chapter 17

When your scale says you weigh in somewhere north of six hundred pounds, you tend to be more of an observer than a participant. Don't get me wrong. Jack DeMarco didn't just fatten me up so he could leave me an immobile blob of fat. For one thing, I could get around all right, if I wanted to. But, whew, what an effort! Just hauling my *** off to the bathroom would make me sweat like a stuck pig, which pretty much explains while I sat around all day watching television.

Don't get me wrong. Jack paid me well for allowing him to get his jollies by watching me turn into a human blimp. I had a million and a half bucks just sitting in the bank. I paid my bills. Hired someone to cook and clean around the apartment. But I was sort of aimless, just drifting through life.

Then one day Mario Torino, the head chef at DeMarco's came by for a visit. He had heard what had happened with me and Jack and he was concerned. Frankly, he had every reason to be. When you're still short of thirty, weigh almost as much as one of those teeny cars you see on the street every so often, and you really had no future to speak of, well, that's a cause for concern.

As it turns out, Mario had left DeMarco's. It seems that the DeMarco family got tired of reading in the newspapers how their restaurant was contributing to the obesity epidemic in this country. So they decided to change the bill of fare at the restaurant to "healthy" stuff like broccoli or kale and free range chicken, which was definitely not Mario's style. So he quit.

So here we were, me sitting on a pile of cash with no idea how to use it and Mario with ideas seemingly bubbling in his brain but no capital to finance any of them. It seemed like a marriage made in heaven. Mario proposed we open up a restaurant, which made sense. We'd both been in the restaurant business for a long time, we knew the pitfalls and the promises. Mario would handle the kitchen and I'd handle the business end of it.

We found a nice little place in a less than posh part of town, not really a slum area but you wouldn't be far wrong in calling it seedy. There was only room for about twelve tables, but that was good. Keeping it small meant that we wouldn't try to over-extend ourselves. After all, I had to live off the million and a half Jack gave me and if I blew it all on this restaurant thing, I'd be a fat, poor, unemployed girl with few prospects for the future, so I knew we had to get it right.

So we had our restaurant. It was all set up and ready to go. We were only missing one thing, a name. We batted around a bunch of names and they all seemed kind of blah. They weren't bad names, just dull.

I think the problem we were having was trying to find a niche for us to fit it, a hook that would draw the customers in. We both agreed that we would offer the kind of food that you ate for the pure pleasure of the dining experience. Mario came up with the Pleasure Palace, which I rejected because it sounded too much like a high cl*** house. While mulling over the whole eating for pleasure thing in my mind, it came to me. Why not call it Hedonism? After all, wasn't that what pleasure was all about? So Hedonism it was.

One of the things that had always bothered me about restaurants was that they wanted the customers to eat and eat a LOT, but the servers and hostesses were all skinny little things who looked as if they hadn't had a good meal to eat in their entire lives. My idea was to hire a staff of fatsos. Mario kind of liked it but it didn't seem to have that pizzazz we were both looking for.

That's when Mario gave me the strangest look. He looked me up and down as though he was about to buy a prime steer, and then he smiled. Not your ordinary, I'm happy because it's such a nice day, kind of smile. No, it was a devilish, almost nasty kind of smile, and, as it turned out, it was devilish with good reason.

Mario suggested we hire an extremely thin girl as our waitress and an equally thin girl as our hostess and then proceed to fatten them up. We'd post pictures of their "progress". He said we could advertise this way, "Don't think our food is GREAT? Just look what it's doing for THESE girls!". I was floored. The idea was great. The only problem is that it made the name Hedonism seem a little "high hat". Then it came to me. I had just joined Fantasy Feeder, so why not call the place FEEDERS? It would be like Hooters for feeders and feedees, a market which had NEVER been tapped in the restaurant business. If nothing else, the name would at least encourage people to come in who liked to EAT!!

And so it was that FEEDERS was born. Of course, we still had to find girls who would be willing to trade in their stylishly thin bodies for big, fat ones, but how hard would THAT be? Alas, Mario and I were about to find out!