Fat Page 7

  I had to get out of watching any more of Xander stuffing his face. “I am going to try to get in line for the buffet before all the good stuff is gone, I will catch up with you two later, maybe when you’re less sweaty, Xander.”

  “Ha, Dr. Grant, don’t count on that.” Xander smirked as he forked another mouthful down the hatch.

  Kate took out another napkin from her purse and continued patting Xander’s forehead sweat. “Geez Louise, you are so embarrassing, Xander. Dr. Grant, you should definitely get something to eat before the buffet dries out, we will catch up with you later. Maybe catch the fireworks together?”

  “Sure, save me a seat.”

  I left towards the buffet. Those ribs really did smell great. Something about charring sugar and pork in the hazy humidity made for a Siren song that drew its end at stacks of white china. The buffet line was long. On one side was a line of food, and the other was a mass of mass -- so many protuberant bellies in so many styles. Some were overflowing over a low belt; I guess keeping a low belt can offer the psychological benefit of a numerically smaller waist size. Why not just belt the pants off at the knees and claim a 22 waist while weighing three hundred pounds? Others secured their pants on the other side of their abdominal globe with a high belt, cinching pants just underneath the nipples, attempting to blend the belly into a lower wall of flesh curtained behind wide but anatomically implausible long pants. Why else would someone five foot eight wear pants sized 50W, 50L? Most of the females looked impossibly pregnant – everyone from little chunkster girls to post-menopausal grandmas sported an eight month gestational paunch. All these bellies were swinging awfully close to the food. This buffet line didn’t need a sneeze guard; it needed a belly guard to prevent bellybuttons from dipping into potato salad and pork ribs. As I stacked my plate with barbeque, I had to look around to see if any mayonnaise or BBQ sauce had been displaced from the food and smeared on any of the surrounding bellies. Thank God, only one rack of ribs was missing some sauce, and it looked like it was on a guy who was in a previously clean looking dress shirt, and not on the frayed smock of the old lady who looked like she was wearing the only article of clothing that still fit her triple XL size and who looked at least three days off from her last laundry day.

  These obese people were obviously well-off country club folk – a mishmash of big time stock brokers, successful businessmen and women, management executives, lawyers and doctors, all with their families. So by appearances, they must dine on aged New York strips, lobster tails soaked in drawn butter and crème brulees on a daily basis and the weight is just another outward sign of prosperity. They’re adopting the way of some bygone cultures where it is a status symbol to be overweight, as if to show “I have so much material success that I can consume more than I need and wear my excesses in a massive skin suit”. It is no surprise to see overweight, affluent people; extra money has to go somewhere, and why not use it to get padded in luxurious, fat dense delicacies. But, the means to obesity has to go deeper than just money, because on the drive over to the club, as he is every day at the same exit off the Eisenhower, there was this homeless guy pan-handling with a sign that read: “No werk, no home, help, I am hungrey.” I call him Hobo Heavy. This guy is easily three hundred pounds. Impressive for someone who claims homelessness, no money and spends his days begging on the side of the road to relieve his self-proclaimed hunger. Calories are calories, whether they cost a hundred dollars a pound or if they are free in a trash can outside a Burger King, whether they are put together by a culinary school prodigy or slapped together by a high-schooler at his after school job, whether eaten by someone in Hugo Boss or by someone wrapped in newspaper sleeping under an overpass. Many of my own patients are on public aid, and even as their parents beg me for prescriptions for over-the-counter medications to get Dollar Store Tylenol paid by the state or for a note to the electric company to override stacks of unpaid utility bills with some vague medical need to get their power turned back on or wrangling free advice over the phone instead of paying for an office visit because of their economic plight, I can see that their stated lack of money has not prevented dad, mom and kid from eating to such an excess that their extra calories could sustain another person each. A common excuse is that healthy food costs too much and junk is often the cheapest meal available. Yes, the calories per dollar in junk food is much higher, and there is a logic to maximizing calories per dollar when dollars are limited, but in obesity, an inefficiency of calories per dollar is not the problem. Buying a few less calories per dollar should be preferable for most. Buying a few thousand extra calories on top of the required daily calories should be supplanted with simply buying the required daily calories in better quality. Most people cannot turn down paying just five dollars for one grease filled value meal, as being the much easier way to meal plan. Instead of planning a meal from ingredients to recipe, they can just pick a number off a well-lit menu while idling in their car. The easy way is the lazy way, and the worst way. You can feed a whole family with about five dollars worth of potatoes, frozen veggies and ground beef (shepherd’s pie, beef stew, sloppy joes), and save about five hundred calories per person. Water is the cheapest and lowest calorie beverage around, drinkable and flowing freely from any tap, but everyone will pay any amount to hydrate with the elixirs of soda and juice. Sure, some fruits and vegetables can be pricey, out of season especially, but so are diabetes medicine and heart attacks, which are always in season with obesity. Money is not a limiting factor in excess calories; not giving a shit is what buys the calories.

  I spent the rest of the day setting a personal record for pork and corn-on-the-cob ingestion seated under the willow tree off to the side of the main lawn. Today was one day for me not to give a shit. I can’t even imagine how some people live eating like this every day. I was feeling bloated, nauseous, and, periodically, a splash of bilious foodstuff would lip up to the back of my tongue to give me a mucoid, acrid taste of what was being slowly digested. My stomach can only digest what it can per hour, and this load was way above its threshold, so pounds of pork butt has to wait in line to get at my digestive juices, intestines, colon and toilet. A punch to the stomach would’ve burst me open like a piñata to spew half digested pig out to all the partygoers. The obese must be able to push aside these feelings of over-satiety, like a they do to bowls of steamed organic vegetables, and just ignore the discomfort and regurgitant to keep on eating. The body has the defense of discomfort to try to regulate maximal intake, but when those defenses are ignored for so long, the body has to adapt by just turning off the discomfort sensor, so the gullet gets a constant green light. My discomfort was making me feel so tired. It must be a way for the body to sleep through the worst of digestive overloading. This willow tree provided the perfect shaded spot to doze off this bomb of a meal. Plus, it was a great vantage point to watch the Xander show.

  After that monster lunch, he took a long nap on a pool lounge chair, using two adjacent sun loungers to support his haunches. He snored loudly and stopped breathing a few times, only to jostle out of REM and resume sucking in air each time. When he finally awoke after two and a half hours, Xander wiped his mouth, rocked back and forth to get momentum off the sagging lounge chairs, and strolled back to the buffet to spend the next few hours trying to eat another whole pig by himself. He also started wearing down the grass in between the buffet and bar to continually fill his plastic cup at the keg. Beer seemed to be his new breast milk. Now he was tanked up with the smoked meat of two pigs and a full pony keg. He was exactly like when he was a baby, happily guzzling calories through unintelligible babbling, though now he was feeding himself and peeing in bushes. He had discovered another easy way to down a few hundred extra calories every day with minimal effort. And if he becomes like most people, he will never think of alcohol as calories, just as something to drink for good times. When he goes back to college in the fall, he’ll start packing on the pounds exponentially quicker while eating the same diet and wonder why. His fat wil
l become more concentrated about his abdomen, and he’ll start joking that his pot belly was becoming a keg. Never to blame weekends spent at frat parties and bars. Then when he grows older, he will never blame the happy hour drinks or the post-dinner cocktail or the twelver while watching the Bears vs. Packers. Unless the drink is made from a blended bacon cheeseburger, its calories will never count in Xander’s mind.

  Dusk was now settling in quickly, and the Xander show was winding down. He was stumbling around the lawn, sloshing his beer from his plastic cup, shirt untucked with sweat saturated around the collar and both armpits, and swiveling his pumpkin head from side to side looking for his parents, his head seemingly sitting directly on his sternum, as any neck was long engulfed by the thick scarf of fat wrapped around jawline to chest.

  “Mom, where the balls are you sitting, when are the fireworks freakin’ starting?” Xander was literally shouting. His chest mass insulating his lungs and vocal cords created a cave effect which made his voice bellow as if sounded by the combined echoes of a dozen spelunkerers.

  Kate ran up to him and started steering him towards their seats near the lake. She grabbed his arm, and as she speedily backpedaled to lead him, I could see the brisk pace was starting to nauseate him. Xander’s face tensed briefly, he grabbed for his mouth, and then he vomited all over Kate’s frontside, the spaces between his sausage fingers having formed a series of small nozzles that caused a wide spraying of vomitus onto her chest rather than the typical no-handed upchuck of one thick sloppy brushstroke. I guess pork, barbeque sauce and beer make for something that looks like diarrhea. Kate’s white dress shirt was a clean canvas to display this Pollock of gluttony. Her breasts were really evident now, but this was one awful wet T-shirt contest. Kate took a few steps, grabbed for her mouth, then proceeded to form hand blinders and direct a stream of vomit onto a patch of lawn in between two families of picnickers; it looked like she had drunk her share of strawberry daiquiris. Albert rushed in and rescued them both. He grabbed them by the arms and ran them away from their bile soups, somehow without vomiting himself, though he dry-heaved a few times. The whole Xander family was now disappearing over the grassy hill and towards the parking lot.

  They missed a great fireworks show.

  PARK BENCH

  Running has to be the worst activity ever. Propelling oneself for the sake of propelling oneself is idiotic. I feel like crap during the entire run – a little lightheaded, eyes blurry from sweat, nose and throat filled with a slurry of spit and snot, chest burning, nipples chafing, stomach cramping, sore butt and thighs, noodle-y legs, shin splints, and achy arches. Then I feel great when it’s over. I guess I have to do it because my masochistic body tells me it’s good for me. I anticipate today being no different: feeling awful for forty minutes, then getting a wave of satisfaction for pushing my body past some self perceived limit. I guess some of the high has to do with the fact that I’m pre-paying the penance for the chocolate shake I’m going to have after dinner tonight. Cave men always stayed in shape from needing to run everywhere to catch food. I have to run to get rid of food.

  I usually run near a park by my house. It is a pleasant patch of grass; usually there is some little league game stirring and some dogs chasing Frisbees and some pretty girls dozing on their backs getting some sun. Usually a sure bet for some great scenery to keep my mind off how much I hate running. But, not today.

  It looked like Xander and Xander’s twin wearing a long blonde wig were sucking face on a park bench. They looked like they were frantically trying to climb to the top of each other. They both had asses in the front and back. It was a squash humping a gourd.

  I am sure Xander got sick of being alone. Every male starts out thinking he can sex Heidi Klum. Movies always have some awkward geek being able to win over a gorgeous woman with just his sparkling decency and uniqueness. Hell, Knocked Up had Seth Rogen sexing Katherine Heigl. But then, as the rejections start to add up in the real world due to physical or financial or personality status issues, Heidi starts to become Tara Reid to your friend’s mom to Jill the Burger King girl. Xander must’ve got fed up with putting lipstick on his left hand and calling that his girlfriend or spending hours searching and downloading internet porn so he could use his robotic vagina simulator in front of his computer screen. So he hit upon this girl, and decided to take it.

  Regardless of who the woman was, Xander is lucky; women are more tolerant of big bodies than men. Fat chicks have to accept being tossed aside or start getting really slutty, irrespective of their personality, just to make it with the typical male sensibilities. And they will likely never be considered the dream girl; at best, just an okay-for-now-while-I’m-drinking-and-horny girl. Fat dudes only have to worry about trying to attract a girl with their status, money or personality, and not so much their physique. No amount of money and status will get Rosie a spot on People’s “50 Most Beautiful” list, but a little paunch has never hurt Russell Crowe with the ladies; a few pictures of a heavier Jessica Simpson get national coverage while a pudgy Val Kilmer in swimming trunks gets placement at the bottom left on page thirty surrounded by blown up pictures of a possibly cottage-cheese thighed Tyra Banks. Fat men can become successful and earn the option to shoot for the stars and see what they can hit; fat women usually have to take whatever they can get given their present deviation from society’s stereotypical image of attractiveness, regardless of moneyed status. Pavarotti’s ladies were beauties with bodies; Rosanne got Tom Arnold. Xander was no Pavarotti, and was probably about double that tenor’s size. His body would test even the most tolerant of women. Yet he still found one.

  Even for him, food was not enough to satisfy everything. He got to this body size because, for a long while, he got off on eating so much that it far superseded the pursuit of any sensation that he could have gotten by putting his flesh into a warm, soft, wet orifice. Someone that has worked to blow up to over three fifty does not have attracting the opposite sex as a high priority. If Xander thought humping a cooling Bananas Foster felt as good as eating it, he would be much trimmer. Even in movies, crotching a pie was not sweet enough to stop the pursuit of sexing a real female. The need to feed his simmering sexual starvation eventually grew to an extent that it won out over his need for gustatory overindulgence. A love of food gave him the weight, and the weight made him tired at recess, tired walking to class, tired walking at graduation, tired walking up office steps, tired walking to the buffet, and eventually tired of walking alone.

  This current scene at the park only proves the adage (my adage) that save for the odd fetishist, the obese usually come in pairs – similar to intra-sexual insects, wherein only they will tolerate mating with someone that may potentially eat them. Go to any family dining establishment and there will be plenty of families where clearly a three hundred pounder mated with another three hundred pounder and created little future three hundred pounders. Of course Xander himself was a new mutation, weighing as much as Kate and Albert put together, but if he is able to procreate with this girl, there will be another litter of Xander’s born. She may be pregnant right now, she could be 8 1/2 months pregnant for all I know, but her girth makes it impossible to distinguish a bulge of abdominal fat from a bulge of fetal life. No one could comment for fear that their congratulations on a baby-to-be are instead congratulations on ingested Krispy Kremes. It could be that she does not even know if she was carrying a little Xander, ignoring nausea as a bad Big Mac and her lack of menses to her baseline metabolic dysfunction from obesity, leading to one day when she gets bad cramps after eating a full package of Oreos with a gallon of whole milk, then runs into the bathroom expecting to BM and instead comes a toilet baby.

  Obviously they need to somehow have sex to create a baby. The usual simple task of insertion becomes a bastard task between morbidly obese persons and makes getting sperm to ova their miracle of life, rather than the actual birth of the baby. Mounds of flesh obscure genitals and create mushy obstacles that necessitate superhuman angles
to align penis and orifice. Abdominal panni has to be lifted and moved aside, and rhythmic movements make for an ever shifting plane, like trying to keep an avalanche of mayonnaise from overwhelming a small pubic village during an earthquake using just your hands. The physics of obese intercourse are mind-blowing, but it must occur because this park’s playground is filled with their progenies; little rolys taxing swings and monkey bars with faces smeared in chocolate and hands sticky from earlier ice cream snacks. How does a morbidly obese man’s penis ever physically get into morbidly obese vagina? How does sperm ever get to that egg? Does the man fill a kiddie pool with ejaculate so the woman can take a fertilizing squat? Or is it related to why my local megamart is always selling out of funnels?

  It looked like Xander and his lady were eating each other. This was way too much tongue and heavy petting for a mid-afternoon on a public bench. Both Xander and his lady were wearing black T-shirts with “Fat is Beautiful” on the front in block lettering. The tees were like every tee on the morbidly obese, in that the bottom of the shirts were unable to get all the way over the expanded belly and instead only able to stretch near the apex of the protrusion, unable to fully cover the hanging fleshy mass that was now flopped over their respective groins. I knew those exact shirts from the Fat Awareness Club that had a vocal membership at the nearby college, where I heard Xander had enrolled a couple years ago. The shirts were their uniform. This club always has cupcake giveaways most spring and summer weekends on the town’s sidewalks, yelling out “Fat is Beautiful!” on megaphones while handing out the baked goods with their “Fat is Beautiful” slogan in icing on the top and with pamphlets attached espousing anti-fat discrimination bullets – the latest pamphlet pushed into my hands had on it articles titled “Would you call your grandmother a fatass?” and “Buddha had a belly”. The cupcakes were damn good, though; I didn’t expect anything less from true connoisseurs of sweets. The club also had fundraising car washes a few times a summer with some of their more topside voluptuous female members in bikini-tops and flowing wraparounds as the sudsy spongers. It was a militant obesity club – less about a support group to become healthier than about forcing everyone to acknowledge their right to be overweight and be considered beautiful. It was really just a club of people that found it too hard to change their own habits, so they were efforting to try to change everyone else. Yes, it is an inalienable right to be fat, but it is an absurd notion that people should be forced to behold another person’s idea of beauty. “True beauty is on the inside” -- that is empty rhetoric everyone can get behind for show, but in actual practice beauty is a visual medium. No amount of cupcakes and megaphoning in slicked up size 20 bikinis fronting double D’s are going to convince me that a three hundred pound woman in a purple miu-miu dipping bon-bons in drawn butter is the same as Victoria’s Secret models slowly licking away lollipops. Beauty beholding is in itself also an inalienable right. That subjectiveness applies to everyone, regardless of girth: I think Kate Moss looks closer to an alien than a supermodel, but my college roommate stickied every picture of her he could get in his left hand. It isn’t that the world is filled with shallow people, as much as that theorem is used as reason for obese self-loathing, it is that people are evolutionarily hardwired to be attracted to their perceived versions of healthy people. The chances of producing future generations during harder times was exponentially smaller if someone was unable to move fast enough to catch food or chronically sick with organic diseases or dead decades before healthier peers.