and then the mayonnaise ran out

And then the mayonnaise ran out. It wasn't until I was in my late fifties that I actually learned how to spell 'mayonnaise' correctly, and now it was gone. Gone from my pantry, gone from the grocery shelves, gone from my life. Gone from the planet.

I never found out who made this vast executive decision, who had the authority and the audacity to simply snap their fingers and stop the production of mayonnaise forever. I shudder to think what else that person might have done with their terrifying power.
Ban the color pink?
Pave the streets with paper clips?
Make chives the national anthem?
Force baseball players to train football players during the off season?

It's enough to make a man feel sleepy right after a heavy dinner.

When I realized there would never be a bottle of mayonnaise sitting on my pantry shelf again, smug and reassuring as lares and penates, I went a little crazy. I broke into a lumber yard at night to sleep naked on a pile of sawdust. I ground sea shells into a paste to brush my teeth with. And I grew tomatoes in a "No Tomatoes" zone. For that last one I was hauled before a judge and told to leave the township pronto if I valued my pelt.

So I began my wanderings among the Stick People. They live on the margins of society, often depicted by imaginative children as nothing but thin black lines and wobbly circles with smiley faces. But in reality they are a fascinating segment of society that have been neglected and abused for far too long. They make all our bottle caps, having lost their cork farms to the besom of modern technology. Just a hundred years ago they were happy and bucolic  agriculturalists living independently on their cork farms, tending the tender little cork shoots and nourishing them into the sturdy stoppers that kept all our bottled beverages safe and sound. But today they are aimless migrants, settling down like a flock of starlings for a few days or weeks to produce bottle caps, and then taking off again with a giant 'swoosh' when the neighbors complain and bang pots and pans together at them.

I traveled with them, trading my steeplejack skills for room and board, mourning out my days. Then I heard the news, a faint whisper on the breeze that came from nowhere and everywhere:  There was mayonnaise to be had again, in certain obscure places down near the Equator. To be had, that is, for those willing to pay the price.

So I rubbed elbows with the Stick People and headed to the Equator. But the price, when I got there, was steep indeed. I lost a finger in Bogota. My left eye in Singapore. All my hair in Nairobi. And my heart in Fortaleza. She was the daughter of a campesino, fiery and defiant, willing to cross any line, abandon any scruple, in order to escape the crushing poverty of the chicle mines. 

She told me of a sleepy village where salad dressing was to be found -- and, she implied with a toss of her crinkly curls, where there's salad dressing there's bound to be mayonnaise. I believed her, so we boarded the China Clipper for a haircut before leaving, hitching a ride with a wallaby drover over the unswept plains of Andalusia to a small jerkwater village that had remained uncorrupted by modern technology and free from capricious government mandates. And there we found it -- the very last jar of Hellman's. 

But before I could prepare my first ham on rye I was struck down by beri-beri. I lay senseless for a week, with Fernanda, my inamorata, constantly by my side, fanning me with a pineapple.  When I finally came to my senses I learned that Fernanda had thrown the jar of Hellman's onto the flames as an offering to the jungle gods for my recovery. Superstitious brat.

I had cut some shady deals while tracking down that jar of Hellman's, and now they came back to bite the hand that fed them. The birdseed cartel demanded their ostrich back. And when I was slow giving them the bird, they got all tectonic on me. And that's when Fernanda really proved her worth.
She danced for them until they cut my head off.