Synopsis

This is a story about a former fat boy who returns to town thin, and opens a restaurant called Ghetto.

At 380 Pounds, Walker found himself in the psychiatric ward of the NYU medical center on First Avenue and 36th Street in Kips Bay.

A story about how to molt.

His roommate was a schizophrenic who dressed only in green, and would only eat green food.

About seeing the present as part of your future instead of as part of your past.

Walker spent a week there, getting pumped up and then detoxing from a combination of Haldol, Kolozopin and Ambien.

Blissed-out happy: a how-to.

He was interviewed and diagnosed and interviewed and diagnosed again.

This story is about how to have a loving heart.

Walker returned to his job as sous-chef at a pan-Asian restaurant in the East 60’s but he no longer snacked on the dumplings—mondus and momos and chinese dumplings. The medicine made him full all the time.

It’s a series of epitaphs: He was a secular humanist saint. Here lies a body, any body, anybody.

He decided to save money and began walking the forty blocks to work, rather than take the bus or the subway.

A suicide note; an invitation to the narrator’s funeral.

At 340 pounds Walker bought his first new pair of pants in six years.

It is not about death.

Organized by weight, the man returned to his hometown. $311 a month for mental illness, and low rents for commercial kitchens on the West Side.

It has a happy ending, a Dexatrim deus-ex-machina.

This story is a cautionary tale.

About soul food.