Ineffable Menus

Visions of Apocalypse: California Kreme-in’

The evening had begun innocently enough. My hostess – longtime Hollywood fixture and renowned guide to parallel dimensions – had summoned some friends to her hillside compound for a canonical California nouveau barbecue: Viognier; Pesto-marinated ahi tuna; Herbed, free-range chicken breasts; Unpronounceable salad greens. The guests arrived and hit their marks on cue, the standard poolside blocking on a flagstone stage, played against the dramatic elements of blooming lavender, terra cotta and palm trees as the sun slouched into an angry purple scrim of spent hydrocarbons.

Sometime before eleven, after the coals had cooled and the police helicopters descended into the metropolitan basin to begin their trolling in earnest, the party deliberated on a number of after-dinner entertainments. Our debate quickly split into two factions: vigorous urban adventurers, who thought we should hike up into the hills and dance with coyotes (while gingerly side-stepping the other leather-clad scrub dwellers who would be indulging their more urban libidos), and the dipsomaniacal couch-dwellers leaning sharply in favor of a downhill expedition to the Tiki Bar of the moment.

Parallel Dimension Girl introduced a surreal alternative: “OR”, she bleated, conspiratorially twirling her wine glass, “OR – We could get doughnuts.”

Now, I thought this was just weird. And not just because I’d just polished off a cornucopia of delicious, healthful, low fat, organic California cuisine, either. I love high-octane confections as much – no, a lot more, actually – than the next guy. But doughnuts just never appear on my gastronomic radar. Doughnuts, I think: category, “odious junk food”; Badly fried dough. Sometimes garishly embalmed in atrocities of colored sugar. Most often seen in the company of bad drip coffee. Definitive emblem of incompetent law enforcement. Official pastry of the hopeless.

On the other hand, Parallel Dimension Girl is something of a legend for her feral, cool-hunting, zeitgeist-homing powers. Over the decade I’d known her, she had been on the very leading edge – and occasionally the wildly inventive perpetrator – of a number of bona fide pop culture phenomena. If she was saying doughnuts, well, doughnuts.

Voyage Into The Valley

There are times when the epic conceals itself behind a mundane account: Captain Ahab goes fishing; Madame Bovary shops for a matching handbag; Whitley Strieber is surprised by unexpected guests. And we were just going out for doughnuts.

We piled like teenagers into PDG’s sport-ute, and drove. I was still a little shaky on the whole concept, wondering what to expect: perhaps a charmingly lurid little shack, staffed by beehived waitresses from a bygone era, propped up defiantly in the center of some forgotten patch of asphalt. Maybe there would be a drive-up window, I thought hopefully. Maybe we wouldn’t even have to get out of the car.

What we actually encountered was more like a major social upheaval. It was, we would soon see, a sort of low-intensity doughnut riot. Its effects could be felt well in advance of the sight of our destination; the left-hand turn lane on Van Nuys Boulevard was packed solid for two blocks. PDG’s instincts were on target; there was, in California, in the Fall of 1999, a new fad afoot. Hysteria, actually, given the scene. Doughnut hysteria. And this burgeoning craze had a name, and a corporate face: Krispy Kreme.

I was, of course, to later learn that there was nothing particularly new about Krispy Kreme doughnuts. Apparently, Krispy Kreme has for decades been part of the hidden, good-ole’-boy culinary arcana of the deep South, along with other institutions like Waffle House and Piggly Wiggly. The only thing really new about these fat-fried, sugar-glaze cyclopses was their sudden debut in trendier urban climes.

But here we were: the calendar teetered on the edge of 2000, and the appearance of the Krispy Kreme star in the firmament of Southern California junk food was being greeted as the Second Coming. Certainly the police had recognized it as some kind of apocalyptic event; this particular Krispy Kreme franchise had become the locus of an angry traffic snarl, and the men in blue expertly wrangled the overflow with phalanxes of orange cones, blazing flares, and sharp, staccato arm movements.

Night of the doughnut-eaters

We parked blocks away and approached on foot, through streets congested by stalled cars and throngs of doughnut-eaters wandering dreamily down the middle of the ordinarily perilous intersections now become parking lots. I was agog; It was, looking back, my very first inkling that the popular predictions might not be so far-fetched after all, that the approach of the third millennium might precipitate all manner of inexplicable mass insanity.

Certainly the scene before me supported this interpretation. My mind raced; what could possibly account for this doughnut-based mass panic? Could it be that some kind of fin-de-siecle junk food variation on biblical revelation, one in which the entire population of Southern California suddenly repents of whole grains, tofu and raw vegetables at exactly the same moment? Or the recognition of some kind of millennial fatigue, in which we all decide to call an end to this elaborate, fifty year lifestyle experiment called the “California Experience?” Or that the myth of the Golden State has just become too difficult and cumbersome to maintain, with the green and white Krispy Kreme banner coming to finally call our macrobiotic bluff? Or perhaps Krispy Kreme was some sort of high-cholestoral sacrament, a renunciation of our cultural pride, a dim and intuited confession that Californians were, after all, normal, and ordinary, with the same lumpy hopes and unholy doughnut desires of our brothers and sisters in the less fashionable quarters of the nation?

We took our place in line, which stretched around the shop and onto the sidewalk. The atmosphere was oddly, unexpectedly festive. People huddled cheerfully in the October night, sharing intimacies with absolute strangers, as people will when pressed together by extraordinary events. Soon we too found ourselves chatting with fellows travelers on this inexplicable junk-food hadj: How we had heard about Krispy Kreme; How could otherwise thinking people come to be found away from home, at midnight on a Saturday night, standing in the cold, waiting for doughnuts. None of us could do otherwise but smile sheepishly and explain it was “just the thing to do.”

But this uncertainty of purpose didn’t dampen anyone’s enthusiasm. “You can see them made!”, one true believer gushed. “All the way from batter to glaze! Never take your eyes off ‘em.” She was referring, of course, to the completely automated doughnut machine featured at every Krispy Kreme shop, displayed prominently behind a wall of glass. Part of the experience, we learned, would be our slow progress past the mechanism as the line approached the cash register. This piqued my curiosity, and clarified the moment somewhat. Here, at least, was some small thing to be genuinely excited about: doughnut ontogeny.

Some of my fellow pilgrims stood in line anticipating the flavors of salvation: chocolate with sprinkles; powdered sugar; old fashioned. PDG demonstrated her gnosis of the subtleties of devotion: “Oh, no – you only want to get the glazed, the ones they make fresh all day long. The ones that go straight out of the oil, through the syrup, and into your mouth.” She said it with expert conviction. The rest were dumbfounded, but convinced. PDG has that effect on people.

The Creation Myth

It was true about the doughnut machine. There was something implausibly satisfying about peering through the glass at the slow but inexorable progress of legions of doughnuts as they made their journey from extrusion to sticky, golden maturity. It was hypnotic; the slow, deliberate mechanisms began to induce fanciful metaphoric reveries. Soon I had imparted an epic, mystically resonant quality to the scene, as if I were witnessing the enactment of some obscure, deep-fried Tibetan bardo:

Life begins as we fall, barely formed, from the shifting, shapeless primordial batter, onto the conveyor of life.

Up and down we travel in the rising chamber, gathering strength as the yeast-force builds within us.

We descend into a tribulation of boiling oil where, despite the pain, we begin to develop our full, doughy potential.

Midway in the journey we are inverted, realizing our duality (and ensuring an evenly distributed, delicious outer crust.) Those who fail to flip suffer a tragic underdevelopment of their true doughnut nature. They will be prematurely removed by the Creators and cast into the void.

We emerge, passing through a soothing curtain of sugar syrup, and into the world. Some of us will go on great journeys, in vessel “boxes.”

All, in the end, are devoured by gigantic, hungry beasts.

The final product does nothing to betray my creation fantasy. There is something vaguely fetal about my first Krispy Kreme glazed doughnuts. They are warm, spongy, implausibly light. They nestle together in the box like a litter of kittens.

I begin to understand. What we have just done has nothing to do with doughnuts; we have come to the temple, where the mysteries and intricacies of creation have been laid bare. Doughnut fate, finally, is the same as ours: we will be interred in a box, there will be a final reckoning, a bell will ring, and we will be shoved across the counter into the unknown.

Make mine glazed, please. Fresh ones.