Benjamin Hale - The Fat Artist and Other Stories

Food and drink of any sort is ordinarily prohibited in the museum, but special exemption was made for those who had come to view my exhibit. I was astounded — heartwarmed, even — by the magnificent variety of offerings the visitors brought me. They brought me shrimp cocktail. They brought me T-bone steaks. They brought me spare ribs, glistening with barbecue sauce. They brought me spaghetti and meatballs. They brought me pepper-blackened ahi tuna. They brought me to-go cups of split pea soup. They brought me chocolate cake. They brought me greasy paper boxes full of tandoori chicken. They brought me snickerdoodle cookies. They brought me waffles, soggy with whipped cream and blueberry compote. They brought me kebob. They brought me deli sandwiches. They brought me hot pastrami on rye. They brought me club sandwiches. They brought me egg salad sandwiches. They brought me Reubens. They brought me bagels with lox. Others came bearing fast food. They brought me Big Macs. They brought me Whoppers. They brought me Chicken McNuggets. They brought me Frosties. They brought me Baconators. They brought me Crunchwrap Supremes. They brought me Blizzards. I am told the street vendors quickly learned to capitalize on my exhibit, and clustered their carts on Eighty-Ninth and Fifth near the entrance of the museum for all the visitors who felt acutely embarrassed, seeing other people’s offerings, by not having brought any offerings themselves, and thus I saw a great abundance of New York street food: They brought me hot dogs, falafels, puffy cheese-stuffed pretzels, roasted corn nuts. Still others touched me with the personal warmth, the unexpected hominess of their offerings. These ones brought me dishes made from cherished family recipes for casseroles, for fudge brownies, for lasagna, for manicotti, for scalloped potatoes, for jambalaya, for lemon meringue pies, for key lime pies, for pecan pies, for rhubarb pies, for butterscotch cookies. They brought me plates of deviled eggs. They brought me dozens of raw oysters. They brought me chips: They brought me crinkling cellophane bags of Doritos, of Fritos, of Ruffles, of Lay’s. They brought me tubes and tubes of my beloved, orderly-stacked Pringles: They brought me Cheddar & Sour Cream, Honey Mustard, BBQ, Memphis BBQ, Jalapeño, Pizza. XThey brought me chorizo burritos. They brought me shrimp tacos. Naturally, star chefs from gourmet restaurants all over the city also sent up meals, desirous that the delicate works of their own ephemeral art, the culinary, be incorporated into this gastronomic spectacle, this stationary one-man saturnalia, this unmovable feast — that the fruits of their labor should be enjoyed by the Fat Artist, physically and spiritually sublimated into the flesh of his body. They sent me their choicest dishes. They sent me saddle of venison seasoned with celeriac, marron glacé, and sauce poivrade with pearl barley and red wine. They sent me duck breast with spaghetti squash, almond polenta, and pomelo molasses. They sent me cippollini purée with pickled onion vinaigrette. They sent me smoked lobster garnished with snap peas, mussels, and lemon-mustard sauce. They sent me crispy pan-seared red king salmon steak with parsley. They sent me anchovy-stuffed bulb onions with sage jus. They sent me za’atar-spiced swordfish à la plancha with chickpea panisse. Such heights of the culinary arts were amusingly offset by the more lowbrow offerings, which I also enjoyed and consumed. They brought me family-sized buckets of fried chicken from KFC and Popeye’s. They brought me pyramids of diminutive hamburgers from White Castle. Hostess snack products were popular offerings, selected surely for their artificiality, nutritional worthlessness, nostalgia value, and sheer cultural vulgarity: They brought me Twinkies, they brought me Hostess Cupcakes, they brought me Ding Dongs, they brought me Ho Hos. They brought me Mallomars. They brought me candy. They brought me Butterfingers, Three Musketeers, Snickers, Milky Ways, Whatchamacallits. They brought me Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. They brought me cartons of chocolate chip chocolate ice cream with caramel fudge swirl, sweating in the sun. They brought me bags of sticky Campfire Marshmallows. They brought me dozens upon dozens of donuts, with pink frosting and sprinkles. They brought me jars of mayonnaise, jars of jelly, jars of peanut butter, jars of Grey Poupon mustard and bottles of Heinz 57. I have not even mentioned the beverage offerings. They brought me boxes of wine. They brought me chocolate malts. They brought me six-packs of Heineken. They brought me Perrier. They brought me two-liter bottles of Coca-Cola, of Pepsi, of Dr Pepper, of Mr Pibb, of Mountain Dew. They brought me bottles of fine French champagne. All this they brought me and more.

And I ate and drank all of these without even the deftest nod of consideration for harmony of the palate or of the stomach. I simply ate my offerings in the order in which they came to me, and if that meant following a box of powdered chocolate donut holes with a platter of eel and salmon sashimi followed by a grilled BLT dripping with sizzling bacon fat and American cheese, all while alternately sipping a lukewarm bottle of Budweiser and slurping noisily from the straw that punctured the plastic lid of a strawberry milkshake from Shake Shack — then so be it. And so it was.

• • •

Soon the table in the corner of my exhibition chamber on which the people lay their offerings was piled so high with foodstuffs that they began to tumble over the edges and onto the floor, where they were kicked around and trodden flat by many feet. A few hours after opening, there was no room left in the refrigerator reserved for chilled items, and so cartons of ice cream quickly became containers of warm, sweet milky glop in the early-summer heat. When my waiters were not busily clearing away refuse or transferring the food and drink items from the on-deck table to my dining table, they were employed in swatting away the flies that had discovered us. The visitors would linger on far beyond their allotted viewing time, hoping to wait long enough to watch me insert into myself some of the food they themselves had brought — but more often than not they waited in vain. I simply had too much to eat. I had such a backlog that it often took me hours after the offerings had been left for me to get around to eating them. The museum staffers, equipped with their institutional walkie-talkies, would frequently have to remind the dawdling visitors that there was still a very long line to enter the exhibit, and that they should be considerate of others and give them a chance to see the Fat Artist. Later they erected a sign warning visitors they were allowed only a maximum twenty-minute viewing period. When the people finally had to go, they would slowly back away from the exhibit, slightly disappointed — but only slightly, for although they would not get a chance to witness me actually ingesting their food, they left knowing they had caught a glimpse of something great.

No one — not one person — ever attempted to speak to me, and I certainly did not ever initiate conversation with them, nor did I ever deign (or dare?) to make eye contact with the visitors. To them I was a like a wild, exotic animal, like a panther pacing ferociously behind his bars — a being not to be interacted with, but marveled at. Once, I recall, only once, a curious child reached out a finger and curiously poked the flesh of my thigh while I was eating. I did not react. The child’s mother tore his hand away and, her fist shaking the offending arm, scolded him in a severe voice, saying, “Never, ever touch the art in a museum. You know better than that. Do you understand me?” The child nodded silently and held back tears.

I ate on.

• • •

I became keenly attuned to the secret rhythms of the cosmos in the course of my consumption, digestion, and excretion. I had to. I would of necessity eat very slowly, in order to prevent vomiting. Do not pause —I told myself— you may eat slowly, but you may never stop eating . This mantra I inwardly repeated to myself over and over as I ate. Just keep the food flowing . I learned how to keep the muscles of my bladder and sphincter permanently relaxed, so that it required no conscious effort of my own to expurgate my bodily wastes. My urine and feces slid easily out of my body and disappeared down the rubber tubes, vacuumed away into oblivion. The input — output relationship between eating and defecation, between drinking and urination, became as unconscious and as physically effortless as the inhalation and exhalation of air. My body was an ever-flowing continuum, connected at both ends to the material effluvia of the external world. I achieved a Zenlike state of serene hypnosis, a harmonious fusion of being and becoming, oblivious to all but the hands that brought the food before me to my mouth. In, out, in, out: like an element of nature, like a river, like the waters of the river flowing forever and anon unto the sea, where it rises to the heavens and falls again to the earth, a never-ending samsara cycle of death and rebirth, entering and exiting, my body nothing more than a passive and temporary holding chamber for the things of this world.