Born Round Read online

  But the twelve-hour days didn’t let up. Neither did the binges at the end of them. Increasingly they came to seem automatic, inevitable, more reflex than choice. And I was less agent than audience, watching myself gather up the food, watching myself lay waste to it, watching myself expand, then turning my eyes away.

  As badly as I wanted to lose weight and as often as I pledged to, I also discovered that there was a strange mercy in being fat, a peculiar sanctuary. Being fat absolved me, in a sense, of so many other flaws. It took the blame for a whole host of setbacks and disappointments. It was a handy, hefty scapegoat.

  Not managing to strike up interesting conversations at a party?

  That’s because no one gravitates toward the fat guy.

  Not getting invitations to many other parties?

  No one fattens the crowd with a fat guy.

  Not doing as well as other reporters in cultivating Congressional sources?

  A fat guy doesn’t cut as compelling a figure or project as much confidence.

  Love life moribund?

  A possible deficit of wit or shortfall of charm needn’t be pondered. Fatness is so far ahead of them in line.

  I was getting to be a practiced, accomplished celibate. During my three and a half years in Manhattan, after my move from Detroit, I’d been sexually involved with just two people on a total of three occasions. Those three occasions were the only ones when I’d so much as kissed someone else. And during my first nine months in Washington, I’d been sexual with just one person on all of two occasions. Five physically intimate moments across more than four years: I didn’t need a Masters & Johnson study to tell me that this wasn’t usual for a successful single man in his thirties, gay or straight.

  I was in retreat, my weight a reason not to reach out or take risks. I’d deal with my love life once I got thinner. I’d be more aggressive in trying to find original stories on Capitol Hill and make more of a name for myself once I got thinner. Until I got thinner, I certainly couldn’t model myself after reporters who broke news and then rode their prominent bylines onto political talk shows. I wasn’t fit for TV.

  Fatness simplified life and lessened the stakes. It put life on hiatus, making the present a larded limbo between a past normalcy and a future one. It argued against bold initiatives.

  But while I wasn’t trying to make things happen, they nonetheless happened to me. In the late summer of 1999, nine months after my relocation to Washington, the newspaper’s bureau chief in D.C. gave me a new assignment. George W. Bush, the Texas governor, had just formally announced his candidacy for the presidency. And I was to begin shadowing him full-time, going to every speech he made and major event he attended, hanging out in Austin when he wasn’t on the road, interviewing him whenever he allowed it, schmoozing with and getting to know his advisers.

  It promised to be fascinating. But it would also be a magnification of much of what I disliked about covering Congress: the race against so many other journalists for the same stories; the media groupthink that I either had to fall into or rebel against; the relentless pace and deadlines; the smarmy entreaties from political operatives trying to promote their agendas.

  And it was the kind of assignment that did damage to many reporters’ health, mental and physical, as two campaign-trail veterans in the Times Washington bureau immediately cautioned me. As they painted a picture of the road ahead, they emphasized that I’d have little or no time for exercise; that I’d be surrounded by the most fattening kinds of food; that I’d drink too much at hotel bars with fellow reporters on the trail.

  “Be really careful,” one of these veterans said. “A lot of reporters gain ten to fifteen pounds.”

  I flinched, first off because I could tell that this wasn’t a warning given to everyone. It was a warning for people who showed some evidence of having trouble managing their weight. But I also flinched at the threat of those ten to fifteen pounds. Then I laughed inside, because these bureau veterans didn’t realize how lunatic the idea of another ten to fifteen pounds was. They’d known me only since I’d come to Washington and weren’t clued in to my life years before. So they weren’t aware that I was already more than ten to fifteen pounds over how I was really supposed to look and how I would look as soon as I found my way out of this current slump. They didn’t account for the fact that I was at my absolute apogee.

  The next months—August, September, October—hurtled by, a blur of Bush speeches in New Hampshire and Bush rallies in South Carolina and enormous buffets of food at many of them and chicken wings and cheeseburgers at midnight in Marriotts and Sheratons and Hiltons in a half dozen states.

  In late October, during one of my rare breaks from the trail, when I was back in Washington, I found myself trudging to the Gap for new pants.

  I usually bought work clothes that were slightly nicer, from stores somewhat pricier. But I went to the Gap for the same reason I’d gone to T.J. Maxx when my weight had ballooned in Detroit: I had to believe that this new, worse ballooning was another exceptional situation, and that the pants I was buying were the most temporary of measures, calling for the most modest of expenditures. Besides which, I didn’t deserve pants any better, not when I was in this kind of shape.

  I bought four pairs of pants in all: size 38 chinos in a light tan and a darker, green-hued tan, and size 40 chinos in the same colors. While the 40s fit better and were the real reason for my trip to the store, the 38s were truer to what I was telling myself: that I was going to turn the corner any day now and be the lesser of the two sizes. I chose the colors I did because they were neutral, disposable, another sort of assertion that I was in a brief holding pattern.

  Over the next months, my waist-down wardrobe for my assignment covering a potential president for the most influential newspaper in the country was confined to two cheap pairs of chinos, size 40. For a while I packed the 38s, too—maybe I’d succeed in fasting for two or three days on the trail and all of a sudden they’d fit. Then I stopped hauling them around in my suitcase, because the fast never happened and the 40s themselves were increasingly tight.

  I resorted to dry-cleaning the 40s rather than laundering them, so that they wouldn’t shrink and I wouldn’t have to consider moving up to an even larger size. The 40s were as high as it could go. On this point I was adamant.

  New Year’s Eve wasn’t a holiday that my dad, my siblings and I necessarily spent together. After Christmas we’d often go our separate ways, return to our separate homes, save New Year’s Eve for big par ties and for friends. But for New Year’s Eve 1999—the turning of the millennium—we agreed that we should celebrate with one another. A moment this big and symbolic needed to be spent with the immediate family.

  Dad asked us to join him for a black-tie dinner at the Scarsdale Golf Club, where our family had been members for many years and where he, now retired, practically lived, sometimes playing thirty-six holes of golf a day. We’d be joining not just him but Dottie, a woman he had met about a year after Mom died and later married. It was odd to see them together—to see him with any woman other than Mom—and it was sometimes awkward, too, because she was such a stranger to the family’s dynamics and traditions. But I was glad he wasn’t as lonely as he’d obviously been during the first years after Mom’s death.

  Mark, a predictably big success at the high-powered consulting firm where he worked, owned his own tuxedo. So did Harry, who had unpredictably redirected the enthusiasm he had once trained on Star Trek and then lifeguarding toward investment banking, and was every bit as successful as Mark. But I had to rent a tuxedo, which meant letting some stranger lasso a tape around my waist and fiddle with the ends of it until he had an accurate inch count. I tried not to watch. I didn’t want to see the numbers on that tape.

  I chose a cummerbund instead of a vest, hoping it might function as a kind of man-girdle. And as I walked around the party letting Dad introduce me to his friends and obediently furnishing them with lively behind-the-scenes anecdotes about Governor Bush,
I kept reaching down to pull on the cummerbund’s clasps and bands, to cinch it ever tighter. Maybe this man-girdle, coupled with the darkness of the tuxedo jacket over it and the amusing stories I was spinning, would prevent anybody from noticing how enormous I was. Maybe I could sail into a new year, a potentially good year, as something less than a blimp.

  Me (upper right) with Adelle (lower right),

  her husband (lower left) and some family friends.

  Mark looked thinner than ever, thanks in part to his itty-bitty-bites approach to meals. Adelle looked good: whatever curves she had weren’t necessarily liabilities. Harry looked good, too. The weight lifting during those lifeguard days in La Jolla had given way to long-distance running—he’d even done the Boston Marathon—and while fatherhood and work were increasingly cutting into any exercise time, he had the body equivalent of a lot of goodwill stored up.

  But he struck me as maybe a bit too full of himself. Because he was my younger brother, I never shrank from the task of deflating him.

  At the New Year’s Eve party, the pinpricks I made concerned how much he liked to spend money. His salary went up and up, and he charted that progress in cars, wine, nice jewelry for Sylvia and extensive home renovations. He could be showy, and on this night, as I sloshed through a third martini, I called him on it. I asked him if he and Sylvia now owned four cars or three. I asked him how many pairs of cuff links he had amassed.

  I didn’t see the color rising in his face until it was too late.

  “Well, Frank,” he said, pausing for a loaded moment, “at least I’m not fat.”

  Sylvia, standing within arm’s reach of us, looked away. Adelle, also nearby, studied her shoes. The words hung there, heavier than me, and the silence in their wake stretched on and on, surrounding us like some ghastly bubble, beyond which I could hear the muffled strains of the party’s music and laughter.

  I had to get away.

  I turned, walked out of the club’s main dining room and hustled down the first staircase I found. I had some vague knowledge from the past that there were little-used hallways and bathrooms and locker rooms below ground level: hiding places. I wanted to be somewhere no one could see me. I needed to be invisible, because what I felt right then was hideously and horribly exposed.

  So: they’d noticed. The whole family had noticed. And there was something in the what-the-hell, screw-the-tact tone of Harry’s insult that suggested that they’d also been marveling for some time at my deterioration, discussing it, probably even cautioning one another not to mention it to me, because they all knew how sensitive I could be when it came to my weight and weren’t sure how to nudge me in a healthier direction without sending me into a tailspin. They were pitying me, and what I felt now, as my stomach cratered and my heart jackhammered, was pitiful.

  I started crying. In a far corner of a back hallway in an unfamiliar basement, I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes to try to stanch my tears and I pressed my lips together to try to muffle any sound. I couldn’t control the violent rising and falling of my chest, the whistling intakes of breath. I thought about Mom—couldn’t stop thinking about Mom. Although she more than anyone else in the family would have hated seeing me like this, I wanted her here, needed her here, needed someone unafraid to ask me what the hell was going on and tell me I was in trouble and be able to do both without breaking me. If she’d been around, would I have let myself go? If she’d been present, would the impulse to do so have been so strong in the first place?

  After ten minutes I found a bathroom, splashed cold water on my face and stood at the mirror, waiting for the wildness in my eyes to dim, for my nose to stop running, for my breathing to even out. I recognized this drill from those college days when I answered binges with purges. Here I was, more than fifteen years further down the road, and still I hadn’t found a steady way to navigate it. Still I was lurching and swerving and scraping the rails.

  When I rejoined the party, I stayed away from Harry, because I owed him an apology and didn’t want to give it, and because he owed me one and I didn’t want to hear it. I wanted the whole incident forgotten. If we revisited it, even obliquely, we’d just be giving it staying power.

  I knew that the surest way to lose the shame I was feeling was to lose some weight. But the hell of it was that I’d never been in circumstances that made that more difficult. By January 2000, the Bush campaign had entered the phase in which reporters no longer forged their own paths in following the candidate. Instead they lashed themselves to the candidate’s entourage. That entourage assumed control of their lodging and their transport.

  That entourage also assumed control of their feeding.

  Thirteen

  The advent of eating is the crack of dawn. That’s when the first of the day’s many meals comes along, and it’s no off-the-cuff, on-the-go improvisation. It’s an upsized, deconstructed Denny’s Grand Slam, sausages in one steaming metal warming bin, bacon in another, a viscous ocean of scrambled eggs here, leaning towers of pancakes there. The bins fan out along the wall of a hotel banquet room, its air humid in a way that’s particular to the presence of enough cholesterol for at least two hundred people. Those of us in the press pack shadowing the candidate number no more than seventy.

  We descend on the room for “baggage call,” the appointed hour for handing our luggage to campaign aides in time to have it loaded onto the campaign plane for the first flight of the day. The baggage-call deadline is as many as ninety minutes before we ourselves must board one of the buses for the airport, and during this interminable wait we rummage through newspapers and marinate ourselves in caffeine at round tables within perilous olfactory reach of those bins. We breathe in the heady, greasy, piggy perfume of an unhealthy breakfast for the taking. Is it any wonder that I take it? That I allow myself a few spoonfuls of eggs to settle my stomach from the martinis last night, and maybe one link of sausage because I adore sausage and maybe a second link because it’s going to be another epic, agitating day of multiple time zones and mind-numbing dictation, and I need and deserve just a small dose of happiness, don’t I? Just a soupçon? Aren’t some rendered, cased, spiced pig parts my due?

  The second meal comes on the plane, no more than forty-five minutes after the end of the first. It’s more eggs, more sausage, some cornflakes, a banana, white toast, a blueberry muffin, butter, jam. All of this is compressed onto one awesomely engineered tray, a geometric marvel of calories per square inch, delivered by a flight attendant who’s fleet and insistent and above all sneaky, because she shimmies the tray into a nook of space beside my laptop before I notice her and wave her away. I was going to wave her away, I really was. But now the tray and food are right here, right under my nose and my chins, ready and waiting for me to get distracted or curious. It happens. And . . . wow, these sausages are possibly better—meatier, fattier, oilier—than the ones back at the hotel. I’ll need another taste for a proper determination.

  The third meal comes around eleven thirty a.m. It’s the first of two lunches, and it’s in yet another hotel banquet room, this one in the new city to which we’ve flown for the morning speech on tax cuts or educational standards or the privatization of Social Security. The speech is done, we’re typing up our notes or stories, we may need nourishment. We’re in a Southwestern state, so we’ve been given a Southwestern spread: enchiladas, quesadillas, guacamole. I suppose there are people who can pass up free guacamole, but they’re either allergic to avocado or too joyless to live.

  Wheels up. Back in the air. And back to eating: The flight attendants are passing out Lunch No. 2, which is Meal No. 4. It’s a modest sandwich deal, the least tempting spread of the day so far, but the attendants pass out, for dessert, these Dove chocolate-covered ice cream bars, and they pass them out in a manner so persuasive I’m wondering if they moonlight as Hollywood recruiters for the Church of Scientology. The ice cream bars look delicious. Since I skipped the sandwich, I don’t skip this.

  Another landing. Another city.
Another speech. Another hotel banquet or meeting room in which to set up our laptops and hunker down to work. No food this time around, because it’s past lunchtime and well before dinnertime and the schedule is especially hurried during this later phase of the day. I have seventy minutes to write a daily story on what Governor Bush stated or didn’t state or misstated—his malapropisms are legendary, and never go out of style—and must spend the first fifty minutes transcribing the tape. So it’s a panting, praying, slam-bang, slapdash type-type-type deadline situation, and by the time I’m back on the plane yet again, being shepherded yet again toward the grubby seat stained by all the greedy eating I’ve done in it, I’m all nerves. Praise the lord and pass the Gouda: the charter company has laid out a cheese tray! With crackers. And chicken fingers and fried jalapeño poppers and of course beer or wine, take your pick. It’s a happy hour’s worth of fried bar snacks for an hour that didn’t start out so happy. If we count this as a meal, and I think we must, it’s No. 5.

  No. 6 is served to us in our seats as we fly at night to be in place for the event tomorrow morning, when we’ll wake somewhat later than usual, since we’ll already be in place and won’t have to begin the day by traveling. We can choose chicken or steak, salad dressing A or B: your basic airplane routine, only the portions are bigger and the food better, in fact just better enough to seduce a weary, besieged political reporter whose happy hour cheese consumption was compromised by calls from editors about a little nugget of information heard on CNN and about a big thought that someone high on the paper’s masthead wanted to see reflected in the day’s story—and, if it’s not too much trouble, could I help one colleague by getting a quote from the Bush campaign about the capital gains tax and another colleague by getting a quote about doping in professional sports and another colleague, this one in the Style department, about whether Laura Bush has a favorite handbag? On the campaign plane we’re allowed to use our cell phones all the way through takeoff, and the calls don’t stop coming until the plane rises too high in the air for my phone to maintain its connection, at which point pausing to eat just a bit of that chicken or steak isn’t an act of unconscionable overindulgence. It’s a hard-earned, meditative turn away from the pressures of the day. It’s akin to a moment of prayer.