A TASTE OF THAI
By Matt Knudsen

So I got food poisoning a couple few months ago. I ate at this restaurant in Hollywood called a Taste of Thai. It was in one of those mini strip malls that sit on almost every corner in Hollywood. You know the ones that have a Thai or Chinese restaurant, a wig shop, dry cleaner, a Santeria, a school uniform store, a car insurance place and a Winchells. And for all the stores in the little strip mall there are only like 6 parking spots. It was one of those places.

 
The Taste of Thai looked pretty crappy and apparently the health inspector agreed with my assessment and had given the restaurant a C grade, which it by law had to hang in the window. From the run down look of the Taste of Thai, I don’t know if this place was disappointed by the grade that it received or in fact proud that they had improved their cleanliness enough to actually get a C. Normally, I do not eat at restaurants that have C’s in the window but I was super hungry and I already had one of the six parking spots. Desperate times etcetera.   

So I ordered the shrimp pad Thai with steamed rice and a side of vegetables. I gobbled it down because that’s what I do with all food, I gobble it and I was on my way. I still had to go to a late afternoon audition for The Yellow Pages because apparently they’re still trying to get the word out about the phone book and I had to swing by the Guitar Center to return my defective piano bench. Aside from a little heartburn, which unfortunately, I can get from such things as oxygen, I felt fine.

Once a week, the wife and I go out to dinner or “date night.” We make it a point to hang out at least one night a week because she works a 9 to 5 job and I’m usually out like 3 or 4 nights a week trying to get alcoholics to laugh at my jokes in various comedy clubs and bars. Sometimes with our schedules, we can be like two ships passing in the early evening. So when we do go out, we usually go someplace ritzy.

So we go out to dinner at this nice place, we’ll call it Ritzy’s. It’s on Pico. Just to give you an idea of what kind of restaurant this was, our waiter had one of those little metal things that they use to sweep away breadcrumbs off the tablecloth. So we’re sitting there at dinner, and I had just ordered like a 23-dollar chicken and I start to feel a little light headed. The feeling was as if I had drank like 3 beers only without any of the self-confidence. Light-headedness then graduated to a queasy upset stomach feeling and I excused myself to the bathroom.  

While I was in the bathroom, I did one of those self-consultations in the mirror. “Hey, you’re OK. Are you getting sick? No. You’re not getting sick. You’re going to be fine.” But then I started to sweat like I was sitting in a sauna that was on fire in hell. I splashed some cold water on my face because unless movies and on TV have steered me wrong, splashing cold water on your face is the cure all.

I patted myself down with some paper towels and went back to the table. I sat down and ate the little lemon wedge that was in my water just in case my sudden illness was scurvy; I would begin to battle it immediately. I felt terrible and the wife said, “You look terrible.” She either said terrible or she used a synonym for terrible, bad, awful, dog crap. I don’t remember exactly what she said because I felt terrible.

After a while, the waiter came by with our food and asked, “Can I get you anything else? Fresh ground pepper, some more butter, perhaps a comfortable place to go lie down and die?” OK, he didn’t say the third thing but it would have been a nice option to have. I said that we were fine and he scooped away our breadcrumbs with his little metal thing and left.  

I didn’t eat a bite of my meal. I sat there and had a staring contest with this chicken for about 20 minutes and then asked to get a to go box so that I could enjoy it later. To his credit, the waiter didn’t ask if we wanted to see the dessert menu. I started to feel a little better and we got up from our table at Ritzy’s and walked outside into the cool night air.

Now the term “projectile vomiting,” is often bantered around casually in this day and age. I myself have used it as a punch line more than once. I had never projectile vomited in my life before that night. For those of you who have never projectile vomited, it’s like, you know when you turn a garden hose on full blast and there’s not a part of the hose where water isn’t coming out. It was like that. Mouth wide-open, top teeth to bottom teeth, projectile vomiting.  

I was bracing myself on one of those little trees that was planted by the city and grows out of the sidewalk. The kind that is small enough that it still has to be tied to a stake in the ground until it grows up strong enough on it’s own. I did the kind of throwing up that when you’re not actively throwing up, you’re just yelling out loud. “Aaaaaaaaaa.” My wife to her credit stood by my side and patted me on the back as I wrecked the little tree. A man that was walking past me on the sidewalk asked, “Hey buddy, are you OK?” My wife said, “He’s not drunk.” That made me laugh out loud.

The thing that made me laugh even more than my wife defending my sobriety was what I must have been doing to the pristine reputation of the ritzy restaurant. A guy coming out of your establishment and immediately puking his guts out is not exactly a ringing endorsement. It wasn’t their fault that I was super sick but I couldn’t help thinking even in the midst of my wretching, “Oh man, what if the restaurant is being reviewed tonight.” What if the guy from the Zagat guide was sitting at his table next to the window watching me spray the sidewalk with shrimp pad Thai?” When I was doubled over trying to catch my breath, I could almost read the review scrolling through my head, “Pleasant atmosphere, great service and delicious food. I give Ritzy’s 4 stars. To be fair however, another patron gave the establishment the less favorable review of, ‘I threw up more than I ever have in my entire life.’ But come and judge for yourself.”

I went home and shuked for like 4 hours. Shuking is basically when you’re sitting on the toilet with a bucket in your lap and your body is being evacuated from the north and south simultaneously.  The wife suggested we go to the emergency room and I didn’t try to argue against it. When I we got there, I was handed a barf bag which I promptly filled. “You seem to be vomiting a lot,” the doctor observed. He should have seen me on the sidewalk. He put me on on IV drip and I went through 3 bags of fluid before I started to feel kind of OK.

We got back to our place at about 5 AM. We were both exhausted and I was completely empty and much to my surprise, hungry. I went in to fridge and took out my 23 dollar chicken from Ritzy’s and ate the whole thing. It tasted pretty good but I have to say it was no Taste of Thai, thank God.