The Good Humor Man Read online

  They don’t understand. Knife — what’s the Spanish word for knife? No time for this. I grab my radio from its holster. Only now I notice the stains near its base. Battery leakage stains. Dead. The damn thing is dead.

  “Mitch!” I scream in the direction of the caves, the last direction I remember them heading in. “I’ve got a man down! I need a knife!” My voice, thin and hoarse, bounds back to me from the derelict McDonald’s. “A knife! Mitch! Brad! Mitch!”

  Something glints near my left knee. A pen. A chrome-plated Cross pen. I’d forgotten it was in my bag.

  I straddle the unconscious man’s chest. This will be clumsy, brutal, and messy. The flesh of his neck is loose and wrinkled. Pushing the pen through it is like pushing a broken needle through leather.

  I’m rewarded with a sudden spurt of blood. Someone to the right of me screams. The bleeding is worse than I’d anticipated. I reach for where my cloth bandages are spilled on the ground.

  The matron grabs my arm.

  “Let go! I need to staunch the bleeding —”

  Others in the crowd move in. The sight of blood has freed them. Freed them to tear into me. I shake my arm loose. They’re on me, four of them, trying to pull me off him.

  “You don’t understand — I’m a doctor — I need to save him —”

  The first blow skips off my shoulder blade. The second lands square. I think my nose is broken. I try covering my face.

  Boot in my ribs. A young man’s picked up the shotgun. He’s holding it by the barrel, like a baseball bat. Winding up like a major-league hitter. Emily, it’ll be soon now…

  Aahhh! My ears! A shotgun blast. From behind me.

  “—off him! You fuckers get off him, or the next shell goes between your goddamn eyes!”

  Mitch. He’s here. The angry faces scatter. I see the fading sun again, over the Arches. Someone hoists me off the ground. Brad. My patient is still bleeding from the hole I made in his throat. I see his chest move up and down, lungs pumping air. At least I accomplished that much.

  Brad gently but insistently pulls me away from him. “Brad, let go. He’ll bleed to death. Let me finish —”

  A man from the San Clemente squad turns his dragon on the pile of cheese. “I’ve got to finish. Mitch, make him let me go —”

  Mitch responds by grabbing my legs. “Lou, you’re out of your head.” The two of them hoist me like a piece of lumber. “Let’s get him back to the van, pronto.”

  My words rise from the bottom of the ocean.”… but… but he’ll bleed to death —”

  “Who? The brownie? Fuck him. Fuck all those miserable cocksuckers. We did what we came to do. Now we’re getting the hell out.”

  It’s all out of my hands.

  Upside down, the Golden Arches look like a pair of teats. They bob up and down, just out of reach, the breasts of a golden woman. A giant maiden who will suckle me on nourishing, fattening milk, if only I’d let her.

  The candy bars I stole for my father, crushed, broken, slide out of my vest pockets. I feel them slither down my torso and watch them fall into the street. I’m sorry, Dad. You won’t get your goodies. I’m sorry. Even though you were an absentee husband, an absentee father, always chasing after your latest celebrity client, I still love you. Everybody deserves a little pleasure. Even Dr. Walter Shmalzberg — the liposuctionist who killed Elvis Presley….

  CHAPTER 2

  I’m being carried… haven’t been carried since I was a little boy… this doesn’t feel real, almost like a session of Realité Magique…

  I’m with my wife. Emily and I just made love. She caresses my face with her fingertips, the way she used to. Before she died. I don’t want to think about the helmet or the migraine headache that will be coming soon. I don’t want to think about what I might be doing to my brain. Emily is here now, and she’s stroking my face.

  I’m in my examination room at the West Hollywood clinic. My plastic surgery practice gone, I put in a few shifts a week here as a general practitioner to make my rent. This room stinks of mold. The wood paneling has warped and pulled away from the wall, a result of a ceiling leak that’s never been fixed. The intercom buzzes incessantly. I was supposed to see my first patient an hour ago. But I’ve got better things to do.

  Emily and I have just finished breakfast. We’re on the veranda of the Monteverde Inn, enjoying the spectacular scenery of Costa Rica’s Central Valley, sipping the most delicious cups of coffee we’ve ever tasted. The mold scent is distracting, but a bit of extra concentration and it’s obliterated by the aroma of brewing coffee. The space between my eyes throbs. But this is worth it.

  Her breasts are as full and lush as the fruits of the tropics, radiating health and wholesomeness. No disease could ever maim such radiant globes —

  “Doc?”

  The mold smell returns. I’m back in the examining room. Humiliation and fright clear my head like a bucket full of ice water. I yank the RM helmet from my skull, turning to see who’s come into the room.

  It’s Mitch Reynolds, a sportsman who wrenched his knee. I’ve been giving him weekly shots of cortisone. “Doc? I’m sorry to, uh, disturb you. But I’ve got this business interview I can’t be late for, and those shots you give me are all that’ve been keeping me walking…”

  He stares at the RM helmet, illegally reconfigured, hanging from my hand. He’s no babe in the woods; he knows what it is. His eyes are equally surprised and pitying. The pity makes the rush of nausea worse than it normally would be. “That’s one of them Realité Magique gizmos, huh?”

  I nod, feeling the room begin to polka.

  “Uh, Doc,” he says, slowly, “I don’t mean to tell you your business or anything, but that can fuck you up pretty bad —”

  I stumble past him and vomit into the sink.

  “Lou, you can do it. Knock ‘em dead, pal. You’re about to kick the Good Humor Man movement in California into high gear.”

  Mitch follows me as I enter the State Capitol chambers and await my introduction. The confidence in Mitch’s voice helps dispel some of my stage fright. Some, not all.

  “Honorable ladies and gentlemen of the legislature. My name is Dr. Louis Shmalzberg. I work as a doctor of general medicine in a low-income neighborhood of West Hollywood.” I grip the lectern tightly, trying to keep my legs from shaking — I feel thrilled, empowered, more whole than anytime since Emily died. “Every day, I treat dozens of patients hobbled by obesity and the maladies it causes: pulmonary heart disease, cancer, diabetes, arthritis, asthma, and spinal strain. Every day, the State of California, now running annual deficits in the tens of billions, spends millions of dollars it doesn’t have treating these diseases. Diseases caused by the endless rivers of processed sugars and hydrogenated fats we all consume.

  “What can be done? Decades of public health education campaigns have failed. As a nation, we get fatter and sicker — and poorer — every year. Our bodies, trained by thousands of years of scarcity, are hooked on cheap, ubiquitous, empty calories. When citizens are unable to stop harming themselves, government has a moral duty to step in. Opium was once legal, readily available, and almost universally abused. Society made the choice that it not remain that way. We as a society can make the same choice regarding anti-nutritious, high-calorie foods.”

  I have the attention of every lawmaker in earshot. GD2, the second Great Depression, has frightened and demoralized them, bled California’s business community and government white. They’re eating from the palm of my hand. “I’ve heard many political leaders state that California can’t afford another experiment in Prohibition. That police forces, already strapped by shrinking tax bases, don’t have the resources to enforce a ban on obesity-generating foods. This is not a burden that government needs to take on alone. Just as the Minutemen rose from the citizenry to secure American independence, so today a legion of volunteers stand ready to secure our independence from the slavery of obesity.”

  Time to close the sale. “Deputize the men and women of th
e Good Humor Man movement, just as the lawmakers of Massachusetts and New York did three months ago. Let us make California strong again, both physically and fiscally. Let us make our home once more the Golden State, not the state of the Golden Arches.”

  Mitch is beaming. The bill will pass. We’re in.

  I wake up on a familiar-feeling sofa. It’s the sofa in my study. I’m home.

  I feel a hand on my shoulder. Am I still inside a dream?

  “You look like crap,” Mitch says. “How do you feel?”

  “Like… crap.”

  “You’ve got visitors.”

  “Who…?”

  “Group of school kids from Jerry Brown Elementary. They’re here for their nutrition history lesson.”

  My appointment for this semester. I’d completely forgotten. “Damn… I’d hate to disappoint… Karen Dissel.”

  Mitch smiles. “Yeah, I’ll bet you would. She’s been carrying a torch for you the size of the Statue of Liberty’s, and everybody in town knows it. She’s a little young for you, but that’s all right, you old dog. Long past time you got saddled back up again. Don’t worry — that busted nose gives you character.”

  I close my eyes and see Karen Dissel’s face, cheekbones protruding like the womanly breasts she never developed. Once upon a time, when I was still a plastic surgeon, her appearance was a look I gladly accepted tens of thousands of dollars to sculpt on a patient’s face. But now her gauntness makes me shiver. Karen looks like a tribeswoman from an old news show about an Ethiopian famine, only she’s the victim of a famine we’ve willingly brought on ourselves. A thirty-six-year-old woman dwelling inside a prepubescent body… I wonder if she’s ever menstruated. I wonder if she suffers at all from the thought she’ll never bear a child.

  “Mitch… I’m in no shape to go in front of those kids. Could you… do it for me, this one time? Do you know how to work the vid-9 unit?”

  “That old contraption? Yeah, I guess I can figure it out. Sure, Lou. I’ll fill in for you, don’t you worry none. Get some more rest. You’ve earned it.”

  I listen in as Mitch introduces himself to the class in the meeting room next to my study, answers a few questions about being a Good Humor Man, and then starts the vid-9 program. It’s sponsored by the MannaSantos Corporation, and it’s meant to be a sort of “Scared Thin” for the under-ten set. I’m rather fond of the ludicrous title: Beware the Fat Monster!

  “In the days before your parents were born, the people of the rest of the world looked at America and laughed at ‘The Land of the Fat’…”

  MannaSantos’s image-archaeologists did one hell of a job. Somehow they got their hands on a print of a nearly fifty-year-old German porno film which was marketed to European fat fetishists. Essentially a home movie of suburban American life, circa 1990, it features three-hundred-pound women wearing tank-tops and bright pink polyester shorts, exiting a neon-lit Krispy Kreme Doughnuts shop, their arms filled with bags of fried, sugar-coated dough. The filmmakers always shot them from behind, framing the view so that the screen overflows with jiggling buttock flesh.

  “America, land of the free and home of the brave, was suffocating beneath a sea of ugly, unhealthy fat. Something had to be done. Just as they had so many times before in the history of our country, hopeful Americans turned to science for an answer —”

  Here comes the bullshit. MannaSantos and the other chemical companies didn’t create genetically modified foods in response to some obesity crisis. They created them to more effectively market their own proprietary brands of herbicides and pesticides. They created them because they thought shoppers would pay more for bananas that could sit on supermarket shelves for months without rotting.

  Bread basket of the world… we thought we’d always keep that title, that it was our birthright. But we somehow forgot that the customer gets a vote, too. People around the world revolted against being forced to consume what they called “Frankenfoods.” Punishing tariffs spiraled into trade wars, which spiraled into the Second Great Depression, the worst years of my life. If it hadn’t been for the treasure my father gave me, his vacuum-packed legacy, I’d have lost this house, this clinic. And these children wouldn’t be sitting here today, absorbing these half-truths under my roof.

  I want to tell them the truth, my truth. I want to tell them that they are the first generation in American history who will be shorter than their mothers and fathers. I want to feed them the whole milk and whole cheese and natural fats their growing brains and bodies need.

  How did I get sucked in? Why did I let myself be seduced?

  As if it can read my mind, the vid-9 program offers an answer. It’s reached the part about Hud Walterson. The very first Good Humor Man. The founder of my guild.

  I’ve seen this program often enough to have memorized every frame. At the beginning of the public part of his story, Hud was the reluctant owner of nearly a thousand pounds of flesh, trapped in his own bed by immobilizing weight. He’d been an overweight child, his widowed mother’s only happiness, and by the time he’d turned thirty, his mother and aunts had fed him to the point where he weighed an estimated nine hundred pounds.

  Hud’s rescuers were a wealthy Beverly Hills dietician, whom my father knew socially, and the dietician’s partner, a washed-up Hollywood starlet who had gained new fame following her own dramatic weight loss under the dietician’s care. Emily and I saw Hud’s extrication from his bedroom (paramedics used a forklift), televised live on The Geraldo Rivera Show. Video simulcasts over the internet documented his stomach-stapling surgery, his various lipectomies, and the experimental drug treatments.

  As a TV stunt, his Beverly Hills handlers arranged for Hud to burn the small mountain of junk food his relatives had stockpiled during his years trapped in his former home. Hud insisted that the producers let him carry out the burning with a military flamethrower. I see him again, still mountainously impressive at just over five hundred pounds, his face flushed with passion, holding the nozzle of his flamethrower in both hands like a priest preparing to drive out the Devil. America witnessed the birth of a new hero when Hud waded into the pile of snack cakes, corn chips, candy bars, and chocolate bunnies, his eyes flashing with an almost-palpable hatred as he incinerated his former treats.

  Hud Walterson was the right man with the right gimmick at exactly the right time. The country was desperate for a new craze, anything to divert attention from the international economic meltdown. The national mood was ripe for a big, fat scapegoat. And Hud Walterson, making as many as five or six paid appearances a week to burn up heaps of junk food, pointed his accusing finger at a juicy one — the notoriously gluttonous eating habits of the average American, bankrupting the American health system with a plague of cardiovascular disease, joint degeneration, and cancer.

  Emily and I saw Hud in person, at an event sponsored by a Los Angeles chain of body toning spas. She had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer; I hoped that taking her to this presumably goofy event would help lift her spirits. Hud was down to three hundred pounds then, a third of his peak weight. The hundreds of dollars’ worth of snack foods he was to burn had been donated by local grocery stores; I remember thinking how bizarre that was. Hud Walterson attacked that food, incinerated it with the frightening, total conviction of a Crusader leading the charge to recapture the Holy Land from the infidels.

  Emily remarked that if she could manage to fight her disease with just half of Hud’s emotional dedication, the cancer would shrivel inside her like a box of MoonPies bathed in napalm.

  Things began going downhill for Hud not long after we saw him, however. His body betrayed him; it fought to regain the pounds he’d shed, lowering its metabolism and increasing its production of insulin. With every pound he regained, he lost another paid endorsement, another donation of snack foods to burn. But having captured the national spotlight, he refused to let it go. Following in the hallowed footsteps of Bonnie and Clyde and Billy the Kid, Hud Walterson became an outlaw.

  Snac
k food warehouses in California and Nevada burned to the ground. An ice cream factory in Seattle lit the night. Neighbors of the destroyed building swore that just as the fire started they’d heard a tinny calliope playing children’s songs. Urban legends quickly sprang up — Hud Walterson had hijacked an ice cream truck in Las Vegas to use as his getaway car; Hud was being secretly financed by Jane Fonda and the Turner media empire; he’d bought a whole fleet of secondhand ice cream trucks to use on missions; Hud and his gang would not rest until all of America had been purged of junk food.

  Hud returned to the big time just three weeks before Emily died. I was with her in her hospital room when accounts of his latest provocation exploded onto all the national news channels. A man with a video camera had caught Hud in the act at a McDonald’s in Salinas. Hud was back up over the five-hundred-pound mark; his jowly face was tired and strained as he ordered employees and patrons out of the restaurant. In true Robin Hood fashion, he tossed a five dollar bill to every patron he’d deprived of a meal. He no longer had his famous flamethrower; instead, he dragged two huge gasoline cans around the restaurant, splashing the liquid on grills, deep fryers, cash registers, and rows of cheeseburgers pre-assembled for the lunch hour. Emily and I saw the videotaped fire replayed on dozens of newscasts during the next two days, endlessly repeated on CNN and Fox News. The hypnotic images temporarily distracted us from what lay ahead for us.

  That incident was the spark that ignited dozens of copycat arsons around the nation. By that time I wasn’t paying attention. Emily was going very quickly. Her double mastectomy had failed to halt the advance of the cancer. Chemotherapy and radiation treatments provided only temporary roadblocks. I was a physician. But I was unable to do a thing to save my own wife. Three months later, the future we’d planned for and everything I’d loved about my life were buried along with her.

  Five months after she died, the law finally caught up with Hud Walterson. And I was there in person, just as I had been at his start. It was around seven in the evening. I was walking back to the garage where I’d parked my car, following a shift at the McHardy Clinic in West Hollywood. I remember very little about that time. I sleepwalked through most of my shifts, writing basic prescriptions for the flu, diabetes, and hypertension, hazily witnessing how chronic neglect and poor habits led to crippling chronic disease.