My blood pressure was sky high. I had crippling incidents of gout, which kept me either at home or getting around with a walking stick. One night, as I was heading into the supermarket, a jacked-up Jeep came screaming to a halt feet from me and a very pretty stranger, coincidentally in the crosswalk. The Jeep sat, idled, and revved as I “walked” past its headlights; I had two walking sticks because both of my feet were being ravaged and it was almost impossible to get around. “Move a little slower, you fat fuck!” the letter-jacketed high schooler driving the Jeep spat. I limped to my shopping cart and glanced at the stranger, who was looking at me with a mix of disgust and pity. Once upon a time I would have instantly started flirting with her. Now her pretty face was a mirror in which I saw that I was fat, broken, and lonely.
I was the person online dating was invented for, or so it seemed. I got the thrill of seduction without ever getting up from my desk. I spent deliciously long times spinning webs, delighting in the narcotic of fear and desire, explaining to Benny how this one was going to be the one. Velouria, I decided, was just beyond caring.
The problem came when I met the women. One after another, the spells were broken unceremoniously. It wasn’t enough to be desired by someone, even in my state—want had to be a two-way deal. It was a really awful feeling, going through six weeks of fantastical online gymnastics with women who were willing to meet me in spite of my weight, meeting them, feeling the spell break, and ushering them unceremoniously out of my space (both physically and emotionally), seemingly in an instant, as Benny and Velouria looked on. I just couldn’t lie.
Jill was immediately different; I didn’t need to puff out my artistic chest, didn’t need to flaunt the planks that made up my sociopolitical platform. She couldn’t give a damn. She was about the laughter and the want, and those two things started my motor from the deep freeze. Jill and I, from the day we e-met, laughed our asses off. Serious water-shooting-out-your-nose, knee-buckling, snorting fits. I recognized her as family, something I had been missing for so long. I could lay my four hundred pounds bare and I knew she just didn’t care. She had a family, friends, a steady job—in other words, things that ruled out stark, raving mad. She ran a dog-walking and pet-sitting business in Redondo Beach, outside LA, and besides a pit stop working in a yogurt store in high school, working with animals was all she had ever known.
We met in person for the first time in Vegas. That was a no-brainer. If it didn’t work out, there were plenty of things to console an addict, starting with (but certainly not limited to) gambling and all-you-can-eat buffets. I had my friend Amy at the ready with an exit strategy: when the phone rang at a prearranged time, I would find out Benny was ill, and I’d have to head back ASAP. Jill would understand that.
Of course it didn’t go down that way. We laughed and laughed and this time we could collapse together into a king-size bed at the Sahara. And thank God, because it meant that when my insurance company told me that I was costing them a fortune and I had two choices, gastric bypass surgery or gastric bypass surgery, I had somebody I completely trusted to help me get through it.
Benny, meanwhile, perhaps in sympathy with me, began developing his own eating issues.
There was the time, for example, that he stopped drinking his water. Whether he was thirsty or not doesn’t play into this; the fact was that I couldn’t get him to drink. He already refused, under any circumstances, to eat wet food, and I can’t even begin to describe this frustration, but that’s another story. But because of his reliance on water instead of food for hydration, he was now constantly underhydrated, with a lot of dander, a lot of excess shedding, and his coat was really dull. And then one day, because all his regular bowls were in the dishwasher, he walked up to a small, beveled glass tumbler that I was drinking from, seemed fascinated by the way the water reflected and danced off the engraved areas… and drank from it. He stuck his head all the way in and started drinking like there was no tomorrow. So, no questions asked, I went out to the ninety-nine-cent store and stocked up on those glass parfait ice-cream dishes with the same kind of beveled designs on the outside that refract light, and I put them all over the place in the dual hope that he would drink more water and have another piece of territory to call his own, to make part of his daily rounds. And sure enough, he drank from them. In true Benny style, however, if I moved them at all, he wouldn’t drink. In fact for the first several weeks I had to put little masking-tape Xs where the dishes were supposed to go—the end table, next to my bed, my nightstand, wherever—and eventually that apartment was covered in masking tape and ice-cream dishes.
Then he started pulling his fur out yet again, more vigorously than ever. The more compulsive Benny got, the less I understood him. By now this was a frustrating point of rage for me; the what, the why that sent him into fits of fur pulling, mutilating himself, was maddening. There are some behaviors that can be willfully swept under the rug. This was not one of them. This was a behavior that left scars, blood, pieces of him missing—and I could swear, when I caught him and managed to break the spell, cleaning fur trails from all around him, he looked… shamed. Like I had caught him in a destructive ritual that he had no power over.
I understood that my reading was wholly anthropomorphic and projected, and I wondered why it still resonated so deeply. And then I got it. The look I interpreted from him was no different from the look I remember giving to the pretty stranger in the supermarket parking lot, after the kids had called me a fat fuck, as I struggled to walk into the King Soopers to get a few frozen pizzas. And the look she gave me back, sympathetic with a hint of “why don’t you make a different choice?” was the same look I gave Benny, day after head-banging day. We were compulsive mirrors; I couldn’t help him, yet again, until I helped myself. In fact, I had to walk the walk again. I always told adopters that you are at the top of the energy food chain in your home. Your stress becomes manifested in your animal companions, as surely as it is manifested in your significant other, in your children. If you choose to share your life with others, you have a responsibility to check your shit at the door or others will suffer. And Benny was suffering. When was I going to learn that blind spots in him were Achilles’ heels in me?
There was a long mandatory waiting period between scheduling the surgery and actually having it, during which you had to go through a psych evaluation and classes. Fairly soon before my scheduled date, I started going to Overeaters Anonymous meetings. I gained even more weight, however, since my lower self was making noise about going out with a bang. The mandatory classes began ten weeks before my date. When I say mandatory, I mean, miss one and you’re done—no surgery for you.
A few days before the first class I was on the phone with Jill. “You know, I got this, kind of like, you know, my chest is tight…”
And she says, “You mean you have chest pains?”
“I didn’t say I had chest pains, per se. That sounds so… you know… I just feel a little bronchial.”
“How are your feet? Can you get into your shoes?”
“No.”
“You need to call the doctor.”
Again with the doctor thing. “Seriously, I do not want to call the doctor. I just don’t want to deal with this.”
But she girlfriended me into it. I called the doctor, and as soon as he heard “chest pains” and “swollen feet”—I swear I hadn’t hung up the phone before I heard sirens coming down the street. And now came the humiliating nadir of my fat humiliation: I was on the third floor of a walk-up building, and they wouldn’t let me walk down the stairs. They wheeled me out of my own house.
The hospital held me for three days, and on the first night the doctor did his own sleep study. The next morning, he walked in with a long tape of EKG readout.
“See this line?” he said.
“Yeah.”
“That’s you sleeping.”
“Okay.”
“And see this one here?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s your h
eart stopping for thirty-seven seconds.”
Beat.
“I died?”
“Well, we prefer to see it as a rest.”
“I rested?”
I was fucking dead. I don’t care what you want to call it. I’m sure there was a white light involved.
The third day of my hospital stay was the first of the required classes, so I had my drummer pick me up and drive me screaming down to the place where it was being held, and I showed up for the first class with my hospital band still on.
It couldn’t have been more movie-ready. There I am, sitting there with a hospital bracelet on, face-to-face with the rest of my class, forty people in various stages of about-to-be-deadness. And I insisted, gnawing that thing off my wrist, that they were SO much worse off than me, just like at that first meeting when I heard Dmitri talk of Christmas and his burned lips. But facts are facts. We were all about to be dead. If you’ve been in a room of people who all went into rehab around the same time, you can look around the room and say, this is what addiction really looks like. Everybody’s squirming, everybody’s detoxing, everybody’s a drug addict. In this room, though, I looked around and everyone had busted blood vessels in their faces, busted blood vessels in their calves and their ankles, canes, walkers, oxygen apparatus. We were all about to be dead by food. But as long as we stuck around and agreed to at least entertain the idea of learning, of breaking these chains, we might live not to see another Whopper.
My stomach surgery was done laparoscopically, which meant that I wasn’t actually opened up. What they do is bypass your stomach (mine was at this point the size of a watermelon) and part of your small intestine to create a new “stomach” pouch about the size of an egg right above your hip bone. (This has had some odd side effects. For one thing, when I get full now, it’s not in my belly, and that feels odd. And I don’t get heartburn because I don’t have stomach acid, which is great. But the downside is that food absorption doesn’t happen well. You eat to get full, but you have to get most of your nutrients from other places. You have to take in about 100 grams of protein a day. You have to get your calcium from other places. You have to get your iron from other places. Which I tend to be slack about.)
So I came home and I sat in front of the TV and I was crying. This is really pathetic and awful to talk about, but I was crying and I was saying to Benny, “I want a turkey sub, I want a turkey sub,” and I said it over and over and over and over again. I just wanted a turkey sub. And I thought that for the rest of my life I would never be able to eat one again. Then I made the mistake of calling Jill. She’s never been one for “It’s okay, honey, let’s talk about it, there, there”–type shit. Her family comes from Germany by way of North Dakota. Which is to say the family motto is: “Rub some dirt in it and stop crying.” Exactly what I needed at that moment in time.
Needless to say, though, the weight came pouring off me. There were some days I lost a pound, and some days I lost two. In seven months or so I lost over a hundred pounds. And I’ll tell you, that really screws up your body pretty good, not to mention your self-identification. I was no longer “the big guy.” I lost muscle mass, my hair went completely gray. But it was better than the alternative.
When I first got clean off drugs, there was about a two-year period during which I couldn’t watch images of drug use on TV. Pot smoking, drinking, coke snorting—those were the things that triggered me, that gave me using dreams so strong I sometimes woke up with the taste of coke in the back of my throat. But my using dreams of food were so much closer to the surface, because you never recognize it as being a bad thing. Food was just something I did a little bit too much of, but it’s not illegal. It’s a devil you have to dance with every fucking day of your life. You have to eat food.
Now, I haven’t worked my program as hard as I could have. I’ve gained some of that weight back. Quitting smoking didn’t help. But I’m still in okay shape, and one thing that’s allowed me to stay that way is seeing other people put back the entire amount of weight they lost. You can literally kill yourself doing that. But addiction is such a strong thing. I know one guy who, two weeks after the surgery, when you can only eat soft food, was putting chili cheeseburgers in a blender, blending them into a smoothie, putting it into a sippy cup, taking that to work with him, and nursing it for hours at a time. He would go out to places like Denny’s with friends, and he would come with packets of Saltines, which inflate the pouch, and then you can drink soda and inflate it even more, and then you can force some food in there. And then he would excuse himself to go to the bathroom and throw up. And then he would do it again and again and again. Your addiction does not go away just because you have a pouch.
That’s addiction. That’s what we do.
There’s a picture of me from the day before my surgery, and even though I’m smiling in the picture, there is a sense of defeat and misery in my face that I never, ever, ever want to see again. It can’t be an option. I’ve seen pictures of me drooling, stumbling around, high, that somehow I can dismiss, and I’m not sure why that is, but I cannot do that with food. Which made me think, I may have been addicted to many things in my life, but this was the thing that I learned as a very, very young child, and this was the thing that was going to kill me. Every day of my life I know that I could go and get high again, and I know that I can go drink again, and I’ll go into a tailspin and I’ll have a relapse, and there’s a 50–50 chance that I’ll pull out of it. But I can promise you one thing: if I have a relapse that involves me gaining, say, sixty pounds, I will never come back, because I’ll gain two hundred, and I’ll be dead. I’ll kill myself. I’m not trying to be dramatic here, but if I wind up four hundred pounds and suffering the way I was again, it will kill me or I will kill myself, because I will not do this again.
Sugar, Spice,
and Everything in
a Million Pieces
One of the first phone calls I got after my surgery was from this guy in Boston, a lawyer named Phil. I have no idea what brand of law Phil practiced, but it was definitely the money-making kind. He made it a point right after introducing himself to tell me how big his house was; after making me feel sufficiently like a pauper, he moved on to the problem.
The cat who’d been living with Phil for quite a while was named Sugar, so the new cat was—of course—Spice. She was a community cat from his neighborhood; he’d worked really hard on capturing her and bringing her into his home. Spice was a kitten, very loving and very adorable, and Sugar wanted to murder her.
Phil was convinced (and after hearing the recounting of the violence, I agreed) that there was no way I could do the job from Boulder, so he said, “I’ll fly you in first class, put you up in a suite, and pay you $1,200 plus expenses. You spend the weekend with me and my wife and two cats and just, please, make it work.” I had never had anybody offer me that much money before—the most I’d ever had in my pocket in my life was $200—and the idea of making $1,200 for a weekend’s worth of doing what I liked rather than for moving rocks from one end of the lot to another in a wheelbarrow seemed to be a message from the universe that I was on the right track.
Living the Zoned Life
Permanent site swapping is a controversial idea. Shouldn’t all cats have equal access to the space at all times? In a perfect world, yes.
In this world, certain cats just don’t like certain other cats, and we can’t make them get along. If you want to keep both of them, live a tightly regimented zoned existence. If one of them sleeps with you one night, the other one gets the next night.
In the cat world, separate but equal is okay. Your only other option is to consider re-homing one of the cats.
The key here is not what’s best for you but what’s best for them.
So I went to Boston and, after picking me up at Logan and taking me out to dinner, Phil explained, with a dry, acerbic wit, what was going on. Underneath the W. C. Fields–like put-on about hating kids and barely tolerating anybody or anything else, he w
as very serious about this issue, and the strain on his marriage was approaching the breaking point. His wife didn’t see why they couldn’t just find a home for this nice kitten, but he was convinced it was going to work—why wouldn’t it work?—and then he started in with the whole you’re-our-only-hope-if-you-can’t-do-this-I-have-no-idea-what-we’re-going-to-do-because-I-love-this-kid-so-much thing. We were walking back to his late-model Benz import, white, sleek, admittedly beautiful, when I looked down and saw, no joke, a pair of brass balls hanging from the rear bumper, the kind usually reserved for the trailer hitch of an F-350 like you see on the back roads of Iowa.
When we got to his house, before I had the chance to say I wanted to spend some time alone with the cats, which would’ve been the smart thing to do, I let him and his wife tag along and show me the place, which deserved its own zip code. The hugeness was magnified because it wasn’t cluttered with stuff, just clean lines and shades of white all around. A beautiful house right on a golf course—one of those enclaves where you imagine an entire neighborhood landing in the middle of nowhere, just like a UFO.
Ten minutes into meeting the cats I realized that I had my work cut out for me, but I didn’t think anything I tried was going to do any good. The resident cat, Sugar, wanted the other one dead. I’m usually the king of the silver lining who says, I know if Sugar wanted Spice dead that she’d be dead by now. Well, if Phil hadn’t kept them separated, living a zoned existence, methodically switching them out in regular intervals—she’d have been dead by now. But Phil was hell-bent on creating the picture he saw in his head of everybody being a happy family.
Cat Daddy Page 16
