A Visit to the Hometown Buffet

Note from Candy: This is the only post I've ever written that I had second thoughts about. I was afraid it was too malicious. I wrote it on a night that I was sick to death of my own bad habits, one of which is eating junk food when I'm too "busy" to pay attention to what my poor wailing body needs. To stay somewhat sane, I occasionally just aim at a clear target when I write. Believe me when I say the target was me, even though I only have 20 extra pounds to struggle with. My vices are much more disguised. One can be obese with self destruction in many forms.





After Saturday night service at the Methodist church every week, a few of us go out to dinner. Usually to Panera. But when my friend Nancy has her two grandkids with her (ages 6 and 8) she takes them to the Hometown Buffet after church. They think this is a magical, heavenly place because they can choose any food from the vast array and they can just have it.

I had not been to the Buffet de la Hometown in 5 or 6 years. I now remember why.

It never fails. Every single time I've been there, I've had to stifle my startle reaction upon my first glimpse of a very very very very very fat person. My mother and I are both intensely fascinated by lard-asses. We can't help it. We become involuntarily hyper-focused when we see them.

She usually starts the lambasting with a long drawn out, half-whispered "holyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy sh*t." And I will know exactly which masticating manatee she is referring to, because it's not like trying to find an Easter egg in tall grass, is it?

Admittedly, we don't do much actual eating at Hometown Buffet, because every bite is flying in the face of a cautionary tale. It's like trying to inject heroin while staring into the nearly-embalmed visage of Keith Richards, or chewing sirloin steak while facing a Heimlich poster.

We watch as the ample-flanked ones waddle up to the sneeze-guarded trough, their giant buttocks moving in that way that giant buttocks do: one cheek independently hoisting upward, all on its own, only to smear downward against the other one as it heaves upward toward the sad equator of the Sisyphian-tortured belt. This slow, fleshy 2-step continues until the destination of the shiny silver buffet is reached. Some of the more massive cannot even make it to the buffet without help.

In one memorable scene, we witnessed a hugely obese guy being helped up to the buffet with a person on either side, holding tightly to one of his arms. He seemed to point with his sweaty forehead at the glistening delicacies he desired, then was assisted back to his table while one of the enabling sentinels went back to the pigatorium to fill his death-plate. The first of many plates. I know. I watched. And so did my mother. And by this time, we were allowing ourselves to split one mere chicken wing for dinner, lest we become one of the flesh monsters we so recoil from. It is, FYI, not a simple task to split a chicken wing.

I'm not talking chubby here. I'm not even talking fat. I'm referring to the kind of girth that mutates a butt into two of those blow-up exercise balls, glommed together and stuffed into billowing, special-ordered pants. And to accompany it, there is sometimes a horrifying front bulge that hangs completely off the bench seat of the booth until it comes to an uneasy rest on the Hometown Buffet carpet, sticky with meat sauces and hot fudge syrup.

Candy, you are so judgmental, you may be saying. These people are hurting, they come from dysfunctional families, they're crying for help. It doesn't matter what they're crying for. What they're going to get is an early heart attack or intestinal burst, and then an awkward funeral where the attendees pretend not to notice that Uncle Slugly is being lowered into the earth in a grand piano case.

Maybe I'm envious. Because the bottom line, for me, is that they've given in. There is no way I can look at someone who weighs 500 pounds and not think they've thrown in the towel. They might as well hire a plane and skywrite "I give up." And really, there is at least some kind of freedom in giving in to that constant insistent knocking and throwing open the front door of your life to let in your own ruination, in whatever form it takes, be it high-fructose syrup, department store credit card, tiny little line of coke, viscous cloud of remorse, hidden decades-old hubris, or charming quick-fisted man with the eyes of a shark. No more stabs at self-discipline, no more disappointing plummets into not being that person you were hoping to be. Stop the striving, end the failure. Finger-pointing onlookers be damned.


I need to go. Someone's at the door.