Journey to the Center of the Cheesecake Factory

A man walked along, slowing down and gasping for air after a dead sprint away from another man, a man with no teeth. The first man, whose name would only be important following his elusion from this toothless maniac and subsequent capture, knelt down next to the cave wall. He looked down and discovered a note. It was tattered and covered in dirt, and dated the fourteenth of November of the year 2009.

“Why, this is over ten years old!” exclaimed the man.

He checked to make sure he wasn’t still being followed, sat in a corner of the cave wall, and began reading the note.

“I’m having the hardest time finding a way to begin this, which is something I can ill afford to do. If you’ve made it past the first sentence, please, allow me to explain my current predicament in a manner in which your interest is held long enough to free me from my current state of captivity. I desperately scrawl this in the far reaching corners of an underground factory, beneath a restaurant. No, really. I was apprehended during what will undoubtedly be a story with very little believability should you continue to read, and please, I beg of you, do so. Before I go into the specifics of how I ended up here in this state of need, I’d like to begin by saying I was right. I predicted this societal downturn, and to those who doubted my pessimism with regards to the future, I’d like to say that because it is I here and not you. I’d like to also point out my assertion that justice does not exist has been equally proven.

Now that that’s out of the way, I suppose I can begin. You see, it wasn’t always like this. Hard to believe, I know, but if people can find Adam Sandler funny, anything’s possible. There was once a time, shockingly enough, in which people thought for themselves and shared cultural experiences didn’t include episodes of Everybody Loves Raymond, or mindless tea party “protests” against the government.

You see, there was a time in which a friend’s desire to eat the Cheesecake Factory’s overpriced food for her birthday was just that—a meal. Today? Today, a trip there can only be a meal if you sit down and shut up, don’t ask questions about how things are cooked, and certainly don’t ask your server where the location of the actual Cheesecake Factory is. I only wish someone told me that.


It’s a shame, really. All my friends and I wanted to know was why nothing around us made sense. My friend Kevin pointed up at the neoclassical Roman pillars situated between the tables. Then he asked what place they had in what was supposed to be a contemporary upscale restaurant, and what place they had set against the backdrop of an Egyptian themed sky.

So we asked.


“How’s everybody doing?” asked the waitress.

“Why are there Roman pillars in here? The sky ceiling looks Egyptian and the walls have what look like ancient cave drawings on them.” Kevin asked.

Naturally, the waitress had no clue what he was talking about, laughed, and said she’d have to ask. I guess that reaction, however much we expected it, was what led to where we are now. It was just that way she answered, clearly clueless to her surroundings, never once noticing that not only was the inside of the restaurant completely nonsensical, but its lights dimmed invariably as the smooth jazz music was suddenly turned louder for no reason.

“Excuse me, miss? Why did it just get so much sexier in here?” asked Kevin.

“What are you talking about?” laughed the waitress.

“Don’t act like you don’t know what we’re talking about, you think we didn’t notice the lights dimming and the music getting louder? What kind of mind control devices are you guys using? What are you trying to get us to do?”

The waitress again laughed, called us crazy, and walked away. I guess we just didn’t know when to stop.

“Where’s the actual factory? Does it use child labor?”

“You guys are crazy!”

And so on. Each time we asked her something more and more bizarre, she tried to call us “conspirators.” She didn’t know what the actual word was that she was looking for, though, so she made them up. The first time she called us “conspirathors.” When we asked her again how to get to the factory, she called us “conspirathorizers.” And so on. It was such a shame that this young woman who was around our age had no idea what to say, had no clue we were messing with her, and didn’t know what a conspirator was.

We decided we’d mess with her even more by getting up and walking away, when she could see us, and return with the location of the factory. And that, reader, is how I am where I am today. We couldn’t just make something up, we had to keep going and going with it until it went too far. We went to the front of the restaurant, looking for some innocuous piece of furniture or wall hanging to use as the secret portal to the factory located underneath the restaurant. We were going to make up some elaborate story and see if we could get her to believe it. Upon walking toward the front hallway, where the bathrooms were, I noticed one of those coffee tables restaurants have against the wall with a lamp on them , the ones that serve no purpose other than to look like your rich aunt and uncle’s living room. There’s always a drawer in them, too, but it doesn’t open. Underneath that table I noticed there was a tile on the floor that was unlike any other one around it. I figured it fell in line with this Roman-Egyptian nonsense they had going on, but my curiosity got the best of me. I tapped the tile with my foot and saw it was hollow. Kevin and I decided to see what was being hidden underneath it, thinking we’d find something like a shoe that we could try to use as evidence of the only thing left of the last poor sap to venture into the factory. Only there wasn’t a shoe. We lifted up the tile and saw a light emanating from somewhere beneath the surface of the floor. The tile was huge, easily big enough for us to fit completely into if we wanted. Can you guess if we wanted to try and fit? I went in first, Kevin after I did.

The light we saw was a small torch sitting next to the edge of what appeared to be a body of water. Kevin held the torch closer and discovered it was a river made of chocolate. There was a small boat tied to the pole that previously held the torch. At this point, why wouldn’t we get in and see where this chocolate river could lead us? We each climbed into the small boat and set sail, convinced we had stumbled into a scene from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Apparently all factories contain the same chocolate river. We sailed down for a little while before we saw anything significant. On the shore to our right was more of that ancient cave writing we saw inside the restaurant.

“These interior designers get paid too much.” Kevin said.

We continued sailing on until the river dumped us into a large lake. Stepping out of the boat and on the sidewalk again, we found ourselves in a place similar to those cheesy haunted houses you see at amusement parks around Halloween. You could practically hear blood curdling screams and feel some idiot dressed as a wolf creeping up behind you. We could hear something that sounded like machinery in the not too far off distance. As we got closer, our question posed earlier about child labor was answered. There, in front of us, was this huge contraption being operated by some kid who looked like Oliver Twist. He didn’t see us, and we ran as quietly as possible alongside this huge machine’s conveyor belt. We could see part of other children being ground into gears.

“This will be the next cause everyone makes t-shirts for.” I said. “Repost this MySpace bulletin so the children of the Cheesecake Factory are freed and the genocide can end.”

“What the hell is this thing?” asked Kevin. We approached the end of the machine and raised the still barely lit torch to it. There was a plaque mounted onto the end of it. The inscription read:

“The Infamous Machine of Infamy”

We looked at it, wondering what the hell that meant. We agreed it sounded like something from some horrible modern day science fiction movie. Then we saw the control panel. Some of its buttons included “Hindenburg Explosion”, “Pearl Harbor”, and “9/11”—and that was just under the “Manmade Disasters” category. That category was divided by race, as well. Under the African American subcategory was just one button. It read “Crack Cocaine.” Interesting. Flabbergasted by what the hell I was looking at, I was speechless, save for hysterical laughter. Kevin wasn’t.
“ Nine-eleven was controlled by the Cheesecake Factory? Finally, something to supersede all those other conspiracy theories, they didn’t even make sense. This, this shit makes complete sense. Terrorists didn’t hijack anything, it was all an elaborate scheme concocted by some American restaurant serving overpriced food.”
Before I could laugh along with him, I felt an unbelievable pain in the back of my head. It was gone when I woke up. In a jail cell.

Something tells me it was a frying pan that caused that massive headache. Some disgruntled cook probably came down here through the entrance in the kitchen, looking to add his own manmade disaster button somewhere between “Chicago Fire” and “Will Ferrell.” Who knows. I looked around me, taking in my surroundings. I couldn’t find Kevin anywhere. I wanted to yell out his name, but my head…my head hurt so much that the mere thought of yelling sounded like cymbals crashing right next to my ears. As I slowly gained control of my surroundings, I looked around and saw two other people. One was tied up. He wasn’t moving. I looked at him, at that blank look on his face, sitting horrified wondering what could have happened to him. He stirred. He looked suddenly distressed before he started screaming, writhing around in the small place in which he was tied, until he stopped as suddenly as he started.

Aghast, I called out to him.

“Hey! Hey! Are you alright?”

The blank look returned to his face. I couldn’t imagine what was going on inside his head. I looked closer at his eyes, his open mouth. I stared at him, imploring him to show some sign of life. As I stared, I felt like I was suddenly thrust into his mind. There was a toaster. I went over to it, afraid of what was going on, how I suddenly could be in a room with nothing but a toaster. I looked down at it, noticing there was nothing in it. It suddenly popped up, as if the toast it should have been browning was ready to be taken out and eaten. I jumped, taken aback. Then the lever moved down, and about thirty seconds later, it was done toasting nothing again.

I was back in the small cell. The guy was gone, but the other person I saw was still there. Before I could yell over to him someone else walked over to him. Actually, he lumbered over. All he was missing was the hump in his back to complete the caricature I’ve always had about the guys who tortured people in the middle ages. He thrust a bag over the guy’s head and dumped water on him from a bucket, spilling out in torrents as the man tried to yell between cascades of liquid. The torturer finally ceased and dragged the sopping wet man away. I wasn’t about to wait around to hear the huge blade of the guillotine drop before I decided to try to escape. As I began to fumble around for anything to aid my attempt at decampment, it happened again. In the moment it took to blink, I was vaulted into an open space. As I looked around I again saw the man who was just dragged away. I saw the terror in his face as he pulled off the sack that was thrown onto his head. He coughed. He looked into his hand, horrified. One by one, his teeth all began to pour out into his hand, blood strewn about his lips and chin. Before I could figure out what was happening, I again looked around and saw I was in that same cell within which I first found myself. I tunneled out before the ogre could show up and perform his consternating dolor upon me. I ran off, narrowly escaping the clandestine symphony of torture befalling beneath the Cheesecake Factory.

And that’s why I’m writing this to you, whoever you are. I’m lost beneath the Cheesecake Factory restaurant, inside the actual factory. I’ve chosen to appeal to the outside this way not because it’s my only means of possibly escaping, but rather, because it’s become painfully obvious to me that my efforts to question just what the fuck is going on around me have been rendered futile. I’ve yet to regain my bearings since escaping and still feel too disoriented to locate the chocolate river in which I sailed to this scene of misery. Should I rot here until the restaurant is finally recognized as a pointless endeavor, merely sitting atop the new representation of society, then I do not envy whoever finds this note, for your fate will undoubtedly be similar to mine.”

As the man finished reading the letter, harrowed by its contents, something came flying at his face.