10.

Long before Audrey Mapes ate Kalamazoo, and long before Herr Essenalles ate his first light bulb, medical literature was rife with stories of people devouring coins, buttons, laundry detergent, screws. We can all agree that these are disgusting, if somewhat imaginative, dinners.

There’s more, too. Bed sheets. Chalk. Rust. Folks who can’t stop swallowing wooden toothpicks are so common they’ve earned their own nickname (I mean, medical term): xylophagians. Look it up. Compulsive swallowing is a condition that affects about as many people as are killed annually by falling out of bed.

Here’s a story from the archives:

A hardy man in Tucson by the name of Garry Tranquility (“Garry” pronounced with a short a, incidentally, because it rhymed with “starry”) once fit a Webster’s dictionary, hardcover and all, into his stomach. It took him a full business week. His body rejected the dictionary the next day, in an unsettling series of pulpy expulsions, but what no doubt carried him through this unpleasantness and made him feel worthy and strong was the memory of the hundreds of local folks who’d cheered him on. Somewhere between eight and ten of these people even sent flowers, dictionaries, and cards with yellow smiley faces and praise like, “You are first-place wild man!” (a Japanese tourist) and “My dad thinks you’re nuts!” One woman from the audience was so impressed with Garry’s gustatory abilities that she proposed marriage. Garry accepted her proposal, effectively ending his burgeoning rock-n-roll career. That’s the ‘60s for you! One minute he’s Garry Tranquility, front man for The Splendid Knights, the next he’s plain old Bertram Trank again, guitar instructor at Rainbow Music and future footnote in the New En gland Journal of Medicine.

My point is that while Audrey Mapes was unquestionably talented when it came to her craft (and you’ll find no bigger fan than this writer), precedent had already been set. She was the first in many categories—perfecting the footless Moonwalk, for instance—but she was not really a pioneer in gastronomical exploration.

I can hear the whining already: “Screws and cigarette butts and dictionaries are weird and flavorless, but an entire city?! You can’t even compare the two!”

I agree in principle. Certainly, even a city as culturally bankrupt and magnetic to clouds as Kalamazoo contains hundreds of thousands of bed sheets, millions of buttons and coins, metric tons of dictionaries, canyons of laundry detergent. Not to mention all that brick, wood, steel, and concrete—30,000 homes, hundreds of apartment buildings, a public university, a liberal arts college, a luxury hotel, ten motels, two root beer stands, five bowling alleys and five cemeteries (coincidence?), forty churches, three malls, miles of chain link fence, armfuls of dog houses, handfuls of cat-houses, a children’s museum, a restored theater, a railroad station, a factory for guitar chords. And so on.

Certainly, it’s diffcult to compare Audrey to even the most extreme compulsive swallower. I’ll just answer this way: Audrey was never a girl to go at a task without full commitment.

In fact, none of the Mapeses were (or are). Some people see this as a fault.