by Irvine Welsh
When I half shut my eyes, I can almost see Lucy still in this room. The way she moves, tidying everything up around her, like a smooth machine, attacking all the chaos, leveling it out into order. You can imagine her as a mother, weaving that intimate dance of habit and routine. Children’s crayoned drawings on the walls. Messages posted on the refrigerator. But after supervising my eating and exercise, scrupulously recording the results on her iPad, Lucy always leaves me alone. During the day. All of the night. Visiting only in the morning and early evening with tiny portions of unsatisfying food. What she calls real food, or good food.
I’m so hungry and tired and lonely! What I want now is bakery goods: cakes, scones, croissants, bread, but also eggs, bacon, hash browns, waffles, steak, burgers, tacos . . .
— I’M HUNGRY, LUCY! A high screech from the front room. Fat fucking asshole.
My bad eating habits probably began when I was around ten years old. Back in Potters Prairie, Otter County, Minnesota. The Midwest is an expanse of dreariness, punctuated by the odd sparkling jewel. We were at the beating heart of its blandness: too far from Minneapolis–St. Paul to be classed as a suburb, but close enough to preclude anything that might excite the imagination.
At ten years old my life started to go bad. It hadn’t been that way before. I was the miracle baby, the one who’d come along just when Mom and Dad had almost accepted that they would never conceive. Mom actually thought I was a cyst for the first seven months of her pregnancy. She was too scared to go to the doctor. She would repeat to anybody who listened, and, no doubt, to many who didn’t, “I just prayed, and those prayers were answered.” She never specified if she was praying for me to be a baby, or simply not to be a cyst.
Oh shit, we gone struck gold! Thank you, Michelle Parish! Thank you, Julia Cameron!
We lived in a small, comfortable home with a large yard, which sat right on the shore of Lake Adley. The beautiful lake and the surrounding forest ensured my childhood memories had a decidedly idyllic flavor. I recall long, warm summers, where the heavy air crackled with the hum of crickets and grasshoppers. I’d ride my bike to the Kruz’s corner store with my friend Jenny. Buy a bottle of Coke or Sprite and some candy. Then I discovered the Couch Tomato Diner on Galvin, near my old elementary school, that place where could you buy over thirty kinds of ice cream. And wash it down with more Coke or Sprite.
The winters were vivid and white. The snow like a shroud of silence placed over the house; other than the big clock, the only sounds came from the kitchen, the odd muffled pot rattling or tray shunted into the oven, testifying to Mom’s cooking and baking labors. Even if he was at home on Sunday (he worked at least six days a week at the hardware store), Dad remained an almost silent presence. If I was playing or reading in the living room, I’d hear him breathing deeply or perhaps turning a page of his book or rustling a newspaper. But the main noises came from the kitchen and involved the preparation of food. There was always more food.
Yet, by the time I was sixteen, I was still stick-thin. 118 lbs. Then, at around my eighteenth birthday, as I was ready to go to Chicago to prepare for art school, I was 182 lbs.
What happened in those two years?
— LUCY! Sorenson shouts. I snatch the papers from the countertop and head through.
— WHAT?!
— Where’s breakfast?
— I’m trying to read your papers.
— But I’m starving!
— What do you want me to tell ya? Fight through that shit!
— No, I won’t, I need to eat something—
— You know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna go out to a local diner, have my breakfast, and relax and read those fucking pages.
— No, you have to—
— And before you start shouting again, it’s your own fault, I wave the papers in her face, — for writing fucking War and Peace.
— Please, Lucy! Sorenson is up on her feet, jumping on the spot, chain clanking, as I split, getting the fuck outta the apartment.
I head down in the elevator and get back in the Caddy. There’s a scarcity of any social facilities in Miami’s dead downtown, and that includes decent places to get breakfast. After passing a few shitholes, I find somewhere palatable in a mall, and have a green tea and a wholegrain bagel with salmon and low-fat cream cheese, getting another of the same for Fatty Sorenson. She can’t eat oatmeal and blueberries every morning. A TV in the corner distracts me from her journal, as it’s running a feature on the twins. I can’t make out what’s going on but it doesn’t look good as they’ve turned pointedly away from each other. Amy is crying, which makes her seem human, so different from the scowling, parasite self she normally presents to the world.
But back to Sorenson’s shit:
You saw things, felt things, as you grew up. The human hurt behind all that apparent tranquility. A town where public lives intersected and connected through sheer custom, as well as a denying, studied civility and convention, blinding us to the poverty, meth labs, and large swathes of shit-blanketed, corn-stuffed nothingness. The silences that buried so much pain within the walls of those old family homes.
Mom.
Oh, snap!
When I was around fifteen, our happy house became less jovial. Mom and Dad started to behave differently toward each other. And she was growing very, very big. I once saw her weigh in at 270 lbs. What I didn’t realize was that she wanted a partner in crime. In the crime of lovelessness, of becoming unlovable to justify that lovelessness. So we ordered ice cream from the Couch Tomato Diner and pizza from You Betcha Pie. “Uff da! You can eat anything at your age,” she would say. I liked that I could eat anything.
My father, Todd Sorenson, was a short guy, about half a head smaller than Mom, with a habitually ulcerated expression and an air of piety. He said little. If anything contentious ever arose in discussion, or from the news, he’d dismiss it as “something or nothing.” Dad did little else but work, and take Mom to the occasional dance. Every month he’d go hunting with some friends: dreary guys in the hardware business who were full of dull platitudes. Dad took me a few times, showed me how to load, shoot, and clean a rifle. I treasured the one he gave me, the same type he used, a Remington 870 Express Super Magnum. “Works just fine on everything from doves to deer,” he said. I liked shooting, at tin cans and bottles, but the thought of taking the life of a living thing for sport disgusted me. Then I saw them shoot a young deer. It just looked inquisitively and started moving toward us. I thought, surely they have to let it go. I saw them look at each other for a second, as if deciding, then my father shot it. The small animal jerked back about five feet, coming to rest, its legs kicking into stillness. “Right in the kill zone, Todd,” one of his friends yelped.
I knew from Dad’s lectures that the zone included the shoulder area, and behind it the heart and lungs. Viewed broadside, it was roughly centered on the rear of the shoulder. It gave the hunter the best chance at hitting vital organs. From that range, he could hardly have missed. It wasn’t “hunting” at all.
I was sickened to my core. To see something so alive, innocent, and trusting, callously exterminated by stupid old men, gaining nothing but a short-term buzz and buying into a deluded fantasy of how that defined them in the eyes of the world, just seemed so crass and pathetic on every level. I kept quiet, but they could see my anger and sense the contempt I had for them.
I obviously decided that I wouldn’t be going with Dad on any more trips. He said nothing, and while on some level he seemed relieved, I could also feel his disappointment. And I’m sure he and Mom could feel mine. As I grew, I became less at ease in the home I was born into: developing more of an awareness that I was a misfit in this household, in this town, and that while I didn’t measure up in its eyes, the feeling was mutual.
I was getting ready for school one morning; it was about 7:45. The phone rang and Mom switched on the TV. We saw one of the towers in the World Trade Center smoking. They said a plane had crashed into it, and showed the rep
lay. I looked at Mom and Dad; we all thought it was a terrible accident. Around fifteen minutes later, another plane smashed into the second tower. I was scared, and so was Mom, and we held each other on the couch.
“New York,” Dad scoffed, as if it were happening somewhere across the world. “Something or nothing.”
I don’t know to this day if he really believed that or if he was putting on a brave face, perhaps in the belief that Mom and I might become hysterical. I stayed home with her, sitting on the couch watching the events unfold, nervously eating candy, until it got too much and we had to switch off. Dad went to work as normal, in his hardware business in Minneapolis. It would never have occurred to him to do anything else. He smelled of the store: paint, turps, oil, sawn wood, glue, and metal particles that seemed to cling to his hands in particular. No amount of washing or aftershave could disguise that odor.
Sometimes Dad spoke so slowly I could feel myself perishing inside, desperate for him to finish his sentence so that I could resume my life. On a few occasions he would halt his speech in a pained pause, where he seemed to be evaluating whether or not it was worthwhile continuing.
As he worked increasingly longer hours, Mom and I did everything together and that “everything” involved food. Or what Lucy would describe as crap: sugary, salty crud. We ate whole pies, pizzas, and cheesecakes till we were sick. We would lie on the couch, immobilized, barely able to draw breath. We were almost drunk, almost drowned by food. Tormented by stomach cramps and acid reflux; beyond satisfied, in real physical pain, sitting in abject self-hate which throbbed inside us like the garbage we’d just eaten, yet just wanting this mountain we’d tipped into our guts to subside, to be broken up and processed by our bodies, the pounds of fat sticking onto what was already there. Just wanting that to happen so that we could start again. Because when it happened, we just felt so empty. We needed, craved, the same again.
Poor me! Daddy was a coldhearted NRA stumpy dick, who shot furry little animals with his subsitute prick! Momma was a big fat pig who stuffed herself, cause she wasn’t getting enough schlong. BIG FUCKING DEAL, SORENSON! Doesn’t willpower factor in here? Doesn’t self-respect? Is there a fucking core? A person in there?
Then I saw myself in the large, ornate mahogany-framed mirror in our hallway, just after my exams. A blimp. I could no longer eat what I wanted. So I dressed in black, became a goth, a fat goth. I could draw, and I could paint. Always. But I could no longer eat what I wanted, because I wanted more than anybody could eat.
It caused problems at high school. Before my weight gain I had been not exactly popular, but, although quiet, thoughtful, and a little small for my age, I’d been able to go along with the usual games and schoolyard antics. Now I was sticking out from the crowd. It was strange the way the other girls looked at you: first a discomfort, then a cruelty would seep into their eyes. It was like a slowly dawning nightmare, where the people seemed like themselves on the outside, but were possessed by a demonic force. I had—quite literally—outgrown Jenny. I knew she was embarrassed hanging around with me. Then one day, in gym class, when a group of girls started tormenting me, she joined in. I couldn’t even hate her. Like my mom, I had convinced myself that I was unlovable, and was suffering some sort of just retribution.
Even in art class there was no respite. I was working on a portrait of an old man. When I came in one morning, it was defaced, the figure rendered fat with black paint, the face altered to a crude, cartoonish approximation of my own. BLUBBER-ASSED BITCH was scrawled underneath it in big letters. I was mortified, saw the others in class laughing, but I couldn’t show it to my teacher. I disposed of it discreetly in the trash and started another, my hand trembling as I sketched.
Other people could see that I was becoming more detached and withdrawn. A teacher, Mrs. Phipps, recommended to Mom that I should see a doctor, as I was possibly depressed. We went to our family physician, Dr. Walters, who had been feeding me antibiotics and antihistamines since I was a kid. He told my mother I was suffering from “lethargy.” “I want to avoid pejorative terms like depression,” he said to us.
Even I knew there was no such designated medical condition. But I could barely bring myself to shower or brush my teeth. Even the three minutes of the buzzing electric toothbrush was excruciating, and I’d pray for it to end, counting down the seconds as I poked it around my mouth.
But Mom still loved me. She showed it by treating me. Treats. Our life was one long round of treats. The dictionary describes that noun as “an event or item that is out of the ordinary and gives great pleasure.” There was nothing out of the ordinary about our “treating” regime. And every pleasure it afforded was short-lived compared to the slow, throbbing pulses of pain it constantly left us in.
Um, hello! Wise the fuck up! And the doctor, in Potters Prairie, Otter County, was a fucking quack? Now who would have thunk that?
A nerdy kid called Barry King was my only friend at high school. He was as skinny as I was fat, a shy and awkward boy with Harry Potter glasses. As is often the irony in such situations, in retrospect I now clearly see that Barry, with his slender, athletic frame and dark, haunting eyes, needed only a minor change in attitude to be rebranded a conventionally good-looking kid. Sadly he was unable to take that small but giant step. Like me, he jailed himself with his self-consciousness: his movements, walk, glances, nervous, inappropriate pronouncements, they all invited persecution. In response, we created our own world, one which both sustained and shamed us. Our refuge was science fiction—we were particulary obsessed with Ron Thoroughgood, a British sci-fi writer—and Marvel comics. We’d bring in comic books and first draw the superheroes and villains in them, then create our own characters.
The world we constructed from those materials not only defined our present, but would also be our future. We made plans; he was going to write sci-fi adventures, and I was going to illustrate them.
We hung around the Cup of Good Hope Cafe and Johnny’s One Stop, eating candy and potato chips, and drinking soda, always soda: Coke, Pepsi, Sprite, Dr. Pepper. Hiding, always hiding. Him behind those unflattering frames, me in my fat suit, peering out from the thick, black curtain I’d allowed to grow over my eyes, which made my father squirm in silent rage. “It’s my style,” I’d shrug, when he confronted me about it.
All the while I craved that comforting spike of sugar, awaiting, in choking anticipation, its future promise. One time Barry and I were heading to the Cup of Good Hope, when a group of kids from high school stopped us and started being abusive. They called Barry a retarded geek and me a beached whale. They said we were having sex. That he was a skinny pervert for fucking a really fat chick. One of the boys punched his face, knocking his glasses to the ground but not breaking them. They laughed as he picked them up. We walked for a bit, then went to the Cup of Good Hope. He sucked soda through a straw which sat on his fat lip. I remember him saying, “Nobody understands us here, Lena. You’ve got to get out.”
His words chilled me, even then. It was the way he said “you,” and not “we.” It was as if he knew then that he himself would never make it.
And he didn’t.
I hated Sundays more than any other day, as the promise of high school and a week of bullying lay ahead. The fearful anticipation of this was actually more crippling than the reality. Sunday was also the dreary, soul-destroying ritual of church, which seemed to foreshadow the slaughter. My mom’s folks, Grandma and Grandpa Olsen, would come to the house early for breakast, then we would walk to church together. It was a horrible trek, boring yet full of dreadful anticipation, and it meant walking awkwardly with my family, along an exposed road, but we would never, ever drive. Even if it was raining or cold, we’d huddle underneath umbrellas. If I protested Dad would explain that it was “family tradition.” Grandma would chat to Mom, while Grandpa Olsen was silent, only ever talking to Dad, and always about their respective work. I was made to dress in bright clothes by Mom. I felt retarded, it was like they drew the world’s eye
s to me, much more than my preferred black ever could. Before we left the house, I’d force myself to stare at the image in the mirror. I was just like Mom, fat and stupid. A younger version, but dressed in the same ridiculous clothes. Dad barely looking at us. Shamed by us. Even though I was a teenager—a small, fat, zitty teenager who hid behind bangs—I was dragged along.
During vacations, I would go into Minneapolis with Dad, to work in the hardware store. I hated the silent drive, the flat nothingness ahead, the big hollow skies above us. The store itself was full of hokey old guys, both staff and the customers, some of whom I recognized as Dad’s hunting cronies, who came in to talk about shit. They were usually bored, ancient retired men who had DIY projects that would take years, if they ever got done at all.
Grandpa Olsen was like one of them. He died suddenly; a huge heart attack at the wheel of one of his flatbed trucks, in the parking lot behind his business. Fortunately, the vehicle was stationary at the time.
At his funeral, on a cold, windswept day by an open grave, Mom cried, comforting Grandma, who kept repeating over and over again, “He was a good man . . .” Noting my boredom and discomfort, Dad gruffly told me, in a very adultlike way, as if he were talking to a friend, he believed that Grandpa Olsen knew he was going to die, and that was why he’d climbed into the cabin of his rig.
Grandpa and Dad had shared some sort of joyless bond, as both were successful in business. Then Dad’s luck changed when Menards opened a new store in a mall barely a mile away. Dad grew very bitter. It was symptomatic of America’s decline, he said. He started to voice his support for various right-wing politicians, going across the spectrum from the authoritarian to the libertarian, eventually settling for Ron Paul. He even became active in one of Paul’s numerous doomed presidential campaigns.