Animal Style

Don Gorske is feeding Kim Kardashian’s ass. I’m sure of it.

As of May 17, 2011, Gorske’s eaten 25,000 Big Macs. He usually eats two a day (no fries, no soda), the only foodstuffs he consumes. But he’s a slim 185 pounds and has enviable blood triglycerides. In Touch magazine may have theorized recently that fameball Kim Kardashian is looking so exceedingly Daisy Duck callipygian because of getting coals-to-Newcastle butt implants, but I believe the truth is stranger but more direct: The thousands of hamburic calories Gorske’s ingested over the past few years go straight into Kardashian’s ass.

It makes perfect sense. After all, we’re talking about The Hamburger, the American sacramental meal. I could wax poetic like some smarty-pants Jimmy Buffett-cum-Lester Bangs about the sizzle, the savor, the iconic perfection of a round of sizzling cow flesh parked between a soft bun (and mayo, mustard, tomato, lettuce, pickle, and onion—raw, not grilled—for me, thanks) and how it’s rooted in God and Country and Fourth of July and corn-fed Iowa beef and the smile of a child . . . I couldn’t give a shit. I’m no food writer, all agog with taste “revelations.” If I eat meat I want Ur-Hamburger, the divine body of America transubstantiated behind the waxy communion wafer of a well-done patty.

Ur-Hamburger is not a recipe. It’s not some defanged, chained menagerie creature perching on Jack Hanna’s khakis and piddling on his shirt, womp wommmp. It is a slavering, fearless monster incarnate in carne: two all-Id patties, special Us, lecher, greed. It crashes through the underbrush of our cultural consciousness, shedding sesame seeds like cougar scat and leaving mayonnaise-glistening, onion-perfumed scratch marks on our collective soul. Mike Tyson won’t eat meat now—he’s a vegan because an all-plant diet dampens his rancor. I know what he means, since a Big Mac opens the chakras of my American savagery in a way that belies its 540 calories. Suddenly I’m connected to Chicago’s big shoulders and Custer’s Last Stand, transcontinental railroads and Iggy Pop twirling off the stage into a basket of outstretched, needle-scarred arms.

It’s like George Carlin’s joke about what cocaine makes you feel like: “It makes you feel like having more cocaine.” The American More, our polymorphously perverse gluttony that pervades everything we eat and smoke and buy and steal and covet. If we turn up our nose at the rude trough of fast food, we get our More fix by declaring we want our burgers organic, grass fed, applewood smoked, topped with humanely raised foie gras and locally sourced alpaca chevre. High or low brow, we are inescapably a nation of Andrea Trues cooing “How do you like it?” in response to Burger King’s “Have it your way.” More, more, more.

I’m sure none of my postmodern raptures on the hamburger have ever crossed Don Gorske’s mind. He eats Big Macs because he likes them, a whole lot. Again, what is more American, other than maybe Kim Kardashian, at this point? I believe the two of them are what Kurt Vonnegut deemed a duprass in his novel Cat’s Cradle, a linked collective of two strangers who together work towards a shared goal, a common raison d’être. In Gorske and Kardashian’s case, they exist to express the Dow Jones of American More, the rise and fall (but mostly rise) of our inexhaustible appetite. Gorske’s stomach closes not in a duodenum but in an interdimensional portal, a wormhole to the fat cells of Kardashian’s swelling ass. He eats for us, and she grows for us. If this trend continues Kardashian will outgrow her Princess-Jasmine-drawn-by-Coop proportions very quickly, becoming instead a protoplasmic mass like the mutated Tetsuo at the end of Akira. And what’s strangest is that she seems to know this, to understand that she—or rather, her famously sinusoid corpus—does not fit the standard tragic metaphor of “body for public consumption,” a nauseating buffet of masochistic Femaleburgers spanning from Marilyn Monroe to Heidi Montag. Glenn O’Brien wrote in Artforum about the hamburger: “Like Frankenstein, it is a body made of many bodies.” Kim’s body is our body, fed by our burger lust, billions and billions served. Robble robble.

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