Hyper-chondriac (7 page)

I started doing stand-up in college. I had stumbled into the profession when a Comedy Writing professor at Emerson required that everyone perform five minutes for the class at the end of the semester. My first joke was semi-melodically singing, “What would you think if I sang outta key?” and then a key, which I'd hidden under my tongue before class, would fall to the ground after I'd spit it out. For whatever reason, that was the beginning of a new career, enabling me to quit my night job at Marlboro Market walking through aisles, pulling items on shelves forward.

For the better part of the next ten years, I continued to pursue both bodybuilding and stand-up. Just as I didn't reveal my personality in bodybuilding, I didn't want to reveal anything about my body in comedy clubs. So my gym friends had no idea I did stand-up (laughing and hack squats don't mix), and my comedy friends had no clue I lifted weights (I wore really baggy clothes so they wouldn't mock me).

Besides, I didn't want my trapezoids distracting from what I was saying. Not that what I was saying was very important. Basically, I yelled all my jokes as veins popped out of my neck like a series of suspension bridges and my face turned beet red, giving little insight into myself besides being pretty angry. A Boston newspaper referred to me as “a glue-sniffing Doberman,” which may have been an understatement.

My mother was interested in both of my pursuits. She carried a picture in her purse of me flexing in a Speedo and showed it to her various doctors, whether or not they were interested. She also became a connoisseur of comedy, following my stand-up peers on television as they made it big. And her critiques were scathing. She was more jealous of them than I was. But at least I had a fan.

 

At twenty-eight, I moved my stand-up act to Manhattan so I could be heckled by people with New York accents. There, the years of Bigarexia bingeing caught up to me. Several times a month my colon would randomly pulsate and contract, followed by a few short bursts of acute, searing pain. Two years prior, my colon had hemorrhaged and I was rushed to the hospital, where I spent the next three days hooked up to an IV to replenish the fluids my body had emptied. I'd lost so much blood and was so dehydrated the nurse couldn't even find a vein to stick the tube in. I had colitis. When the doctor asked if I was under a lot of stress, I answered, “Not that I know of.” But in retrospect, the more accurate reply would have been, “Yes, but only for the past fifteen or sixteen years, sir.”

Like many Manhattanites, my living conditions were less than ideal. I shared a one-bedroom apartment in the West Village with a sixty-eight-year-old man who sang opera at four in the morning and would disappear for a week at a time, leaving me to clean up a week of his Australian shepherd's shit in the living room. It was bad enough I had to monitor a strange dog's colon; I wanted mine to be trouble-free. I thumbed through the yellow pages and found a place on the Lower East Side that specialized in this sort of thing.

A bright-eyed, cheery Scandinavian-looking woman named Gretchen, who was a little too fond of eyeliner, greeted me at the door.

“Hi, are you here for a monthly cleaning?”

“Monthly? People have this done once a month?”

“Healthy people do.”

I wrote out a check for $54 and put on a sea-foam green paper hospital dress with an open back for easy access. I was instructed to lie flat, facedown on a padded gray table. Then, without a moment's notice, Gretchen shoved $54 worth of rubber hose up my ass. It completely startled me. I was expecting some small talk first, as most doctors attempted when they were taking blood or giving me my allergy shots.

“Say, Brian, pretty hot out today, huh?”

Then jab! While I was thinking about the question, a needle would puncture my arm. I'm sure doctors giving death-row inmates lethal injections have better bedside manner than Gretchen.

This invasive process was followed by gallon after gallon of water being pumped through the hose into my intestines. After what felt like enough fluid to sail a boat on was in me, I was told to prop up my upper body to a forty-five-degree angle so everything could drain. As I did so, Gretchen wedged a small plastic container under my non-face cheeks as various “materials” came racing out of my system.

“Oh, no!”

“Oh, no, what?” I trembled.

“I've never seen anything like this!”

“Like
what
? I've got a tube stuck in my ass! Can you please try not to scare me?!”

“You don't chew your food.”

“Of course I chew my food.”

“You don't chew it enough! There are
huge
chunks of unchewed food in your system. You really need to do something about this. It's pretty serious.”

I instantly sweated through my paper gown and began to have an anxiety attack. My pulse raced, my breath shortened, my face turned white, my vision blurred, I got dizzy and nearly blacked out. I didn't chew my food! It was so fucking simple to chew food. Damn it! Another set of internal organs ruined! For all the weights I was lifting and all the drugs and alcohol I was avoiding and as good as I was at staying away from my childhood friends fried food and junk food, my haste in everything I did was coming back to haunt me.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah…I'll be all right…I just need to lie down on a cold floor. Is there any linoleum here?”

Gretchen escorted me to the bathroom, where I remained prone for about fifteen minutes, breathing deeply.

“Should I call a doctor?”

“No. I'll be fine. Really. Just some more deep breaths and I'll be back to normal.”

After I returned to my upright self, I asked Gretchen what I should do.

“Well, you obviously have some issues with food…”

“Among other things,” I chimed in, trying to make the ass lady grin.

“I think you should see Irene. I'll write down her number for you. She's a food coach.”

A food coach? What the hell was a food coach? Were there whistles and yelling involved? I had to try it.

 

Irene Robbins was an ultra-serious, fortysomething, dark-haired, overly skinny woman who looked like she had either the world's healthiest skin or a really shitty fake tan. After a brief introduction I was motioned to have a seat across from her maple desk in her swank Upper East Side office. As I sat down, I saw it! And I began to squirm in my seat and get dizzy, again approaching Blackout Land. Irene eyeballed my convulsive actions in confusion but said nothing.

“Can you…uh…this is gonna sound REALLY insane…but can you put that glass of milk somewhere other than right in my line of vision?”

“The milk?” she asked incredulously. “The
milk
is bothering you?”

“Actually I would say it's more like it's taunting me, but bothering works, too.”

I hadn't had a glass of milk since I was six months old. My mother said that when the nipple on the bottle I was being fed with broke, I just stopped drinking it. My parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles then tried to force-feed me milk, experimenting with an assortment of new nipples on an assortment of new bottles, even trying different types of milk such as goat's and yak's. But my little baby brain wouldn't budge. After just half a year of existence, I had unequivocally ended my relationship with that purest of white substances.

“What about milk shakes?”

“Sure, I've had milk shakes but always of the non-white variety. Can't do vanilla. Only chocolate, strawberry, coffee. And I can't watch when they pour the milk in the blender.”

Irene scribbled something in her notebook, which could very well have been,
Must find job where I don't have to work with crazy people.

“And what happened when you were growing up if someone at your lunch table in elementary school had milk?” she continued.

“I'd change tables.”

“You'd get up and change tables?”

“Yes.”

“But didn't every child in elementary school drink milk?”

“There were assorted juice drinkers, but yeah, I changed tables a lot.”

“And why do you think you're afraid of milk?”

I remained silent for a minute, which was unusual for me.

“I guess because I feel guilt over having messed up the milk-collecting stage of my life and now my bones aren't as strong as other people's.”

“So all of this is about guilt?”

“Yeah. Now if there's any structural weakness in my body, it's my fault.”

Even today, despite all of my travails, despite being in my forties and on Zoloft, I'm still unable to watch another human drink a glass of milk. Which might also explain why I'm extra terrified to have a kid. The mere sight of white liquid in a bottle would probably make me faint. The only white substance I seem to be able to interact with is Wite-Out.

“Do you have any other food fears?” asked Irene, who didn't bother looking up from her already ink-filled pad.

“Not really…Okay, I hate baked beans. I don't know why. I've just always hated them. I hate the smell, I hate the shape, I hate the color. But especially the smell.”

“Did you ever have a bad experience with beans?”

“Just watching my father eat them.”

I don't mean to imply that he would eat a few and then throw the rest at me. He was more mature than that. My dad would simply sit at the far end of our long, rectangular Formica kitchen table hunched over the bowl like a vulture while he read the newspaper and chomped on them. If I happened to venture into the kitchen for a snack while the bean-eating was taking place, I'd sit at the far end of the table to put maximum distance between me and my brown gooey enemies. But that wasn't enough. The smell would permeate throughout the room and, out of my peripheral vision, I could still see the beans.

“So did you leave?”

“No. I rigged up a handkerchief around the right brim of my Mets hat which formed a mini-scaffolding to shield my eyes from the beans.”

“You ate with a handkerchief attached to your hat?”

“Yeah. And once in a while pinching my nostrils, to block out the smell. Sometimes I even ate with nose plugs.”

“Did your parents try to break this fear?”

“I think they thought I'd grow out of it.”

Irene made more notes.

“What else are you afraid of?”

“Raisins.”

I can't stand raisins. Their shriveled-up charcoal mass nauseates me. Yes, I know that raisins come from grapes and, yes, I do drink wine, but it's not the same. I ate one raisin when I was three and the awful taste seemed to spread into every artery within seconds, making my entire body feel polluted and ill. It doesn't help that they look like mouse shit—which comes from mice—another irrational fear passed down to me by my father. In fact, the mere sight of a factory-sealed box of raisins is enough to make each of my intestines convulse. If I'm in a supermarket, I can't even make eye contact with that smirking raisiny woman with the red bonnet on the front of the red box. It's as if she's an ex-girlfriend to whom I owe money and I'd rather eat mouse shit.

“Do you think this is related to the baked beans?”

“Not sure.”

“I mean, they're both roughly the same shape. And size.”

“That's exactly what my mother has said. I think the baked beans are more of a smell thing and the raisins are more of an aesthetic mishap.”

Despite food quirks being her area of expertise, Irene offered no solutions for any of my woes. But she had written a lot of stuff on her pad.

“Okay.” Irene sighed. “What I think we should do for next time…”

Next time? How could she be so certain that there would even be a “next time”? I mean, she hadn't exactly unlocked the secrets behind my problems. All she did was ask some innocuous questions like an inquisitive waitress.

“…is meet at a restaurant. So I can take some notes on how you eat.”

This made sense. Irene was smart.

 

A week later we met at a local diner in a booth near the back. Irene now had a small tape recorder and a fancy pen. When the waiter appeared I ordered a chicken breast with rice and broccoli and a large orange juice. I expected Irene to ask for a vanilla milk shake with a scoop of rum raisin ice cream and a side of beans just to torment me. But she ordered exactly what I did, either to kiss my ass or to make it easy to split the bill.

As soon as our food arrived, I began to eat as I normally would. Quickly.

“Ah ah ah!!!” Irene waved her hands around frantically, seconds after my fork left my mouth.

“What?”

“What's the rush?”

“I want to eat my food. It smells good.”

“But there's no need to do it
so quickly.
Like Gretchen told you, not chewing your food enough puts undue stress on your internal organs. You want to make sure the work is done up
here
”—she pointed to her mouth overdramatically, like a model on a game show illustrating a speedboat—“and
not
down
here
!”—and with a sweeping arc, her hand patted her stomach.