PRESIDENTIAL FLAKES

People, sayeth the sage, are pack rats. They will collect anything and everything. The rich accumulate more riches, the powerful amass more power, and the wise assemble more wisdom. Even the poor multiply their poverty. Pulp Starr collects cereal box tops.

            In fact, he possesses the finest private collection—the only one, insofar as he knows—in the world. He has gathered every brand from the abstract art of Fruit Loops to mono-chromatic Cocoa Crispies and pasted them on his apartment ceiling. As he lies in bed watching tv or soaks in a hot tub, his box-top collection is up there, watching over him.

            When he isn’t pasting up box-tops, Pulp enjoys whittling ducks out of bars of Ivory soap. He’s also crocheting a red, white, and blue scarf for the Statue of Liberty.

            Once, Pulp decided to make the supreme sacrifice and donate his unusual collection to the Smithsonian. He was rebuffed and has never quite gotten over it, believes himself the victim of a great conspiracy.

            In the beginning, he ate every bit of the cereal he’d bought. But as his taste developed, grew more refined, he merely sampled each new variety. The rest he threw out. Today, he has become, as it were, a connoisseur. But his all-time favorite cereal is still Presidential Flakes, each of which forms a mini bust of a famous American President. Not that he eats them, oh no. Although Presidential Flakes are made from “amber waves of grain,” they taste more like postage stamp glue.

Pulp’s morning ritual never varies.

            First, gripping a box of Presidential Flakes, he grunts, “Lift tab to open,” and surreptitiously scratches his crotch. A tear-shaped glob of glue catches his bleary eye. “To clos,” he reads, but the rest of the message is undecipherable because stuck behind the tab.

            For three minutes he squints at this defective specimen of modern technology, chanting “Hmmm.” Then, throwing up his hands in disgust, he spills Presidential Flakes among the soap shavings on the kitchen floor. Whereupon he mutters, “Millard Fillmore!” and staggers over to his refrigerator, crunching the skulls of Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. He pours two percent milk into his favorite bowl and presses his right ear close to the soggy surface to hear strains of “Hail to the Chief.”

After humming along for a few bars, Pulp is content merely to contemplate the Presidential Flakes box, which has been sculpted to resemble a mini White House. He’s captivated by the mouthwatering recipes on the back (“Cucumber marshmallow Presidential Treats”), engrossed in the nutrient tables (“an average ¾ cup serving provides the following percentages of minimum daily requirements”), reassured by the table of contents (“crude fiber, 0.5%”), and awed by the trademark, a replica of the Presidential Seal. To Pulp Starr, breakfast is more than a meal—it’s a religious experience.

Finally, he throws out the cereal.

One of Pulp’s favorite cereal features is the special limited offer. Instead of pasting up all his box-tops on the ceiling, occasionally he’ll send a duplicate lid off for, say, a Lone Ranger arrowhead scout whistle. And sometimes the best offers involve surprise packages. That’s how Pulp obtained his prize Kit Carson cap-shooter, his original mask of Zorro, and even his favorite bowl, a Tupperware mold of John “Duke” Wayne’s indomitable jawbone (which may also be used as a club to smite his enemies).

            Pulp’s enemies encompass the greedy capitalist cereal manufacturers and their lackeys who run the grocery and the Smithsonian. Before these pigs conspired to inflate cereal prices and thus ruin his unique collection, Pulp bought his new box tops. Now that hard times are here, however, he must cut corners. Namely, the corners of new box tops.

            He has worked out a system.

            Innocently, he piles his shopping cart with cereals and then tools around the supermarket, passing the haggard housewives pinching their plastic calculators at the meat counter and the aged shoppers with mesh bags sniffing the delicatessen aromas. Suddenly, an unkempt urchin leaves a patch of shopping cart rubber in the produce aisle and tweets an incredibly piercing Lone Ranger arrowhead scout whistle.

            In the ensuing chaos, clerks and store detectives take their eyes from those big round mirrors for just a moment. The time is right, Pulp strikes. They never notice his gleaming razor blade or the severed box-tops that fill his coupon envelope. Unhurriedly, he replaces the topless boxes on the shelf and melts away.  It starts a fad as shoppers begin munching cereal along the frozen foods aisle.

            Later, the store manager will fume, “Darned if we haven’t been hit again.”

            But by then, Pulp Starr is safely ensconced in his apartment, pasting up his latest trophies and watching the enraged merchant on tv. He never misses the news because of an insatiable desire to see and hear the President, who’s always on the tube for one thing or another. The anchor says more people are going hungry these days, especially the sick and the old, who are eating more dog food and enjoying it less. And countless empty wrappers are discovered stashed behind the shelves.

            Pulp begins to see himself in a new light—robbing the rich to give to the poor. But the giddy sensation never lasts long. Fearing the omnivorous tentacles of the Great Cereal Conspiracy, Pulp declares, “Let them eat cake mix.”

            On Saturday mornings, Pulp suffers through endless episodes of “Pebbles and Bam-Bam,” “Scooby-Doo” and “Shazam!” just to see and hear his old pal, Tony the Tiger, exclaim, “They’re GRR … ATE.”  Mention the back to nature cereal and he’s convulsed with a craving for wild hickory nuts.

            Pulp has heard that a new cereal called Congressional Flakes will be out soon. When milk is added, it’s supposed to play either “Yankee Doodle Dandy” or “Stars And Stripes Forever.”  They’re having a contest to decide which. Pulp doubts that they’ll sell. In the first place, a cereal named Congressional Flakes surely would digest at a snail’s pace. In the second place, the faces would have to be changed every two-year election cycle (although hardly anybody would notice the difference). And in the third place, Presidential Flakes have been around a long, long time and are near and dear to America’s stomach. Pulp doesn’t really care one way or the other, so long as he gets the box tops.

            The hell with the Smithsonian.

© 2025 Rick Neumayer

“Presidential Flakes” was first published 1975 in RagTimes and will appear in the forthcoming THREE FOGGY MORNINGS: Stories by Rick Neumayer. If you liked this one, I’d love to hear from you.