Born Round Read online

  A seventh meal is still to come. Two senior Bush strategists have agreed to a long off-the-record conversation over food and drinks with me and an ABC News producer with whom I work closely, and that means we’re buying them a big dinner in a decent steakhouse, because a big dinner in a decent steakhouse is the best way to make sure they’ll agree to another long off-the-record conversation down the road. We all meet at about eight p.m., and what follows is the whole works: the martinis, the iceberg wedges with blue cheese, the porterhouses, the potatoes, the red wine. All stomachs having limits, even mine doesn’t permit the kind of consumption that would be possible if I had steered clear of food since lunches No. 1 and No. 2. But it makes a valiant effort in the spirit of not dragging down the table’s mood or distracting the strategists from the scuttlebutt they’re giving up. It holds up through the cheesecake. It finally gets its reprieve at ten forty-five p.m.

  At the bar on the ground floor of the hotel where the campaign is staying for the night, several of the best reporters assigned to the campaign are gathered, as are several of the workers in the press department of the campaign itself. There’s only one responsible thing to do: join them. The reporters will be tossing around what they deem to be their most incisive observations and thus divulging what they know and what they plan to report. The campaign workers may get a little loose-lipped. So it’s another few glasses of wine before midnight, and maybe, while drinking them, some peanuts grabbed absentmindedly from a bowl, but not so many peanuts that they constitute what would be Meal No. 8. The count stands at seven.

  That wasn’t an utterly typical day on the campaign trail. But it wasn’t wholly atypical, either.

  From the campaign’s perspective, a well-fed press corps was an upbeat, docile press corps, so campaign officials made whatever arrangements necessary to ensure that we’d be fattened like Angus steers. Meanwhile the charter company that ran the planes had to justify the astronomical sums it was charging all of our news organizations for our passage, so it laid on the canapés, desserts and snacks. And the hotels that filled the banquet halls or meeting rooms with buffets for us knew that they were serving the traveling news media, so they saw every steroidal spare rib or cheese-mummified nacho they laid out as a marketing and publicity effort.

  Not all the reporters got fat. For every one who gained weight there was another who found some way—often eccentric, sometimes extreme—to keep it off. One young female television producer was so appalled at the ten to fifteen pounds she put on in the first months of the campaign that she stopped eating altogether, and by the last months of the campaign her hair had started falling out.

  A wire service reporter trying to wring some order from this chaotic food universe decided to eat only foods of a given color on a given day, an approach that sounded relatively straightforward until it was put into play. Was a banana yellow (the peel) or white (the edible fruit)? Was an egg white (the shell) or yellow (the yolk, as well as the results of scrambling)? Toward such weighty philosophical questions our worlds turned. A reporter could devote only so much thought, and so much conversation, to the pros and cons of lowering the capital gains tax.

  I needed my own special strategy, something accommodated by the kinds of food typically available on the plane and on the ground, a regimen that would leave me with plenty to eat while limiting my calories enough to create the possibility of weight loss.

  “Starting today,” I told John Berman, the ABC News producer, and Kevin Flower, a producer for CNN, “I’m a fruitarian.”

  I didn’t know if the word even existed, but I liked the sound of it. I liked saying it. So as I commenced the transition into my new self—pear-focused rather than pear-shaped—I talked as much about it as possible. I resolved to turn deprivation into shtick. What I was giving up in protein and fat I would gain in self-amusement.

  John was eating some scrambled eggs for breakfast.

  “I always preferred my eggs over medium, or as an omelet, to scrambled,” I told him. “But that was before I became a fruitarian.”

  Hours later, as I assembled a vivid hillock of pineapple slices and strawberries from one of the fruit plates that always seemed to accompany the sandwich spreads in hotel meeting rooms, Kevin asked me, “What life changes have you noticed since you became a fruitarian?”

  “I’m definitely more alert as a fruitarian,” I told him. “I have more mental clarity. And as a fruitarian I have more energy.”

  “Can you have coffee,” John asked me, “as a fruitarian?” We were all having some fun with this new script of mine.

  “Yes,” I said, “and diet drinks.”

  “Alcohol?” Kevin wondered.

  I hadn’t thought about that. I didn’t want to give up alcohol.

  I didn’t have to give up to alcohol!

  “Wine!” I exulted. “I can have wine, because it’s just grapes. I have to steer clear of vodka, bourbon, beer. A fruitarian never drinks those.”

  My first day as a fruitarian was going swimmingly. I had gambled correctly: there were bananas on the plane for breakfast, so I ate three of those. At lunch there was the pineapple, the strawberries. During our airborne happy hour, I laid claim to a disproportionate number of the apple slices and grapes skirting the cheese. Fruit was around. Fruit was plentiful. And no one was going to out-fruit me.

  Having no fat but loads of fiber in me made me feel instantly lighter of step and flatter of stomach, and I all but floated up to my hotel room that night. Then it hit me: the effects of such a sudden increase in fiber. I writhed in gastrointestinal distress. Sprinted frequently from bed. Slept maybe two hours in all. And used all of that as an excuse the next morning to do what I’d wanted to for all of the previous day, my testimonials of fruitarian bliss notwithstanding. I ate something other than fruit. I ate lots of somethings other than fruit.

  I needed exercise, and there was rarely any time. If you wanted to run in the morning, you had to do it as early as five a.m., and you had to hope the city or country streets around whatever hotel you were inhabiting were suited for running, and you had to make peace with tightly sealed bags of sweaty clothes crowding your suitcase for days on end, because the campaign moved around too quickly for laundry to be left with any of the hotel laundry services. If you wanted to run at night, you might have to wait until ten p.m., because the days often ended that late. As for the gyms in our hotels, they were dreary and tiny, with maybe two StairMasters and one treadmill, always being used by others. The gyms were useless.

  I’d have my occasional days of sudden and severe self-denial, when I imagined I could repair in twenty-four hours what I’d mucked up over months. But at the ends of many of those days, at one a.m., I’d find myself sitting on the floor in front of the hotel room minibar, famished and frenzied, reaching first for the Famous Amos chocolate chip cookies, then for the Snickers bar, then for the roasted cashews in the miniature Mason jar, then for the squat miniature can of Pringles. There were nights when I went through every single item other than beverages in the minibar, to the tune of close to a hundred dollars. The Times, as a matter of policy, didn’t reimburse minibar expenses, so I didn’t file mine. They cost me close to two thousand dollars over the course of the campaign.

  But the financial impact paled next to the sartorial one. Before the midpoint of the year, I had to reconfigure the clothing in my suitcase yet again. I got rid of one of the two pairs of 40s. And to the remaining pair I added two new pairs of chinos from the Gap, size 42.

  And then there was the matter of my jacket.

  There were almost always a few things in my closet to which I had strong, superstitious attachments, and I was almost always attached to them because I thought they made me look thinner. At Carolina I’d worshipped this collared short-sleeved shirt with eighth-of-an-inch vertical stripes in gray and black: their darkness and verticality convinced me that the shirt was more effective than a month of protein shakes. I wore it every time I went to the gay bar in Durham, where I must have been
known as the Striped Crusader, or maybe Umpire Guy.

  When I attended Columbia and then when I worked for the Post, I favored this black overcoat that didn’t fit me closely enough to show any unwanted curves but hung straight enough along my sides that it didn’t create any impression of extra body mass that didn’t exist. The material, a dyed, brushed denim, was matte, which was preferable to shiny if you were trying to deflect visual attention. The coat reached almost all the way to my ankles—I supposed that made me look taller. It wasn’t thick and warm enough for cold weather, but I ignored any of my shivering or teeth chattering as I donned it instead of a puffy down jacket or parka even in December and January, when winter winds would make it billow up behind me. It was a sort of coat-cape hybrid, making me look one part Johnny Cash, two parts Vampire Lestat.

  And in Washington, even before the campaign and all the pounds that came with it, I bought and clung to a gigantic hooded gray sweatshirt, treating it the way toddlers treat their favorite bedtime blankets, taking it with me everywhere. Its virtue wasn’t just its folds and folds of figure-obscuring cotton but, even better, the big pouch in the front created by adjacent, front-facing pockets in which you could bury your hands. Since the pouch made anyone who wore the sweatshirt look like he had a belly, it made no one who wore it look like he had a belly. I loved that pouch and I wore that sweatshirt as often as I could. This was the era of Marsupial Frank.

  The campaign trail brought about Frank the Human Tent, courtesy of a shapeless, floppy pale green Army-issue Windbreaker from the Timberland outlet in Hilton Head. At first I imagined that it made me look dashing, on account of its splashes of turquoise trim and all its flaps and zippers, which popped up in surprising places and at surprising angles. Beneath those flaps and zippers were pockets upon pockets: in the front, on the sides, down by the hips. It hung well below the hips, which was one of its best features.

  All in all it looked like the kind of jacket worn by news photographers, who needed many baggy pockets for their lenses and film and backup cameras. So I could get away with it, sort of. It wasn’t an entirely ridiculous coat, at least not until the weather turned hot, and then it was. Still I didn’t ditch it.

  “Aren’t you boiling in that?” was a question I frequently got as we reporters stood outside for some campaign speech far south of the Mason-Dixon Line in July or August. Other reporters wore polo shirts, T-shirts: as little as they could get away with while on the job. I wore my shapeless Timberland.

  “It’s deceptively light,” I’d say as I tried to blow upward inconspicuously and dislodge the bead of sweat on my nose.

  “But you really seem to be hot,” a colleague would counter, perhaps noticing that I had streaks of sweat just in front of my sideburns, that the skin above my upper lip was more than a little dewy and that even my palms were wet.

  “I’m warm, sure,” I’d concede. “But this coat is really convenient. It has all this space for notebooks and pens and tape recorder batteries. I like to have all of that handy.”

  I wore my Timberland when the temperature was eighty degrees and when it was ninety and sometimes even when it was a hundred. I wore it on the campaign plane and on campaign buses. I wore it over a dress shirt and tie, if for some reason I had to wear a dress shirt and tie, even though it nullified the effect of them. It nullified everything. That was the point of it. And so I continued to wear it even as it became mottled with dark blue stains from broken pens, even as zippers jammed and the insides of pockets tore. When my Timberland was on, nobody could see just how big I was. I could hide inside of it.

  In my Timberland jacket, on the campaign trail.

  I was hiding in so many ways. Sexually, I had shut down more completely than ever, and what drove that home hardest wasn’t the celibacy itself, which was now complete—I’d gone the length of the campaign without any intimate contact of any kind with anyone. It was the way my colleagues and friends on the campaign trail interacted with me.

  The campaign trail is famous for the furtive hookups, tortured affairs and budding relationships it encourages; being on the road, far from home, sends people into one another’s arms. While covering Bush, I watched that happen and I listened to colleagues’ confessions. I was a good, reliable audience. And as colleague after colleague confided in me, I realized that one reason I seemed a safe storehouse for their confidences was that I existed apart from it all, a placid and neutral territory, a sexual Switzerland. I realized that none of these people ever asked me if I had anything going on. It was assumed I didn’t, and the assumption was correct.

  I increasingly wondered if, free of my Timberland and my embarrassment, I might be enjoying this whole chapter of my life on a whole different level. How much better would I be able to focus on the exhilarations of covering a presidential campaign for the Times? On this close-up view of something most people saw only from a distance?

  I had a great job and a great house in a beautiful neighborhood. I had an expanding, adorable brood of nieces and nephews: Harry’s children Leslie, Erica and Harrison; Mark’s children Frank, Sarah and little Mark; Adelle’s son, Gavin, just born. But I was increasingly haunted by all that I was letting pass me by and slip away from me. Those failures dogged and dulled everything else.

  When the campaign ended I resettled in my house and made a deal with my editors. I’d agree to their wishes and cover the White House for six to nine months; they’d agree to mine and, after that point, let me work as a Washington-based staff writer for the newspaper’s Sunday magazine.

  It would be a job with less travel, less chaos, less competition, less frequent deadlines. I figured it might help me get some of my weight off, and some of my life back.

  A few months after the campaign ended, I went to my Washington doctor. I’d gone to him only once or twice before, and he’d told me that I needed to lose weight. He told me that again on this visit. I stifled the impulse to ask him about his own plans for a diet. He was easily thirty to thirty-five pounds too heavy, by my amateur’s estimate, and I dwelled on that rather than on what he was telling me. Who was he to be lecturing me?

  “When was your last physical?” he asked me.

  I said I couldn’t remember, and reminded him that I was there only because I had some sinus congestion that wouldn’t go away. Couldn’t we just settle on the right antibiotics and move on?

  “I’m going to take some blood,” he said, and started gathering the necessary medical paraphernalia before I could mount an effective protest. “At your age, we should be watching your cholesterol.” In went the needle.

  He listened to my lungs and took my blood pressure, and the next thing I knew he was shoving me onto a scale.

  “Just don’t tell me the number,” I instructed him as I stood on the scale. “I’m serious. Don’t tell me.”

  “OK,” he said.

  I stepped off and was about to thank him when he announced: “You weigh 268 pounds.” Just like that. Defiant. Staring at me. Saying without saying: you can’t be allowed to run away from 268 pounds.

  268 pounds?

  It was worse than anything I’d feared. In my mind I batted the number away, but it kept coming back, a measure somehow blunter and more irrefutable than the size 42 pants, a final contradiction of something I’d always assumed about myself without ever quite articulating to myself. I was someone who let things get a little out of hand, not a lot—or so I’d believed. I’d done that with bulimia at the start of college, with my Mexican speed at the end of college. I done that with my Tyson chicken in Detroit, and later, with Greg, I’d caught myself and righted myself after our trip to T.J. Maxx. I always pulled back before things went too far.

  But 268 pounds was too far. I heard Harry’s voice—at least I’m not fat—and thought for the first time that he’d actually been kind. He could have gotten away with “obese.”

  Interviewing President Bush on Air Force One

  during his first months in office.

  I wanted better bearings
than I had. I was 268 pounds compared to what in the past? All I knew was that at certain points in my late teens and early twenties, I’d been under 190. So the 268 meant that I’d gained at least 78 pounds since then.

  I was appalled at myself.

  And yet.

  I was now saddled with covering a new presidential administration, and while my travel load had lightened, my workload hadn’t. Nor had the stress. The late-night eating went on.

  Then there was the number itself—268!—and what it said about how much self-denial was in store if I was going to get back to where I wanted to be. The magnitude of the journey, once revealed, made it all the harder to begin. It was one thing to stare down a fifteen- to twenty-five-pound challenge. It was another to be looking at seventy-five or more.

  And so, yet again, I faltered, beginning a diet and exercise program on a Monday only to stop it on a Wednesday, because I’d slip up and decide that I should wait until the following Monday and the blank slate of a new week to begin again. Then I’d treat Thursday through Sunday as a free pass, a last-hurrah opportunity to get all my cravings out of my system.

  I’d order pork lo mein and cashew chicken and barbecued spare ribs from my go-to Chinese. I’d wonder as I ate my way through this food if I should have addressed a pizza craving instead, and I’d call Domino’s, asking for a large sausage pizza and adding some buffalo wings with blue cheese to the order just before hanging up. Since I was never going to eat this way again—since I could never allow myself to eat this way again—I’d give final vent to all of my gluttony on this one night.