Fast food may be contributing to America’s obesity problem. But take me to a Michelin three-star French bistro and I’m going to order things that are much more fattening than a Big Mac. Starting with that foie gras and going straight to escargots in garlic butter sauce, roasted duck breast (1,500 calories and 25 grams of fat), asparagus hollandaise, potatoes au gratin, crème brûlée, and a big wedge of cheese washed down with two bottles of 1996 Château Latour. At least when I emerge from between the golden arches I’m just fat, not fat and broke.
Plus some fast food is delicious by any standards—In-N-Out Burger, Chick-fil-A, Whataburger. I fondly remember when that icon of suburban sprawl Popeyes fried chicken first came north. It was in the 1980s, when I lived in New York and was dating a stylish young lady from New Orleans who was full of scorn for Yankee cooking. She claimed a decent meal could not be had north of the Mason-Dixon line. Every few weeks she’d give a dinner party, inviting New York guests for “a real southern treat.”
But the stylish young lady could not cook. What she did was sneak down to the only Popeyes in the city, which was in a scary neighborhood on Forty-second Street. She’d come home with her Vera Bradley bag full of spicy white and dark, biscuits, Cajun fries, red beans and rice, and jambalaya. She’d stick them in silver serving dishes and everyone would rave.
It’s a Free Country
And I like that. We Americans are supposed to be able to do what we want to do. And what we want to do is obvious. Fifty-two percent of us live in the suburbs. On any given day 37 percent of us will eat fast food. And, as far as I can tell, a hundred percent of us are stuck in a traffic jam on the Leverett Connector.
Acknowledgments
Herewith the part of a book that nobody reads except for the people whose names the author accidentally left out. And me. I’m a fan of “Acknowledgments.” Often I’d rather read the acknowledgments than the book in which they appear.
Acknowledgments are informative. If, right at the start, the author thanks someone you’ve never heard of in lavish terms but for vague reasons, that person is the ghostwriter. And the more lavish (and vague) the gratitude, the less likely it is that the author has read his or her own book that the ghostwriter wrote.
No such person will appear in these acknowledgments, partly because I can’t afford one but mostly because even the most mercenary ghostwriters do have standards.
Likewise, in nonfiction books, expansive compliments to “research assistants” mean that people more intelligent than the author—not usually hard to find—are responsible for the content. Fulsome praise of a particular research assistant indicates the author and that assistant are having a torrid affair. My lack of research assistants proves (a.) I’m no hunk and (b.) nobody with any intelligence is responsible for this content.
Also be alert—in the bibliography as well as the acknowledgments—to authors’ long lists of “other works that have made this book possible,” especially if those works are little known, out of print, or available only in downloaded microfiche digital images. I’m not saying nonfiction authors are plagiarists. They may also be lying their heads off about having read all that shit.
No plagiarism accusations, however, are to be made against humorists. Why accuse us of something for which we already stand convicted? The whole world knows we’ll steal jokes from anywhere. No T-shirt slogan, bathroom graffiti, or Snapchat cat meme is safe from our thievery. Although there are a few humorists who are innocent of this crime. The technical term for them, in the humor trade, is “not funny.”
Another acknowledgment sentence to be on the lookout for begins, “This book could never have been written without . . .” What follows is usually an encomium to a spouse or partner. What should follow is the word “money.”
People who don’t write for money exist. They include sensitive poets—sensitive to everything except meter and rhyme. Also, old duffers pecking away at personal histories on their Royal portables. The children of the old duffers had better pretend to be thrilled if they want to stay in the will. (I believe a close reading of the First Amendment would indicate that sensitive poets with execrable scansion and old duffers with self-published life stories—along with TikTok rappers, social media influencers, people who use “journal” as a verb, and Donald Trump—are tacitly excluded from the constitutional prohibition against abridging the freedom of speech.)
So let us get to the heart of the matter. This book could never have been written without money from my friend, editor, and long-suffering (having commissioned every book I’ve ever written) publisher Morgan Entrekin, president of Grove Atlantic.
Morgan paid me money. What he got in return was this book. Call it one of the mysteries of late-stage capitalism. I don’t understand late-stage capitalism and, thank God, neither does Morgan.
But let’s not forget the encomium to a spouse or partner that usually goes about here in an acknowledgments, in place of vulgar talk of pelf.
In years gone by, when most writers were men and most writers’ spouses or partners were wives, what was really meant by the obligatory panegyric was this: “She retyped the whole manuscript including my indecipherable scribbles in the margins and fixed the spelling, punctuation, and grammar. She took care of the house and the kids, cooked all the meals, mowed the lawn, and changed the oil in the car because I was drunk when I wasn’t writing and sometimes when I was. She held down a full-time job of her own because this book is six years overdue. She never got nosey and discovered the torrid
