Apocalypse in Flavortown
I got covid, so you get Guy Fieri Vs. Zombies.
Hi Everyone, guess what: The time has finally arrived. Today is the day I treat you to the first installment of my unfinished novella, Apocalypse in Flavortown, a work of speculative fiction about Guy Fieri attempting to battle his way through a zombie wasteland in order to save his family. This is real! And by real I mean fake, cuz fiction, obviously, but real as in it’s something I devote(d) actual time to, as one of a handful of projects I work on in my capacity as Fiction Writer of Limited Renown.
As for Why Now?, that’s simple: I got covid this week, along with other members of my household, which means we’re taking turns masking and isolating and caring for the baby, which means I’ve had very little time for much else, and so in lieu of a new essay or whatever, you get a couple thousand strange but maybe engaging words. But that’s not anything I’m going to apologize for, because 1. This newsletter is free; 2. I had a blast writing this and am 98% sure you will enjoy it; and 3. You voted for it! Well, at least two out of three of you did when I posed this question in June. So there’s a lesson here: Make sure to vote!
Anyway, I think that’s all the set-up we need. Without further ado, I present to you, “Apocalypse in Flavortown,” Pt. 1.
Apocalypse in Flavortown
Part One: The Awakening1
The first sensory experience Guy Fieri had that morning was the distinctly non-culinary smell of cordite wafting into his nostrils. It was not the kind of smell one expected to encounter on a Wednesday morning in Kansas City, up on the eighth floor of the Courtyard by Marriot, where Guy and his crew had spent the night. But there it was: cordite, that gunpowder smell of a match being struck, scratchy-metallic, woody top notes. It stirred the first pangs of wakefulness within him, luring him out of his slumber, which he was enjoying. It was a dreamless sleep, but heavy, and well-deserved.
They’d been shooting the two previous days at a small (yes) diner near the football stadium. As shoots go, it was a bear. The diner was owned and operated by two brothers, Irish transplants who’d transformed themselves into devout Kansas City Chiefs fans, and who served up a hybrid menu of Dublin pub-grub and KC BBQ. The whole situation looked great on paper, but it had been six months since Guy’s field team had scouted the place, and in that time the brothers had found themselves on opposite sides of a trans-Atlantic family dispute involving land rights and the original spelling of the family surname—“McCarthy” Vs. “MacCarthy”—with daily operations at the now-contested "McCarthy" & Sons becoming strained to the point of breaking. And so when Guy and his team finally showed up there for what was supposed to be a compact 8-hour shoot day, the diner’s longtime chef was nowhere to be found, had been replaced by a rather hapless though jovial line cook and ex-con named Paddy, and the brothers could not agree on—were in fact arguing to the point of coming to blows about—who should spend which scenes on camera with Guy, having jettisoned the original plan to appear side-by-side with the host throughout. The switching around of the brothers—who weren’t technically twins but who were virtually indistinguishable to anyone who couldn’t tell pasty, bearded, red-headed Irishmen apart in the first place—made the segment a great deal harder to produce, introducing as it did various logistical and continuity issues that required the utmost focus and sanguinity from Guy’s field producer Liz to navigate. And while he was actually an utter joy to converse with and be around, Paddy was a miserable cook, with Guy having to coach him through such basic tasks as caramelizing onions and balancing the acid notes in McCarthy & Sons ostensibly “signature” BBQ sauce, which was the same blend of ketchup, brown sugar, spices, and wash-your-sister sauce that Guy had seen a hundred times over. The whole shoot was a nightmare, stretching to 14 hours, which was a very long time to spend in a kitchen that smelled like wet beef and old sponges. And so as the hours wore on he found it especially hard that day to switch between his convivial, on-camera, distant-cousin-from-Sonoma persona that had won him so much praise and adoration from so many different corners of America, and the hard-nosed executive producer he was required to be in order to run the tight ship that was the Triple-D production operation. But as always, he soldiered through—they all did—finally retiring to the Courtyard by Marriott shortly after midnight, with Guy so bushwhacked he barely had the energy to give his standard end-of-day speech to his crew exhorting their efforts, thanking them for the daily contributions that had made Triple-D the runaway success that it was.
And so Guy was groggy when he awoke that day, which was uncharacteristic of him. Usually when he came to each morning, he did so sans alarm, as if from a jolt of electricity—kerrzzzow! Consciousness would come burbling up inside him like steam from a geyser. But today was different. Guy felt laden on this morning, perhaps because of the long day and the late night, though he’d had plenty of those before. Guy wasn’t someone who required a full eight hours to achieve peak function—five hours of sleep was usually plenty. But here it was 8:30 a.m.—he’d gotten at least seven hours. And come to think of it, why had no one from the crew called? Liz was an early riser, was always in Guy’s ear first thing each morning, laying out the day’s plan. Not even a text? Also, what was that smell?
Guy pulled the covers back, sat up, placed his bare feet on the room’s unforgiving industrial carpet. He checked his phone and it had nothing for him—no texts from Liz, no emails from the team that ran operations at Donkey Sauce LLC., nothing from his wife regarding some new policy at the kids’ school or a reminder to look over the updated designs for the backyard treehouse the contractor had sent over. Nothing. This was all very odd, but it wasn’t something Guy gave a lot of thought to, initially. His brain was clouded that morning, his body heavy and tired and his mind, well, it was all over the place. The shoot days seemed to just pile up during production of seasons 32-34—Portsmouth, Salem, Breckinridge, Cheyanne, Billings…it was getting impossible to keep track of. But it wasn't just the demands of making the show—constant travel, long days, endless cycles of waiting then hosting then waiting then hosting—it was actually much more about the overall combination of constant pressure and utter malaise Guy felt at this particular phase of his life, when it seemed as if everything he'd ever hope to accomplish, he had.
There was no doubt about it: Guy had built an empire. What had started as a simple dream—putting BBQ sauce on sushi—had metastasized into an array of TV shows, restaurants, endorsement deals, product lines, speaking engagements, training programs, a fashion label, and roughly a half-dozen more nascent revenue streams—a solar system of synergistic profit centers, all orbiting around Guy Fieri, although that wasn’t strictly true. What these planets orbited around was “Guy Fieri,” the persona, a vestige of its creator but not the creator himself. “Guy Fieri” was a real person, sure, invented organically and out of a certain necessity back when Guy was an aimless Northern California college dropout who felt at least some kind of calling beyond hand-delivering cases of wine to wine-club members and/or bartending. Not unlike BBQ eggrolls or kimchee tacos, “Guy” was a semi-original invention, a canny amalgam of surfer-bowler-biker-stoner that the real Guy arrived at iteratively, stitching together a persona out of such winning juxtapositions as Birkenstock sandals and Russian River pinots, wallet chains and rice paper, motorcross shades and cedar-plank salmon. There was a certain natural momentum to it all, to the inception of the persona, its evolution, the slow accretion of key details (bleached tips), its initial embrace and then sustained promulgation by the Sonoma culinary community (though not its stodgier branches), to the simultaneous ascent of The Food Network and of celebrity chefs generally, to the idea that developed in Guy’s brain that this brand he’d more or less stumbled upon had legs outside the confines of the walled garden that was the Northern California food scene, to Guy’s pursuit of this idea via the crafting of a “show reel,” i.e. a taped and edited series of culinary demonstrations Guy did for a then-hypothetical audience wherein he perhaps a bit too overtly modeled himself as a NorCal Emeril, enthusing about pops of freshness and bursts of acid as he crafted his recipes; to Guy’s being selected via said reel to appear on and then ultimately win the title of Next Food Network Star; to the success of Triple-D and the ubiquity of the coinage Flavortown, a term that had been rolling off Guy's tongue since his fraternity days at UNLV, where it had much seedier applications only Guy's closest frat buddies remembered.
But so there was just an impossible momentum to it all, an amount of forward propulsion that Guy, despite being the empire's figuredhead—and here again it’s important to understand that Guy no longer strictly identified as “Guy”—felt powerless to impede. And all of this had been weighing on him of late. He couldn't pinpoint the moment these feelings sublimated from inchoate wisps to persistent formulations, but the feeling was relatively new and, with each new day, increasingly vexing, possibly even…exhausting.
Finally it hit him: Where was everyone? How could there be zero messages on his phone? How could Liz have let him sleep so late? Where was Boomer, one of Triple D's cameramen, with an invitation to seek out smoothies and double “express-ohs”? He sent out a few texts, waited thirty seconds, then when nothing came back splashed some water on his face and suited up: flip flops, a bowling shirt, cargo shorts that went past his knees. It was early spring in Missouri and there was still a chill in the air, but Guy ran hot; he tried to avoid pants at all times if he could.
Walking down the hallway of the top floor, Guy was certain he could sense an abnormal stillness—hotel floors at this hour were usually at least somewhat busy as travelers readied themselves for checkout and the hotel's various service workers carried out their duties. But Guy's floor was empty—not a hair dryer or local news morning show to be heard, not a maid or bellhop to be seen. Still no response from the half-dozen people he'd texted, Guy thought to himself. Still no idea what that smell is. He pressed the call button on the elevator and waited. After fifteen years in show business, not to mention a decade before that navigating the Sonoma County food scene, which was, if you were Guy, actually the Sonoma County party scene, where Riesling was just as likely to be paired with psilocybin as it was a stinky cheese, Guy had learned to be skeptical of paranoia. Ninety-nine percent of the time, whatever negative thoughts were coming up in one’s head were not only false, but had the potential to distract you from whatever good time you could otherwise be having—so why bother with them? Guy had developed this line of thinking into a discipline, a practice, the uniform for which was a button-down shirt with flames on it. He was, in some sense, a negativity-dispelling machine. And so even with the eerily silent hallway and the cordite smell and the fact that the elevator wasn’t coming after several smashed call buttons, Guy didn’t allow himself to get too worried. The paranoia he could keep at bay. His frustration over having to take the stairs in order to reach the lobby, on the other hand, was harder to suppress.
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Healings is written by Garrett Kamps and edited by Tommy Craggs. Ayana H. Muwwakkil provides art direction.
Healings is about illness, recovery, spirituality, and related topics, and began in the summer of 2023 as a chronicle of Garrett’s battle with cancer. We make no guarantees that it will hold together, thematically speaking, now or ever.
I’m sorry there are no actual zombies in this part. That’s not super-fair of me but I didn’t originally intend this to be serialized. I promise there are zombies in the very next part, which I’m now all but obligated to share, probably sooner than later, regardless of how anyone votes (reminder: this newsletter = free).
A masterpiece. Please post the rest!
Loved this!