Millroy the Magician by Paul Theroux
I was always with him these nights, keeping him company, listening, trying to think of something to say back to him.
‘Eaters don’t do that in the diner,’ I said.
Walking back to the Day One Diner one night from touring the outsides of restaurant windows, he said that watching the people had taken away all his hunger.
Another time he said, ‘Eating is the most intimate and revealing act – more intimate, deeper and longer-lasting even than any other human activity. It is not eating. It is feeding.’
Yet watching people feeding filled him with conviction. These people were lost – too old, too wayward ever to enter a Day One Diner. They had Fat Voices, Smoker’s Face, Sitter’s Hips, water retention, porky necks, belly sacks, swags and bags. They were burgers, they were creepers, they were cud-chewers. They ate tuna fish, and other sea creatures without scales or fins. If they knew what Millroy stood for, he said, they would oppose him. Already he had been denounced by some Boston churches: the Catholic cardinal, the Christian Scientists – who were just down the street at the Mother Church – and the Seventh-day Adventists (‘The Sevvies think I’m stealing their thunder’). Some people who knew him, hated him.
‘I make a point of not ignoring them,’ he said.
That was why he went out several nights a week to watch these ‘feeders.’ He was as interested in them as he was in the Day One eaters.
‘What good is it to have blind support and well-wishers and fat crazy women making shrines to me and touching their bodies?’
He had not stopped agonizing about Hazel DeHart.
‘I need these burgers ranged against me. I need to see them chewing flesh and then licking their lips, and gnawing their fingers. Their very attitude inspires revelations.’
I have mentioned a thing or two about what you ought to eat, Millroy said the following week on The Day One Program. But what about forbidden foods? What’s bad for you?
He reached to a table and with his incredible strength picked up the enormous phonebook-sized copy of the Book, as he always did, using only his thumb and forefinger, and went on holding it as he talked. You were so worried that he might drop it, you listened to him.
The Book is specific in prohibiting pigs, rabbits, lizards, snails, moles, ferrets, and mice. Can’t eat ’em. Also weasels and tortoises – and anything with paws, anything that creeps, anything that moves on its belly. Fish without scales – sharks, tuna, catfish. We can interpret the rest – crabs, oysters, and it goes without saying, snakes. Certain birds are bad news – herons, swans, pelicans, cuckoos, owls, hawks, and – my fellow Americans – the Book says no one can eat eagles.
Leviticus eleven is an environmentalist’s charter, and it’s also a sort of anti-shopping list. Now think of all the other food prohibited in the Book – prohibited by omission. There is no coffee in the Book, no tea, no chocolate, no Coca-Cola. No one drinks milk in the Book, no one eats potatoes, no one chews gum. What’s so odd about that? Most of what you find on the shelves of the average supermarket is not only unclean in scriptural terms but also in rigorous medical terms.
Scientists are still trying to catch up with old prophets and preachers. The Book does not advocate a single item of food that has proven to be carcinogenic.
More importantly, all the food the Book does mention is healthful. Surely there is a message here that no one so far has entirely grasped?
He was still holding the thick book with two fingers of one hand.
Let this be your cookbook. You will be healthy. You will lose excess fat. You will grow strong. You will live in righteousness for two hundred years.
He put the Book down and he came forward until his face filled the television screen.
Other preachers will promise you Heaven, he said. But how can they? No mortal can make promises like that. I am merely a messenger. And my message is – let the Book guide your appetite and you will know health. You will be regular. You will be delivered from constipation.
‘I never heard anyone preach a sermon like that before,’ LaRayne said, when the program was over that Sunday.
We were eating together as usual, having shoved four tables together, end to end, with Millroy in the middle.
‘Maybe not,’ Millroy said. ‘But I hope you listened, because it’s your message, too. Very soon I am going to send you forth, with some other Sons and Daughters, to run Day One Diners in chosen cities. I want you to be ready.’
‘I’ll be ready,’ Dedrick said, smiling and sitting up straight.
‘That is good.’ Millroy hugged him and then offered him a fig bar.
‘But I’d be more ready if I had my driver’s license.’
‘Get it,’ Millroy said. ‘What’s wrong with you?’
‘I ain’t old enough, man,’ Dedrick said.
‘Yo, Big Guy. Dedrick is fifteen,’ Tuppy said.
‘Does it matter how old you are if you have your health and the child inside you still intact? With Day One you will have these same bodies for two more centuries. Age is a meaningless number, if you truly know health.’
‘They are still going to ask Dedrick how old he is at the Registry if he puts in for a license,’ Tuppy said.
Millroy smiled, and the smile said Listen.
‘This is a ridiculous argument,’ he said. ‘Dedrick doesn’t need a driving license. Dedrick needs to be perfect in his eating, and so do you.’
I knew what was coming, though they did not – they were still smiling. They claimed to be very interested in the emission meter when it was fitted and they breathed into it. They also said they wanted to try the stomach pump, but when Millroy inserted it and worked the contents of their stomachs – these new Sons, Dedrick and Tuppy – into two tin trays, and poked through lumps in the stew with them, identifying specific meals, they began to gargle and choke and they said they did not want to look. No smiles now.
‘This is how you become a faithful Day One Son or Daughter,’ Millroy said. ‘How else can I send you with confidence to a chosen city, to carry on the program?’
Still he was stirring the soft chunks of pukey stew in the tin tray.
‘I see sodium benzoate. I see emulsifiers. I see Niblets out of a can,’ Millroy said. ‘I know your problem, fellas. You’ve been eating out.’
They protested, but the proof was on the tray, if anyone had the strength to look at it without gagging or watery eyes.
He did an emission check on Ike and Daylon.
‘You’re clear.’
He did one on T. Van.
‘We’ve got blowback.’
‘So I drank some tomato juice. Hey, that’s supposed to be good for you.’
‘Yours was canned,’ Millroy said. ‘And that’s not all.’
T. Van sulked, but Millroy steered the boy’s head around by grasping his chin.
‘Additives. Alcohol. Your juice was stepped on, son.’
Millroy had more revelations.
‘I just had a call. People wanting to put my face on cans of beans,’ he said. ‘They’ve seen the marketing potential in Paul Newman salad dressing, Roy Rogers chicken, Ninja Turtles bubble gum. Know what I said to them?’
It was one of our after-work giving-thanks meals, and we were all listening.
‘“Did Quaker Oats ever make anyone into a conscientious objector?” ’ Millroy was smiling. ‘But I have had a true revelation. I am meant to explore the possibilities of certification.’
He knew we had no idea of what he was talking about, so he waited for this to sink in.
‘Like kosher certification by those gloomy-looking rabbis on the sides of matzoh boxes,’ he said. ‘Free of charge, I provide Day One statement of purity on certain foods that pass rigorous tests of fibrosity, residue content, scriptural authenticity. Anything that’s stepped on gets flushed.’
The Book suggests certain foods, Millroy said on a program. But
He explained how various recipes had been revealed to him, combining Day One food with his own ways of cooking it – almond apricot pie, pistachio bars, melon smoothies, date squares, multi-grain loaf, garlic and mint pie, apple-fig cobbler, reddened snapper, escabeche of sardines, puréed chickpeas, pomegranate jam, bramble jelly, roasted chestnuts, honey popcorn balls, and all manner of vegetable soups, and bean stews and fruit breads, or loaves with olives and dates and herbs baked into them. It was not just pottage and Ezekiel bread and barley cakes anymore. The Day One Diner became known for its bakery and its desserts.
This brought a new crowd of eaters – dieters, health-food people, joggers, body sculpturers, aerobics instructors – all seeking this nutritious food. They were people who had never read the Book.
‘But maybe they will read it now,’ Millroy said, ‘when they realize how good the Book can taste.’
These revelations took the form of recipes that he broadcast on the Sunday Day One Program, and he wanted to publish them, too, but as always he had a problem writing them down. He said he got too impatient, too lonely, too distracted sitting at his desk, trying to write. It was drudgery. You left it, and when you came back to your desk, nothing else was added and it was shorter and skimpier than you remembered.
‘No amount of magic can produce even a line of writing,’ he said. ‘Never mind good writing. But you can write down what I say, angel.’
That was how we produced some more small folded-over four-page pamphlets. One was called Situational Eating, about the bad food that people ate in particular places, like sports events, or banquets, or in the movies – and how to avoid falling into the situational trap. Another pamphlet was Recreational Eating. This one began, ‘I’m bored,’ Jimmy said. ‘Let’s go get a pizza –’ The last was called Sequential Eating and described the process by which a person became entangled in dangerous eating habits – chewing salted peanuts and getting thirsty, then drinking a Coke, but instead of quenching your thirst it only introduced more sugar and salt into your body, making you want to chew something like a burger to eliminate the sweetness, and wanting ketchup on the burger, and a chocolate bar afterwards, which contained salt, which increased thirst, more Coke, more sugar, and so on.
Food can make you very hungry. Food can make you very thin, Millroy said on the next program. If it’s bad food you can starve, and you can seriously damage your health.
With his face filling the screen he closed that program, howling, Food can kill you!
Around this time, because of the popularity of The Day One Program Millroy was working on opening Day One Diners in Baltimore and St Louis. He also liked Denver, Chicago and Detroit. Certain cities were natural Day One cities – something about the city, and where the show was big. He could not succeed with the program, he said, if he did not give people a place to eat, and the diner would not work without the program.
The Day One Program had high viewing figures in those cities, even though it was only once a week – eight o’clock on Sunday morning cable, an inexpensive time slot, between Body Shaping and The Hour of Power Prayer Line.
When some of the diners were almost ready, Millroy sent Boston Sons and Daughters to these target cities, some of the newer youngsters for training and the original Sons and Daughters, Willie Webb, Stacy, Kayla and Berry, to supervise. They went in pairs to the various diners – Bervia and Tuppy, LaRayne and Ike, Jaleen and Dedrick.
The other Sons and Daughters, Shonelle, Peaches, T. Van and the rest, stayed in Boston, but Millroy said they would be sent soon to diners that were being renovated in Chicago and Detroit.
‘We will go nationwide in time,’ Millroy said, and then he took on a confiding tone, almost a whisper, that he did not want anyone but me to hear. ‘That is the limit of my ambition, muffin. We will never be overseas. I do not want to conquer the world. It is unworthy of me.’
You would not have thought it was possible to receive more mail than came each morning for Millroy, forwarded by the TV station in bags. Millroy read every letter. Some he filed, some he burned.
‘I don’t care what journalists are paid to write about me in the newspaper,’ he said. ‘The trouble with being me is that they try to imitate me – they go on the attack, they denounce, they try to be funny, they fumble with words and make fools of themselves.
‘They know I am not Elmer Gantry,’ he said. ‘But that’s the only preacher they can think of. The drunk, the adulterer, the faithless man. Americans are trained to see the clergy as hypocrites. Who can blame them?’
He was opening a mailbag that was fat with letters in bundles, and using a Day One dagger he began opening the letters.
‘Jimmy Swaggart – who has been, excuse me, muffin, a whore-hopper – the things that man has eaten!’ Millroy said. ‘Never mind just the meat you see fleshing his face. Never mind his jowls. I’m glad we’re on TV an hour apart! I want people to see us both. I want Jim and Tammy back. I want Oral Roberts and his heart attack, and trembling Billy Graham.’
I have lost forty pounds and the Spirit of the Lord dwells within me, I could see on a letter Millroy was holding but not reading.
‘They’re not looking for souls – they’re looking for money,’ Millroy said. ‘Let them come on my show and take turns trying to punch me in the stomach.’
Your Day One Program is the high point of my week, and when are you going to open a Day One in Albany?
‘No one’s paying for these letters. These letter-writers mean what they say. Some of them hate me. I can understand that. The rest of them love me in a way that makes me want to hide.’
For that reason he avoided making personal appearances. He did not want to speak to large crowds. He refused to sign any of the pamphlets. He would not allow his photograph to be sent out.
‘Just send the Day One logo.’
He wanted the Day One idea to be important, not the name Millroy. No one needs to be grateful to me. Thank the Lord.
But the more he hid, the more famous he became. He refused to appear in public, he would not speak to journalists, he turned away people from Today and Good Morning America. He would not return calls to People magazine. And as a result his name was known everywhere.
‘Sometimes, nothing is more obvious than the thing you try to hide,’ he said. ‘And nothing is more hidden than what is obvious. Every magician knows that, muffin.’
‘I’ve been thinking about flesh,’ he said to the remaining Sons and Daughters and me one day. ‘And by that I mean meat.’
It was the slow dreamy Remember this voice that he used for revelations.
‘It is almost impossible to say the word “meat” without showing your canine teeth. The word makes you smile and bare your teeth. And the other sinister aspect is the sound – “meat” sounds like “eat,” and it also sounds like “meal.” ’
Though he roasted lamb in the Day One Diner, and served it skewered or else seethed it according to suggestions in the Book, he did not eat meat himself – I had never seen him do so. The Book was full of lambs frisking and also full of their crackle and smell as they roasted on a spit, he said. But he would not touch it.
‘All flesh has a face,’ he said. ‘All flesh has a mother.’
That was his reason for not eating it, or so I thought. But he had a deeper reason. He did not tell the Sons and Daughters. He did not tell me. And then he had a nightmare.
It was worse than any nightmare he had had so far – more noise, more clattering, more gasps. I heard it first as a commotion, the sounds of his hands clawing and banging, mistaking the wall for a door, a slapping of woodwork as he tried to get out.
Then his voice from the dark: ‘Talk to me, angel.’
Darkness itself, because of Millroy’s descriptions, seemed to me like
And when Millroy sounded desperate I felt lost. What could I say to this magician that he did not already know?
‘Please,’ he said.
‘Were you having a bad dream?’
‘A terrible dream,’ he said, his voice coming through the boards. ‘That there was a woman outside, waiting for me.’
‘Did you know her?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s neat.’
‘It was death,’ Millroy said.
What could I say to that? But I tried.
‘I wonder if I would recognize her if I dreamed her,’ I said, hoping it would never happen.
‘Everyone’s dream of death is different,’ Millroy said. ‘Only you would know it. My dream would not frighten you. It was my mother wearing a pig-faced mask, standing on one skinny leg in front of the Day One door, shrieking at me.’
‘That’s wicked scary.’
‘It’s not supposed to be for you.’
‘The part about one leg.’
‘That’s the important part,’ he said.
Millroy was breathing hard, as he usually did when he woke up suddenly, and although walls of wood and space separated us I was so used to talking to him in the darkness it was as though we were in the same room.
‘She was small and intense. She always smelled of flour and milk. She was a wonderful cook.’
‘In the dream?’
‘No. When I was growing up,’ Millroy said, in a raspy whisper. ‘In my dream she was death.’
‘When you were growing up,’ I said, trying to think of a question, and making it up as I went along, ‘what did your mother give you to eat?’
There was one of those silences which made the darkness purr like a big sleeping animal. I counted to seventy-seven.