Everything Is Awful

by Matt Bellassai

  It’s no surprise, then, that I’ve grown distrustful of physical activity in my mature state. For me, fitness will always equal shame and pain, broken bones and the bad kind of balls to the face. Going to the gym will always feel off, because I’ll never feel like I belong. The people who are there are the people who were picked before me, the people whose bodies actually work, the people whose bones are strong and intact.

  Or at least that’s what I told myself when I canceled my gym membership and the woman on the phone told me I was making a terrible mistake. Maybe one day, Sheri from LA Fitness will read this chapter and understand that she saved herself a lawsuit. You hear that, Sheri? YOU TRIED TO SHAME ME FOR NOT JOINING YOUR FUCKING GYM, BUT I PROBABLY WOULD’VE DIED THERE.

  You’re welcome, Sheri. And you’re welcome, body.

  ON NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES, OR THAT TIME I CHOKED ON A TAQUITO

  Braces are an abomination. I know this is an obvious observation to most people, but I had braces for six painful, raw-gummed, swollen-tongued years, so I feel particularly entitled to complain about this one, and I’d like anybody who never suffered, or who didn’t suffer as awfully as I did, to understand the agony I endured for more than half a decade. Because six years is an abnormally long time to have braces, especially when the entire journey fucked up my relationship with food forever. But let’s start at the beginning.

  Braces are barbaric. They are the only means of medieval torture that have carried over into common application today, presumably because they keep teenagers from giving enjoyable blow jobs until they’re at least eighteen. (Which has less to do with the fact that your teeth feel like knives and more to do with the fact that, whenever you smile or speak, you look like the Terminator registering his next mortal enemy.) You’d think, surely, that dental science and engineering would have, since biblical times, advanced beyond installing an entire airplane hangar worth of sheet metal inside a child’s mouth. But you’d be wrong. If anything, the dental profession has regressed even further, and I’m predicting that full-body metal braces that tie around the back of your scalp will be making a comeback in the next five years.

  (Actually, I don’t even know if kids still get braces these days, or if everybody has those invisible braces that go right over your teeth, or if robots just replace your teeth with better teeth while you sleep. But in my day, we had metal-as-fuck braces, and they were the worst.)

  The real problem, of course, is that braces all but destroy your ability to enjoy a decent meal. The entire dental industry is anti-food, and I’m sure there’s some crack dentist somewhere who’s gonna write me a letter and tell me that eating a healthy diet will make my teeth whiter or some shit, but you can save the ink, buddy, because the teeth I have left are perfectly fine without your meddling and I know you just want to stop me from eating delicious caramels. I remain convinced that they only make you answer one question when you want to be a dentist, and that question is: “Will you make people feel like absolute garbage for everything they eat?” And if you answer yes—congratulations, you’re a dentist. It’s like every time I ever go to the dentist, all he can talk about is every meal he finds in between my molars. He’s always like, “Hey pal, looks like you missed a whole bunch of food in here while you were flossing.” And I’m always like, “Joke’s on you, friend. I’ve never flossed even once in my whole life.”

  But when I was little, my crack dentist wasn’t happy enough telling me passive-aggressively to brush my teeth every six months, so he was all like, “I think you need braces.” And then, presumably so I could mentally prepare my tubby body for the deprivation it was about to endure, he gave me a manual of all the things you weren’t allowed to eat while you had braces, which included just about every food you can possibly imagine besides bananas that have been pre-chewed by a parent or legal guardian and regurgitated into your mouth.

  I got braces in the fifth grade, on one of those glorious days in elementary school when we were catered some local delicacy, like McDonald’s or the knockoff Subway or pizza from the place inside the bowling alley. Our school brought in these hot lunches every month, I assume, as a way to keep us from rioting, and they were my favorite days of the year. I kept a calendar for the sole purpose of tracking hot-lunch days.

  By some cruel twist of fate, the day I got braces coincided with fried-chicken day, and the moment I bit into that crispy chicken breast with my newly metallic teeth was like biting into a stick of dynamite that had been dipped in burning acid and wrapped in angry bees. My entire mouth exploded in pain, because apparently, when you get braces, your teeth and gums freak out about how everything is changing and nothing will ever be the same, and decide to set themselves on fire the second you try to use them for their intended purpose. Defeated, I set aside the chicken and tried my luck with a biscuit, but my teeth were like, “Nice try, asshole, but you might as well get used to never eating delicious baked breads ever again,” and then I tried the mashed potatoes and gravy, but even they proved too painful to swish around. So I vowed to jump in front of the school bus the next morning and end it all for good.

  Except I didn’t, because I was far too scared of moving vehicles and also our bus driver, so I just persisted in agony for the next six years with a mouth full of metal that made eating the most difficult thing in the world.

  But here’s the thing. Braces weren’t even the worst part of having braces. The worst part was all the preparation required for getting braces, because apparently you can’t just slap those babies in and call it a day, you have to get your mouth ready with a whole host of awful procedures that exist for the sole purpose of creating moments that will scar you well into adulthood and make you, once again, fear food entirely.

  The first thing they do when they assess you for braces is a thing dentists called impressions. Impressions are a process in which the dentist fills a tiny round metal tray with a glob of clay putty he scooped from the bottom of an abandoned marsh, and smashes it against the roof of your mouth to get a 3-D rendering of your teeth. To make it worse, the dentist people try to flavor the putty to taste like bubble gum, but really, it tastes like it was made by an alien who has never tasted bubble gum before, which is to say, it tastes like the inside of a recently douched anus. Inevitably, the dentist will overfill the putty tray, which means, while he presses it against the roof of your mouth, half of the stuff goes down your throat and tickles that part of your tonsils that I like to call the Violent Vomit Button.

  This may go without saying, but the action of someone jamming an entire handful of ass putty into your mouth is officially the most gag-inducing thing you can do to another human, and yes, I’m including whatever it is you’re thinking about right now. It smelled like burning flesh and tasted like intestines, and it was being used as a weapon of war that attacked as many of my senses at once as possible. So yes, I threw up. Well, actually, I gagged a lot at first, like that real deep gag you do sometimes that sounds like a sea lion calling for its mother. And then I threw up a lot. It didn’t matter how many times they screamed, “JUST CLOSE YOUR EYES AND RELAX YOUR THROAT, YOUR MASCARA IS RUNNING,” I puked all over that dentist and his dumb tray of butt clay and not at all into the bucket they were holding under my face to catch the barf. And you know what? They did that shit three times, until my gags yielded only dry heaves, because apparently throwing up all over the little clay version of your mouth makes it unusable and they have to do it until there isn’t any vomit in all the little teeth holes.

  (Side note: I heard that dentist call one of his assistants a bitch one time, so I have zero regrets about vomiting all over that bastard. If I could, I’d go back and vomit on him again, because my stomach is bigger now and can hold even more vomit.)

  And the worst part is, those fucking impressions screwed me over, ’cause they sent them to the lab or whatever weird sex palace they send children’s mouth molds to, and they came back and they were like, “Guess what? Not only are your teeth not straight, your mouth is too sma
ll, like some kind of idiot.” And they were telling the truth. My mouth was, in medical terms, narrower than a pigeon’s beak. Or at least that’s how the doctors described it. Apparently, my mouth was too narrow to fit all my teeth, because the two in the front started kinda growing into one another, like two awkward kids at a crowded party getting smashed together by a bunch of people dancing to “Mambo No. 5.” It’s a relatively common malady, which, if left untreated, guaranteed that I would grow up to be either a very successful prostitute, or one of those guys who auditions for television talent shows with the ability to whistle entire Mozart compositions through his nose. Coupled with a mild case of sleep apnea, it meant that my throat was basically the anatomical equivalent of a collapsed Chilean coal mine. (Thirty-three men had been briefly lost in it.)

  The only solution to this condition was to install a janky contraption the doctors called an “expander,” conceived by the same sadists who designed mattresses in the nineties or the wooden benches at Starbucks or any number of other bullshit things created solely to bring nothing but torment and pain to everyone, particularly narrow-mouthed children like myself. Here’s how it worked: The expander was a metal apparatus that the dentist literally installed in the top of my mouth with actual cement, which I’m pretty sure he was not even legally allowed to use, because he was a dentist and not a fucking construction worker, but that’s not the point here. He cemented that thing to my mouth, and then gave my mother a tiny key, and whispered in her ear instructions for how to use it. Every night, just before bed, she was to insert the key into my gaping mouth, slide it into a teeny hole on the bottom of the device, and turn it three times, and with every turn, the spacer would crank wider, like those torture devices they used in the Middle Ages to rip people apart, except instead of ripping someone apart, it would slowly lurch the roof of my mouth wider and wider. My mother claimed it was just as painful for her to crank the key, because she knew how much it hurt and a mother feels the pain of her children or some shit like that, but that’s bull, because it felt like a very tiny person with a very tiny chainsaw had climbed inside of my head and started to chop off my face from within, and I’m pretty sure she didn’t fucking feel that. In fact, I would go so far as to say that she even enjoyed it some nights, because I was a smart-ass, and my narrow mouth and I deserved every bit of pain we had coming to us.

  In addition to the physical pain, though, the device was a general pain in the ass to live with. It was a giant hunk of steel cemented to the top of my mouth, which you’d think would be a perfectly discreet place to keep a hunk of steel, but turns out, not so much. For one, metal of the medical variety is always somehow sharper and more jagged than the metal they use for, say, barbed wire or hacksaws. So I spent most of the four months I wore this device hoping that I wouldn’t wake up one morning to find half of my tongue lying next to me in bed. It also turns out that your tongue generally needs the full space of your mouth in order to speak in a language that other humans understand, so I sounded like I was constantly trying to get an oversized bite of peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich unstuck from the back of my teeth.

  And worst of all, it was virtually impossible to eat anything even closely resembling solid food the entire time that thing was up there. My only means of nourishment was to rip all of my food into tiny pieces, delicately put them on my tongue like I was feeding a hummingbird, and swish them slowly around my mouth until they were melty enough to swallow. If I took too big of a bite, or swished too quickly, the food would somehow find its way up into the expander, and lodge itself in the tiny space between the metal and the roof of my mouth. And then I’d have to spend hours trying to effectively suck my own mouth to get the food unstuck, or somehow jam a knife in the tiny space in the front of the thing to push the food out the tiny space in the back. It was, as they say, a disaster waiting to happen.

  And disaster struck, as these things always tend to do, during my brother’s surprise sixteenth birthday party. Perhaps, subconsciously, I simply could not stand to attend an event at which I was not the sole center of attention. Or perhaps, on some deeper level, this milestone reminded me of my own mortality and my body decided to simply end it all before it had the chance to get any worse. But more than likely, disaster struck because we had made the mistake of combining a high-pressure social gathering with steaming-hot appetizers and a minor orthodontic surgical device.

  Here’s what happened.

  I didn’t particularly like parties as a kid, especially when they weren’t for me, and especially when they were surprise parties I wasn’t told about because I couldn’t be trusted to keep a secret. If I’d had my way, I would’ve spent the evening in my bedroom, playing with my Pokémon cards in peace, descending only to retrieve a slice of ice cream cake, which I would’ve dragged back to my room to swish slowly in my mouth piece by tiny piece. Parties always felt like too much effort, mostly because I was ten, and didn’t have the stamina to sustain more than three minutes of small talk. You know what everybody asks you when you’re ten? “How is school going?” How the fuck do you think school is going? I’m in the fifth grade. I colored a map today, and some kid swallowed an eraser. I don’t have time to be answering this garbage.

  But of course, my mother forced me to attend because that’s the only way she would give me cake, and I had no choice but to make conversation, or whatever conversation I could muster with a chunk of metal dentistry filling most of my throat.

  And herein lay the problem. You put a child who doesn’t want to be at a party at a party and surround him with people he doesn’t want to talk to, and he does the only thing that ten-year-olds know how to do with any sort of confidence: he eats. He eats whatever you put in front of him. Anything at all that keeps him from having to speak, or emote, or interact socially with any human besides someone who may be standing in the way of food.

  Now, we never really had appetizers at parties. We were more of a chip-and-dip family. If you came to a party hungry, well, that was your own damn fault, ’cause all that we promised in the invitation was cake and maybe a single box of wine. The day of any party was usually rife with cleaning and dusting and screaming, and my parents rarely had time to do all three of those things, let alone time to prepare pigs in a blanket.

  But today was a special occasion (i.e., my mother had made it to Sam’s Club with enough time to buy a cake and a few boxes of frozen finger foods), and we had a hopping spread of sliders, barbecue chicken wings, and taquitos. And my tubby self couldn’t get enough of it.

  First of all, it was food, and food meant I didn’t have to talk to anybody. But more important, it was appetizers, which are inarguably, categorically better than regular-sized food. It’s like Jesus said, “Take the same amount of flavor as a full-sized adult food, but put it into the body of this tiny baby food, and also roll it into a stick, because everything is obviously better in phallic form, and BAM, you got yourself the greatest foodstuff in the world.” I mean, I was only a kid, and I couldn’t know this at the time, but I would make the argument now that fried mac ’n’ cheese balls fresh from the oven, no matter how sloppily they are made, are greater than the best sex you can possibly imagine in your entire life. (The thought of combining these two things is too much for my brain to even comprehend.)

  So let’s recap. I was an awkward, chubby kid, standing at a party I didn’t want to be at, with a mouth full of metal that tasted like a handful of quarters, next to a plate of the greatest food created by Jesus himself, a food we did not get to eat but once every five to ten years. My brain said, “You know this isn’t going to end well. Just wait for your ice cream cake, and everything will be fine.” But my stomach said, “Eat the taquitos, tubby. We’re not gonna live forever.” And you sure as hell know which one I listened to.

  I took the biggest taquito on the tray, dipped it as far into the bowl of sour cream as it would go, and inhaled that thing like I was a congressman who had just burned down an orphanage to make room for an oil rig and was sucki
ng eagerly on the end of a cigar. But here was the problem. I quite literally inhaled it. Like, for some reason, I actually sucked on the sour-creamed end of the taquito, presumably to extract as much flavor as I could and prolong this savory bliss. But the dried, frozen meat inside the rolled shell somehow came loose and shot to the back of my throat, and when I coughed, the meat came back up just enough for half of it to catch in the metal expander and lodge there, the other half dangling down the back of my throat.

  So there I was, in the center of my brother’s surprise sixteenth birthday party, involuntarily deep-throating the dried beefy center of a taquito, and freaking the fuck out. If you’ve ever seen footage of a pelican swallowing a fish that somehow swims back up its gullet, that’s exactly what was happening to me, except it wasn’t a fish, it was a hard rod of spicy meat, and it wasn’t swimming out of me so much as it was being held immovably halfway between a swallow and a regurgitation.

  I panicked. I looked around and nobody seemed to notice I was being slowly choked to death by the meat of a taquito colluding with the metal brace on the roof of my mouth. I started coughing, and then waving, and then fearfully grabbing my neck, and if I hadn’t been so afraid I was experiencing the end, I would’ve enjoyed the melodrama of it all, but something about dying via taquito didn’t feel quite dramatic enough to accept—I’d prefer to die in a blaze set by Beyoncé’s own hands—so I fought. And by fought, I mean I ran in panic to my mother, who opened my mouth like she did when the dog snatches a dropped piece of chocolate, reached into my esophagus, and ripped the meat free.

  I took a deep breath of oxygen and probably fainted, for maximum dramatic effect. And even though I spent the rest of the party as the focus of everyone’s empathy, I could not forgive the hunk of metal in my mouth for turning food against me.