Born Round: A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite (29 page)

“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.

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.

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.”

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.