Everything
Still Tastes
Like More
There’s an unfortunate glamour to alcoholism, to drug addiction: whether it’s James Dean flying off a cliff, Kurt Cobain blowing his face off, tales of glorious excess from the likes of John Bonham and Keith Moon, these things are all—what—attractive? Somehow we see glamour in the last drooling, incoherent days of our idols.
There is, however, no glamour in being Mama Cass, Orson Welles, or Marlon Brando. Food addiction is not glamorous; it’s just humiliating. And yet for so many of us it’s the primal addiction. At six years old I couldn’t smoke or drink. But I could hoard and sneak food, and it was the buzz I got from doing that that I recognized in later years from pot, alcohol, pills. After all of the things I’ve talked about in terms of recognizing who I am, going to my first meeting, seeing myself in other drug addicts, other alcoholics, other smokers, other compulsive human beings, it was still a long painful road from there toward uncovering the primal from the swamp of shame that lay on top of it. I am an addict: An alcoholic. A drug addict. A food addict. The first two are easy now to say. The third isn’t and maybe it never will be. It makes me cringe.
When I moved out of the apartment I had shared with Beth, it was the first time in my life I got to live by myself. I thought it would be an instant feeling of freedom, but all it turned out to be was an opportunity to isolate myself. Any of “us” know that this is an invitation for our addict to come out and play. I’d broken up with girlfriends, broken up with my band, broken up with my friends, I wasn’t working at the shelter anymore, I was working on my own, my office was in my apartment. There were times when I didn’t shower or leave my apartment for four or five days. I was a “dry drunk,” not using but not working a program either; I was Caligula looking for a fix.
I wasn’t indulging in dope or drink or pills anymore, but I had to continue to “fill the void,” and finally this subconscious mission became literal. “Suddenly,” I was seeking out and living off of unbelievable quantities of fast food. I would have actual food blackouts; finding myself driving out of a fast-food place not knowing how I got in. I made light of it—it became part of my fat-guy repertoire. But let’s break it down. A double Whopper with cheese has 1,061 calories and 68 grams of fat, and for lunch I would eat two of them, plus a chicken sandwich (750 cal/45 g fat), plus a shake (760 cal/24 g fat), and a couple orders of fries (500 cal each/24 g fat). That’s 4,632 calories /253 grams of fat, for all of you counting. Which I never, till this moment, did.
Then I’d do the same thing somewhere else for dinner.
All my mirrors showed me from the neck up. You can’t blame me for not wanting to see anything else. But at one point my apartment building was being fumigated and I had to relocate for a few days. I took the cats over to Kate’s while she and her husband were out of town; to help keep them grounded in their routine while their territory was upside down, I kept them playing as much as possible. Benny was a play voyeur. He seemed to gather calm by watching Velouria absolutely go bananas. I was, as always, nicely outside of my own body while paying attention to them both, acting as Velouria’s surrogate prey as she did me proud by just being herself, a consistently amazing little hunter and jumper, while Benny gazed on, inscrutable. I trailed her fishing pole toy across the hard stone of the office, and UP! she flipped like a ballerina and caught the feather in midair. I was doing this play at first moving around the basement, but I ran out of breath, so I sat in an office chair, praising Velouria as Benny watched her snag her feathery prey and run off, clanking the pole behind her.
And then I caught a glance of something. The office itself was lit with desk lamps, and there were glass French doors separating the office from the rest of the basement, which was completely dark. Those doors had closed, and the reflection of the lamps created a ghosted mirror of Benny and me. And seeing it, I recognized only one of us.
Looking at myself, I thought, “Who are you?” All of the years that I vainly struggled to retain identification, ownership of this mortal coil. And in the end, I don’t even know whose body this is.
In the blink of an eye, my emotions bungeed from the bridge, the gorge spinning around me, the rocks approaching rapidly. The depression was sudden, a punch to the eye from a brass-knuckled hairy fist. Then, bobbing and weaving from the onslaught, I went straight to, “You know what? Fuck it. I’m done.” I was speaking to food. “I’m finished. I’m not dieting anymore. I lose ninety, I gain one hundred and twenty and I am losing this fight and I will always lose this fight, so if you want to be the thing that takes me, then fucking take me, I don’t care anymore. Are you proud of yourself? Well before you gloat, remember this: You get to kill me but I’m already dead.”
And over the next nine months I gained another eighty-five pounds, weighing in finally at four hundred pounds.
Jean and I, meanwhile, had been through a lot. But two people can live in the same pair of pants for only so long. As anyone who has had a business partner can attest, it felt like we might as well have been sleeping together. We spent way too much time together. Every decision made by two brains, every dollar spent. Our vision for the products and for our ideology never diverged. I was, however, building resentments during the time of her recovery from her heart condition; I was convinced that at the end of the day, she just wasn’t pulling her weight. I would sit at my desk, falling asleep in front of a thrice-revised mission statement, knowing that Jean had been asleep for hours, and I would start that seemingly unstoppable argument that I was only able to accomplish in my thoughts. There is an inherent problem with this kind of karmic constipation—flower essences are an energetic medicine, and if you’re sitting there thinking poisonous thoughts while you make them, it will just be passed on, a vibrational bad penny. So I knew that the problem really had to be solved.
One day I came home from doing a consult and when I petted Benny, he backed away out of arm’s reach with a decidedly funny look, both facially and physically. And within thirty seconds he started to throw up. Then something took a radically weird turn and he started to hurl himself against the wall, foam flying out of his mouth. I had never seen anything like it in my life.
I got in my car—all four hundred pounds of me—and went screeching with him over to the twenty-four-hour clinic, and meanwhile the foam was just pouring out of him, covering the outside of his soft-sided carrier. I was consumed with panic, but had to keep talking to him, keeping one hand on him. They got him on the table, and immediately he started dying.
“What the hell is happening?” said the vet, both to me and her tech simultaneously.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“I don’t know!!” yelled the tech, trying to intubate Benny and failing. His convulsions were simply heartbreaking—and worse, baffling to the professionals in front of me.
“I mean, he had a dental done a couple weeks ago,” I stuttered, “and he had a hard time coming out of anesthesia. Like, it took way too long. He wasn’t right for days.”
“That’s what it is, then,” the vet said. “That was demonstrating an underlying heart condition, and this has to be a heart attack.”
And then Benny died.
The vet brought him back with an epinephrine shot, but immediately he started foaming up again.
I remember, in that moment of unbridled panic and desperation, asking him, Do you want me to let you go? And his convulsions stopped and he stared me dead in the eye. I knew—I don’t know how I knew, but I knew—that he was telling me he wasn’t ready. The vet was asking me to let him go. So was the tech. And I said, “No—keep working.”
The vet thought I was insane, but we fought for Benny’s life for hours. She kept telling me, “You might want to say good-bye.” Finally, when he died again on the table and we brought him back again, when he was resting for a moment in an oxygen chamber, I collapsed outside around a cigarette. And after six hours of the worst kind of bad trip, the idea occurred to me to ask for help.<
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Don’t get me wrong—there were many people to call. Friends, sober friends, my sponsor, bandmates, old HSBV coworkers, all of the vets I had made connections with in my first few years of consulting. I just didn’t think of being anything but alone. Again, as always, this was classic addict behavior. Addiction is incredibly isolating. Inevitably there’s a bridge crossed where partying with others becomes procuring, preparing, and using—alone. You spend all your time getting high by yourself and doing all those rituals by yourself, and then later, when you’re clean and all these feelings are woken up, and you’re starting to live again and experience emotion again, there’s something in you that says, well, you should be doing that by yourself, too. Demonstrating anything was shameful. I was off Klonopin. Jen, in a multiprescription-drug-fueled haze, had broken up with me, and I thought I was alone. That was no reason in itself to panic. I just was.
But as the slowest-burning cartoon lightbulb imaginable ignited above my head, I realized that I could call Jean. I didn’t want to, because I wanted to keep my relationship with her at that point very strictly business, since I knew our partnership was on the brink, but at that moment I thought, I’m lost without her and I don’t know what to do and I need her. So I called her, and somehow, driving down from 10,000 feet, she was there in fifteen minutes.
And then things got crazy.
Jean walked into the room, looked at Benny, and said to me, before she even put her bag down, “I don’t think that’s a heart condition. I think he’s choking on something.” And the more she talked, the more it made sense.
“Absolutely not,” said the vet.
“Can’t you just X-ray him to check?” I said.
“With his heart condition, because that’s what this obviously is, the stress of putting him under the X-ray would kill him.” And nothing Jean or I could say would change her mind.
But finally her shift was over, and when her replacement came in to relieve her, he took one look at Benny and said, “I don’t know what this is, it may be a heart condition, he may be choking, but he’s dying either way, so we might as well at least find out whether there might be a way to save him.”
So we got to the X-ray and, sure enough, there was some kind of blockage. Benny was not a big cat (he always hovered around seven pounds), and I looked at the X-ray and said, incredulous and somehow relieved that there was an answer, “Is that a Matchbox car?” It was as if he’d swallowed something not a whole lot smaller than he was.
“Whatever it is,” said Jean, “the damn thing has to come out.”
“We don’t have an endoscope,” the relief vet said gently. Our only choice, she said, was to go to another animal hospital, twenty-five miles away, wake up the surgeon—it was 1:00 a.m. by now—scope Benny, and figure out what the hell was going on.
The problem was, Benny was so freaked out that, if he got in the backseat of my car awake, he was going to give himself that heart attack that the first vet had practically wished into existence. So we had to sedate him. But we couldn’t give him anesthesia, because you can’t drive around with an open, functioning oxygen tank in the backseat of your piece-of-crap car. So the vet and her tech sedated him with an IV and intubated him, which was pretty amazing—to put a tube down the throat of a cat whose throat is already clogged up—and then Jean got in the backseat of my car with Benny’s limp body in one hand, and the airway bag in the other, squeezing it rhythmically, breathing for him, and I got in the front seat and I drove that goddamn car like it was a rocket with the Dukes of Hazzard theme song playing, with Jean yelling, “Drive faster! Drive faster!” because on IV sedation he would wake up in about twenty minutes, and that was the one thing that absolutely could not happen. I made the twenty-five miles from Boulder to Wheat Ridge in twelve minutes.
When we got there, Jean went running in—this was where bulldozer Jean worked really well—put Benny on the counter in the bag, and said, “This cat needs to have an endoscopy right now.”
And the guy at the front desk said, “Well, first we need to—”
“RIGHT NOW!” Jean exploded, and there is not a person on earth who could have disobeyed her.
She got us into the operation room to witness as the surgeon, distinguished and disheveled from the bed we had just pulled him out of, took the scope and slid it in Benny’s throat with an incredible agility, and he showed us what was down there: a hair ball.
The biggest fucking hair ball I have ever seen, to this day. I still have a picture. For the price I paid, I should frame it.
Instantly, as he pulled the hair ball out, Benny got his color back and started breathing again. And then he pulled out another hair ball, and that was that. Benny went into recovery and stayed at the hospital for three days so his insides could get back to normal. The bill was $3,600, and I remember this because that was the day I decided I didn’t care if I maxed out my credit cards, because that was how you have to live. And yes, I thought about how many times I had run credit card cons to get drugs, and what I would have done once for $3,600 of dope. Being able to take care of that boy was what guardianship was all about. I felt… clean.
And the next day when I talked to Jean, it was with not a sense of resentment but with an incredible depth of appreciation for who she was and everything she had brought to my life, and it changed our relationship on the spot. Being reminded of how much I loved her as an unbelievable presence in my life, and how a few years before she had allowed me to walk out of that shelter and into a new phase of my life absolutely holding my hand, absolutely guiding me through—it also reminded me of what’s truly important in life. I didn’t care anymore that our business was dissolving. I would make it work for her, and I would make it worth her while to sell me her interest in Spirit Essences and Little Big Cat. And she was totally amenable to it. I would own the company outright, and I wouldn’t feel resentment anymore about working constantly for her because I’d be working for me.
The Last Supper
with My
Compulsive Other
By now I was no longer having blackouts at fast-food drive-throughs and joking about them with friends; I was literally drowning in food. I ate 24/7. Yes. I fell asleep chewing. Didn’t even think that was possible. Just like when you’re trying to make sure that your dope is taken care of, you don’t wait until you’ve got four joints left, you don’t wait until you’ve got three lines of coke left, you don’t wait until you’ve got a quarter bottle of wine left, you don’t wait until you’ve got two cigarettes left—you do not wait until you’ve got two pieces of leftover pizza in the house. You line up everything so that you can enable your isolation, so that you can make sure that your perceived control over the universe is in place. You’re always thinking three steps ahead. I’d buy four orders of large fries so that I could have two right away and two later that night.
I kept getting accidental feedback from others and doing an amazing job of ignoring it.
“What are you doing today?” my mom said once on the phone.
“Well,” I said, “I was going to go to the mall, but I can’t get my feet in my shoes today.”
There was a long pause. “What do you mean, today?”
“Oh, there are just some days when my feet just get big and I can’t get them into my shoes, so I walk around barefoot.”
“Honey,” my mom said very carefully, “that’s called edema, and it’s your heart. You have to get to the hospital right now.”
But going to the hospital would have been a big pain in the ass. So I bargained. “I’ll go tomorrow, Mom.”
“No,” and then in measured tones, “you need to go now.”
“It’s the weekend, which means I’d have to go to the ER, and I don’t have money for that.”
“Honey,” I heard the unmistakable tone of her speaking through her teeth, “I. Don’t. Care.”
She just wouldn’t let me slither out, so I finally went to the hospital, and sure enough, I had edema. I still have the marks on my legs and
feet from how swollen they were, the busted blood vessels that just became part of the scenery.
When I went home to New York, my family never said, “You’re fat.” But my dad, who is diabetic, would always be running around the house trying to poke me with his little meter to get my blood sugar level. And I’d make fun of him and say, “Dad, do you realize how old and Jewish this makes you look? Will you stop? I’m fine.” He and his glucometer finally caught up with me, hovering over my air mattress at 7:00 a.m. I looked up and he was standing there. Terrified and vaguely surprised I wasn’t lying in a puddle, I said, “You know what, fuck it, take my blood.”
“Thank you,” he said, and poked me with the thing. And when he was done, he looked at it, and all the blood drained from his face, because my glucose was at around 400, which, I found out quickly, is fucking high. He was fighting the twin towers of fear for the life of his son and the desire to say I told you so. This wasn’t his usual vicarious hypochondria; I was diabetic.
But I still didn’t do anything. And the dominoes continued to fall. There is, I believe, a very specific number, and at one pound over that number your body begins to tell you to screw off; it will not work any more overtime to support an uncaring employer. Things just fail.
“I see how big you are,” said a friend I’d met while at the vet with Benny, a friend whose husband had sleep apnea, “and I see that look in your eyes from the twenty cups of coffee you have to drink to stay up. You need to have a sleep study done.”
I rolled my eyes with the subtext of, “So don’t have time for that.”
“You do realize this could kill you?’
“Yeah,” I said, “but I’m really busy.”
That’s actually what I said. “Yeah, but I’m really busy.”
I did the sleep study despite the protestations of my lower self. And it turned out that I was having sixty episodes an hour in which I held my breath for more than thirty seconds, which meant that for more than thirty minutes per hour I wasn’t breathing. And during these episodes, there was no way to get into REM sleep. I was literally not sleeping. I was diagnosed with sleep apnea and introduced to what I called the “mask-and-hose snorkel”—the contraption that hooks you up to the awful CPAP machine—that I had to wear while I slept. Mostly the thing wound up thrown violently on the floor.
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