John Barlow - Eating Mammals

‘And thus the evenings were enacted. The audience soon lost its coyness, and God alone knew what would come next. “Five locusts!” someone might shout, to the derision of the rest (in fact, we did have a small selection of dried insects, awaiting the order of any guest well known for his generosity), but through the derision an alternative would usually surface. “Well, if not locusts, how about worms?!” At which point my assistant and I would go into a protracted communication, resulting in the announcement, “Mr Mulligan will eat only one worm, since he says that he already has one, and another will keep it company!”

‘That one always got an enormous laugh, but the laughter would turn to screams of horror as a long, wriggling earthworm was placed before me, and I sucked it up like a string of spaghetti.

‘My twenty dollars a week turned out to be good business for the hotel too, since all petitions to Le Grand Michael Mulligan were billed to the requester. A very good business indeed. And in this way, sadly, I managed to bankrupt more than one person with my stomach.

‘I had, very early on, developed a penchant for beluga caviare, which could, as you can imagine, have perilous financial implications. Yes, in this way I turned several of our best guests insolvent, although for the most part I think they probably didn’t realise until the following morning. Yet it is a poor, sad-faced English gentleman for whom I harbour most regret. It happened on a particularly slow night, with no one of consequence (or imagination) in the house. My evening’s work had run to a mere bucketful of cherries, a fox’s tail (from a stuffed animal in the hotel lobby), and a side of pork belly, which I had rather enjoyed. Throughout the evening I had noticed, at the far end of the table, a man in a crumpled dinner suit, whose expression of empty fatigue had deteriorated by stages to one of inconsolable despair. With the mood rapidly leaving us, I was keen to secure one final request. Apart from anything else, I was still hungry, and my paltry menu sélectionné had thus far provided me with but a snack. Finally, the despairing English gentleman drew himself up from the nearly horizontal slouch into which he had fallen, and getting (somehow) to his feet, raised his glass.

‘“My dear Mulligan …” he began, as those around urged him to retake his seat, “… fine, fine, noble son of the Emerald Isle …” at which point he belched, but I took no offence, “… I tonight stand here, a poor man …” (“You’ll make another million, Quentin! Sit down, old boy!” came a shout from someone further down the table.) “… I have made and lost a great fortune. Yes …” he gulped down some port, “… but you, you of the fine orange hair, dumb to the heartless world which you neither understand nor whose vices, my dear sir, could you comprehend …” At which point he rather lost himself … “Err … ehm, but think not of this world, good man!” he rallied. “It is not worthy of your attention. Michael Mulligan, I toast you, and with my final sovereign I invite you to share with me my final dozen oysters.”

‘With this he raised his empty glass and held still, save for some involuntary listing, awaiting my reply. I communicated with my assistant, and indeed this time I really did use a form of secret language, for the message was unusual, and in truth it was rather a rash one.

‘“Mr Mulligan will toast your future success, sir, not with a dozen oysters but with a dozen dozen oysters!”’

Here Mulligan took a long, pensive draw on his cigar, watching the rich smoke spiral upwards from his nose and mouth, spilling out into thin, flat clouds which hung in the air, forming a plateau across the hotel room.

‘That,’ he said wistfully, ‘turned out to be a touch imprudent. A dozen oysters, two dozen, even six dozen, I had swallowed on one occasion. After all, seventy-two oysters are no heavier nor occupy more space inside than seven or eight braised pig’s trotters, or a couple of ostrich eggs. But a gross of the things … Ha! It was the undoing of me, two nights running! And as for the poor Mr Quentin, we never saw his face again. Who knows, perhaps he is paying off the debt to this day.

‘Ah, yes! Paris in the ’Twenties! How much I learned there, how much I learned. How much I ate!’

From his armchair he recounted more incredible tales, of churns of milk in Belgian monasteries, a grilled lion’s paw in Baghdad, sinkfuls of pasta (‘Tubes, my boy, the biggest possible! Pound for pound they look more!’); of a forty-five chitterling marathon in Brittany, ten kilos of roast cod in Bilbao, seven pickled mice for a bet in Marrakech. And he told me also of the people, those fine clients of the hotel, who sought a little extra zest to their dinner parties in Rome, Kabul, Delhi, London, Frankfurt, inviting him to their holiday entertainments in Goa, Rimini, Monte Carlo and Thessaloniki. On a visit to Tokyo he had consumed so much sushi that, in listening to him, one felt as if one were floating on a sea of raw fish; in Constantinople his ability to finish off an entire roast goat in little over half a day had so enthused one of the dignitaries privileged enough to witness the spectacle that Mulligan was presented not only with a belly dancer for the night, but was invited to extract and keep the bulging ruby which adorned her navel. Along the Magreb he had sucked the eyes out of more dead animals than he cared to remember, and the glittering rewards for such fripperies were staggering indeed. To crumbling European castles he had travelled, there to gorge on whatever his noble amphitryon decreed: seventeen pairs of bull’s testicles at the table of the Duke of Alba in Salamanca; inconceivable quantities of sausage for any number of gibbering, neurotic Central European counts; regular sojourns to the seats of the Dukes of Argyll, Dumfriesshire and sundry other Scottish lairds, each one desperate that Mulligan improve upon some or other haggis-eating record, or simply curious to know how quickly their national dish could disappear down the throat of one man. For a time he was in huge demand in the USA, where he set a string of records for chicken and ribs throughout the Southern states; he amazed the Romanian Jews in New York with his evident partiality for ridding any restaurant of all its chopped liver and the relish with which he glugged down whole pitchers of schmaltz as if it were … well, metaphors are hardly appropriate; the Ashkenazim wouldn’t have him, but he didn’t mind, there were plenty of other sects, plenty of other religions, to astound; he even did a promotion for the pro-Prohibition Methodists, drinking the body weight of a six-year-old child in lemonade, presumably to illustrate that purity and excess can coexist. He repeated Americana for countless gatherings of businessmen, and in one particularly prolific afternoon’s work notched up a record of sixty-two hot dogs (even before Babe Ruth’s achievement) at a public demonstration sponsored by Wurtz’s Wieners, a Chicago sausage company owned by one of those immigrants who really wants you to mispronounce his name.

‘Then the Depression hit,’ he continued, ‘and the profession of gluttony suffered something of a downturn. The rich became preoccupied, and the poor became hungry. Overnight, or so it seemed, no one wanted to see how much more than a normal man I could eat. Now it was a matter of just what I would eat beyond the normal. On its own this was nothing new for me. After all, for the better part of a decade a great many of the things I had sent down to my stomach could have been called food only through a very liberal understanding of the word, or by a desperately hungry person: in Oxford I had feasted on a sturdy hiking boot, prepared in advance, not à la Chaplin, but in vinegar and wine, and then slow-roasted in butter and olive oil; somewhere else (I forget) a mackintosh, curried; a canary in its little wooden cage (I mean, and its cage); a large aspidistra (leaves au naturel, stem and roots flambéed) …’