The DU Lounge

served over an ice cream scoop of rice that, varying from week to week, could either be a solid ball of starch welded together or way undercooked hard little white shards. The beef chop suey was about 5 levels of quality below Chun King and was more like what might get shipped in a 55 gallon drum. Usually you were lucky if there was an actual, barely visible piece of meat. The sauce/gravy was more like a way over salted slurry that would make canned broth seem thick and tasty.

Usually accompanied by a scoop of what we were told was sweet corn but it was as pale as paper and every bit of flavor had been boiled out of it so nobody knew for sure what it was. This would be served with the usual doughy, small dinner roll that you could hold in your hand and squeeze into a small ball with complete confidence it would never spring back. You could wash all of that down with a carton of milk that was lukewarm because the cases had been delivered an hour before and had been sitting in the hot kitchen off to the side.

I began to not eat lunch at all and when I hit junior high it was like finding Heaven when I discovered that a small bakery was only a couple of blocks from school. It was a closed campus and we would sometimes get caught for leaving the school grounds but it was worth the detentions. Jelly filled bismarks and filled long johns. When I hit high school it was also a closed campus but some kids who had cars could leave for work/study jobs or doctor appointments etc. and if you begged you could hitch a ride with them as long as you ducked down until they were out of the driveway. Once they got a block away they could stop and let you out and you could walk to the burger joint (chains didn't exist) and order to go. Getting back unseen could be risky but there were a couple of different wooded areas bordering the school and you could take your chances as to which one the vice principal would be watching. We never worried much about the principal because he would usually split for lunch to the local golf course bar and not come back until the end of the day.