textfiles/stories/excerpt.txt

  A Relevant Excerpt from "The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of 
               Death", by Daniel Manus Pinkwater.  


    "Walter!  Come see what I've got!" said my father.
    What he had was an avocado.  Whenever he brings one home, which is
 fairly often, he makes a big fuss about it.
    "Looky, Walter, an avocado!  What do you think of it?"  My father
 is the only person I know who says "looky!"  He also says "lookit!"
    What I think of avocados is this: On principle, I do not eat
 green, slimy things,  My mother doesn't eat them either.  She says
 she doesn't like the taste of avocado.  That's good enough for me.
 If there's any question at all about the taste, I'm leaving those
 suckers alone.
    My father loves them.  Every time he brings one home, he acts like
 it's a three-hundred-pound sailfish he's caught singlehanded, or an
 elk he brought down with a bow and arrow.
    He's really enthusiastic about avocados.  He skins them and digs
 out that oversized, stupid-looking pit, and then mashes up the slimy
 green part with a fork.  Then he puts lemon juice and vinegar, salt
 and pepper, and powdered garlic and paprika on it.  Of you have to go
 to all that trouble to disguise the flavor, why bother, I say.
    Then he makes a speech about it.  "My goodness, this is one fine
 avocado," he says.  "You have to know how to choose them.  You have
 to look for the ones that are black and blasted looking.  The pretty
 green ones aren't fit to eat.  The funny thing is that they reduce
 the price of the really scrumptious ones just because they're ugly.
 I guess they want to sell them before they rot completely."
    My father isn't a bad guy, in my opinion.  There are just a few
 subjects, like avocados, on which he's irrational.
    My mother had found another tuna-casserole recipe.  This is
 something of a hobby with her.  She's constantly finding these
 recipes in women's magazines.  She tries another one at least once a
 week.  They all taste like tuna fish.  Usually the have things in
 them you wouldn't expect to eat with tuna fish - like grapes, hot-
 pickle slices, fried Chinese noodles.
    "I hope you will appreciate this, kiddo," my mother says, "seeing
 that your mother took a healthy slice out of her finger whilst
 chopping up the ingredients."  She usually manages to injure herself
 at least once while preparing a meal.  She has a Band-Aid on her
 finger.
    "Eat up, champ," she says.  "It's American."  My mother has an
 idea that tuna caught in Japanese waters is tainted with
 radioactivity, so she always shops for brands canned within the
 continental United States.  Even Canadian brands are out.  "They're
 too chummy with the Commonists," she says.  She calls Communists
 "Commonists."
    If you were blind, or only knew my mother from talking with her on
 the telephone, you'd probably think she was about six feet tall...and
 maybe two hundred and fifty pounds in weight.  It's her voice, and
 the way she talks.  She sounds like she ought to be a big, slow-
 moving person, maybe a little sloppy.  Actually, she's small and
 nervous, always well dressed, and a chain smoker.  Once my father and
 I have started eating our meal, she brings a little ashtray to the
 table and puffs a cigarette between bites of food.  This is far more
 disgusting than avocado eating.  If I can possibly get out of it, I
 try not to have meals with my parents.  I've complained to them about
 various nauseating things they do, but it doesn't do any good.
 "Everybody has a family," my mother says.  I don't know what that
 means.
    Our apartment is new.  We are the first people ever to live in it.
 When we first moved into the building, it wasn't quite finished.  The
 whole place smelled of paint, and there was brown paper on the floors
 in the elevator and the hallways.  In those days, we had to take our
 shoes off outside the the apartment door so we wouldn't track plaster
 dust onto the carpet.
    Come to think of it, I've never walked on the floor in our living
 room.  There are those clear plastic runners my mother put down,
 making a kind of path through the living room to the dining alcove.
 The furniture has plastic covers, too.  My mother says that when you
 decorate with light colors, you have to be careful.  Nobody ever sits
 in the living room, except when my parents have company - and then it
 has to be company wearing suits and ties, and fancy dresses.  When
 they expect company like that, my father puts on a suit and tie, and
 my mother puts on a fancy dress and rolls up the plastic runners, and
 the all sit in the living room.  I get called in to be introduced to
 the company.  I always stand at the edge of the living-room carpet.
 The company says, "I understand you're a fine young man," or, "He
 looks like a football player.  Are you a football player?"  I'm at
 least a foot too short to be a football player.  Besides which, I
 hate football.
    "Yes," I say, "I'm a football player."  This happens -having
 company in the living room - about twice a year.  The rest of the
 time, nobody sits there.
    When regular people - relatives and such - come over, everybody
 sits in the den.  The den has a linoleum floor.  Sometimes my father
 sits around in his undershirt.  When he's feeling funny, he gets
 Nosferatu, my parakeet, and gets him to sit on his head.  Apparently,
 Nosferatu likes him.  He'll sit on my father's head for an hour.


  -=End

  -=Typed in by Mr. Pez for about an hour.



 Want to call the Perfect World?  914-666-3997?
 Or the Works?  914-238-8195?

  She says
 she doesn't like the taste of avocado.  That's good enough for me.
 If there's any question at all about the taste, I'm leaving those
 suckers alone.
    My father loves them.  Every time he brings one home, he acts like
 it's a three-hundred-pound sailfish he's caught singlehanded, or an
 elk he brought down with a bow and arrow.
    He's really enthusiastic about avocados.  He skins them and digs
 out that oversized, stupid-looking pit,