The tater tots taught me early on how losing focus for even a second made my mind waver from its goal, left me defenseless against my body’s base and fleshy needs. My mind, it seemed, needed to grow stronger along with my senses.
At school I made myself sit and be still. I ignored my classmates, the words and emotions they disturbed the universe with, the stink of their bodies and their unwashed clothes and their hormones crackling in the air like popping corn. I could see now that I wasn’t universally hated, the way I’d imagined I was. Apathy, sweet and dull as gasoline, was the smell that came off most of them. And the hate of the actual homophobes had lost its sting, their coiled violence and cocked fists had ceased to frighten me.
Mostly.
Mostly I felt strong and unstoppable. Better than everyone. Superhuman.
But those moments still came. The ones where I caught someone staring, and shriveled inside. Where I saw my own reflection unexpectedly, and gasped with horror at the ugliness of it. When I felt weak and doomed. Subhuman.
You’re wondering, how is that possible, Matt? How can you be both sub- and superhuman?
That’s one of the more infuriating bugs in the human software. You can have two ideas that are total opposites and believe them both completely.
Of course, I ate. I couldn’t just starve myself. Not yet, anyway. But I ate very little, and every day I ate less.
When your body has passed a certain hunger threshold, food becomes the only thing you can focus on. The only thing you can think about. Pains pop up in the strangest places. Joints creak and scream, and their screaming sounds like the names of food. Very little is truly frightening, because you have learned the identity of your true worst enemy. And, spoiler alert: it’s you.
More than once, I spat out a strip of raw pink bleeding skin I’d unthinkingly torn away from a fingernail. So, another important thing to know about hunger: it can drive you into mild fugue states of self-cannibalism.
I sat, and I listened. I smelled. Did people know, looking at me, that I was transforming from a helpless sissy into something unspeakably powerful? I could barely see them, my peers, the people whose respect I once craved, the people whose hate I once dreaded.
At home, I kept researching.
Online I read about food developed by cultures with severely limited resources, and found tsampa. Tibetan roasted barley flour. Mountain food. Sherpas and yak herders take it with them on long journeys. Maximum nutrition, minimum space. Eat ten tablespoons a day—about 800 calories—and you should be able to keep your hunger in check. Keep the body alive. I found a place that shipped to Hudson, and put two ten pound bags on my mom’s debit card.
I clicked from Wikipedia to pornography. I watched superhuman torsos writhe and flail and grapple. Chiseled manly faces clenched in pain and pleasure. My stomach, angry at being ignored, clenched so tight I gasped. Black stars flashed in the air all around me, spiral galaxies of brain cells dying.
I stood up and collapsed.
I don’t think I was out for very long. If I was out at all.
The human body can go for up to thirty days without eating, I told myself over and over.
I was fine.
I was fine.
RULE #14
Should you ever need a reminder of what a savage animal your body is—should you ever start to doubt that you are chained to a wild creature—just hurt someone. Hurt them bad. And see how your body feels after.
DAY: 11
TOTAL CALORIES, APPROX.: 800
I invented a thing.
Food masturbation, I called it. In as much explicit detail as possible, I imagined a hot and heavy scene of mouth intercourse with cheeseburgers or pizza or the seafood fra diavolo at La Concha D’Oro in Catskill.
All fantasy, of course.
It is significantly less messy than actual masturbation. But afterward, I feel just as dirty.
I double-fisted french fries, shoveling them into my mouth so fresh from the fryer that they burned my fingers and my tongue. Salt fell off in slow-motion snow showers. I scooped handfuls of fast-food pickles into my mouth, squirted mustard all over my face in hot wet splurts. I sucked ice cream direct from the Dairy Queen nozzle. I bought an entire pizza from Pizza Pit, on Lower Warren Street, and ate only the cheese, because I don’t know what kind of cheese they use or what they do to it, but the cheese from Pizza Pit is a thing of beauty.
I bought more pizzas. I ate them. My food depravity knew no bounds. I rolled a whole pizza up into a tight tube and ate it in five superhuman bites, barely chewing, until—
A hard blow to the stomach snapped me back to reality. Gym class. Dodgeball. Boys snickered at the sight of me struggling not to throw up.
“Lay off him, asshole,” Tariq said to whoever threw the ball. Hudson High is a small school; lucky me, I shared gym class with Tariq and eight members of the soccer team. He squatted at the sidelines, having already been hit.
Loss of concentration is a common symptom of eating disorders. The internet says so.
Not that I have an eating disorder, but I’m not eating, so a lot of the same principles apply.
Concentration is a human process. Concentration means trying to keep a lot of things straight in your head. When your body is starving, it doesn’t have any patience for complicated mental maneuvers. It just wants you to fucking kill and eat something.
Aggression. My mind came alive. Different parts lit up, clicked together. Things that had never made sense before suddenly fell into focus. Physics, sports, human society—the awakened mind could master them all.
Effortlessly, I scooped the ball out of the air.
“Nice catch,” someone on my team said, shock in his voice. I held the ball in my hand for a moment, felt its weight, turned it over to analyze every imperfection on its well-worn surface.
“Come on,” the coach called. They stared at me, all of these brutal boys, these bloodthirsty hairless primates, these bullies, these animals. These weak spindly towers of delicate sinew, these fragile heaps of dying cells.
I shifted the muscles in my arms, my legs. I swiveled my hips and knees and shoulders. I was a magnificent machine. I knew the logic of my own body, and I knew the logic of the bodies of my enemies. How had I not seen this before? I could do anything with this machine.
Someone laughed.
Ott’s mouth made the word faggot, but all sound had dropped out.
I could see how to hurt him.
With a swift punching motion, bringing one arm forward as I brought the other back, I threw the ball at Ott. It hit him in his gut so swift and hard he didn’t have time to block or dodge—
—and, quick as lightning, the ball bounced off his belly and returned directly to my hands.
Physics. Simple.
Ott roared in pain.
“No shit,” Bastien said. I took one small step forward to add momentum and repeated the trick on him. His scream when the ball hit his solar plexus was high and deeply satisfying.
Throw—hit—bounce back into my hands.
Another boy curled in on himself, holding his stomach.
Physics was not some complicated theoretical science: it was real and rough and practical. Simple logic; the unshakable cold equations of gravity and weight and surface angles. The body knows physics in a way the mind never will.
I felt like goddamn Magneto.
I knew this day would come, I thought. A reckoning is at hand.
Hunger was helping me become the kind of monster that can make it in this world.
With six swift throws, I incapacitated the entire other team. Changing it up some, aiming for the knees or crotch or head when I could see their reflexes were sharp enough to block a shot. One of them ended up on the ground. Crying.
And, just for the joy of causing pain to these boys who had caused so much pain to others—or would one day cause pain to others—I took out everyone on my team, too.
And yes, reader, you’re right, perhaps I was going too far. Maybe not
everyone was a bully. But knocking them down just felt too . . . good.
The coach blew his whistle, a long angry shocked screech. Before the sound was finished, I had hit the whistle with the dodgeball, knocked it into his mouth and halfway down his throat. He coughed it up, spat it out. Everyone stared.
I smiled to myself, all the way to the principal’s office. I felt proud.
I had never been suspended before.
RULE #15
Sun Tzu said: “Engage people with what they expect; it is what they are able to discern and confirms their projections. It settles them into predictable patterns of response, occupying their minds while you wait for the extraordinary moment—that which they cannot anticipate.”
It’s astonishing, how many aspects of fifth-century-BC Chinese military strategy are applicable in twenty-first-century American high schools.
DAY: 12
TOTAL CALORIES, APPROX.: 800
It stayed with me, the adrenaline euphoria of hurting those boys. The moment played itself over and over in my mind, sending a fresh rush of pleasure through my veins every time. I could never in a million years have repeated it—I had somehow switched on to autopilot and accessed strength and knowledge I, under normal circumstances, totally lacked. But it had happened, and there were witnesses, and that’s what’s important.
My epic dodgeball victory came on a Friday, which meant my two-day suspension would start the following Monday. Which meant a four-day weekend. It occurred to me that getting in trouble was pretty awesome.
Saturday morning my phone rang.
“Hey, Matt,” Tariq said. “Got plans?”
You may be wondering, Dear Reader: why did Tariq suddenly want to be my friend? Why, when he was so popular and I was so not? And why, when I was a useless faggot and he was a ladies-man sports star, did he call me on the weekend to see what I was up to?
I have many theories. Here are my favorites:
1.Tariq’s busy throbbing social life left him feeling unfulfilled. There were plenty of ugly words I could use to describe Tariq, but stupid wasn’t one of them. Tariq was a smart boy with lots of stupid friends. His soccer teammates and the people they hung out with weren’t down for discussions of literature or politics or current events. The best he could do was Bastien, whose intellect lacked imagination, who shunned art and culture and anything else that might involve emotion. Perhaps Tariq wanted a friend who was his intellectual equal. So he turned to me. Which isn’t to say that I was very smart, but he wouldn’t be the first person to mistakenly assume that someone was intelligent because they were unpopular.
2.Tariq liked books. I liked books. No one else in our school liked books. So.
3.Tariq felt guilty. Movies and books are forever saying how criminals feel compelled to confess, how thieves and murderers who got away scot-free are nevertheless hounded by their consciences into doing penance, often in ways that lead to their capture. So even if Tariq didn’t explicitly say to himself, I did something terrible to Maya, maybe I can set my karma straight by being buddies with her poor, ugly, misshapen brother, maybe he felt some impulse pushing him in my direction, telling him to take pity on me, trying to feel better about the hurt he put on her.
4.Tariq was the helpless victim of the expert manipulation skills that my super-sharpened senses gave me.
5.Tariq was an even bigger sociopath monster than I thought he was, and having destroyed my sister by getting her to drop her guard he had turned his sights on me.
6.None of the above.
7.Several of the above, in a gruesome messy complex combination not even Tariq truly understood.
So I smiled and said, “No weekend plans,” and paused for just a second, and said, “Why?”
“Thinking of heading down to the city to see a punk show,” he said, and I could hear in the tone of his voice and the echo of the wind that he was sitting in his truck, alone. “Wanna come?”
“Absolutely,” I said without pausing, without thinking, without wondering whether Mom would give me permission, because nothing else mattered but this opportunity to be alone with my enemy. I grinned gleefully.
Poor little lonely Tariq, the lamb leading himself to my slaughter.
I remembered how his eyes lit up when he had a beer in his hand. No more so than most high school jocks, I imagined, but still, it was a weakness. Something I could exploit. I sniffed around the whole house until I found a bottle of scotch—so well hidden it made me stop and think—
I had never seen my mother drink a drop of alcohol.
I wondered why—and put the bottle in my book bag.
RULE #16
Life is suffering. Embrace it, endure it, and you will be stronger than everyone around you. Because everyone else struggles against the suffering, and you have learned to float on its current.
DAY: 13
TOTAL CALORIES, APPROX.: 800
These rules aren’t mine, mostly. I stole lots of them. Others I adapted, amended, updated.
Several rules ago, I said I thought I might be a Buddhist, but I don’t think I really know what that means. There is a lot of stuff on the internet about Buddhism, but it’s hard to make sense of. It’s not so much a religion as it is a philosophy or a way of life. It’s about not being materialistic. It’s about finding inner peace and enlightenment. So nothing like any of the really good stories I loved in the Old Testament. The kind where there’s fire and plague and smiting of the wicked.
And while I know that in Buddhism there are Four Noble Truths, I really only cared about the First one:
Life is suffering.
That, right there, was enough to make me a Buddhist. Or make me want to be one. Because that much I already knew was true.
It was especially true that Saturday, sitting, waiting, walking around the house, wondering when Tariq would pull up. Listening for the sound of his truck tires crunching on the dirt drive.
Because I’d made up my mind. On this trip, I’d start to question him. Nothing direct. Not at first. Just enough to feel him out, smell whether he had anything to offer on the subject of Bastien and Ott and Maya.
I opened my bedroom window and stuck my head out and shut my eyes so I could simply hear. Let my mind drift with the wind, focused on the sound of every passing vehicle, noticed for the first time how every single one had its own unique rhythm, a sound that belonged solely to it, made up of a million diverse pieces—engines, pistons, brakes, shocks, parts made of metal and plastic and rubber, none of which I knew the name of.
By then I had listened a couple dozen times to a CD Tariq had made for me. Punk rock was scary, its noise and its anger, but it was fascinating, too, the way horror movies had mesmerized me when I was a child, and for the same reason: because I believed that if I could survive the experience, I’d emerge stronger. These songs were raw rage, naked emotion, howls that combined the shriek of frightened infants with the bellowing of angry adults. They scared me, but they also made sense.
Rage, I understood.
I felt rage, even if I also feared it.
I couldn’t have told you what any of the songs were about. Incomprehensible lyrics with the occasional stray scrap that made sense, lines about love and rejection and The Man and long-defeated municipal legislative agendas—tough terse band names intended to intimidate, with words like Dead, Chain, Sex, Clash, Toxic.
Five tracks in, I felt close to crying. It was like I had never really heard a song before. Never really listened. Was it the power my hunger gave me, or was this what songs felt like to everyone? I shut my eyes, and I was there, inside the singer’s head, inside the echoing snare drum. I felt what they felt even without understanding a single word.
Music was magic. It could make you feel someone else’s emotions.
These were the songs Maya used to listen to. The ones she guarded so jealously, relishing her job as Older Sibling, enforcing Mom’s rules about no movies or music with cursing in it. Listening to them now, I felt like I could feel her. Like we
were connected. And it made me so happy.
I heard the music before I felt the truck, a windborne squall of churning chords, and I shut my eyes and felt it swell inside me as he came closer.
“Hey, Matt.”
“Hey,” I said, getting in. “Thanks for taking me along. What’s the occasion?”
He smiled. “I figured your multiple assassination deserves celebrating. You are now a legend.”
“Legend?” I said, and fought a war within myself over whether to believe him.
“Yup. Everybody is talking about it. It was pretty impressive to start with, but by the time the rumor mill got through with it, you had broken every window in the gym and caused concussions and forced the physical education department to ban dodgeball from Hudson High forever.”
“Wow,” I said, and then wondered whether I could trust my own memory of what happened. After all, given my abilities . . . “But for real—were any of those guys seriously injured?”
“Nah. Only their pride.”
I was surprisingly relieved. “They’re probably pretty mad at me,” I said.
“Actually, they’re impressed. Nobody thought you had it in you.”
Again the pleasure rush. I could see the peril in that feeling. I could see why bullies bullied.
“Anyway,” Tariq said. “You excited about our road trip?”
“I am,” I said. “I’ve never been to New York City before.”
“For real? How is that possible? It’s so close!”
I shrugged, decided not to say any of the real reasons. Because my mother never had enough time off from work to take us anywhere fun. Because we never had any money. Because, unlike you, my parents couldn’t afford to buy me a truck and give me the gas money to go wherever I wanted to go whenever I wanted to go there.
Saturday, late afternoon, the sky darkening already. I paused a second before shutting the door behind me, smelling the air, feeling the cold of the coming twilight. Rain felt likely. Mom was at work. She couldn’t stop me from getting in the car with a boy I had sworn to destroy. She couldn’t make me leave the bottle of scotch behind. She couldn’t make me eat.
The Art of Starving Page 7
