• • •
On the roof of the Guggenheim Museum, on a sunny, pale blue day in mid-May of a year sometime in the spirit of the twenty-first century, I, Tristan Hurt, removed my clothes and handed them to an assistant, and with great effort hefted my 493 lb (224 kg) frame onto my bed. I gingerly maneuvered my body as museum staff workers inserted my penis into the narrower of the two rubber tubes, made a seal of adhesive silicone putty, and wrapped the bond in gauze for double reinforcement. Then I slowly turned over and allowed the workers to insert the other rubber tube into my anus, a good two inches deep, and likewise seal the bond with sticky silicone putty. The hole in the mattress was situated directly below where I was to sit, such that I could partially sit up on the bed with no discomfort, my back resting against the plush mound of pillows piled against the headboard.
Although I was naked, I was not indecent, as my genitals were obscured between my enormous thighs and beneath the rolling folds of my lower torso. I spread my legs on the glossy velvet bed and playfully wiggled my distant toes. I reflected on my luxurious comfort. I mentally remarked upon the pleasantly crypto-erotic sensation of the vacuum tubes sucking ticklishly at my penis and anus. I gazed at the faces of the museum workers surrounding my bed. That night the world would get its first glimpse of me at an invitation-only VIP opening exhibition. I was prepared to eat.
• • •
The concept was elegant in its simplicity: to turn Kafka on his head. “A Hunger Artist” in part derives the power of its allegory from the sheer horror of self-abnegation. Why on earth would anyone deliberately starve himself to death? But in a culture of abundance and affordable luxury, bodily self-abnegation no longer retains this primeval horror. Rather, the twenty-first-century middle-class American must actively labor not to become fat. Thus eating becomes moralized behavior. How often have you heard a woman describe a rich dessert as “sinful”? To eat is to sin—in secular society, the body replaces the soul. Good and evil are no longer purely spiritual concepts—these words have been transubstantiated into the realm of the flesh. At other times it seems as if the very process of eating has even become a chore—something associated with work. How often has a waiter at a restaurant asked you if you are “still working” on your meal? Perhaps eating for us has therefore also been stripped of the especial joy it might retain in a culture in which people are immediately conscious of the threat of want. In a culture such as ours Kafka’s story becomes deflated of much of its sting—we fail to feel the poison of it, because food exists for us in a different psychological space than it did for Kafka: We are a culture that moralizes the diet. Thus “A Hunger Artist” cannot strike its contemporary readers with the same fascination and revulsion. Indeed, far more apropos to an age of overabundance is a Fat Artist.
• • •
And I, Tristan Hurt, the Fat Artist, vowed to become the fattest human being in known history.
As I have said, I was forced by the necessity of objective measurement to equate “heaviest” with “fattest.” Before me, Carol Yager of Flint, Michigan, was widely thought to be the heaviest human on record. Prior to her death at age thirty-four in 1994 from massive kidney failure, Yager was estimated to have peaked at about 1,600 lbs (726 kg). Just below Yager was Jon Brower Minnoch of Bainbridge Island, Washington, who died shortly before he turned forty-two in 1983, having attained a peak weight of approximately 1,400 lbs (635 kg). I, Tristan Hurt, began my journey at a comparatively scrappy 493 lbs (224 kg), which meant I had to gain 907 lbs (411 kg) to even tie for second place, and I had to gain 1,107 lbs (502 kg)—half a ton—to tie the record, though preferably much more if I was to comfortably surpass it. The work I had before me was nothing short of daunting.
The parameters were thus: Anyone could bring me food of any sort—rather, the public was greatly encouraged to bring food—and I would have to eat it. There was but one rule for the visitors, that their offerings had beyond all reasonable contestability to be food—i.e., nothing inedible, impotable, or indigestible. No chewing gum, mouthwash, motor oil, cigarette butts, packing peanuts, cotton balls, chewing tobacco, shaving cream, rubber bullets, small toys, leather, paint, etc. Aside from this one broad guideline, any cuisine was permissible. And there were but two rules I designated to myself, the Fat Artist: (1) any food that is brought to me I must consume; and (2) during museum hours, I must be in the process of consuming (eating or drinking) at all times.
My exhibition chamber also contained a glass table on rollers, long enough so as to stretch wider than the industrial scale beneath my bed, high enough to come up to my midriff when wheeled over the bed, and transparent, so as not to obscure my fat beneath it. My dining table. Waiters were employed. The waiters wore black bow ties and tuxedo vests, and worked in shifts to attend to my dining experience at all times, clearing away my dirty dishes and continually presenting me with more food. The visiting public was to bring me offerings, which the museum workers kept on a table nearby to await their imminent consumption. The table was equipped with heat lamps to keep warm food warm, and a refrigerator underneath it for chilled items. The waiters would bring me the food when I was ready for it and clear away the refuse of whatever I had just consumed.
• • •
The VIP opening of the exhibition was held on a Thursday night in May. It was a beautiful evening. The temperature was consummate, hovering at about 70º F. The museum employees propped open the doors of my exhibition chamber, and the people milled about on the roof, ambling in and out of the open doors of my glass cube. My opening meal was specially prepared under the supervision of Philip Laroux, the chef de cuisine at the West Village’s preeminent three-Michelin-star restaurant, Pleonexia. Laroux also supervised the preparation of the hors d’oeuvres that were arrayed on a long table on the roof outside my glass exhibition chamber. The theme of the evening was food, and thus naturally I demanded that the hors d’oeuvres represent the height of culinary excellence. The hors d’oeuvres table was laden with colorful displays of foie gras, crystallized seaweed, oyster vinaigrette, carpaccio of cauliflower with artichoke and chocolate jelly, scallop tartare and caviar, white chocolate velouté, braised rabbit dumplings in broccoli ginger sauce and chili oil. The centerpiece of the display was an ice champagne fountain, 3D printed after my deliberately garish design: Five female nudes lay basking in sumptuous repose around the base of the fountain, which sloped curvilinearly upward into a deep bowl; the sides of the fountain’s bowl were studded with five erect penises carved from ice and complete with testicles; the fountain was filled with a great quantity of champagne, which tunneled through the hollow flutes of the ice penises and squirted in smooth golden arcs into the open mouths of the five nudes at the base of the fountain; the champagne gargled and frothed in their icy mouths and dribbled down their chins into the lower basin, where it was thrust back into the fountain bowl by a recirculating pump. The guests would catch the champagne by holding their glasses under the streams jetting from the constantly ejaculating penises of ice.
Meanwhile, for added effect, a string quartet played Eine kleine Nachtmusik in continual repetition. Achingly beautiful clothes abounded. Some people wore designer gowns and others, ripped neon mesh T-shirts. Jewelry flashed at slender throats. A photographer slithered through the interstices between bodies with his camera slicing at the night with blank razors of light. High heels clapped on the asphalt surface of the roof. Wineglasses tinkled. Hands shook hands, bodies embraced bodies, lips kissed cheeks. New inamorata were introduced to friends and colleagues. As the string quartet played, mellifluous songs of lovely female laughter rose and fell amid the burble of general conversation, in incidental accompaniment to the violins lacing their high sweet notes through the luscious velvet of the viola and the cello.
The roof of the 1992 addition to the Guggenheim was never designed as an exhibition space. We could not have constructed the exhibit on top of either of the two smaller towers included in Frank Lloyd Wright’s original building because they were n
ot big enough, and we demanded the exhibit be constructed outside, for important aesthetic reasons I do not presently recall. Pipes, antennae, ductwork, and unsightly things like that crawl out of the hot, tar-spattered surface of the flat rectangular roof, and there really isn’t much room to move around. Before the opening, certain cautionary procedures were taken to assure the safety of the patrons, including a temporary guard railing to keep people from straying too close to the edge of the building. All night people awkwardly squeezed past airshaft ducts while trying not to dirty their clothes or spill their drinks.
The attendees of the VIP opening crowded at my bedside like family round a dying patriarch, munching the hors d’oeuvres they cradled in folded napkins in their hands, sipping champagne and murmuring with reverently muted conversation, while I sat nude on my enormous purple bed and ate.
My opening meal began with a bottle of ’97 Château d’Yquem and a modest tomato soup with minted crème fraîche, peekytoe crab, and julienned bacon. This was followed by a plate of langoustines and snails glazed in a light Hollandaise with cracked Basque pepper and parsley. I ate every one of them, scraping the puffy white meat from the sharp ridges of the lobster carapace, delicately sucking the slick mollusks from their shells. Following this, a course of veal cappelletti and truffles stuffed with ice-filtered lamb jelly, sweetbread, and mussels. At this point I swallowed the last of the Château d’Yquem and switched to a velvety yet robust 2000 Châteauneuf-du-Pape recommended to complement my main course, which one of my tuxedoed waiters forthwith displayed to me with a flourish while the other swept away the remains of my previous course, and I wiped my oily fingers clean with a moist towelette: an entire goose, braised in a champagne-butter reduction and stuffed with chestnuts, shiitake mushrooms, and venison sausage. For maximum effect two silver candelabras softly illuminated my meal, and I ate with fork, knife, and spoon, although I neither wore a bib nor draped my lap with a napkin, which would have obscured part of my fat body, for which I wanted maximum visibility; it did not take long before I took to wiping my hands on my plush purple bedsheets. Crumbs tumbled between my legs; drippings of sauce streaked my belly. It took me about an hour and a half to devour the entire goose. I had to work very slowly so as not to overstuff or exhaust myself. I did once have to move my bowels in the middle of the meal. This is something I would learn over time to feel less squeamish about. It is an oddly exhilarating sensation to defecate in full view of spectators while actually eating at the same time: to eliminate the arbitrary and bourgeois separation between not only the physical, but also the psychological spaces designated for the body’s admission versus evacuation of material.IX My excrement, liquid and solid, simply slipped out of me when it was ready to go, with minimal effort on my part, and was immediately whisked away unseen, vacuumed straight out of my body via the tubes concealed beneath me. I don’t think anyone present even noticed. When I had slurped the last remaining edible sinews from the last remaining bones and ligaments of the goose, the dish was borne away and immediately replaced with a glass of forty-year-old tawny port and my dessert: a whole cheesecake, which I hacked apart and shoveled into my mouth one dainty forkload after another, dampening my bites with glass after glass of port. By the end of the night, this cheesecake took me longer to finish than the main course. Several times I nearly vomited, but each time I felt the bile racing up my throat, I clenched my mouth shut tight, steeled myself, closed my eyes, swallowed, and recovered—ready to eat on.
By the time I had almost finished the cheesecake, most of the VIP opening’s invitees had left. I was feverish, ill, sweating profusely, slightly delirious. As I sat nude on my giant purple bed, the edges of things had begun to acquire a silvery haze, like a faraway desert horizon, and my vision of the world before me kept sliding off its axis, stopping, getting back on, sliding off again. The exhibition was closing for the night, and my scale reported that on that first night, I had gained 23 lbs (10 kg) in one meal alone, finishing out the evening at a formidable 516 lbs (234 kg). Although I knew that in order to reach my goal of becoming the heaviest human being in known history I had approximately another 1,200 lbs (544 kg) to gain, and although I very well knew much of this initial weight gain was only temporary, as it would soon be evacuated from my perilously engorged digestive tract through the rubber vacuum tubes connected to my body’s lower egresses, I felt then an enormous inner swelling of pride at my achievement.
The last stragglers left the museum employees to clean up after the party as I sluggishly chased the remnants of my cheesecake across the platter with my fork and nipped at the dregs of the port. From my bed, in delirium, I watched the museum employees pick up the discarded fingerprint-fogged, lipstick-smudged wineglasses, sweep away debris with push brooms, dismantle the hors d’oeuvres table, and throw out the basinful of tepid water that my champagne fountain/pornographic ice sculpture had long since become. As if from twenty feet under water I looked languidly at my waiters, who stood leaning against the outer glass walls of my exhibition chamber with their shirts now untucked and unbuttoned at the throats, and the flaps of their undone bow ties dangling down, as they joked and chatted. They were smoking cigarettes and blowing the smoke into the warm May air, and looking out across the dark expanse of Central Park and the Upper West Side’s glittering wall of light. They did not look back at me. Nor did they think to speak to me as they wheeled away my long glass dining table, misted it with Windex, and wiped it down with squeaky rags. I watched them sweep and mop the smooth concrete floor of my exhibition chamber while passing a bottle of wine left over from the opening back and forth between them, and I faintly heard them make plans to join some of the other museum employees for a drink after they were done with their work. When they had mopped the floor, one went to return the mop and bucket to a janitorial closet while the other surveyed the room for anything they might have missed, and, finding nothing, pulled the doors shut, snaked a heavy chain through the door handles, secured them with a padlock, and left—all without looking at or speaking to me or acknowledging my presence in any way. He was simply at work, and I may as well have been an inanimate object in the room. I settled my weight against the pile of pillows at my back and watched him go. From my vantage point, propped up on the plush purple bed of my own design, inside my glass exhibition chamber atop the roof of the Guggenheim, I could see clear across the park, and gaze at the towering luminous rectangles of Midtown Manhattan to the south. Jets flew low overhead, red and green lights blinking, engines droning low streams of colorless noise as they gently descended toward JFK and LaGuardia. The city at night sparkled and hummed with heat, with light, with life, ardent life.
• • •
In the morning I awakened to the clinking sounds of a museum employee fiddling with the padlocked chain on the doors to my exhibition chamber. That day my exhibit was to open to the general public.
The roof was thick with humanity all day, from the museum’s opening at 10:00 A.M. until it closed at 5:45 P.M. The exhibition was hotly anticipated, as it had been hailed as a groundbreaking cultural event, preceded by a long campaign of advertising that had culminated with a massive billboard draped across the west-facing side of the Condé Nast Building. The opening-day visitors had purchased their tickets months in advance. The line to get into my exhibit coiled twice around the block, I’m told, with an average wait time of two hours. Once visitors made it into the museum, they were directed into two streams of traffic: one line to enter the regular museum, and the other line for those who had come only to view the Fat Artist. Still others had purchased tickets that allowed them to also see the exhibits in the rest of the museum before or after viewing the Fat Artist, and these people were allowed to choose their line, though most of them, for fear of not being able to make it to my exhibit later, chose to see me first. Velvet ropes corralled the line into the museum’s addition and stopped at the elevators, to which visitors were admitted in small groups of ten to twelve by museum employees who communicated with the staff
on the roof through walkie-talkies that crunched and squawked in their hands. The elevators then ascended to the top floor, where staff herded the visitors outside onto the roof. And the people came, crowding into my exhibition chamber to watch the artist eat. Museum staff tried to keep the number of people on the roof to forty at most, but there were too few of them to properly police the behavior of the visitors, and the people thronged around my bed in such numbers that many were forced to stand outside of my exhibition chamber and peer in with faces puttied to the glass, breath blowing spots of fog. The late spring was slouching into early summer and the temperature was warm, and with the pulsing flux of sticky, sweating skin moving in and out of the room it quickly took on the thickly biotic aromas of a bath house, a public locker room, a zoo. Soon the interior of the box had become so opacified with condensation that it was difficult for those outside to see in. Tremulous beads of moisture gathered on the ceiling and dripped desultorily onto my bed, my body, my food. There was a constant, rushing din of people—so much humanity in all its vivacious grotesquerie—taking pictures, talking, giggling, pointing, watching me eat.
Food and drink of any sort is ordinarily prohibited in the museum, but special exemption was made for those who had come to view my exhibit. I was astounded—heartwarmed, even—by the magnificent variety of offerings the visitors brought me. They brought me shrimp cocktail. They brought me T-bone steaks. They brought me spare ribs, glistening with barbecue sauce. They brought me spaghetti and meatballs. They brought me pepper-blackened ahi tuna. They brought me to-go cups of split pea soup. They brought me chocolate cake. They brought me greasy paper boxes full of tandoori chicken. They brought me snickerdoodle cookies. They brought me waffles, soggy with whipped cream and blueberry compote. They brought me kebob. They brought me deli sandwiches. They brought me hot pastrami on rye. They brought me club sandwiches. They brought me egg salad sandwiches. They brought me Reubens. They brought me bagels with lox. Others came bearing fast food. They brought me Big Macs. They brought me Whoppers. They brought me Chicken McNuggets. They brought me Frosties. They brought me Baconators. They brought me Crunchwrap Supremes. They brought me Blizzards. I am told the street vendors quickly learned to capitalize on my exhibit, and clustered their carts on Eighty-Ninth and Fifth near the entrance of the museum for all the visitors who felt acutely embarrassed, seeing other people’s offerings, by not having brought any offerings themselves, and thus I saw a great abundance of New York street food: They brought me hot dogs, falafels, puffy cheese-stuffed pretzels, roasted corn nuts. Still others touched me with the personal warmth, the unexpected hominess of their offerings. These ones brought me dishes made from cherished family recipes for casseroles, for fudge brownies, for lasagna, for manicotti, for scalloped potatoes, for jambalaya, for lemon meringue pies, for key lime pies, for pecan pies, for rhubarb pies, for butterscotch cookies. They brought me plates of deviled eggs. They brought me dozens of raw oysters. They brought me chips: They brought me crinkling cellophane bags of Doritos, of Fritos, of Ruffles, of Lay’s. They brought me tubes and tubes of my beloved, orderly-stacked Pringles: They brought me Cheddar & Sour Cream, Honey Mustard, BBQ, Memphis BBQ, Jalapeño, Pizza.X They brought me chorizo burritos. They brought me shrimp tacos. Naturally, star chefs from gourmet restaurants all over the city also sent up meals, desirous that the delicate works of their own ephemeral art, the culinary, be incorporated into this gastronomic spectacle, this stationary one-man saturnalia, this unmovable feast—that the fruits of their labor should be enjoyed by the Fat Artist, physically and spiritually sublimated into the flesh of his body. They sent me their choicest dishes. They sent me saddle of venison seasoned with celeriac, marron glacé, and sauce poivrade with pearl barley and red wine. They sent me duck breast with spaghetti squash, almond polenta, and pomelo molasses. They sent me cippollini purée with pickled onion vinaigrette. They sent me smoked lobster garnished with snap peas, mussels, and lemon-mustard sauce. They sent me crispy pan-seared red king salmon steak with parsley. They sent me anchovy-stuffed bulb onions with sage jus. They sent me za’atar-spiced swordfish à la plancha with chickpea panisse. Such heights of the culinary arts were amusingly offset by the more lowbrow offerings, which I also enjoyed and consumed. They brought me family-sized buckets of fried chicken from KFC and Popeye’s. They brought me pyramids of diminutive hamburgers from White Castle. Hostess snack products were popular offerings, selected surely for their artificiality, nutritional worthlessness, nostalgia value, and sheer cultural vulgarity: They brought me Twinkies, they brought me Hostess Cupcakes, they brought me Ding Dongs, they brought me Ho Hos. They brought me Mallomars. They brought me candy. They brought me Butterfingers, Three Musketeers, Snickers, Milky Ways, Whatchamacallits. They brought me Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. They brought me cartons of chocolate chip chocolate ice cream with caramel fudge swirl, sweating in the sun. They brought me bags of sticky Campfire Marshmallows. They brought me dozens upon dozens of donuts, with pink frosting and sprinkles. They brought me jars of mayonnaise, jars of jelly, jars of peanut butter, jars of Grey Poupon mustard and bottles of Heinz 57. I have not even mentioned the beverage offerings. They brought me boxes of wine. They brought me chocolate malts. They brought me six-packs of Heineken. They brought me Perrier. They brought me two-liter bottles of Coca-Cola, of Pepsi, of Dr Pepper, of Mr Pibb, of Mountain Dew. They brought me bottles of fine French champagne. All this they brought me and more.
The Fat Artist and Other Stories Page 12