Fat Fat Fatty

I’ve always had a problem or two with my weight. I’ve never been one of those people that both disgust you and force you to take pity on them, but I’ve never been quite content with the size of my jeans or what belt notch I was using at any given time. I suppose I could always be a bit slimmer. Not abs of steel slimmer, just less… I don’t know, bulgy.

My weight seems to come and go like the tide throughout the year, which I suppose is the case for most people. During the fall months, I always feel fairly confident in myself and wear t-shirts that didn’t fit a few months earlier. However, by the time that Christmas comes around I cram myself full of Smithfield ham like I need the extra layers of fat to survive hibernation. Sadly, I tend to stay this way well into Spring and early Summer, when I finally decide to stop eating everything that I see and try to become one of those people that actually enjoys exercising and healthy living. Assuming that they actually exist, of course.

Whenever I see someone gaily jogging past me on the sidewalk, or on the off chance that I actually go to the gym see someone lifting weights while screaming at themselves in the mirror I always become overwhelmingly puzzled. What the fuck is wrong with these people? What could be driving these people to put themselves through such torture? I understand having low self-esteem but this just seems extreme. I can’t even wrestle with the idea of consistent exercise: you put your body through a heightened state of activity, working your lungs, heart, and muscles harder than what their used to, all while getting sweaty and smelly--and you tell me that it’s good for me? That can’t be right. I refuse to believe that anything as unpleasant as this whole exercise thing can’t be good for you. Has anyone actually done studies on this sort of thing? They have? Entire schools of thought you say? Well then maybe attitudes like mine are why so many fat people exist in this world.

It’s just that I’m not uncomfortable with myself to the point of actually wanting to do something drastic about it. Of course that doesn’t mean that I’m thrilled with myself either. I’m just not the type to look at myself in the mirror and feel the immediate need to start a diet consisting only of carrots and sugar packets. Although, every now and then I will stop eating fried chicken, which seems healthy enough to me.

I think there are two reasons that I’m a bit self-conscious about my waist line, the first being that I was always picked on in elementary school. Now, I’m not going to turn this into some self-pitying sob story about how nobody gave me a fair chance, and that the kids would throw rocks at me and call me Kris The Pig Fucking Fat Shit, but I acknowledge the fact that every class needs a doughy kid and that it was my job to fulfill this need. I’m just saying that spending your childhood, adolescence, and teenage years being considered the tubby friend kind of takes its toll on you.

The second reason I’m convinced is the heart of the matter: my mother has always been obsessed with her own weight. Now in order to understand this you need to understand my mother. Hanging out with my mother as a child meant that you had to become an immediate judge of other women, and my mother seems to have a radar for spotting out asses that are bigger than hers. “Kris,” she would say, “Kris. Do I look like that over there? Man look at that thing. I bet she takes up two chairs when she sits. I don’t look like that do I?”

She never has looked like that. Ever. But my mother still seems convinced to this day that she stands as the fattest woman in the grocery store, department store, restaurant, or beach. Of course, being a good son I always assure her that she does not, in fact, look like a borderline diabetic elephant seal—and I even mean it. This always puts her in a better mood, and makes me wonder what was wrong with her vision.

Still, my mother had me trained to pick out the fatties by the time that I was three, and together we treated life as if were constantly attending some sort of vaudevillian freak show. Once while in the doctor’s office with an ear infection, I loudly pointed out an oversized parent to my mother. “Mom! Mom look at the butt on that one! She’s HUUGE!”

Panicked, my mother pointed to the painting of whales on the wall and nervously agreed “Yes, Kris, but I don’t think whales have butts.”

“No mom! The lady! She’s got a big ol’ butt!” Sometimes I almost feel sorry for my parents—but then again they raised me, so ultimately anything embarrassing I did as a child is their fault.

After years of judging overweight people with my mother I think I understand where she was coming from—comparing yourself to those who look terrible compared to you makes you feel great about yourself. It doesn’t exactly get results like obsessing over someone that looks better than you does, but it does make you realize that life could be worse and that you at least look better than that schmuck whose ham thighs hang out from the bottom of his elastic waist shorts.

So while I don’t exactly have the healthiest outlook on the way that I look, but maybe I’m just a sucker for those Dove ads that promote accepting your body weight. Sure I might not be able to run very far without crashing into the bushes and dying, and I don’t really like carrots, tomatoes, celery, cucumbers, radishes, or cabbage; but at least I know where to draw the line. Because if my mother taught me one thing, it’s that fat people are gross and not to be trusted. Thanks mom!

And You May Ask Yourself

Once when I was sixteen I asked the girl who sat in front of me in my English class to be my date for an upcoming school dance. Now, I was never one to be forward with my romantic intentions. In fact, even speaking to a girl without the conversation wandering into awkward ramblings about the necessity of socks or the process of growing cranberries was nothing short of miraculous. So working up the courage to actually ask a girl out happened as often as a meteor crashing into the planet and ending life as we know it.

It took me weeks to figure out exactly what to say her but eventually I had my plan of attack completely figured out. I would intercept her after class and ask while she walked to the cafeteria. I had gone over exactly how I was going to do it a thousand times in my head, and I even managed to make it through a few practice runs where I would ask out the empty space beside me. If all went well I would use my best dapper voice and suavely sweep her into my arms and carry her into our future filled with wedding gowns, children, social security checks, and eventual death and abandonment.

That afternoon I followed my plan exactly, but as I approached her I suddenly realized that I hadn’t actually worked out what I was going to say to her and it dawned on me that I had planned the situation as if it were a military strike. I planned on moving in, destroying the target, and moving out before the enemy had enough time to put together a halfway decent counterattack. I never took into account that I might actually have to put some thought into what I had to say when asking someone out. I was flying in with no missiles and by the time I realized it I was already past the failsafe point. Before my eyes my flawless attack for romantic bliss suddenly turned into a kamikaze run of my social life.

“Bethany.” Oh Christ, I was in it now. “Yeah, Hi. Uh. Hm. Well.” I could tell already that things weren’t looking good. She smiled politely as I stumbled to find my words but her eyes told a different story: a story of horror, embarrassment, and desperation. I stopped breathing completely. My palms were sweaty, and the back of my head had a sudden inexplicable itch. I had to get this over with and by the time the first word reached the tip of my tongue the rest of them came flooding out over top of one another like a surge of vomit. “Wouldyouwantgothedancewithmeonfriday…………..?”

By the time I got home I had gotten over the rejection for the most part. She told me that she went the year before and didn’t really want to go through the trouble dealing with the money and effort it takes to find a dress, which seemed like an acceptable answer to a sixteen-year-old who didn’t know any better. Afterall, what did I know of the hardships involved in picking out a dress? There could be more to it than simply finding one that looks good and buying it. Maybe dresses had to be woven by hand around the girl while she stood perfectly still for days on end. It could have been a month long, life-draining process for all I knew.

I ended up not going to the dance and instead opted to spend the evening alone watching cartoons and counting discarded change left around the house, an activity I often resorted to when the relentless disappointments of suburban teenage life got me down. After all, the sting of unrequited love was nothing that $7.84 cents in rolled pennies couldn’t numb.

Later in the evening as my fingers began to brown from fumbling through pennies that had once undoubtedly been inserted into someone’s anus, I received a call from a friend.

“Kris!” he managed to shout above what sounded like “The Electric Slide.” “You will not believe who is here...”

That bitch. She lied to me. That rat faced, two timing, angel-haired witch had lied to me. She was there with Dennis Slattery—the head of the debate team. Not only did she reject me in favor of the quintessential Asian geek, she also wore a brand new blue dress. She could not get away with this. Who was she to toss my heart aside as if it were the browned core of an apple? She would not get away with this. I felt something inside me break. I wanted blood.

***

Now when you’re sixteen, revenge can be a tricky subject. My first instinct was to take all of the change I collected that evening, fill them into a sock, and savagely bash her perfectly shaped head in—but frankly I’m not that violent of a person, and I think homicide isn’t exactly something that gets you into a state school. I considered slashing her tires, but since she drove her mother’s handed down Volvo 244, I figured that would only get her parents angry; and since revenge by the hands of parents tends to involve lawsuits and community service I ruled that out as well. Obscene phone calls were also out of the question because, really, obscene phone calls aren’t so much revenge as they are a part of the masturbatory repertoire of men with thin moustaches named Walter.

This operation required something with more finesse, something with more charm, and, most importantly, something completely untraceable. Realizing that I couldn’t do this alone, I called together three of my closest friends: Patrick, Richie, and Michael. My friends and I shared an equally jilted and disenfranchised view on teenage life, and as such our collective angst was deadly and vast enough to fill a shark tank.

My blatant jilting at the homecoming dance was more than any of us could handle, so we put our collectively bitter and angst ridden minds together in order to finally strike back at those who made our teenage lives so superficially miserable.

However, it would seem that a childhood reared by video games and action movies didn’t exactly work wonders for our imaginations. The best idea any of us could muster was murder. Sure, we hated the girl—but the idea of shoving her corpse into a wood chipper or sharing a jail cell with someone who refers to you as Loraine didn’t exactly sit well with any of us. Some other ideas that we considered but ultimately scrapped for legal issues were as follows:

1. Set her car on fire.

2. Burn a hateful message into her yard.

3. Burn a caricature of a kitten into her yard (The kitten, somehow, made it seem less “hate crimey”).

4. Stab a cryptic message onto her front door.

5. Set her front door on fire. (Something about fire appealed to me at the time, I’m not sure why).

After several hours of debate, our ideas were running as dry. Since we were completely incapable of coming up with a revenge plot that wasn’t either implausible or a felony, we decided to call it a night and go to the grocery store to restock the house’s dwindling soft drink and junk food supply.

After gathering enough Cheez-its and orange soda to drown away our disappointment we headed towards the registers, but just as we had come to terms with our defeat something stopped us. Perhaps it was chance that brought us by the discount meat counter, or perhaps it was the will of God Himself; whatever it was, we came face to face with the objects that would make our rein of terror complete: pig’s feet. Rows of them, glistening in the halogen light of the 24-hour grocery store. They laid there untouched for weeks, and bore discount stickers as if they medals of valor.

After that, everything became clear.

***

One major draw-back to working with half rotten pork products as a medium of revenge, however, is that you have to work in direct contact with the stuff. A luke-warm pig’s foot isn’t exactly the most welcoming object to handle with your bare hands. The smell didn’t help matters either. After ripping open the cellophane the car immediately smelled like a retirement home—an odor reminiscent of soiled bed sheets and clammy skin. I still will never understand how exactly a person could bring themselves to cook one of these things much less actually consume one.

After becoming comfortable with our weapon of choice, the operation essentially planned itself. We would pull up to her house under the cover of night and strike in three-unit pincer attack: the first would hit the car, the second would strike the mailbox, and the third would take out the most vital target: the front porch. Nothing says “Fuck you” like rotting pig parts sitting on your front porch.

We pulled up to the house just after midnight, and the lack of light in the house assured us that nobody was stirring about. We burst out of the minivan like a squad of trained marines with a pig’s foot clenched in each fist. Michael took the driveway, and he threw the pig’s foot underhanded towards Bethany’s Volvo as if he was lobbing a grenade under an oncoming Panzer. Patrick ran straight for the side yard and launched his foot towards the roof, managing to land it in the gutter. Both had unloaded their payload before I even reached the front walkway—but then something happened that I hadn’t accounted for: motion lights. As soon as my foot hit the front step the lawn became flooded with a blinding light. Panicked, I haphazardly chucked the foot towards the front door slamming it onto the Plexiglas door leaving a pale white splatter where it hit. The impact of the foot violently shook the door and I was horrified when I saw the teeth of the family’s dog heading straight towards the closed door.

By the time the Harrington family dog’s husky bark flooded the neighborhood I was already halfway across the yard. My get-away car had already begun driving away by the time that I reached the street, and my friends reached out of the open door towards me, telling me to jump in as if I were a tramp hopping onto a moving train. I threw my body in towards the open door and the van sped off with my feet still dragging against the pavement.

***

When I went to school the next day I expected it to be ablaze with rumor mongering.

“Did you hear about Bethany’s yard? Poor girl. They say she may need therapy.”

“Her parents might get divorced because of it.”

“The CIA is at her house now—they think it might have been terrorists.”

But when I arrived I was thrown off by the lack of buzz reverberating through the hall. Still, I was giddy to see what was left of my victim’s shattered psych; or at least satisfying a gross out story about finding a fly-covered pig’s foot stinking up her front porch.

When I got to class the seat where Bethany normally sat was empty—a rare site considering her perfect attendance and penchant for punctuality. A good sign. Maybe she got sick when seeing the foot and threw up on her door step. Perfect! It was personal damage without anything permanent or traceable bogging things down. I stared at the door nearly shaking with anticipation just waiting for the delicious sight of her stumbling through the door looking colorless and disheveled.

The sound of the bell snapped me out of my trance. Where was she? Where was my revenge? Jesus Christ, maybe something bad did happen. Maybe all of those rumors running around the high school in my imagination were true. Maybe her grandfather did have a stroke after finding out about the desecration of his favorite granddaughter’s house; maybe the pig’s foot did drive her insane and she ended up hanging herself; my God, maybe her dog found the pig’s foot ate it and died! Jesus, I just assassinated a girl’s dog! What the fuck is the matter with me? I was a dog murderer. I was on the same level as child molesters and men who eat used chewing gum. I was an abomination.

After an eternity of living out scenarios like a secret world government hunting for me, or being eaten alive by angry, footless pigs the door to the class opened bringing me back to my senses. It was her. My chest swelled with relief, she was alive. In fact, she looked amazing. Her hair and make-up were perfect and she was even wearing a new outfit. Wait, Goddamnit, after all of that effort and three dollar expense she has the gall to come waltzing into my classroom looking amazing? That bitch! Maybe I should have killed her fucking dog. I should have broken its stupid neck and left its bleeding carcass right in her God damned bed. My quest for revenge crumbled before my very eyes as she jaunted into her seat.

I spent the period staring furiously at the back of her head as if my eyes would burn a hole through her skull. What could have gone wrong? As far as I knew pig’s feet didn’t dissolve when exposed to open air, and I didn’t dream the entire evening. Did I?

***

Despite our apparent failure, this wasn’t the last time that my friends and I consulted the discount meat counter out of acts of revenge. In fact it almost became a bi-weekly tradition. Every time we would strike in the night like the undead we would hope that maybe this time someone might actually find what we’ve done. But in all the time of us sneaking around and calling ourselves the Pig’s Feet Bandits no one ever found anything. It wasn’t exactly as effective as other methods of high school revenge, but I’d like to think it was at least healthier than taking your grandfather’s World War II rifle and shooting your geometry teacher. I still haven’t figured out what could have happened to all of those pig’s feet, and I suppose in the end that never mattered. But if you’re reading this and you’ve always wondered from where that pig’s foot on your porch appeared, it was me. And if it also managed to kill your cat, well then I’m sorry—you shouldn’t have spilled milk on my history project.

Whoever Said “No Pain, No Gain” Should Be Killed

I have never been one for frivolous sequels or uncalled for cash-ins, but the topic of how soul crushingly terrible I was at sports in my childhood never seems to get old. One would think that after repeatedly failing at a fairly lax sport like baseball would teach me to pack away my cleats and stick to the warm glow of the television and the safety of a firm Nintendo controller. After all it’s hard to have a career ending injury while playing NFL Blitz, except when the person you’re playing with relentlessly goes off sides and suplexes your quarterback every. play.

But something inside of me never let go of playing sports. It may be that the spirit of competition was sewn into my very genes. My father both wrestled and played football in his youth, my uncle played football and even went semi-pro, my grandfather coached football, baseball, and basketball; even my cake-baking grandmother was captain of the basketball team. Nevertheless, failing at playing soccer (crushed between a crowd of hyperactive six-year-olds), basketball (I made a basket once, during practice), and baseball (a well-documented incident involving a lot of blood and temporarily blinding a parent) left me with only one sport that I had yet to try: football.

Now, I don’t know why I thought it would be a good idea to try my hand at a sport that actually required me to dress in full body armor, but considering my large stature compared to the other eleven-year-olds at the time I figured I was made for the sport. After all, all I had to do was knock the smaller kids over, right? How much skill and coordination could that require?

One qualification that little league football had over other sports I had played in the past was a weight limit, because God forbid the fat kids get to play the sport practically designed for them. So taking into account that I was shaped like a Thanksgiving turkey I was made ineligible to play with my age group. But feeling sorry for me, the local sports organization gave me the “opportunity” to go into the next age group--which meant that if I wanted to play, I had to play with the twelve to thirteen-year-olds. Now age is a funny thing. Looking back, the difference between a 10 and an 11 year old is pretty negligible; but through the eyes of a ten-year-old, an eleven year old is like a mountainous God. They were in middle school; they had a facial hair; they were not quite pre-pubescent; and most importantly, they could kick the shit out of a fifth grader without batting an eye. So let’s see what happened when I played hyper-aggressive contact sports with them, shall we?

The first time I ever put on football pads I came up against a person who was about my size, so he too was playing along side the twelve-year-old demigods. Feeling confident at going up against someone my own age, I lined up to him not knowing what was to come in this boy’s future. If only I had known that this boy would go on to dominate the varsity football team, eventually going on to play college ball where he was an All-American linebacker for two years in a row. This person was the first person who ever hit me in football. After regaining consciousness, I found an oxygen mask strapped to my face and the blurred image of my coach with two fingers in front of my eyes barking at me to tell him how many that he was holding up.

Being the grandson of a successful high school football coach, I still felt confident in what I was doing—even though, in retrospect, I had absolutely no idea how the to play the game. The various rules and complex plays were completely lost on me, and as it turns out there is more to the sport than Super Tecmo Bowl put on, and apparently just doing 87 yard Hail Mary passes every play, in reality, never, ever works.

When confronted with actual football plays, I was aghast when I realized it required route memorization, organized blocking, pulling, opening up holes, double teaming—what the fuck was this? . I just thought I just had to go out there, knock some kids around, leave the strategy up the quarterback and call it a day. I had no idea what was going on. After the center snapped the ball, I would always try to follow the play the best I could, but by the time, it was over, I found that the quarterback had been killed and that I had blocked my own teammate.

I actually didn’t learn what clipping was until an official called back a forty-five yard interception return because I decided to start arbitrarily knocking people over for the hell of it. I mean, why not? It was football. They were standing there, so I knocked them over. Pussies!

Seeing that I was a strategic black hole my coaches put me on defense, probably hoping that the less complex philosophy of “less talkin’, more hittin’” of the defensive line would be a better suited position for me.

Playing on the defensive line introduced me to new levels of pain. What I thought would be an opportunity to crash down on good-looking quarterbacks or break the spine of puny running backs. I quickly discovered that defense really meant repeatedly crashing into an impenetrable wall of flesh only to be bowled over by a full back three times my size as he careened down the field like an unstoppable freight train. Who would have thought that good-looking quarterback would be protected by an impenetrable wall of flesh, and that my crushing that puny running back may actually involve catching him? Little bastard ran like a cheetah covered in chicken grease.

As the season progressed, my coaches came to their senses and simply decided never to let me play. Ever. Every game I would come in my pristine jersey, and my team mates went on to actually enjoy themselves, I just watched from the sidelines and pretended to be a part of the whole process of actually playing. Really, my amount of playtime was probably limited to maybe four plays in the entire season. The coaches would feel sorry for me, put me in, then I would pull the wrong way and run into another team member, then they would promptly put me back on the bench. At least they gave me a chance. I guess.

The end came during practice. The only time I really got to participate was during practice. The team mostly just used me as a living, breathing blocking dummy that just also happens to be able to experience pain. Intense, unforgiving pain. We were practicing a fundamental running play where I was supposed to open a hole in the center of the line. When the play started, the defender pulled right and with all of my momentum counting on him to stop me I slipped and fell face first. As I rolled over to get up, my own running back came charging through the hole and rather than being the sensible freight train and hop over me, he opted for the obvious option and simply dug his cleats into my unpadded mid-section.

After the play, the team collectively groaned as I gasped for air as I grasped my stomach as if I had to shove my intestines back into my body. I laid in the cold dirt as my coach hovered over me, asking if I could still practice, and looking up into the cold, grey November sky I replied that I couldn’t. After that, I took off my shoulder pads and sat on the wet grass until practice was over. I never went back after that.

For a while, I felt like I had let my entire sports loving family down. In a matter of ten years, I managed to fail at every sport possible, and after my failure at football, I never played organized sports again. I didn’t even have a good career ending injury. Maybe if that happened I would have just been looked at like a paradigm of lost potential—I could have gone out like Joe Theisman, except hopefully without the whole worst televised sports injury in history part.

As I got older, I started to be thankful that I had given up football, as I suspect the kids that the coaches were filling my former teammates with human growth hormones. While I grew to a reasonable height for my weight, they grew to be the type of people who were six foot seven and would eat nine sandwiches for lunch. Also, something about forcing a fourteen-year-old into a regimented weight lifted program seems deeply demented looking back on it. So as my peers formed into a High School version of the 2007 New England Patriots (18 and awwwww), I was happy to eat hot dogs in the parking lot and watch the game from the stands. I still got to enjoy the game but there was the added benefit of not having to worry about being killed by a person with a rare genetic growth disorder.

Slam Dancing

Hello is this Mr. Terrence Clark of Clark Carpentry Associates?
Hello sir, this is Walter Pidgeon calling on behalf the third fastest growing telecommunications company in the South Eastern part of the state, and let me tell you, I want to make you a better person. Now I know what it’s like to pay for phone bills—Lord knows, don’t we all? You just make a few calls and there goes half your paycheck, your wife thinks you’re cheating on her, and you don’t have enough money to buy yourself a new pair of socks much less that new car you’ve been eyeing for so many years. Now if you were a smart man, Mr. Clark you would listen to me. And you’re a smart man, aren’t you? Of course you are.
You don’t have enough time for this? You can’t spare a few minutes in order to save yourself and your family your own hard earned money? If I were you, I would listen. Mr. Clark, tell me. How much do you pay for your phone bill every month?
Oh my! It’s worse than I thought; you should be grateful that I called. Because the company that I represent can save you up to—are you sitting down Mr. Clark?--$2.50 a year on your phone bill.
No I am not kidding sir, my company Legiticom is willing to give you line rental and all of your calls for $2.50 less than what you are paying now. How is that possible you might ask? Let me tell you, it’s nothing short of miraculous.
Excuse me? Did you say that $2.50 isn’t worth all of the trouble? Sir, do you value your hard earned money? Well with that attitude you may as well go straight to the bathroom and empty your wallet in the toilet. Millions of people would kill to save $2.50 a year on anything, and I am coming to you out of the kindness of my heart in order to offer you an extraordinary deal so you can save your hard earned money. Now sir, you are a businessman, surely you are savvier than that.
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Of course I will tell you how much our additional charges are as well as send you our full terms and conditions through the mail, but I just need to get your verbal consent in order to do so. And keep in mind sir, that you will have a full three days to cancel without risk of a termination fee.
No sir, there’s no obligation to stay with us within the first 72 hours of signing up, after this generous period which we allow you to decide you would only be obligated to stay with our company for the remainder of the five year contract period. But I’m sure you will agree that three days is more than enough time for a man of your status to decide what is good for your business. Sign up today and see the savings for yourself and I guarantee on both my and my family’s honor that you will be an extremely happy man if you sign up with our company because you will be saving your hard earned money.
You say you are currently in contract with your current provider? Well my brother, I could see how that’s a problem, but since you have been such a patient man and have dedicated so much of your precious time, I am willing to give you a very special offer that we give to everyone. Sir, my company is willing to offer up to fifteen dollars to cover your termination fee. All you would need to do is pay for your $150 termination fee, send us written proof of your payment, and allow us six to twelve weeks to judge whether the payment would fall in line with our terms and conditions, and then we would give you fifteen dollars in credit redeemable at some participating Walgreens stores.
Yes sir, you will see all of what I have laid out for you in writing once you agree to sign up. Now that I already have you signed up, you will be receiving the paperwork in the mail sometime within the next month. And keep in mind, you can cancel this contract at anytime within your 72 hour trial period, but after that period an early termination fee of $1200 will apply. If you have any questions or concerns, or if you want to cancel your new contract just give our customer services number a call at any time of the day, as long as that time is between 2:15 and 4:26 AM Monday through Thursday.
You want to be put on a no call list? Very well sir, now that you are a customer you needn’t worry about our company phoning you any more at all. In fact, you will be lucky to get in touch with us if you try! Thank you very much for your time and patience Mr. Clark. I appreciate your generosity as if it were a gift from my ancestors. You sir, truly are wise and smiled upon by the Gods. Now if you will excuse me, I need to go spread my commission over the bed and rub your hard earned money across my naked flesh. Good day, sir.