So here’s a question for all you Voodoo Priests and Priestesses out there, courtesy of a conversation I had a few years ago that came back to me the other day. It relates to a specific situation, so if you’ll give me a minute, I’ll explain.

Now, here’s the question…

Do you get to keep what’s left of the cake?

***

A few years ago I had this friend — or maybe we were more like acquaintances, it was hard to tell — who I met under what I guess you’d call ‘forced circumstances.’ He was married to a woman who was a good friend of a woman I was seeing at the time, and in one of those moderately awkward thirty-something situations, it was deemed by our respective partners that we should become friends [2].

Unfortunately, we were polar opposites, this guy and I, and if you could imagine any two people less likely to agree on anything than the two of us, then they were probably locked in a vendetta that had already claimed generations of peace-loving members of their families.

But still, aside from the fact that if I said “Good morning,” he’d argue about it, he was a nice-enough guy, and maybe collectively we weren’t forging one of those lifelong friendships you read about, but for individual coffee-and-an-annoying-conversation experiences, you could do worse.

Until he told me the cake story.

***

Note: The following is a dramatic re-enactment and may not necessarily reflect actual historical details.

“The hell are you talking about?” I demanded. It was a bright day and I had a headache. Also, my underwear was riding up from the walk to the cafe and I wasn’t in any mood to be taking guff, or anything even closely resembling guff.

“I’m saying, I took the cake home.” Mister E said.

I thought about this for a few moments. “Only a true psychopath would have taken that cake home.”

“I took it home!” He snarled. “It was my cake, so I took it home! What was left of it, anyway.”

“But you can’t just take the cake home. That would be insanity. They asked you to take it home, right? They said, “Hey, there’s cake left over, would you like to take it home?” Tell me they said that.”

Mister E shook his head and leaned forward, skewering me with a twitching, bloodshot sneer. “I just picked it up and I took it.”

I didn’t like the way he was holding his Kebab wrapper, with the shiny, silvery inner lining exposed like that. You could do some damage with a Kebab wrapper, if you knew how to use one. And I couldn’t help noticing that he had beads of sweat on his elbows, a sure sign that his emotions were running high and that his personal hygiene choices needed some rethinking.

“That,” I said, carefully enunciating my words [3], “is just. plain. wrong. That’s wrongy-wrong. That’s wrong with some extra leftover wrongy bits that you can take home after dinner is finished, that’s how wrong it is.”

“Listen Midnight,” he said [4], drool raining onto the table like an unexpected summer shower, “I’m not taking no shit from nobody, least of all am I taking shit from a nobody like you. Hur hur hur.”

I didn’t have time to think about how his dialog had mysteriously changed over the course of our conversation to the point where an impartial observer might have suspected that I was deliberately attempting to make him sound like an inbred thug, because it was at that moment that I chose to surge to my feet, knocking over the table and sending a scaldingly hot meatball Subway sandwich into the surprised faces of the Japanese family sitting at the table next to us.

“Right,” I screamed, “that takes the cake!”

I lunged at him with inhuman ferocity, while the Japanese father — who I only noticed at that point was wearing a World War II officer’s uniform — drew his sword with a deadly swish and led a charge against the startled employees behind the Subway counter, with a blood-curdling “Aieeee!”

But Mister E was too quick for me. With a deft flick of his wrist he bapped me behind the ear with his Kebab wrapper, and I reeled off in the direction of the German Sausage Stand, grabbing at menues and cutlery and plates as I staggered along, before falling in a clutter in the Neapolitan Sauce bucket of the Pizza Pie Place next door.

It was at this moment that I thought, “You know what? Every time I have a coffee with Mister E I end up gently bobbing up and down in the Neapolitan Sauce bucket. Maybe I should just stop accepting his invitations?” I had to curtail these thoughts, however, as Mister E was doing his best to push my head back down into the sauce, while I was busy whipping him across the face with strands of spaghetti that definitely weren’t al dente.

Outside, the Japanese forces had met up with the Italian and German contingents, and they were launching a combined offensive against the staff of the Subway restaurant, who had managed to enlist the forces of the bar tenders from the Olde English Pub and the waiters from the French Restaurant a couple of doors down the street.

It was touch and go there for a minute, but just as Mister E was forcing my head down into the sauce for the very last time, it looked like the Allied armies were winning.

***

It’s a sort of Seinfeldian situation, when you think about it. Do you take the cake? Do you leave the cake? Are you prepared to be known for the rest of your life as The Cake Taker?

Personally, I’d leave the cake. My opinion is that when you took that cake into someone else’s house, you were giving them the cake, not just the portion that would be eaten at that specific meal.

But that’s just me. Mister E, on the other hand, vehemently disagreed with me. He felt that since he paid for the cake, he was entitled to the cake. He was, in his own mind, doing his neighbours a favour by letting them share in some of his cake. I thought he was a lunatic with some fairly large unresolved issues.

But what does everyone else think?

Do you get to take the cake? Or should you, maybe, buy two cakes, so you can walk away from the one you took to dinner, safe in the knowledge that another cake waits for you at home?

Tell us what you think in the comments. Go on, I dare you.

Photograph by bobweasel.