A sleepless man in a peanut butter pickle

A bunch of us guys were hanging out the other night having some laughs over nothing when one of the men went to the fridge to grab a beer.

I don’t drink beer and I have only a few friends who do, but I keep it on hand for the occasional truck driver or drywall plasterer who drops by with a burning thirst. Anyhow, the friend who does drink it, named Ralph, comes back to the table with a beer and says, “I see you have peanut butter in there.”

I am not sure where this is going because Ralph, who is always spoiling for an argument, can turn the ownership of peanut butter into a moral or environmental offense. So I say, “Yes, so what?” I’m ready for him.

He says, “Did you know that 75% of the homes in America contain jars of peanut butter?” He sees the skeptical look on our faces and adds, with a certain degree of smugness, “Look it up.”

When the guys go home, I find for some reason I can’t get peanut butter off my mind. I lie in bed with the moonlight streaming through the window, unable to sleep, imagining I am a jar of peanut butter walking down the street. I meet a girl peanut butter jar coming the other way and ...

“What’re you thinking of?” Cinelli says suddenly. I realize she’s been watching me. “You were grinning like a guy with lust in your heart.”

“No, actually, I was thinking about peanut butter.” I don’t mention the rest of it.

“Sure you were,” she says, rolling over, “you and Jimmy Carter.”

Women have an uncanny way of reading a man’s mind. It must be a gift God gave them to replace their inability to love football

Anyhow, I am becoming so obsessed with peanut butter that I get out of bed and go to my computer, the oracle of electronics. I need to know more about what my daughters used to call “the sticky stuff in your mouth.” I have a love/hate relationship with peanut butter. During my childhood, it was sometimes all we had to eat, and I loathe the memory of those impoverished days. On the other hand, I actually like peanut butter, so I’m ripped apart every time I eat it.

I discover on the Internet that the Chinese were pounding peanuts into sauces centuries ago, possibly while they were building the Great Wall. In Africa, they were grinding peanuts into a stew as far back as the 15th century. In America, an anonymous physician in St. Louis urged one George Bayle Jr. to produce a ground peanut paste to provide protein for people with no teeth. Bayle did just that in 1890 and peanut butter emerged in the New World. Not to be outdone by its discovery, Dr. George Washington Carver began studying the peanut itself at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and developed more than 300 uses for it beside peanut butter.

I am soon up to my kazoo in peanuts and their butter. I am drowning in them. Ralph was right. Three-quarters of all households in America have a jar of peanut butter on hand. In fact, nearly half of the U.S. peanut crop is used to make enough to keep up with the demand. All this info is put out by peanut lobbyists who could probably arrange statistics to prove that 87% of the people who eat peanut butter live longer, have more satisfactory sex lives and never lose their hair.

I do know that it’s used to make cookies, sauces and salad dressings, and a kind of gooey topping for bananas. On one of the Internet pages, Olympic diver Greg Louganis is quoted as saying, “To me, peanut butter is the breakfast of champions!” My doctor says, “Your cholesterol is up. Eat peanut butter instead of pork chops and see me in 30 days.”

I am so full of peanut butter lore that all my senses are tingling and I know I’ll never sleep unless I have a little something to calm me down. So I have a sip or two of cognac and then, because Cinelli dislikes my drinking, I fix myself a peanut butter sandwich to mask the booze. It is a stroke of genius. I should’ve been in the CIA.

After finishing the sandwich, I am relaxed enough to go upstairs, tiptoeing so I won’t wake Cinelli. I am maybe 10 feet away from her, and without even opening her eyes she says, “You’ve been eating peanut butter to mask the smell of cognac.” And she’s still asleep! Now that’s scary. I snuggle down, but now I’ve got peanut butter on the brain again. What a night. Wake me when it’s over.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He’s at al.martinez@latimes.com.