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

everything he ate in a notebook. That left him with stacks of notebooks, a
great many small dishes to wash, and unusual manual dexterity in putting
down and picking up his fork. His favorite diet was the one that said you
could eat all you wanted of your favorite food, so long as you ate nothing
but that. The only problem was that Kenny couldn't decide what was really
his one true favorite, so he wound up eating ribs for a week, and pizza for
a week, and Peking duck for a week (that was an expensive week), and
losing no weight whatsoever, although he did have a great time.
Most of Kenny Dorchester's aberrations lasted for a week or two. Then,
like a man coming out of a fog, he would look around and realize that he
was absolutely miserable, losing relatively little weight, and in imminent
danger of turning into one of those cottage-cheese fatties he so pitied. At
that point he would chuck the diet, go out for a good meal, and be
restored to his normal self for another six months, until his secret pain
surfaced again.
Then, one Friday night, he spied Henry Moroney at the Slab.
The Slab was Kenny's favorite barbecue joint. It specialized in ribs,
charred and meaty and served dripping with a sauce that Kenny approved
of mightily. And on Fridays the Slab offered all the ribs you could eat for
only fifteen dollars, which was prohibitively high for most people but a
bargain for Kenny, who could eat a great many ribs. On that particular
Friday, Kenny had just finished his first slab and was waiting for the
second, sipping beer and eating bread, when he chanced to look up and
realized, with a start, that the slim, haggard fellow in the next booth was,
in fact, Henry Moroney.
Kenny Dorchester was nonplussed. The last time he had seen Henry
Moroney, they had both been unhappy Pounds-Off members, and
Moroney had been the only one in the club who weighed more than Kenny
did. A great fat whale of a man, Moroney had carried about the cruel
nickname of "Boney," as he confessed to his fellow members. Only now the
nickname seemed to fit. Not only was Moroney skinny enough to hint at a
rib cage under his skin, but the table in front of him was absolutely
littered with bones. That was the detail that intrigued Kenny Dorchester.
All those bones. He began to count, and he lost track before very long,
because all the bones were disordered, strewn about on empty plates in
little puddles of drying sauce. But from the sheer mass of them it was clear
that Moroney had put away at least four slabs of ribs, maybe five.
It seemed to Kenny Dorchester that Henry "Boney" Moroney knew the
secret. If there were a way to lose hundreds of pounds and still be able to
consume five slabs of ribs at a sitting, that was something Kenny
desperately needed to know. So he rose and walked over to Moroney's
booth and squeezed in opposite him. "It is you," he said.
Moroney looked up as if he hadn't noticed
Kenny until that very second. "Oh," he said in a thin, tired voice. "You."
He seemed very weary, but Kenny thought that was probably natural for
someone who had lost so much weight. Moroney's eyes were sunk in deep
gray hollows, his flesh sagged in pale, empty folds, and he was slouching
forward with his elbows on the table as if he were too exhausted to sit up
straight. He looked terrible, but he had lost so much weight. ...
"You look wonderful!" Kenny blurted. "How did you do it? How? You