Eating My Feelings (17 page)

7:09 p.m.:
I meet my newest husband. He doesn’t know I love him, but I soon realize that no one will fall in love with me if I continue to dress like the kid from
A Christmas Story
. After he departs, a smell wafts from the Olive Garden across the street. It smells a bit of fettuccini Alfredo and I begin to weigh my dinner options.

7:30 p.m.:
The final countdown begins. It’s a half hour to show time and I tell people to hustle up and hit the showers, as if we were all about to, or had just played a football game. As I am doing this, a man approaches and I ask if he has any questions. He tells me that he is a New Yorker and doesn’t need my help. I give him a dirty look and his tune quickly changes. “Excuse me,” he says. “Do you have tickets for
Cats
?” I begin laughing
uproariously. Toward the end of an eleven-hour day, after seven cups of coffee, the smallest things can turn into a laugh riot. “I thought you said you were a New Yorker,” I say gasping for air. I’m literally hysterical as I continue: “That show has been closed for ten years you stupid piece of shit!” I continue laughing. “But you’re a New Yorker, you know
everything
, don’t you?” I laugh until I almost fall over and the man walks away in shame.

7:39 p.m.:
I am bored so I contemplate getting my eighth cup of coffee of the day.

7:40 p.m.:
“Do you sell tickets for
Jersey Boys
?” “Go to hell!”

7:59 p.m.:
It’s quitting time. I get on the subway to go home.

8:23 p.m.:
I get off the subway and have swamp ass again. Going from hot to cold and back again is going to give me pneumonia by New Year’s.

8:49 p.m.:
I am on the couch with a bucket of chicken watching
One Life to Live
, dreading doing all of this over again tomorrow. So maybe things aren’t all that bad. I have a job—it’s an annoying one, but it’s a job nonetheless. At least I can still afford fancy dinners, and my soap operas will always be free.

When I stopped drinking, I made it a point to hit the gym as much as possible. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, no one likes a fattie, especially one who spends his afternoons in a room full of alcoholics trying to stay sober. In an effort to not revert back to my old ways of being a complete fat-ass (I was supplementing booze with food for a bit and the results were seam splitting), I joined the Midtown Health and
Racquet in Times Square. Every afternoon I would hit the gym and was constantly surrounded by every chorus boy Broadway had to offer. Each body was more ripped than the next, and I was quickly becoming more self-conscious than ever. After a few weeks I decided it was time to put a personal trainer on the payroll in order to fast-track the results I desired.

One Tuesday, I began to weigh my options in the personal-trainer department. There was the pretty blond girl named Lindsay who was always training the blind guy who was there every time I was at the gym. Being gay and going to the gym was obnoxious enough, but not being able to see must have made it an absolute nightmare. He wasn’t able to actually see the hot guys at the gym judging him, which must have made his hour at the gym devastating. Then there was Corey, the deaf trainer. He seemed very friendly and very fit, but it always seemed as though he had trouble communicating with his clients. Then there was Ricky. Ricky was about my height, five eight, tan with a short military haircut and built like a brick shit house. There was something about Ricky that drew me to him. I wanted to sleep with him.

“Excuse me,” I said as I tapped Ricky on the shoulder as he was about to enter his office.

“What’s up?” he said.

My heart was aflutter. He was gorgeous.

“Ummm …” I said. “I wanted to inquire about using your services.”

Suddenly I felt like every Japanese businessmen who ever ordered a hooker from an escort agency.

“All right yo,” he said as he gestured me toward his office. “Take a seat.”

Ricky sat down on the adjacent chair and I stared at him. He was the most handsome man I had ever seen.

“I’m Ricky,” he said as he stuck his hand out to meet mine. I grabbed his hand, shook it, and then put it to my nose to smell his sweet manly scent. He quickly pulled his hand out of mine. “What can I help you with?”

“Well, I want to get back into shape,” I said.

Ricky gave me the once-over and replied: “It looks like you’re in pretty good shape to me.”

I blushed and tried to gather my bearings. His awesomeness was entirely too overwhelming. I was going to need a cold shower and a Kit Kat in order to calm down. Since neither were readily available, I replied, “Thanks.” I was blushing to the point that it must have looked like my head was going to explode.

“So what the fuck do you want with me?” Ricky said.

I wanna fuck you!
I thought, but kept my big mouth shut.

“Uh.” I didn’t know what to say. Suddenly, my badass attitude came thundering back. If I was going to train with Ricky, I was going to have to get my shit together and pronto.

“Listen, Ricky,” I said. “I know I am in okay shape, but I want to be in the best shape possible. I need to find a man, and fast, and the only way to do that in this town is with a good body. I’m roaring into my late twenties and I’m basically in a race to make sure that I don’t die alone. And considering the fact that I have spent the last decade of my life chasing after every unavailable man in the tri-state area to the point that I could teach a class at the goddamned Learning Annex on how to date losers, I need to make sure that my body is in check so that I can start attracting a better class of men.”

Ricky laughed uproariously. “You are one funny son of a bitch!”

I told him that if he thought that was funny, then he would
certainly need to read my book, so following my outburst we ordered it on his computer.

“Anyway,” Ricky then said, “tell me about your diet.”

“Well …” I trailed off. I couldn’t possibly tell my new best friend that I had just eaten half a cake for breakfast, so I did what I did best: I lied to his face. “You know, for breakfast I eat eggs usually [lie], for lunch I usually eat a sensible salad [lie—unless you consider the lettuce and tomato on top of a hamburger a salad], and for dinner I usually eat chicken or fish [not a complete lie unless someone had pissed me off that day, in which case I would eat a whole pizza myself].”

“Sounds pretty good,” Ricky said. I was starting this relationship off on a lie, as I had with every other relationship I had been in up to now. Perhaps it wasn’t my body that was keeping me from having a boyfriend. Perhaps it was my big flapping mouth.

I smiled at Ricky. He smiled back.

“Do you mind if I order lunch while we have this conversation?” Ricky asked.

“No, of course not.”

Ricky dialed the phone and put it to his ear. Before anyone picked up on the other end he whispered to me: “Fucking Chinese people. At least they’re good for something.”

Once the Chinese restaurant picked up on the other end, Ricky then ordered everything off the menu. He was a man after my own heart, a borderline racist with an insatiable hunger for the food made by people he claimed to hate.

After ordering what seemed like seven hundred dollars’ worth of food, Ricky turned to me and asked if I wanted anything.

“A few dumplings never killed anyone, now have they?” I asked.

“They sure as shit haven’t.”

“Great,” I replied. “I’ll have twelve.”

As I sat and watched Ricky give the restaurant his credit card information, all I could think was that Ricky eerily reminded me of someone, but I couldn’t put my finger on whom. Ricky loved Chinese food, had a touch of racism, and was sure to be calling me fat and making me hustle around the gymnasium for hours on end. I soon realized that I was about to pay someone hundreds of dollars to do what someone had done for me for free for twenty-seven years: make me feel fat and inadequate. I was paying Ricky to replace my father, and apparently my stepmother as well.

“I’m fucking starving, man!” Ricky said as he hung up the phone.

“Do you always eat this much?” I asked.

“Yeah, pretty much,” he replied, “but I work out like a motherfucker.”

“You curse even more than I do,” I said as I gazed into his eyes.

“Yeah, I was in the military for like four fucking years. All they do there is curse. And shoot things. I miss it.”

“Right,” I said. “So you think you can help me?”

“Of course.”

Ricky explained that he thought it would be best if we did a series of drills he had learned in the military. They were excruciating, but he promised that if I kept it up, the results would be amazing.

When the food arrived and I got a waft of an eggroll, I
was suddenly transported back to elementary school. I’ve always associated Chinese food with my father. Many years ago at our favorite Chinese restaurant he’d revealed that he had gotten married in a secret ceremony without any of his children present. Since then, my relationship with Chinese food had not been the same.

After stuffing our faces and talking about who we wanted to have sex with at the gym (which was pretty much everyone for me), Ricky and I agreed to meet every Tuesday.

I will never forget my first session with Ricky. I met him in the dance studio at the gym. There were three punching bags in the middle of the floor. On the sides of the room were weights and staking steps. I had no idea what I was in for, but I was already regretting the three cupcakes I had eaten for breakfast.

“Hey, fucker!” Ricky said as I entered the dance studio.

“What the hell is going on in here?”

Ricky explained that I would be dragging all three punching bags from one end of the room to the other. Once there, I would lift the weights that were set aside for me, then I would hit the floor and do crunches while placing the staking steps from one side of me to the other. After I was finished with that, I was to drag the punching bags back to the end of the room, do forty jumping jacks, forty squats, and forty push-ups.

Once he finished going over our routine, I laughed, because I thought he was kidding. He wasn’t.

“Seems like a lot of work to me,” I said.

“You want a boyfriend, right?”

I nodded.

“Then get your ass to work.”

“Can we listen to music at least?” I asked.

“Sure.”

“Britney Spears?”

“Fuck no.”

“Gangster rap?”

“Duh!”

“Good. I can only listen to Britney or O.D.B. while I’m working out.”

After plugging my iPod into the stereo system and blasting “Shimmy Shimmy Ya” as loud as I possibly could, I began dragging the first punching bag from one end of the room to the other. Before I had even made it halfway, I paused.

“Why are you stopping?” Ricky asked.

“Out.” I paused. “I’m out of …”

“WHAT?”

“I’M OUT OF BREATH!” I yelled.

“Do you smoke?”

“Yes.”

“You need to quit. Gay boys these days don’t like smokers.”

“How the fuck do you even know that?” I said as I continued to drag the punching bag across the floor. But it was true: The gays are so health-conscious these days. Apparently, they think it’s more socially acceptable to smoke crystal meth than cigarettes.

“I have a lot of gay clients,” Ricky said. “In fact, one of them took me out to a gay bar. Did you know that Britney Spears sang a song about getting naked? I found it very distasteful.”

“Are you kidding me right now?” I asked. This was coming from a man who moments earlier had explained in great detail what he wanted to do sexually to one of the female personal trainers, but continued that if he had done these things
she would get “too attached because that’s what stupid women tend to do.” “Let’s not talk about distasteful right now,” I said.

I continued huffing and puffing and Ricky continued chiming in with his ridiculous segues.

“You know what doesn’t suck though?” Ricky asked.

“I don’t remember asking, but what?”

“Smoking weed. I smoked the biggest blunt last night. I got so high that I literally ate everything in my refrigerator and the only things in there were a pack of batteries and a jar of mayonnaise.”

After having carried one punching bag across the floor, I stopped dead in my tracks, already dripping with sweat, and looked Ricky dead in the eyes.

“YOU ARE THE DUMBEST PIECE OF SHIT I’VE EVER MET,” I yelled.

Suddenly, his face went from being completely lax to that of a creepy jack-in-the-box and he began laughing hysterically.

“I know, man, I was so high.” He couldn’t control his laughter.

“Are you high right now?” I asked.

Suddenly he stopped laughing and got very serious. “A little, but don’t tell anyone.”

After an hour of dragging things, jumping jacks, and thinking that Ricky was actually out to kill me rather than help me, our session was over. I had asked Ricky if a shower with the personal trainer was included in the package and he told me to fuck off.

The following Tuesday, I was greeted at the gym by Ricky, who was eating the biggest bowl of pasta I had ever seen.

“Seriously?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he replied, with pasta sauce on the side of his cheek. “I like to eat shit in front of people at the gym to make them feel bad about themselves.”

Ricky was such an asshole and quite possibly the greatest person I had met in my life. I soon realized that the two of us together would be unstoppable and invited him to a party I was throwing later that week.