“I live a tasty life!” Kenny Dorchester would proclaim, beaming. And so he did. But Kenny also had a secret. He did not often think of it and never spoke it, but it was there nonetheless, down at the heart of him beneath all those great rolls of flesh, and not all his sauces could drown it, nor could his trusty fork keep it at bay.
Kenny Dorchester did not like being fat.
Kenny was like a man torn between two lovers, for while he loved his food with an abiding passion, he also dreamed of other loves, of women, and he knew that in order to secure the one he would have to give up the other, and that knowledge was his secret pain. Often he wrestled with the dilemmas posed by his situation. It seemed to Kenny that while it might be preferable to be slender and have a woman than to be fat and have only a crawfish bisque, nonetheless the latter was not entirely to be spurned. Both were sources of happiness after all, and the real misery fell to those who gave up the one and failed to obtain the other. Nothing depressed or saddened Kenny so much as the sight of a fat person eating cottage cheese. Such pathetic human beings never seemed to get appreciably skinnier, Kenny thought, and were doomed to go through life bereft of both women and crawfish, a fate too grim to contemplate.
Yet despite all his misgivings, at times the secret pain inside Kenny Dorchester would flare up mightily, and fill him with a sense of resolve that made him feel as if anything might be possible. The sight of a particularly beautiful woman or the word of some new, painless, and wonderfully effective diet were particularly prone to trigger what Kenny thought of his “aberrations.” When such moods came, Kenny would be driven to diet.
Over the years he tried every diet there was, briefly and secretly. He tried Dr. Atkins’ diet and Dr. Stillman’s diet, the grapefruit diet and the brown rice diet. He tried the liquid protein diet, which was truly disgusting. He lived for a week on nothing but Slender and Sego, until he had run through all of the flavors and gotten bored. He joined a Pounds-Off club and attended a few meetings, until he discovered that the company of fellow dieters did him no good whatsoever, since all they talked about was food. He went on a hunger strike that lasted until he got hungry. He tried the fruit juice diet, and the drinking man’s diet (even though he was not a drinking man), and the martinis-and-whipped-cream diet (he omitted the martinis). A hypnotist told him that his favorite foods tasted bad and he wasn’t hungry anyway, but it was a damned lie, and that was that for hypnosis. He had his behavior modified so he put down his fork between bites, used small plates that looked full even with tiny portions, and wrote down everything he ate in a notebook. That left him with stacks of notebooks, a great many small dishes to wash, and unusual manual dexterity in putting down and picking up his fork. His favorite diet was the one that said you could eat all you wanted of your favorite food, so long as you ate nothing but that. The only problem was that Kenny couldn’t decide what was really his one true favorite, so he wound up eating ribs for a week, and pizza for a week, and Peking duck for a week (that was an expensive week), and losing no weight whatsoever, though he did have a great time.
Most of Kenny Dorchester’s aberrations lasted for a week or two. Then, like a man coming out of a fog, he would look around and realize that he was absolutely miserable, losing relatively little weight, and in imminent danger of turning into one of those cottage cheese fatties he so pitied. At that point he would chuck the diet, go out for a good meal, and be restored to his normal self for another six months, until his secret pain surfaced again.
Then, one Friday night, he spied Henry Moroney at the Slab.
The Slab was Kenny’s favorite barbeque joint. It specialized in ribs, charred and meaty and served dripping with a sauce that Kenny approved of mightily. And on Fridays the Slab offered all the ribs you could eat for only fifteen dollars, which was prohibitively high for most people but a bargain for Kenny, who could eat a great many ribs. On that particular Friday, Kenny had just finished his first slab and was waiting for the second, sipping beer and eating bread, when he chanced to look up and realized, with a start, that the slim haggard fellow in the next booth was, in fact, Henry Moroney.
Kenny Dorchester was nonplussed. The last time he had seen Henry Moroney they had both been unhappy Pounds-Off members, and Moroney had been the only one in the club who weighed more than Kenny did. A great fat whale of a man, Moroney had carried about the cruel nickname of “Boney,” as he confessed to his fellow members. Only now the nickname seemed to fit. Not only was Moroney skinny enough to hint at a ribcage under his skin, but the table in front of him was absolutely littered with bones. That was the detail that intrigued Kenny Dorchester. All those bones. He began to count, and he lost track before very long, because all the bones were disordered, strewn about on empty plates in little puddles of drying sauce. But from the sheer mass of them it was clear that Moroney had put away at least four slabs of ribs, maybe five.
It seemed to Kenny Dorchester that Henry “Boney” Moroney knew the secret. If there was a way to lose hundreds of pounds and still be able to consume five slabs of ribs at a sitting, that was something Kenny desperately needed to know. So he rose and walked over to Moroney’s booth and squeezed in opposite him. “It is you,” he said.
Moroney looked up as if he hadn’t noticed Kenny until that very second. “Oh,” he said in a thin, tired voice. “You.” He seemed very weary, but Kenny thought that was probably natural for someone who had lost so much weight. Moroney’s eyes were sunk in deep gray hollows, his flesh sagged in pale empty folds, and he was slouching forward with his elbows on the table as if he were too exhausted to sit up straight. He looked terrible, but he had lost so much weight….
“You look wonderful!” Kenny blurted. “How did you do it? How? You must tell me, Henry, really you must.”
“No,” Moroney whispered. “No, Kenny. Go away.”
Kenny was taken aback. “Really!” he declared. “That’s not very friendly. I’m not leaving until I know your secret, Henry. You owe it to me. Think of all the times we’ve broken bread together.”
“Oh, Kenny,” Moroney said, in his faint and terrible voice. “Go, please, go, you don’t want to know, it’s too…too…” He stopped in mid-sentence, and a spasm passed across his face. He moaned. His head twisted wildly to the side, as if he were having some kind of a fit, and his hands beat on the table. “Ooooo,” he said.
“Henry, what’s wrong?” Kenny said, alarmed. He was certain now that Boney Moroney had overdone his diet.
“Ohhhh,” Moroney sighed in sudden relief. “Nothing, nothing. I’m fine.” His voice had none of the enthusiasm of his words. “I’m wonderful, in fact. Wonderful, Kenny. I haven’t been so slim since…since…why, never. It’s a miracle.” He smiled faintly. “I’ll be at my goal soon, and then it will be over. I think. Think I’ll be at my goal. Don’t know my weight, really.” He put a hand to his brow. “I am slender, though, truly I am. Don’t you think I look good?”
“Yes, yes,” Kenny agreed impatiently. “But how? You must tell me. Surely not those Pounds-Off phonies…”
“No,” said Moroney weakly. “No, it was the monkey treatment. Here, I’ll write it down for you.” He took out a pencil and scrawled an address on a napkin.
Kenny stuffed the napkin into a pocket. “The monkey treatment? I’ve never heard of that. What is it?”
Henry Moroney licked his lips. “They…” he started, and then another fit hit him, and his head twitched around grotesquely. “Go,” he said to Kenny, “just go. It works, Kenny, yes, oh. The monkey treatment, yes. I can’t say more. You have the address. Excuse me.” He placed his hands flat on the table and pushed himself to his feet, then walked over to the cashier, shuffling like a man twice his age. Kenny Dorchester watched him go, and decided that Moroney had definitely overdone this monkey treatment, whatever it was. He had never had tics or spasms before, or whatever that had been.
“You have to have a sense of proportion about these things,” Kenny said stoutly to himself. He patted his pocket to make
sure the napkin was still there, resolved that he would handle things more sensibly than Boney Moroney, and returned to his own booth and his second slab of ribs. He ate four that night, figuring that if he was going to start a diet tomorrow he had better get in some eating while the eating was good.
The next day being Saturday, Kenny was free to pursue the monkey treatment and the dream of a new, slender him. He rose early, and immediately rushed to the bathroom to weigh himself on his digital scale, which he loved dearly because you didn’t have to squint down at the numbers, since they lit up nice and bright and precise in red. This morning they lit up as 367. He had gained a few pounds, but he hardly minded. The monkey treatment would strip them off again soon enough.
Kenny tried to phone ahead, to make sure this place was open on a Saturday, but that proved to be impossible. Moroney had written nothing but an address, and there was no diet center at that listing in the yellow pages, nor a health club, nor a doctor. Kenny looked in the white pages under “Monkey” but that yielded nothing. So there was nothing to do but go down there in person.
Even that was troublesome. The address was way down by the docks in a singularly unsavory neighborhood, and Kenny had a hard time getting the cab to take him there. He finally got his way by threatening to report the cabbie to the commissioner. Kenny Dorchester knew his rights.
Before long, though, he began to have his doubts. The narrow little streets they wound through were filthy and decaying, altogether unappetizing, and it occurred to Kenny that any diet center located down here might offer only dangerous quackery. The block in question was an old commercial strip gone to seed, and it put his hackles up even more. Half the stores were boarded closed, and the rest lurked behind filthy dark windows and iron gates. The cab pulled up in front of an absolutely miserable old brick storefront, flanked by two vacant lots full of rubble, its plate glass windows grimed over impenetrably. A faded Coca-Cola sign swung back and forth, groaning, above the door. But the number was the number that Boney Moroney had written down.
“Here you are,” the cabbie said impatiently, as Kenny peered out the taxi window, aghast.
“This does not look correct,” Kenny said. “I will investigate. Kindly wait here until I am certain this is the place.”
The cabbie nodded, and Kenny slid over and levered himself out of the taxi. He had taken two steps when he heard the cab shift gears and pull away from the curb, screeching. He turned and watched in astonishment. “Here, you can’t…” he began. But it did. He would most definitely report that man to the commissioner, he decided.
But meanwhile he was stranded down here, and it seemed foolish not to proceed when he had come this far. Whether he took the monkey treatment or not, no doubt they would let him use a phone to summon another cab. Kenny screwed up his resolution, and went on in the grimy, unmarked storefront. A bell tinkled as he opened the door.
It was dark inside. The dust and dirt on the windows kept out nearly all the sunlight, and it took a moment for Kenny’s eyes to adjust. When they did, he saw to his horror that he had walked into someone’s living room. One of those gypsy families that moved into abandoned stores, he thought. He was standing on a threadbare carpet, and around and about him was a scatter of old furniture, no doubt the best the Salvation Army had to offer. An ancient black-and-white TV set crouched in one corner, staring at him blindly. The room stank of urine. “Sorry,” Kenny muttered feebly, terrified that some dark gypsy youth would come out of the shadows to knife him. “Sorry.” He had stepped backwards, groping behind him for the doorknob, when the man came out of the back room.
“Ah!” the man said, spying Kenny at once from tiny bright eyes. “Ah, the monkey treatment!” He rubbed his hands together and grinned. Kenny was terrified. The man was the fattest, grossest human being that Kenny had ever laid eyes on. He had squeezed through the door sideways. He was fatter than Kenny, fatter than Boney Moroney. He literally dripped with fat. And he was repulsive in other ways as well. He had the complexion of a mushroom, and miniscule little eyes almost invisible in rolls of pale flesh. His corpulence seemed to have overwhelmed even his hair, of which he had very little. Bare-chested, he displayed vast areas of folded, bulging skin, and his huge breasts flopped as he came forward quickly and seized Kenny by the arm. “The monkey treatment!” he repeated eagerly, pulling Kenny forward. Kenny looked at him, in shock, and was struck dumb by his grin. When the man grinned, his mouth seemed to become half his face, a grotesque semicircle full of shining white teeth.
“No,” Kenny said at last, “no, I have changed my mind.” Boney Moroney or no, he didn’t think he cared to try this monkey treatment if it was administered by such as this. In the first place, it clearly could not be very effective, or else the man would not be so monstrously obese. Besides, it was probably dangerous, some quack potion of monkey hormones or something like that. “NO!” Kenny repeated more forcefully, trying to wrest his arm free from the grasp of the grotesquerie who held it.
But it was useless. The man was distinctly larger and infinitely stronger than Kenny, and he propelled him across the room with ease, oblivious to Kenny’s protests, grinning like a maniac all the while.
“Fat man,” he burbled, and as if to prove his point he reached out and seized one of Kenny’s bulges and twisted it painfully. “Fat, fat, fat, no good. Monkey treatment make you thin.”
“Yes, but…”
“Monkey treatment,” the man repeated, and somehow he had gotten behind Kenny. He put his weight against Kenny’s back and pushed, and Kenny staggered through a curtained doorway into the back room. The smell of urine was much stronger in there, strong enough to make him want to retch. It was pitch black, and from all sides Kenny heard rustlings and scurryings in the darkness. Rats, he thought wildly. Kenny was deathly afraid of rats. He fumbled about and propelled himself toward the square of dim light that marked the curtain he had come through.
Before he was quite there, a high-pitched chittering sounded suddenly from behind him, sharp and rapid as fire from a machine gun. Then another voice took it up, then a third, and suddenly the dark was alive with the terrible hammering noise. Kenny put his hands over his ears and staggered through the curtain, but just as he emerged he felt something brush the back of his neck, something warm and hairy. “Aieee!” he screamed, dancing out into the front room, where the tremendous bare-chested madman was waiting patiently. Kenny hopped from one foot to the other, screeching, “Aieee, a rat, a rat on my back. Get it off, get it off.” He was trying to grab for it with both hands, but the thing was very quick, and shifted around so cleverly so that he couldn’t get ahold of it. But he felt it there, alive, moving. “Help me, help me!” he called out. “A rat!”
The proprietor grinned at him and shook his head, so all his many chins went bobbing merrily. “No, no,” he said. “No rat, fat man. Monkey. You get the monkey treatment.” Then he stepped forward and seized Kenny by the elbow again, and drew him over to a full-length mirror mounted on the wall. It was so dim in the room that Kenny could scarcely make out anything in the mirror, except that it wasn’t wide enough and chopped off both his arms. The man stepped back and yanked a pull-cord dangling from the ceiling, and a single bare lightbulb clicked on overhead. The bulb swung back and forth, back and forth, so the light shifted crazily. Kenny Dorchester trembled and stared at the mirror.
“Oh!” he said.
There was a monkey on his back.
Actually it was on his shoulders, its legs wrapped around his thick neck and twined together beneath his triple chin. He could feel its monkey hair scratching the back of his neck, could feel its warm little monkey paws lightly grasping his ears. It was a very tiny monkey. As Kenny looked into the mirror, he saw it peek out from behind his head, grinning hugely. It had quick darting eyes, coarse brown hair, and altogether too many shiny white teeth for Kenny’s liking. Its long prehensile tail swayed about restlessly, like some hairy snake that had grown out of the back of Kenny’s skull.
Kenn
y’s heart was pounding away like some great air-hammer lodged in his chest and he was altogether distressed by this place, this man, and this monkey. But he gathered all his reserves and forced himself to be calm. It wasn’t a rat, after all. The little monkey couldn’t harm him. It had to be a trained monkey, the way it had perched on his shoulders. Its owner must let it ride around like this, and when Kenny had come unwillingly through the curtain, it had probably mistook him. All fat men look alike in the dark. Kenny grabbed behind him and tried to pull the monkey loose, but somehow he couldn’t seem to get a grip on it. The mirror, reversing everything, just made it worse. He jumped up and down ponderously, shaking the entire room and making the furniture leap around every time he landed, but the monkey held on tight to his ears and could not be dislodged.