Eating My Feelings (13 page)

“God, why does this always happen?”

The reason that this always happened could be the fact that vagina is disgusting, but I decided to refrain from telling her that.

“I’m sorry, Betty,” I said as I got into the front seat of her car.

That was the last time I ever ate at Chili’s. Besides the fact that I had thrown up all over someone who was basically prostituting herself out for chicken wings, something about this entire situation left a bad taste in my mouth.

On Thanksgiving, junior year of college, I breezed into D.C. to visit the family. Every time I came home to see them for a holiday, I felt the need to get as hammered as possible the evening before. This prepared me to deal with a night of inevitable dramatic revelations and the subsequent screaming and
door slamming that followed. My childhood education of soap operas prepared me for drama surrounding special events, because a holiday with your family that doesn’t involve misery or the surprise revelation of a “secret family” is like a cake without icing—incomplete. In order to detour myself from the dramatics, I would get blackout drunk the evening before, which would in turn lead to more dramatics. Luckily, that’s all in the past, but I can always rely on the rest of my family to provide the hysterics in my sobriety.

The night before this particular Thanksgiving, like any normal family, I met up with my sister Jamie at a gay bar in downtown D.C. We had a couple of cocktails and both commiserated about the fact that we were still single. For one reason or another, Jamie is like a magnet for gay men: They love her. It’s probably because she lives in D.C.’s gayborhood, is drop-dead gorgeous, and is always dressed in the hottest fashions she can afford. I got up to refill our drinks and when I returned Jamie was surrounded by a group of gay men. Bitch was holding court and all of them were hanging on her every word.

“MARK!” she yelled. “Look at all of these fabulous men I just met.” Suddenly Jamie was like Madonna, surrounded by ten to twelve men who looked like they could have been her backup dancers.

“Hello,” I said as I handed my sister her cocktail. I introduced myself to all of Jamie’s new gay friends. Shortly thereafter, Jamie and I were left with just Chuck and Skip, a couple that was clinging to her every word. Considering most gay guys have the attention spans of four-year-old girls, I found it quite interesting that these two were still schmoozing with her. When they had gotten up to refresh their drinks, my sister leaned over to speak to me.

“Skip and Chuck want to have a threesome with you,” she said.

“What?” I said.

“Hello deaf-o! Skip and Chuck want to have a threesome with you.”

“Wait … what?” I said. “Are you trying to liaise a three-way for your little brother?”

“Why not?”

“I’m not really comfortable with all of this,” I replied. Skip, for one, looked like he had been kicked in the face repeatedly as a child, and Chuck looked and acted as if his mother drank throughout her pregnancy with him. If I were to have a three-way, it certainly wouldn’t be with this dynamic duo.

“Come on, Mark, it will be fun,” my sister said.

“Jamie, what the hell is your problem?” I asked. I didn’t need an answer. She was hammered. Why else would she have cared?

I excused myself and went to the upstairs part of the bar. I didn’t want to tell my sister, but I was still a virgin … well, an ass virgin at least. I had dated my first boyfriend, Sebastian, for some time but we never went all the way. He was scared because at the age of thirty, he had never had sex. One time, in an attempt to loosen him up, we bought three dildos in the hopes that we would finally be able to have sex like adults. A big one, a medium-size one, and a small one—just to test the waters. Trying to keep the mood light, I decided to name the dildos. The biggest one was Angela Channing, the matriarch on
Falcon Crest
. She always meant business, so I figured she was the obvious name for the biggest dildo. The middle-size one was Maggie Channing. She was pleasant to be around, but if you pissed her off, she would go bat-shit crazy on a bitch. The
smallest one I called Lance Cumson. He was Angela’s grandson and basically did whatever she told him to.

I’ve found that plastic penises are more fun when you name them after characters on 1980s primetime soaps. Night after night, Sebastian would attempt to stick these plastic penises up his rear end but he couldn’t even get the tip of Lance Cumson inside of him without crying like a little baby. I never understood the need for the whole dildo fiasco in the first place. For one thing, we both had penises of our own, and for another, Sebastian was pushing thirty. Not having sex at that point is a little ridiculous. Moral of the story is, at twenty years old, I was still a card-carrying member of the V-Club. I didn’t know a ton about sex, but I did know that I wasn’t going give it up to Skip and/or Chuck.

I lingered around the upstairs portion of the bar. All I could see were hammered gay guys pairing off left and right in hopes to extend the evening a little longer, because we all knew tomorrow was to be spent with the family. The bar that night smelled like every gay bar I’ve ever been to: alcoholism and regret. After a while, I spotted a very good-looking guy across the way. He was tall and had long blond hair and blue eyes. He walked over to say hello.

“Hi, I’m Mickey,” he said.

“Mark,” I replied.

“What are you doing here, all alone on the night before Thanksgiving?” he asked.

“I’m with my sister,” I replied. “She’s downstairs. God only knows what she’s up to now.”

I had downed about four cocktails and was feeling pretty good. Before I knew it, Mickey and I were pounding drinks and I was hammy hammed. I was almost to the point of being “date-rape
drugged” wasted, but I wasn’t quite there yet. Mickey and I drank and laughed and before I knew it, I was flirting with not only a blond but a blackout as well. As I continued drinking, my sister sashayed upstairs.

“Way to go, Mark,” she said. “Chuck and Skip left. I guess you’re not going to have that threesome after all.”

“You’re really in it to win it with this whole threesome business, huh?” I asked.

“Mickey?” my sister said, turning her attention to my new friend.

“Oh my God, Jamie Rosenberg! How the hell have you been?”

Suddenly, I was out and Jamie was in. All attention was on my sister. I stood there while the two of them caught up. Apparently my sister had become the empress of gay D.C. while I was away at school. After they finished, my sister leaned in and whispered in my ear: “You should sleep with him. He’s good people. He totally saved my ass at JCC summer camp.”

With that, my sister left me with Mickey to fend for myself. She told me that I needed to have sex with him and that she would pick me up the next morning and drive me to my mother’s.

We went back to Mickey’s apartment on M Street. Before I knew it we were making out like teenagers. As if on cue, a few minutes into it, Mickey pulled out a small Baggie and rolled-up a twenty-dollar bill and asked me if I wanted to do coke. It was already three in the morning and I knew I had to sit through Thanksgiving dinner the next day. Could I potentially do this while coming off of cocaine? I concluded that yes, I could, and proceeded to snort cocaine and make out with Mickey until five in the morning.

The next day, Jamie picked me up from Mickey’s and drove me to my mother’s.

“So …” she asked.

“So, what?” I replied. I was cracked out from the drugs I had done the night before and less than three hours of sleep I had gotten.

“Did you guys do it?”

“Jamie.” I paused. “I’m still technically a virgin and not really sure I’m ready to give it up,” I said. My sister looked shocked. Either that or she was severely hung over. I honestly don’t recall. I continued, “And since when did you become so invested in my sex life?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I went on six J-Dates last week and haven’t heard back from any of them. This is really all I’ve got going on this weekend, if I’m being honest.” Little did we know that at this time a year from now, she would be knocked up.

Jamie dropped me off at my mother’s house and she greeted me.

“Mark!” my mother said, “you look so … skinny.”

“I know,” I said as I hugged her. “I lost the baby weight.”

“Baby fat,” she replied.

“Baby weight,” I repeated.

“Shut the fuck up and get in here!”

I had lost a few pounds during junior year of college. Keeping up with the Joneses and substituting food with booze and drugs will really help to shed those excess inches. However, whenever I came home for any occasion, I gorged like one of Sally Struthers’s children-in-need after a forty-mile trek through the African Sahara. For me, coming home meant eating like I had ten assholes. I guess being around my family made me feel like a fat kid again and I would just go ahead and embrace it.
That Thanksgiving, I inhaled food like someone had told me that I had a meeting with a firing squad the next morning. My mother looked on in awe. Rumors of bulimia spread like wildfire that holiday season. No one could believe that I ate as much as I had. What they didn’t know was that doing a ton of cocaine the night before speeds up one’s metabolism the next day. Cocaine makes you so hungry that you would literally eat dead baby if someone served it to you on a garnished plate. That evening Mickey called me and asked if I wanted to come over. Having met my quota of family time, I agreed. When I arrived, we started making out and he once again offered me drugs.

“I’m not one hundred percent sure what this is,” Mickey said.

“What do you mean?” I asked. “Isn’t it coke?”

“I don’t know. My friend Patrick gave it to me. He said he thought it may be heroin.”

“Well, try it out and let me know what you think it is. If you start having convulsions on the floor, I’ll know not to touch it.”

“Wouldn’t you take me to the hospital if I was having convulsions?” Mickey asked.

I thought about it for about a minute and replied: “Of course.”

Mickey did a bump of the mysterious substance while I waited. I stared at him to see if he was going to die or pass out, and when he hadn’t five minutes later, I did a bump as well. I’m still not sure what was in that bag, but that night I got the most fucked up I had ever been in my life. Mickey and I sat around and talked about stupid shit and watched reruns of
Dynasty
. We continued chatting and before I knew it, Mickey and I were naked and about to have sex.

“I’m a virgin,” I told him.

“That’s okay, I’ll be gentle.”

That night, high on a mysterious substance that may or may not have been heroin, I lost my virginity. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. It was certainly a hell of a lot better than having Lorenzo Lamas up my ass.

The next morning when I woke up, I was starving. I briefly wondered if I could have been pregnant. I had skipped most of health class in middle school, so at the age of twenty, I still believed there may have been a way for me to get impregnated. I told Mickey that the least he could do after stealing my virginity in the night was to take me out to breakfast. I do not think that he imagined it would be a ninety-dollar affair.

We sat down and I immediately ordered three eggs, bacon, toast, two waffles, and a cup of coffee with an iced tea chaser.

“I’ll have yogurt,” Mickey told the waitress.

“Yogurt?” I said. “Seriously?” I gave him a dirty look for making me feel like a fat-ass.

We chatted until our food arrived. Then all conversation stopped. I shoveled food into my mouth as if I had never eaten before. It was very reminiscent of when I was young and fat and would take three-mile walks every day to stay in shape. I was, however, taking those three-mile walks to Burger King and would proceed to scarf two Whoppers and walk back home, thus defeating the purpose of walking three miles in the first place. Mickey looked at me with awe.

“When’s the last time you ate?” he asked.

“Yesterday, why?” I replied.

“Because you’re eating like—” he stopped.

I stopped eating and looked up at him with crumbs around my mouth.

“You’re eating like you’re eating your feelings,” he said.

“What?”

“You’re eating your feelings.”

“Come again?”

“Are you okay with this whole lost-virginity thing?” he said.

Quite honestly, the only thing on my mind was the plate of food in front of me.

“What do you mean eating my feelings?”

“You know, when you’re upset about something and you binge-eat to forget about it.”

Finally, someone had given a proper name to what I had been doing for years.

“I’m not upset about anything,” I replied.

“Okay, I just wanted to check.”

I continued eating, and when I was finished, I ate the rest of Mickey’s yogurt. I was starving. Perhaps whatever drugs were served the previous night had baby laxatives in them. After breakfast, Mickey dropped me off at my mother’s.

Since Mickey lived in D.C. and I lived in New York, we both knew there was no potential to have a worthwhile relationship. Because of geographical issues, we decided whenever we were horny, we would text-message each other the words
sexy pants
, which was code for “I’m ready to have phone sex.” That, ladies and gentlemen, is what I like to call communicating like adults.

It is tradition in my family after gorging on Thanksgiving dinner to go out for pizza the next night. As if we hadn’t eaten enough already. I ate about four hundred slices of pizza that evening. I remembered what Mickey had said. Perhaps I was more upset about this whole lost-virginity situation than I thought I was. As I was gorging food, my other sister, Kim, asked, “Are you coming down off of something?”