Punching Michael Butts

In high school, one of the two fast food restaurants I worked at was Grandy’s. Grandy’s slogan was “fast food that doesn’t taste fast” and they specialized in fried chicken, chicken fried steaks, chicken fried chicken, fried livers and gizzards … pretty much anything that was deep fried and served with gravy. There are Grandy’s restaurants in nine states, mostly in the south and midwest. They are known for their cinnamon rolls, their fresh dinner rolls, and “Granny”, old ladies they hire to serve as hostesses.

At Grandy’s, I pretty much did it all. I started out on the front register, worked drive-thru, and eventually moved to the kitchen.

Grandy’s had two types of employees — hourly, and managers. I believe our store had at least eight managers. It was not unusual to have three managers working at any given time, and I think our store may have trained manager for other stores. Managers wore white shirts and black slacks, were salary employees, and were scheduled for 66 hours a week (but sometimes worked more). If you divided it out I think the managers made about the same amount of money per hour as the hourly employees.

Michael Butts was a new manager at our store. His dirty blond bowl haircut and chin fuzz made him resemble Shaggy from Scooby Doo, which he could have passed for if he hadn’t have been about 5′ 6″. While he looked like Shaggy, his dream in life was to be Bruce Lee. When he wasn’t working at Grandy’s, he took Kung-Fu lessons (Kung-Fu, not Karate) at a local dojo. Occasionally when entering the kitchen he would let out a cat-like squeal and pose his hands in some sort of Kung-Fu pose that struck fear in the hearts of no one, not even the fried chickens. Later, when Michael was planning on turning in his two-weeks notice, he would go around saying “AHH, TWO-WEE-NO” in a fake Chinese accent. Again, ridiculous.

So one boring evening, Micheal came back to the kitchen blathering on about how Houdini often challenged people to punch him in the stomach, which is actually true. Houdini developed incredibly tight stomach muscles from years of hanging upside down and performing escape routines, that (according to people who tried it), punching him in the stomach (when his muscles were tightened) was like hitting a brick wall. (Incidentally, it was a blow to the stomach that ruptured Houdini’s appendix and killed him.)

This was pretty old news to me. By the age of ten I had read at least two biographies on Houdini; I had performed as him at a school function and studied magic tricks because of him. Apparently, Michael mistook my disinterest in him as disinterest in his story as he continued raising his own volume.

Eventually Michael said that he too had been training his stomach muscles and that he too could take a punch to the stomach. He then said to us, the three cooks at Grandy’s, that he would let us hit him in the stomach.

While I don’t remember, there must’ve been some heated debate on who got to hit Michael first. Again, I don’t remember my argument, but it must’ve been persuasive. I got to hit Michael first.

All this commotion caught the interest in the “counter help”, who came back to see what was going on. With employees from the front peering through the opening to the kitchen and with two cooks standing directly beside me, Michael began doing some sort of deep breathing exercise. It didn’t look like any martial arts training I’d ever seen; it looked like something an actor would do. After several seconds of this, Michael took a deep breath and held hit, put his arms behind his head and said, “Now.”

I stood there, balling my hand into a first. Michael looked at me with anticipation. As he held his breath his face began to turn red. I slowly began to assume the fighting stance I had learned from taking Karate since third grade, the place where I had punched a million punching bags and learned how to throw, if I may say so, a pretty good punch.

The anticipation was thick. Michael’s face was redder now. “Go!” he said, still holding his breath. I waited until I heard the first hint of an exhale, and then as swiftly as I could, I punched him as hard as I could.

In the solar plexus.

Your solar plexus is the part of your chest right below your rib cage. According to Wikipedia, getting hit in the solar plexus can “cause the diaphragm to spasm”, “cause difficulty in breathing”, and “cause great pain.” I am happy to report that my punch did all three.

Michael moaned as he deflated, collapsing down on the greasy kitchen floor. As he gasped for air I turned and noticed a basket rising from the fryer. “Fries are done,” I said as I lifted the metal basket full of golden fries from the burning grease. For a moment every one stood still, unmoving.

“Think you killed him?” one of the cooks asked me, looking at Michael writhing on the floor.

“Nah, he’s still wiggling,” I replied. Slowly, Michael pulled himself up on to his hands and knees and crawled from the kitchen to the next room.

Glenn, a gruff manager who I always liked finally came back to see what was going on. “Michael asked me to punch him in the stomach, so I did,” I said.

Glenn looked at each of us in the eye. Then he looked at Michael, who was just now getting to his feet. Glenn shook his head and returned to the front of the restaurant.

That was the last time anyone at Grandy’s ever asked me to punch them. A few days later, Michael turned in his “TWO-WEE-NO”, apparently deciding fried chicken and getting punched in the solar plexus was not for him.