Of Crime, Punishment and Calories

If i were a bored gen-xer who realized that body piercing has lost its power to shock, yet I still wanted to outrage and offend and make some huge bucks, I’d open a Sunset Strip restaurant offering nothing more than the last meals of condemned men:

“Aaah . . . I’ll have the John Wayne Gacy special--fried chicken, French fries, strawberries and a soda. But can you make that a Diet Coke?”

“Can I get a J. P. Jernigan burger--chairbroiled? Get it, chair?”

“Gimme a Ted Bundy--steak, medium rare, eggs over easy, juice and coffee, fine, but I want cottage fries instead of hash browns, OK?”

At this point the waitress would grimly point her pen to the line on the menu that says, No changes or substitutions. Violators will be executed . . . JUST KIDDING!

*

Murder titillates, judicial execution fascinates, but only vicariously, as secondhand horrors and once-removed thrills.

Food we understand: that last morsel a doomed man wants on the four compass points of his tongue--salty, sweet, sour and bitter--one last gluttonous dip into the earthly appetites of humankind.

Food is middle America’s venial, shared sin; we indulge, then we atone. When a man is about to die for the greatest sin of all, what choice does his palate make, without consequence? I have yet to read a news story about a condemned man that does not list his last menu.

Robert Alton Harris’ horribly bungled exit in 1992 was California’s first execution since LBJ was president. Harris as good as guaranteed himself the gas chamber by not only killing two boys but by eating their fast-food burgers, giving himself over to the cravings of the flesh before his victims’ bodies were cold.

What did Harris want in his belly when he left this world? Bare news accounts--pizza and fried chicken and jelly beans and Pepsi--were inadequate. Reporters investigated and found more. It was the 21-piece bucket, extra-crispy, from The Colonel. There were two Domino’s pizzas, no anchovies. It all arrived an hour late, and the warden ordered it reheated.

*

In dying, a murdered human often curls into a fetal position, life’s last pose imitating its first. A condemned man’s last meal may take him back to his first ones, like a class barometer on a plate. Mom always said you are what you eat. With all the world’s tastes to choose from, Death Row inmates ask for junk food, ersatz food, trash food: burgers, French fries, pizza laden with organ meats. An infuriated Oklahoma inmate’s final message to the press was that he was served a last meal of real spaghetti instead of the canned Spaghetti Os he requested.

Some years ago, two California sociology professors told a Newport Beach criminology conference about their finding that merely improving inmate menus at juvenile institutions reduced the incidence of fighting, theft, assault and suicide by nearly half. A Twinkie and a Dr. Pepper, they said acidly, are not the way to start the day. It is the way Dan White started one day in November in 1978, when he murdered the mayor of San Francisco and a supervisor. His defense? That gorging on junk food like Twinkies sent his depression spiraling out of control.

Pose the same question for yourself. What would you want for your last tactile, sensual, earthly pleasure? The glutton’s route or the ascetic’s? Eat for the id or for the superego? Eat to please yourself or for the news stories? (Last year an L.A. deejay asked Sarah, the Duchess of York and a yo-yo dieter, for her last meal. She chose a baked potato with salted butter and mayonnaise, chicken and salad. In the Alec Guinness film “Kind Hearts and Coronets,” the condemned Duke of Chalfont orders coffee and dry toast--and some grapes, as an afterthought, to gratify a public expecting some show of quirky ducal taste.) On my behalf, a colleague asked boxer George Foreman for a last menu. The noted trencherman chose breakfast: “Dozen eggs, a pound of bacon, biscuits with gravy. Then keep ‘em coming”--until the warden arrives.

Former Dodger manager and likewise noted trencherman Tommy Lasorda would make his exit with “a big bowl of pasta e fagioli, followed by a big plate of linguine.” No desserts; “I’m staying away from desserts.” (Tommy--it’s a last meal.)

What would Ted Kaczynski choose? Something he had to track and kill himself, perhaps, and cook over an open fire. Low-tech to the end.

Bill Clinton’s last meal would never end.

I incline toward fettuccine Alfredo, heart attack on a plate, with those white Piedmontese truffles so rare that they must weigh them in carats, like diamonds. Steamed French runner beans. Brie studded with roasted garlic cloves and almonds. That chocolate dessert from Bookaniste in Paris. And fraises de bois, which are only in season for about two days a year, so they’d have to delay my execution to find them, by which time I could have filed another appeal.

Bon appetit!