Eating My Feelings (19 page)

This is the true story of one homosexual … picked to live in Manhattan, work out every day and write about it, to find out what happens when Mark stops getting drunk and starts getting real … annoyed. This is the P90X-Files.

Everyone always asks me, “Mark, how are you so fabulous? I mean, you’ve gotten sober, against all odds, now what? You
have a published book, you look amazing, and you’re a productive member of society. How can you have it all?” But what does “having it all” entail? A year and a half after I stopped drinking, I was finally beginning to feel like a normal human being again. I had a fabulous apartment on the Upper West Side with my lesbian life partner, a job I hated, but a job nonetheless, and a published book. I was happily sober and living as a functioning adult, but something was missing. For the first year of sobriety, I refrained from dating. I did not kiss, fondle, hold hands with, stick my dick in, or even cuddle another man. After hitting the big 3-6-5, I decided it was time to start putting myself out there again, and the results were nothing if not hilarious. For the first half of 2010, I went on date after date and quickly realized that while I had stopped drinking and calmed my life down, everyone else was as crazy as ever. After dating a Venezuelan who only had the word
pinkberry
in his English vocabulary, a buyer for a clothing line who went to China on business and never returned, an alcoholic who went to Las Vegas and never returned, several men named after major players in the Bible, and a lawyer who was dating so many men at the same time that he had to go to Daters Anonymous, I decided I needed to take a new approach to dating.

During the summer of 2010, I decided that it was also time to shake things up on the workout front. I had been doing the same routine for several years and I wanted to revamp my humdrum habits. My lesbian life partner (LLP) had started doing P90X, the home workout system, and was thrilled with his results. P90X is a twelve-week workout program designed to help people who are in decent shape get into great shape, and my LLP told me that this was exactly what I needed to get the perfect body I desired.

As the heat of the summer reached a fever pitch, I believed that a major change was upon me. Because after all, working out is like dating. No one wants to do it, but it’s the only way to get to the end game we all desire: hot bodies and hot-bodied husbands.

To kick the season into high gear, I spirited away to Fire Island with Ron, my one and only Asian friend. He is quite possibly in the best shape anyone could imagine being in. He has cantaloupes where arm muscles should be and a washboard where his stomach should be. He would be the perfect male specimen if God had intended the perfect male specimen to be Asian. Ron was so good looking that whenever he was around, I felt even worse about myself. I met Ron a few years back through a friend in D.C. Ron was a financial adviser or something boring like that, but every time he tried to explain what he did for a living, I’d get bored and change the subject. The two of us met at Penn Station in our Unabomber attire (sunglasses, baseball caps, tank tops, and shorts) and began our rainbow tour of Long Island. Fire Island is a gay getaway off of Long Island that one must literally take two trains, a car, and a ferry to get to. We gays like to keep things as difficult as possible, or “exclusive,” as we call it. Once Ron and I got on the train, the squawking commenced.

“Who are you fucking these days?” I asked Ron once we took our seats.

He laughed. Ron had just gotten out of a three-year relationship and was hell-bent on sleeping with everyone he could get his hands on.

“Well, I am currently sleeping with an Israeli who is still at my apartment as we speak, an Australian dance teacher, and some white guy named John.”

“Seems as though you have your own little United Colors of Benetton thing going on.”

“Fuck off,” Ron replied. “Who are you sleeping with?” Ron eyed at me as I looked down at the magazine I had brought with me. “WHAT?” Ron yelled. Suddenly, the gays on the rainbow tour ride to Fire Island all looked at us wondering what was going on.

“Shut up!” I said. “I haven’t slept with anyone all year.”

“Seriously?” Ron asked. “I am practically running a whore house on Tenth Avenue. How have you not slept with anyone at all this year?”

“I don’t know. I just can’t seem to find anyone I like.”

“That’s bullshit!” Ron said. All of the sudden he was very angry. Ron is a very emotional, very protective friend. He’s the kind of friend who will start to cry if you approach him with good news or if something earth shattering has happened to you. He’s also very in your face and to the point and knows when he’s being lied to. “You’re not trying, are you?”

“Well—”

“You’re not!” Ron interrupted. “I can tell by the look in your eyes you’re not. It’s because of Dr. Jake, isn’t it?”

“What?” I said, pretending I had forgotten about my most hated super ex-boyfriend. Dr. Jake was a married man I had dated right around the time I had decided to get sober. Because his life was such a mess, he seemed determined to undermine my efforts in getting sober. Needless to say, his machinations left me distrusting anyone with a penis and led to my dateless year and a half. “Of course not.”

“You’re lying to me. You still can’t get over what he did to you. Listen, Mark,” Ron said, “you are too fabulous to be single forever. You are going to have to at least try dating again.”

“I dated all throughout the spring. They were a bunch of fucking losers, but I dated nonetheless. Besides,” I said, abruptly changing the subject, “I don’t seem to know how to find good men to date anyway.”

Ron reached into his pocket and pulled out his iPhone. “Get one of these.”

“I have a cell phone, Ron. It’s 2010.”

“You don’t have an iPhone. You want to know how I manage to keep that rotating door on my apartment in full swing?” Ron tapped his phone and brought up a page that was filled with little pictures of men. “Grindr. It’s an application on iPhones that allows you to ‘meet’ men by telling you where they are in relation to your current location using GPS.”

I took Ron’s phone out of his hand and looked at his Grindr. I looked at all of the pictures on it and quickly realized that everyone on his phone was also on the train. We literally
were
on the rainbow tour. I was practically the only person on the train who didn’t have Grindr. Suddenly I felt like an outcast among my own people. It must be what Clay Aiken feels like on the daily.

“Just get an iPhone. It will change your life,” Ron said.

“Thanks, but I don’t think Grindr is where I am going to find my next boyfriend,” I said.

“I currently have an Israeli in my apartment who would say otherwise.”

“Whatever,” I said. “I never thought you could contract an STD from your cell phone, but I guess I was wrong.”

Ron began to laugh uproariously: “You are so fucking funny, Mark. It’s a gift.”

“Herpes is no gift.”

Once Ron and I arrived on Fire Island, the real shit show
began. I’ve always said if you ever want to feel bad about yourself, go to a room filled with gay men. However, if you ever want to kill yourself, apparently you should go to Fire Island. Everywhere Ron and I looked, there was one ripped man after the next. We kept yelling our mating call of “BODY BE RIGHT,” which we say whenever we see a hot guy approach. We say it because I think we think we’re black girls, and because we think it’s endearing in some way, but it never works. Going to Fire Island and seeing all of these perfectly toned men made me realize even more that I needed P90X if I was going to roll with the big dogs this summer and find a husband. After twelve hours of only being flirted with by women in their midforties, Ron and I went back to the heat of the city. On my way home I made a quick pit stop because there was something I desperately needed if I were to move on with my summer successfully.

“One iPhone please!” I said.

“Your iPhone won’t be ready for two weeks,” the woman at the Apple store said.

“GODDAMN IT!” I yelled as I stormed out of the Apple store. There was one thing I didn’t have to wait for.

After inadvertently being made to feel horrible about myself on Fire Island, I popped my first P90X DVD into my DVD player and was introduced to Tony Horton, the “ringleader” of P90X. Tony is about forty-five years old, built like a Greek god, and has a flapping mouth that just won’t stop talking. At first sight, I was attracted to Tony, but much like every man I’ve been attracted
to before, once he starting talking my infatuation quelled. Tony went on and on about how P90X was going to change my life if I stuck to it and how happy I was going to be with the results. I found this all very entertaining considering he didn’t know me, my life, or what was going to make me happy. He kept talking and talking and talking until finally I realized that I had popped the “Welcome to P90X” DVD and not the actual workout into my DVD player. I realized this about thirty minutes into the welcome DVD. I decided it would be best if I smoked a cigarette, regrouped, and came back to the workout.

After smoking three cigarettes, eating a bag of Swedish fish, and chatting on Skype with my brother for a half hour, I came back to Tony, ready for a workout. The first workout in the program is chest and back. I began the DVD and quickly realized that the chest-and-back workout that Tony had planned for me was simply a series of pull-ups and push-ups, neither of which I was very good at. About halfway through the workout, I stopped to take a breath. After doing about two-hundred pull-ups and half as many push-ups, I began to think that Tony Horton was not actually trying to help me, but punish me for something horrible I had done in another life. I was in pretty good shape, but I had never been in such pain before. I took a break to smoke one more cigarette and gather my bearings. When I resumed the DVD, I was more than horrified to find out that the second half of the workout was just the first part of the workout in reverse. I shrugged my shoulders, bit the bullet, and got down to business. I hadn’t come this far to give up now. I finished at a snail’s pace only to find out that after the chest-and-back workout was over there was another fifteen-minute abdominal workout that followed. I figured since it was my first day and I had been tortured enough, I would throw in
the towel for now and refocus for tomorrow. Besides, between the welcome DVD, multiple cigarette breaks, and girl talk with my brother, this had now become a two-and-a-half-hour ordeal and I needed to get to work.

I hopped into the shower after working out and began to lather, rinse, and repeat, but when it was time to wash my hair I could not lift my arms to reach my head. Suddenly, I was in more pain than I was after losing my V-Card. It took me about as long to shower that day as it did for Britney Spears to get her act together after that head-shaving fiasco. Once I had finally lifted my arms to wash my hair, I couldn’t put them down. Always resourceful, I grabbed my left arm with my right arm and yanked it down, much like Dorothy had done with the Tin Man in
The Wizard of Oz
. I did the same with the other arm, got out of the shower, and dried myself off, then spent a full ten minutes putting on a T-shirt. If this was how I was going to feel after every workout, I wondered how long I was going to be able to continue with it, as it hurt to even put a coffee cup to my mouth that day.

I basically drugged myself to sleep and the next morning woke up still rusty but ready for day two of working out. The second P90X DVD is a plyometrics workout, which translates in normal-people talk to “jump-training,” which translates to retard talk for people like me to “jumping up and down like a moron for an hour while trying not to knock yourself out.” Already annoyed with the ramblings of Tony Horton, I muted the TV and tried to replace his voice with the musical stylings of Britney Spears. I realized quickly he was contorting his body in ways I had never seen a human being do before and reluctantly brought Tony back to life. After finishing the warm-up, he explained what jump-training was and I wanted
no part of it. Plyometrics is a series of miniworkouts that focus on strengthening your glutes and legs. Each miniworkout was thirty seconds long, followed by three more miniworkouts, then a minute-long workout, and then the rotation was repeated.

“You can do anything for thirty seconds. Right?” Tony asked with his pearly white teeth gleaming on my TV screen.

“Fuck off,” I said aloud. After our foray into the chest-and-back arena the day before, I trusted Tony even less than the “homeless” man on my corner who was always asking for a quarter but miraculously could afford a cell phone.

“Remember, folks, plyometrics is like swimming. Don’t eat for an hour before working out,” T-bone then said.

I had just eaten my usual breakfast of cheesy eggs and thought his disclaimer was a bit late. I always ate like crap at the beach before I went swimming and never drowned so I figured I would be cool doing this workout. As Tony continued blabbering on, he introduced me to the people who were working out with him. I liked to think of them as his backup dancers. They were there to create a nice effect, but never spoke or had any personality whatsoever. On the plyometrics DVD, Tony’s backup dancers were the black girl, the Jewish guy, and Pete. Pete was there to make me feel horrible about myself because as we concluded the warm-up, it was revealed that Pete only had one leg, and the other was prosthetic.

“Jesus, you have to be kidding me,” I said. I was already exhausted from the ten-minute warm-up and now I had this one-legged wonder judging me. The way he looked at me had the air of a cocky little son of a bitch. His eyes said,
“Look at me, I have one leg and even I’m in better shape than you are!”