I am infatuated with food. Foods that are terrible for you. Appetizers, stuff with melted cheese on it, stuff with bacon on it, anything with melted cheese and bacon on it, a sandal if it’s battered and deep-fried and any salted red meat, especially if it has melted cheese and another kind of salted meat on it.
I get excited when I’m about to eat. Really excited if I’m about to eat alone. (If it’s at home and alone, clearly the shirt’s coming off.) I get excited about a late night burrito today at twenty-eight the way I got excited about a Hustler when I was eighteen. Or now. I plot where I’m going to eat, study the menu like it’s the Lord’s Word and order really dumb amounts of food. I have never under-ordered. And that’s if I’m sober. If I’ve been having some soda pops, heads up. I will scare you. Most people think I’m joking when I’m ordering drunk. But there’s no joke being told. I want it all, and I’ll probably throw a 99 cent nugget on when I get to the pick-up window.
About a year after I finished college I began working at a Lincoln Park bar and ended up living up stairs. Directly across the street from my front door, a mere thirty-five feet away was a 24 hour Dunkin’ Donuts/ToGo’s Sandwich shop. The bar offered half-price employee drinks which equated to twice as drunk Pat’s. About a week into me living in this place, I came home from a night of saucing with a 12? sandwich and two bags of chips. Sat next to my new hippie roommate who I really didn’t know that well at all and according to his eyewitness account, devoured it all while the same song was still playing from when I entered the room. Didn’t say a word the entire time until I finished my last bite, turned to him and said, “I’m starving.” I walked out of the apartment and returned with two breakfast sandwiches from Dunkin’ Donuts. (In my defense, it was probably one of those absurd String Cheese Phish jam songs that lasts for twenty three minutes, but none the less it was a filthy display.)
There hasn’t been a Saturday in the last five years that hasn’t ended with me chatting up a Mexican cook at three in the morning. I went to the burrito joint around the corner from my current place for the first time sober about a month ago, ordered a taco dinner and an order of nachos and the guy behind the counter goes, “You not too hungry?” I honestly think you could offer a sober me $500,000 to simply drink the entire evening and forego a late night meal, and every time I would wake up the next morning only to find a gyro wrapper on my alarm clock, a cheese fry container in my hamper, two fried mushrooms in my sock drawer and a half eaten pizza puff in the bathroom garbage can. I am a weak man.
The thing is I don’t even feel guilty about it. Pretty much everyone I’m friends with eats like a billy goat after they go out drinking. And it’s the Mid-West. Nobody feels guilty about their eating habits in the Mid-West.
That’s not the attitude in L.A. where the pretty people live. I read an interview with Gwyneth Paltrow in which she talks about her macrobiotic diet. She said she once had an order of cheese fries after a late night drinking binge and felt horrible about it for a month. If Gwyneth Paltrow woke up one morning and found out she ate half of what I usually attack on a Friday at 2am, she’d slice her throat.
