My Lips Are Sealed (Surprises Can Suck)

Three years I toiled as a Frito Lay salesman in the back woods of Vermont and New Hampshire. I drove a rickety Grumman Frito Lay truck up and down the mountains with an eye towards filling every possible rack of every possible store and hole in the wall with Frito Lay products.

We had the products. Cheetos (puffs and fried to a crackly crunch). Fritos (regular, scoops, and barbeque). Doritos (nacho and cool ranch). Tostitos. Ruffles (plain, barbeque, sour cream & onion). Lays (plain, barbeque, sour cream & onion). Munchos. Funyons. Bakenettes. Rold Gold Pretzels (twists, rods, minis). Grandma’s cookies. Beef Summer Sausages.

My job was to make people fat and give them acne.

Anyway, Mondays and Fridays I hit the big stores in the bigger cities. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays were the trying days. I would use those days to travel between little towns 10-15 miles apart to stores that sold 5-10 bags of chips per week. I could make a dizzying $3 per week on one of those stores. Yet, my route was littered with the little mom and pop outposts, and Frito Lay was out like a bloodhound for any salesman who didn’t treat the little stores like they were Wal-Marts.

I was bored. I even memorized the 17.5 multiplication tables up to 50 because the small bags of chips cost the stores $.175 each (they sold for $.35 back then). So, while I was roaming the back woods working on my multiplication tables, I would quite often indulge in one of my favorite Frito Lay products, the Beef Summer Sausage. Man, were they good. I’d hold them like a cigar in my mouth, savoring the big, Frito-Lay flavor. Over my career I must have eaten three or four million. But then came that fateful day.

I don’t know what came over me. Traveling between towns with half a sausage in my mouth, I got the bright idea of looking at the ingredients of my favorite snack. Never before have I yakked with such velocity or ferocity! The first ingredient? BEEF LIPS!!!

Couldn’t they just have said “PARTS?” Immediately my mind raced to poor lipless cows wandering in the fields, wondering how they would utter their next “moo.” Then I thought of the mindless creeps running around the fields with their lip extractors, sneaking up on poor, helpless cows.

Then I thought of the places the lips had been. That thought was enough to produce another projectile vomit. Cows lips didn’t seem that sanitary to me, and the thought of their lips against mine was simply too much.

That day, waves of nausea swept over me. Each time I placed another box of Beef Summer Sausages on the counters, I couldn’t help but feel I was a part of the mindless horde causing the terrible and painful lip extractions of hapless bovines. I wanted to shout, “read the ingredients!” but was overcome with the fear that each store would become a mass of puking customers and I might have to clean it up.

Never again did I even touch a Beef Summer Sausage. But to this day, I feel responsible for my part in the great bovine lip extraction that is going on week after week in this country. Where is PETA when you need them?

Blawgerman.