Fried Chicken and Bleach

There are moments in our life that truly shift what we think or feel about a person or a thing.  One of my fondest memories, yet a memory that cruelly slices my very soul - oddly enough invoked by a smell.  My deepest embarrassments surface when I smell fried chicken.  To this day, I don’t eat fried chicken because it brings this life changing moment roaring back into my head like a derailed freight train.

It was 1989, I remember the day, etched into my mind like an over-used Etch-a-sketch that refuses to be erased despite vigorous shaking.  It’s a Tuesday night, 11pm. I have to get up at 6am and have only just gone to bed after a long night studying for an English exam.  I hear my dad’s voice calling me from the hallway to get dressed to pick up my Mom from work.  She had a day job as a teacher with Pre-kindergarten kids.  A job that started early in the morning and lasted until around 5pm.  Why she felt the need to get a second job, 5 nights per week and not be at home with her family I couldn’t understand.  It made no sense whatsoever. We didn’t have a ton of money growing up but the house was always incredibly decorated and organized thanks to my mother’s gift for decorating and design.  It probably didn’t hurt that she also had a huge propensity for cleaning like no one I have seen since.  Not understanding why my dad who had also worked twelve hours today didn’t just go pick her up himself and leave me alone, I begrudgingly got dressed in some clean-ish sweats and flip flops. 

The night air was slightly cool, yet strangely the humidity hung in the air with an almost spa steam room like quality.  Climbing into the back seat of our brown Ford Bronco II (I didn’t want to have to get out when we got to the place my Mom was working to move to the back seat).  I sat in silence watching the headlights of passing cars as I stared out the window into the night sky.  I really should be in bed, I had a test in the morning.  My dad was perfectly capable of driving himself to pick up my Mom.  He didn’t need me and I was old enough to stay home by myself, my older brother was actually home in bed anyway. 

Pulling up into the seeming day light of the gas station that was frequented at all hours of the night by truckers, I noticed half of their neon lights were out. 

Through the hazy humidity I could see my Mom standing by the door, she was wearing a black skirt and the required uniform gas station T-shirt.  Black with a chicken that today seems to always remind me of the Kansas City Jay Hawks.  I can tell my mom is a little bit cold by the way she has her sweater wrapped tightly around her, holding it together with both hands crossed over her body in an attempt to what I can only presume was meant to ward of the thief of body heat- the cool night air.  She immediately got in the car before we had even stopped, the car had those lights that dimmed slowly as the door is shut so I could clearly see her smile as she turns to me to ask how my day was; did I finish my homework; did I clean my room.  Behind her eyes I see something that I didn’t quite understand at that age; now as I am 40 I understand it to be the look of exhaustion.  The point where you have pushed your body to the point at which it can barely function, the point where when you can go no more you have to dig down deep into the very pit of your soul and resurrect the energy and strength to go on. 

As we go in to the reverse, I take a deep breath and immediately want to throw up.  “What’s that smell” I say aloud.  The response is of course obvious, Fried Chicken.  Now mind you not like the smell when you get when you fry chicken at home, but more like the smell when copious amounts of fried chicken are cooked in a restaurant sized fryer only to absorb the chicken and then the old grease smell.  I would always avoid gas stations that served fried chicken because I didn’t want to smell like old grease for the rest of the day.  “It’s not just fried chicken” I retort with the haughty and know it all attitude of a teenager, it’s something more, like a chemical.  My Mom chuckles as she begins to tell me that whoever worked at this gas station before her probably never learned how to clean and sanitize well (she never would say anything negative about a person, always that maybe they just didn’t know) so she had to clean the work station with straight bleach.  “Straight Bleach- that’s probably not good for you to be inhaling those fumes like that”.  “probably not, but it’s the only way that I could get the grime and build up clean”.  Well the smell is making me sick, I mutter under my breath as I crack my back window to let the cool night air brush my brutally assaulted olfactory glands.  

The smell of used frying grease is bad enough on its own, it clings to clothes and hair like a toddler on his first day of school clings to their mom.  Add bleach to the mix, the smell is positively revolting, making me gag and crawl into the back trunk area to escape.  The window rolls itself up automatically, I look up to my dad and catch his eyes in the rear-view mirror as he gives me “that” look and shakes his head slightly NO.  He tilts his head ever so slightly towards my Mom who has her head completely against the head rest and in under 2 minutes has dozed off in a moving car.  She has her sweater even more tightly wrapped around her and is slightly shivering from the cold.  I roll my eyes but comply and respond by pulling my t-shirt up over my nose in attempt to dampen the smell of Fried Chicken and Bleach.  This story would unfortunately repeat itself several times, for several weeks actually, almost in every throat gagging detail. 

Increasingly I would argue with my Dad and demand an answer as to why I had to go with him to pick up my mom.  The smell makes me nauseous I would say repeatedly in my over dramatic adolescent way.  His response was simple- You are going because I said so.  “But I have school”, “I have a test” “I have cheerleading practice”- all were met with the understanding but firm, get in the car.  “why doesn’t my brother have to go”.  Dad was true to his quiet man of few word self in only saying I didn’t ask him to go, I asked you to go. 

Words were rarely spoken on the way to the Chester Fried Chicken-Gas Station-Truck Stop.  Dad was too tired from his twelve-hour day.  Mom, when we picked her up, always asked me about my day, then promptly fell into the sleep that can all come from complete and utter exhaustion.  I sat in the back seat with my t-shirt pulled up over my nose as if someone had released a dangerous mustard gas into the cabin of the car; rotating between sulking and being angry that I had to make this nightly trip.   My cheerleading team was getting ready for summer camp and we were practicing later and harder, so this nightly trip needed to come to an end so I could get my rest.

Weeks passed and I continued in my routine, school (I was an average student at best), Cheerleading practice, hanging out with friends.  Going to the local Amusement Park on the weekends.  Yet still nightly I made my trip to Chester Fried.

Moms days were the same, up at 4am to clean and do laundry, breakfast for my brother and I, morning bible devotion, take us to school by 7 (sometimes dad was able to drop us off on his way into work, granting my Mom a precious and rare moment alone)- then straight to work for her, until 4pm! Followed by her nightly trip to Chester Fried Chicken and Gas until 11pm. Home to sleep for 4 hours, repeat.  It was a laundry cycle that never skipped for her. 

On one particular day I distinctly remember as she placed breakfast on the table, my mom’s hands looked grotesque. They were red as if they had been placed in boiling water, with little tiny cigarette looking burns all over them.  “What in the world is wrong with your hands!”  “Oh its nothing” she mollified “just the bleach and sometimes the chicken grease will splatter and burn my hand a bit”.  Raising an eyebrow and speaking out of the side of my mouth, I scoffed- “a Bit.  You should wear gloves”. 

As it turns out, they didn’t have gloves and didn’t want to spend the money to buy them, so that left my mom bleaching everything to high heaven and washing her hands 10,000 times a night, as she cooked fried chicken for weary truckers.  “Surely there’s some soap that can take that smell away” I mention just short of gagging, thinking in my mind I am being helpful.  “Perhaps” was the only response I received from this crazy woman who worked more than was humanly possible and gave like she was  Mother Theresa.  She treated both jobs as if they were her mission from God, whether it was assisting a child of a drug addicted mom with overcoming a learning disability, or brightening a truckers long weary night with a smile and some Fried Chicken (prepared safely and in an immaculate environment of course).  If I had been thinking I would have realized that as much as my Mom washed her hands, if it would have been possible to get rid of the smell she definitely would have by now.

Two weeks before school was out I reminded my Dad that I need to pay for Cheerleading camp.  It was around $500 for the week but true to form I waited until the last minute to remind him that I needed the money.  In my defense, I had given them a letter about it two months ago so obviously they were responsible as my parents to keep track of everything going on in my life, I was a very busy teenager, with a super active social life.  “When’s it due” he asked.  “today” I said emphatically and most probably with a hint of a southern whine. My mind took off of its own accord, before the gate had been lifted- Oh no, did they forget, do they not have the money, did they forget that it has to be a money order, I will just die of embarrassment if I have to tell my coach we can’t afford to send me.  All of these thoughts run through my head like a Williams Sisters tennis volley.  He walks into the bedroom where my Mom is getting ready for her Parent- Teacher conferences and returns with an envelope.  Immediately I breath out and realize he’s got the money and All is right in the world.  “now don’t forget it’s $500 for the camp, but transportation will be $45 and our uniforms are $150 and then the shoes will be $95, but I only need the $500 money order today” I spout like the ungrateful twit that I am.  I’m practically bouncing with excitement.  I am going to go to a camp that I have been wanting to go to all year and it’s going to be so much fun and – “Get in the car so we can run to the bank to get the money order” my Dad breaks in to my jumbled but excited thoughts.

Pulling in to the parking lot of the Teachers Credit Union my Dad hands me the envelope and a deposit slip and tells me to go inside and deposit the checks and get a money order.  I don’t even complain as I am excited to get this camp paid for and want to make sure everything is perfect.  I grab the envelope and jump out of the car, rushing into the bank and forgetting my manners to hold the door for an exiting elderly lady (which my Dad will surely address when I get back in the car).  As I hand the envelope to the teller, she opens it and brings the checks to her nose.  Making small talk – she says- these checks smell strange. Without thought I blurt “its bleach and fried chicken”.

8 checks, not cashed or spent, 16 weeks sitting around waiting, waiting on a 15 year old teenage boy who really wanted to go to a camp that his family really couldn’t afford. 8 checks handled by hands cracked and bleeding from too many chemicals and bleach, spotted with eraser sized burn marks.  16 weeks of too little sleep and even less gratitude.  I get my money order and walk out of the bank, “bleach and Fried Chicken””bleach and Fried chicken” “Bleach and Fried chicken” and there I sat in the back seat for 16 weeks with my t-shirt pulled up over my face ninja style to ward off the smell, not noticing or thinking of anything other than myself, my own ridiculous “discomfort”. 

I indeed went to camp that summer, paid for by a mother’s silent sacrifice. We won an award. My mom was there to support me.  As she was shaking the other parent’s hands, I noticed a grimace in her sleep deprived eyes.  The realization that the grimace from my mom was because every time she shook someone’s hand it hurt her own hands, opened a window into my soul letting in the bright light of the universe.  The grimace on the face of my friend’s moms was because they were trying to figure out why my Moms hands were so rough compared to their well-manicured ones.   

Before my epiphany I would have been mortally embarrassed, now I simply sauntered up next to my mom, in my immaculately cleaned and pressed uniform (she stayed  up late to wash and hand iron it), took her hand gently in my own so as not to hurt her,  brought her hand to my lips and gently kissed her hand, and took  a deep breath inhaling the most beautiful smell of Bleach and Fried Chicken. 

It was a moment that changed me.  A moment that made me not so quick to judge.  A moment that to this day reminds me to be thoughtful and kind.  A moment that reminds me every day why I lead my teams, show up for my teams - the damage that we experience is the very thing that makes us such beautiful leaders, leaders that sometimes may be reminiscent of fried chicken and bleach. 

“You’re damaged too.  But that’s what makes you special.  Some things are better damaged.”

-Ziggy Zezsyazeoviennazabrizkie