The Newcott Scoop: The All-American Frito Boat
Suddenly my mind had to rewire itself and alter everything it had ever learned. It was as though I was seeing color for the first time. As if I was first experiencing the sensation of dipping my toes into the ocean. It was like that part in "The Matrix" where Morpheus hands Neo the red pill to wake up from reality, except only if Morpheus first put the red pill in a plastic bag and then filled it with chili and cheese.
That's because I just had my first "Fritos Boat" at 7-Eleven.
"This changes everything." I said aloud. "I have seen how far the rabbit hole goes."
As my friend Greg explained to me, a "Frito Boat" (or apparently "Frito Pie," depending on your geographic location) has been a long held and rarely spoken tradition among poor college students in which they visit their nearest 7-Eleven location, purchase a bag of Fritos, and then use the nacho cheese machine to coat it in a hearty layer of artificial cheese and chili.
"This can't be legal." I said to Greg.
"Believe me, it is." He told me. "Come. I will show you the ways of a cheap college student."
As we walked to the closest 7-Eleven, I was suddenly reminded of myself over three years ago when the very same chain of convenience stores offered me the only job I could find in Portland, Ore.
"Can you tell me about your work history?" the manager asked me.
"Well, that's kind of a long question. I worked my way through college as a web designer, a celebrity interviewer, a Jungle Cruise skipper at Disneyland, a weekly humor columnist-"
"Let me stop you there." She said. "Do you think you can handle knowing which taquitos are hot and which ones are still frozen in the middle?"
I was given five black polos for the job, which I thought was unnecessary at first, but then quickly realized were much needed after I was repeatedly splashed by piping hot chili, followed by freezing cold Slurpees. Overall, it was a luke-warm experience.
The smell of powdered coffee was constantly fused to my finger-tips, and now, three years later, I smelled it again as I entered the cold phosphorescent interior of the 7-Eleven down my street.
"Here's the best part," Greg said to me. "You can use any flavor of Fritos that you want."
"If I use the chili-flavor and then pour chili on it, will that open some kind of black-hole, or portal to the afterlife?"
"That's the best one." Greg told me.
When you work at 7-Eleven, the poor are usually not the hungry. They're the thirsty. At the location I worked at we also traded in recyclables in return for cash. Late one night a man handed me his plastic bag full of crushed cans only to apologize once I was holding it, saying, "Sorry about all the blood."
I suddenly had to hold back the partially frozen taquito I had consumed earlier when I realized that the bag he had handed me was coated in the wet redness spouting from his hand.
"That happens," my coworker later told me in the kitchen as I endlessly rinsed and repeated my hands in cleanser. "They try to take back the cans they recycled earlier from the machines, but don't realize the doors are lined with razor blades."
The cycle continued as the cans he collected went to buying another tall can.
So I thought, maybe there are worse ways to be cheap than filling a small bag of chips with chili and cheese. It gave me some confidence to think that after buying my bag of Fritos to approach the large black monolith of a nacho cheese machine and begin dispensing the sweet muck of processed product it contained.
Suddenly, I felt an intense burning on my hands and realized that the bag had crumpled when I placed it under the nozzle. As a result, I was just pouring a torrent of hot chili all over my fingers.
Wincing, I looked at the pile of chili I spilled and hated myself for having become that one man I always hated when having to clean the chili machine at 7-Eleven.
Among my last weeks working at 7-Eleven, I found myself as the only employee working on the 4th of July holiday. Since my store was located in a highly industrial area, the entire store sat empty, merely open due to company regulations. It's really 24/7-Eleven. As I heard the popping and whistling of fireworks in the Portland sky, I did what no employee is supposed to do, and climbed onto the roof.
It was only after both that night while I watched the red white and blue explosions in the sky, and the night three years later when I filled a Fritos bag with chili and cheese, that I realized that both of my most significant experiences of being an American must have come from the same chain of convenience stores. It was a little bit bittersweet, but then again, so is the chili and cheese.
Zachary Newcott is a multimedia reporter for the Times-Delta/ Advance-Register.