The
state of oblivion Tennessee Williams wrote about to describe how he became a
living corpse while luxuriating inside a opulent hotel for several months is
the same dangerous escape that lures American extreme behavior, whether it be
our gluttony or self-starvation. We see this oblivion in certain types of “big
eater” restaurants that are popular in this country. Either they are
all-you-can-eat buffets or they are theme restaurants that serve obscenely huge
portions.
There
is such a buffet that is, ironically enough, juxtaposed next to the health club
I used to train at. When I used to frequent the gym, I’d see the buffet’s
patrons many of whom could not walk out of their cars to the buffet but had to
limp or rely on canes, walkers, wheelchairs, and other ambulatory aids, for it
seemed a high percentage of the buffet mongers were afflicted with obesity,
diabetes, arthritis, gout, hypothalamic lesions, elephantiasis, varicose veins
and fleshy tumors. Struggling and wheezing as they navigated across the vast
parking lot that leads to their gluttonous sanctuary, they seemed to worship
the very source of their disease.
In front of the buffet is a sign of
rules and conduct. One of the rules urges people to stand in the buffet line in
an orderly fashion and to be patient because there is plenty of food for
everyone. Another rule is that children are not to be left unattended and
running freely around the buffet area. My favorite rule is that no hands,
tongues, or other body parts are allowed to touch the food. Tongs and other
utensils are to be used at all times. The rules give you an idea of the kind of
people who eat there. These are people I want to avoid.
A mile away from
the buffet is another popular restaurant aptly decorated like a Wild West
saloon and while it is not “all you can eat” per se, it is just as committed to
pandering to one’s gluttonous appetites. Its theme is the prospector’s search
for the mother lode. The restaurant specializes in oversized portions of steak,
prime rib, baby back pork ribs, spicy chicken wings, cheddar cheese mashed
potatoes, deep-fried onion ring “flowers,” carrot cake, cheese cake and
chocolate fudge cake. The cakes are famous for their moisture, the result of
several cups of mayonnaise that are used in the batter, and for their huge
size. Each “slice,” if it could be called that, is over a foot tall and leans
to the side as if it were about to tip over, but through a miraculous breakthrough
in chemical-additive engineering, the cake remains upright and intact.
The portions are
so big that the waiters have to practically use cranes to get the platters of
food from the kitchen to the patrons’ tables. Big helpings of food require big
tableware. The knives resemble ivory-handled scimitars, and they evoke a more
primitive age when people dressed in animal skins and tore the blubber off of
beached whales and woolly mammoths.
Like the buffet
patrons, the Wild West eaters have eaten themselves into a condition of
debilitation in which the simple act of breathing becomes a near impossibility.
Just what is the
appeal of consuming slop until one is moribund and incapacitated? It seems a
uniquely American experience. I’m reminded of a book by Laurence Shames, The
Hunger for More, where he explains that the
America’s frontier, fueled by the myth of Manifest Destiny, created an appetite
for conquering vast lands. In the absence of virgin forestry, we, as Americans,
still have the hunger to conquer and exploit, but now we’ve circumvented that
rapacity into consumer excess and in the process, I would add, we’ve regressed
into our troglodyte ancestors.
Overeating, then,
is part of some kind of domination fantasy in which gluttony constitutes a
crude competition against the rest of humanity. Indeed, gluttony has a competitive component to it.
Observing people piling food onto their plates inside a buffet, the narrator in
Tobias Wolff’s short story, “Smorgasbord,” points out: “There was something
competitive and desperate about them; they seemed to be eating their way toward
a condition where they would never have to eat again. You would have thought
they were refugees from a great hunger, that outside these walls the land was
afflicted with drought and barrenness. I felt a kind of desperation myself; I
felt like I was growing emptier with every bite I took.”
It is precisely
this desperation, this loss of humanity, that scared Tennessee Williams out of
his self-indulgence and made him escape the luxury hotel and move to Mexico
where he embarked, once again, on his playwriting and where he began to rebuild
himself.
Unfortunately, too
often when Americans wake up to the self-destructiveness of their gluttony,
they react with a form of equal destruction—fanatical training and dietary
regiments, which result in the same desperation and loss of humanity.
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