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Feasting at the Devil’s Anus

By Jaroslav Dampfstain

Whenever I encounter non-Americans interested in dissecting the American psyche, I always make two statements. The first is that America as a subject is a white whale, and until one truly understands that reference, there’s little point in attempting to analyze us as a people. The second is that Arthur Miller’s dramatic masterpiece, “The Crucible,” could be subtitled “Everything You Always Wanted to Know about American Puritanism but Were Afraid to Ask.” Miller’s play has more to say about America’s banshee domesticity and spiritual underbelly than a thousand penetrating insights by that French-fried social commentator Alexis de Tocqueville.

I recently added a third statement: One cannot know contemporary America until one has feasted at the devil’s anus. Allow me to explain.

The America that brought us monkey trials, Southern Baptist book-burning marshmallow roasts and McCarthy-style blacklists has changed since Miller first staged “The Crucible” in 1953. When Miller took Proctor, Witch & Co. to Hollywood four decades later, Americans were waddling about in sweatpants too bloated to notice (although a few literate lard heads probably bothered to check the box office totals in EW). A cancerous anti-geist had swept the nation—an hypnotic spell that caused many Americans to trade their pitchforks and torches for remote controls and tubs of Velveeta. (A witch trial just isn’t a witch trial without the tangy zip of processed cheese.)

What happened, of course, was that a man named Sam Walton took his retail business public in 1973, almost single-handedly castrating American community spirit, while numbing national aesthetics, to boot. While this box store villain get loads of credit for his place in the decline and fall of the Rockwellian Empire, little has been written about an equally heinous partnership (also begun in 1973) between two North Carolinians, which led to the filling of many a blue light special sweat suit with endless cellulose largesse. I refer of course to the shiny yellow calf, Moloch’s meal ticket: The Golden Corral.

Golden Corral is to the taste bud what Wal-Mart is to the cheap good. (I’m not sure that’s good enough for the Miller Analogies Test, but you get my point.) So if foreigners really want to understand Americans, they better head to their nearest swine trough buffet on a Saturday night to partake in a G.C. Steak & Steak experience.

I make a smorgasbord appearance at least once per year, in order to keep my bearings in a society obsessed with consumerism sans sanity. There are nations, places like Japan, Italy and Spain, where eating a meal is a ritual observed, a statement of beauty, a ticklish kaleidoscope for the taste buds. Movies like Babbette’s Feast and Big Night are cinematic exemplars of the feast as a grand cultural event, where communities partake of dishes that are works of culinary art. And when we visit these places or see these images, we are assured there is a refrigerator in Plato’s world of forms.

Enter the Golden Corral, a brand which commands our attention. We recognize gold as the symbol of quality, purity and bounty: the Golden Horn, the Golden Gate, etc. At the entrance of this eatery, we anticipate a nest of gastrointestinal luxuriousness. But wait! What’s that sound? Humans queued at a register, mooing and lowing. It’s that second word that damns us: Corral. A pen for cattle! Here stand we in line, we bovine hominids, swatting our tails to keep the flies from the chowder tureen at bay. A lady takes my bankcard, charges me $12.50 and hands me a red plastic tray and two plates. I have entered the Third Circle of Hell: an immoral, gluttonous orgy beckons!

I head for the food trenches. My tradition is to fill two plates with an incongruous display of nuclear caloric intake certain to ruin even an iron kidney. Plate One is piled high with succulent tuna salad, fried shrimp, beef tamales, corn, banana pudding, pit styled ham, all drenched in caramel topping and timberline chili.

As I load Plate Two, a sign stops me dead in my tracks: BAKE POTATO. I am confused by this aberrant imperative. Surely the Golden Corral masters do not expect me to cook for myself? But I obey the lipid lords; I grab a potato from the well and strike my lighter beneath it until the tuber is warm. Plate Two is soon filled with an exotic array of wormwood legumes, snow goose gumbo, giblet gravy marinated salad, baby seals in a blanket, Oreo manicotti, and of course, the famous Golden Corral sirloin steak (which tastes like it could be made from (only the freshest) possum road kill).

I advance to my booth, upon which a server has piled enough honey-coated buns to shoot a bukkake film. I study my fellow patrons, slopping lasciviously. Watermelon-sized paunches. Appendages plagued with fatty-deposit goiters. Globulous heads and necks that undulate cephalopod-like. The remnants of a thousand plates of cinnamon buns and Asian pork roasts and hot bacon dressing gestating in their bellies, forming unspeakable, hippopotamus-shaped homunculi. Where have I seen these masses before? Sam’s Club? K-Mart? Cosco?

I have no intention of eating a bite of this immoveable feast. I have come only hoping to save one or two of my fellow man. I notice a lone-diner woman, as shapely as the Hunley sub, arise from two padded chairs and head for the dessert trough. Several tables over, a man—possibly Grimace’s stunt double and also a lone diner—leaves his table and heads for the men’s room. (Does he hope to snag a pocketful of urinal cakes?)

This is my chance. I play gastrointestinal savior and set Plate One at the women’s station and Plate Two at the man’s. Beside each plate, I leave a note on a napkin etched in butterscotch with a chicken bone: “You are what you eat.”

Mr. Dampfstain is filling in for columnist Harry S. Iarch, who is on assignment this week investigating the disappearance of several Korean employees at the Forest Drive Golden Corral, which occurred simultaneous to the launching of the Tuesday Chinese Buffet.