Colin Kemp
I often cook beans in my Instant Pot. What kinds? I have black turtle beans, red kidney beans, white navy beans. I have pinto beans, lima beans, fava beans. I even have garbanzo beans. But until recently, I wouldn’t know a garbanzo bean if I came face-to-face with one in vodka aisle of Liquor Mountain…
I was at the liquor store, minding my own business, trying to find the cheapest vodka on a per-unit basis. I’m not fooled by fancy bottles and labels with pictures of old-time mustaches and words like ‘craft’.
So there I was at the liquor store, minding my own business, doing the math, when I was approached by a short, corpulent, middle-aged man wearing round eyeglasses glasses—the kind once in fashion with crypto-fascists and jingoists. His skin was a uniform tan colour, and he wore tan overcoat that gave him a bland appearance overall, especially because his hair was also a tan-like colour—sandy blond, really—and his shoes were tan suede. Plus, he wore tan khaki pants, the kind with the permanent crease in the front—although they were also extremely wrinkled, so the prim effect evoked by the crease was nullified. His shirt—tan, linen, threadbare—looked like burlap. He wore gloves, leather—you guessed it, tan. At first, I didn’t see him at all, but detected a waft of…it smelled exactly like my Instant Pot does after the steam is released. That was the smell—bland, earthy. Like beans.
I ignored it in case the smell was coming from me. Which it wasn’t, but it was a distinct possibility. Anyway, I was holding a bottle of vodka with a black-and-white label depicting some guy who looks like hipster cult leader. It was called ‘Rasputin’s Revenge’. And it was craft vodka, of course. Which meant it cost about 1.82 cents more per milliliter than my standard go-to, Kirkland Signature American Vodka in a 1.75 liter bottle. Too bad they don’t make a non-Signature version. Anyway, I was inspecting the hipster on the label when this bland man reached out with his tan glove hand and grabbed the neck of the bottle and started pulling!
“Hey!” I said. I’m inspecting that!”
I was just about to release the bottle—I wasn’t going to buy it anyway—when he bit my hand! For a guy who looked like a large ball of wax, he moved like a cobra. I fell to the ground and screamed in pain and cradled my hand. The man stuffed the bottle into his overcoat and waddled for the door and disappeared out onto the street.
Meanwhile, the manager rushed over with a first-aid kit. I thought it would be cool if he opened a bottle of vodka and poured it over my wound to sanitize it, but instead he took a little iodine wipe out of the kit and applied it. Then he put a band-aid over the wound. “You’re going to need to get a tetanus shot,” he said.
The assistant manager helped me up. “I’ve already called the police, Mr. Holmes,” he said to the manager.
“Thank you, Charles,” Mr. Holmes said. Then he turned to me. “On behalf of Liquor Mountain, I sincerely apologize.”
By now I had regained my composure. “That’s alright,” I said, “It’s not your fault, nor is it Liquor Mountain’s. It was that strange man…he seemed to really like that brand of vodka. Me, I’m indifferent.”
Shortly, two uniformed police officers arrived to take my statement.
“So, he was short, round, had tan-colour skin, a tan trench coat, tan gloves, tan shoes, tan hair, and round eyeglasses, like a fascist? Is that correct?” one of the officers recapitulated.
“Yes. Or a jingoist,” I said.
He wrote that down.
Just then a third police officer joined us, this time a detective. “Hello,” he said, “My name is Detective Yob. I’ve been trying to track down this suspect for months.”
“Oh yeah?” I said.
“Yes, we call him the ‘Garbanzo Gangster’. We’ll have to review the CCTV security footage, but it sounds like this is our man.”
“Garbanzo Gangster?” I said.
“Yes. It’s because he is described by his other victims as looking exactly like a large garbanzo bean.”
“Oh.” I said, scratching my head. “If you ask me, he looked more like a chickpea.”
The detective stared at me intensely, his steel grey eyes scrutinizing me, negatively impacting my well-being. Then he sighed. “It’s the exactly same thing,” he said. He shook his head disapprovingly and then addressed one of the uniformed officers. “Doesn’t anyone know their beans anymore?”
When I entered my apartment after returning from the hospital for my tetanus shot, I was temporarily overcome with a wave of panic—until I realized that the smell was not the Garbanzo Gangster, but simply my Instant Pot, which was had entered its Keep Warm holding pattern. I opened the lid and savored the earthy chickpea aroma. Then I went to my computer and googled ‘chickpeas vs. garbanzo beans’.
Detective Yob was right—they are exactly the same thing.
COLIN KEMP lives in Ottawa, Canada, where he works as a social scientist. He is currently taking courses in the Creative Writing program at the University of Toronto.