by Paul Theroux
Willie said, ‘I can handle this,’ and seemed pleased that he was getting any money at all.
‘I want you to be happy,’ Millroy said, when he doled out the money.
If you treat people right they do it back, he said. The Sons and Daughters would have moved in if there had been room for them. Millroy said they were more grateful because they spent each night at home, and they could see the difference between their houses and the Day One Diner – how limited their houses were.
‘And their food at home must be wicked,’ I said.
‘They are going home to houses of death,’ Millroy said. ‘That’s why they are so relieved to come here.’
After we had cleaned up the diner and they had gone home, Millroy locked the doors and fed me, sitting in front of me, holding his spoon.
‘Eat,’ he said. ‘I want to be responsible for everything inside you.’
And while he spooned and I ate, he came up with ideas.
‘What about writing a book?’ he would say. ‘I can’t write but I can talk. You take it down.’
Or maybe two books, he said. One about his life – how he had discovered the obvious secret of eating right, his personal testimony about escaping from the wilderness of his fatness and called The Darkness of the Body or This Is My Body – how he had become a magician. The second book would be called The Day One Program, about the food itself, the diet, the scriptures, with selected recipes for the dishes we served in the diner: ‘Daniel Pottage,’ ‘Ezekiel Bread,’ ‘Promised Land Lentils,’ ‘Nahum’s Fig Bars,’ ‘Bethel Barley Cakes,’ the vegetable salad he called ‘Herbage,’ and all the rest.
‘Explain how I got here,’ he said. ‘And why.’
Another late-night idea was containers – sell all sorts of sturdy containers for storing Day One food. Or commission a whole new translation of the Book – emphasis on exact meanings of food items – with recipes listed after Revelation.
Every morning, people were waiting on the sidewalk for us to open up. Breakfast was popular – fresh bread, honey, fruit and yogurt, and tea of Day One herbs and spices. Millroy was especially pleased to see that the most faithful eaters were young, the students, the secretaries, the school kids, the local workers.
Many of them came because of the TV program, the rest of them knew nothing about Millroy’s reputation, and liked the diner because it was cheap and healthy food. In the diner Millroy did not say that he was a messenger, and it pleased him that the people ate without needing an explanation.
‘The act of eating makes them believers,’ Millroy said. ‘If this food convinces them, they will follow. I love the simplicity of that. They literally have a gut reaction.’
He pointed out that it was generally older white males who were the hardest to convince. Some people were repeat eaters because our prices were low, others because they wanted to be thin, or because the food was making them regular. The best ones, Millroy said, were the ones who did not know why they ate here day after day. They did not ask questions. They just opened their mouths and we fed them. Something in their bodies told them they were doing the right thing.
It was not all smooth. Some days, people cheated us, left without paying, claimed the service was bad. A man swore at Stacy for spilling hot pottage on his leg – called her a name that made her cry. Another man tripped Berry. And now and then a person would say straight out that the food was disgusting and where did we get it from?
But when Millroy praised the Sons and Daughters for not shouting back at the bad customers, there was something about the way Willie Webb smiled at Berry that made me think he had a secret.
Then one day I saw Willie squeezing a plastic bottle of Sun-Glo liquid detergent into a dish of Promised Land Lentils.
‘That’s for the dude at table seven,’ he was saying to Berry. ‘He called me slow.’
‘Do it, bro,’ Berry said. His last name was Loomis, though it was always first names here and sometimes Son Berry or Daughter Stacy, or just Son or Daughter. They noticed that Millroy did not speak to me that way – I was Rusty – and they did not know whether that meant I was more special or less so. I did not mind what they thought. I knew I mattered to Millroy.
Willie noticed I was listening.
‘Just a little old squirt of this will make him run all night,’ he said to me, laughing his growly laugh.
I said ‘Jeekers,’ because I was so shocked.
I said nothing more. I was too afraid. I was Jilly Farina from Marston’s Mills. I was no one. But Willie must have thought that I was going to say something to Millroy about him, talk trash to the Big Guy, as he might put it, because while I went on watching he threw the lentils away. He got a new dish and served it to the man without soap, and I hoped he forgave the man.
The way we waited on tables in the beginning was clumsy, but within three weeks we had the hang of it, and we knew how to be busy and efficient. Millroy did not criticize us, nor did he raise his voice. It’s all a lesson, he said.
‘These people are putting their lives in our hands,’ Millroy said. ‘Think of the responsibility. Are you aware of how awesome a task we have taken upon us? People’s very lives.’
The Sons and Daughters listened, feeling proud, and they thanked Millroy for giving them this chance. And I knew then that Willie must have forgiven the unkind man and regretted ever putting liquid detergent in bad customers’ food so that they would get the squitters.
After a month of the Day One Diner, when we were alone at night, in the back, Millroy looked at me and said, ‘So what do you think?’
It surprised me that he asked me any question at all, especially this hard one.
‘Say something, angel.’
I did not know what to say; anyway, what was the question?
‘Is this going to work, angel?’
‘It’s already working, I guess.’
Looking sideways, he seemed to shrink a little, his neck shortened, his mouth fell open and he spoke in a slow stupid voice.
‘I have moments of doubt.’
Hearing his voice quiver, what could I say?
‘Didn’t you hear me? I don’t want to be another Mister Phyllis, on a tinky-winky show, boring people rigid with sermons and boasting of my health.’
‘It’s working good,’ I said with a dry mouth.
‘I want it to be great.’
‘Tons and tons of people,’ I said, ‘plus a neat TV show that’s wicked popular that everyone watches on Sunday morning.’
Now he said nothing, but he turned to face me.
‘It is great,’ I said.
His face was rumpled with shadow and his whole head had creases so deep I almost could not recognize him.
‘Do you honestly think so?’
‘Sure.’
I was afraid he might say How do you know? but he just nodded slowly and sat down.
I waited for him to say something more, but he was asleep in his chair. I stepped over him and headed to bed. But before I locked myself into my little box of a room I looked back and saw that his lips fluttered and his cheeks blew with long windy snores.
That fretful Millroy was so different from the Millroy of The Day One Program, who never doubted or looked back or had shadows on his face. The television Millroy attracted more viewers, and many of them became customers – ‘eaters,’ he called them, meaning believers.
‘He looks like an eater,’ he often said, seeing a stranger. Or: ‘She’ll definitely eat.’
One taste and they would be convinced, was what he meant.
On the show he talked the whole time, his mouth and mustache going so fast he looked like he was chewing. It was talk and food, not much scripture and a lot less magic.
‘I think your average viewer is spooked by magic,’ he said. ‘I know from experience that your audience often regards it with palpitating apprehension, and they are right to do so, because many peo
ple who work magic have an impure motive. A demonstration of magic can seem hostile and aggressive, Daughter.’
He was speaking to Kayla, who nodded seriously, but looked nervous, as people often did when Millroy was engaged in an explanation.
‘Something exploding in your face, or flopping on the floor, or surprising you where you least expect it – maybe bursting into bloom. That can be traumatic.’
Kayla glanced around, thinking What?
‘I won’t have anything gratuitous or misleading on my show,’ Millroy said. ‘No tricks. No nonsense.’
Daughter Kayla agreed with him, looking respectful, and I began to think both from her reaction and the way Willie had decided not to doctor the bad customer’s lentils with soap that they also feared Millroy.
We all watched The Day One Program with amazement, because being an all-Millroy show you never knew what was coming next. Millroy walked back and forth, from camera to camera – he had the knack of suddenly turning and peering into a different camera, into your face, even extending his face into your room. It was his bulging eyes that created this illusion. He told stories. He testified. He ate. Now and then he worked the old magic, doing the very things that he had told Kayla were traumatic – exploding a flower, hatching a live bird from an egg, gulping a mouthful of fire, or slipping eighteen inches of sword blade into his gullet.
‘Just to wake people up,’ he said. ‘Get their attention.’
The early programs were testimony and personal history, and a sideways look at the Book. They were I am a messenger and the darkness of the body, the stories of how he had been imprisoned in the wilderness of his fatness. It was shocking to hear him say, Most of the food we eat causes cancer. You saw flashing past all the familiar food that everyone ate – milk, peanut butter, sirloin steaks, full-fat cheese, jelly, candy bars, breakfast cereal, chocolate cookies, white bread, hot dogs, burgers and bacon. Then liquid and loopy images of skulls, gravestones, hellfire and devils – obese devils.
If you still were not frightened into eating his food Millroy had more magic, and somehow he managed to eat and chew through a whole show while delivering the message in his own voice – ventriloquism, we guessed – that America had lost the art and science of cooking, and less than five percent of kitchen time was spent preparing fresh food. We were unhealthy and unholy because we had stopped cooking – food companies had turned us into addicts. We warmed up chemical paste, we opened cans, we dumped out envelopes, whisked water into toxic powders, and then nuked it in the microwave. What we called cooking was no more than heating and rehydration.
That whole message, and he never stopped munching.
After the shock of the cancer-producing kitchen cupboard, he put out some happier Day Ones, recounting various meals in the Book – so many of them, because food was always shared. And never mind the Last Supper, what about the most profound meal in the whole Book, Jesus feeding with his disciples by the shores of Lake Galilee after he had come back from the dead?
‘It is impossible to eat this original and life-giving food’ – he was chewing fish and swallowing as he spoke – ‘and not sense that a mystery is being revealed to you.’ He gulped and said, ‘Go and do likewise. Imagine – the prophets urging us to eat complex carbohydrates.’
After he began to receive letters, he spent a whole program replying to criticism.
‘I am not a fanatic,’ he said. ‘I am not a fundamentalist. Not a Branch Davidian. Not a Swaggart. I am not a crank.’
Waving a letter of accusation, he began to laugh softly.
‘Listen, I am not even religious,’ Millroy said. ‘And I am not comfortable using the term God.’
Then he leaned forward and began to smile.
‘I know that you can assert many crazy theories using the Book as evidence. That in pain ye shall bring forth children – no anaesthetic. That the earth is four thousand years old. That women are forbidden to wear men’s clothes. That adulterers should be killed. That it is death to touch a man on his stones. That a bastard can’t enter a church, and neither can a man with a groin injury. That wool and linen can’t be woven together. That a man who pisseth against a wall is damned. That because Jesus lost his temper once, with the money-changers, we are licensed to freak out whenever we want. That wizards and magicians must be put to death.’
He was still smiling as he crumpled the letter and made it disappear among his fingers.
‘But where food and nutrition are concerned, the Book is subject to rigorous scientific scrutiny and the test of time. I have personally experimented with it, and so have many leading laboratories. And, friends, the Book has been validated. The Book will make you regular and grant you longevity.’
Refresh my bowels in the Lord, he said on another show. That is my text for today.
Already Willie and Stacy were laughing at the TV set, remembering the fuss over Paradise Park, how the sponsors had canceled the show after the Christmas program, when Dedrick had described the ideal bowel movement (‘Loosen all your clothes … take off your shoes …’).
‘The Big Guy is so cool,’ Willie said.
‘What it down to is, he one funny dude,’ Berry said. ‘He just crank it out.’
I was proud to hear them say that and to be reminded that being funny was a way of being strong and was another example of Millroy’s magic. What the Sons and Daughters said of him was a fact, and Millroy’s motto was that nothing was more interesting than the truth.
In that period I mention, my wilderness, I was trapped inside my own darkness, lost within the hellish size of my own body. The word fat does not even begin to do justice to my ordeal. Imagine being forced to carry a two-hundred-pound weight with you wherever you go!
Millroy could blow up his cheeks and expand his face and fill the whole TV screen so that he looked terrifying.
And so I often vocalized my despair, echoing the cry in Lamentations, Behold O Lord, for I am in distress, my bowels are troubled, my heart is turned within me, for I have grievously rebelled –
‘Tell it,’ Stacy said, urging him on.
The prophets knew about spastic colons and pouchy diverticula and chronic obesity, that roughage is a blessing from heaven, and that goodness proceeds from the bowels. I want you to repeat what Isaiah wrote. My bowels shall sound like a harp –
‘My bowels shall sound like a harp,’ Kayla said, sitting there, looking up at the TV screen.
‘My bowels shall sound like a harp,’ we all said.
At the end of that show Millroy displayed the food that would accomplish this and produce the harp sound – wheat, barley, parched corn, figs, garlic, leeks, and so forth.
‘The elements of The Day One Program,’ he said. ‘Why has no one made this connection before, linking health, holiness, slenderness, regularity, longevity, and salvation?’
You heard these words together and wanted to eat and be saved.
‘Never mind. I saw the link in my darkness, and my bowels were refreshed. And I became a messenger.’
His bowels got into the newspapers, his bowels got into magazines, people called the diner to ask about his bowels, photographers showed up hoping to get Millroy’s picture. Even though he would not talk to the press and refused to pose for pictures, the program racked up more viewers. He knew they were people who hoped he would talk about bowels again, which he did, on the very next show, ‘The Life Wish,’ how people in the Book lived a long time.
My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh, yet his days shall be a hundred and twenty years – and that is just for starters.
There was food in every program – food with a message that said, Eat well, eat Day One, get right and live a long time. The Book is the book of life.
He often told the story of how he had discovered the truth by reading the Gideon Bible, as he went from hotel to hotel as a traveling magician – like Daniel. And when his diet
improved he became a better magician, and soon he hardly understood the miracles that he could work. He got regular. He saw the face of God – or Good. And Millroy appeared to be looking into a mirror. This was not a delusion of grandeur, he said: we could do the same, because we were capable of being God-like, that is, good.
The Lord appears at mealtimes, was another Day One text-for-today – how there was usually eating or food served when Jesus showed up. And how all the meals in the New Testament had been validated by modern dietitians and nutritionists. It was a serious error to regard these meals as symbolic, because after all the Lord himself had chewed this bread and munched this fish and drunk this inky wine, and the Lord had garlicky breath. The Lord was regular. His bowels sang.
Ye shall eat no manner of fat, was another week’s text. Leviticus seven.
Another: Be conscious every second of what you’re putting in your mouth. If it smelled like bubble gum, as so much American food did, spit it out. And no more raspberry shampoo!
Millroy wore an open-necked shirt, and his cheeks were healthy. With his sleeves rolled up you could see his arms were strong. When he punched himself in the stomach you heard a wooden thud, as though he had smacked a chopping-block. One-arm push-ups were his specialty. In the middle of a show he might pump out twenty of them, and then continue talking, hardly winded.
‘An unhealthy person is doing something wrong,’ he said. ‘A fat person is fallen and lost, but not for ever – that is my message to America. Fatsos must be found and saved.’
In the Book there was redemption – recipes, too; a whole eating program that we served in the Day One Diner.
I went among you, from house to house, selling bread and recipes, he said on another show. It was a dramatic story about braving the winter darkness to bring a message of health and holiness. It was not until much later that I realized that he was talking about the time – the two days, really – he and I headed out of Wompatuck to Egypt and Greenbush and Marshfield with thirty loaves of Ezekiel bread, to knock on doors. He had said, Stick with me and try to look a little wounded.