Christopher D. Nyenhouse
The World's Deadliest Snackfood

_____When I was a little kid my uncle used to like to sunbathe. He would lie out on the deck of my grandmother’s house in a red Speedo, sip white wine from a box, and bake in the sun. When the wine and the sun had properly cooked his brain, he would disappear into the basement for a minute and reappear with a Reuger 10/22 semi-automatic rifle slung across his chest. This rifle was not factory issue. He had replaced the wood with a non-reflective black folding stock, strapped a high powered scope to the top, and loaded into it an enormous banana clip full of hand-loaded hollow point bullets. With his red Speedo, aviator sunglasses, and flip-flops he looked like a psychotic god. He would stalk up the long trail to the farm above my grandmother’s house, walk through the fields, and put a bullet through any animal that crossed his path…mostly fat little groundhogs. He was a crack shot and beautiful to watch, a creature in his element. Birds fly, fish swim, and my uncle bakes his noodle and kills things.
_____Occasionally the first round he fired wouldn’t be a kill shot and that is the sole point of this rambling anecdote. I’ve known since I was a little kid exactly what kind of noise a groundhog makes when it has been ripped apart by a hollow point bullet. It is a surprisingly loud, screeching wail with all the sorrows and horrors of this world in it. It’s enough to make even God weep. This is exactly the noise that I heard my best friend Andy making as he lay semi-conscious at the bottom of a cliff with his skull crushed in. If you think that’s not the most vivid memory of my life then you are sorely mistaken.
_____We were seventeen or eighteen years old, and my friends and I were coming off of a string of massive personal victories. We had just graduated from high school, and we had recently made a couple of illicit road trips to New Orleans against parental advice. We basically discovered everything good in life all at once. Freedom, loud music, sex, drugs, and drastic forward velocity had all blurred into one high fine note in our heads, which made relaxing at home an impossible proposition. In this spirit, we jumped in my car and went to a coffee shop in Allentown that was advertising a “Grateful Dead” night. It wasn’t quite the action we were looking for, but it marked a starting place for the evening.
_____I was sitting on the curb outside, sipping coffee with my buddy Jack, and waiting for our other cohorts Gabriel and Andy to get back from CVS with some cigarettes when a pair of beautiful girls drifted up to us and started chatting. “Ah ha!” I thought, “Here we go. Now things get interesting.” Their names, I learned, were Robin and Becky. They were both wearing some kind of hippy chick halter-tops and had long braids. We ended up hitting it off and they asked if we wanted to go “up on the mountain”. We informed them that we had to wait for our friends to get back and then we could go. They were waiting to meet a pair of friends too, so we waited, drank coffee, and generally hung out. Robin and Becky liked to sing and kept harmonizing TV jingles. “Wacky Wild Cool Aid Style”, they’d sing and then fall apart giggling. This is the kind of thing that normally annoys the hell out of me, but their halter-tops and pleasant attitudes made up for a multitude of sins.
_____Soon all of our reinforcements had arrived and we were off to our dooms. I was to follow the car full of girls to a place called “Bake Oven Knob,” apparently a point somewhere on the Appalachian Trail. We made several stops along the way. We picked up a couple of more girls, some bongos, and some unnamed “supplies” at a non descript cul-de-sac in Allentown, then we hit a Wawa for extra cigarettes and sunflower seeds. Barbeque flavored sunflower seeds. I used to love them. Pulling out of the Wawa I accidentally drove up on the curb. Conscious of the girls in the other car, I decided to make my mistake look intentional by taking my car entirely onto the sidewalk and driving that way for a block. The curb at the end of the block was a good two feet high however, and I shot off of it and through a red light to keep up with the girls in front of us. My car hit the ground with a noise like cannon fire and sparks shot out behind me. This elicited cheers and applause from the other car.
_____“Jesus,” Andy said. “You’re going to get us killed!”
_____“Relax guy,” I told him. “Have some of these sunflower seeds.” I tossed the bag into the back seat and Andy and Gabriel started munching them greedily.
_____“Hey, these are good!” they said.
_____We drove around in an impossibly circuitous manner that had me confused in no time. “These fucking hippies don’t know where they’re going,” I growled. Finally we turned onto a rocky, unpaved mountain road that led up at a steep angle. My clutch started slipping and Andy jumped out of the car and ran in front to mock me. Ha Ha Sucker, he seemed to be saying. I’m faster than your car! This is not the kind of humiliation a red-blooded young man will take lying down, and I tried desperately to get the clutch in gear so I could run him over. When he got tired of running he climbed onto the roof and peered through the windshield in front of me like Spider-Man. I jerked the wheel left and right to try and throw him off. I figured if I threw him I could at least run him over with one of my rear tires and teach him a lesson. He managed to hang on like a rodeo clown and grinned.
_____Finally we pulled into the parking area, got our stuff, and started hiking up the long trail. As we walked, the girls harmonized some song that I didn’t recognize (and which seemed to feature the word cunnilingus over and over). At the top of the trail was “Bake Oven Knob”. Basically it was a rocky point on the top of a hill near a cliff that afforded a clear view of the stars above and the lights of Allentown below. We set up shop thirty feet or so from the cliff at a sort of natural amphitheater where everyone could sit comfortably around in a semi-circle. It was a beautiful night and I was thoroughly pleased with the situation.
_____The unnamed “supplies” the girls had stopped for in Allentown turned out to be a copious (and I do mean copious) supply of ganja that Becky produced from her white purse and started loading into an enormous blue wooden pipe. She handed it to my friend Jack and he sucked at it greedily. Nobody else got any because right about this time Gabriel (who totally disapproved of this sort of thing) called sullenly for someone to pass him the sunflower seeds. Andy still had them. He stood up, took two steps to his left towards Gabriel and disappeared. There followed a cacophony of noises. I heard brush breaking, dull thuds, followed by a long pause, and finally a sick splat. The feeling that something really horrible had happened suddenly seized me, but it took me a few stunned moments to figure it out. The cliff was a good ways off, but I now noticed a narrow gully-like crack in the rock that led down to it at a steep angle. Andy had tripped into this gully, rolled thirty feet or so and continued right over the edge of a seventy-foot sheer vertical cliff.
_____People leapt into action. Becky and Robin bolted into the woods to our right. The two other girls said, “We’re going to get help!” and took off at a run down the trail (taking our only flashlight with them). I started to climb down the gully Andy had fallen into with Gabriel following close behind. That’s when the noises started. Andy was squealing and grunting in a most horrific fashion. It was the aforementioned “Shot Groundhog” sound and I nearly threw up. We got halfway down the cliff, but there was nothing but yawning darkness below us and nowhere left to go. Becky and Robin called up from below with tears in their voices and said that nobody else should come down, that it was a mess. I couldn’t figure out how they had gotten down there until I realized that they had simply gone around the cliff instead of trying to go straight down it like an asshole.
_____Gabriel climbed back to the top and I followed slowly after in the darkness. Above, Jack was leaning over the edge with a lit Zippo in his hand to try to light my way. Standing on the mountain with a light in his hand, he looked like “The Hermit” from my deck of Tarot cards (or maybe the inside cover art of Zeppelin IV).
_____The girls called from below for us to throw down clothes to staunch the bleeding. Andy’s horrible Ned Beatey-like pig squeal continued, and clothes fluttered down past me as I tried to climb. I got to the top and Gabriel was essentially naked. He looked ridiculous standing there shivering in his shorts and I decided that since Andy was a dead man anyway I’d just keep my kit on (I was wearing my lucky denim shirt too…can’t get blood and brain matter all over your lucky shirt…). Jack handed me the girl’s blue pipe when I climbed up. I freaked out and said, “This is no time for this shit!” and threw it into the woods. Jack told me later that he wanted my fingerprints on it in case he got in trouble…I don’t play with him anymore.
_____I waited there at the top of the cliff for an hour listening to my friend’s brain-damaged screams coming up from the blackness below. The girls insisted that no one else come down, so I stood around smoking cigarettes and thinking that as soon as this shit was over I was going to move to Alaska, dig a deep hole, and hide in it for the rest of my life.
_____“Hey Gabe, what do you think of the life of a hermit?” I asked.
_____“It sounds pretty fucking good right about now,” he replied and promptly threw up all over himself. I felt really bad for him standing there dressed in boxer shorts and vomit and decided that my denim shirt probably wasn’t that lucky after all and gave it to him. Finally, I saw a ribbon of flashing lights creeping towards us in the valley below. Every fire truck, ambulance, and police car in the world seemed to be coming. It looked like a giant serpent of flame as they wound their way across the hills in our direction. From below I could hear Becky babbling and crying, “Oh no, please don’t try to move, no, no, don’t try to open your eyes. Oh, god, no…”
_____Andy stopped squealing for a second and let out an insane laugh that haunts me to this day. “BUT I HAVE TO SEE!” he roared, then went back to squealing. Raw horror like nothing I’ve ever known cut through me. It took an hour of waiting before any help arrived and another hour for them to raise Andy up the cliff on a backboard. They loaded him onto some kind of weird mountain rescue vehicle for the trip down the path to the parking lot where a helicopter was waiting.
_____That vehicle moved at a snail’s pace and we got down there on foot well in advance of it. We were subjected to repeated batteries of sobriety tests by a pair of loopy cops. We were all stone cold sober, but I am convinced that those cops were drunk. I spied a half empty bottle of vodka in their cop car. When the helicopter finally took off, the cops had left their windows wide open and all manner of dust and debris blew in which they then tried to clean off the upholstery with individually wrapped wet naps. Gabriel, who had never done anything illegal in his life, almost got arrested because he had carried down Becky’s purse with a quarter pound of weed in it. The cops figured out that everyone was straight and they never even pressed charges on Becky. It was almost dawn when they told us we could go. It was a long quiet drive home.
_____Andy lived after being in critical condition for a long time. He has titanium plates in his head, permanently lost his sense of smell during brain surgery, and had to take the medication Dilantin for years to prevent seizures. Now he’s off of medication, and you would never know that anything had happened to him if it weren’t for his annoying habit of taking people by the hand and making them feel the titanium bolts under his scalp. We took to calling him “Spalding” because his head was enormously swollen, shaved, and stitched from temple to temple like an enormous baseball when we visited him in the hospital. He is now a defense contractor with low-level security clearance and a proclivity for wearing “Wile E. Coyote” t-shirts. He remembers nothing about that night. Gabriel took it the hardest; he says that the only thing he can remember is my hair blowing in the wind as the helicopter took off. He says it was very cinematic, like something out of “Platoon”. He now lives in Manhattan and is a struggling actor. Becky and Robin decided life is too short, quit college, and followed Phish around. Jack was found drowned last year at the bottom of a pool in Washington D.C.. He was only twenty-six. For my part, I took all of the money I had saved to go to college, loaded up my car and drove around America for a little over a year. Between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one I managed to total four cars with only minor injuries. All but once I was doing things that I consciously realized would eventually end in me crashing my car. I think I was an accident junky. They say that people who live through a trauma sometimes try to recreate it later in their lives.
_____This is a long and involved story but the moral is a simple one…boycott barbeque flavored sunflower seeds!