Born Round: A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite (26 page)

“Mainly Propecia,” I said, referring to the hair-loss drug. I’d been using it for nearly three years, in the hope that it would fill in an incipient bald spot and slow down a receding hairline.

“Any problems, side effects?” the doctor asked.

“No.”

“Good.” He scribbled, looked up. “Any other medications you’re taking?”

“Um, yes,” I said, as if the next one were an afterthought. “Prozac.”

It wasn’t true. But I’d always thought I should take it and many friends had told me I should. So had the one therapist to whom I’d paid about eight visits at one point back in Detroit. But I’d resisted, equating the drug with a failure of character, wondering if it weren’t some sort of numbing, flattening, homogenizing agent straight out of
Brave New World
. I was also suspicious of how many people had so quickly embraced it. Was it a psychiatric breakthrough, or the pharmacological equivalent of leg warmers?

At this point, though, I wanted to give it a try. I had to. Day in and day out I felt sad and anxious, and the feeling seemed larger than Mom’s death. It spread everywhere, turning every big assignment at work into something approaching a panic attack: What if my calls weren’t returned? What if I froze when trying to write the lead paragraphs? What if I got a major fact wrong and the paper had to run a correction? I’d wake up at three a.m. on a day when a long story was being published and belatedly question the spelling of a person’s name, the date of a historical event to which I’d referred, my entire understanding of what sources had told me. I’d spend the next fifteen to eighteen hours willing the phone at home and then the phone at work not to ring, because the call might be someone telling me I’d screwed up.

Maybe Prozac would help. And maybe, as a bonus, it would have a side effect of weight loss—I’d read that some people on Prozac experienced that. My size 36 pants were snug again, and these were the most generously apportioned, mercifully cut 36s I could find.

The doctor asked, “You’ve had a good response to Prozac?”

“Yes,” I said blithely. Too blithely? I toned it down a few notches. “It seems to work for me.”

I went straight from his office to the pharmacy and waited for the prescription to be filled, passing the time by walking up and down the aisles. I noticed the Metamucil on one shelf. Been there, done that. I was now on to something more responsible.

It took more than a week for the Prozac to kick in. Once it did, there was no mistaking it. I got assigned a breaking news story that required me to take a ninety-minute subway ride to a remote corner of Brooklyn, and instead of feeling daunted and exasperated by that, I dwelled on what an interesting mix of people there were in the subway car.

One weekend I had to schlep out to the Ikea store in New Jersey, and Elli, visiting the city from her house in the Catskills upstate, drove me in her car. We hit traffic, it took forever, the Jersey scenery along the way wasn’t particularly pretty. None of this bothered me. She and I were having our usual lively conversation—we were never at a loss for conversation—and I couldn’t see how it mattered whether that conversation took place on the couch in my apartment or over a delicious dinner in a favorite restaurant or right here in her dusty gray Toyota Camry at a standstill on the New Jersey Turnpike. It was a conversation all the same.

I was resigned and reasonable and calm like that. And sleepy. Very sleepy. Prozac hadn’t given me the speedy buzz it gave some people. It had given me the opposite: a gauzy lethargy. I frequently went to bed by nine p.m., contemplating the fluffiness of my comforter instead of the fact that my day was ending so uneventfully. I didn’t get up until eight a.m. And while I ate as much as usual, I exercised less than ever, too tired and sluggish to be bothered with it.

There were other problems with Prozac as well. While it diminished my sex drive only modestly, it pushed back its satiation much more substantially, so that I found myself going round and round the block without any sure sign that I’d ever get to pull into the garage. As often as not I just gave up and left my car idling at the foot of the driveway.

During this period that problem had an impact only on me, on the time I spent with myself. But maybe because Prozac had reacquainted me with optimism, I harbored some hope that there’d be company in the near future. I didn’t want to be denied the full enjoyment of it.

So I ditched Prozac, enemy of pleasure, collaborator with hunger, author of a modern-day Rip Van Winkle story. I went back to wide awake.

Now what?

 

 

 

 

Despite my initial anxiety, I was actually doing well at the
Times.
I wasn’t so great when it came to spot news and had little talent for investigative work, but I was a faster writer than some colleagues, and I was good at the sorts of illustrative details and anecdotes that editors called “color.” I gave decent color. So on the Metro desk, which was my home for my first three years at the newspaper, I’d evolved into someone used less for short, breaking stories than for longer features: a chronicle of a shooting victim’s winding, uncertain road to recovery; an excavation of the tortured past of the woman who was famously stalking David Letterman and repeatedly breaking into his house.

I wrote many profiles, including in-depth portraits of political figures like Ruth Messinger when she was running for mayor of New York and Charles E. Schumer when he was running for the U.S. Senate. For the Home section, I spent a long, hazy night at Hunter S. Thompson’s ranch outside Aspen. For the Sunday magazine, I spent several days trailing Vanessa Redgrave around London.

That last one started out as a nail-biter. In the days leading up to my departure for London, Redgrave’s publicist held firm: all I could have was one ninety-minute interview, and that interview couldn’t take place in her home. I needed much more than that to make a magazine profile work. I was scheduled to see Redgrave in a production of Ibsen’s
John Gabriel Borkman
on the night I arrived, and I successfully pleaded with the publicist at least to let me poke my head backstage after the play for a glimpse of Redgrave in her dressing room and a five-minute hello—no more.
Maybe
, I thought,
I’ll be able to push those five minutes to ten or fifteen.

Redgrave greeted me warmly and distractedly. She had the air of someone never fully oriented to the circumstances around her. After we’d chatted a few minutes and she’d escorted me to the dressing room of her friend and costar Eileen Atkins so I could meet her, too, she asked me how she and I were supposed to proceed from there.

I was confused. Hadn’t my marching orders from the publicist really come from Redgrave herself? Weren’t they Redgrave’s terms? If not, hadn’t the publicist told Redgrave what was what and counseled her to stick to a certain plan?

Whatever the case, I sensed an opportunity.

“Right now I’m going to buy you dinner,” I said, as if that were part of an established schedule, “and we’ll chat some. Then, over the next few days, we’ll just keep getting together to chat until I have what I need for the story.”

She nodded, and sought clarification on one point. This dinner and any subsequent ones—did my expense account cover them?

“Absolutely,” I said.

Her eyes lit up. As I fast learned, Redgrave’s generous donations to her beloved political causes left her without all that much money for herself. So if I wanted to tag along with her to a refugee center where she did volunteer work or accompany her anywhere else, I just had to offer to take care of the cab fares, emphasizing that I’d be reimbursed by the newspaper. I got to see the exterior and a little bit of the interior of her unremarkable apartment by arriving in a cab to fetch her for her day’s chores, and thus I noticed that in the foyer, in place of a real lighting fixture, a single bare bulb dangled from an exposed cord. It was a perfect little symbol of how little value she placed in material things, and a perfect little suggestion of how eager she was for anyone crossing her threshold to note that about her.

The Redgrave profile and others caught the attention of editors in various departments of the newspaper, some of whom presented new assignments.

The editor of the National News desk asked me if I wanted to work for three months—and maybe even longer—in the newspaper’s San Francisco bureau. I went, eager for the change of scenery and pace and curious to see if it might be the catalyst I needed to start exercising more, slim down some and go on a few dates. It wasn’t.

Then the head of the Washington bureau asked if I wanted to move to D.C. and cover politics full-time. I went, once again with the hope that I would get the jolt I needed. I bought a narrow attached town house in Georgetown and a gold-colored Oldsmobile Alero with a sunroof that I never opened and an expensive stereo system that I used constantly. And I spent most of my first six months of work in Washington sprinting through the halls of Congress to chase down Congressional representatives or senators for comments about one fiercely contested piece of legislation or another.

“Senator Snowe! Senator Snowe!” I bellowed as I elbowed aside five other reporters and rushed toward the Senate elevator in which she was poised to make her escape. “How much pressure is Trent Lott putting on you to vote with other Republicans on gun control?”

“Representative DeLay! Representative DeLay!” I screeched at Tom DeLay, the House whip, as he tried to crawl into some shadowy den beyond reporters’ reach. “How exactly does one parlay a pest extermination business into such awesome political power and shameless political corruption?”

I’m kidding about that last question, but not about the games of chase I was forced to play as one of the
Times
reporters assigned to cover Congress, which was basically this sprawling hunting ground across which you tracked your journalistic prey as if they were so many hapless, jittery impalas on the veldt. The task was more aerobic than cerebral, requiring fleetness and stamina and above all agility, inasmuch as you had to race past and maneuver around freshly minted Congressional aides so young they were almost larval and newspaper photographers with cameras hanging like cowbells around their necks and television crews staked out everywhere. The crews’ dependable presence explained my favorite Congressional incongruity: self-consciously macho Red State legislators galumphing from meeting to meeting in full pancake makeup. Estée Lauder may well make more money on Capitol Hill than in Beverly Hills.

It was inevitable, given all my own galumphing, that one of those crews or one of those photographers would at some point catch me in the frame, and sure enough a colleague nudged me one day, told me to look at the photograph on page something or other of the
Times
or the
Washington Post
(I quickly repressed the memory) and pointed out that I was in it, on the fringes, one of the jackals swarming around a bill’s besieged sponsor.

I didn’t fully recognize myself. My head was turned sideways, and the path of flesh from my chin to my Adam’s apple was a direct, diagonal one, not the two-leg trip, with a ninety-degree turn, that it should have been, that it once was. When had I developed a wattle? Me at thirty-three: half man, half turkey. Which, I guess, made all of those sandwiches Mom had once prepared for me props in a surreal drama of prophetic cannibalism.

I was surprised by the change. Something strange happens when you keep gaining weight that you don’t want to be gaining and keep breaking your resolutions to lose it: a part of your brain—the part that keeps your disappointment in yourself at a manageable level, trading real self-disgust for more routine self-flagellation—shades the truth a little, and then a little more, and then a lot. It tells you that while the 38s you’re now wearing almost all of the time certainly indicate a thicker waist, they don’t necessarily mean that all of you looks thicker and heavier. It’s an adaptive mechanism, getting you through the days. There’s some evolutionary wisdom in self-delusion.

That newspaper photograph wasn’t the only challenge to mine. A short time later I took a weeklong vacation in Cuba, where at least a half dozen of the Cubans I encountered, including a waiter who was bringing me a beer I didn’t need and a ticket-taker at a museum devoted to anti-American propaganda, looked at my midsection as they rubbed their own and said,
“Gordo.”
I didn’t know a lot of Spanish, but I knew that word. It meant “fat.”

“How can they be so rude?” I asked Elli, my designated analyst of all matters Latin American, when I got back from the trip. She had spent serious time in almost every Spanish-speaking country in the Western Hemisphere, so she would have to answer for Havana’s ill-mannered legions of waistline censors. Was Fidel really just Richard Simmons in revolutionary drag?

“They’re not being rude,” Elli explained. “To be well fed is a sign of wealth. Saying you’re
gordo
is like saying, ‘Ah, you do well for yourself.’”

“They should find a different way of saying it,” I huffed. “They’re never going to get us to lift the embargo with this approach.”

 

 

 

 

I worked longer hours in Washington than I had in San Francisco or New York, filing many more stories on much stricter deadlines. To calm my nerves I’d alternate keystrokes with handfuls of SunChips or pretzel rods, going through whole bags of them in mere minutes. When I was stressed out, I ate. And in Washington, where dozens of print and television reporters competed with one another for stories small, medium and large, I was almost always stressed out.

I often didn’t get home from work until ten p.m., and sometimes wasn’t done with phone calls from editors until well after eleven. It was around then that the Chinese delivery might come, or that I’d walk two short blocks to pick up two or even three Philadelphia-style cheesesteak sandwiches, plus an order of hummus with toasted pita, from a nearby takeout joint that stayed open past midnight. At that late hour the final verdict on whatever story I’d been pursuing that day—the answer to the question of whether I’d done better than the competition—was unclear and out of my hands, and I’d be seized by a sense of powerlessness. But what I could control were the thirty minutes of primal contentment before bedtime as I worked my way through the lo mein or the cheesesteaks or whatever else I’d rounded up.