Last night I had a nightmare about donuts. In the dream I was very hungry, and I was eating donuts, lots of donuts. Every donut I ate, I got hungrier. I drank down glass after glass of milk, tearing apart glazed donuts and swallowing huge chunks of them, barely chewing. Then, sort of half-asleep, half-awake, I realized it was just a dream. The sensation reminded me of what I felt when I quit smoking and then dreamed I had started smoking again. Same emotions—horror, disgust, self-loathing.
Donuts are practically a universal food. Humans must be hardwired to desire them. Donut lust lurks in our unconscious. Who came up with idea of frying dough, rolling it in sugar, pumping it full of custard, and slathering it with jam and icing and chocolate? Probably the same kind of people who thought of the lethal injection.
I was in ninth grade when Dawn’s Donuts appeared on the corner of Center and Hemeter in Saginaw. I saw it as something exotic and magical that had come from outer space and landed on that corner. One happy day an ice storm blew through Freeland, uprooting trees and downing power lines. School was closed, and a bunch of us piled into Richard Roche’s Chevy Nova and rode to Dawn’s Donuts, where we drank mugs of coffee and ate donuts. That may have been the first time I ate a cruller, sometimes called a “French cruller.”
The term “cruller,” according to Free Merriman-Webster, comes from Middle Dutch crul, meaning “curl,” although according to my urban dictionary, cruller also means “anus” (“yank those rosemary [sic] beads out of my cruller”) and “a man who likes to pee on himself” (“My friend is a cruller so he always takes the stall instead of the urinal”). Very well then. But the best definition—at least the one that best harmonizes with my upbringing—is “a tractor tire–shaped donut.” That pretty much nails it, while inducing fantasies of size. When I was in the ninth grade, a cruller the size of a tractor tire would have been heavenly. Or perhaps an inner tube–sized cruller, enabling a gluttonous adolescent to float down the Rifle River, yanking off hunks of donut and stuffing them in his mouth.
I was in college when Tim Hortons came along. It was the early seventies. At that time, Tim Hortons and Wendy’s had not yet become a combined, multinational corporation. Tim Hortons was still a far-off Canadian thing, making it more exotic than Dawn’s. I had a pal from Philadelphia named Denise who, one weekend when her friend Lynne was visiting, decided to join me on a trip to Stratford. We saw Love’s Labor’s Lost at the Shakespeare Festival and slept in pup tents in a hot, weedy lot posing as a campground, Denise and Lynne together in one tent, me solo in the other. The next morning we sat at the counter in Tim Hortons eating crullers and drinking Tim’s heavenly coffee. For me, donut regret had already crept into the experience. Even one tasted like too many.
At that time my friend and her companion had a Philly pal studying art in London, so on our way back to Detroit, we stopped to visit this friend Sharon, who was older and married and had a house. To celebrate this little reunion, we did not eat donuts. We ate scrapple, a Philadelphia pork mush delicacy also known as “pon haas” by the Pennsylvania Dutch and “death by sandwich” by anyone not raised in the mid-Atlantic states. What else are you going to do with your hog offal?
It was a brief stopover, marked by an awkward moment when Sharon’s husband, who wore baggy shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt and had long, shaggy hair, ushered us into the vagina room, formerly known as the dining room, to show us the latest masterpiece in his wife’s oeuvre. The painting was right above the buffet and depicted a woman’s thighs and gigantic sexual vortex. There was nothing stylized or abstract about it. This was no Georgia O’Keeffe flower. It was just a big anatomical billboard, in garish colors, that caused me to reflect on the difference between art (take a long look, it makes you feel good) and porn (take a quick peek, it makes you feel bad). But this thing seemed neither art nor pornography.
Denise and Lynne gazed, nodded, and approved. They said it made a statement. Sharon said that was her purpose. The feminist movement was in full swing, represented in the popular imagination by bra burning, by Gloria Steinem and her glasses, by Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique. This work of art, Sharon said, was neither aesthetic nor erotic. It made a statement.
Yeah, the Philly girls said. It’s rhetorical.
We stood there in silence, sucking scrapple from our teeth, contemplating the rhetorical vagina.
“What do you think?” the husband asked me, with obvious pride. I had an idea it was not rhetorical to him.
I was at a loss. I would have been happy going back to the kitchen, even if it meant eating scrapple. Finally I just said what was on my mind: “It’s really big.”
Many years after that my wife and I took her cousin’s family, visiting from Italy, to Disney World, where we encountered no end of food difficulty. It seemed to me, Mickey and all those roving characters notwithstanding, the place might have more properly been called Hormel Land. Hormel and its smoked, processed meat were everywhere. Breakfast in particular was a challenge. How do Italians start the day? Sausage and eggs? No. Cereal? Don’t believe those Müeslix commercials. They like coffee and pastries. Italian kids like cookies and chocolate spread. There was no chocolate spread, and none of the cookies were right anyway. The cousin’s wife could find nothing to feed her child, a nervous little boy around three years old, until the second day, when she discovered sugar donuts that resembled their bomboloni. She broke the pastries into pieces and fed them to her boy, who lay back in her arms in dreamy donut ecstasy. What he didn’t eat she finished. They had finally found a food they could reason with.
I took psychology in college. Child psychology, abnormal psychology, psychology of religion, psychology of sex. I may even have read some of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and learned about the pleasure principle and wish fulfillment, about unconscious desire finding expression in dreams. The idea of dream interpretation seemed appealing. As far as I could tell, there were no rules other than “this stands for that” and “make it work.” In your dream you are running. You’re trying to get away from something. Those white basketballs in the dream—those are cauliflowers, which stand for your mother, who insisted you eat your vegetables. You’re trying to get away from your mother.
I have an idea what Freud would have said about my donut dream, about donuts in all their various permutations. He might have been right. These days, I can’t drive by Tim Hortons and not think about rhetorical vagina. But am I really working through unconscious turmoil and wish fulfillment? I don’t think so. For one thing, deep down, I’m a very superficial person. And for another, to paraphrase Freud, sometimes a donut is just a donut.