FAT
Norman Spinrad
1 rue Maitre Albert short story
Paris 75005 about 7500 words
France
THE FAT VAMPIRE
by Norman Spinrad
When she returned from puking up the meat course in the ladies'
room, the deserts were already on the table, enormous platters of
profitrole au chocolate--six balls of vanilla ice cream encased in
puff pastry and swimming in lakes of deep dark fondant.
"I took the liberty...." Armand said suavely, smiling at her as
he wrapped his lips around a dripping spoonful.
Christine had never met a man like Count Armand Kubescu before.
True, Los Angeles was awash in slick continental types laying
claim to nebulous titles of nobility, dressing like Ruritanian
diplomats, and living it up with no visible means of support. It
was an old Hollywood tradition. They fronted fancy restaurants and
clubs, pimped for sleazy porn producers, sold real estate or used
Mercedes, or gigoloed for ancient has-been starlets flush with the
proceeds of their latest divorce.
Like most of these counts from central casting, Armand Kubescu
had thick straight black hair impeccably groomed in some unisex
Beverly Hills salon, intense dark eyes under dramatic brows, and a
light generalized European accent. Like most of them, he was slim,
graceful, affected a languid William F. Buckley slouch, and seemed
ageless.
Ordinarily, Christine Coleman avoided such creatures like the
plague they were. If they weren't gay, they were impotent, and if
they weren't impotent, they were into slimy fetishes or dumb bondage
numbers. If they weren't out to sell you something, they were out
to sell you.
Indeed, in a certain twisted sense, they were a form of
competition, predators working the neighboring ecological niche.
Christine understood them all too well.
For Los Angeles was even more abundantly awash in beautiful
women of a certain age which made them a bit long in the tooth for
starlets, with a sprinkling of walk-on credits extracted on low-
budget casting couches, a garage apartment in the hills, and a
cranky twelve-year old used Porsche. Women just short of enough
acting talent to make it as tv bit players, possessed of just
enough pride to prevent them from sliding into hookerdom or the
fading porn industry, and too indolent, face it, to wait tables in
topless bars.
Women, who, like Christine, surfed through life at the fringes
of The Industry via affairs with tv writers, minor-league actors,
and production managers, odd jobs in Santa Monica boutiques, a very
occasional walk-on in a commercial, ectoplasmic this, and crystal-
channeling that.
The Count Kubescus and the Barons of Brentwood worked the
feminine flip-side of much the same turf, and while the competition
from them might be rather oblique, the idea of actually dating one
of them had always struck Christine as the moral equivalent of fag
haggery. Like, what was the point? To see whose reach for the
check could be slowest?
But Armand Kubescu was different.
The man could eat.
It had been fascination, if not exactly lust, at first sight.
Allie Ellison had been one of Christine's closest girlfriends
before she married Alex the Plastic Surgeon; in fact it had been
Allie who had taught her the art of vomiting. How to tickle the
back of the throat with a forefinger, the necessity of brushing
after every in between course barf in order to avoid both halitosis
and enormous dental bills.
"Bulimia, schmulemia," Allie had assured her, "Everyone who's
anyone does it, hon. Jackie Onasis. Jane Fonda. Margaret
Thatcher. Nancy Reagan. It's as American as apple pie ala mode
with chocolate sauce. Or you rather spend the rest of your life on
lettuce and Rye-crisp?"
Christine had always had a sweet tooth, had always loved pasta,
and barbecue, greaseburgers and fried chicken, mashed potatoes with
country gravy, huge steaks, slabs of bread slathered with butter or
cheese, guacamole, cheetos, anything with chocolate, everything with
whipped cream, and it all had a tendency to go straight to her belly
and ass.
Having spent most of her adult life on starvation diets
punctuated by occasional guilt-ridden binges, Christine had nursed a
secret hatred for the sylphan Allie, who seemed capable of cramming
anything and everything down her dainty throat without ever gaining
an ounce, until Allie had revealed the Hollywood Diet Secret.
Then they had become the best of bathroom buddies, even
engaging in projectile vomiting contests for accuracy and distance
from time to time. If only men knew what really went on when the
girls went off together to powder their noses!
Christine had lost touch with Allie after she married The
Plastic Surgeon and moved into the mansion in Bel Air, hadn't seen
her for months when Allie called up to invite her to a garden lunch,
and she was amazed and appalled to see what Allie had become.
Allie had turned into a blimp, a veritable globuloid! She
presided over the garden party in a white silk muumuu that could
have covered a hippo and apparently did. Her arms were hung with
wads of blubber. Her face had puffed out into a fleshy balloon.
Gross!
Stranger still, Allie spent the whole afternoon picking
listlessly at the bountiful buffet, a radish, a carrot stick, a bit
of caviar on toast, a sprig of cress, a stalk of celery.
Was this what a successful marriage did to a girl?
Maybe not. For hovering around Allie, or perhaps more
accurately somehow causing Allie to hover around him in a manner
clearly indicative of hanky-panky to everyone but her dorky husband,
was this obvious gigolo-type in a costume-party ice-cream suit who
Allie eventually simperingly introduced as Count Armand Kubescu.
One sideways glance from Allie towards the Count told the whole
usual tacky story. The former hot number about town transformed
into a rich bored hausfrau. The oily Hollywood nobleman charming
her with his phony European accent and elegant sleaze.
It was, except for Allie's inexplicable state of bloato, cliche
city. And yet there was something not at all standard about this
phony Count.
Oh yeah, he looked the part, and dressed the part, and spoke
the usual lines in the usual accent.
But lord could the man eat!
He didn't slobber, he didn't dribble crumbs, he used all the
right silverware, his manners were perfectly elegant, there was
nothing gross about his performance at all, but while Allie picked
at tiny bits of this and that, Count Armand Kubescu managed in
unobtrusive and cultivated style to devour truly enormous quantities
of food.
He didn't gulp, he didn't grab, he didn't talk around unseemly
mouthfuls, he just ate steadily without pause for at least three
solid hours.
Allie found herself fascinated with his performance. She
carefully avoided obvious staring, but every time she stole a glance
in his direction, Armand Kubescu was eating. Eggs Benedict. Apple
strudel. Cheese and fruit. Chocolate mousse. Rumaki. Smoked
duck. Italian sausage. French charcuterie. Buffalo chicken wings.
He ate and ate and ate.
Christine kept waiting for him to slink off to the bathroom to
disgorge this enormous load--with a build like his and an appetite
like that, he had to be in on the Hollywood Diet Secret--but he
never did.
Finally, Christine just couldn't keep her eyes off of him.
Finally, it became all too obvious. Finally, he noticed her, or
perhaps finally deigned to notice that she had long been eyeing him.
She was sitting by herself under the shade of one of the
umbrella tables when it happened, peering at him over the lip of a
champagne glass. Their eyes locked for a moment, and when she
didn't look away, neither did he. Instead, he ambled lithely over
to her table along their mutual line of sight, balancing a platter
of assorted petit fours on one hand like a waiter. He paused beside
the table, smiled silkily, picked up a mini-eclair daintily with
curved thumb and forefinger, popped it into his mouth, and proffered
the pastry-plate to Christine.
Christine, having already consumed enough of this and that to
be considering a quick trip to the loo, hesitated for a beat, then
selected a tiny pecan pie, and nibbled tentatively at the edge.
What the hell, she was going to barf it all up sooner or later
anyway, and under the circumstances....
Armand Kubescu smile again, slid smoothly into the chair
opposite her, picked out a chocolate gnoli, and devoured it in two
bites, never averting his gaze.
"You eat like a bird," he said.
"So do you. Like a vulture."
Count Kubescu laughed. "So I have been told," he said.
"How do you do it?"
Armand Kubescu leered at her like some kind of B-movie vampire.
"Comment sa," he said, lifting a cream-puff and sucking it down like
a lizard. "One bite after another."
"I mean, seriously...." What did she mean? What Christine was
dying to ask him, of course, was whether he was going to puke it all
up later. He hadn't disappeared into the john yet, but maybe he
just had a big stomach. But how could she...?
"Seriously, I do only what is natural to me, what else?" the
Count said. "The lion has evolved on the veldt, where days may
elapse between kills, so he can put away twenty kilos of meat at a
sitting. The bear may not eat for months while in hibernation, so
he dines while he can. The python has evolved the ability to
swallow a goat larger than himself. My kind..., well, where my
ancestors come from, meals were long few and far between, so we
evolved a permanent appetite...."
"Where you come from?"
"Eastern Europe, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Romania,
Transylvania, the way the borders shift, it's hard to tell."
"Oh no, don't tell me you sleep in a coffin and drink blood!"
Count Kubescu laughed. "Not my idea of haute cuisine," he
said, picking up a moca eclair, and chewing on it thoughtfully.
"Though of course, in a boudin noir fried up with apples and some
onion, why not?"
The conversation was certainly in the process of taking some
bizarre turns, yet Christine found herself becoming somehow
fascinated with Armand Kubescu.
She had already eaten enough to require a trip to the ladies,
so it couldn't be that all this was putting an edge on her appetite,
nor did she feel anything closely resembling sexual attraction to
the likes of this Hollywood count.
Yet there was a strange feeling south of her stomach and north
of her crotch which seemed to partake of neither and both, a weird
warmth that seemed both satiation and desire, though for what, she
couldn't imagine. It was a bit like what she felt halfway through a
good full-course meal, her tastebuds rosy in the afterglow of a
hearty appetizer, her stomach bloated, her mouth salivating in
anticipation of the next course--which was to say it felt like it
was time for her to ready herself for the main course by disgorging
the preliminaries.
She had to bite her lip to keep from laughing aloud at the
thought. I wonder what you'd say to that, Armand Kubescu! I find
you strangely attractive, you make me want to throw up.
"Something amuses you?" he said.
Christine found herself munching on her pecan pie to cover the
moment. "Well you've got to admit this is not exactly your ordinary
pick-up conversation," she finally said.
He laughed. He bit into a tiny raspberry tart, the red berry
paste glistening suggestively on his neat white teeth for just a
moment before he licked it off with the tip of his tongue.
"Well then perhaps we should revert to more conventional
behavior," he said suavely. "Would you like to have dinner with me
tonight?"
"Dinner!" Christine groaned. "After what you've been eating
all afternoon?"
Armand Kubescu consulted his Rolex. "Barely six o'clock," he
said. "The end of tea-time in civilized climes. Shall I make a
reservation for 8 o'clock? I believe I've had enough to hold me
till then. What about you?"
"I think I'd better go powder my nose," Christine had said.
That had been three trips to the toilet ago. She had cleared
her palette into the crapper in Allie's house before they left for
the restaurant, a second time after the fish course Armand had
insisted they order between the appetizer and the main event--trout
stuffed with cornmeal, oysters, and bacon on top of fried buffalo
mozzarella on pizza-dough rounds--and now, yet again after consuming
tournedos Rossini served with a generous side of spaghetti
carbonara.
Only to confront this enormous chocolate, pastry, and ice cream
desert. It was enough to make a girl puke, if she hadn't puked
three times already, though come to think of it, if she did manage
to get the desert course down, she probably would have to stick her
finger down her throat again.
Armand, though, had gobbled it all up without recourse to the
men's room, had gone through a whole basket of bread besides, and
indeed ordered a refill, and now here he was, after having polished
that off too, wolfing down profiltrole au chocolate as if he hadn't
had a square meal in days.
Just watching him was enough to make Christine feel bloated all
over again, and though the desert was admittedly quite delicious,
she found herself picking rather listlessly at it, as if her
tastebuds had somehow become disconnected from the pleasure-center
in her brain.
"Cognac?" Armand suggested, after he had spooned up the last
drops of chocolate sauce. "It goes quite nicely with walnuts, and
perhaps some fresh figs, which are now in season....."
Christine groaned. "I couldn't eat another bite," she said.
"Coffee, then," he insisted, and ordered two Cappucinos with
whipped cream that came with tiny platters of bittersweet chocolate
truffles dusted with cocoa.
Armand polished off his candies in four quick bits, arched an
inquisitive eyebrow at her when he saw that hers were going
untouched. Christine nodded, and he plucked up her portion, one
after the other, and popped them in his mouth.
"Don't you ever stop eating?" she asked.
Armand Kubescu laughed. "Occasionally," he said, leering at
her in time-honored manner, and running his tongue around his lips,
though whether this was meant suggestively, or just a matter of
capturing the last few errant grains of cocoa dust was impossible to
tell.
Still, he did seem to be regarding her as the next prospective
course as the waiter approached with the check, and Christine
realized that the old moment of truth had now arrived in more ways
than one. Did she want to ball this character? More to the point,
who was going to pick up the tab for this enormous meal?
She decided that the question of the first part be determined
by the answer to the second. If he paid for the whole thing, she
would certainly have been wined and dined to a fare-thee-well, and
the Code of the West demanded that he get laid. If she was going to
be stuck with dutch treat, or, god forbid, if he was the kind of
deadbeat who claimed he had forgotten his wallet, he could damn well
get stuffed, as if he hadn't already.
She didn't need to steal a glance at the total to heave a great
sigh of relief when he reached smoothly into his jacket pocket,
pulled out an overstuffed credit card holder, extracted American
Express platinum, and slapped it down on the service tray with a
flourish. Chivalry had apparently not quite expired, and neither
had his plastic.
"Well?" she said, smiling at him, after he had signed the
credit card receipt.
"Well?"
"Well, your place or mine?"
Armand Kubescu didn't actually blush, but he did frown
deprecatingly. "Please don't think that...anything is required," he
said. "The pleasure of your company as a dining companion has been
quite enough. I don't enjoy eating alone."
He sounded so sincere, so suave, such a gentleman, that
Christine felt an instant surge, if not quite of lust, then
certainly of willing warmth.
Unless....
"Uh.... you're not gay, are you?"
Count Kubescu laughed. "Not quite," he said, reaching across
the table to take her hand, "merely content."
#
It wasn't what you could really call kinky, but it certainly
was rather weird. Armand gallantly insisted on going to her place,
surely much more charming than his grubby bachelor pad, he assured
her, and so his Volvo followed her old Porsche up into the hills to
her garage apartment.
Once inside, he asked if she had any wine, which didn't seem
like anything out of the ordinary, nor, when she told him there was
a cold bottle of Chardonnay in the fridge, did it seem anything more
than European manners when he volunteered to fetch it.
But when he returned to the living room, he had the open bottle
and two glasses awkwardly clasped in one hand, and a big plate piled
with bagel chips, garlic rounds, doritos, and an assortment of
cheese scraps balanced on the other.
These he proceeded to gobble as they sipped wine, babbled
inanities, inched closer to each other on the couch, and let nature
take its inevitable course.
Which it finally did, and they moved into the bedroom, though
not before he had eaten every last crumb. Once the foreplay had
been concluded, Christine was somehow less than surprised to
discover that Armand Kubescu was a master of oral sex beyond
anything in her previous experience.
What was surprising, however, was the strange and entirely
uncharacteristic lassitude with which she accepted the whole
impressive performance. While he brought her to orgasm after
orgasm, she just lay there supinely, drifting voluptuously in a
foggy torpor, as if it were she who had previously gorged herself
like a python.
Nor did all he had eaten seem to have drained his energy for
the main event, though Christine's memory was a bit vague on that in
the morning, seeing as how she had fallen asleep either during it or
immediately afterwards.
What she certainly did remember was waking up in the middle of
the night feeling as if she had eaten an anvil. Her sides ached,
her gut rumbled, and the contents of her stomach seemed to be
pressing at the back of her throat.
Armand seemed quite soundly asleep, and anyway there was
nothing else for it, so she stole out of bed into the bathroom,
assumed the position, and stuck her finger down her throat.
What emerged seemed hardly anything at all. She tried again,
and came up empty. Two more gags proved to be nothing but dry
heaves.
When she gave up and slipped back into the bed, she heard
crunching sounds from the pillow beside her, an apple, or maybe a
pear by the sound of it. While she had been doing her thing in the
bathroom, he had apparently woken up, gone to the kitchen, and now
he was once more doing his!
Good lord, had he heard her?
In the morning, she awoke to the ordinarily enticing aroma of
coffee and frying bacon. Armand soon enough entered the bedroom
bearing a breakfast tray. On it were two cups of coffee, and two
plates, each laden with eight strips of bacon, four fried eggs, and
two thick slices of whole wheat toast slathered with about half a
pound of butter.
"Uh...how sweet," she managed to say, for after all, it was.
Nor was there any mention of middle of the night events, thank god.
Armand attacked his food in the usual manner, putting it all
away before she had managed to get down two eggs and three strips of
bacon for courtesy's sake. When it became obvious that she could
eat no more, he had no trouble devouring her leftovers too.
"Dinner tonight?" he suggested as he swiped the last of the egg
yolk from her plate with the final chunk of bread. "I know a
wonderful German place out in the Valley, hunter's stew, then
perhaps a Schnitzel ala Holstein, a Black Forest cake, or the most
marvelous pear and cheese strudel...."
"Uh...I'm afraid I'm tied up for the next few days," Christine
lied, the thought of another enormous meal enough to green her
gills.
"Friday, perhaps?"
Christine thought about it. He was a gentleman, he was
charming, he had a fat stack of credit cards, and he was a wonderful
lover, despite the fact that she hadn't exactly been at her best
last night. Considering the usual tapped-out tv writers and
Hollywood sleazebags she had been attracting lately, a girl had to
be crazy to pass on a man like this, didn't she, a man whose only
apparent flaw, if you could call it that, was this unholy appetite.
What was the problem, anyway? He was more than willing to take
care of anything she couldn't handle, and besides, she knew the
Hollywood Diet Secret, didn't she?
The thought that it was Allie Ellison who had taught it to her,
Allie, who had nevertheless turned into a land whale, perhaps thanks
to the influence of the Count, gave her some pause.
But after all, Allie was married now, she had probably put on
all that blubber before she ever met Armand, that's what marriage
did to a girl, didn't it, you got lax once you had landed yourself a
Bel Air Plastic Surgeon, you let yourself go. A warning for the
wise.
So she accepted a dinner date for Friday before she kissed
Count Armand Kubescu good bye. And after he left, remembering
Allie, she went straight to the bathroom and did her dietary duty.
Nevertheless, when she stepped on the scale, she discovered, to
her befuddlement and consternation, that she seemed to have gained
two pounds overnight.
It was certainly the strangest affair Christine had ever found
herself trapped in, stranger than the coke-head production manager
with the closetful of leather and chains, stranger than the
transvestite tv writer, stranger even than the agent with the
chicken-suit and the brooms.
And trapped did seem to be the word for it. Lalaland being
what it was, Christine had certainly dated her share of kinks and
weirdos, had found herself in bed with any number of out-to-lunch
pervos, and admittedly had continued brief affairs with some fairly
bizarre sexual freaks as long as she thought there might be some
advantage in it for her. But she had never before found herself
unable to extract herself from a self-destructive relationship that
seemed to have no pragmatic reason to exist.
Admittedly, Count Armand Kubescu was always a perfect
gentleman. Admittedly, he wined and dined her as she had never
been wined and dined before. Admittedly, he always picked up the
huge tab. Admittedly, he was an excellent lover who seemed
interested only in pleasing her. Admittedly, he made absolutely no
demands, sexual or otherwise.
But there was something elusively perverse about it all
nonetheless. Traditionally, men treated women to lavish meals in
order to get them into the bedroom, everybody knew that, it was a
mating dance as old as the human species. Armand Kubescu, however,
seemed to turn the old game inside out and upside down. He seemed
willing and able to provide as much or as little of whatever sort of
sex she might desire in order to seduce her into the dining room
with him.
That was all that they did. They screwed and they ate. They
ate and they screwed. With the primary emphasis on the food. Three
dinner dates the first week, five the second, and by the third week,
he was dragging her to lunch, too. He always stayed over at her
place, and always cooked them a monster breakfast the morning after.
By the third week, Christine was throwing up six, seven, eight,
ten times a day. But it did no good. Every time she stepped on the
scale the morning after a heavy date with Count Kubescu, she had
gained another pound or two. By the end of the third week, she had
put on 22 pounds.
She knew that she had to break it off. Already, she was
popping buttons on her blouses. Already, she couldn't squeeze her
blubber into any of her jeans and pants. If this went on much
further, she wouldn't even be able to get into her Porsche.
But somehow she just couldn't. Every time she tried, the words
just wouldn't come, and she found herself making a date for the next
meal, and the next, and the next. Perhaps the permanent state of
overstuffed torpor she found herself waddling through in a glaze was
interfering with the processes of her brain.
On the other hand, what could she say? Armand was a perfect
gentleman and a perfect lover, and gave not the slightest hint of
disgust at the grossly-bloated state of her once-perfect body. And
though part of her had long since come to anticipate the next
cuisinary orgy with bilious dread, the meals always were delicious,
he always did pick up the tab, and the sex afterward never left
anything to be desired despite her present unwholesome appearance.
Face it, in her loathsome hippoid condition, how could she
attract any other man into her bed, let alone a lover like Armand,
let alone someone who would pick up all these enormous dinner tabs
for the privilege?
She was trapped. In between meals with Armand, she made
endless firm resolutions to break it off, but in his presence, her
will always faded away, as if he had cast some weird spell on her,
like Tammy and her Scientologist, Erma and her channeler, Tess and
her vegetarian guru, like Bela Lugosi in all those dumb old vampire
movies.
Finally, on the morning after an eight-course Chinese banquet
topped off by Death by Chocolate sundaes at C.C. Brown's and a
breakfast of chocolate-chip waffles with raspberry syrup and ham
steak, she lumbered onto the scale to discover that she had now put
on 33 pounds.
Her panties wouldn't even fit anymore. She couldn't even read
the damned scale without bending forward to peer over her gut.
She had to do something. But what?
She desperately needed some advice. And the only person she
could think of who might supply anything remotely relevant was the
woman she had stolen Armand away from, if that was indeed what she
had really done, his previous victim, her one-time best bathroom
buddy and present-day fellow globuloid, Allie Ellison.
#
Considering the circumstances, Allie had been surprisingly
cordial on the phone, and readily agreed to meet her for lunch at
the Green Goddess, a Beverly Hills tea-room, whose decor tended
towards ferns and potted palms, whose menu featured greens, sprouts,
and tofu, and whose clientele consisted primarily of elegant matrons
on permanent starvation diets. The sort of place whose ladies' room
was provided with chin-height miniature toilet bowls and water-piks
for the convenience of the customers.
They met in the lobby and stared at each other in amazement.
"Good god, hon!" Allie exclaimed tactfully. "You look like the
Goodyear Blimp!"
"How did you do it?" Christine moaned.
Allie's face was limp and wrinkly, like a balloon with the air
let out of it. All the fat was gone; she looked positively gaunt.
She wore a tight white pants suit that revealed a figure about a
hundred pounds of blubber less than her previous incarnation.
"Alex did a lot of slicing and dicing," Allie told her.
"Micro-liposuction on the face, it's the latest thing. Next week,
he's going to finish it off with a polish to retighten the skin."
She frowned. "But how did you...?" She held up a hand,
smiled. "No, let me guess."
Christine squirmed with embarrassment. "Look, Allie, I'm
sorry, I know... I mean...."
Allie laughed. "Hey, hon, I should be thanking you, even Alex
couldn't have done anything as long as I was sneaking snacks with
Armand Kubescu. The Count's some kind of, I dunno, fat vampire,
only in reverse, know what I mean?"
"Tell me about it!" Christine groaned.
Over steamed tofu and romaine salads with vinegar and safflower
oil dressing and a bottle of low-cal white zinfandel, Allie did.
"I just couldn't help myself, hon, Alex isn't exactly Mr.
Natural in bed, know what I mean, and Armand will do just about
anything in the sack to get a girl into a restaurant...."
She shrugged. "Besides which, I dunno, when you're with the
guy--"
"I know what you mean!"
"You ain't the only one, hon!" Allie said. "When he took up
with you, it was like some kind of spell had lifted. I mean, yeah,
I was pissed off for a few days when he dropped me, but after that,
well, it was like I was myself again, stopped gaining weight, puked
off about twelve pounds even before Alex got to work...."
She laughed. "You gotta give the Count one thing, hon, the
guy's monogamous, serially, that is. I sniffed around a bit after
it was over, found four other poor fatsoes, same damn thing, one
after the other, good luck for Alex, though, least I could do...."
"But what am I going to do, Allie?"
Allie shrugged again. "Pass him on, what else can you do?" she
said. "Seems like he can only handle one at a time. After which, I
can set you up with Alex. One third off, or no nookie for him, I
mean, what are friends for, hon...."
Christine thought about it as they finished their salads and
treated themselves to a desert of carrot-flavored toffuti ice-cream.
It just didn't seem right. She could think of any number of ways to
introduce Armand Kubescu to his next victim, but no one who really
deserved such a fate, not even, when push came to shove, Patti
Kelly, who, after all, had taken up with her Dodger second baseman
on the rebound.
The Count was a menace to Lalaland womanhood. The Code of the
West demanded that the buck stop here.
But how?
"What say we powder our noses into the toilet bowl for old
times' sake?" Allie said after they had finished their decaffeinated
coffee. They ambled into the ladies, and popped their lo-cal cookies.
While they were sluicing the acidic residue into the porcelain
with the complementary water-piks, Christine sensed the glimmerings
of a vague idea.
"Were you doing this when you were with the Count, Allie?" she
asked.
"Are you kidding, hon? A dozen times a day towards the end.
Otherwise, I probably would have exploded!"
"Maybe not..." Christine mused. "Maybe he would've
exploded...."
"Huh?"
"Look, the guy eats and eats, and we get fat, right? Somehow,
the results of all the stuff he crams down his throat goes straight
to our stomachs...."
"So?"
"So maybe there's a limit."
"I never noticed one, hon! Have you?"
"Never tried to reach it, did we? I mean, the Count uses his
victims like we just used these toilet bowls, right, only somehow he
doesn't have to stick his finger down his throat, sort of like
ectoplasmic bulimia, or like he's a cow, and we're his extra
stomach...."
"Gross!"
"...he eats and eats, and we keep dumping it for him.... Well,
what if a cow's extra stomach is stuffed to the gills to begin with?
Wouldn't it like maybe back up the system? Reverse the flow? Give
him a dose of his own hi-cal medicine?"
"Oh no, Chris, you're not suggesting--"
"I'll bet he's never even learned the Hollywood Diet
Secret...."
"Jeez, hon, you don't imagine you can eat Armand Kubescu under
the table!"
"It'd be sort of like getting him to do it to himself, wouldn't
it? After a certain point, I'm stuffing my face, and he's putting
on the blubber."
"After a certain point!" Allie groaned. "By that time, you'd
weigh more than an elephant!"
"Maybe not. Not if I did it all at one sitting."
"What are you gonna do," Allie said, "challenge him to a pie-
eating contest?"
Christine grinned at her. "After all the meals he's bought me,
don't you think it's only fair that I take him out to dinner for
once? At Mom's Good Old Country Kitchen."
#
Mom's Good Old Country Kitchen had been in business out in
Glendale for something like sixty years, though it had certainly
seen better days. You wouldn't think to look at it that it was
still one of Los Angeles County's most expensive restaurants.
A single-story concrete building was tackily painted to
simulate a Disneyland farmhouse. There was a one-third scale barn
and silo out back and the whole compound was surrounded by rustic
wooden fencing. Two diseased-looking cows wandered listlessly
around the ersatz barnyard, along with half a dozen scrofulous
chickens, and four hairy Mexican pigs. The smell, at least, was
authentic.
"You're sure this is the place?" Armand Kubescu said dubiously,
as a phony hayseed in dry-cleaned bib overalls let Christine's
Porsche into the parking lot.
"Just part of the atmosphere," Christine assured him. "It's an
old LA institution, you're gonna love it."
Mom's Good Old Country Kitchen had been founded by a family of
Okies back during the Great Depression. In those days, it had been
all you could eat for $5, stiff by the standards of the day, and
now, at $100 for the same, likewise.
The original idea had been to appeal to Dustbowl refugees who
had made it in The Industry. In the forties and fifties, it was the
in place for Hollywood cowboys seeking to establish their country
roots. During the macrobiotic sixties, it had fallen into disfavor,
relying somewhat precariously on the custom of perverse right-wing
producers who used it to inflict their version of power lunches
on hapless Beverly Hills trendies.
In these health-and-body-conscious days, Mom's Good Old
Country Kitchen was reduced to a dwindling clientele of loyal old
lardbuckets and European tourists. Christine had read about it in
an old airline magazine someone had left in her gynecologist's
office, never imagining that she would ever dare to set foot in such
a place.
But it was certainly ideal for present purposes.
The dining room was done up as a giant eat-in farmhouse
kitchen. Rough-hewn splintery gray wood flooring. A high red
ceiling from which old wagon-wheels ringed with phony kerosene
lanterns hung low over round redwood picnic tables draped with red-
and-white checked cloths. Electric logs glowed bucolically in the
hearth of a big brick fireplace. Low country and western Muzak
twanged in the background.
The Good Old Country Kitchen itself opened onto the dining room
over a big wooden counter, and inside, the latest version of Mom
herself, a huge middle-aged woman tented in gingham dress and white
apron and wearing a white chef's hat over a cheap gray fright-wig,
was visible bustling about, assisted by three teenaged chicanas done
up as midwestern farm-girls.
The place wasn't even half-full--a fat old couple, a family of
huge hearty blond German or Dutch tourists; two enormous Japanese
who looked like sumo wrestlers; their American counterpart, a man-
mountain who went by the handle of Little Abner, accompanied by a
date who looked right off the plane from Vegas; a table of Hell's
Angels--and Christine and the Count were seated immediately by a
surfer-type in designer bib overalls and an idiot straw hat.
Count Kubescu glanced around the room rather dubiously. "A
rather peculiar place to have chosen," he muttered.
"Don't worry, Armand," Christine said with a little smile,
"it's as American as Mom's apple pie. Of which, believe me, there
is plenty."
There was no menu. Mom and her helpers loaded the goods onto
the counter as they came off the stove, the waiters piled the food
onto flat-topped wheelbarrows, and offered you everything at your
table.
First came the so-called appetizers. Barbecued baby back-ribs.
Buffalo chicken-wings. Pigs-in-a-blanket which were actually
enormous knackwursts wrapped in pizza-dough. Fried catfish fingers
swimming in red-hot tomato sauce. Hush-puppies with melted butter
and honey. Scrambled eggs with oysters and bacon. Half a dozen
different cold-cuts and as many cheeses.
Armand's attitude brightened considerably as he perused this
impressive offering. "Uh, the ribs, and the fish-fingers, and the
eggs, and let's see--"
"Oh come on, Armand, this is my treat," Christine said gaily.
"We'll just have everything," she told the waiter. "With schooners
of beer, and a nice big pitcher of buttermilk."
The waiter began unloading more-or-less human-sized portions of
this and that onto the huge wooden platters set before them.
"More," Christine demanded. "We didn't come here to eat like birds.
Don't be so mingy!"
By the time the waiter had left, each of their plates was
heaped high to overflowing with enough food to feed the Rams'
offensive line or sink the Queen Mary.
Armand tucked into it in his usual manner, eating everything
with his silverware like a European gentleman, but managing to pack
it all away steadily like the perfect all-American farmboy.
Christine ate a good deal less fastidiously in her efforts to keep
up, but keep up she did, even though by the time they had cleaned
their plates, her stomach seemed to be pressing against her rib-cage
and the back of her throat.
"Quite nice," Armand said, taking a hearty swallow of beer.
"Simple, perhaps, but ample."
"Glad you like it," Christine said sweetly. "Let's have
seconds."
Armand's gaze may have narrowed a tad, but when the wide-eyed
waiter had finished refilling their plates, he went at it again with
no noticeably diminishment of his seemingly bottomless appetite.
Christine, though, had to force herself to cram it all down her
throat by act of will, had to choke back doing what should have come
naturally, and by the time she had managed to push the last hush-
puppy down past enormous resistance, her ears were ringing, her
diaphragm was pressing on her lungs, and she was starting to see
spots before her eyes.
She was somewhat encouraged by the new look on Armand Kubescu's
face. Not that he looked what you could call sated, but he did
indeed seem to be eyeing her speculatively, as if he was beginning
to realize that something was going on.
"Ah, the main course!" he said when the waiter arrived with a
wheelbarrow loaded with roast beef, fried chicken, ham-steaks in red
eye gravy, pork chops, legs of lamb, roast turkeys, and barbecued
Texas hot-links. He smiled at her as he said it, but there was a
certain wolfish edge to it, a stripping away of a certain amount of
civilized veneer, and there was something challenging in his voice
that seemed to indicate that he now understood that he was in a real
contest.
And it was Armand, this time, who told the waiter that they
would have everything and lots of it.
Christine's memory of the meat course was to be a bit vague
later. She clearly remembered that they started in on the hot links
and ham steaks with knives and forks like a lady and a gentleman,
but by the time it came down to the pork chops, her brain had
entirely disconnected, her stomach had become completely
anesthetized, and she seemed to have been reduced to a set of jaws
and a pair of hands, gnawing pork off the bone like a hound-dog,
ripping apart chicken and turkey with her fingers, even, perhaps,
picking up an entire leg of lamb and attacking it like a famished
lioness.
The Count, all civilized pretense gone by now, was down to
eating with his fingers too, glaring back at her with feral eyes,
ripping off chunks of meat with his teeth, fairly growling at her as
he bolted them down, as if they were pieces of her own enemy flesh.
By the time the waiter arrived with the side dishes, they were
snarling at each other like animals, spitting spent bones on their
plates, glaring across the midden-heap of the table at each other
with blood in their eyes.
Vast platters of corn on the cob in melted butter appeared on
the battlefield. Baked potatoes with sour cream and chives. Boiled
green beans. Candied yams. Peas and carrots with pearl onions.
Onion rings. Deep-fried mushrooms. Mountains of mashed potatoes
soaked in butter and thick country gravy. Someone called for more
meat. Someone demanded the bread trolley.
It all took place in a glutinous greasy brown fog. But
Christine remembered the moment when it cleared with crystal
clarity.
She came back from wherever she had been in the act of gobbling
mashed potatoes with a tablespoon in each hand. Suddenly she felt
light-headed but magically lucid. The ache in her guts was gone.
Her vision cleared. She didn't even feel like throwing up.
Across the table, Count Armand Kubescu was picking listlessly
at a turkey carcass. His eyes were glazed, he was slumped back in
his seat, his cheeks were puffy, and he seemed to have developed a
set of jowls that she had never noticed before.
Christine, for her part, felt like she could eat forever.
"What's the matter, Armand?" she said savagely. "You're eating
like a bird."
Count Kubescu moaned, then belched torpidly. The turkey
carcass fell from his limp fingers.
Christine leered at him triumphantly as she drew the whole huge
serving platter of mashed potatoes to her. Gloriously crazed with
the succulent aroma of impending victory, she dispensed with the
niceties, leaned over the platter, and proceeded to shovel great
gross gobs of the gravy-laden potatoes into her mouth with both
hands like human conveyer-belt.
With every handful, Armand Kubescu groaned softly, sank back
deeper into his chair, seemed to visibly accumulate fat around his
eyes, and jowls, and neck, as if a million years of Southern-fried
chickens were all at once coming home to roost.
By the time she was finished with the mashed potatoes, which
didn't take that long at all, he had pushed his chair back from the
table to accommodate his newborn paunch, his arms were hanging
limply at his side, and he had broken out into an oily sweat.
"Ah, just in time!" Christine said.
The waiter had arrived with the dessert wheelbarrow.
Deep dish apple pie. Dutch apple pie. Peach pie. Pecan pie.
Chocolate cream pie. Banana cream pie. Boston cream pie.
Angelfood cake. Devil's food cake. Strawberry short-cake.
Platters of chocolate, vanilla, and rum raisin ice cream. A huge
bowl of whipped cream.
The old couple and the family of Teutonic tourists had left
sometime during the proceedings, but the Japanese sumo wrestlers,
Little Abner and his chorus girl, and the Hell's Angels had gathered
in a semi-circle around the table.
"I'm getting a little full," Christine said, "so I think I'll
just have one piece of everything ala mode with whipped cream."
There was a spattering of applause.
"No! No!" the Count gibbered in terror. "Not dessert!"
But Christine showed no mercy. She leered across the table at
Armand Kubescu, slowing her pace somewhat to savor it, but steadily
devouring everything. Beads of sweat poured down the Count's face,
then rivulets. His eyes all but disappeared behind oleaginous wads
of flesh. His fat cheeks panted. His jowls quivered.
Distractedly, as if of their own volition, his hands, with their
sausagelike fingers, reached up shakily to grasp at the lip of the
table.
Christine was down to the last slice, banana-cream pie with a
big ball of chocolate ice cream, smothered in whipped cream.
She slid the whole dripping thing onto the palm of her hand,
winked at the Count, opened her jaws as wide as they could go.
"Delicious," she said, and crammed it all down her throat in four
continuous gulps.
The Count screamed, spasmed, pushed against the table, and went
over backwards, to lie supine on the floor, quite comatose, gasping
and blowing like an enormous beached whale.
There was a round of applause.
Christine rose shakily from the table, bowed to the audience,
and waddled off to the ladies' room for a world-class barf.
#
Allie Ellison was there in the recovery room to greet her when
Christine came out of the anesthesia.
"All's well that ends well, hon," she said. "Alex outdid
himself. Guess I own him a blowjob. Ah well, what are friends
for?"
Christine ached all over, but that was to be expected. She
reached down to pat her tummy. Sore as hell, but even under the
padding of the bandages, it seemed flat as a board.
"Got a mirror, Allie?"
Allie reached into her purse, extracted a compact, opened it,
handed it to her.
Christine started at what she saw. Purplish black bruises all
over her cheeks and beneath her chin. Loose skin hanging
everywhere.
"Don't worry about it, hon," Allie assured her. "The marks
will be gone in a week or two, and then Alex'll tighten things back up".
Allie laughed. "You should see the Count!" she said.
"No thanks," Christine said, "I'd rather remember him as he
was, laying there on the floor like a mound of slime jello."
Allie laughed again. "Better than that, hon," she said.
"These days, he's looking like the second coming of Orson Welles."
She shrugged. "Of course, you've gotta hand it to the guy, he
is a survivor."
"How so?"
"Well, he's taken up with a certain blimpoid ex-actress rolling
in dough from her twelfth divorce. A match made in heaven."
"Really?" Christine said.
"Sauce for the goose, hon," Allie told her. "Meat for the
gander. She's already blown off fifteen pounds."
end