Girls with Insurance

Mr. Potato Head looked at the directions he had printed out from the internet when he was in the small university town where he had lived for three years. He was wearing his glasses, his hat, his shoes, a light shirt because it was still summer, thinking “A job will make things better.” He felt like his plastic shell would melt away, under the heat of the sun. He opened the window of the truck he had rented.

He was arriving to the city where he had popped out of Mama Potato Head’s vagina twenty-five years before. This is the city where he had lived as a young potato head, where he acquired his language. They had lived in a five-story brick condo. There had been an orange tree in the patio of the building. No one ever ate the oranges it dropped. There were always sweltering ripe oranges over the ground which circled the tree. The kids, along with the young Mr. Potato Head, would throw the oranges at each other.

Mr. Potato Head was on his way to the home of an old friend of the family, an ex-colleague of Pastor Potato Head, who was still very active in community services in this city. She was a nonprofit sector management counselor. She lived in a suburb outside of the city where Mr. Potato Head had been raised until the age of ten. The pupils of the pair of eyes he was wearing were very small.

The summer after they returned from tour the Vegetables, the punk rock band in which Mr. Potato Head sang, broke up. There are many possible reasons as to why the Vegetables may have broken up. Some were very obvious reasons, like: each time they played out live, it was likely that one of the members of the Vegetables would lose one of their pieces, and they were afraid to slowly be left void of anything which could represent who they were. Other reasons lay below the surface and would only be mentioned vaguely in rooms, where two at a time, members of the Vegetables would become high on marijuana.