Skipping Towards Gomorrah (25 page)

With me, Tim can share a sinful passion that his girlfriend will never understand; with Tim, I can tempt a fate (obesity) that Terry never has to worry about. Since eating together feels so much like we're cheating on our partners, I had to say no when Terry tried to invite himself along on a date Tim and I made to eat at Claim Jumper, a West Coast restaurant chain famous for its huge portions. Tim and I planned to go MAD.

 

I
t was a chocolate cake that brought me to Claim Jumper.

A seven-layer chocolate cake taller than it is wide, the Motherlode confronted us as soon as we entered the Claim Jumper. The cake squatted in a glass pastry case facing the door, looking for all the world like an upside-down trash can covered in chocolate frosting and studded with walnuts. The frighteningly phallic cake looked enormous and threatening in the pastry case, dwarfing the enormous pieces of cheesecake, six-inch square brownies, and grapefruit-size muffins arranged around it. Since the display case holding all these superpastries faces the restaurant's supersize doors, the Motherlode is the first thing every diner who enters a Claim Jumper sees.

Stunned by the sight of this chocolate cake—picture the mountain in
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
covered in chocolate frosting—it took me a moment to notice the teenager peering over the top of the pastry case. The hostess had to ask us for the number of people in our party three times before I finally heard her. She took our names and told us the wait would be about forty-five minutes. Then she handed us a pager and a square piece of cardboard with DANCE HALL GIRLS printed on it. Apparently, when our table is ready, she would beep us; if we failed to respond, she intended to humiliate us by shouting, “Dance Hall Girls, party of two, Dance Hall Girls.”

There are twenty-nine Claim Jumper restaurants in California, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, and Washington State. It doesn't much matter which Claim Jumper we're in, nor does it much matter what city or state we're in. All Claim Jumpers have the same Old West theme, the same slowly rotating fans and Tiffany-style lamps, the same tin ceilings and wood posts, and the same moose and buffalo heads staring down from the same faux river-rock walls. And like so many restaurants in the United States, the Claim Jumper we visited served food to white folks prepared for us by brown folks. What makes Claim Jumper unique, though, is not the Old West theme, but the portions. Everything at Claim Jumper is huge, from single orders of onion rings that can feed eight people, to their thirty-two-ounce serving of prime rib, to that monstrous chocolate cake in the display case. Each Claim Jumper location seats five hundred people, and all together the twenty-nine Claim Jumper restaurants take in about $200 million per year.

The Claim Jumper location I visited sits in the middle of nowhere, off a highway, not far from a mall—all Claim Jumpers are in the middle of nowhere, off highways, near malls. The only way to get to a Claim Jumper is by car; the only way to leave is by car. The food is trucked in, the waiters and cooks and hostesses park their cars in the far-off corners of the huge parking lots that surrounds the restaurants. We drove past a Tony Roma's Famous For Ribs, an Outback Steak House, a Chi-Chi's, two Houlihan's, and a Rainforest Cafe on our way to the Claim Jumper. Like those other mall restaurants, a Claim Jumper isn't really a place. It's an intersection. Cars filled with customers cross paths here with trucks filled with food.

While we're both gluttons, I have one distinct advantage over Tim when it comes to avoiding obesity: I don't smoke dope quite so often as Tim does. Marijuana makes gluttons out of normal people, so it's probably not a great idea for people who are already gluttons to smoke dope in a car parked outside a restaurant that serves foot-and-half-high pieces of chocolate cake. But the suburbs make Tim nervous, so after we put our names on the greasy waiting list, we went back out to the car, beeper in hand, and took the edge off. I hadn't planned to get high, but I took a hit. I figured that, like a runner doing wind sprints before a race, a little appetite-enhancing pot would help me get through the marathon of a meal we were about to embark on.

“Two hits should probably do us both,” he whispered.

As I pointed out in the “Sloth” chapter, I don't smoke a lot of dope, and two hits can do me in. But I didn't want to make Tim feel self-conscious about how much dope he was smoking, so I took a second hit.

“You know, the car is a long way from the restaurant,” Tim said, taking a third hit, “and we wouldn't want to come all the way back here in the middle of dinner. . . .”

The Dance Hall Girls wound up taking a third and a fourth hit before we stumbled out of the car and back to the Claim Jumper. Once inside, I was drawn back to the Motherlode, which I stared at with an intensity that unnerved the hostess; she shot me some dirty looks from behind the pastry case. I only managed to pull myself away from the pastry display case when I noticed that there were pieces of Motherlode cake on plates all along the counter surrounding the Claim Jumper's pizza oven. I floated over. The teenage white boys and Mexican men making pizza didn't seem to mind that I was leaning over their counter, staring at the slabs of chocolate cake.

“It's plastic,” said one of the boys behind the counter, gesturing towards the cake. He had a mouthful of braces and was looking at me through narrowed eyes. Over the pizza boy's head a sign in Old West lettering read PIZZA & DESSERTS GRILL EST. 1849 RE-EST. 1977.

“Plastic?” I asked.

“Fake,” he said. “That piece, the stuff in the pastry case. It's for display only, you can't eat it.”

I rushed back to the pastry case. Of course! There was a single slice of Motherlode cake on a plate in the pastry case, but the towering cake itself was uncut—and the piece that was on the plate was perfectly uniform! The frosting's complexion was unblemished (no nicks from the slicing, no dents from being set on the plate), and the layers of brown frosting between layers of dark cake were perfectly even. What's more, all the pastries on display were fake! The massive slices of cheesecake weren't sweaty, like they would be in a cooler, there were no grease marks in the two or three empty spots on the trays of brownies and cookies; there were no crumbs anywhere near the muffins. Plastic pastries!

I grabbed Tim and pointed out the fake cake, the fake cookies, the fake brownies, the fake muffins, the fake cheesecakes . . . and suddenly the Buffalo heads and fake cakes and the surly hostesses and fat patrons and the pizza grill established in 1849 all seemed pretty hilarious. We were laughing so hard we doubled over. We tried to get ourselves under control, but no doubt we looked like two very high, very skinny guys who didn't really belong in a restaurant filled with large, sober, suburban gluttons. Heavy women in baggy T-shirts moved away from us, while grown men in baggy shorts and baseball hats looked around, trying to figure out what was so funny. I thought we were about to be tossed out when the hostess crooked a finger at us, calling us back up to . . . oh, no! NOT THE PASTRY CASE FULL OF FAKE CAKES!

Instead of throwing us out, the hostess quickly showed us to an enormous oversize booth. We'd been waiting for only twenty-five minutes, and our pager hadn't gone off, so I asked the hostess if she was seating us early to get us the hell out of the waiting area. She just smiled tightly, handed us menus, turned on a heel and marched back to . . . oh, no! THE PASTRY CASE FULL OF FAKE CAKES!

 

W
e were still laughing about the fake cakes when our waitress arrived and set two water glasses on our table—two enormous water glasses that, when we held them up and took a sip, made us look like toddlers waiting for Mom to bring us PB&Js. Soon we were laughing our asses off about—oh, no!—the huge water glasses! The water glasses at the Claim Jumper were not an accident, if you ask me, nor were they designed to spare Claim Jumper's waiters the agony of refilling our water glasses (that was our waitress's explanation). No, like the oversize plates the food is served on and the oversize stools at the bar for people too hungry to wait for a table, and the oversize booth we were escorted to by the furious hostess, the Claim Jumper's enormous water glasses are designed to make enormous Americans feel like they're not really that enormous. “Come on,” the glasses say, “you're a tiny little kid. Have some onion rings, have a piece of cake. . . .”

After our waitress told us about the specials and left to get our drinks, we tried to focus on the menu: burgers, ribs, chicken, pizza. While the portions we'd seen waiters and waitresses carrying around the restaurant on platter-size plates were huge—more than living up to the hype—the prices on the menu were no higher than those at restaurants serving normal size portions of the exact same foods.

“Jesus, how do they make money doing this?” Tim asked, looking through the menu.

“Yeah, how do they do it?” I said.

Then a disturbing thought popped into our pot-addled heads—suddenly we knew how the Claim Jumper did it, how they sold huge portions at regular prices and turned a profit. Or, I should say, we
thought
we knew how they did it. Before I share this realization let me preface it with one fact about pot: Mild paranoia is a well-known side effect of smoking marijuana. So Tim and I were both feeling a little paranoid when we concluded that the only way Claim Jumper could sell twice as much food for the same amount of money as other restaurants was by . . . God Almighty . . . was by . . . buying the
cheapest, rankest, lowest-end
cuts of “meat” that they could possibly find. Claim Jumper's first concern when ordering food from wholesalers would have to be mass, Tim observed, quantity, not quality.

A spokesperson for Claim Jumper might insist that they can sell huge portions at low prices because they buy quality foods in bulk, and that may very well be the case. There wasn't a spokesperson for Claim Jumper in our booth with us, however, and so no one challenged our conclusion about the food. Our conclusion—whether it's true or not, whether Claim Jumper buys quality in bulk or buys crap in bulk—had an immediate impact on our order. Tim had originally planned to have the meat loaf, but we quickly ruled
that
item out. Meat loaf is ground beef, and there's no floor with ground beef. You can grind up lips, assholes, udders, pigeons, rats, and busboys, call it “ground beef,” shape it into a loaf, and serve it without having to worry about the customers catching on.

So the burgers, nachos, potpies, and meat loaf were out.

We figured that we couldn't be too badly abused by the whole roast chicken. With a whole chicken, there's a floor. Claim Jumper would have to serve us something that, after preparation, looked like something that was once a live chicken. When it comes to a whole chicken, there's a point past which no restaurant chain can dare sink and still get away with calling the thing on your plate chicken. I ordered the whole roast chicken. Tim ordered barbecued baby-back ribs. Like chicken, ribs have to look like ribs. They might come from the scrawniest, most underfed, miserable pig that ever lived and died in an airless shed on an industrial farm, but they would have to be recognizable ribs, not udders and assholes and index fingers.

Unless . . .

After Marshmallow Peeps, the scariest processed food product currently available in the United States is McDonald's McRib Sandwich. Lift the top of the bun off a McRib Sandwich and the meat sitting on the bottom of the bun looks just like ribs, with familiar rectangular ridges where the rib bones cut through the meat. But there are no bones in a McRib Sandwich—no one is dumb enough to buy a sandwich with bones in it, not even people who eat at Mc-Donald's. So why will we buy a sandwich with a processed patty made from shredded pig meat that has been sculpted to look like a tiny slab of ribs, bones and all? I suppose it was possible that the Claim Jumper's “whole” chicken or “slab of baby-back ribs” could be from shredded bits of the cheapest pigs and chickens, just like a McRib Sandwich. And even if my chicken arrived with what appeared to be bones in it, well, how could I be certain that what was on my plate wasn't processed chicken scraps mushed into a “whole” chicken shaped over a set of reusable fiberglass chicken bones?

While I contemplated these and other horrors, Tim asked our waitress to get us some onion rings. We were going MAD.

Everywhere we looked while we waited for our food, we could see uniformly fat men and women digging into meat loaf and ribs, Motherlodes and slabs of cheesecake—unlike the NAAFA convention, no one was holding back. This particular Claim Jumper wasn't full of people who wanted to be exonerated for being fat; they came fat or they came to get fat. One of the women who spoke at NAAFA's WLS seminar described her out-of-control eating as slow-motion suicide. There was no one at Claim Jumper who appeared to be eating himself or herself to death—no one in a motorized cart, no one who weighed more than three hundred pounds—but there was something perverse and self-punishing about Claim Jumper. What self-destructive impulse drives people already struggling with their weight to go out of their way to eat in a restaurant where they're going to be overserved?

 

S
o besides that, Mama Cass, how was the food?

Huge. The bushel of onion rings our waitress brought to the table could have fed a dorm full of stoned college students, and while our beefsteak tomato salads were inedible—the huge slices of bright red tomato crunched like celery and tasted like Styrofoam—my whole chicken and Tim's barbecued ribs were, if not delicious, still not the worst things that ever happened to a couple of farm animals. The chicken was mysteriously moist, if completely without flavor, leading Tim to conclude that the bird had been dunked in a deep-fat fryer before it took a quick spin on the Claim Jumper's wood-fired rotisserie. Tim's ribs were flavorful, but the meat was not “falling off the bone,” as the menu promised.