by Sam Polk
I biked to the corner store and purchased a half gallon of chocolate-chip ice cream, whipped cream, and all the ingredients for a Betty Crocker chocolate cake mix. I baked the cake and when it cooled, I smeared the whole thing with chocolate frosting. I piled on mounds and mounds of chocolate-chip ice cream. I shook the can of whipped cream and sprayed until every bit was covered, as if by snow. Then I sat down at the table and ate, and ate, and ate. When I felt sick, I rested, then ate some more. When I finished, I stood up woozily and walked toward the couch. But I didn’t make it—I veered off to the bathroom, knelt before the toilet, and vomited everything up.
CHAPTER 5
Chicken-All-Together
¤
When Dad moved the family to a rented house in La Cañada—an effete suburb on the outskirts of LA—so Ben and I could attend the excellent public high school, I saw an opportunity for reinvention. I got my ear pierced and bought baggy jeans and a chain wallet.
La Cañada High School was small—three hundred students per grade—so our arrival set off a ripple of excitement. That first week, I received intricately folded handwritten notes from Stephanie Dodge and a girl named Mouse. I was attracted to both of them, especially Mouse. But as the week wore on, I realized Mouse and Stephanie were not part of the incrowd, so I ignored them. I wanted the popular girls.
I was fourteen and feverish with hormones. After school I’d sneak into my parents’ room and pluck out the Penthouse Forums my dad kept in his bedside table. In the sanctuary of my own room—for the first time, Ben and I didn’t have to share—I’d read the erotic stories and masturbate over and over until I was exhausted.
I figured since there were no gangs at La Cañada, I could be the tough guy. Those first few weeks, I stared down several guys in the hallway and was thrilled when they dropped their eyes. One day I stared down a short guy whose muscles bulged underneath his sweatshirt. He dropped his eyes, but with a smirk on his lips. That afternoon six guys surrounded me at my locker. The short muscular guy stepped forward. I thought he was going to say something, but then my right ear exploded, and my vision went black. When I came to, I was crumpled on the ground. The hallway was empty. I stayed home for a week, too humiliated to return to school.
A few months into freshman year, Ben started dating a girl named Emma Ramsdale. She had pimples, braces, no curves. But Ben liked her, and soon she was his girlfriend.
It was the first time either of us had a girlfriend, and I was jealous. I was also surprised. Since elementary school, things had been easier for me socially than for Ben. We were both nerds, but Ben took more flak than I did. He was always the smartest kid in school and, like many geniuses, had rough, abrasive edges. His sarcastic lash of a tongue, sweatpants, and thick glasses made him a frequent target. Toward the end of junior high, he’d started spending lunch alone in the library, studying algebra, because in the school yard he’d get picked on. And he was too scared to fight back.
But in high school he found refuge in Emma. She adored him. She was always over at our house. I became friends with her. Sometimes when she called for Ben, I’d talk to her on the phone for a few minutes before putting Ben on. I liked talking to Emma and wanted to be included.
That feeling only intensified when I was first invited over to Emma’s house, with Ben. Her house was everything ours was not. It was immaculate. The refrigerator was stocked. Emma’s mom cooked dinner every night. They ate together as a family.
Our Guatemalan housekeeper would leave a pot of spaghetti or greasy chicken on the kitchen table for dinner. We’d all eat at different times, in front of the TV. On weekends, Dad would order pizza, but in an effort to save money he’d order just one. You had to eat fast to get a second piece. Once I took a piece into the bedroom and hid it in a drawer. Then I went back, got another slice, and ate it slowly, savoring it. Mrs. Ramsdale would make home-cooked meals like Chicken-All-Together, a golden-brown chicken and cheese casserole. There was always enough for seconds.
When her husband walked through the door, they stood in the kitchen kissing and whispering. When my parents were in the same room, it was like being in a tank with two angry whales. I loved that the Ramsdales were still in love, and I harbored an innocent crush on Mrs. Ramsdale.
I wanted to spend as much time as I could at the Ramsdales’. I loved the cleanliness, the order. I loved being in a house where the parents weren’t at war. Emma didn’t seem to mind, but I could tell Ben didn’t want me there. But still I came. As the months passed, Emma herself started to develop. One day I noticed that her stick-figure body all of a sudden had legs, breasts.
For a while, I ignored my attraction and held to the delusion that since Emma and I were friends, I had equal invitation to be at their house. That idea was smashed when Emma’s family invited Ben, and not me, along for their annual Lake Tahoe family vacation. I asked Mrs. Ramsdale questions about the trip agenda, to make clear that I was available. But they never invited me. I was at their house as they loaded the van for the drive. I waved as they pulled away.
A few months after the Lake Tahoe trip, I was still hanging around Emma’s house, and Ben had finally had enough. We were in the Ramsdales’ living room with Emma and her younger brother. Ben and I were arguing. I said what I thought was the winning line and was smiling proudly when Ben retorted, “Why don’t you leave? No one wants you around.”
A nervous silence descended on the room. Ben and Emma’s brother went outside to throw the football. A minute later, we followed them, and when Ben was running backwards, his eyes on a high-thrown ball, I ran up and slugged him on the jaw. Ben was now bigger than me, but I knew he wouldn’t do anything. He was still scared to fight. He didn’t seem hurt. He just stared at me scornfully, until I turned tail and ran down the street.
At the end of freshman year, my closest friend, Nate Robertson, said, “Wow, you are really getting fat.” It was true. I’d weighed myself the day before—210 pounds. At every meal, I ate until I was stuffed, chasing numbness.
I laughed off Nate’s comment, keeping a straight face so he wouldn’t see how much his words stung. Later that day, for the first time, I decided to go on a diet.
I ate three times per day, about three hundred calories per meal: a small bowl of cereal, a bagel, or a turkey sandwich with no cheese or mayo. I literally counted down the minutes till my next meal. I’d get in bed shortly after dinner in hopes that I could fall asleep before getting hungry, but soon I would be tossing and turning, taking sips of water to cool the burning coals in my stomach.
That summer I lost forty pounds.
Then, at the beginning of sophomore year, Ben went out for the wrestling team. I knew he didn’t want me to follow. He had installed a lock on his bedroom door, one of those fragile slide bolts you find on bathroom stalls. I could have knocked it down with one kick, but its symbolism was obvious. He wanted distance from me, but I missed him and looked up to him, so I joined the wrestling team, too.
Wrestling is the perfect sport for a chubby kid dying to be tough. I began that first year wrestling in a 170-pound weight class but soon dropped to 160 pounds to fill an open varsity spot. In the off-season Ben and I went to wrestling camps and drove all over Southern California to compete in freestyle tournaments. By junior year, we were decent.
At practice I was always paired with Ben, which I hated. Whenever I went for his legs, it felt like getting in a car crash. It soon became clear he was the better wrestler.
I was getting tired of losing to Ben. In tenth grade, I scored 1400 on the PSATs. Ben scored 1510. During a bathroom break in the middle of the SATs, the most important test either of us had ever taken, I told Ben I’d missed at least three questions.
“I’m getting a perfect,” he said. And he had been right. He was physically larger than me, stronger, and a better wrestler. He had better hair than I did. Even his goals were bigger than mine. At the beginning of junior year he posted
a piece of paper above his bedroom door that read:
Ben Polk, Goals
• California State Wrestling Champion
• 1600 SATs
• Bench press 350 pounds
• Run five-minute mile
• Straight As
Every time I saw that sign, I felt diminished. A few months into junior year, Ben and Emma broke up. I gave it about a week and then started showing up at her house. Without Ben there, I felt less obtrusive, and fell into the easy machinations of a family’s routine. Now Mrs. Ramsdale would smile at me—just me—as I sat across from her at the dinner table. I would help Emma’s brother with his homework. And I would spend time alone with Emma.
At first it was innocent—we’d study or watch TV together. But I still felt guilty. When I’d hear a car pull into the cul-de-sac, I’d rush to the window terrified that I’d see Ben driving up. From Emma’s house I took a circuitous path home to obfuscate where I’d been. But nothing had happened.
Then, things started to happen. Small things. I helped Emma stretch, my chest against her back on the floor of her bedroom. We started sunbathing on her porch, and I would accidentally brush my hand across her legs. After a while, I started leaving my hand where it touched her. She didn’t object. I think we both enjoyed that we were crossing a line. But the line kept moving. I started stroking her legs, closer and closer to her bikini bottom. But still, I believed, nothing really untoward had happened.
And then, something untoward happened. We didn’t sleep together, but for a few glorious nights we did everything else.
After a few hookups, Emma stopped it. Of course, I never told Ben. A couple of months later, Ben and Emma got back together. He started to go again to her house, and sometimes she’d come over to ours. I’d greet her casually, as if nothing had happened.
But something had happened. And though Ben didn’t know for sure, he must have sensed something. Ben and I had both started drinking that year, egged on by guys on the wrestling team, who taught us how to casually slide bottles of peach schnapps under our tee shirts and smuggle them from the grocery store. But over the past few months, I’d started to suspect that Ben wasn’t just drinking with the wrestlers, but also alone in his room.
One night, I was in my room with Claire, a girl who’d progressed from platonic friend to shameful secret hookup to publicly acknowledged girlfriend. Ben was in his room with Emma. I went to the bathroom, and when I headed back toward my room, I passed Ben in the hall. My shoulder bumped his as we passed.
“What the fuck?” he said.
“What?” I said.
“Fuck you,” he said.
“What are you even talking about? Fuck you.”
He came up on me fast and put his forehead against mine. I saw a rage in his eyes that I’d never seen before.
“Do something,” he sneered.
“Fuck off,” I said.
He hit me in the face. My head rocked backwards. I didn’t so much feel pain as register the massive force of the impact. I stood there in the hallway, with blood running down my chin, and gaped at him.
“Hit me,” he said.
“No,” I said. He hit me again. His eyes were frantic. I could see he wasn’t going to stop. I couldn’t lift my arms. Not only was I now terrified of my brother; I was also thick with guilt. I deserved this. He hit me again. I took it. As he hauled back to punch me again in the face, my dad rushed out of his room and threw himself between us. I went into my room, sat on the bed, and burst into tears.
CHAPTER 6
Fifteen Pounds
¤
By senior year in high school, I was no longer fat—veins snaked my forearms and my shoulders. A thick layer of muscle covered my arms and back. My hair was bleached, mimicking how wrestlers from Temecula Valley and Calvary Chapel, two of the toughest programs in the state, wore their hair. The previous summer, Ben and I had gone to several wrestling camps, including a two-week intensive that was billed as the toughest camp in the nation. Every day after school Ben and I drove an hour and a half to East LA to practice with the wrestlers at Schurr High School, a regional powerhouse.
For senior season I cut down to 152 pounds. It was grueling—I was cutting 8 to 9 pounds of water weight for each match—but I loved how small my opponents were, how easy to throw. Midway through the season, I started to consider dropping even lower, to 145 pounds.
To qualify for state at a certain weight class, you had to wrestle several tournaments at that weight. The California Interscholastic Federation was concerned about the health risks of dropping excessive water weight. If I wanted to drop to 145 pounds, the match versus San Marino was my last chance.
The day before the San Marino match, I stood alone in the cold gray locker room on a cold gray scale. I hadn’t eaten since the night before. I took a deep breath and started sliding the metal cartridge over the grooves. As I passed 155 my stomach tightened; I thought I’d dropped a few pounds that week. The metal finger didn’t drop until I hit 160. Holy shit, I thought. I have to cut 15 pounds in one day.
I pulled on mesh shorts, a tee shirt, and then two pairs of sweatpants and sweatshirts. I’m already hot, I thought plaintively, as I pulled on a pair of plastics over the sweats. Plastics are trash-bag suits with elastic at the wrists, neck, and ankles that cinch, trapping the heat inside. I looked like an astronaut. I put on a ski hat.
I was an hour early to practice, so I jogged around the perimeter of the mat, the squeak of my ASICS my only company. Practice was brutal, two straight hours of intense drilling and hard wrestling. After, I lay exhausted on the mat. I hadn’t drunk any water during practice. I figured I had dropped six or seven pounds. My mouth was parched and I fantasized about a sip of water. But I knew this was only the beginning. I got up, walked out into the warm Los Angeles air, and started to run. I followed the trail the cross-country team trained on, each footfall bringing a brown puff of dirt. It was already difficult to swallow.
After three miles I headed back to the locker room. I stripped, toweled off, and stepped on the scale: 153 pounds. Not even halfway. Ben was dropping a weight class, too, and had to cut almost as much as I did. Even though we weren’t really speaking, it felt comforting to be with him. We walked to the car in silence, our mouths dry and lips chapped.
At the YMCA, we undressed, wrapped towels around our waists. We each held a credit card as we pulled open the wooden door, revealing the dark maw of the sauna. The air singed my face, and the scalding wood burned the back of my legs. Soon I was sweating. Sweat is a cooling mechanism; as it evaporates from your skin, heat leaves your body.
I started to scrape the sweat off with the credit card. The more I scraped off, the more my body produced, desperately trying to cool itself. First one arm, long swipes from shoulder to wrist, then the other. Then chest, stomach, sides, calves, thighs, face, and neck. Then again, in rhythm. Scrape, scrape, scrape, switch hands, scrape, scrape, scrape. Sweat pooled below me.
I’d committed to ten full credit card circuits of my body. Halfway through, I started to panic. I wanted to run out, drink water, quit wrestling. But I didn’t. I wanted to go to state. I wanted to wrestle in college. And I kept thinking about what had happened with my dad the weekend before.
The whole family was at Manhattan Beach, a forty-minute drive from our house. Dad and I started wrestling. I thought we were just fooling around when suddenly my foot slipped in the sand and I went down. He ended up on top of me, his heavy belly covering my face. He let out a triumphant whoop, loud enough so heads snapped toward us. I lay grimacing underneath him, waiting for him to get off. But he didn’t get up.
“Big wrestler guy,” he taunted, holding me down. “Still can’t beat your old man.”
“Get off me!” I yelled, arching my back and pushing him off.
He fell back but kept his arms high in the air, triumphant.
“Never going to beat your old man,” he said.
But I didn’t want to beat him. I just wanted him to be proud of me. That incident stayed with me all week. I’d remember the feeling of Dad on top of me, and my jaw would clench with resentment. In the sauna, I steeled myself for the excruciating pain I knew was still ahead of me. Sweat was still coming off me in buckets—it was when you stopped sweating that things became really hard. I watched proudly as my puddle grew.
My mind was a single camera, orbiting around an ice-cold lemon-lime Gatorade. Droplets of water condensed on the bottle. One slid down like a tear.
Eventually the panic and heat overwhelmed me, and I rushed out and lay on a bench, touching the metal lockers with my hand to feel their coolness. I savored that cool for five minutes and then, head hung like a prisoner, I reentered that dark oven.
After three hours of fifteen minutes in, five minutes out, Ben and I went home to endure a long, sleepless night. In the morning I was still two pounds over. After classes, I grimly piled on my damp layers of sweats and shuffled along the same dusty trail I’d run the day before. The sun beat down, but no sweat came.
Coach was in the locker room when I returned. He was angry that I was still a pound over. He put me in the front seat of his car, rolled up the windows, and turned the heater up full blast. While he drove, I sucked on Jolly Ranchers, spitting the saliva into a plastic cup. Coach’s face was dripping, but I didn’t start sweating until twenty-five minutes in.
I was still a half pound over when we got back but was too parched to do anything. I stripped to my underwear and lay on the cool stone floor, shifting positions every few minutes to new slabs to conduct away the heat. I kept sucking on the Jolly Ranchers, spitting toward the drain next to my head. My teeth hurt, like the enamel had been ripped off of them.
