When a fat man cries, his big body shakes so hard it feels as if his bags will fall off him. Last summer, the last time I left the house on my own steam, I squeezed into the car and drove to a truck stop thirty miles from home and drove onto the truck scale, and found out that, deducting the weight of the car, I was 911 pounds.
I went to a surgeon who said, “I could pump out four hundred of that with liposuction, but first, you’d have to lose two hundred on your own before I could do surgery. You’re too fat to open up.”
I went to a nutritionist who said, “You could become slender again if you would skip the butter and the dessert. Try dessert substitutes, such as erasers. A plate of erasers served on a slice of sponge contains less than two calories. You could also eat less by provoking fierce arguments at the dinner table. Insult your wife, get her to scream at you, scream back. It helps.”
“I love my wife,” I said. “I could never be angry at her.”
“Then try disgust. It’s a helpful tool in weight loss. Imagine your food was dropped on the floor and scraped up and served to you with hair on it and parakeet poop. Imagine that the caramel rolls were used as toilet paper by old veterans. Imagine the roast beef is the flesh of your beloved grandmother. Think of the eggs as the eyeballs of horses. Imagine the cheese as having been scraped from between the toes of elderly patients in the hospitals. Imagine that the butter is solidified pus collected from diseased cattle.”
I went straight from the nutritionist’s to a restaurant, sat in a dark corner, and ordered dessert.
“Hi, my name is Tina,” said the tiny waitress. “Our dessert special today is the Chocolate Slab with Ice Cream, Whipped Cream, Chocolate Sauce, Pecans, Chunks of Toffee, and Hot Buttered Brandy Batter, and it comes in five sizes: the Ballerina, the Allegro, the Diva, the Extra Diva, or the Wild Swine Loose in the Corncrib.”
“Give me three of those big oinkers,” I said. “I’ll look at the dinner menu afterward.”
Thus did I become a star of the traveling Nelson&Barney carnival, spending three hundred days a year spread out on a king-size bed in a mobile home parked next to the Ferris wheel on a shopping-mall parking lot somewhere in the Midwest, with an electric fan blowing on me and people paying seventy-five cents to come and gaze down at my vast bulk and to read the sign above my head:
PLEASE DO NOT FEED THE FAT MAN
DO NOT POKE HIM OR MAKE RUDE REMARKS—HOW WOULD YOU LIKE IT IF YOU WERE TOO LARGE TO MOVE AND PEOPLE TORMENTED YOU?
HE WAS ONCE A 165-POUND HALFBACK, FLEET OF FOOT, DARTING LIGHTLY AND AVOIDING TACKLES.
DO YOU BELIEVE IT?
NO PHOTOGRAPHS, PLEASE—PHOTOS ARE ON SALE AT THE CARD TABLE. PHOTO REVENUE IS HOW FAT MAN HOPES TO PAY FOR SURGICAL REMOVAL OF PAINFUL SORES ON HIS HINDER. YOU MAY VIEW THE SORES FOR AN ADDITIONAL PAYMENT OF $15.00. NOT RECOMMENDED FOR THE SQUEAMISH
COMMONLY ASKED QUESTIONS
1. HOW DOES HE TAKE A CRAP? HE IS DRAINED WITH A PUMP.
2. HOW DOES HE WATCH TV? THROUGH A SPECIAL MIRROR MOUNTED ON THE CEILING.
3. HOW MUCH DOES HE WEIGH? CURRENTLY, HIS WEIGHT IS STABILIZED AT EIGHTEEN HUNDRED POUNDS.
4. HOW DOES HE MOVE? HE MUST BE LIFTED WITH A SPECIAL FORK LIFT OR ON A SLING RAISED BY A CRANE. HE IS LIFTED TWICE DAILY AND TURNED. HE IS LIFTED THREE TIMES A WEEK TO BE JIGGLED, TO PREVENT CONSTIPATION. AND HE IS LIFTED EVERY MORNING SO HE CAN BE HOSED DOWN.
5. HOW DOES HE MAKE LOVE? DON’T BE SILLY.
Myra wrote the sign by hand. She also drives the truck that tows the mobile home and operates the forklift, and she remains ever loyal and true, my constant friend, my beloved wife. When the crowds leave, she sits and holds my hand and we watch our favorite shows. I am guaranteed a hundred thousand dollars a year, and earn that much again in photos, an all-time record for earnings by a fat man. I have put my girls through college and graduate school. Margaret is a resident in obstetrics in San Diego, Matty is at Yale Divinity School and hopes to become an Episcopal priest, Molly went to Bryn Mawr and is now studying film at Columbia, and Johanna is in women’s studies at Northwestern. They are all beautiful and smart, and I am proud of them. Mostly, we talk by phone, what with my busy schedule.
I often doze off on my bed, catch a nap in the morning, cut some Zs after lunch, snooze through the late afternoon, and in my dreams I smell the grass and sweat and mud and leather. I feel how it felt to fly and to float and turn and race for the goal, and the crowd is standing and their mouths are open and I hear a rush of wind and then I awaken, my beloved wife standing above me.
I used to think that when a hero falls, he becomes tragic, but I’m not tragic, only former, an object of curiosity. People drive a hundred miles to see me who wouldn’t go see any ordinary fat man, because I once was a star halfback. I understand that it’s quite a sight. Some come back again and again. One lady named Janis has hundreds of photographs of my body, 8 × 20s. “Would you like one?” she said. “They’re quite professional.”
“No, thank you,” I said. “I would rather remember me as I was.”
“Do you ever think,” she asked, “that you’d be able to lose weight and be slim and quick again?”
“Yes. Anyone can. It’s a matter of eating less fat, substituting carbohydrates, and getting more exercise.”
She told me that I am an inspiration.
I said, “Well, there’s always hope. Where would we be without hope?”
EARL GREY
arl Grey flew to San Francisco to speak to the Tea Congress and stayed overnight at the Fairmont so he could drive to Berkeley in the morning and speak to a toast symposium there. He was awakened at five a.m. by some jerk singing Gershwin and took a shower and mistakenly turned the Hot and Cold handles so that scalding water struck him in the chest, and as he recoiled, he slipped and banged his head, stunning himself, and suffered bright-red burns, and spent six days in the hospital, in a room with a boy who had swallowed an orange, a bad week for the fifty-one-year-old Grey, the only living American to have a popular beverage named after him, Dr. Dave Pepper having passed away a few years before. Though his worldly air and good haircut bespoke travel, books, wealth, he was badly burned and his head throbbed like an agitating washer. He felt like warmed-over death on rice.
The hospital tea was gruesome, of course. They had teabag tea, which tasted like hot rinse water from a mop bucket, and they had obscenities like powdered iced tea, carbonated tea, and various “natural” concoctions such as Apple Mint and Raspberry Jasmine, all useful if a person needed to vomit, but nowhere in that institution of healing was one person who cared to make a proper pot of tea, using boiling water and decent tea leaves. So he drank juice for a week. His chest hurt, and his head ached, and he became so despondent, he turned on the TV set and watched for hours. Then he switched to martinis. When he was a complete wreck, they released him.
Earl Grey was a middle child, the third in a family of five, so he was accustomed to suffering. When he was small, his family often forgot to call him to the table for meals. He was a chubby boy with size-12 shoes, a hard one to overlook, but they did, all the time. Sometimes they called him “Vern” by mistake, and when he corrected them, they said, “Oh well. Whatever.”
Pardon a digression here, but as a middle child himself, the author is moved to elaborate: In other cultures, middleness is not a losing position, perhaps because those cultures are less linear, more circular, than ours. For example, in Sumatra a middle child is cherished as the bright jewel of the family, and is referred to as “our central child” (olanda rimi mapindi) and is carried around on a litter, or pajandra, but in America the middle child is the invisible one. The firstborn child is usually dutiful, earnest, the First Child, the Living Miracle, and the younger kids are disturbed, with tiny haunted eyes, they grind their teeth, they wet the beds, they strangle cats. The middle child is the normal, friendly one. In between their grievous mistakes, the parents have done something right and produced a keeper. So the middle child is ignored: because he or she is so nice and
requires no special attention. Parents devote themselves to the troubled children and become close to them. The middle child, the healthy child, is a stranger to his parents. Earl Grey liked to bring a fresh pot of tea to his mom and dad as they sat in the Walnut Room of their spacious mansion in Chevy Chase and rested from the day’s labors. “Oh, thanks, Vern,” they said. “Here’s a quarter.”
TEA NOTE. INTERESTINGLY ENOUGH, EARL GREY’S TEA TODAY IS AMONG THE WORLD’S MOST POPULAR, AND YET HARDLY ANYONE REQUESTS IT BY NAME. THE CUSTOMER SAYS, “I’D LIKE TEA,” AND THE WAITER SAYS, “EARL GREY? IS THAT OKAY?” AND THE CUSTOMER SAYS, “OH, SURE.”
Earl Grey’s dad was the Minority Whip in Congress, and Earl grew up in Washington, a city of broad streets and wide steps ascending to immense granite porches, a good place for a boy with a bike, and it was full of curiosities, such as the National Cold Beverage Museum and the Museum of Coasters&Napkins and the national headquarters of the American Association of Holes in the Ground. But the Grey family lived under a cloud, dreading the next election, afraid that each term would be their last. Daddy was a conservative Republican from Georgia, and his seat should have been safe, but he was careless, something of a bon vivant, and didn’t bother to keep his political fences mended.
Daddy loved Washington. He enjoyed the lunches at Le Louis, the parties at the embassies where black servants circulated with silver trays of buns with pork in them. He loved the little restaurants, loved to sit in them and drink tea and read the gossip and arts sections of the Washington Post. He belonged to a madrigal ensemble and a sonnet circle. He read Proust. He was a civilized man and it was hard to get him ginned up for elections. Every even-numbered year, in the spring, his wife and children begged him to please do whatever he needed to do to get re-elected, but he hated the thought. “Oh pooh,” he said.
He kept putting off rehearsing his campaign speech, in which he said, “Mah fray-ins, this is a tahm of gret pay-ril foah owuh blovid cuntrah.” He hated that speech. He got terribly depressed when Mrs. Grey made him practice it—“Why can’t I go down there and talk about federal support of the arts, Margaret? Why do I have to talk like a pig farmer?”
And then in the fall, the Greys trooped south to fight for their lives.
“Daddy’s got to say some mean things, children,” said Mrs. Grey, “otherwise we’ll have to live here in Georgia and learn to eat lime Jell-O again and attend square dances and have clunky furniture and linoleum floors.”
For the campaign, they rode around on hay bales in the back of a pickup truck, waving bandannas, dressed in Sears outfits, Daddy and Mom, the dull plodding Vance, the troubled Vivian, Earl, and the ill-tempered twins, Vince and Vera. The twins were spoiled rotten and stuck out their tongues at the voters and gagged. “Oh pew! Gross! Smell those big honkers out there! Bleauggghhh!” But Earl stood and smiled faithfully and looked up at Daddy with moist rapturous eyes, as a Republican child is trained to do.
Don’t slump, children, whispered Mrs. Grey, her face grim, her undies all bunched up. Don’t be glum. Glitter, sweet pea. Smile. Big white one—as a country singer in a blue velour suit sang “Ain’t it Grand to be an American” and “God Bless the Good Ole U.S.A.” and other songs of the common man and then Daddy rose and spoke out for the American flag, the American family, the American family dog and cat, the American lawn, and railed against the State Department for selling out our country’s vital interests abroad. “Ah tell yew, mah fray-ins, if we c’d git thim pin-strahped ayghaids down heah t’ meet yew good folks, waall, mebbe they’d have thim a bitter idee whut a gret cuntrah we got heah—the Yew-nighted Stets of Uhmurka,” he’d cry, mopping his brow with a red bandanna, sipping from a Dixie cup. “B’lieve yew me, I look for’ard to the day whin th’ bur-den of public ser-vice is lifted from muhsilf and muh dear fam’ly and we kin leave the hip-ocrisy and false valyews of Washinton and git back heah and scootch down amongst the fawnest pee-pull in the en-tar worruld.”
And then in November, Daddy got re-elected and the Greys made a final appearance at the victory rally at the Ramada Inn, grinning, hugging, their brown eyes glistening with tears of gratitude, and Daddy got choked up and called them “the grettest famly in the worruld, Vance and Vivian and Vince and Vera and that little skeeter there in the middle, doggone him,” and Daddy looked at Earl vaguely—and Earl mouthed his name—Earl, my name is Earl, Daddy—but when you mouth the word Earl, it looks like you’re puckering up for a kiss, so Daddy puckered back—and then they took off the dumpy clothes and packed them in a cardboard suitcase they stored in Daddy’s sister Earlene’s basement and made a beeline back to Washington, glad to be done with the dirty business for another two years. They put on their nice clothes, and talked normally, and Daddy resumed his lovely life of receptions and dinners.
At the Grey home, dinner was served promptly at seven o’clock, and once his mom looked Earl straight in the eye and said, “It’s suppertime, Timmy. Time for you to get home. Your mother is probably worried sick, wondering where you are,” and Earl had to tell her, “You are my mother, Mom, and you’re not worried about me at all. You don’t even know I exist.”
“Oh, don’t exaggerate,” she said. “I just didn’t recognize you in this dim light.” But poor lighting had nothing to do with it, of course. Earl was a middle child.
INTERESTING FACT. TODAY EARL GREY TRAVELS MORE THAN TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND MILES A YEAR, SEEING TO HIS FAR-FLUNG TEA BUSINESS, APPEARING AT CHARITABLE FUNCTIONS, AND WHEREVER HE GOES, PEOPLE SAY, “EARL GREY! ARE YOU THE EARL GREY WHO INVENTED THE TEA?” AND HE SAYS, “YES, I AM HE.” AND THEY SAY, “OH, GOOD,” AND TURN AND TALK TO SOMEBODY ELSE. ONCE A MIDDLE CHILD, ALWAYS A MIDDLE CHILD.
In 1956, Daddy had a real stinker of an opponent, a bullet-headed, red-necked, carpet-chewing radio preacher named Gerald K. Wills who accused Daddy of losing touch with the district and being a secret liberal who intended to tax the hide off people and spend the money subsidizing pornographic pictures of men with their whangers hanging out. He crisscrossed the state in a cheap wrinkly suit waving dirty pictures and yelling, “Where’s Grey, the big phony? Why’s he afraid to show his face in Georgia? Is it because he knows what I know about him and his ladida pals and the high life they live in Washington, D.C.?”
Mrs. Grey read about him and told Daddy to get down on the floor of Congress and yell and pound the desk and light into the State Department.
“I have friends in the Foreign Service,” he said. “They’re among the finest people I know. They’d think I was a creep if I engaged in demagoguery like that.”
May went by, and June and July, and in August Daddy had a tennis tournament to play in, and early September was when his madrigal group gave its big recital at the Folger Library, so it wasn’t until September 22 that he and Mrs. Grey and most of the kids trooped down to Georgia to do their business.
They forgot to bring Earl. He was standing by the car, about to climb in, and his mother said to him, “You be sure and mow the lawn every week, Hector, that’s what we pay you for.” Earl’s eyes filled with tears, he turned to blow his nose, and away they went without him.
So he spent the next six weeks with the housekeeper Anna Tin, a nice Sumatran lady who took excellent care of him. She was dark and slender and spoke in whispers like a breeze in the banyan trees and she adored Earl for all she was worth. Being Sumatran, she saw Earl’s middle-child status as blessed, a divine calling—he was a living keystone, a bridge, a bond, a fulcrum, a vital link. Every evening they sat together on the terrace and sipped tea and listened to the crickets, and she wrote poems to him in an exquisite hand: O divine child, our threeness, completing the triangle of life, we regard you with unsullied joy and thanksgiving. That sort of thing.
Meanwhile, down in Georgia, the rest of the Greys traipsed around Daddy’s district trying to be wholesome and perky, bravely ignoring the polls, while Gerald K. ran circles around Daddy on the stump. Gerald K.’s slogan was “Honor America and Send a Real Man to Washington” and he
flew hundreds of flags at every appearance, outflagging Daddy by a ten-to-one margin. Daddy used small tasteful flags and Gerald K. had flags as big as barns. He spread rumors that Daddy had only one testicle, smaller than a dried lentil, and he accused Daddy of having a secret plan to strip seniors of their pensions, and before Daddy got his drawl back, Gerald K. found photos of Daddy singing in his madrigal group, wearing a foofy shirt with chin ruffles, his hair curling out around his ears, a garland of daisies on his head, his mouth open in a prim oval for a falalalala that—well, the picture did Daddy no good. But what really killed him was tea.
One hot night, in Marietta, at a debate on a flag-draped platform in the courthouse square, when Congressman Grey was waxing hot and heavy about the pinheads in the State Department and how, if elected, he’d clean them out of there and replace them with God-fearing folks with a farm background, suddenly Gerald K. jumped up and strode to the podium and hollered, “What you got in that Dixie cup theah?” And he snatched it from Daddy and sniffed it and yelled, “Tea.”
“Tea?” the crowd murmured.
“Tea!” yelled Gerald K. “This peckerwood is standing up here peckin at a cup of tea. Well, ladida. Ain’t we fine?”
Everyone laughed, and Daddy was dead.
It was the tea that did it. Conservative men didn’t drink tea, except if they were down with the flu. Tea was for wimmen, fruitcakes, pantywaists, college perfessers, hermaphrodites, and elderly Episcopalians. Gerald K. held up the picture of Congressman Grey falalaing and said, “You folks intendin to vote for a poof and a priss and a pansy? I smelled that man’s Dixie cup and it smelled of tea, people. And I say ole Oolong has been in Congress Toolong!” and that was that, everyone laughed, and the election was over. Daddy yelled and he hollered and he got a flattop haircut and he drank gallons of Coca-Cola laced with bourbon whiskey and offered to have his urine tested for tea and he cursed the State Department, bureaucrats, unions, communists, porno pushers, welfare cheats, the media, rapists, and flag burners, but he was swamped on Election Day by a lavish margin, and the family slunk back to Chevy Chase, heartsick and bitter.
The Book of Guys Page 17