Skipping Towards Gomorrah (26 page)

Readers of
Consumer Reports
magazine—no doubt awestruck by the enormous portions—ranked Claim Jumper as the fourth-best chain restaurant in the United States. If volume is the best measure of a restaurant's performance (and not taste and texture), then perhaps Claim Jumper
is
the fourth-best restaurant chain in the United States. Two old ladies in the old Woody Allen joke would certainly approve: Sitting in a restaurant, one complains that the food is terrible. “Yes,” the second old lady responds, “and the portions are small.” Those old ladies would love the Claim Jumper, where the food may be terrible food but the portions are
huge
.

Writing about gluttony, Saint Gregory warns us of the Five Fingers of the Devil's Hand: eating at inappropriate hours, “overdelicacy” in a person's choice of meat and drink, overindulgence, overly curious in experimentation with exotic food and drink, and greedy table manners. Americans have only three fingers of the Devil's Hand, as we overindulge, have awful table manners, and eat at all hours. We are not, however, particularly picky about
what
we will and will not eat; everything set before us at the Claim Jumper was garbage, and the place was packed.

But we didn't really come here for the chicken or the ribs or the onion rings. We came for the cake, the Motherlode, and though we were already full (our meals came with corn muffins as big as our heads that—surprise!—were just huge pieces of yellow cake), we nevertheless did our duty and ordered a piece of chocolate cake. À la mode.

We'd been at the Claim Jumper for two hours by the time we were ready for our cake; while the hostess was anxious to seat us, the kitchen didn't seem all that anxious to feed us. For two hours I'd been watching waiters set down Motherlodes in front of other diners, and each and every customer had the exact same reaction: Their eyes went wide, they laughed, and then looked up at the other people at their table, expressions of shock and delight playing on their faces.

When our waitress, Lisa, set our slab of Motherlode down on our table, Tim and I gave each other that same shocked and delighted look. Only then did I realize that I'd seen this look before, the look we just shared, the look I'd been seeing all night, over and over again, as slabs of Motherlode were set on tables. It was the look people give each other just before they jump out of airplanes wearing parachutes or off bridges with bungee cords wrapped around their ankles. It was a wide-eyed, nervous, I-can't-believe-we're-going-to-do-this look. Sitting in this intersection tarted up as a restaurant, ordering cake, we were all sharing the high we usually experience in moments of death-defying danger, however contrived the circumstances. On airplanes and bridges, the look asks, “What happens if my parachute doesn't open?” or, “What happens if the bungee cord breaks?” At the Claim Jumper, it asks, “What happens if I eat this whole piece of cake?” The answer to all three questions is the same: You will die. That's what makes jumping out of airplanes and off bridges so exciting—and it's what makes that piece of chocolate cake so exciting.

The whole point of this corporate gimmick of a chocolate cake is its death-defying size, not its taste—and it truly was an enormous piece of cake. Eating an entire piece of Motherlode in one go could kill any normal person and that, of course, is the point. The Claim Jumper chain has successfully repackaged dessert as an extreme sport, but instead of asking “How fast can I ride my bike down this mountain?” diners at the Claim Jumper ask themselves, “How much of this foot-and-a-half-long, eight-inch-wide piece of chocolate cake can I stuff in my mouth?”

The most exciting part of jumping out of an airplane is the moment before, that split-second when you make the final decision to jump, to physically propel yourself out of the aircraft and into thin air. Ask anyone who jumps. The descent is almost beside the point, a two-minute anticlimax as you float down to earth. It's that split-second, death-defying decision to jump that keeps you coming back. While the Claim Jumper does provide its customers with an almost perfect death-defying-dessert experience, please be warned: The experience is complete before you take a single bite. The death-defying rush comes when you decide whether or not to
order
a piece of that cake. We'd seen the Motherlode when we walked in, and we'd seen it on plates hitting tables all over the restaurant while we ate our dinner. Lisa even brought a homey-looking dessert tray filled with plastic replicas of all the Claim Jumper's desserts to our table before we ordered. We were already full from dinner. We looked at each other. Would we order dessert? Yes, we would! Let's do it! Let's go! Go! GO! And so . . . the rush. We did it! We jumped! We ordered a piece of that huge fucking cake! Dude!

Then Lisa had to go and ruin our high by bringing us a piece of cake. The Motherlode she set down on our table looked a lot like the fake cake in the pastry case, but with some slight imperfections: the frosting was nicked off one corner, the cake wasn't perfectly centered on the plate. With a piece of the cake finally sitting in front of us, I suddenly felt the same way I do when I find myself sitting in the front passenger seat of a huge gas-sucking SUV: I felt like a complete asshole.

The Motherlode is to chocolate cake what the Ford Expedition is to automobiles: a ridiculous exaggeration, a self-conscious, pushy, no-one-really-needs-something-that-big, show-offy parody of a piece of chocolate cake. We picked up our forks and took our first bites. Like two guys floating down to earth with parachutes strapped to our backs, we realized that the truly transcendent moment had come and gone and that the rest—the falling, the eating—was all anticlimax. As cheap chocolate cake goes (and I'm a fan), the Motherlode was a disappointment. Like everything else at Claim Jumper, the cake was greasy; each bite instantly turned into a sort of gritty paste in our mouths, and the only clue that the cake was supposed to be chocolate was its color.

My eating friend and I did our solemn duty, though. With the help of the pot we smoked in the car, we managed to polish off our Motherlode. Jerry, Robert, Rush, and William would've been proud of us.

Envy has shaped and continues to shape our political culture. That is
probably why it is front-page news in the
New York Times
that the
United States displays greater inequality in wealth than other industri-
alized nations. The unstated assumption that makes this worthy of the
front page is that there is something morally wrong, even shameful, in
having greater wealth inequalities than other societies.

—Robert Bork

—Robert Bork

 

 

 

 

I
wouldn't have to bring much with me to the pricey weight-loss spa outside Malibu. Whatever I wore on the daily hikes through the mountains would be washed at night by the maid and ready to wear the next day. The Ashram would also provide me with sweats, T-shirts, and bathrobes; many Ashram veterans, the voice message continued, arrive at the spa with just the clothes on their backs, their hiking shoes, and their toothbrushes.

Just a short drive from Cher's house, the Ashram has been helping affluent Americans drop unwanted pounds for more than twenty-five years. The spa's weight-loss program consists of a week's worth of forced marches up and down the mountains in the desert combined with a strict low-calorie diet. I'm not much of a hiker, I'm not affluent, and I didn't like the idea of some stranger taking control of my diet, but . . . I had packed on ten pounds dining with the ladies of NAAFA, stuffing myself at the buffets in Las Vegas, and eating at the German restaurant in the Julien Inn in Dubuque. In real life I could never afford to go to a place like the Ashram—the weeklong program costs $3,200, almost $500 bucks per day—but in book-deal life, well, how could I afford not to go?

Whenever someone points out that the rich have it better in the United States than the rest of us—better schools, better tax cuts, better spas—conservative pundits and politicians accuse him of engaging in “class warfare.” Class warfare is a no-no in the United States because we're not supposed to have classes here, just taxpayers and citizens, all of us equal before the law. That's the way it's supposed to work. In reality, we've got classes, and a class war has been raging in the United States since Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980. Since 1980, the rich have gotten richer, and the working class has gotten screwed. Americans with full-time, minimum-wage jobs live below the poverty line; millions of Americans have little or no access to health care; and underfunded schools trap the children of poor parents in an unbreakable cycle of poverty.

While we're told there isn't money in the budget for, say, a national health-care program—which would do more to help working and lower-middle class American families than a thousand years' worth of Republican “pro-family” rhetoric—there never seems to be enough money in the budget for a program that would benefit the majority of American workers. There's always money, however, for a new corporate tax break, for another round of tax cuts for the wealthy. You've got to hand it to the Republicans—they've been wildly successful at convincing lower- and working-class Americans to vote against their own class interests (remember Reagan Democrats?), and they've somehow managed to convince working-class Americans that what's good for rich Americans is good for America, period, despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary.

Which brings me to envy and the Ashram.

According to Peraldus, a thirteenth-century Dominican friar, envy is the only sin that does not delight in itself. While lusty gluttons derive pleasure indulging themselves in sex and food respectively, the envious succeed only in making themselves miserable. Envy “creates sorrow out of joy,” said Peraldus. I wasn't looking for sorrow at the Ashram, just envy, and a kind of envy that's taboo in the United States: class envy. Like the
New York Times,
I am distressed by the gap between the rich and poor in the United States. I don't have anything against rich people in general; like all people, I wouldn't mind being one of the rich people. Still, I'm often annoyed when the rich flaunt their wealth in a world of want. Using some of my publisher's money to buy a week at the Ashram would not only help me drop those NAAFA, Claim Jumper, and Vegas pounds, but it would also expose me to people who have more money than I do and to people who were in better shape than I was—and, really, aren't looks and money the two things Americans are most envious of in others?

Americans may heap praise on the virtuous, we may admire them, but very few of us envy them—that is, we don't want to
be
them. Based on a close reading of
People
magazine in the eighties and nineties, it's clear that Americans loved and admired Mother Teresa, who gave away all of her possessions and dedicated her life to serving the poor. Very few Americans if any at all envied her enough to emulate her. The people we envy, the people whose joys fill us with sorrow, are the rich, beautiful, famous, and fuckable. Mother Teresa, sadly, was only one of those four things.

At the Ashram, I hoped to observe the rich and the beautiful in a place where they don't have to interact with the poor and the ugly. Perhaps I would leave the Ashram with a slimmer, trimmer figure, fewer concerns about the gap between rich and poor, a new appreciation for tax cuts targeted at wealthy families, gated communities, and the wit and wisdom of Steve Forbes. That I would be able to write off my week's stay at the Ashram was the clincher: Seven days at a spa, hiking in the mountains, mixing with the swells, writing it all off—it's nice work if you can get it and, hey, I could get it for free.

 

P
rovided I could get into the Ashram.

The spa takes only thirteen paying guests per week, which means only 676 rich folks can get into the place in a year. When I first called the Ashram to make a reservation, I was told there wasn't much hope. They were booked solid for the next ten months. I wasn't even in at the Ashram yet, and I was already feeling envious. Other people—people with more money or better connections—already had reservations! Their joy, my sorrow. I was invited to put my name on the waiting list, but I was warned not to sit at home by the phone. Openings were rare, and the odds of getting in any time soon were slim. I hadn't been on the waiting list for more than a month when I got a call about a last-minute cancellation. If I could be at a hotel near the Los Angeles airport by noon the next day, Mary told me, the open slot was mine for $3,200. I booked a pricey, last-minute flight to Southern California, reassuring myself that my flight, like my week at the Ashram, was fully tax deductible.