So after conquering the Dom, I had to celebrate so I ate cake out of the trash. Or was it vegan chocolate chips out of the cupboard with peanut butter, vanilla rice dream, and a soymilk chaser? It's usually a bit of a blur, my 4AM kitchen rape and pillaging. I go to sleep at 2:30 or 3AM after watching my third Sports Center of the night, in between Howard Stern re-runs, a late game from the west coast and Nerve whoring. Surprisingly, I'm anxious when my head hits the pillow. Then, "all girls hate you. You'll never work again. You're going to die very soon because you're worthless and God, who doesn't even exist, thinks you suck. And you're gonna die of AIDS from Mistress Fiera. But I didn't do anything. Who knows where that fucking rod has been. But I watched her clean it with surgical scrub!"
I called the CDC, who barely will talk to me anymore I've called them so much.
"CDC AIDS hotline," the Jamaican man said in a think accent.
"Hi, yeah, is it possible to get HIV from... If a man had a steel rod inserted into... can you get HIV from an inanimate object if it's been doused in Betadine and in the air for a few seconds first?"
"What are you talking about, Sir?"
"If someone had, if a man had a steel rod inserted into his penis is there any risk of getting HIV."
"Why did you have a steel rod inserted in your penis?"
"Look, Sir, I don't need to discuss that. I just need some information..."
"Are you the guy that calls over and over all the time in the middle of the night?"
"Maybe I am and maybe I'm not but your job is to answer whatever questions I have whenever and however often I need them answered."
"Maybe a psychiatric hotline would help you more."
"Thank you for your counsel, but the only information I require from you tonight is if I can get..."
"No."
"No way?"
"No way."
"Even if the steel rod had old HIV semen or liquid on it from someone before it was stuck into mmm...y friend?"
"Your 'friend' is not at risk as long as it wasn't taken directly out of a warm body that was infected with HIV and somehow had semen or blood on it and then quickly was inserted into your 'friend' without being sterilized."
We went back and forth for another few minutes but then I felt safe enough to resume taking out my anxiety with just my eating obsession and not my dying one.
I rose from the computer (having got the CDC number off it) in a wonderfully familiar trance, one that carries with it the peaceful excitement of a child awakening throughout the night on Christmas Eve, and sleepwalk to the kitchen. If I'm in one of my "healthy phases" I eat an apple, and proud of my restraint, go back to bed. If I'm in one of my "unhealthy" - well, we don't like to judge ourselves too harshly so lets just call it one of my "doing the best I can" phases - I open the cupboard where the vegan chocolate chips are. Let's clear this up right now because you really don't want to be one of those people I hate who say "You mean carob chips?" No, I don't. Vegan chocolate chips are not carob. They are full-blooded chocolate; they just don't contain any dairy and are sweetened with malt extract rather than white sugar. They taste like regular chocolate chips.
I alternate mini handfuls of chocolate chips with little spoon, fork, or knife-fulls (in that order) of peanut butter. The weapon is contingent on what stage of dirty dish insanity I'm ignoring in my sink that has left the clean utensil drawer empty. I won't go to the final option of chopsticks though; even I'm not that crazy. I'll wash a spoon before I do that. I alternate the chocolate and peanut butter getting more and more parched, feeling more and more sublime with my eyes closed, trying to stay asleep like in a beautiful dream as I quietly devour the half bag of chips and the combined three tablespoons of peanut butter. I negotiate amounts which are acceptable for my night eating so as not to make me fat, calories I've carefully banked by scantily eating throughout the day so I can cash them now. More and more parched, salty-sweet, chocolatey-carby, like the best foreplay ever, all leading up to the last bite which I finish chewing as I put the peanut butter back in the fridge, about to cum as I grab the perfectly cold soymilk and just as the last swallow goes down, with the precision of a NASA launching ... cold soymilk. Gulp, gulp, gulp, pause, gulp, gulp, gulp, ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
That's the good version. The not so good version goes something like this: "I'm a fucking grown man with will power and I can have cake in the house and not eat it!" This is during the "experimenting with moderation" phase. It emerges every six months or so between the "healthy" and the "doing the best I can" phases. In this phase, after the "you can have cake in the house and not eat it in the night" voice has allowed unfinished cake to remain in the house, I wake up at 4AM and head for the kitchen, a fierce debate instantly beginning. "DO NOT EAT THE CAKE! You don't NEED it. But I WANT IT! I'm a fucking adult, if I want the God damn cake, I can have it! Don't you have any will power?! Do you want to be a loveless, alone, fat piece of shit? One of those pathetic people who goes through life 20 pounds fat just because they can't not eat cake in the night but they're not so fat that people point at them and go, "Look, there's a fat guy!" The kind of guy who will never know how it feels to have washboard abs like Brad Pitt? Hey, I'm not twenty anymore. Two things. First, you never had washboards abs, even when you were twenty. And two, Brad Pitt is forty like you are and he somehow manages to figure it out! EAT IT! NO! YES! NO!" Sometimes I eat it, sometimes I don't. When I do, at least I let myself enjoy it. Sort of. When I don't, I proudly march back to my bed, my stomach full with a glass of water, feeling like a fucking champion. Until the next night, when sure I've beaten it, take to the kitchen again, and scarf every inch of cake I can find.
This leads to the LIGHT BULB ABOVE THE HEAD IDEA. A sign to everyone else in the world that reads "Turn and run away!" but I see as the margin of my brilliance. The idea is... "If I throw the cake in the trash I won't eat it because it's garbage now." Mensa, baby! I know if I'm going to eat the cake out of the trash before my feet hit the floor. And if I've spoiled it with detergent, I eat around the detergent. If believing it isn't safe in my internal apartment trash, I throw it in the communal trash in the hallway, I still eat it. Once, the service elevator door opened and the porter, looking to steal away my trash bounty, caught me in full bite, chocolate smeared on my face when I didn't want to waste the time to go back inside and eat it. He just looked at me with a steely stare, "You done?" Pointing to the stinking industrial can of the seventeenth floor's waste, more affectionately known as my evening dessert. I made sure I got all my cake out. "Take it. And then just the check please." I didn't say that last part.
So, I rummage through the communal trash until I find my cake and take it back into my apartment. The only way it's safe is soiled with detergent, mutilated into crushed bits and scattered among other people's garbage. It has to actually be touching my neighbor's decaying chicken carcasses, not only safely touching my decaying chicken carcasses in the womb of my own trash bag or it would be totally in the game. Kind of like how you would touch your own inner child's shit if you had to for some reason but no one else's. The last line of defense is the "keep absolutely nothing in the house" strategy. Knowing the refrigerator and the cupboards are bare, I will always ransack them anyway hoping to find some forgotten gem from whenever ago. In twenty years of reconnaissance I've never found even a single chocolate chip. But one night, right there safely tucked on the right side of the shadowy fridge, I thought I saw a suspicious unknown plastic take-out container? What the hell was that? I knew everything in my fridge and I hadn't gotten any food that lived in one of those containers that week for sure. I cautiously opened it up. It was white on top. Some old moldy thing? Gross. I prodded it with a fork because I still wanted to detect its origin. The fork moved through the mold easily and softly. Strange. Is that mold? I turned on the light. I literally could not believe my eyes. A fresh piece of Boston cream pie? I don't think I've ever eaten a piece of Boston cream pie in my life. I'm not sure how I even know what it is. All I know is that that is a piece of chocolate pie with whip cream on it. Boston cream pie right? I quickly turned the light off in case it was a dream, I didn't want to wake myself up, and cautiously took a bite. OH MY GOD! It was the best tasting thing I had ever tasted in my life. I ate it slowly, savoring every bite of this immaculate cakeception until the only graham cracker crust bits remained. I smashed them onto the back of a fork, finished them off and went back to bed, truly feeling I had been visited by God.
Then I realized the maid had been there that day and she had left it, but unfortunately it didn't matter. I'm ruined, because every night now I am sure I will find something.
Posted by Eric Schaeffer at 2:54 PM