Avocad-No: A Story of Sushi, Shame, and a Saintly Taxi Driver

Did you know that you can develop food intolerances over time? I learned this fun fact in the most mortifying way when I was in my early twenties.

Allow me to take you back to one fateful night in 2006 when I ate a large helping of avocado and suffered the consequences.

Don’t worry; it has a happy ending - and you may even learn a life lesson or two.

It Started with Sushi

I was in my final year of music college and living in a slummy part of the city because it was cheap and close to campus. One evening, my dad was staying in a nearby hotel for work and I took the bus out to meet him and his associate for a sushi dinner.

Neither my dad nor his colleague had tried sushi before and were a little apprehensive about it. I had only discovered it myself a few months earlier and was completely obsessed. I assured them that it was the greatest food ever.

We ordered a wide spread of dishes so we could sample everything the restaurant had to offer. I’d been living off hotdogs and Pizza Pockets for the past month, so I took advantage of the feast and wolfed down roll after roll, including a particularily spicy dragon roll. My dad and his colleague were pleasantly surprised by how tasty the sushi was and we were all having a great time.

But the fun fizzled towards the end of the meal when my stomach started churning. At first, I was worried that we had eaten bad sushi, but my dad and his colleague appeared to be totally fine. I ignored my discomfort, determined not to ruin a great evening with my dad.

After dinner, we walked back to the hotel where they were staying. By the time we got to the lobby, I was feeling horrible. The pain in my stomach was so bad I could hardly stand.

I told my dad I wasn’t feeling well and that I needed to get home.

They were puzzled by my sudden malaise because they both felt fine. My dad called a cab and gave me the fare to get home, telling me to call him when I got in.

“Take care of her, she’s my daughter,” he said to the cab driver as I crawled in.

The driver acknowledged him with a curt nod and my dad shut the door.

I didn’t want Dad to worry so I smiled at him through the window to show him I would be fine - but I definitely wasn’t.

A Bumpy Ride Home

My cab driver was a gruff middle-aged man who didn’t care for idle chit-chat. That was fine by me because I was putting every ounce of energy into stemming the turmoil that was growing inside my stomach with every passing second. It didn’t help that the city where I lived was lax on road maintenance, and the ride couldn’t have been more turbulent if I’d been on the back of a drunk camel.

I held on for as long as I could, but the situation reached critical mass about three blocks from my apartment. Desperate, I opened the car door while we were still moving in attempt to puke out the side of the car. Instead, I projectile-vomited all over myself, the door, and down the side of the seat.

When the cab driver caught a glimpse of the ghastly scene unfolding in his rearview mirror, he broke his silence with a startled shout and promptly pulled over.

I got out of the cab and finished hurling on the pavement.

“I’m so sorry!” I said between heaves. “I swear I’m not drunk, I think I ate some bad sushi!”

The cab driver, to his credit, seemed completely unperturbed by the site of half-digested sashimi sliding down the window of his taxi. He grabbed a towel from the trunk (that he apparently kept for such occassions) and stoically wiped down the door and seat as though it were his third vomit cleanup of the evening.

“I’m so, so sorry!” I exclaimed again, utterly mortified.

“Honey, I’ve been a driver in this end of the city for years and I’ve seen it all. It’s no big deal.”

The brusque man's benevolence had stunned me then, but now I think back to that moment when he nodded to my dad. I'd like to believe that he was a father himself and was honoring some kind of “Dad Code” to look out for another man's daughter. Then again, maybe he really had seen it all and had long ago resigned to ralphing fares as an occupational hazard.

Whatever the reason, I will always be grateful to him for his compassion in that moment.

The cabby let me back into his car and we continued the drive to my apartment as though nothing had happened.

There was just one little problem.

I had yakked all over the cab fare. It was not the kind of tip the man deserved, especially after handling my dragon roll explosion with such grace.

“Can you stop at an ATM, sir, please?” I requested sheepishly, crumpling up the nasty bills in my hand to hide them.

He obliged and I withdrew some clean cash to pay him with. Although I made it home without another incident, it took several more hours of calling Ralph on the big white telephone before I finally got all the sushi out of my system.

Epilogue

For the longest time, I thought it was bad fish that caused me to toss my cookies, so I didn’t touch sushi again for a long time. Then one day, I was happily noshing away on nachos with extra guacamole and had the exact same experience, but without the degrading taxi ride. In a moment of clarity, I had a flashback to the dragon roll I ate that night, which had been smothered in a copious amount of avocado.

I finally put two and two together and realized that the alligator pear was the real villain in this dietary whodunnit.

I have been happily partaking in avocadoless sushi ever since.

See, I told you it had a happy ending!

Now, you might be wondering what I did with the barf money from the taxi. It was still perfectly good legal tender, so I cleaned it off the best I could, put it in an envelope, and deposited it into a bank machine the next day. (I was certainly too ashamed to give that cash to anyone in person.)

It was one of my most embarrassing moments but at least there’s a moral to the story: Don’t automatically blame the fish for your stomach troubles because there could be another culprit.

That, and always wash your hands after handling money.

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