grade was long gone. But it meant a lot to me. Cool Ranch Doritos, for me, symbolized something that was once unattainable. It was a cloud over my self-confidence and is what, in my mind, kept me from being accepted by my peers.

The irony is these days, now as a middle-aged man, I couldn’t care less about being accepted by anyone or anything. Still, I manage to keep my pantry stocked with Cool Ranch Doritos…mostly because I just love how they taste. I mean, they’re pretty damn delicious. But I also have them as a subtle reminder to myself that if there is anything I want in life, there is nothing I can’t have for myself…as long as I’m willing to work for it.