I Wouldn't Eat That if I Were You

By Joel Stein

The last economic boom, people paid guys to score them coke and hookers. I was in high school at the time, but that's what I gathered from Bret Easton Ellis novels. These days, when name dropping has been replaced by gym dropping ("I was wondering, while I was on the Stair Master..."), rich people are spending their money to keep pleasure away from them. I know a guy who belongs to a gym that charges him extra for not going. And I've got a guy who keeps me from getting the phone numbers of hot, dangerous women. He's called my hairdresser.

There is also a guy you can hire to sit at your table at a restaurant to prevent you from ordering high-fat foods, like some sort of Zone Diet Escort Service. So last Thursday I called this guy, surrogate willpower professional David Kirsch, a gym owner who gets $150 an hour as a trainer, and asked him to dinner. But since Kirsch has so many celebrity clients (Ivana Trump buys him dinner often, and model James King paid him to go with her to Paris restaurants during the runway shows), he already had plans. So he agreed to come over to my office at 11 p.m. to watch me snack.

David, a cross between Cal Ripken and a machine that crushes cars, was in my office for about three minutes before he jumped up, ran his hands over my upper body and estimated my body-fat percentage. Here my notes say just that "he touched me in funny places." I don't know if I was trying to be a thorough reporter or just really well instructed from that ABC Afterschool Special.

I took him around the office, where several writers and I scavenged for snacks, as is our nightly ritual. On our way to Barbara's Drawer of Chocolate, we passed some peanuts and pretzel sticks. "Did you set this up?" he asked incredulously. "Did you just put this here?" Seeing his reaction to mildly high-carb and high-fat foods, I circumvented Barbara's Drawer and took him to Ray's Closet of Low-Fat Snacks. He was not impressed. "In the late '80s, the dairy industry and the packaged-goods industry created this low-fat and no-fat bulls___," he said slowly and quietly, as if we were on The X-Files. "Nothing has caused obesity more." A friend of mine in the office started calling him "The Snackalator."

A former lawyer, David says people crave the kind of discipline he offers. "There's organized religion and organized government," he said. "We need order in our life." Although he does not dictate what his dinner companions should eat, and has never used physical force to come between a model and a French fry, he does employ a searing, disapproving look that, oddly, just made me miss my mother.

Kirsch was a great guy, and his tip about how the fig doesn't really justify the newton was helpful. I'm not against the idea of employing such courtiers, but when I get rich, I'm thinking more like erotic dancer, personal chef and even a poet, just so I can make fun of how lame poetry is and force him to wear a hat with bells and a codpiece.

But I worry that we are going to become free-will invalids. People have stylists, dog walkers and personal shoppers. Am I supposed to hire a couples therapist to follow me around so I don't cheat on my girlfriend, and a music critic to hide my Bruce Hornsby CDs? I don't want to live in that world. Mostly because I can't afford to.