Born Round: A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite (27 page)

The downstairs of my town house had a living room with sliding glass doors onto a brick patio in the back, a dining room with windows onto a brick sidewalk in the front, and a galley kitchen between them, plus a half bath tucked under the staircase. Upstairs were two bedrooms and a full bath. It was on a futon in the smaller of these bedrooms—the one I used as a TV and computer room—that I would open the evening’s food bag and unfurl the evening’s feed. The futon was ratty, lumpy and stained with soy sauce; the room was the dingiest in the house. It felt right to do my eating here.

I did a lot of eating here. I ate to steady my nerves, to distract myself from my apprehensions, to dull my occasional loneliness, to quell my sporadic boredom. I ate because I didn’t have any dates on the next week’s calendar or any romantic prospects in my sights and could postpone a new diet and a new discipline by a day, a week. I ate because I was in the habit of eating, because eleven thirty p.m. was cheesesteak time and a switch would automatically flick in my brain.
Want cheesesteak. Get cheesesteak.

After months of
Times
bylines from Washington made clear to anyone who read the newspaper and recognized my name that I was now based in D.C., I started hearing from friends from the past who lived nearby.

First it was Jane, who had been a classmate at Loomis, then Nancy, my Carolina apartment-mate for several years. Each figured out my e-mail or found my number in the book and suggested we meet to catch up. To each I said yes, absolutely, no question, we’d get together, I could hardly wait.

And to each I also said that the meeting would, regrettably, have to be put off for just a little while. The current month, I fibbed, was too busy. The next month, I lied, was full of traveling. I promised to be in touch the month after that, as soon as my life calmed down. What that meant was that I’d be in touch the minute I lost fifteen or, better yet, twenty pounds, when the half wattle was gone and the 38s were history. As soon as I was back to loose 36s or slightly tight 35s, I’d be all for—and all about—warm and fuzzy reunions.

I never followed up with either of them, reasoning that I had newer friends who couldn’t and wouldn’t betray any surprise at the extra pounds I was carrying, because they’d known me only with those extra pounds. Better to stick with them, and not to look back.

There was a third person from the past who got in touch with me during my first year in Washington.

“You probably won’t even remember who I am,” he said when he called.

I told him to give me a shot.

“This is Scott,” he said. “From Chapel Hill.”

I remembered. I remembered meeting him at that Carolina campus newspaper party and wearing that black Windbreaker through our whole first date. I remembered that he had seen me as a preppie all-American—he had told me that many times.

He wouldn’t see me that way now.

“Scott!” I said. “Wow. What are you up to these days? Where are you living?”

“I’m in Dupont Circle,” he said. That meant he could be as little as a mile and a half away. He caught me up on his life. He was a lawyer. He had a boyfriend—a partner—he’d been with for many years.

He proposed that we meet for coffee or a drink or a meal, saying it might be fun.

“It would be great,” I said. Then I explained that this month was unusually busy, and that I had an unusually hectic travel schedule the next month. I’d be in touch—I assured him of that. I even believed it. Scott’s reemergence would be the summons I needed to cut back on the cheesesteaks and start running more than once every week or two, which was the frequency I was down to.

But the twelve-hour days didn’t let up. Neither did the binges at the end of them. Increasingly they came to seem automatic, inevitable, more reflex than choice. And I was less agent than audience, watching myself gather up the food, watching myself lay waste to it, watching myself expand, then turning my eyes away.

 

 

 

 

As badly as I wanted to lose weight and as often as I pledged to, I also discovered that there was a strange mercy in being fat, a peculiar sanctuary. Being fat absolved me, in a sense, of so many other flaws. It took the blame for a whole host of setbacks and disappointments. It was a handy, hefty scapegoat.

Not managing to strike up interesting conversations at a party?

That’s because no one gravitates toward the fat guy.

Not getting invitations to many
other
parties?

No one fattens the crowd with a fat guy.

Not doing as well as other reporters in cultivating Congressional sources?

A fat guy doesn’t cut as compelling a figure or project as much confidence.

Love life moribund?

A possible deficit of wit or shortfall of charm needn’t be pondered. Fatness is so far ahead of them in line.

I was getting to be a practiced, accomplished celibate. During my three and a half years in Manhattan, after my move from Detroit, I’d been sexually involved with just two people on a total of three occasions. Those three occasions were the only ones when I’d so much as kissed someone else. And during my first nine months in Washington, I’d been sexual with just one person on all of two occasions. Five physically intimate moments across more than four years: I didn’t need a Masters & Johnson study to tell me that this wasn’t usual for a successful single man in his thirties, gay or straight.

I was in retreat, my weight a reason not to reach out or take risks. I’d deal with my love life once I got thinner. I’d be more aggressive in trying to find original stories on Capitol Hill and make more of a name for myself once I got thinner. Until I got thinner, I certainly couldn’t model myself after reporters who broke news and then rode their prominent bylines onto political talk shows. I wasn’t fit for TV.

Fatness simplified life and lessened the stakes. It put life on hiatus, making the present a larded limbo between a past normalcy and a future one. It argued against bold initiatives.

But while I wasn’t trying to make things happen, they nonetheless happened to me. In the late summer of 1999, nine months after my relocation to Washington, the newspaper’s bureau chief in D.C. gave me a new assignment. George W. Bush, the Texas governor, had just formally announced his candidacy for the presidency. And I was to begin shadowing him full-time, going to every speech he made and major event he attended, hanging out in Austin when he wasn’t on the road, interviewing him whenever he allowed it, schmoozing with and getting to know his advisers.

It promised to be fascinating. But it would also be a magnification of much of what I disliked about covering Congress: the race against so many other journalists for the same stories; the media groupthink that I either had to fall into or rebel against; the relentless pace and deadlines; the smarmy entreaties from political operatives trying to promote their agendas.

And it was the kind of assignment that did damage to many reporters’ health, mental and physical, as two campaign-trail veterans in the
Times
Washington bureau immediately cautioned me. As they painted a picture of the road ahead, they emphasized that I’d have little or no time for exercise; that I’d be surrounded by the most fattening kinds of food; that I’d drink too much at hotel bars with fellow reporters on the trail.

“Be really careful,” one of these veterans said. “A lot of reporters gain ten to fifteen pounds.”

I flinched, first off because I could tell that this wasn’t a warning given to everyone. It was a warning for people who showed some evidence of having trouble managing their weight. But I also flinched at the threat of those ten to fifteen pounds. Then I laughed inside, because these bureau veterans didn’t realize how lunatic the idea of another ten to fifteen pounds was. They’d known me only since I’d come to Washington and weren’t clued in to my life years before. So they weren’t aware that I was already more than ten to fifteen pounds over how I was really supposed to look and how I would look as soon as I found my way out of this current slump. They didn’t account for the fact that I was at my absolute apogee.

The next months—August, September, October—hurtled by, a blur of Bush speeches in New Hampshire and Bush rallies in South Carolina and enormous buffets of food at many of them and chicken wings and cheeseburgers at midnight in Marriotts and Sheratons and Hiltons in a half dozen states.

In late October, during one of my rare breaks from the trail, when I was back in Washington, I found myself trudging to the Gap for new pants.

I usually bought work clothes that were slightly nicer, from stores somewhat pricier. But I went to the Gap for the same reason I’d gone to T.J. Maxx when my weight had ballooned in Detroit: I had to believe that this new, worse ballooning was another exceptional situation, and that the pants I was buying were the most temporary of measures, calling for the most modest of expenditures. Besides which, I didn’t deserve pants any better, not when I was in this kind of shape.

I bought four pairs of pants in all: size 38 chinos in a light tan and a darker, green-hued tan, and size 40 chinos in the same colors. While the 40s fit better and were the real reason for my trip to the store, the 38s were truer to what I was telling myself: that I was going to turn the corner any day now and be the lesser of the two sizes. I chose the colors I did because they were neutral, disposable, another sort of assertion that I was in a brief holding pattern.

Over the next months, my waist-down wardrobe for my assignment covering a potential president for the most influential newspaper in the country was confined to two cheap pairs of chinos, size 40. For a while I packed the 38s, too—maybe I’d succeed in fasting for two or three days on the trail and all of a sudden they’d fit. Then I stopped hauling them around in my suitcase, because the fast never happened and the 40s themselves were increasingly tight.

I resorted to dry-cleaning the 40s rather than laundering them, so that they wouldn’t shrink and I wouldn’t have to consider moving up to an even larger size. The 40s were as high as it could go. On this point I was adamant.

N
ew Year’s Eve wasn’t a holiday that my dad, my siblings and I necessarily spent together. After Christmas we’d often go our separate ways, return to our separate homes, save New Year’s Eve for big par ties and for friends. But for New Year’s Eve 1999—the turning of the millennium—we agreed that we should celebrate with one another. A moment this big and symbolic needed to be spent with the immediate family.

Dad asked us to join him for a black-tie dinner at the Scarsdale Golf Club, where our family had been members for many years and where he, now retired, practically lived, sometimes playing thirty-six holes of golf a day. We’d be joining not just him but Dottie, a woman he had met about a year after Mom died and later married. It was odd to see them together—to see him with any woman other than Mom—and it was sometimes awkward, too, because she was such a stranger to the family’s dynamics and traditions. But I was glad he wasn’t as lonely as he’d obviously been during the first years after Mom’s death.

Mark, a predictably big success at the high-powered consulting firm where he worked, owned his own tuxedo. So did Harry, who had unpredictably redirected the enthusiasm he had once trained on
Star Trek
and then lifeguarding toward investment banking, and was every bit as successful as Mark. But I had to rent a tuxedo, which meant letting some stranger lasso a tape around my waist and fiddle with the ends of it until he had an accurate inch count. I tried not to watch. I didn’t want to see the numbers on that tape.

I chose a cummerbund instead of a vest, hoping it might function as a kind of man-girdle. And as I walked around the party letting Dad introduce me to his friends and obediently furnishing them with lively behind-the-scenes anecdotes about Governor Bush, I kept reaching down to pull on the cummerbund’s clasps and bands, to cinch it ever tighter. Maybe this man-girdle, coupled with the darkness of the tuxedo jacket over it and the amusing stories I was spinning, would prevent anybody from noticing how enormous I was. Maybe I could sail into a new year, a potentially good year, as something less than a blimp.

Me
(upper right)
with Adelle
(lower right),
her husband
(lower left)
and some family friends.

Mark looked thinner than ever, thanks in part to his itty-bitty-bites approach to meals. Adelle looked good: whatever curves she had weren’t necessarily liabilities. Harry looked good, too. The weight lifting during those lifeguard days in La Jolla had given way to long-distance running—he’d even done the Boston Marathon—and while fatherhood and work were increasingly cutting into any exercise time, he had the body equivalent of a lot of goodwill stored up.

But he struck me as maybe a bit too full of himself. Because he was my younger brother, I never shrank from the task of deflating him.