Starf*cker: a Meme-oir (4 page)

“He’s a good student but is beginning to show off too much.”

If I wasn’t bragging about being unable to zip myself or bragging about how many gallons of urine I could expel while dreaming we got an aboveground pool, I guess I must’ve been bragging about being the fattest kid ever.

By first grade, I was so plump I think I was wearing clothes I could squeeze into now. My queeny, shrimpy sidekick—we were like a pre-pubescent, homosexual version of Laurel & Hardy, which if you think about it, is not the worst idea anyone ever had—frequently pointed out my girth as a means of controlling me. He never had a better opportunity than he did the day we were all weighed in class with the results yelled out for all to hear. Shit like that actually happened in the ‘70s…and you’re wondering why people over forty-five laugh warmly at horrific sayings like, “You can never be too rich or too thin”?

My weight easily eclipsed that of the next fattest child, just as I easily eclipsed the sun if I stood near a window.

My sidekick took to calling me by my weight. “You 65-pounder, you!” he would say as a conversation came to a close. He was actually much more clever than he sounds. He once told a teacher that
Hamlet
was an omelet made with ham. For a seven-year-old, he was a regular Noel Coward. Lohanthony’s got nothin’ on him.

And yet in spite of what we could now call verbal abuse, I adored my sidekick, so much so that I was heartbroken to move away yet again in the third grade, after four years of palling around with the little terrorist. For one thing, he’d always come to my birthday parties, commiserating with me that time when I pissed off Lisa J.—she’d been the only girl at one of my parties, so she turned around and made me the only boy at her roller-skating birthday party at Genesee West roller rink, which was way worse because I kept accidentally passing for a chunky teenage girl thanks to my puffies.

When I did move, my sidekick wrote me very adult letters, in which he informed me, very matter-of-factly, that his dog had endured a false pregnancy, and that a teacher at my old school had dropped dead of a heart-attack. It was my first taste of gossip and my first experience with death, however distant. Teachers died? Maybe it was a false death, like the dog’s pregnancy?

In another letter, which bore a gold seal, he favorably reviewed the last birthday party of mine that he’d ever attended, asking that I be
sure
to tell my mother the cake had been delicious. Today, you could get tossed into jail in Russia for letters like that.

I went looking for this kid years later. It took quite a while for his success as a poet to hit Google, whereupon I reached out and we communicated. He didn’t remember me
at all
at first, not until he quizzed his mom. He then was outraged when I wrote a blog post describing his childhood self as being a li’l queen. I hadn’t seen it as an insult and still don’t; queens sit on thrones, I routinely brand myself a queen, plus I knew nothing of what he was like as an adult.

Apparently, very touchy, but I still have positive memories of him.

Once I’d smoothed that over (writing this might unsmooth it), he got friendly again, forwarding me newsletters filled with conspiracy theories about how Sandy Hook and basically every other world event was staged, until I gingerly requested that he stop.

I can’t get behind conspiracy theories because they demand that you believe scores of people are reliably keeping a history-altering secret, and if there’s anything I’ve learned in this life, it’s that people talk.

Back to kindergarten: “Has been careless in his work this marking period. Not listening, but talking too much.” Another report card slam. It was like a drag queen was reading me.

I
was
developing a bad habit of not paying attention to things I thought were stupid, a major flaw in a world where most of what we hear is stupid, and yet a lot of stupid stuff is important to absorb all the same. You may think the state of Selena Gomez’s relationship with Justin Bieber is dull—and it is—but gauging people’s reactions to it is instructive. Some of the stupidest shit has some of the greatest lessons about our society and about people you know. I did start paying attention to things more, possibly to the point of a position somewhere on the autism scale between Jerry Seinfeld and Susan Boyle. As an adult, I aim for “observer,” often sink into “voyeur,” but have never again
not
paid attention to
anything
.

I reject all conspiracies (except for that one about Sarah Palin’s baby—her uterus is the right-wing Area 51), but I was born a skeptic when it came to religion. My family was Lutheran, which is like Catholic without any rules, and yet it still wasn’t chill enough for me. I rejected most of what was being taught in church because none of it made rational sense. People living for 900 years? Sacrificing children? Worldwide floods? A book filled with stories gathered from across huge spans of time that we’re supposed to believe were all divinely inspired, and that stayed divinely inspired and accurate through translations and updates?

I remember singing swear words in my boy-falsetto just under the hymns when I attended Sunday school. “Oh, cum, fuck, shit, assssshole…”

Maybe that’s why God made me wet the bed.

As a 65-pound atheist, I was righteously pissed off when, at Elms—a public school mind you—I found myself performing in the Evangelical pageant
It’s Cool in the Furnace
about Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, Jews spared from a fiery death in the furnaces of Babylon thanks to their devotion to God. There was only one known Jew in my school—he was Matt S. to my Matt R., and it was
not
cool in the furnace for him when he explained to our classmates that he didn’t celebrate Christmas or believe in Santa Claus. Kids, and Protestants, can be so cruel.

My apathy toward church is captured perfectly in the opening paragraph of my very first journal from November 12, 1978—“Has written about himself in five separate decades!” was rejected jacket copy for the book you’re reading—in which I wrote, in Number 2 pencil:

“In Sunday School, my teacher said we’d be sending tapes with Christian songs on it to a retarded place in two weeks. Today was okay.”

Again, P.C. B.C., but still, I think my disdain for the church’s alleged good works (tricking mentally challenged people into being Christians counts as conversion?) shines through. I couldn’t zip my damn coat, but I was wise to the whole God conspiracy.

And yet I spent my childhood begging God or whatever panel of galactic overseers must exist to please make life more fair so that I could stop being fat, even if I continued to be about as finicky an eater as a goat. The only times when I excelled were related to food, including a blue ribbon for father-son cooking in Cub Scouts for our Amazing Coconut Cream Pie, a recipe handed down from Bisquick. I don’t remember my dad and I doing anything other than eating the pie. I had grandparents who were Southern restaurateurs famous for their pies on one side and a Russian hairdresser who’d just as soon make you pigs-in-the-blanket as say hello on the other. My stomach was blessed, but my waist was doomed.

Fat or skinny, I just wanted God or fate to take note of how special I was. My defense mechanism as a fat kid and as a gay kid (who didn’t know that word yet) was to decide I must be better than everyone else, even as I worried I was way worse. I gotta tell you, as long as you don’t buy into it too heavily, it’s definitely a workable way of surviving your gay childhood. I never once thought of killing myself.

Instead, I was biding my time until something would happen to reveal to people that I was their superior. And it took so long to happen that by the time it did, I already realized I wasn’t.

To my surprise, it soon became clear that intelligence could be my secret power that would make me famous among my peers.

Speaking of fame, upon moving away from my tiny sidekick, I quickly became known as the fattest kid in Miss Cosell’s fourth-grade class at Springview Elementary in a different corner of Flushing—a distinction that continued to keep me from total obscurity, and yet also one that kept me from being part of the (th)in crowd.

I was tubby, with brown hair that always flirted with a bowl cut, courtesy of the town barber, Ron at Kipp’s, who sheared me while talking about sports. He might as well have been talking to me about the intricacies of Watergate for all I understood his one-man banter. I couldn’t do a thing with my ultra-fine, corn silk hair, chopped straight across until I discovered I could wet it and center-part it. That would hold for several minutes. Ron, who looked like he’d do all right in a singles bar in nearby Flint, himself had a white man’s afro, and my dad was experimenting with a perm; I don’t want to get too heavy on you too soon, but the ‘70s were
hard
for men’s hair.

A southern relation had declared upon seeing me for the first time since I was a toddler that I was as “pretty as a girl” and a kid from another school had once asked me over a carton of chocolate milk and a deep-fried fish rectangle if I were, in fact, a boy or a girl (it occurred to me darkly later she might have been looking for a yes or no rather than an either/or), but if I
had
been a girl (I sometimes wonder if maybe I
was
a girl when as a kid), I’d have been the kind of girl who was frequently told by strangers that she had
such
a pretty face…if she’d
only
lose 10 pounds. Ten or eleven times.

I was like a Melissa McCarthy YouTube character before she’d invented any.

My teacher, Miss Cosell, whom I really liked and found Liza Minnelli-fabulous, wasn’t overweight like me, but she was a strange duck herself. Maybe that’s why I liked her? She was a never-married former classmate of my mom’s who a future-lesbian classmate of mine claimed to have once caught painting her own fingers with markers while grinning goofily. Listen, Liza had to deal with a lot of rumors, too, most of them true. But still.

And there were other unpopularettes around, including a white-trash girl who never washed her greasy hair so was cruelly dubbed “French Fry,” and another whose pitifully offbeat demeanor led to her very name being synonymous with all that was horrible—a haunted-household name. Turned out later she’d been molested and shunted from family member to family member, so in true Midwest, salt-of-the-earth style, we’d all answered that shitty situation with ostracism and contempt.

In spite of being the widest load, I was also one of the brightest. I know—claiming intelligence as a fatty is like proclaiming one’s innocence in prison. We all want to think we’re special on the inside when our outsides are anything but. In my case, I was lucky enough that my status as a mental giant had been recently and publicly documented when all of my classmates (including a girl who at the time looked to me like a
Hustler
model in training, and who in our antique class photo now looks to me like an innocent child) had been given mandatory I.Q. tests. The goal was to weed out the “gifted” kids and send them to a special, less rigid, once-a-week class where they could express themselves and experience lessons more challenging than memorizing the 50 states or finding as many words as we could within longer words, like seeing “whale” and “allow” in “Hallowe’en.”

The I.Q. test involved weird shapes, some of which invariably did not belong—boy, could I relate…it’s a wonder I didn’t form an attachment disorder on a rhomboid—and far-out logic questions that I approached as if they were supposed to be fun. It actually
was
fun for me—I always loved school, especially tests, which it occurs to me should have exempted me from consideration as being very smart at all.

As it turned out, I didn’t make the cut on the first try. I felt as stupid as hell because, interestingly enough, most of the kids who
did
make the cut were not considered smart at all. Until their names were called out and they started to attend the special class. After which time they were considered geniuses. (And interestingly, they all grew up to be exceedingly cool and resourceful, so that test had either been good at detecting non-book smarts or made people intelligent simply by suggesting that they were.)

My mother, intimately acquainted with my brilliance at devising new ways to drive her crazy, like pointing at my open mouth beseechingly when I was hungry, questioned the results and the school promptly discovered that my exceptional performance had been somehow overlooked, determining without fanfare that I belonged in the gifted class after all.