Shortly after returning to my mother’s house, I made a vow to eat everything in sight for the next two weeks straight. My heart-to-heart with Janet Jackson was all but forgotten, because I planned to gain all of the weight that I had lost before seeing either my father or my stepmother again. Seeing her pleased with me just because I had done what she wanted me to made me want to pull my hair out. There was no way I was going to let that bitch win this round. I even went as far as eating McDonald’s, Roy Rogers, and Burger King all in one day. At the end of the two weeks, I had not only gained the fifteen pounds back but had added an extra five.
When I went back to visit my father that weekend, the look on his face was priceless. Stacey was livid, and when asked what had happened to my weight loss, I responded: “Growth spurt. I had a horizontal growth spurt.”
My stepmother was furious and our war continued. I think that may have been the night that she tried to stab my father in his sleep, but I cannot recall exactly.
THE FIFTY-DOLLAR DIET
With their fat-camp efforts thwarted, Mark’s father and stepmother were not done with their plot to make their fat son the perfect boy. Had he not started watching daytime television at such a young age, they may have gotten their wish, but what happened next was wrong on so many levels. No one is winning parent of the year for this next debacle in weight loss.
“Your stepmother and I think you are getting a little … wide,” my father said. Since his plan to get me skinny at fat camp had been thwarted, my father was becoming increasingly distressed about my weight.
“Wide?” I asked.
“You know …” My father drifted off. “Uh, hefty.”
My father was obviously disillusioned. Having lived with my bobble-headed stick figure of a stepmother for several years, anyone over one hundred pounds must have seemed “hefty.” I glanced in the mirror behind my father. There I was, all 175 pounds of me. At the age of twelve, I had become quite a looker. I stood at a mighty five feet two inches tall, had thousands of dollars’ worth of orthodontia in my mouth, and a cowlick. This was, of course, before I discovered the beauty of hair product. As I stood there staring at the mirror, I wondered what my father could have been thinking.
“You think I am fat?” I asked.
“No, no, no,” he said, nearly choking on his words. “Not fat … hefty. You could stand to lose a few.”
“Well, you know my schedule is so crazy right now,” I said. At age twelve, I had already mastered the art of stretching the truth to benefit myself. In my mind, I was the busiest middle schooler on the East Coast. Every morning, I would wake up, go to school, and then come home. That’s where my day really began. I would pop The Sound of Music into the VCR player and watch one of the most glorious movies ever made while baking a pan of brownies, which I would then eat while scrubbing every inch of my mother’s house. I have no idea why as a twelve-year-old I was such a clean freak, but looking back, it certainly explains why I am currently so very OCD. After eating a pan of brownies, I would then recite all of the words Julie Andrews sang to Christopher Plummer after they got married. I so wanted to be her, because what adolescent boy doesn’t want to sing to Christopher Plummer? He was such a dreamboat and I totally would have made an amazing stepmother to all of his children. I dreamed of the amazing sing-alongs we would have while fleeing the impending Nazi invasion. All of this was very time-consuming and there was no possible way to fit a new diet into the mix.
“Just change some of your eating habits,” my father said. There was no way eating a pan of brownies every day after school was going anywhere. He was delusional. If I didn’t eat a pan of brownies and watch The Sound of Music every day after school, what the hell was I supposed to do? Exercise? If it hadn’t been eleven in the morning, I would have thought he was drunk.
“I don’t know, Dad. I am pretty content with the way things are now,” I replied. “I’ve got a pretty good thing going, if ya know what I mean.” I winked at him, which he did not find charming in the least. He rolled his eyes and walked out of the room. I sat down on our living room sofa and glanced at the picture of all his children that was sitting on the mantel. Of all his five children, I was definitely the fattest.
My older brother, Tony, was skin and bones. My father would proudly call him “Bones.” He certainly didn’t have a problem with food. Then there were my sisters, Kim and Jamie. Kim was a superstar soccer player and worked out so much that she could pretty much eat whatever she wanted. It came as no surprise some years later when she revealed she was a lesbian. Jamie, on the other hand, had her cheerleading, and I guess it must have been all of the hurkies, but the girl pretty much kept her weight in check. My younger brother, Kevin, who was a troublemaker, was also really skinny. I guess starting fires in the woods and getting detention every other day speeds up one’s metabolism. Then there was my fat ass in the middle of a sea of perfectly toned bodies. Maybe my father was right. Maybe I did need to change my eating habits.
“Your stepmother had an idea just now,” my father said as he reentered the room. I looked into his eyes. He was desperate for a perfect family. Had he not been twice divorced at this point he may have gotten one, but he knew what the next best thing would be: the perfect-looking family. “We are going to pay you fifty dollars for every ten pounds you lose.”
I think any normal person would have been offended by this, but the Jew in me was just about to blossom and I was going to take up any potential moneymaking opportunity that presented itself.
“It will be really good for you. Isn’t your stepmother just the greatest?” my father asked. I highly doubt that Julie Andrews told Kurt Von Trapp that if he held off on the Ho Hos while they were trekking up the Austrian Alps that Ulysses S. Grant would be waiting for him on the other side. She certainly wasn’t winning stepmother of the year in my book.
“I’ll try it,” I said. And so I put my rolling pin away as I began my first-ever diet.
“Nowhere in this diet plan are baked goods listed,” I said, looking over a pamphlet I had picked up at the school counselor’s office, while sitting at my mother’s kitchen table.
“Why are you going on a diet?” my mother asked as she prepared dinner.
“I could stand to lose a couple,” I replied. There was no way I could tell her that my father was basically paying me to lose weight. She would have put the kibosh on that immediately, and I had my eye on a ceramic Cinderella figurine that had just come in stock at the Disney store. I had a huge collection of ceramic Disney figurines and my first fifty was going to be spent on the illusive Cinderella that had just come back into stock for a limited time only. I had to have it.
“Okay,” my mother said. “We can go on walks together when I get home from work.”
“Uh, that’s when I am usually watching The Sound of Music.” My mother, who should have just thrown me a gay pride parade right then and there just smiled and asked, “What about swimming?”
My cousin Jeri had tried to teach me how to swim the summer before, but I was more of a sit-on-the-sundeck-and-tan-while-drinking-virgin-piña-coladas kind of twelve-year-old.
I winced.
“What about biking?” my mother asked.
“Seems like a lot of work,” I replied. “I think I am just going to eat cereal with skim milk for every meal and see if I lose weight. Those bitches on the commercials say that works.”
Dieting seemed like such a pain in the ass. I retreated to my room to see if I could afford liposuction, but I was pretty sure twenty-five dollars in quarters wasn’t going to do it. Then I came up with an even better plan. I would go to the doctor and tell him to write me a prescription for diet pills, which I would then make my mother pay for, and then weasel a fifty out of my father after I had lost the weight. It was the perfect plan.
A few weeks later, my mother took me to Dr. Waldorf’s office. Dr. Waldorf had been my doctor since I was born and bore a striking resemblance to Ronald Reagan. He was about four hundred years old and h
ad always been there for me. I knew he would prescribe diet pills if I just presented a good enough case.
“Why are we here again?” my mother asked as we sat in the waiting room.
“Well, Mother, I read in Good Housekeeping that before one starts a diet, one must check to see if everything is where it should be,” I replied smartly.
“When the hell did you start reading Good Housekeeping?” my mother asked.
I don’t know how it happened, but I realized that I was slowly turning into a pathological liar. My mother knew better than to think I read Good Housekeeping. She knew the only thing I read was the Soap Opera Digest in the checkout line at the grocery store because I was too cheap to buy the damn thing. I needed to get my hands on these diet pills or else I would never lose weight.
“I don’t know, Mother,” I said. “Probably the last time I went to the grocery store to buy vegetable oil for my brownies.”
God love that woman, she always believed my madcap tales.
The doctor came out and greeted my mother and me. “DR. WALDORF!” my mother yelled with glee as she walked over to help him into the waiting room, “It’s so nice to see you …”
“Alive,” I said under my breath as my mother shot me a dirty look that could have killed.
“Lovely to see you too, darling,” Dr. Waldorf said. “How is your husband?”
“We’re divorced,” my mother said, “and we have been for three years. He’s remarried, remember?”
The doctor furrowed his brow and tried his hardest to remember that my mother had told him that she had gotten a divorce. She had done this nearly six times since the actual divorce had taken place. I could tell that the good doctor was losing his shit. Now was the time to hit him with my request.
“Oh yes,” Dr. Waldorf replied, “of course, now I remember.” He didn’t. “What brings you in today?” he asked.
“Just a checkup,” I replied. “I want to make sure everything is in order before I start my new diet.”
Dr. Waldorf gestured me into his office and I sat on the cold counter while he poked and prodded me. I knew everything was where it needed to be, but I also knew I needed to lose about forty pounds and was too lazy to get off my ass to do anything about it.
“Everything looks in order,” Dr. Waldorf said as he removed his stethoscope from my ear. Why he needed to do any of this in order for me to get what I needed was beyond me.
“Hmmm …” I said, “are you sure about that?”
“Of course,” he replied, “you are a perfectly healthy twelve-year-old.”
Really? I thought. Everyone around me seemed to think that I was overweight, and yet the old doctor seemed to think my weight wasn’t a problem.
“Don’t you think I am a little bit … overweight?” I asked, fishing.
“Yes,” he replied, “but once you hit your growth spurt, you will drop those unwanted pounds before you know it.”
I couldn’t possibly wait for that to happen. It could take years and that Cinderella figurine wasn’t going to buy itself.
“My aunt told me that fen-phen worked for her,” I said. Fen-phen was a very popular diet pill at the time that a certain cousin of mine had used to lose about a hundred pounds. The only side effect of the drug was the fact that it caused severe heart attacks, which I was certainly willing to overlook if I made some extra cash in the process.
“You can’t be serious,” Dr. Waldorf said.
“Uh,” I gave him my cute “I-didn’t-do-it” half-smile. “Actually.”
“Mark,” he said, “I cannot, in good conscience, write a prescription for diet pills for a twelve-year-old. I would lose my medical license.”
“Really?” I asked. “You can’t make this one exception?”
“No.” The old man was about to either fall asleep or die, and looked me in the eyes and replied, “Mark, all you have to do is change your eating habits and exercise a bit. It won’t take you very long at all to lose the weight. You’re only twelve years old.”
Damn it! This wasn’t going to be as easy as I had hoped. I was actually going to have to do something to change my appearance. Dr. Waldorf walked me into the waiting room, where my mother had been patiently waiting for me.
“Everything okay?” she asked.
“Yep,” the doctor said as he winked at me and nearly fell over. “Mark is fine and ready to start a new diet, isn’t that right, Mark?”
“Sure,” I said as I grabbed my jacket and left the doctor’s office.
The next day, I decided that I was going to have to actually start a diet. I was very concerned because that happened to be the day that I was going to begin the second phase of my Julie Andrews movie marathon with Mary Poppins, but important things such as that were going to have to be postponed. I was dieting now. I packed my lunch that day after eating a sensible breakfast of Special K and a banana. It was the first time I had eaten fruit since fat camp. Apparently, fruit snacks are not classified in the fruit food group, which had caused major issues in my dietary plan. I went through my day starving and knew that only an apple was waiting for me when I got home, in lieu of a pan of brownies. Instead of Julie Andrews, an hour-long walk lay ahead. I tried my damndest to get detention that day so I would not have to go home, but my school-time shenanigans were old hat to the teachers by then so I was sent home.
I popped the Julie Andrews Broadway cast recording of My Fair Lady into my portable cassette player and began my hour-long walk. I discovered that moving around after a long day of sitting on your ass isn’t a half-bad idea. I walked around the neighborhood and when I got home, I felt rejuvenated. So this was exercising? It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. In fact, I felt amazing. Perhaps this was the beginning of the new and improved Mark Rosenberg.
The school year was coming to an end and I was so happy that I was not going to have to pretend to like any of the people in my middle school anymore. I could be a loner in the summer, go on my walks, eat my healthy meals, and watch movie musicals all afternoon. High school was right around the corner, and I was hell-bent on making a whole new set of friends upon moving on. After a few weeks of dieting, I had my first weigh-in. I had gone from a hefty 175 to a less-hefty 160 in a matter of weeks. Not only had I made my first fifty dollars, I was also halfway to my second. I was such an entrepreneur.
“DAD!” I yelled as I walked into his house that afternoon. “I lost my first ten pounds. Give me fifty bucks!”
“Wow, buddy!” he said. “You look great.”
My father had taken my whore of a stepmother on vacation to Tahiti or Tibet or something and had been gone for weeks. He could tell upon his return that I meant business as far as this whole weight-loss project was concerned and was ready to complete his picture-perfect family.
“Let’s weigh in, and then you can take me to the mall. I have to hit up the Disney store before July 31 or else I am going to miss Cinderella. We simply cannot have that now, can we?”
“I can’t take you to the mall right now, Mark. Your stepmother and I are having a dinner party tonight and we have to prepare. Her family is coming over for Sabbath.”
“Seriously?” I replied. Not only did I hate my stepmother, but her family left much to be desired. Her sister and brother-in-law lived on a nudist retreat (but made sure to cover up their junk upon entering our home) and talking to their kids was about as fun as watching ice melt. “Goddamn it, Dad!” I said as I ran up to my room and pouted. I knew that a long night with a bunch of people I did not like talking about a bunch of shit that I did not understand was ahead.
Sabbath rolled around and we all sat at the table to eat dinner. My idiotic stepmother was not the best in the kitchen, and let’s just say her food did not dance on one’s taste buds. So there was no need for me to cheat tonight. She had made a huge pot of gefilte fish, which is the nastiest-tasting food in the world. I am not exactly sure what goes into gefilte fish, but it seems as though it’s just miscellaneous parts of different fish mashed up i
nto a ball of grossness. As the pot was passed, I gracefully declined the soupy fish, but my stepmother stopped me.
“Why don’t you eat the gefilte fish, Mark?” she asked.
“Honestly,” I replied, “it smells like dead-baby soup.”
“MARK!” my father yelled.
“Eat it, Mark!” my stepmother said.
Wait a second. Were these the same people who were paying me to lose weight? I quickly wondered if Stacey had in fact used six to eight dead babies in order to make this soup. The smell was revolting.
“The soup isn’t made of dead babies,” Stacey said.
“Regardless,” I replied. “Moral of the story—not eating it.”
My stepmother, whose main goal in life was to make everyone as miserable as possible, smirked.
“I’ll pay you fifty dollars to eat the gefilte fish,” she replied.
“When did this family start throwing fifties around like Rockefellers?” I asked. “Aren’t you paying me fifty dollars to lose weight? Now you want me to eat? Sounds a little ridiculous on your part, doesn’t it?”
“Come on, Mark, I will give you fifty bucks right now,” she said.
I may not have been a Jew who liked stinky fish, but I was a Jew who liked money and my stepmother knew it. I took some of the fish and put it on my plate. As I lifted my fork to my mouth I said: “I would just like to state for the record, that you people are quite possibly the biggest hypocrites in the world. The only reason I am eating this nasty fish is in fact for the money, because the way you people are spending money on vacations, I am going to have to start a college fund ASAP before all of this family’s money is gone.” I needed that money and even though I was dieting, a little soup wasn’t going to kill me. If anything, it would make me so nauseous that it may be a nice segue into bulimia and I could go back to sitting around on my ass all the time.
Eating My Feelings Page 8
