I'm not a celebrity chef. I like to think of myself as a giving, caring person who really does think about the modern world-someone who tries to improve the planet, even though it seems pretty much doomed. As a consequence, maybe I'm not fully qualified to pa.s.s judgment on the diet of most Americans. But as I stood there staring at the s.h.i.t-coated guano logs and repulsive cans of room-temperature weasel p.i.s.s in the airport vending machines, I was appalled. "Come on, America, you're living creatures, not science experiments."

"Scary, isn't it, Ray."

"How on f.u.c.king earth do Americans expect to ensure that weaker countries stay weak when all they eat are overpackaged chemical goatf.u.c.kings manufactured in the same factories that make d.i.l.d.os and pesticides?"

"Ray, I don't think there's anything in there we could actually put in our bodies."

Still we scanned the grids of toxins wrapped in bright paper and the cans of sugary blight.

"Look!" Neal was pointing, with a heartbreaking note of hope in his voice. "Look at that bar there-it's got peanuts in it. That's food."

"Probably tastes like a pocket calculator garnished with dried herpes juice flakes."

"That's quite a word picture, Ray."

"I try." I was reflective for a moment, "Neal, back home in your Samsung telly cardboard box, what do you eat?"

"I like to think I eat very well-that I'm discriminating, actually. Always try to eat vegetables and the like. I find the women who work in the better cla.s.s of restaurant enjoy feeding me properly out the back door. They like to take me on as a personal project. I can't count the number of them I've s.h.a.gged, too, in the back alleys after closing time."

The f.u.c.king hobo lives like a king. "G.o.d, there have to be more options for breakfast in this place."

"Let me look around the corner."

Neal went scouting and returned a few minutes later. "Ray, you have to come see this."

He led me down a hallway and into what had been maybe a hip and trendy waiting lounge back in the days of Led Zeppelin's 1973 North American tour, but was now a putty-coloured, soul-crushing dump with a groovy tattered orange stripe around the ceiling. Seated in the lounge's cracked leather chairs were twenty-four men and women who were ... who were ... awfully...

"Ray," Neal whispered, "that is one highly f.u.c.kable group of people."

"f.u.c.kable. That is the word I was looking for."

We scanned the crowd: cheerleader, MILF, yoga teacher, schoolgirl-every fetish category imaginable, a true buffet. And while I'm not gay, I could swear the guys had something going for them, too.

"This is no accident, Ray."

"How do you mean?"

"To gather a group as f.u.c.kable as this one would take a trained professional weeks." He took a few steps forward and asked a "farm gal" who they were.

"We're this year's Survival contestants."

"Ah! That's terrific. I'm Neal. I'm working on your show."

I came over to ogle her chest. "h.e.l.lo-h.e.l.lo."

"Raymond here is a cameraman on the show and I'm his personal a.s.sistant."

She smiled but didn't get up to take Neal's extended hand. "Sorry. We're all p.o.o.ped. They're pre-starving us for the show, and we're actually not allowed to speak to crew. They said our meals would be here soon, but that was eight hours ago, and we can't leave the lounge to go find something to eat because our flight could be leaving at any moment. It's awful."

"We're looking around for something to eat too," said Neal. "If we have any luck, we'll bring you back something."

"G.o.d bless you."

As we walked away, I was s.h.a.gging all twelve of the girls in my head. "Holy Christ, Neal, two months with that lot? We'll be living like G.o.ds."

Down a few corridors, we saw a thirteen-year-old driving a golf cart. In the back seat were twenty-four packaged meals. I flagged the boy down. "I'm Raymond, and you are ... ?"

"Todd."

"Todd, right. Stuart told me to bring the meals to the contestants, so if you'll get out of the driver's seat, I'll take over."

"But I was supposed to-"

"Never mind that. I'm much older than you and I'm taking over. We don't want to have Stuart angry at us, do we?"

"No!"

"Okay, then, Todd, just f.u.c.k off now."

Todd got out and Neal and I hopped in.

"Well, that was easy," I said as we whirred away.

"Sure was."

The contestants were to the right, but we turned left and, before a glorious panorama of Pearl Harbor, stopped to inspect the succulent contents of the contestants' clamsh.e.l.l containers.

"Excellent-looking chicken tikka masala, Ray. Want to try some?"

"We need forks. Where's the cutlery?"

Neal fished around in a bag, removed something and handed it to me. It was a forky thing, but with a round depression.

"What the f.u.c.k is this?"

"It's a spork."

A spork, or a foon, is hybrid cutlery having a spoon-like scoop at one end with three or four fork tines. Spork-type utensils have been in use since the late nineteenth century. Patents for spork-like designs date back to 1874, when the word "spork" was registered as a trademark in the U.S. Sporks are used by fast-food restaurants, schools, the military and prisons.

"A spork? Who the f.u.c.k would eat food with a thing called a spork?"

"Look," said Neal. "You can see a forky bit on the edge of the spoony bit." Neal dug into his chicken. His sporkwork was surprisingly dexterous.

"Jesus, Neal, watching you eat with a spork is like seeing Helen Keller at a ladies' afternoon tea."

"Sporks are the wave of the future, Ray. Oh-pa.s.s me some of that ravioli."

"Will do."

I took two sporks and began using them to down some of the smashingly good pasta.

Neal said, "Wait, a second, Ray-you don't need two sporks. The whole point of a spork is that you only need the one utensil."

"Neal, I'll use two sporks if I f.u.c.king well want to."

"But it's defeating the whole spirit of the spork."

"Spork spirit?" It's hard to get mad at Neal, because he suffers from a medical condition called total f.u.c.king stupidity.

"Ray, don't get mad just because I say yes to life. I like to keep myself available to the universe, because it brings me wisdom. Maybe you just don't want me to soar."

"It's a G.o.dd.a.m.n f.u.c.king spork, Neal. It is the embodiment of everything that is wrong with the f.u.c.king Western universe."

"Ray, just eat."

"I can't. I'm upset." It's true. When I get exercised about something, the adrenaline kills my hunger. Fight or flight.

"But you're going to sugar-crash, Ray, and then where'll you be? It'll take you days to rejigger your system back to normal."

Neal, confound him, had a point.

"Here," he said. "You have to eat something. Start with these."

"What are they?"

"Mixed nuts."

"What's this weird-looking one?"

"A macadamia nut."

13.

When a movie is made of this entire soul-fart of an experience, this will be the point where we cut to a scene in which our hero opens his eyes to find himself in bed with an IV in his right arm, while in the background comes the sound of hooting, hollering and the loathsome Neal, singing and most likely dancing his own version of the 1984 Tears for Fears cla.s.sic, "Shout."

What the f.u.c.k?

As our hero regains consciousness, he will realize he is in a six-bed hospital ward shared with five nut-brown Samoan wrestlers, all disintegrating as a result of heart disease or diabetes garnered from a lifetime of fatty, sugary snacks purchased through welfare fraud.

The music will stop and our hero will hear clapping and laughter, and then his faithful slave friend Neal's footsteps approaching.

"Ray! You're awake!"

"What the f.u.c.king h.e.l.l is going on here?"

"You had an allergic reaction, Ray. That macadamia nut you ate. You swelled up like one of these fellows here-you almost died."

I shuddered and a wave of hunger went through me. "Neal, how long have I been in here?"

"Two days, Ray, but I knew you had Survival spirit and would make it through."

"Survival spirit? I have no such f.u.c.king thing. What is wrong with you, Neal?"

"It's a good thing I have some paramedic training. Your eyeb.a.l.l.s were about to pop out of your skull like Ping-Pong b.a.l.l.s."

At that very moment, I heard a voice that made my gonads retreat into my groin.

"Darling! You're alive! All the wh.o.r.es along the International Date Line must be rejoicing at the news."

Fiona? What was she doing here?

"h.e.l.lo, darling. I can see your brush with death has made you contemplative and given your soul complexity and depth."

"Fi, what in G.o.d's name are you doing in ..." I looked at Neal.

"Honolulu General."

"What the f.u.c.k are you doing in Honolulu General?"

"Well, for starters, I'm feasting on your tears. To me they taste of joy. Second, as you know, I was in southern France. I was having a strawberry lubricant-scented frolic with a gifted young thing who was, um, auditioning for a part in a global beverage campaign, when suddenly, just as I was about to withdraw the long string of beads from ..." She paused, noting that the five belugas in the room were listening, completely rapt.

"Go on," said Neal, also enthralled. "Tell us more. You were talking about beads."

"Very well, I will, although before I was using beads, I was using a handful of those Babybel cheeses that come in the red vinyl mesh-just the right amount of satisfying texture and shape. And my young crumpet! Her name was Gwyn. So naive, yet so eager to learn. Skin like a peach. And so respectful of authority."

There was total silence. Fiona looked around, clearly pleased with our reaction.

"To cut a long story short, I was in the midst of naughty, s.e.xy, lubricated fun when the phone rang with the news."

"News? You came all the way here because you heard I had an allergic reaction?" I was touched.

Fiona snorted and Neal leapt in. "Bad news, Ray," he said. "That load of contestants that was about to take off when you ate the macadamia nut?" With his right hand, he made the international sign for a nose-diving corporate jet. "All gone."

I thought about this. "Well, at least they went to their graves hungry."

Fiona nodded. "Them and the entire casting team. So, thanks to contractual obligations, I have been dragged in to recast the show."

s.h.i.t. I knew I shouldn't have been so hard on Mr. Bradley. And then a chill went through me. "Wait-was Sarah on the flight?"

Fiona's unholy left lizard brow arched upward. "Someone has a crush, do they?"