"George R. R. Martin - The Monkey Treatment" - читать интересную книгу автора (Martin George R R)

THE MONKEY
TREATMENT
George R. R. Martin

KENNY DORCHESTER WAS A FAT MAN.
He had not always been a fat man, of course. He had come into the
world a perfectly normal infant of modest weight, but the normalcy was
short-lived in Kenny's case, and before very long he had become a
chubby-cheeked toddler well swaddled in baby fat. From then on it was all
downhill and upscale so far as Kenny was concerned. He became a pudgy
child, a corpulent adolescent, and a positively porcine college student all in
good turn, and by adulthood he had left all those intermediate steps
behind and graduated into full obesity.
People become obese for a variety of complex reasons, some of them
physiological. Kenny's reason was relatively simple: food. Kenny
Dorchester loved to eat. Often he would paraphrase Will Rogers, winking
broadly, and tell his friends that he had never met a food he didn't like.
This was not precisely true, since Kenny loathed both liver and prune
juice. Perhaps, if his mother had served them more often during his
childhood, he would never have attained the girth and gravity that so
haunted him at maturity. Unfortunately, Gina Dorchester was more
inclined to lasagne and roast turkey with stuffing and sweet potatoes and
chocolate pudding and veal cordon bleu and buttered corn on the cob and
stacks of blueberry pancakes (although not all in one meal) than she was
to liver and prune juice, and once Kenny had expressed his preference in
the matter by retching his liver back onto his plate, she obligingly never
served liver and prune juice again.
Thus, all unknowing, she set her son on the soft, suety road to the
monkey treatment. But that was long ago, and the poor woman really
cannot be blamed, since it was Kenny himself who ate his way there.
Kenny loved pepperoni pizza, or plain pizza, or garbage pizza with
everything on it, including anchovies. Kenny could eat an entire slab of
barbecued ribs, either beef or pork, and the spicier the sauce was, the
more he approved. He was fond of rare prime rib and roast chicken and
Rock Cornish game hens stuffed with rice, and he was hardly the sort to
object to a nice sirloin or a platter of fried shrimp or a hunk of kielbasa.
He liked his burgers with everything on them, and fries and onion rings on
the side, please. There was nothing you could do to his friend the potato
that would possibly turn him against it, but he was also partial to pasta
and rice, to yams candied and un-, and even to mashed rutabagas.
"Desserts are my downfall," he would sometimes say, for he liked sweets
of all varieties, especially devil's food cake and cannelloni and hot apple
pie with cheese (Cheddar, please), or maybe cold strawberry pie with
whipped cream. "Bread is my downfall," he would say at other times, when
it seemed likely that no dessert was forthcoming, and so saying, he would
rip off another chunk of sourdough or butter up another crescent roll or
reach for another slice of garlic bread, which was a particular vice.
Kenny had a lot of particular vices. He thought himself an authority on
both fine restaurants and fast-food franchises, and could discourse
endlessly and knowledgeably about either. He relished Greek food and