Cornucopia
A story about eating, sex, work, and losing your mind
I’m being a bit cheeky this week, and republishing the beginning to one of the stories I wrote last year, published by The Baffler, which I’m quite proud of. It’s about mukbangs, and women, and most of all about work, and what it can take from you. You can read the rest at the link at the bottom. The cover art is by the wonderful Olivia Pedigo.
By the end of winter, I couldn’t fall asleep unless I was watching Milena eat. Each night I held my phone in my hand, close enough to my face that I could hear the rustle of her napkin against her chin, light burrowing and refracting into my eyes until I was forced to close them. My dreams were soundtracked by her chews and bites and slurps. I would wake in the mornings with my headphones still in, tasting an invisible meal.
She uploaded a new video every three days or so, always filmed against the same pale lilac wall, as if she were sitting in a hospice waiting room. In the left corner was a slice of her door—paint peeling, an indoor lock. The table that she placed the food on was made of cheap white plastic, and sometimes she would drum her nails on the surface arrhythmically. There was a lot of thought put into the kinds of things that she ate—variations of fast-food chain fare, pasta, barbecues, dumplings—to keep it interesting. I appreciated the thought, though I did not really care. It could have been bowls of plain cereal in every single video. Unlike other creators, she preferred to eat rather than talk, and this was a relief. Proof of her innate understanding and consideration. People like me did not want to know that the food was so good, or what she’d done that weekend, or what her parents were like.
It was supposed to be an all-ages website, but I knew Milena—if it was her real name—was catering to a very specific of fetish. That was why her shirt was too small, and why she sucked her fingers into her mouth to get the sauce off. There was a contact email in her bio, so you could get in touch for “business opportunities,” meaning private webcam sessions. In the comments, viewers asked for messier foods: whipped cream, birthday cake, birria tacos, so she could spill it down her chest. Some wanted her to eat so much that she threw up and keep going. Others wanted to see her get fatter. They called her rica and delicious and gorąca dziwka.
I wasn’t aroused by her, not really. But she didn’t do what they wanted her to do, and it was alluring. She was a neat eater, methodical. While she chewed, she looked straight into the camera, like everything she was doing was for me alone. Maybe that was why I ended up clicking the link in her bio, craving her full attention. She wasn’t beautiful, but her eyes were the strangest shade of blue. The color of Latex gloves pulled onto a surgeon’s hand before his first incision.
*
I lived alone, which I could afford because an old hookup had referred me for a lucrative HR job at a medical insurance company. Before that, I’d had three roommates and an elevator that didn’t work. Sometimes, if somebody had taken my keys by accident, I would clamber onto the fire escape and convince a neighbor to let me in. It had not occurred to me to be dissatisfied with my lifestyle; most people I knew, crippled by student debt and oppressive rent, were in the same position. But when the man put my name forward, a strange longing had gripped me. I wanted to have a pantry instead of a shelf. I wanted to have a bathroom that nobody else used.
The interview had been short. I’d tried my best to appear normal, friendly, competent. The skirt I’d worn was borrowed from my mother’s closet—she had left me several for events that would likely never come to pass: “baby shower,” “date night,” “PTA lunch.” It took me weeks to starve my body enough to fit, and I was always small. I wished she could have been alive to see it, bones poking through my skin like they were saying hello. It would have made her proud.
The interviewers asked me a few questions about college, and then made me role play a scenario in which I had to fire a woman. I had been firm, as if I was disciplining a dog. They’d looked at each other, nodding approvingly. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” I’d said. “But the decision is final, and you need to pack up your things.” As I’d left, the interviewer had smiled at me with none of her teeth. “I like your skirt,” she’d said. “Great color.” My mother had loved orange. The objectively ugly tone of processed cheese. I had realized that the interviewer knew how I had gotten into that room, but I wasn’t ashamed. That meant that she also knew that I could like the dirty, cold facets of life. That I understood how the world, at its core, was a transaction in the process of being fulfilled.
I took the job when they offered it to me and quit the café chain I was supervising. As soon as I could afford the deposit, I found a small rented townhouse in the outer suburbs. One bedroom, one bath, a tiny garden, a balcony. For the first time in my life, I could hear birdsong.
The man probably had expected me to be grateful for his intervention. It wasn’t the explicit terms of our arrangement, but how else to interpret a married stockbroker in his fifties dating a twenty-seven-year-old woman, paying for her clothes and dinners, occasionally putting his foot on her head when he fucked her? Instead, I told him we had to come to the end because he could no longer give me anything I couldn’t give myself.
Since then, I hadn’t seen anybody beyond a few stilted first dates; a couple unenjoyable encounters in back alleys or on a futon. There was nobody in my life to tell me to shower regularly, or brush my teeth twice a day, or eat more than granola bars and frozen hot dogs. But in the office, I revived myself searching through piles of dirty laundry for clean pants, scraping plaque off my teeth with my nails. I never missed a meeting.
On my own time, I rotted—glued to online videos. A man who spent hours giving condescending advice to debt-laden callers, F-list celebrity feuds, people watching people play low-fi horror games, Christian couples bawling as members of their wedding party prayed over them. Stories upon stories, all tragedies.
You can read the rest of the story here. Hope you liked it ;)
I’m reading Shoedog by Phil Knight, which is crazily addictive and has the unfortunate effect of making me wish I was an entrepreneur
I’m listening to Townes van Zandt, who I have discovered shamefully late. Great music, sad story.
I’m watching Hacks. Love Jean Smart, hate the outfits they force Ava into. Put down the mom jeans it is NOT 2018.