We Are Fat and We Are Legion

by Benjamin Duffy

  Denny made reservations at Bernie’s Dining Depot in Chicopee, which is arguably the best dining spot on earth. The restaurant is in an old rail car and they have the biggest portions you’ve ever seen. They serve up the best home style cooking in the area.

  I had the babyback ribs and a potato. Scrumptious. You know it’s good when the meat falls right off the bone. Denny ordered prime rib and a potato with salad. He got the little caboose cut, which is the smallest they have, despite the fact that it’s an absolutely enormous slab of meat. One step above that is the “regular” cut. The big daddy of them all is the conductor’s cut, which is looks like they cut it out of a brontosaurus. Picture a piece of meat the size of a double-decker birthday cake plus a large bone and gristle. Denny didn’t order that one because he couldn’t finish it. I don’t think there’s a person earth who could conquer the conductor’s cut in one sitting.

  Dinner was romantic. He gave me a box of chocolates shaped like a heart. How sweet of him. After our meal, we lounged around and drank wine, chatting about the little things that had gone on during the week.

  Denny takes me by the hand to the bedroom where he sits down at the computer. With a flick of his wrist, he makes the screen saver disappear. He navigates to Youtube and types something into the search bar. I have a guess as to what it is.

  I recognize the song immediately. It’s our song, “I’ll Stand by You” by the Pretenders. A little smirk crosses my face.

  Denny shoots to his feet, extending one hand toward me in a beckoning gesture. I put my hand in his. “May I have this dance?” he asks.

  I giggle. That was just too corny. Corny, but cute. I’m also a little tipsy from the wine. “Yes. You may have this dance, sir.”

  He holds me close to his chest. I can smell his aftershave, Ralph Lauren’s Polo Black. We’re slow dancing like sixth graders at the school dance, except this time I’m not afraid to peel myself off the wall and hit the dance floor.

  I can hear his heart; his breathing too. We begin to turn very slowly in a clockwise direction, his hand on my back, my head on his shoulder.

  “Denny?” I ask.

  “Yeah?”

  “I love you.”

  “I know. And I love you too,” he replies. He gives me a twirl. There isn’t a woman in the world who doesn’t like being twirled. I giggle to myself. He twirls me again for good measure.

  I sigh. “Yep. I was just wondering if I told you enough that I love you.”

  “You tell me every day, babe.”

  “Yeah. And is that enough?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it too much?”

  “No.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ve got another bottle of wine in the cellar,” says Denny. “If you want any. It’s a very nice bottle from Germany.”

  I smile. Sure, I can have some more wine. Sleeping in is what Sundays were made for. Another bottle of wine might be a nice treat.

  “I’d like some,” I say.

  * * *

  I don’t know a single fat woman who doesn’t hate doctors. Going to the doctor’s office is a pretty humiliating experience when you’re as fat as I am.

  The only reason I went to the doctor this past November is because I found a new one. My previous doctor, a man, had had difficulties concealing his disgust for my body. I saw it on his face the moment he came in and saw me sitting in my bra and panties on his little checkup table with the long sheet of paper that always sticks to my thighs. He seemed almost afraid to touch my body with his stethoscope.

  Plenty of doctors share the same discriminatory attitudes toward fat people as the general public: fat people are a drain on society, they have no self-respect. Fat people are just gross. Given the fact that doctors usually belong to the upper echelons of society, there are very few fat doctors. They don’t associate with many fat people in their personal lives either. Many doctors have received medical training that has imparted in them some very bad ideas about why fat people are fat and what can be done about it.

  Doctors aren’t always right. It was doctors who used to run the dungeon-like “lunatic asylums” that regularly exposed mentally ill patients to electroshock therapy and lobotomies. It was doctors who gave speed and deadly nightshade to fat children. Some doctors even endorsed cigarettes!

  One study of health care professionals indicated that 84 percent thought fat people were self-indulgent. Seventy percent believed that fat people were emotionally disturbed. Many doctors sincerely want to “rescue” fat people from themselves, which results in frustration when their patients don’t lose weight. They’ve been taught that weight is a simple in-and-out caloric equation, and that their patients would lose some weight if they’d just have sufficient self-discipline to follow the doctor’s orders. Again, it’s fat people’s fault that they’re fat.

  When you’re fat, every doctor’s visit turns into a conversation about fatness, regardless of the reason you actually made the appointment. Correction: every doctor’s visit turns into a lecture on fatness. Conversations have at least two sides, and most doctors I’ve come in contact with don’t tolerate such backtalk from patients. A study from the University of Rochester found that the average patient speaks for only about eighteen seconds before her doctor interrupts her. Nor does it matter if you’re there for strep throat or a sinus infection. Somehow, the doctor’s visit always begins with a weigh-in (what this has to do with throats or sinuses, I don’t know) and ends with a sermon. Invariably, the affliction the patient suffers from is linked to “obesity” and then conveniently dismissed as secondary.

  Get thin first, then we’ll talk.

  Doctors can be unspeakably cruel to fat women. For their own good, of course. The doctor who yells at his fat patients has become less common in recent years, although not quite extinct yet. It was much more common in the 1950s and 1960s for a medicine man to lose his temper, yell, scream, toss his clipboard, and berate the trembling fat lady in his office. Fat women just had to sit there and endure the heated chain of personal insults—stupid, weak-willed, lazy, gluttonous. I have heard from other people in the fat liberation movement that such doctors still exist, although I haven’t run into one yet. The doctors I know have become much more proficient at hiding their bigotry.

  This doctor I visited harbored deep anti-fat prejudice, I’m quite certain. He didn’t seem at ease around me. He tried to conceal the same outward expression of disgust I get on the street or in the grocery store. Of course he gave me some pamphlets on weight loss which I deposited neatly in the recycle bin on the way out. I wasn’t trying to lose weight then and I’m not trying to lose weight now either. I have no interest in dieting or surgery or whatever else he had in store for me.

  People often ask me what my problem is with doctors. For some reason doctors still enjoy a pretty good reputation outside of the fat segment of society. Their profession is routinely listed as one of the most trusted among the general public. I don’t hold such a rosy view of doctors. There may be a few good ones, but there are also a lot of barracudas. In my estimation, they’re about as trustworthy as lawyers or car salesmen.

  In many ways, they are salesmen—they peddle drugs and surgery to people who don’t need either. Many doctors have been co-opted by drug companies, convinced that they need to push pills on their patients.

  The little known fact about pharmaceutical salesmen is that they aren’t men. They’re women. Usually sexy young things just out of college; preferably busty, usually blonde. These young chicks take crusty old doctors out to nice restaurants, wine them and dine them on the company’s credit card, then deliver their salespitches. The pervy old doctors become intoxicated with the attention they are receiving from pretty girls who are young enough to be their daughters and quickly agree to write prescriptions for whatever the pharmaceutical giant is pushing at the moment. Doctors will prescribe just about anything if there’s something in it for them.

  Amphetamines, for example, were promoted to doctors b
y the pharmaceutical corporations after World War Two. Big Pharma convinced doctors that amphetamines represented a cure-all, hoping that doctors would then prescribe them for a wide variety of ailments, including “obesity” and depression. It worked like a charm. A little public relations work exerted on the medical profession and doctors were writing prescriptions for the stuff left and right, bringing customers directly to the drug manufacturers.

  Even today, doctors whore themselves out, allowing their prestigious titles and white lab coats to be used by the highest bidder. Just write a check to the doctor and he’ll endorse your miracle, never before seen, fast-acting, totally safe, all natural, fat-burning pill or potion. He’ll even recommend it to all of his patients without revealing his own conflict of interest.

  So there I was, last November, ready to give modern medicine another try with a new doctor. I found her in the phone book. Dr. Candice Hassell, MD. A lady doctor. I figured that if someone had to see me damned near naked, I would prefer it to be a woman. Less embarrassing.

  I remember sitting in that room, on the paper, waiting for her to see me, with cool air tickling the exposed skin on my arms and stomach. I recall hoping against all hopes that she would open the door be as fat as me. That way she might understand a little better. Oh, how my mind would have been put at ease if she had opened the door and turned out looking like Rosie O’Donnell in a white lab coat.

  No such luck. She was a skinny bitch, through and through. She glided into the examination room like a ballerina performing a pirouette. I was glad not to see a flash of revulsion cross her face. I think I might have beaten the crap out of her if she had winced at the sight of my body. Kudos to her for that.

  But she was still a skinny bitch. If I had to guess, I’d say she was an athlete. Maybe a tri-athlete, one of those Ironwoman types who bikes and swims and runs like a gajillion miles a week. Probably done the Hawaiian tournament a dozen times. I’d put her age at just a smidgen under forty. Blonde hair and a massive diamond on her slender hand.

  Dr. Hassell went through her whole routine then gave me a hard time about my weight. I knew the lecture was coming but I still didn’t appreciate it. Doctors have a way of attributing all bodily ills to fat whenever examining a fat patient. “It says here that you’re 320 pounds,” she said, glancing at her clipboard.

  “Oh yeah? Huh.”

  To me, the number was meaningless. She could have told me that I weighed sixteen pi squared pounds. I haven’t owned a scale in probably fifteen years. I have no use for it. As a passionate advocate for fat acceptance, I believe that weight is entirely meaningless. Scales are for fish, not for people. I don’t weigh myself because I don’t care one lick what the scale says. Three hundred twenty pounds was of no consequence to me.

  “That puts you into the range of the dangerously obese,” Dr. Hassell explained.

  I nodded along with her. I pretended to care. She asked me about my diet and I told her the truth. A lot of fat women would have lied, but I didn’t. She asked me about exercise and I did the same. She gave me some pamphlets, which I threw out at my earliest convenience, just like the other doctor’s pamphlets.

  Maybe I’ll go back and see her again, but probably not for a while. I’ve accepted who I am. I’ve accepted my body. Dr. Hassell has not. She still thinks that I could look like her with a little diet and exercise. She’s wrong.

  Chapter Six:

  The Jarhead

  It’s happening again. I’m imprisoned here in this bed, my eyes scanning back and forth across the white ceiling. Not sure what I’m looking for.

  I can’t get up. I can’t face this day. I don’t know what this feeling is, but it’s really got a death grip on me. It’s as if the blood in my veins has been replaced with viscous sludge. Goo is circulating through my body. It can’t be right. I’d be well within my rights to call in sick. This must be a sickness of some kind.

  But there’s no way I can do that. I called in sick just last week or the week before. Must have been eight or ten days ago. If I called in sick again, that would just be the last straw. Patricia would have to fire me. I need that job and it’s not like they couldn’t find someone else to do it. Any old high school dropout could do my job.

  But I still can’t get up. I’m wide awake, fully conscious. I’m just incapable of leaving this bed. I command my arms and legs to move but to no avail.

  “Gabby,” says Denny. Denny is still here? “Gabby.” A little louder this time. “Gabby?”

  “Yo,” I say.

  “Aren’t you getting up?”

  I can’t for the life of me understand why Denny is still here. It’s Monday. He should be on his bus route right now. Wait a second, it’s February vacation. Denny’s still here because the kiddies have the day off. My bill collecting agency, on the other hand, is very much open for business.

  “Gabby, it’s time to get up,” says Denny firmly. “Your alarm clock was going off ten minutes ago. You shut it off. Can you hear me, Gabby?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I hear you.”

  I let my head flop to the left and try to see Denny. I blink several times to flush my eyes. I can’t see clearly this early in the morning, certainly not without my contact lenses. Once my eyes are in focus, I notice Denny standing at the corner of the bed wearing his UConn sweats. He sleeps in those. He’s holding a plate in one hand and a piece of burnt toast in the other. He seems to have dabbed a little golden yolk onto one corner of the toast.

  Denny places the toast on the plate and tugs my arm. “Gabby,” he says.

  “I’ll call in,” I whine.

  “No, babe. You can’t do that. You have to go to work.”

  He’s right. I know he’s right. The bastard. “I just can’t,” I say.

  “Yes, you can.” Denny places his plate on the nightstand then takes me by the hand and slips one of his arms under my shoulders. With a massive heave, he lifts my upper torso off the bed so that I’m in a sitting position. I suddenly feel that I can break free of this bed. I blink my eyes a few times. He kisses my cheek. “Let’s go, Gab. You’re going to be late for work.”

  I breathe deeply. I think the spell is broken. The sludge in my veins seems to have disappeared.

  “Denny,” I say.

  “Yeah?”

  “I love you.”

  “I know that, babe. And I love you too. But let’s get a move on while you’ve still got a job to go to.”

  I snort. That was funny. I move one leg out from under the heavy winter blankets. One foot falls on the floor with a thud. Cold air assaults my ankle. Then I drop the other foot. It’s going to take a lot of effort to lift my frame out of this bed. The next thing I know, Denny is lifting me to my feet.

  “Up we go,” he says.

  And then I’m standing. I push aside some of my dark hair and wiggle my shoulders to stretch the muscles in my back.

  “What are you doin’ awake so early?” I ask. “You don’t have work today.”

  “I know. But I thought I’d tackle some stuff this morning.”

  I nod. Right. Sure. Leave it to Denny to get up before dawn on his day off. He never ceases to amaze me. You’d never catch me awake at this hour if I didn’t have to be.

  I give Denny a kiss then trudge to the bathroom for a shower. It’s time to be a responsible adult.

  * * *

  There are a lot of things people don’t know about Denny. He keeps to himself a lot. He’s very quiet around most people, even me sometimes.

  It’s hard to believe, looking at his silhouette these days, but Denny was once rock solid. I’ve seen pictures of him as a young man without an ounce of fat on him. At one time, Denny was a Marine. A jarhead. A leatherneck.

  He doesn’t talk about it much. In fact, we had been dating for almost three months before he mentioned it to me at all. I asked why he’d never told me before and he said, “Because you never asked.”

  We were at a Japanese restaurant in Northampton when it happened. We just kind of stumbled on
the subject by accident when he pointed at three symbols on the placemat and said, “Sake.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Sake,” he repeated. “Those three symbols together mean sake. Japanese rice wine. The first two symbols mean ‘Japan’. The third means ‘wine’, or just ‘alcohol’.”

  I was impressed as hell. I asked how he knew and he mentioned that he’d been stationed in Okinawa with the Marines. You can imagine how surprised I was to hear this from a guy I’d been dating for three months. I asked more about his service and it became the main topic of conversation while we waited for our food. He told me that he enlisted in the Marine Corps after he graduated from high school in 1988. Then he started eating those little green edimame things with chopsticks, which really left me flabbergasted.

  “I bet you learned how to do that in Okinawa too,” I said.

  “Yup. Old Okinawan men eat these things while they drink beer. Kind of the same way old guys here eat pretzels and peanuts.”

  “Can you teach me how to eat with chopsticks?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he replied. He gave me a little lesson. I didn’t catch on that well but I tried. Trying to pick up the green things with two sticks seemed almost comical. Denny made it look easy. To this day, I still can’t use chopsticks, although I don’t blame Denny for that. He gave it his best shot. I just suck at manipulating tiny sticks. I prefer to stab my food with something sharp and metal. Give me a fork any day.

  Denny finished his meal with those chopsticks. Growing up in Ludlow, I don’t think I’d ever met anyone who could eat with chopsticks. How cosmopolitan of my Denny. Maybe I’m just easily impressed.

  Of course, I had to ask him if he’d been in combat. It seemed strange to ask, as if he might not want to answer. I’ve heard that veterans don’t usually like to talk about those things. But it wasn’t that hard. He told me that he’d been in Desert Storm in 1991. He was very proud of that. From time to time, he mentions little anecdotes about his stint in the desert. Maybe once every four or five months he’ll tell me a little story about a funny guy in his platoon or about how the sand got in his uniforms and he couldn’t get it out.