The United States of Air: a Satire that Mocks the War on Terror

by J. M. Porup

  Ice cubes crashed at my elbow. My water glass filled. I jumped in my chair.

  A young waiter stood at my side. “My apologies, monsieur. I will be your personal waiter this evening.”

  Attitude, Frolick. You’re a gangster, d-word it.

  “I ask for water?” I snarled.

  The man stammered, “Non, monsieur.”

  I bunched up my fists. “Then what you doing, huh?”

  The waiter inclined his head. “Please do not kill me, monsieur.”

  “Quit your blubbering,” I said, as irritably as I could manage. My heart went out to him. I had hurt his feelings.

  The man left the pitcher of water on the table and scurried down the stairs. I followed him with my eyes, and let an idle hand drape across my pocket. The vial of poison was still there. Remember your errand, you idiot. You could poison the pitcher of water, but that wasn’t ideal. Only kill half a dozen people that way. Might even miss Fatso. No. Got to get into the kitchen somehow, and do it soon. Hang on. Wasn’t soup usually a first course? Make that real soon.

  The waiter walked along the side wall and pushed backward through a swinging door. The crash of plates and an oath in French escaped the gap before it swung shut again.

  That was where I had to go. The food lab. But how was I going to get in there without getting caught? I was the fattest man in the room, even fatter than Fatso himself, and I was sitting in full view of everyone. Why couldn’t Stummick and the makeup artist have chosen a less conspicuous alter ego?

  The hall was packed. And still I was the only one on stage. Fatso entered, and the guards chained and padlocked the doors. The don of dons led a procession toward the throne, including Marinara, Chow and Gassy. They mounted the stairs and took their seats, except for Gassy, who approached a waist-high microphone. Fatso reclined on the jewel-encrusted throne. Rumor on the street was that the chair was made of solid platinum.

  Fatso put his hand over his heart. The others did the same. Gassy dropped his pants and farted the “Star-Spangled Banner.” He had some trouble with the high notes. When he was finished, he received a standing ovation.

  “Today eez a day uv Sanksgeeveeng,” Fatso said in a loud voice. The hall went quiet. “Zerefore let oos geef sanks.”

  Waiters brought each of us a magnum of French bubbly sour grape juice and a tall, narrow glass delivery device. A chorus of popping corks echoed in the hall. The magnum crunched into an ice bucket at my side. I was supposed to drink all of that?

  “Let oos geef sanks,” the Godfather of Food said again, and lifted his glass in a toast, “for zee Prophet.”

  Snickers from below. And not the candy bar kind, either. (Trust me on this one. I know the difference.)

  “Do not mock,” Fatso said sternly. “Weezout zee Prophet, wat bizz-nees wood wee haf?” He let the question linger. Heads nodded. “Be-cuz wee air bizz-nees-men. Men like oos bilt zees cun-tree. Wee air wat make zees cun-tree great.”

  More heads nodded.

  “Yeer by yeer ow-air pow-air grows,” he continued. “Sanks to one man. Zee Prophet. Zee decisions wee now make—wat food to import, wair to sell eet, and, crucialment, at wat price,” —this drew chuckles from the audience— “zeez decisions air more important zan any law zat zee Air Congress passes, or proclamation from zee Zeen House, or jugement from zee Supreme Food Court. Zerefore, je dis encore, merci beaucoup, Monsieur le Prophet.” And so saying, he drained his glass.

  The others repeated the toast and emptied their glasses. I brought the delivery device to my lips, but could not drink. How could I? Alcohol contains calories. The others were staring at me. They expected me to drink. They probably expected me to eat, as well. How was I going to survive this evening?

  I opened my mouth wide and poured the sour grape juice down my shirtfront. Fatso frowned. My waiter stepped forward and patted me dry. At a nod from the throne, he refilled my glass.

  The man on the most expensive chair in the world lifted his champagne flute once more. “To zee Prophet,” he said quietly.

  I echoed the toast. Fatso drank. He looked at me. Forgive me, Mine Prophet, I whispered, and freebased the prohibited liquid down my throat. Bubbles burned my tongue. I forced myself to swallow. I gagged, but managed to keep it down.

  Fatso said something to Marinara on his left. The Italian laughed. Soon the whole table was giggling. They kept glancing at me. At Don Caponey Baloney. What did that mean?

  I felt funny. Dizzy. The calories must have gone straight to my head. I had to find some excuse not to eat. As it was, it would take months to undo the damage from the glass of champagne.

  Fatso tapped his champagne flute with a large carving knife. “Dinn-air eez sairved!”

  The soup! D-word it. I was too late. The waiters returned from the kitchen carrying gigantic silver platters, each covered with a domed lid. Wait a minute. That didn’t look like soup. Maybe there was still hope. My waiter put a platter down in front of me and lifted the lid.

  Flashback to Gramma’s house. A roast turkey big enough for our family of eighteen, plus leftovers for a week. I stared around the room in horror. Everyone had a whole turkey. Except for Fatso, who had an entire suckling pig, an apple clenched between its crispy jaws.

  “Hey Fatso,” Gassy called out. “Great hors d’oeuvre, man.”

  Hors d’oeuvre?

  The mafioso tore at the dead birds with their hands. Now what was I going to do? The mission had failed. Or was the soup course later? Either way I’d have to play along. But that meant consuming the dead flesh of a fellow creature.

  I studied the glistening brown skin of the avian corpse in front of me. I tugged at a turkey leg, and it came away in my hand. Poor thing. I wiped away a tear. How much worse could things possibly get?

  My waiter slid a platter of mashed potatoes onto the table next to my turkey. The other diners got the same. A pyramid of pureed spuds, ripped untimely from their earthy womb, that towered to the same height as the candelabra. In order to eat we must be so cruel. Upturned grey horns protruded from the mash. I let out a cry of grief when I realized what they were: ground up pig flesh stuffed into the animal’s own small intestine. I went immediately into mourning.

  “Baloney!”

  Fatso tore at a pig leg with his teeth. “Wat eez zee problem? Don yoo like eet?”

  “Great turkey,” I said, with a neoprene grin. “Fabulous spread. Ain’t got nothing like this in Chicago.”

  “Funny yoo say zat,” he said, and swallowed. “Cuz I doo not see yoo eeting nun uv eet, mon ami.”

  I speared a tiny fragment of breast meat, apologizing silently to that once-proud bird. At Gramma’s house we had engaged in similar gluttonous acts of cruelty, and called it family values. A shudder rippled through me. Thank the Prophet this murderous, self-indulgent, unholy day had been finally banned.

  “Don’t think he’s gonna eat nothing, boss,” Gassy said, and farted again, this time the theme song to Top Gun.

  I touched the morsel to my lips. The smell made me nauseous. To eat meant going against everything I believed in. To refuse to eat meant torture and death. The fork slipped from my hand and clattered to my plate.

  “Guess I’m just not hungry,” I said.

  Everyone at the table stared at me. Fatso pounded the table. “Yoo heer zat?” he roared. “Baloney eez not hun-gree!” He laughed, and soon the entire hall was laughing with him.

  A gunshot ended the merriment. Fatso held a gold-plated pistol overhead. He lowered the gun until it pointed at me.

  “Yoo doo not eat be-cuz yoo air not hungree?” he asked. “Or be-cuz yoo seenk eet eez poisoned?”

  Poison! Change the topic, fast!

  “Of course not,” I said. “Why would it be poisoned?”

  “Gassy,” Fatso ordered. “Gif Frolick yor bird.”

  A cavalry charge of a fart sounded in the hall. “Sure thing, boss.”

  Our waiters interchanged the turkeys. Fatso’s gun did not waver.

  “Now eat.”<
br />
  I looked down at the turkey. Another avian friend, ruthlessly murdered in cold blood to satisfy our addiction. My lips cringed.

  “I can’t.”

  Fatso’s finger tightened on the trigger. “Or maybe yoo air not zee reel Baloney. Maybe yoo air sum airhead cop.”

  The Twinkies returned in a glorious flutter of translucent wings. They sang a new song:

  Life or death.

  Eat or die.

  It’s food, not meth—

  you’re a spy!

  They clapped their wings together and chanted:

  At-ti-tude!

  At-ti-tude!

  At-ti-tude!

  I glared back at Fatso’s gun. “Eat you,” I said. I ripped a drumstick from Gassy’s partially dismembered turkey and bit off the biggest piece I could fit in my mouth. I chewed it twice and swallowed. The gun followed everything I did. I grabbed the serving spoon and slopped a mound of mashed potatoes down my throat. A sausage followed. The hard lump of my lost porcine brother—may he rest in peace—galloped down my throat, bruising my innards.

  I shoved more and more food into my body, defiling that air-eating temple. I kept my eyes on my plate and ate as though the fate of the world depended on it. Which, as I was later to find out, it did. My Twinkies cheered and clapped, urging me on. It was the first time I had eaten anything in more than three years. It wasn’t long before nausea took hold.

  Vomit filled my mouth. Oh no! I completely forgot. I could die of overdose. Like the junkies we often found in the gutter, all skin and bones, dead from gluttony. All around me the sounds of slurping and gulping. Fatso mauled his pig leg. His gun lay on the table. I swallowed the mouthful of puke.

  I needed to get to a bathroom, and fast. I pushed back my chair and struggled to my feet.

  Fatso glanced up. “And now I suppose yoo air going to tell oos yoo air full?”

  “Leaky prostate, boss,” I said. “That OK with you?”

  “Use a catheter,” Chew Chow said. “What I do. That way you don’t miss a single course.”

  “Plus a colostomy bag,” Marinara added. Everyone at the table groaned. “I know, I know, it sounds gross,” he said. “But seriously.” He gestured at the food. “Who’s got time to take a dump?”

  Fatso grunted and returned his attention to his dead baby pig. He chucked a half-eaten leg over his shoulder. The waiters behind him scuffled, and one came out of the fray with the gnawed bone in one hand, his white tuxedo jacket ripped at the shoulder.

  The nausea boiled inside me. I edged around the table to the stairs.

  Gassy wiped his lips, and farted “America the Beautiful.” When the applause died, he said, “Hang on, man, I’ll come with you.”

  “I can go potty on my own,” I said. “Unless you’re one of those poo-eating freaks, that is.” Food withdrawal had sent some crazies in LA into a sewer treatment plant. The cops caught them with their mouths full of raw sludge.

  Gassy leaned toward me, enveloping me in his stench. “Thought you said it was your prostate?”

  “It’s both,” I growled. Attitude. Good. “Or do you expect me to announce my bowel movements to the entire table, the way colostomy boy here just did?”

  “Whatever, man.” His face lit up, a chicken-sucking Lone Star grin. “You first. I insist.”

  I waddled down the stairs, Gassy a half-step behind me. I had no idea where the bathroom was. At the bottom, I turned. “Why don’t you go on ahead?”

  It wasn’t a question, but Gassy took it as one. “Us gangsters got to stick together,” he said, and slapped me on the back. “Both on and off the shithole. Ain’t that right?”

  I resumed my slow-motion walk. I could move faster—the fat suit was quite light—but it would not look natural. Plus, if I needed to run, a sudden sprint would take them by surprise. With all the calories I’d just consumed, I’d have the artificial energy of a food-popping Olympic athlete.

  Two blue doors flanked the kitchen. I headed toward them, hoping one of them was the men’s room. Maybe Gassy would tire of my slow pace and jump ahead of me. But he seemed content to lag behind, farting the funeral march in a minor key.

  We passed the first door. A faded men’s room symbol adorned the chipped paint. I leaned against it, but it didn’t move.

  “Nah, man,” Gassy said. “Don’t you remember? We gots to use the outhouse. Like we some cracker hillbilly white trash or some shit.”

  Outhouse?

  So that was how Fatso had evaded capture for so long. We had guessed as much, of course, but it was different to know. To dig a hole to hide your secret excretions… I shuddered. It was too shameful to contemplate.

  “Come on,” Gassy said. “This way.” He held open the kitchen door for me.

  My luck was turning. Maybe I’d get a shot at the soup after all. I straightened my bow tie, thrust my hand into my pocket and gripped the vial of poison. Then I strode past him into that pit of evil.

  Now, I have busted food labs in my time, but I have never seen anything like Fatso’s Thanksgiving kitchen, before or since. The turkey was a morsel compared to what was to come. Hundreds of dead, skinless cows rotated on skewers over charcoal pits dug into the concrete floor. Thousands of bottles of wine filled every free space. Wheelbarrows of bread stood in a row to one side. Punch bowls of salad covered a side table. Freezer after freezer along one wall bore the notice “Ice Cream.” Nuts, cheeses, dried and fresh fruit. A table a hundred yards long, with chocolate cakes to infinity, bottles of cognac and whiskey between them.

  Then I saw it. A six-foot-tall vat in the center of the room. Beneath it a massive gas burner. A sign on the cauldron read, “Soup.” A wooden step stool led halfway to the top. A chef in a towering white hat reached over his head to stir the unseen broth.

  “Hey man, you coming or arentcha?” Gassy laughed. “You act like you ain’t never been to one of Fatso’s Thanksgivings before.”

  I followed him through the busy food lab. Dozens of chefs were at work practicing their sinister craft. At the other end of the kitchen, Gassy pushed through a pair of heavy fire doors, and we stepped out onto the high school’s playground. A red carpet stretched across the asphalt to the soccer field and climbed a flight of stairs onto the back of a flatbed truck.

  That was the outhouse?

  The portable feces receptacle shelter was built of marble and roofed in solid gold. Inside, chandeliers made of diamonds illuminated a two-holer. The toilet seats were studded with emeralds. Rubies the size of my fist held the toilet paper rolls in place.

  “You want left or right?” Gassy asked. The room smelled of incense and rosewater, a futile attempt to disguise the stench of addicted humanity’s ridiculous droppings. Without waiting for an answer, he dropped his trousers and sat down on one hole.

  Vomit surged again in my throat. There was no stall, no divider. He would see me. He would hear me. “I think I’ll go use the bushes.”

  I shut the door and sprinted across the soccer field. The fat suit jiggled as I ran. Bushes along the far fence stood in shadow. Behind me the outhouse door banged open.

  “Wait up!” Gassy shouted.

  My knees scraped into a patch of bramble. I stuck two fingers down my throat and retched. It all came up. Or most of it, anyway. Enough to prevent an OD. I unbuckled my belt and dropped my pants.

  Shoes squelched behind me in the wet grass. “Hey, you all right?”

  I straightened up and wiped my lips. I pulled my pants back up. Gassy stood at my side. “If you must know,” I said, “I had the squirts.” Remember, attitude. “And what the food do you care if I go poo in the bushes?”

  “I hear you, man. This business, you can’t be too paranoid.”

  “Paranoid’s the word,” I agreed.

  We walked back across the soccer field to the school building. A movement caught my eye. A guard’s boot crunched on the gravel rooftop. An Uzi glinted in his hand. Had he seen me? Maybe he was just making the rounds. I hoped it was the latter.


  Together we filed back into the food lab. It was now or never, I realized. I had to find a way to ditch Gassy and poison the soup.

  “You go on,” I said. “I’m going to sneak a piece of cake.”

  Gassy whistled. “Don’t let Fatso catch you, man,” he said. “Remember what happened last year?”

  “Of course I do,” I snapped. Time to double down. “That’s precisely why I’m going to have some cake.”

  “Wouldn’t want to be you if they catch you.”

  I made a finger gun and jabbed it between his eyes. “I got plenty of friends down in Texas owe me a favor. You wouldn’t be thinking of telling on me, now would you?”

  He held his hands out wide. “No way, man. I wouldn’t do that.”

  I dropped my thumb. “Bang.”

  The man flinched.

  “Now get the food out of here.”

  Gassy returned to the banquet hall. When the doors swung shut behind him, I surveyed the room. Chefs swarmed around me, hacking at still-raw cow corpses with meat cleavers. The soup vat was unattended. Maybe they were saving it for the dessert course.

  I strolled among the tables, dwarfed by food piled high to the ceiling. Grip your lapels. The connoisseur casts a critical eye over the food lab product. Is anyone watching? I reached out a hand to touch a cake, but stopped, fingers an inch from the frosting. Swivel the head from side to side. No one was looking. No one cared.

  More quickly now I waddled toward the soup vat. I took the vial out of my pocket. Ten feet to go. Around a table of pies. I uncorked the vial and covered the tube with my thumb.

  I circled a table of chocolates and waltzed around a coffee urn. Nothing stood in my way. No chefs nearby. I approached the bubbling cauldron. The soup gurgled and hissed above me. I double-checked the sign: “Soup.” No mistake there. The top of the vat was two feet overhead, just within arm’s reach. I didn’t dare use the stepladder. I stood on tiptoe and sniffed loudly. A curious diner wishes to sample the broth. I could smell nothing.