The higher calorie intake I was enjoying might not have been so bad if I had still been an active kid. Instead, I stopped moving around so much. The toll of growing up in that house and seeing my father’s alcoholism and anger be taken out on my mom first and foremost, and by extension the rest of us, made me sad, made me feel powerless, and made me angry. Between this and having to meet new people at a new school with my increasing weight, I leaned toward isolation. I was reading more, and I watched a lot of television, but I also took to the internet because it was a way for me to start exploring some feelings about boys that I was told were unnatural and unbecoming. I may have been fat, but the thing I quickly learned about the internet was you could pretend to be someone different in order to talk to people in a profoundly honest way.
My dad used to always say, “I like your size.” I didn’t believe that nigga whenever he said it, but I loved him for that. I may have found him to be a monster more times than not, but I took this as his way of trying to reassure his chubby son about his rising weight and stagnant height, as other kids around the neighborhood were leaning out and rapidly growing taller. My mom noticed the weight gain as well, but never said anything directly about it. One time, though, I finished playing outside and walked back into the house, and she told me to go back outside and “run a little more.”
In hindsight, she may have simply wanted a bit of peace. Between working on her feet all day as a registered nurse, being married to a man who often drove her insane with his drunken tirades, and being saddled with taking care of three children, for her it was one of the few times the house was quiet. But this is probably being very generous—’cause really, to this day, I still hear her “run a little more” comment as telling me to sweat out the Sweet and Sour Sauce she procured for the three thousand Chicken Nuggets I was consuming.
In elementary school, with my buck teeth, complexion, and slim frame, I looked like Alvin Seville. By the start of middle school, I looked like his chubbier brother Theodore. When I got glasses, I looked like Simon if he ate Alvin and parts of Theodore (the dark meat).
Having said that, I can’t say that I was routinely picked on. I’m sociable when I want to be, so I had a lot of friends. However, many teens can’t help but act like the highest grade of asshole, and some classmates couldn’t resist talking about my weight, presumably feeling it too great a target to miss.
In honors biology, a boy I had the biggest crush on likened me to the Pillsbury Doughboy and literally poked me in the stomach with a grin; he waited for me to mimic the laugh from the old commercials. I should have bit him (and not in the fun, sexual way). That would not be the last time he did it. Others, notably those who were not my friend and/or were pissed at me, were far harsher, engaging the subject matter as a means to hurt my feelings and shut me up.
Unbeknownst to them, I never needed anyone else’s assistance in order to feel bad about my body. I saw the other boys in class. The ones I had crushes on that I couldn’t reveal. I saw the men in magazines, on television shows, and wherever else fit men gleamed. I knew I didn’t look like any of them. I understood being 180 pounds in the seventh grade was not ideal. Nor were the man boobs forming on my chest around the same time as the girls around me were maturing.
But in keeping with the mantra “Don’t come for me unless I send for you,” the thing about growing up in a violent home helmed by two people who know how to cut deep is that you know how to cut people down to size when pushed. Cut them down so much that they either shut up or want to run up. If the latter happened, all that did was allow me a means to channel the burgeoning rage that defined my chaotic home life. But tit-for-tats don’t take away the burden of tits sitting on your chest and your feeling hopeless about it.
Still, this was before I began to make myself throw up.
I started thinning out in high school. I was still on the chubbier side my freshman year, but the summer going into my sophomore year, I grew significantly taller and, as a result, started to get leaner in my appearance. My mom will chop you down to size, but she’s an itty-bitty thing. My dad ain’t but that much taller; he has the face of Katt Williams but the demeanor of T.I.—i.e., he is basically Scrappy-Doo, with a smaller frame but ready to wreak havoc. (He has the felonies to prove it.) Thankfully, my dad is an anomaly on his side, so while the Arceneaux gene pool comes with twists and turns, at least height is widespread.
With that kicking in, though my body wasn’t perfect, I was able to fit into medium-sized shirts again.
Bitch.
Do you know what it’s like to be a chubby-ass kid in junior high—where our worst impulses go to vacation—and suddenly be able to fit in a medium? After being extra large. After wearing a larger denim size than your dad. After jiggling to a song that asks you for jiggling, but not in the way your body was doing it? It felt like a miracle.
But miracles can fade.
I always say I wish I had run track in high school. For starters, there were a bunch of fine dudes on our track team. Some uppity niggas in Houston might have talked shit about my hood-ass high school, but beyond many a brilliant Negro attending school there was the fact that in terms of the genre of Black bae, the hood is a bountiful land of snacks. And track guys have the best bodies. Before I got fat, I had been an athletic-ish kid. I definitely enjoyed running. As a Madison High School student and Hiram Clarke native, it’s not like I hadn’t had to sprint running from niggas shooting before. Ugh, I would have been perfect for the track team for a variety of reasons, but my goofy ass just didn’t do it.
Not working out and at the same time eating poorly will catch up with anyone, even if your metabolism is at Avengers-level as a teen. In the morning, I had my best friend Kim buy me an extreme sausage sandwich, no egg—every single morning. Why was it extreme? Because it was two pork sausage patties stacked on each other with American cheese, between a bun that would have been more apt for a burger. It was glorious, but why was I eating such a thing in the a.m.? For lunch, it was fried chicken strips or some other fast food that my friends would sneak out to get. Sneak out, ha; we were too monitored for that. By sneak out, I mean they were let out of the parking garage by security, who looked the other way if they brought them something back. I did not have a car, so I could not sneak out any damn where.
After school let out and I made it back home, my dad, who in an effort to appease us for whatever trauma he had caused his children the night before, would get me whatever I wanted from Jack in the Box. And what I always got was the following order: a Bacon Ultimate Cheeseburger (an Ultimate offers two burger patties) with curly fries, jumbo-sized with a strawberry soda and two tacos. Those two tacos were fried.
By senior year, those bad eating habits, coupled with my lack of joining the track team, had resulted in my weight ballooning. That’s when I started trying to make myself throw up. I didn’t want to go back to fat. I didn’t like the way I looked or felt before I got slimmer. All I could think about was not so much the taunts of others, but the self-criticism I gave myself over how my body looked.
In college, I lost weight because I was struggling with adjusting to life at Howard University, fighting myself over the reality that I was gay, and as a result of that and the depression I had packed with me from Houston, not eating a whole lot. I also walked everywhere, which I never had to do in Houston because who does much of that in hot-ass Texas? I wasn’t purging as much, but it still happened from time to time.
I’ve never been quite sure whether or not I would say I was bulimic. My purging has consistently taken place through the years, but it was never done on a consistent basis. I never quite committed to it in that way. I ultimately learned to eat healthier and exercise regularly. I always knew there were better ways to go about addressing my weight issues, but I didn’t bother for far too long.
The most fit I have ever been was around the time I turned thirty. I was doing much better after initially relocating to New York, so I eventually got the nerve to work with a traine
r. She was a teensy-tiny little thing, but she was a lesbian who looked as if the Shirley Wilson character from What’s Happening!! were several inches shorter and did body lifting. I find that to be a compliment because let the record state she also had a tighter fade and better wardrobe. She was fun, but gave me reasons to be concerned about her. She would offer me tequila mixed in with her sports drink during my workouts. Likewise, she asked if I wanted to smoke weed with her afterward. She was looking for a friend, but even if she was well-meaning, she was crazy in a way that was part ha-ha and part… whatever way leads to violence. To wit, she went off on her manager, which is how she got fired—not just from there but from the gym across the street that she tried to get me to join after that.
Whatever, she was a great trainer. Because she behaved like a lot of the awful, overcompensating straight Black men driving everyone else insane, she had me doing exercises that made even the hurly-burly meatheads in the gym looking in awe. Some of them applauded me after we wrapped. It’s unclear if it was before or after their injection of steroids, but I digress. I stopped working out with her not because she scared me sometimes, but because those freelance checks that were pouring in dried up and whatever little bit was coming in had to go to rent and my loans.
This financial frustration caused me to return to some old habits.
If you had told me I was an emotional eater a couple of years ago, I might have told your happy ass to shut up and stop projecting. But in trying to better understand myself and my issues in every facet of my life, I started to examine my relationship with food. How I would not eat during some dark moments, but in another extreme, teeter toward gluttony in order to deal with some other emotion. That proved manageable, though not an ideal way to live.
I learned to eat healthier foods, and when I wanted to deviate from them while reckoning with a perceived crisis, I explored acceptable alternatives instead of previous vices. What remained a struggle was coming to accept that I was someone prone to emotional purging. By then, I knew if I wanted a better body, I needed to work out and eat right. I saw that I didn’t need to purge in order to attain some perceived goal. So I stopped. I really did stop. Until I didn’t.
Whenever I feel not in control, especially when it comes to money, I panic. I overanalyze. I over-criticize myself. I sink into a state of mind that coerces me into questioning everything about myself. The purging was no longer about my weight, but about the desire to feel as if I was in control of some aspect of my life. No matter how inane, self-destructive, irrational, flat-out idiotic that line of thinking was, it’s where my head was. It never panned out that way in practice, but it was a habit all the same.
As had been the case in the past, it wasn’t necessarily a daily occurrence, but it was growing more frequent and beginning to mirror my younger years, when I had taken to that action the most. At the same time, maybe I had been kidding myself all along. Did it really matter if I didn’t do it daily if I would still do things like excuse myself to the bathroom at a restaurant with friends in order to go throw up everything I had just eaten?
There’s no magic trick to stop doing it. In my case, I simply recognized that this was a habit that needed to be managed and stopped. Plus, there was a part of me that found it not just stupid of me, but wasteful.
As much as I cherish my beloved Pappadeaux, those hoes have always been expensive and the prices have only climbed steeper with time. So when I fly back to Houston and go eat at the spot I consider to be my cuisine Mecca, am I going to keep throwing up $20 worth of fried alligator? In this economy? With my debt? Who do I think I am? Is this what every Black parent meant when asking, “You got McDonald’s money?” Come to think of it, my mom doesn’t read my books, but should she stumble upon the tidbit that I might have thrown up even fourteen of those four thousand Nuggets she purchased for me over the years (to be fair to McDonald’s, they had mad coupons back then), she might ask for restitution. (Okay, she won’t, but I should not be wasting money.) That includes all of the chicken wings I craved and later disrespected by not fully digesting them.
I’m sorry to all, especially the drums, which I happen to like more than flats, but I eat both as a true believer in chicken.
In all sincerity, I have not been miraculously healed from the bad practice. Rather, I am proactive about not succumbing to it. Yes, for practical reasons that extend beyond the financial. Maybe one day I can get another trainer to attain a certain body type, but in the meanwhile, I can trust myself enough to have the discipline to get to the gym, no matter how late the start feels. I cringe at using verbiage that borders on saccharine, but on a fundamental level, there has to be a greater love of self that supersedes setbacks, and the dangerous coping mechanisms we turn to in order to deal.
Worries about overwhelming debt will not be curbed with induced vomiting. There are other ways to deal. But this isn’t just about dealing with disappointment. I had to not just understand, but embrace the truth that each time I purged, I was abusing myself. Hardship and whatever moments of doubt that arrive don’t warrant such self-sabotage. I’ve written so much about the damage other people have done to me. It’s time to admit more of the things I’ve done to myself.
It’s not just for the sake of transparency. I do not owe anyone this information. Still and all, keeping secrets like this are about maintaining control. I just want to be free.
NEVER HAVE I EVER
He was there to use his mouth, not his words.
After I had encountered bed bugs and Megyn Kelly enthusiasts during comically terrible attempts at having some fun-filled fornication, I accepted that I was never going to become a great ho. The cruelty of defeat notwithstanding, I refused to believe that I could not, at the very least, become a semi-decent one.
Aaliyah sang, “If at first you don’t succeed, you can dust it off and try again.” It’s such a good line to draw inspiration from and body roll to. In this moment, this was me dusting my dick off and trying again. (Rest in peace, Baby Girl.)
Such efforts did not require conversation, however, and most assuredly not one centered on my romantic failures, real or perceived. But after he finished, he felt compelled to inquire more about me. Me, a stranger about whom the only real knowledge he had was how I tasted. He was clearly violating the golden rule: When it’s all over, please get up and leave.
I suppose he was, uh, impressed, or um, at least had enjoyed himself, because after he rose and sat on my bed, he jested that he felt sorry for my former boyfriends. That would have been much cuter if he had said it while putting his shoes back on and vacating the premises. Unfortunately, it would take longer for that to happen, so in the meantime I quickly corrected him and revealed that I’d never had one of those. That’s when his curiosities piqued again, albeit for reasons that were no longer prurient in nature.
Why hadn’t I just smiled and nodded when he said that? He had actually looked at his shoes as if he were finally ready to put them back on and get the hell out of my tiny little apartment. He was almost gone! Now I was subjected to an impromptu interrogation from a person I had, as of three minutes ago, planned never to speak to again.
Judgment from a jump-off. How fun! So much fun I could leap into traffic holding a sign reading “End it already, Jesus!”
None of the detailed questions he asked were any of his business. What’s the longest time you’ve dated someone? Or have you never dated anyone at length? If so, why not? If you have, why didn’t it work out, and by work out, I mean, did you use the terms “boyfriend” and “relationship”?
Some people might have been flattered by this impromptu demand for an in-depth interview, but as someone who has done interviews and has been interviewed, I think that timing and purpose matter. This prime-time interview request served me no purpose. Why did he care, anyway?
I did not flat-out ask, Why are you still here, playboy? but my face presumably conveyed as much, as did my curt responses to each of his questions. I then picked up my remote control,
and this pivot begot a shift to bitchiness from him. I would have felt bad about this, but it was the fastest way to get him and his curiosities out of the door and furthest from my mind now that the assigned task was completed.
Ariana Grande, or “Ponytail,” as I prefer to call her (affectionately so), was already a thing, but sadly, “thank u, next” hadn’t been released when this went down. Had it been, perhaps I could have started singing a revised version where I thanked him for his fucking mouth and sent him on his way.
Thank you for your services. Feel free to never, ever bother me again. Thanks, again.
I assumed that I would never see him again, but since God likes to troll, I did eventually see him at my gym. In fact, I started to see him every other day for a couple of months or so. We never spoke. I ignored him completely, sans the one time we made eye contact and gave each other the same gesture meaning that future conversations were not necessary or encouraged. All was well that ended well.
However, I didn’t forget the last comment he had made to me. That he felt “sorry” for me. This was in response to the revelation that I had not been in a committed relationship this deeply into adulthood. I was in my thirties. I had friends who were married, divorced, and remarried. I had friends with kids or who were planning to have them soon. Outside of one sole couple, though, most of them were straight. There were some spare lesbians with kids that I am including in this bunch, but all of them had come from past relationships with men.
He was echoing the concerns I’d heard from others around me—his real offense that sparked my less-than-gracious reaction. I will concede that maybe it leaned on rude—and that it gave way to his slick talk. Even jump-offs don’t want you to be alone, y’all.
By the time he said what he said, I was already hearing it from friends of all orientations. Maybe not so plainly and not done in an attempt to shame me, but yeah, I knew what others made of the fact that I hadn’t been in a long-term relationship. They all meant well. They didn’t want to think of me dying alone one day because I tripped over trying to rub Bengay on my knees after dancing too hard to Megan Thee Stallion. (For the record, I don’t want that, either, even if it sounds as if I would go out doing what I loved.)
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