by Dan Savage
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!
We 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?
So 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.
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-so
mething-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.
Meet the Rich
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
Men were kept from rootless hedonism, which is the end stage of unconfined individualism, by religion, morality, and law. To them I would add the necessity for hard work, usually physical work, and the fear of want. These constraints were progressively undermined by rising affluence.