Chocolate, Please

by Lisa Lampanelli

  “Do you mind if we pick up my son at camp?” The bombshell dropped. “He’s off for the summer and has nowhere to go, so do you mind if he comes with us?” My first thought was “Red flag! He’s a Mexican with only one kid. He’s gay.” But as he looked at me with his pleading little puppy dog eyes and kissed me on the lips, I agreed. Of course, my daydreams of afternoon delight faded, and in their place, there was Madame Tussauds Wax Museum and FAO Schwarz, accompanied by Johnny and his eight-year-old offspring. At this point, it would be safe to say that the only thing stiff I touched that day was Elvis’s finger.

  I was pissed. I was in Vegas, I was lonely, and I was really in the mood to make out. That cockblocker of a kid really cramped my style. So I let Johnny’s next three calls go to voice mail. Then I got a message that was worth returning.

  Johnny said he had heard I was going to be playing in San Jose the same weekend he was going there to see his father. Of course, I found this fascinating—I mean, he was Hispanic and I couldn’t believe he knew who his father was. In any case, we made plans to go to a party I was hosting at a club that Friday, and then to my show on Saturday. For the week before we were to hook up, the texts kept gushing in fast and furious saying how much he was looking forward to seeing me. I was primed!

  Anticipating a fun, steamy, and child-free weekend, I landed in San Jose with enough time to shower, change, and look good for the party—and for Johnny. I texted him when I landed, as he had asked me to, and an hour later, I got a text back saying he’d had “a really rough day with his family” and couldn’t make it. A rough day with his family! What’s a rough day with a spic’s family? Too much lettuce to pick? Too tired from selling oranges at the side of the highway? Exhausted from squeezing thirty people into his Chevy to visit the relatives in jail? What happened—the bucket spilled while he was mopping the floor? The lawnmower wouldn’t start? He wrecked someone’s car while valeting it? (I could go on and on.) Either way, I was pissed—and I headed out of the hotel, ready to replace Johnny with a hotter, steamier, spicier Latino muy ahora!

  It turns out that Jesus—Jesus our Lord and Savior, not the Hispanic who stole my wallet—was smiling down on me that night. Stepping out of the car at the party, I was introduced to my security guard Fabio, who had to be the hottest Portuguese man I had ever seen.

  Now, for those of you who don’t know, female comics and security guards go together like chocolate and peanut butter. It’s a natural fit. Security guards are always buff, they make you feel protected, and you know where they work in case they steal anything out of your room when you’re asleep. Also, they always have handcuffs if you want to get kinky, and they carry a nightstick in case their dicks aren’t big enough. Plus, they know where the cameras are hidden so your bare ass doesn’t pop up on the Internet.

  Well, I personally hadn’t banged a security guard in a while, so I figured tonight was the night, thanks to Johnny No-Show.

  The times I had hooked up with security guards, it had been fun. It had happened in Houston with Hub, a guy right out of a field-hand fantasy. And it had occurred in West Palm Beach with Pierre, a black guy who was so dumb he must have had a plate in his head—sadly, he was so stupid the plate was Styrofoam. I don’t joke when I say this man was so stupid he thought the Jefferson Memorial had statues of George and Weezie in it. But Pierre had served a purpose: he was my rebound bang after my breakup with my black boyfriend Darryl, who had cheated on me, and I’ll admit I did it just to prove I still had game. My last security guard encounter had been with a steroid case in Ontario, California, called Thurl, a moniker that I have since learned means “Mama had eighteen kids and ran outta names.” Thurl may have had a stupid name, but I basically did him just to see what it would be like to bang a guy that buff. Seriously, I chalked that one up to research—sort of like I was Jane Goodall and he was my gorilla in the mist. And just so you don’t write me a letter, I know Jane Goodall dealt with chimps and the furthest she ever went with one was a dry hump.

  So when I was presented with Fabio the Fabulous that night in San Jose, I knew it was on. It was the old “When one door closes, another one opens,” or in this case “When one door closes, you can be pretty sure a spic will jimmy a lock and climb through the window.” By the way, I know what you’re thinking—a Hispanic security guard? Yeah, I know that’s ironic in itself. Putting a spic in charge of security is risky. That’s like giving a black guy keys to Popeyes chicken. It’s like putting a Chink in charge of driving the bus. But Fabio was what was there, and I was ready to play.

  After about three hours of autograph signing, picture taking, and pretending to have fun with some fans, I told Fabio I wanted to leave. He asked what I was doing later, and I took the opening and invited him to my room at the Fairmont. Rushing back to the hotel, I got ready, giving the underarms and other sensitive areas the ol’ Puerto Rican shower. (I wasn’t gonna take a full shower for this guy. He was a security guard, for God’s sake! I wasn’t about to redo my hair and makeup for someone who checks IDs and gives women unnecessary friskings for a living. Plus, I knew my mother would be extra excited if I brought her home some soap from the famous Fairmont hotel.) Plain and simple, I knew this guy was gonna be a one-night stand at the most. Besides, there was really no point in me dating a Portuguese—no one knows stereotypes for the Portuguese, so I wouldn’t get any jokes out of the experience. You know what they say: “Once you go Portuguese, you realize it’s really hard to find anything that rhymes with ‘Portuguese.’” Of course, I tried “Once you go Portuguese, your twat burns when you sneeze,” but it never got the laugh I had hoped for.

  Twenty minutes later, I answered the door in my robe—a new Lane Bryant bra and black Victoria’s Secret XL underwear underneath—and we sat down on the couch together. But instead of making a move, what did Fabio do? He started telling me about himself! What?!? Now, c’mon—it was pretty clear what we were there to do, and I didn’t want to hear his life story. I didn’t care that his father was a farmer and I sure as hell didn’t care that he was the first one in his familia to go to college—especially when all he got out of his degree was a job as a security guard. So, after ten minutes of listening to this broken-English fuck, I was like “Tick-toc, spic—we gonna do this or what? Let’s get started, ’cause I don’t care what your major was. And I don’t care how, as a kid, you ate cats and were a water boy for the cockfights.”

  Now, I’ll be honest with you, my dear readers, about one thing. I talk a lot about sex onstage, but I haven’t had that much of it—and the sex I have had hasn’t been very good. I’ve been a serial monogamist most of my life, and my brief “ho period” when I discovered black guys was just that—brief. So I haven’t been exposed to many weird bedroom customs. Therefore, when Fabio—who was definite eye candy, with tattoos and muscles to his credit (I love that “fresh out of Sing Sing” look)—crouched down next to the side of the bed, I didn’t know what to expect.

  But instead of doing something I’d seen before—in person or the movies—he shocked the hell out of me. Eyes narrowed, he peered into my nether regions, and he…well…he…spit. Seriously, he spit! What was he trying to do—shine it?!? Now, let me be clear: He didn’t wet his fingers and go in for the kill. Nor did he do a little licky thing. He basically was spitting like my snatch was a baseball dugout! All that was missing was that crazy ding noise you hear after someone in a Western hocks one into a nearby brass spittoon. I mean, the guy was spitting on it like my pussy had just insulted his mother!

  The first time he did it, I was like, “What the fuck was that?” I’m thinking, “This is really weird.” Now, I know guys in prison spit on their stuff, but guys with me don’t find that necessary. I may be forty-six, but I have a thirty-year-old’s snatch—I’m moist as Betty Crocker down there! It’s like riding the log flume. But he kept spitting, and then asked for a review: “You like when I spit on it, don’t you?” Of course, I didn’t know what to say. I would have loved to be honest, but I didn’t wa
nt to hurt the feelings of a minimum-wage-earning Latino who I was never gonna see again. So, I was like, “Uh, yeah,” and then I crossed my fingers and rolled my eyes when he wasn’t looking, just so I was being true to myself. My integrity is really important to me.

  By that point, the evening was ruined for me. I couldn’t enjoy myself—the whole time I was completely preoccupied. I kept waiting for him to take out a squeegee, clean it, and ask for a quarter. It was like a carnival game. I figured if he got three in, I’d have to give him a stuffed animal.

  After we were done, he tried talking, but I begged off, saying he had to leave because I had to get rest before the big show tomorrow. As I lay there in bed, I started to grasp the truth of the situation: The guys I was attracting after codependency rehab—Johnny Vegas, Phlegmy Fabio—were no better than Tommy, my pre-rehab bottom. Despite all the work I’d done on myself, I was still pulling guys who did absolutely nothing for me—physically, psychologically, mentally—and whom I was anything but honest with. At the Caron Foundation, we were taught to ask for our wants and needs, and the last thing I wanted was a guy who brought his kid on a date or one who spit all over my junk.

  At that moment, I knew: I had to get back to my year off from men or I’d never get anything better.

  Sadly, there was one other thing I noticed when I was heading out on my date with Johnny Vegas and for my night out when I ultimately met Fabio—something that shook me to the core. My pants were too tight. My new “I just lost thirty pounds on Jenny Craig” pants from Ann Taylor Loft were straining at the zipper. At first, I tried to chalk it up to a dry cleaning mishap and succeeded in pushing it out of my mind. Then as I lay in bed after Fabio’s hasty retreat, there was no denying it—the weight I had lost over a year before was coming back. I tried to justify it by saying it was worth a fifteen-pound gain to get rid of Tommy, a 170-pound pain. But there was no excuse for my behavior—sure, I wasn’t dating a toxic douchebag, but I was once again using food for comfort as I had all my life. I had replaced one addiction with another.

  And, as I lay in bed in San Jose, I realized that I had absolutely no idea what to do about it.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Fat Girl, Interrupted

  You’re not having dessert?” I asked my two friends in disbelief.

  “No.”

  “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me! You said we were going to have dessert!”

  “No, nothing for me,” Laura said.

  “Me neither,” echoed Tracy.

  In the ten seconds of that short exchange, I went from calm and cool to seeing red.

  These two twats had to be joking! Here we were in the restaurant of the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, the night after two sold-out shows, and both of them had been gushing all throughout our noontime meal about how amazing the dessert case looked. Foot-high slices of cake, puddings, gelato, and homemade ice cream had distracted all of us throughout our meal, and now that it was time to order, these bitches were punking out.

  My head felt like it was about to explode with a mixture of anger, resentment, and betrayal. We were a team, weren’t we? We were the Sex and the City cast minus the ugly, man-hating dyke one. We were a crew! But now, instead of ordering dessert with me, Tracy and Laura had turned on me, and I hated them for it. At that moment, I knew exactly how a guy feels when a girl invites him back to her apartment and will only give him a dry hump.

  “For-fucking-get it!” I scream-whispered in that way furious mothers do when they want to yell at their kids in church but don’t want the priest to overhear. Fishing in my wallet, I dug out two twenty-dollar bills and threw them on the table. “Enjoy the rest of your fucking day.”

  Pushing my chair back from the table with a nails-on-chalkboard scratching sound on the tile floor, I stormed out of the restaurant. I’d show those two cunts! They were disloyal and they would see! I steamrolled into my suite and over to my computer to change my flight and get the hell outta there as quickly as I could. And, I vowed, I would never return any of their calls ever again.

  Hmmm…I think I might have overreacted.

  Actually, O. J. overreacted.

  I overreacted and made an ass out of myself.

  Well, who could blame me? In the past seven months, I had gotten rid of a no-goodnik of a boyfriend, spent a week in codependency rehab, had two crappy dates, and put a stop to dating yet again. With food the only source of comfort in my life since it was the only thing I could put in my mouth and enjoy, I had gained back almost half the weight I had lost pre-Tommy, and clearly from the exchange in the Vegas restaurant, food was taking on a much more important role in my life than it had a right to. I needed to put a stop to it now.

  As I sat smoldering in my hotel suite that day, my head pounded from the two-show night before and the angry exchange with my friends. I changed into sweats since they were clothes I felt I could disappear in, and I thought and thought and thought about my food issues.

  Clearly, dieting didn’t work for me. For more than a quarter-century since my first bout with dieting in my freshman year of college, my weight had gone up and down more than a sorority girl’s head on homecoming weekend. That constant cycle of deprive, binge, deprive, binge had done nothing for me except give me a monthlong taste—at the most—of being thin before I gained all the weight back, plus some. It was clear: dieting didn’t work. So, what would?

  Sitting waiting for the red-eye that night in Vegas, I thought about all the diets that had let me down. There was the five-hundred-calorie-a-day plan from the Diet Center in Boston when I was eighteen. Now, to put this in perspective, five hundred calories is less than the contents of one money shot from a guy who has just been released from jail. That particular slenderizing technique had resulted in a loss of sixty pounds, some of my hair, all of my sex drive, and most of my sanity.

  Then there was the eighty-five-pound loss on Weight Watchers right after a graduate program at Harvard, which had stayed off for three months until my dead-end relationship with a former inmate led me to find solace in food once again. And most recently, of course, there was the shedding of thirty pounds on Jenny Craig, which was creeping back up as I sat waiting to board the plane. Now that I think about it, I’m not even sure whether I lost thirty pounds on Jenny Craig or if it just looked like it when I compared myself to Kirstie Alley in the commercials.

  Then, as if I was struck by lightning, an idea occurred to me. I had been able to stop contacting Tommy—and dating at all—because I was “feeling my feelings.” That’s what they had advised us to do in codependency rehab instead of reaching for the phone when we felt lonely, sad, angry, or insecure. So why couldn’t I do the same thing with food? I mean, I was obviously eating more than I needed to if the weight was coming back, so what if instead of eating when I felt those same emotions, I simply “felt”? It was worth a try. And since I’d learned how to shed Tommy in codependency rehab, maybe there was a food rehab somewhere out there where I could learn to do the same with food. Although, when I thought about it, food would definitely be harder to shake than Tommy since it smelled better and didn’t finish ten minutes before I did.

  Too embarrassed by my problem to ask my assistant to do an online search for “fat rehab”—I still hadn’t lived down the time I’d asked her to find me a really good set of ass beads that didn’t chafe—I whipped out my laptop and went for it. The first place I discovered was Sierra Tucson, a world-renowned addiction facility, which offered a forty-five-day food issues program. Forty-five days! That was longer than Lent. I mean, some murderers do less time in jail! Forty-five days was a lot. I knew I could talk my manager into a month off, but a month and a half would be pushing it. A month and a half off and I’d starve anyway because of the way I like to live and shop.

  Continuing on, I found a website for Rosewood Ranch, which offered an intensive in-patient program for seriously obese, bulimic, and anorexic people but also had a partial out-patient program, starting at twenty-eight days—the standard length o
f a stay in rehab.

  Now, that was more like it. I could swing the twenty-eight days. But there was one problem: I was under contract to work for the next four months straight, and as with all addicts, I wanted results now! Besides, if I waited to work on my food addiction until June, I would be ten pounds fatter. And if I continued to behave like a crazed wildebeest, the only thing I was going to lose was the friendship of my two petite openers.

  Scrolling down the page on which I had Googled “food addiction” and “rehab centers,” I spotted an entry for Onsite in Tennessee. Onsite’s website said they were a facility with weeklong workshops named things like “Healing Money Issues,” “Healing Sexual Issues (Men),” and “Healing Sexual Issues (Women).” I scrolled down their list, past “Living Centered” and “Equine Therapy”—horses? What the fuck?!?—and there it was: “Healing Food Issues.” That was me! I had food issues and they could be healed in five days—just like my codependency had been healed at Caron. Five days! What a score—it usually took more time than that for my hemorrhoid medication to kick in. Perfect! I had some time off in a month, right before I was scheduled to go to the Grammys, so I decided that this was meant to be! By the end of the next day, I had signed up and booked my ticket to Nashville.

  None of the fear and trepidation I had about my first stint in rehab was present as I drove from the Nashville airport to the little town of Cumberland Furnace, Tennessee—well, no fears other than the normal healthy ones associated with any trip to the backwoods of Tennessee. Gone were the anxieties about white-coated orderlies administering electroshock treatments and midnight rapes. Gone were my suspicions that Nurse Ratched would visit me after lights-out for a midnight lesbian cornholing. Nope—instead, as I wound my way to the Onsite campus, I was more worried about the possibility of seeing lawn jockeys in actual black and Confederate flags proudly displayed by people who hadn’t evolved past the 1800s. As I found my way through the four or so towns between the airport and my destination, I checked every house with a porch, expecting to see a small retarded boy playing a banjo. But as always seems the case with these rehab facilities, my journey ended at a lovely little farmhouse, but this time, the farmhouse was surrounded by woods and tiny cabins where, I assumed, all the fatties would be staying for the week.