by Paul Theroux
‘And I want to commission a new translation of the Book,’ Millroy said. ‘I want to straighten it out. The word “meat” that Huber used on me. That is a confusion that is repeated all through the Book, but it doesn’t mean flesh – it means food. “He sat down to meat” doesn’t mean the Lord was scarfing lamb chops – of course not. Book apples are apricots. Locusts are carob trees. Manna was probably a lichen, one of the several lecanoras. Scriptural clarification is the way to health.’
He said he wanted to endow a scholarship at Harvard Divinity School, stipulating that the money be used for clarifying ambiguous words and phrases in the scriptures.
‘I envision a Day One Book,’ Millroy said. ‘The true word. No “meat.” No “goodly fruit.” Get the nomenclature right in the Leviticus prohibitions. What kind of wine are we talking about, and how do we grow the grapes? All of that, and with recipes in the back, slot them in just after the Book of Revelation.’
So Millroy sent away businessmen from Slimming Magazine and potential low-cal sponsors and all the ‘lite’-label people, and if they refused to go, Millroy vanished. The way he vanished reminded us that he was Millroy the Magician.
He sometimes found it hard to deal with eaters, as he called the Day One faithful, the believers.
‘It’s for you,’ I would say, holding the phone.
‘Is it an eater?’
‘Yup.’
He would take the call, but squinting and holding his breath, fearing what might come next. And then perhaps: She sounds full-figured.
The most convinced eaters, the truest believers, were women, usually older women, usually single, often sad. They watched The Day One Program. They wrote Millroy letters. They sent him snapshots, sometimes gross ones, their bodies showing, many of them snapping their own picture in front of a big mirror, with the flashbulb popping and spoiling the shot. They came to the diner – to eat, to meet Millroy. They hung around and I got to know them – Erma Wysocki, Earlitha Hurley, Amy Bamberg, Dot Sweeny – their sad eyes. One was just a telephone voice – Hazel DeHart.
Hazel DeHart said she wanted to become a Day One Daughter. Millroy arranged to see her, but she did not show up for the interview. She called the next day. I must see you, she said. At my apartment.
‘I can’t take any chances,’ Millroy said, at the last moment. ‘Look at Swaggart. Look at Jim Bakker. I know they had lust in their hearts but they were entrapped. People in my position have been destroyed by attention-seekers.’
He was much more careful these days than he had ever been. The struggles with Ed Veazie and Orlo Fedewa had upset him, but the visit from the Reverend Baby Huber had made him even more cautious of strangers, whether they were eaters or not.
‘The words that send a chill down my spine are “I am your greatest fan” – mostly, potential assassins say that.’
He seemed happy not to have to deal with the trailer at Wompatuck – the break-in had worried him.
‘I feel conspicuous,’ he said. ‘But why? I am merely a messenger. I want my message to precede me. I want people to know that I too am an eater.’
So he sent us, Jaleen and me, to see Hazel DeHart.
‘If she’s genuine, let me know,’ he said. ‘I’ll see her. But she certainly didn’t sound sixteen. She had a fattish voice. Anyway, I have to go to Baltimore to look at a property.’
On the bus I asked Jaleen how Day One had changed her life.
‘I don’t go to clubs anymore,’ she said. ‘And I don’t smoke doobies. Plus, I think I hate my family so bad it’s stressing me.’
Hazel DeHart’s was a brown brick building at the Jamaica Plain end of Mass Ave, and Apartment 5A was in the basement, the door in a well of steep stairs where the wind had whirled old newspapers and candy wrappers and pieces of dirty knotted ribbons and plastic bags and flattened drink cans.
A big-eyed face appeared at the window – Hazel. She seemed afraid, seeing two youngsters in Day One baseball hats, standing in the shadowy well, at the foot of her stairs. She opened her door a crack, enough for one eye to look out.
‘What do you want?’
‘Doctor Millroy sent us.’
‘Why didn’t he come himself?’
‘He’s in Baltimore.’
She opened up, there was a smell of fresh Ezekiel bread in the air, and the syrupy aroma of soft over ripe fruit, and an earthier, loamier odor of vegetables. She led us deeper into these mingled odors, all the while speaking of Millroy and how she watched him on television – showing us the TV as though it was somehow sacredly connected to him.
‘He is my savior,’ she said.
I thought, Uh-oh, and Jaleen’s face said the same thing.
Hazel DeHart was faded and fattish, about Vera Turtle’s age – forty or so, much too old to be a Day One Daughter. It seemed impolite for me to tell her that, so I kept quiet.
‘This is what I used to look like,’ she said, showing us a photograph of a very fat Hazel scowling on a plump sofa, her hands clasped and her ankles crossed.
‘That don’t look like you at all,’ Jaleen said.
‘That was the point I wanted to make to Doctor Millroy.’ She seemed trembly-mouthed, on the verge of weeping.
She had expected Millroy himself, so she had prepared a Day One meal of red lentils and herbage and Ezekiel bread, with a plate of fig cookies from one of Millroy’s own recipes. This food had been set out in pretty dishes on a table that had the look of an altar.
‘I love him,’ Hazel DeHart said, and began to cry, and then she smiled, though the tears ran down her cheeks. ‘I do exactly as he tells me. He made me well. I wasn’t well before. I was sick. I was coming apart. I was scary.’
‘Do you pray, like Millroy says?’ Jaleen asked. ‘“Eating goodness is worship, and being regular is being pure.” ’
Jaleen was new, and glad to be regular, so all these mottoes were wonderful to her.
‘What do you do, sister?’
‘I touch my body,’ Hazel said softly.
Jaleen whispered Uh-oh and stepped away, nearer to the door.
‘He gave me this body,’ Hazel said.
After that there was a silence, and all those loud food odors.
‘This is different,’ I said, trying to think of something more to say. It was a table, with Millroy’s picture in a frame. Pictures of Millroy were always lifeless and distorted and made him look insane.
‘That’s my shrine,’ Hazel said.
The photograph of Millroy was one put out by the TV station to advertise The Day One Program – Millroy smiling, looking loony, in a Day One apron. Hazel had colored Millroy’s face with crayons, giving it a strange saint-like glow, like a holy picture, but the color made him look even more dangerous. She said she also had one in her car, stuck to the dashboard. Next to the picture was a pot of fresh herbs, and a candle smelling waxily of spearmint. The shrine frightened me more than the woman. It was something about the colored-in face, the gold frame, Millroy made into a god or a bullying saint, smiling from this flickering corner of the fat woman’s room.
When Hazel DeHart started to cry again, we left.
‘I wanted to go, like, “Get a grip, girl,” ’ Jaleen said on the bus back.
‘I have no control over these people,’ Millroy said. ‘I don’t ask for money, and yet they send it to me. I am not a prophet, and yet they treat me like one.’
And he had not seen Hazel DeHart. He had no idea, and I could not describe how strange it had been for Jaleen and me. Yet I knew. She believed – that was the worst of it – and she was the first of many eaters who frightened me. They showed up late at night wanting to see Millroy, they loitered at the door in the morning, hoping that Millroy would talk to them – and they looked as though they had spent the night in our doorway, shivering and hoping.
These people worried him. He sent us out to deal with them.
‘Day One is n
ot a church,’ Millroy said. And before he vanished again, he smiled and said, ‘It is a movement.’
29
When I was alone with Millroy he was a different man, and not always a magician. After he had come back from one of his big-city trips, after everyone had gone home, after the diner was locked and the lights turned out – after all this, Millroy sighed softly and became smaller, quieter, watchful, tired from working magic. We stepped back together and he stood over me and took his first deep lungful of air, having held his breath all day, and it was as though a curtain had come down and we were hidden behind it.
‘I need you, sugar,’ he said, a little hoarse from preaching, but it was the voice he used for revelations. ‘I don’t need them.’
I knew he meant eaters, intruders, and people trying to cash in on his success, and maybe he even meant the Day One Sons and Daughters, because he was not close to any of them, and he seemed so relieved when the day had ended.
Then he watched me eat. He said that he took pleasure in watching me stuff my mouth and chew. Don’t make so much noise, Gaga used to say, but Millroy found this solitary munching inspirational. He told me that – and other things that he said to no one else. No one ever heard him say that he needed me. No one knew about his dreams. How he woke, how he might cry out.
He talked to me, I realized, because he never wrote anything down himself, and talking was his way of trying to make sense of his life – his voice was the pen and I was the paper.
The only thing better than watching me eat, he said, was eating with me, sitting across the table, both our mouths chewing. One of those nights we were eating bean-cakes, and he was chewing as he talked.
‘Huber,’ he said.
From what he said next I knew he was thinking how that man had come in and looked at the vegetarian menu and said fart food.
‘Sure there are complex sugars in beans, whole chains of sugars that aren’t digested. They move wholesale into your lower bowel, bacteria go to town on them, and they ferment. Then you are gaseous. But, hey, we’re talking odorless gases – methane and hydrogen. It’s the pungent foods, onions and garlic, that turn them stinky and sulfurous.’
When he smiled, to show he had made his point, he raised his mustache and the bean skins sticking to his teeth gave him a cheerful jack-o’-lantern mouth.
‘And it happens to be a fact,’ he said, ‘that the more you eat beans the greater your body’s capacity to digest these oligosac-charides.’
He began chewing again, concentrating on the amount he had spooned into his mouth: Think about each mouthful when you eat, was one of his sayings.
‘That way you end up with an essentially gasless bean.’
That was a revelation.
‘I have no wind.’
Those words made me think of him differently, high and bright and glittering, something like a star.
At night he slept on his shelf, in his own cupboard, and sometimes he woke flustered, and wanted me to talk to him.
‘It was the same dream,’ he said in a small trapped voice. ‘I died.’
And it was often the same death.
‘I gagged, I smothered, lost in the darkness of my body,’ he would say. ‘I suffocated inside my own fat.’
It was another of his revelations that a person’s real body was hidden inside his outer body, and that some troubled people hid in their fatness, to bury their spirituality in a mass of pork.
‘I want to reveal the actual person,’ he said. ‘With The Day One Program this spiritual reality will emerge.’
That was another reason he liked younger people – they had a real shape, their original body remained intact.
‘It was what attracted me to you, muffin. Your perfect shape.’
I was skinny, I had turned fifteen in December, I still passed for a boy.
‘And the fact that you were sucking your thumb,’ Millroy said.
That was another revelation to me, because Gaga had always told me to stop. Get that thing out of your mouth. She put a bandage on it, swabbed it in iodine, dipped my thumbnail with lead-based paint.
Sometimes, to please him, I did it again, although I had the urge less and less, and because of that my thumb seemed bonier and had a different, drier texture. After eating Day One food I stopped liking the taste of my thumb.
If the diner was closed, the Sons and Daughters gone, and Millroy and I were still wakeful, he might say, ‘Let’s go for a little walk.’
That was a revelation, too, the first time. These days I knew exactly what he wanted, but I was not sure what it was all about.
He liked watching people eat, and not just eat – he liked most of all seeing people stuffing themselves with big helpings of junk food. I had seen him do the same at the Barnstable County Fair, watching people eating fried dough and hot dogs – weenie worship – and I had not known what it meant. He had liked watching Baby Huber eat hamburgers and Real Good Fries. His liking was not necessarily enjoyment, but an experience he needed, as though one of his theories was being proved.
We would slip out and cross Park Square and head over to the busier streets, where the restaurants were still open – along Tremont and down Stuart, or across Boyleston to Newbury, to the Copley Square area, or down to Mass Ave. There were pizza joints, burger places, ice-cream parlors, and fancier restaurants – French bistros, Chinese, Indian, Thai, sushi bars, Cajun cafés, and Italian delicatessens. Boston had them all.
At night the people eating were visible behind front windows, like smiling victims gasping on food in bright fishbowls. Even in the cheap places where the windows were greasy or steamed up, or had beer signs blinking in the middle, you could see them chewing at small tables, looking at each other rather than the food.
‘They love spaghetti because they can eat it without having to look at it – it’s so easy to fork in.’
But he was smiling. The people attracted him, and he could stand for a long time in the clammy cold on a March night on a dark sidewalk outside a Boston restaurant watching from an angle as a man forked slippery noodles or else mashed potatoes and meat into his mouth.
‘And what is that woman doing,’ he said, leaning closer, ‘to that hot dog?’
It made him eager and reckless, he sometimes giggled with excitement, he dragged me back to look.
‘Let’s study this.’
I tried to be serious, but it was like being very young and a grown-up saying Look! and you just could not see what they were looking at, because you were the wrong size. And why was I so serious? For Millroy this was fun.
‘Isn’t it awful when they can’t fit it all in,’ he said, his face shining with pleasure. ‘When it spills.’ And again: ‘Might as well be Alpo.’ Or: ‘That individual is eating Puppy Chow!’
He seemed fascinated by dabs of mustard in the corners of a mouth, or mayonnaise on lips, or gravy on a chin, and a splat of ketchup on a forehead made him laugh out loud. He looked closely when they tidied up bits of food and tucked it into their mouths with greasy fingertips. People gorging, people chewing, people sucking on big swollen cups of Coke – even the names, a Slurpee, an Awful-Awful, a Yodel, a Big Gulp.
‘He’s putting meat into his mouth,’ he said, staring. ‘She’s putting meat into her body.’
Though he said that he hated it when the people did not look at the food they were eating – when they simply pushed it in until their cheeks rounded out – he could not take his eyes off them.
‘Wait,’ he said. ‘I just want to see this.’
See what happened next, he meant – see them gag, or cough, or spew. He would linger, looking furtive, his coat collar turned up, as he watched a man fill his mouth with bloody meat hunks, or a woman licking whipped cream from a spoon, flecks of white froth on her lipstick.
Sometimes those eaters in the windows of Wendy’s or Burger King were very hungry.
‘Look, he’s actually gnaw
ing his own fingers,’ he said. Or: ‘Burger eats burger.’
He read the descriptions on the menus that were framed and hung on some restaurant windows.
‘“Delicious goujons of pork, skewered with pepperoncini and garnished with julienned baby carrots and bruised garlic, presented on a bed of rice, accompanied by new potatoes in herbed butter, with a chiffonade of warmed baby lettuces.” ’
He spoke the words with a mixture of horror and fascination: veal shanks, chicken thighs, shoulder of pork, calf’s brain, liver paste, blood pudding.
‘“Succulent,” ’ he read. ‘“Mouthwatering.” ’
And then with these descriptions just out of his mouth he widened his eyes at the people eating.
‘“They that observe lying vanities forsake their own mercy,” ’ he said. ‘Jonah.’
If those people in the restaurants glanced up and saw Millroy’s staring face they stopped chewing and stared back, sort of shielding their plates with their hands.
‘That’s pure animal,’ Millroy said. ‘That’s monkey.’
And then he fixed his face on them, as though daring them to begin eating again.
But they seldom looked up. Millroy explained that it was very hard for a person in a lighted restaurant to see anyone clearly in the darkness outside the window.
‘Move along, pal,’ a waiter said to him one night, stepping outside a French restaurant near Copley Square.
Millroy did not hesitate. I knew he was ashamed – the way he walked, the way he sneaked me away and shuffled, the way he had been so sideways in his staring. He would have made himself vanish, except that I was with him, and our vanishing together was magic he had not so far worked.
He seldom remarked on the eaters except to say, ‘That’s serious stomach trauma’ or ‘She’s going to gag’ or ‘Look at the grease on his fingers.’ He always said these things smiling. But there was interest in it for him far beyond anything I could understand. He lurked outside places where fat people were eating bad gleaming food with their hands, and he lingered longest when it plopped through their fingers and they licked their knuckles and dug in again.