Honk if you like tomatoes.

this salmonella scare won't deter my love for the juicy fruity vegetable. i actually just ate one from my garden and it was GOOD. but thinking about what life would be like without them has me remembering one of my more creative tomato utilizations.

I used to live in the front apartment of a brownstone about a block from the west side highway. it was an ideal location because escaping the city was made easy by the highway's proximity. but the major drawback was that everybody and their moms used my side street to get to the highway and they were mostly Connecticut and jersey folks (my fav kind of people, obviously) who were so close to being out of manhattan's sluggish trafficky grasp that they figured leaning on their horns was acceptable behavior. you have to understand the mindset was not that they were knee deep in a residential zone, which they were, but that they were almost going 60 miles an hour and that they could stop being human.

since i was in the front, one floor up, i got to hear everything. including the homeless guy who sifted through the recycled bottles loudly every morning at 5:30 am. i was tolerant of him for obvious reasons, but i wasn't tolerant of the honkers...at all. as a matter of fact, i got into the awesome habit of throwing tomatoes at egregious offenders of the noise ordinances. it was my own form of vigilantism and i got pretty good at it. i always make tomato sauce from scratch so i usually buy a lot of tomatoes. mostly on the vine juicy ones from Fairway, and one day i realized that they make great little juicy bombs for windshields. the riper, the better the splat.

the best instance of tomato bombing i ever did was when i got one of those extra guido jersey shore assholes driving a Range Rover. Range Rovers are a great indication of assholitude and this greased hair boob was no exception. apparently a taxi stopped to let somebody out, because people LIVED THERE, and this kung pao chicken head decides that he's going to speed up the process by leaning on his english horn. now, in most instances, i usually gave people lenience if it was a short blasty honk. but this guy really just sat on that shit. if i can go to the kitchen at a normal pace, get out a tomato and walk to the window, and someone is STILL honking, then it's bombs away mofo.

so i got the juicy yumminess and lobbed it at his windshield. it was a perfectly centered hit. tomato guts splat in several streaked out directions and the main mass slides ever so slowly down the glass and rests on the wipers and slightly under the hood. he jumps out of his car and starts yelling some guido shit at me. i smiled, just loving the dumb animal's heated passion, and knowing that i just got the best of his NJ turnpike driving ass. but now he wanted more. i considered grabbing another tomato or something bigger but thought that i'd instead go for the quick scare and force him to flee like a little new kids on the block bitcho. i knew that would bother him more when he had to think about what had happened to him on the way home. so i opted for the bluff threat. i raised my finger to let him know i'd be right back, i grabbed my aluminum bat from my softball days and came back to the window holding it so he could see it. i leaned out and said, "hold it right there, i'll be right down."

i then walked away from the window. the next thing i heard was the sound of tires screeching.