Mr. Squish and useless teachers.

This strip got me in trouble. Not for the reasons you’d think. I figured if I were to get any grief at all about it, it’d be from slacker professors who felt my portrayal hit way too close to home, and who were too dumb to pretend it was some other guy I was making fun of, not them.

No, I didn’t catch—and maybe neither did you—what it was about this strip that profoundly offended people, causing three students to angrily come to the Hornet offices to request my head on a stick, a phone call from the faculty chair of a department, and an official letter in my file. Neither did I.

It’s two little words in the first panel: “RLS 30.”

Mr. Squish votes for “none of the above.”

Yeah, it’s Friday. Day late. Oh well.

When I started at Sac State, it was 1990, a midterm election year. In California, that means the governor is up for election or re-election. This year, it’s Governor Jerry Brown (D–Oakland), going for his fourth term, thanks to a loophole in the term-limits law which makes him, and George Deukmajian if he wants, the only governors who can run for third and fourth terms. He’s up against Neel Kashkari (R–Laguna Beach). In California’s system, the top two vote-getters in the primary election run against one another in November. The general election seems like kind of a foregone conclusion, considering Brown got 54.3 percent of the vote, and will only get more in the runoff. But you never do know. Brown could always alienate the electorate between now and then. I doubt it; he has won three terms, you know.

Back in 1990 it was then-Senator Pete Wilson (R–San Diego) running against then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein (D–San Francisco). I didn’t care for either of them. As a young knee-jerk conservative, both were too liberal for me. So I drew the above strip.

Hansel and Gretel.

“Tell us a bedtime story,” the niblings insist, because they know the ones I tell will be weird. So I oblige.

“You know the Hansel and Gretel story,” I said. They did.

“There’s more than one version of it, you know.” Historian that I am, I figured I’d slip them some education. “The guys who wrote the fairy tale books—Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm—were college professors looking for all the versions of all the fairy tales they used to tell in Germany. That’s why most of the fairy tales are kinda German. Even Aladdin, with the little-known version where the genie annexes the Sudetenland.”

They didn’t get that joke. That’s okay. It amuses me.

“So in this version of Hansel and Gretel, it goes this way.”

Mr. Squish and adult beverages.

Thanks to all the horrific examples of alcoholism in my family, like a grandmother who chose to die homeless, a father who can’t remember (or selectively chooses not to remember) half the evil things he did during my childhood, aunts and uncles who ruined their relationships under the influence, and various distant family members whom I have never seen sober—I don’t drink. Don’t and won’t.

I never started. The greatest amount of alcohol I have ever imbibed, at any one time, has come from a communion cup. I don’t have the genes to make it worth the risk. If you’ve ever seen me drinking from a beer bottle, it was either non-alcoholic beer or root beer. If you’ve seen me with a Solo cup, it was soda. At a high school party, I admit I spent the whole evening with an open container; but I never once sipped from it.

Why the subterfuge? Because if you don’t drink, people hate to drink alone, and you must join them. “I don’t drink” isn’t a sufficient excuse. They won’t stop nagging. “Come on, one drink. How’s one drink gonna hurt you? You can’t get drunk from one drink. Just one drink. Just a sip. Just a taste. Come on.” All bloody evening. And I’d hold out all bloody evening, ’cause I’m stubborn like that. The open beer in high school was to get people to lay off.

Mr. Squish and the cola wars.

I grew up with the “cola wars”—the insistence that, if you’re gonna have a cola, it must under all circumstances be a Coca-Cola. (Unless your brand was Pepsi, Tab, RC, or Dr. Pepper. Then that.) Offering you an alternative cola was unacceptable: If your server said, “We don’t have Coke; how about a Pepsi?” you were to have anything but Pepsi. Pepsi, despite tasting largely the same, was foul, noxious swill. Only Coke would do.

One of my aunts collected Coca-Cola memorabilia, and I think she was even a shareholder in the company. Whenever we had family functions, she simply had to have Coke. (One of my other aunts for a time simply had to have coke—with the lowercase c. But that’s another story for another time.)

The cola wars were of course invented by the cola companies. As is any brand-name loyalty campaign. For most of us it makes absolutely no difference whether you buy a Chevy or a Ford, an Apple or a Dell, coffee from Starbucks or from Peet’s, raisin bran manufactured by Kellogg or Post. Same with cola. Nut-flavored fizzy water largely tastes the same, and though I admit a preference for Dr. Pepper, I have no trouble with Coke or Pepsi instead. (I would still prefer an iced coffee if available.) But if you’ve been properly brainwashed by the cola companies, give someone a Pepsi instead of a Coke, and they’ll slit your face. Or, more commonly, angrily react, then lower your tip.

Mr. Squish goes to Burger King.

Summer 1990, the summer before I started at CSU Sacramento, I was still working at Black Culture Magazine, but we hadn’t produced an issue in months. I was short on cash, and school was starting. Burger King had a regular help-wanted ad in the Reporter, so I went to Burger King and they hired me immediately.

At the time it was the only BK in Vacaville. It’s the one on Monte Vista Ave., atop “Hamburger Hill,” with McDonald’s next door, Wendy’s and Rax (now Arby’s) and Long John Silver’s (now gone) across the street. Vacaville was still small, and largely undeveloped, and the bus system sucked. (And still does.) I didn’t drive, so it meant pedaling my bicycle over unlit, poorly-paved strips of asphalt in the middle of nowhere (all of which was developed into Factory Outlets and strip malls in the ’90s), at 4:30 a.m., to open BK for breakfast at 5.