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

Chinese food and Japanese food and Korean food and German food and
Italian food and French food and Indian food, and was always on the
lookout for new ethnic groups so he might "expand my cultural horizons."
When Saigon fell, Kenny speculated about how many of the Vietnamese
refugees would be likely to open restaurants. When Kenny traveled, he
always made it a point to gorge himself on the area's specialty, and he
could tell you the best places to eat in any of twenty-four major American
cities, while reminiscing fondly about the meals he had enjoyed in each of
them. His favorite writers were James Beard and Calvin Trillin.
"I live a tasty life!" Kenny Dorchester would proclaim, beaming. And so
he did. But Kenny also had a secret. He did not often think of it and never
spoke it, but it was there nonetheless, down at the heart of him beneath all
those great rolls of flesh, and not all his sauces could drown it, nor could
his trusty fork keep it at bay.
Kenny Dorchester did not like being fat.
Kenny was like a man torn between two lovers, for while he loved his
food with an abiding passion, he also dreamed of other loves, of women,
and he knew that in order to secure the one he would have to give up the
other, and that knowledge was his secret pain. Often he wrestled with the
dilemmas posed by his situation. It seemed to Kenny that while it might
be preferable to be slender and have a woman than to be fat and have only
a crawfish bisque, nonetheless the latter was not entirely to be spurned.
Both were sources of happiness, after all, and the real misery fell to those
who gave up the one and failed to obtain the other. Nothing depressed or
saddened Kenny so much as the sight of a fat person eating cottage
cheese. Such pathetic human beings never seemed to get appreciably
skinnier, Kenny thought, and were doomed to go through life bereft of
both women and crawfish, a fate too grim to contemplate.
Yet despite all his misgivings, at times the secret pain inside Kenny
Dorchester would flare up mightily, and fill him with a sense of resolve
that made him feel as if anything might be possible. The sight of a
particularly beautiful woman or the word of some new, painless, and
wonderfully effective diet were particularly prone to trigger what Kenny
thought of as his "aberrations." When such moods came, Kenny would be
driven to diet.
Over the years he tried every diet there was, briefly and secretly. He
tried Dr. Atkins's diet and Dr. Stillman's diet, the grapefruit diet and the
brown rice diet. He tried the liquid protein diet, which was truly
disgusting. He lived for a week on nothing but Slender and Sego, until he
had run through all of the flavors and gotten bored. He joined a
Pounds-Off club and attended a few meetings, until he discovered that the
company of fellow dieters did him no good whatsoever, since all they
talked about was food. He went on a hunger strike that lasted until he got
hungry. He tried the fruit juice diet, and the drinking man's diet (even
though he was not a drinking man), and the martinis-and-whipped-cream
diet (he omitted the martinis).
A hypnotist told him that his favorite foods tasted bad and he wasn't
hungry anyway, but it was a damned lie, and that was that for hypnosis.
He had his behavior modified so he put down his fork between bites, used
small plates that looked full even with tiny portions, and wrote down