Eating Mammals

In a corner I got to work, grinding down the fruit-flesh with an ancient mincer (aha! If only I’d known!), sneaking cupfuls of concentrate and the odd can of tomato juice from the stores, pulping and grinding in an anxious frenzy. The oil was a dilemma, but also the making of me. In it went, pure olive oil. There was secrecy in it, and no great abundance in the supply room. And all the time that pound note looked less and less like good value. Curiously, though, I felt a certain pride, almost a reverence for the task, with Mulligan’s words echoing in my ears: Oh, and, please, olive oil; of that I really must insist.

And so it was that, as casually as possible, I stood over a pan of pure olive oil on a slow flame, and carefully stirred in a half-pint of honey, mimicking as far as I could manage the slow arm movements of someone heating milk and eggs for a custard. Oil and honey are at best distant relations and, although once heated through the emulsion had a not unpleasant taste, the oil did tend to rise. However, the job of introducing the sweetened oil to my juice mixture posed more acute logistical problems, and in the end I carried the lot off to my bedroom in a steel bucket. I whisked and whisked until my arm went into cramp. To my surprise, the stuff combined tolerably well, and although one couldn’t have said that it was a tasty concoction, neither was it all that bad.

Then I returned to my quiches and the luncheon preparations, leaving the bucket hidden inside my wardrobe. Six hours later I whisked the mixture again and put it into eight milk bottles.

At five minutes to five I began my furtive scurry through the hotel, the heavy crate of bottles in my arms, avoiding the main staircase entirely, sprinting along old servants’ corridors and up dark, winding stairwells only used in emergencies. When I arrived at Mulligan’s room, sweat had begun to trickle down my forehead and into my eyes, and as he opened the door I was blinking maniacally. Before I had chance even to look at him I had been yanked inside, and the door closed behind me. The room was full of the charming, intermingled smells of cigars and cologne, and in one corner hung a purple velvet smoking jacket, which, since Mr Mulligan was wearing a waistcoat and trousers of the same fabric, I guessed was part of his evening dress.

He fussed around with his cigar, unable to locate an ashtray, and finally popped the burning stub back into his mouth. From the wine crate he extracted a bottle, examined the colour of the liquid against the light from the window, and sipped. He murmured his approval, before replacing the bottle.

‘Not all fresh, especially the tomatoes, but a fine olive oil at least,’ he said, nodding towards a table where another pound note awaited me. ‘And that comes with my sincere gratitude, young man, to be sure it does.’

But I didn’t take the note. I wasn’t going anywhere until I’d had an explanation. Although in retrospect it was pure naivety which led me to such presumptuousness. Michael Mulligan, as I was to learn, was not a man whom one obliged to do or to say anything. If the King himself (the Queen by that time, actually) had desired something from him, it would have been requested formally, as a polite favour. In my ignorance, then, I stood my ground until an amused curiosity crept across his face.

‘I can see,’ he began, sitting down in an armchair and gesturing towards another, ‘that you want explanations, not cash.’

He laughed, not the big belly laugh one might have expected, but a high-pitched, impish giggle. I sat down and waited for him to continue.

‘That in itself is commendable. Here,’ he said, offering me a cigar.

I accepted it, lit it as one would a cigarette and, for want of knowing better, sucked heavily. All at once my lungs were full of burning rubber and dark, sizzling caramel, and my stomach lurched and tore itself in all directions, my throat near to rupture as I forced repeated vomit-spasms back down. Not only did I avoid vomiting but, to my amazement, neither did I cough.

Mulligan looked on with interest, and as I recovered from my first taste of a Havana, he said: ‘Now that sort of thing I find really quite impressive. You neither coughed nor were you sick, although even your evident pride has not been sufficient to keep your face from turning green. One doesn’t, by the way, inhale the fumes of a cigar. But I digress. Keeping it down! That’s what this is all about, my friend. The mixture which you prepared will help me to do likewise this evening.’

My head swam uncontrollably, and I was too debilitated by my lungful of smoke to make any response.

‘I have a rather unusual dinner ahead of me,’ he continued. ‘And your fine mixture will ensure that not only can I get it down, but that I can keep it down. Tonight, I will be eating furniture.’

I looked at him, but quickly diverted my stare; I realised that I was in the company of a madman. However, the newly-lit cigar in my hand smouldered, and from what I had often seen in the hotel dining room, a cigar of this length and thickness was going to go on smouldering for quite some time. From its tip a fine strand of blue smoke curled off into the air, but too little and too slowly, and I willed the thin ring of ash to speed up, to eat its way down the filthy stick with more visible speed, as a cigarette consumes itself in a gusting wind.

I desired only one thing more than to escape his smoke-filled room, and that was to confirm that he really had said such a thing. With this information I would quite happily have fled, cigar in hand, back to the hot, frenetic security of the kitchens.

‘I am an eating specialist,’ he said, and again I hardly knew how earnest or capricious I was to take him, ‘although, if I say so myself, of a rather exclusive kind. Not an attraction, in the normal sense. I do not actually attract people. My performances are entirely private affairs. But perhaps you have seen something of my profession, or heard of it at least?’

I assured him that I had not, shaking my head vigorously.

‘And in the pub, or at the fair, have you never seen men competing to be the fastest with a yard of ale, to the delight of all around? And have you never heard of the great pie-eating competitions, of tripe-swallowing and the like?’

I had to admit that I had.

‘Well,’ he said, turning his palms upwards humbly, ‘every profession has its amateurs, its quaint traditions and its side-street hobbyists. And every profession has also its experts, its virtuosi, its aristocrats. I, if I may be so bold as to say so, am of the latter category: a gentleman eater.’

And thus he began a narrative which took us not only to fine, seaside hotels in the north of England, but across the great oceans, to places and societies which, even in the depths of despair during the war, I had hardly dreamed existed.

Michael ‘Cast Iron’ Mulligan left Dublin in 1919 and followed many of his compatriots to the New World. A combination of charm and immense size and strength led him quickly into the public relations departments of New York’s finest bars and restaurants; that is, he became a liveried bouncer. However, he began to make a name for himself not through the grace with which he could remove drunks from the premises, nor the unerring discretion with which he could explain to a troublemaker just why he ought to make his trouble elsewhere, but after the evening’s work was done, whilst eating with his colleagues. Here he showed a talent for food and drink which amazed and frightened all around him. At first they thought he was just a hungry boy from the countryside feasting for the first time on good American food. But it continued, day by day, week by week, the quantities growing steadily. In the early hours, when the last of the customers were slamming taxi doors behind them, the band packing away their instruments, the kitchen would fill up with staff – waitresses, doormen, musicians – all waiting for that boy Mulligan to eat.

Such feats soon got him talked about, and not just below stairs. Before long the fine clientele of the restaurants and hotels where he worked got to hear about him, and wanted to see the greedy Irishman in action. However, the genteel nature of these establishments meant that demonstrations of this kind could take place only behind closed doors. Vaudeville, and more especially the freak-show business, was full of swallowers of all descriptions, and no association with such lower forms of entertainment was desired. So, before he knew exactly what he was getting into, Mulligan was performing nightly for enthusiastic private parties of rich New Yorkers, eager for any novel and diverting spectacle.

In those days he was strictly a quantity man. And his act came immediately after an audience had finished dining. That is to say, it came at the precise moment when, to a tableful of gorged, drunken socialites, the very sight of someone eating was in itself revolting. That such a sight involved almost unbelievable amounts of food merely exacerbated the monstrousness of the performance. To Mulligan it was no more than an extension of dinner, and each evening, after the show was over, he would pat his groaning stomach and shake his head with incomprehension, quite at a loss to explain his growing celebrity. Night after night it went on: a basket of fried chicken, a bottle of champagne, a plateful of sausage, a quart of beer, two dozen lamb chops, a trifle (‘a mere trifle!’ as the script went) followed, as if to confound the disbelievers, by another, identical trifle … The act came to its climax when, plucking a single rose from a vase, Mulligan made as if to present it to the most glamorous woman in the party and then, feigning to prick himself, would say: ‘Why, this is a dangerous weapon! I better take care of it!’ With which he would promptly gobble down the flower together with stalk (which he had de-thorned earlier), to the amazement of the city’s finest.

One evening, after a particularly successful show in which he had performed a routine entitled Americana (forty-eight hot dogs, one for each star; thirteen slices of apple pie, one for each stripe; twenty-eight cups of punch, one for each president; and a brandy for Lincoln), he was approached by a thin, fragile man who spoke in a strange accent, and who had the eyes of someone who expects yes for an answer. Laden with a stomach full of borrowed patriotism, yet happy with his performance, Michael listened with great interest to the proposal: Paris, twenty dollars a week, more varied work …

He was soon on a steamer to France, earning enough money through drinking competitions in the lower-deck bars that when he disembarked in Europe, he had more than two hundred dollars in his pocket, which he spent immediately on fine suits of tweed and velvet.

On arrival at his new place of employment – another unmentionable hotel, I’m afraid, since it is still there, almost unchanged they say, although of course I have never set foot in the place – he found a rather different kind of job awaited him. Amid the grand opulence of banqueting halls, their walls covered in immense oil canvases and gilt-framed mirrors, and occasionally in the private suites of the hotel’s more extravagant guests, he no longer ate his way through a fixed menu, but rather devoured whatsoever was requested of him. This, then, was the meaning of more varied work.

‘I was the greatest!’ cried Mulligan from his armchair, pounding his chest with a cannonball fist and laughing out loud. ‘The act was pure theatre, pure spectacle. After dessert was well under way, I would arrive and sit at a place laid for me at the table, this place having remained ominously and threateningly vacated throughout the dinner itself. There I would assume a pose of impervious indifference to those around me, who, I should say, often included not only crown princes, sheikhs and ambassadors, but also the shrieking, guffawing minor nobility of any number of European states, not to mention the greatest actresses of the Parisian stage, to whom clung more often than not one or another chuckling millionaire. Yet, before my steely, unforgiving expression (in addition to my size), these diners usually appeared a touch intimidated, with those nearest to me the most humbled.

‘And here we worked an excellent trick. The story went that I had been rescued from deepest rural Ireland (my red hair, which in those days I wore long, added zest to this detail), where I had been brought up almost in the wild by my grandmother. Moreover, I was profoundly deaf, and could communicate only through a strange language involving tapping one’s fingers into another’s palm, a language known only to my (now deceased) grandmother and the idealistic Frenchman who had brought me to France on the death of my grandma. This man had become my trusty assistant – the young lad was really an out-of-work actor from the provinces, so out-of-work, indeed, that this was his first job in Paris – and each night he acted as interpreter for Le Grand Michael Mulligan.

‘“Ladies and gentlemen,” he would announce after my silent presence had generated its usual disquiet, “Monsieur Mulligan hopes that you have dined well, and will be pleased to consider your suggestions for his own dinner this evening.”

‘Now, a curious thing is that the powerful and highly placed citizens on this earth are frequently the most childlike. Thus, whereas these guests were prone to exaggerated, uncontrolled enthusiasm once they had become excited, it was not unusual at the initial stages of my act to encounter a nervous silence. Eventually, someone, an inebriated eldest son over from England for the chorus girls, or a fat German banker too pompous and drunk to know timidity, would shout out, “A sardine!” to great and relieved hilarity all round. My assistant would tap the message into my palm. In return, Le Grand Michael Mulligan would consider the request solemnly until the laughter had subsided, and would either give a controlled, deliberate nod, in which case the specified item was called for, or would decline with a slow shake of the head, glowering in the direction of whoever had made so contemptible a suggestion.

‘And thus the evenings were enacted. The audience soon lost its coyness, and God alone knew what would come next. “Five locusts!” someone might shout, to the derision of the rest (in fact, we did have a small selection of dried insects, awaiting the order of any guest well known for his generosity), but through the derision an alternative would usually surface. “Well, if not locusts, how about worms?!” At which point my assistant and I would go into a protracted communication, resulting in the announcement, “Mr Mulligan will eat only one worm, since he says that he already has one, and another will keep it company!”

‘That one always got an enormous laugh, but the laughter would turn to screams of horror as a long, wriggling earthworm was placed before me, and I sucked it up like a string of spaghetti.

‘My twenty dollars a week turned out to be good business for the hotel too, since all petitions to Le Grand Michael Mulligan were billed to the requester. A very good business indeed. And in this way, sadly, I managed to bankrupt more than one person with my stomach.

‘I had, very early on, developed a penchant for beluga caviare, which could, as you can imagine, have perilous financial implications. Yes, in this way I turned several of our best guests insolvent, although for the most part I think they probably didn’t realise until the following morning. Yet it is a poor, sad-faced English gentleman for whom I harbour most regret. It happened on a particularly slow night, with no one of consequence (or imagination) in the house. My evening’s work had run to a mere bucketful of cherries, a fox’s tail (from a stuffed animal in the hotel lobby), and a side of pork belly, which I had rather enjoyed. Throughout the evening I had noticed, at the far end of the table, a man in a crumpled dinner suit, whose expression of empty fatigue had deteriorated by stages to one of inconsolable despair. With the mood rapidly leaving us, I was keen to secure one final request. Apart from anything else, I was still hungry, and my paltry menu sélectionné had thus far provided me with but a snack. Finally, the despairing English gentleman drew himself up from the nearly horizontal slouch into which he had fallen, and getting (somehow) to his feet, raised his glass.

‘“My dear Mulligan …” he began, as those around urged him to retake his seat, “… fine, fine, noble son of the Emerald Isle …” at which point he belched, but I took no offence, “… I tonight stand here, a poor man …” (“You’ll make another million, Quentin! Sit down, old boy!” came a shout from someone further down the table.) “… I have made and lost a great fortune. Yes …” he gulped down some port, “… but you, you of the fine orange hair, dumb to the heartless world which you neither understand nor whose vices, my dear sir, could you comprehend …” At which point he rather lost himself … “Err … ehm, but think not of this world, good man!” he rallied. “It is not worthy of your attention. Michael Mulligan, I toast you, and with my final sovereign I invite you to share with me my final dozen oysters.”

‘With this he raised his empty glass and held still, save for some involuntary listing, awaiting my reply. I communicated with my assistant, and indeed this time I really did use a form of secret language, for the message was unusual, and in truth it was rather a rash one.

‘“Mr Mulligan will toast your future success, sir, not with a dozen oysters but with a dozen dozen oysters!”’

Here Mulligan took a long, pensive draw on his cigar, watching the rich smoke spiral upwards from his nose and mouth, spilling out into thin, flat clouds which hung in the air, forming a plateau across the hotel room.

‘That,’ he said wistfully, ‘turned out to be a touch imprudent. A dozen oysters, two dozen, even six dozen, I had swallowed on one occasion. After all, seventy-two oysters are no heavier nor occupy more space inside than seven or eight braised pig’s trotters, or a couple of ostrich eggs. But a gross of the things … Ha! It was the undoing of me, two nights running! And as for the poor Mr Quentin, we never saw his face again. Who knows, perhaps he is paying off the debt to this day.

‘Ah, yes! Paris in the ’Twenties! How much I learned there, how much I learned. How much I ate!’

From his armchair he recounted more incredible tales, of churns of milk in Belgian monasteries, a grilled lion’s paw in Baghdad, sinkfuls of pasta (‘Tubes, my boy, the biggest possible! Pound for pound they look more!’); of a forty-five chitterling marathon in Brittany, ten kilos of roast cod in Bilbao, seven pickled mice for a bet in Marrakech. And he told me also of the people, those fine clients of the hotel, who sought a little extra zest to their dinner parties in Rome, Kabul, Delhi, London, Frankfurt, inviting him to their holiday entertainments in Goa, Rimini, Monte Carlo and Thessaloniki. On a visit to Tokyo he had consumed so much sushi that, in listening to him, one felt as if one were floating on a sea of raw fish; in Constantinople his ability to finish off an entire roast goat in little over half a day had so enthused one of the dignitaries privileged enough to witness the spectacle that Mulligan was presented not only with a belly dancer for the night, but was invited to extract and keep the bulging ruby which adorned her navel. Along the Magreb he had sucked the eyes out of more dead animals than he cared to remember, and the glittering rewards for such fripperies were staggering indeed. To crumbling European castles he had travelled, there to gorge on whatever his noble amphitryon decreed: seventeen pairs of bull’s testicles at the table of the Duke of Alba in Salamanca; inconceivable quantities of sausage for any number of gibbering, neurotic Central European counts; regular sojourns to the seats of the Dukes of Argyll, Dumfriesshire and sundry other Scottish lairds, each one desperate that Mulligan improve upon some or other haggis-eating record, or simply curious to know how quickly their national dish could disappear down the throat of one man. For a time he was in huge demand in the USA, where he set a string of records for chicken and ribs throughout the Southern states; he amazed the Romanian Jews in New York with his evident partiality for ridding any restaurant of all its chopped liver and the relish with which he glugged down whole pitchers of schmaltz as if it were … well, metaphors are hardly appropriate; the Ashkenazim wouldn’t have him, but he didn’t mind, there were plenty of other sects, plenty of other religions, to astound; he even did a promotion for the pro-Prohibition Methodists, drinking the body weight of a six-year-old child in lemonade, presumably to illustrate that purity and excess can coexist. He repeated Americana for countless gatherings of businessmen, and in one particularly prolific afternoon’s work notched up a record of sixty-two hot dogs (even before Babe Ruth’s achievement) at a public demonstration sponsored by Wurtz’s Wieners, a Chicago sausage company owned by one of those immigrants who really wants you to mispronounce his name.

‘Then the Depression hit,’ he continued, ‘and the profession of gluttony suffered something of a downturn. The rich became preoccupied, and the poor became hungry. Overnight, or so it seemed, no one wanted to see how much more than a normal man I could eat. Now it was a matter of just what I would eat beyond the normal. On its own this was nothing new for me. After all, for the better part of a decade a great many of the things I had sent down to my stomach could have been called food only through a very liberal understanding of the word, or by a desperately hungry person: in Oxford I had feasted on a sturdy hiking boot, prepared in advance, not à la Chaplin, but in vinegar and wine, and then slow-roasted in butter and olive oil; somewhere else (I forget) a mackintosh, curried; a canary in its little wooden cage (I mean, and its cage); a large aspidistra (leaves au naturel, stem and roots flambéed) …’

On he went, and as the list became more and more preposterous, my astonishment and incredulity grew in equal measure. This man, I told myself, was not only mad but also a great fabulist. However, I must tell you, before we go any further, that The Great Michael Mulligan was, in recounting these stories, very far from invention, for the truth was that he had eaten things far more extraordinary, more extraordinary indeed than he dared mention.

But how, you ask, can a man chew his way through a boot, or a raincoat? How, come to that, could he possibly sit down to a chair? Well, you yourself probably possess all that is necessary to achieve such a feat. A mincer, and a good dose of oil is all that you need. Mulligan had begun with a small kitchen mincer, to which he had fitted the finest, most durable blades available, and which was quite adequate for turning all manner of small items into an ingestible mince. With the addition of larger and more powerful machinery, the toughest boot could easily be turned to a leathery crumb. And is that so hard to stomach? Have you never heard of Peter Schultz, or Jean-Paul Kopp? The former ate a Mercedes-Benz, the latter a biplane. Both employed the simple expedient of filing and grinding away slowly at the object in question, swallowing the resulting dust little by little along with a suitable internal lubricant. The aeroplane sounds impressive, no doubt, but it was really only a matter of time, and in the two years it took from propeller to tail fin, Mr Mulligan would have eaten his way through enough household items to furnish a decent sized parlour.

Over the years the great man designed a number of hand-operated grinders, with higher and higher gearing ratios, so that, along with the toughest and best grinding blades available, he was capable of turning wood into sawdust and small amounts of worked metal into perfectly edible filings. He never touched glass (although some did), but he was occasionally tempted by a china cup and saucer, or a particularly fine dinner plate.

‘All of which explains my need for the mixture which you so expertly prepared,’ he said, drawing his story to a close. He examined his pocket watch and stood up. ‘You see, my friend, I really am going to eat a chair this evening. For Freemasons, I’m afraid, dullards to the last, but times are hard. And now I must prepare.’

He smoothed the velvet of his waistcoat down the vast, arcing curve of his stomach and went over to his jacket. I bade him goodnight and, with my head full of the most extraordinary tales of gluttony, as well as the effects of my first cigar, I wandered out of his room. I forgot my pound note and made my way back down to the kitchens quite without knowing which route I took, so immersed was I in a thousand new turns of the imagination.

That was my first stroke of good fortune: a chance meeting with a true king of his craft, a maestro fêted the world over, The Great Michael ‘Cast Iron’ Mulligan.