textfiles/stories/excerpt.hum

  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.



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