The Elephant in the Room Prologue KILLING THE HOG I have this dream. We''re on a road trip, out in this house in the country, and I''m trying to talk to my wife. But this hog gets in the house. It stinks and it''s slick to the touch and I can''t keep it off me. I push it away but it keeps plowing back and I see tusks. I finally shove it out the door. Now I''m in bed. Here comes the hog again.
I can barely stave it off with my hands. It''s all over me. I get to my feet and kick it and ram it with my shoulder and we tumble out into the yard. My mouth is coated with hog-slime, and I reach in and scrape it off my tongue. I''m half-dressed, stinking, miserable. Suddenly we''re back in a room and I can sense I''m being watched. Three or four official-looking people are lined up at a table, like judges on a panel. One of them says, "Here''s what you have to do.
" I wake up knowing two things. One, I have to kill the hog. Two, the hog is a part of me. NEW YEAR''S EVE, 2014 I weigh 460 pounds. Those are the hardest words I''ve ever had to write. Nobody knows that number--not my wife, not my doctor, not my closest friends. It feels like confessing a crime. The average American male weighs 195 pounds; I''m two of those guys, with a ten-year-old left over.
I''m the biggest human being most people who know me have ever met, or ever will. The government definition of obesity is a body mass index of thirty or more. My BMI is 60.7. My shirts are size XXXXXXL, which the big-and-tall stores shorten to 6X. I''m six-foot-one, or seventy-three inches tall. My waist is sixty inches around. I''m nearly a sphere.
Those are the numbers. This is how it feels. I''m on the subway in New York City, standing in the aisle, clinging to the pole. I live in Charlotte and don''t visit New York much, so I don''t have a feel for how subway cars move. I''m praying this one doesn''t lurch around a corner or slam to a stop because I''m terrified of falling. Part of it is embarrassment. When a fat guy falls, it''s hard to get up. But what really scares me is the chance I might land on somebody.
I glance at the people wedged around me. None of them could take my weight. It would be an avalanche. Some of them stare at me and I figure they''re thinking the same thing. There''s an old woman sitting three feet away. One slip and I''d crush her. I grip the pole harder. My palms start to sweat and all of a sudden I flash back-- to elementary school in Georgia, standing in the aisle on the bus.
The driver hollers at me to find a seat. He can''t take us home until everybody sits down. I''m the only one standing. Every time I spot an open space, somebody slides to the edge of the seat and covers it up. Nobody wants the fat boy mashed in next to them. I freeze, helpless. The driver glares at me in the rearview mirror. An older kid sitting in front of me--a redhead, freckles, I''ll never forget his face--has a cast on his right arm.
He reaches back and starts clubbing me with it, below the waist, out of the driver''s line of sight. He catches me in the groin and it hurts, but not as much as the shame when the other kids laugh and the bus driver gets up and storms toward me-- and the train stops and jolts me back into now. I peel my hands from the pole and get off. I climb the stairs to the street and step to the side to catch my breath. I''m wheezing like a thirty-year smoker. My legs wobble from the climb. I''m meeting a friend near Central Park at a place called the Brooklyn Diner. Why is there a Brooklyn Diner in Manhattan? Are Manhattan diners not up to lofty Brooklyn standards? I have time to think about such things.
I''m fifteen minutes early, on purpose, because I have to find a safe place to sit. The night before, I had Googled "Brooklyn Diner interior" to get an idea of the layout. Now I scan the space like a gangster, looking for danger spots. The booths are too small--I can''t squeeze in. The bar stools are bolted to the floor--they''re too close to the bar and my ass would hang off the back. I check the tables, gauging the chairs. Flimsy chairs creak and quake beneath me. These look solid.
I spot a table in the corner with just enough room. I sit down slowly--the chair seems OK, yep, it''ll hold me up. For the first time in an hour, I take an untroubled breath. My friend shows up on time. By then I''ve scouted out the menu. Eggs, bacon, toast, coffee. A few bites and the shame fades. At least for a little while.
* * * By any reasonable standard, I have won life''s lottery. I grew up with two loving parents in a peaceful house. I''ve spent my whole career doing work that thrills me--writing for newspapers and magazines. I married the best woman I''ve ever known, Alix Felsing, and I love her more now than when my heart first tumbled for her. We live in an old house in Charlotte with a yellow Lab mutt named Fred. We''re blessed with strong families and a deep bench of friends. Our lives are full of music and laughter. I wouldn''t swap with anyone.
Except on those mornings when I wake up and take a long naked look in the mirror. My body is a car wreck. Skin tags--long, mole-like growths caused by chafing--dangle under my arms and down in my crotch. I have breasts where my chest ought to be. My belly is strafed with more stretch marks than a mother of five. My stomach hangs below my waist, giving me what the Urban Dictionary calls a front butt--as if some twisted Dr. Frankenstein grafted an extra rear end on the wrong side. Varicose veins bulge from my thighs.
My calves and shins are rust-colored and shiny from a condition called chronic venous insufficiency. (You never want any medical condition that contains the words chronic and insufficiency.) Here''s what it means: The veins in my legs aren''t strong enough to push all the blood back up toward my heart, so it pools in my capillaries and forces little dots of iron up under my skin. The veins are failing because of the pressure caused by 460 pounds pushing downward with every step I take. My body is crumbling under its own gravity. Some days, when I see that disaster staring back, I get so mad that I pound my gut with my fists, as if I could beat the fat out of me. Other times the sight sinks me into a blue fog that can ruin an hour or a morning or a day. But most of the time what I feel is sadness over how much life I''ve wasted.
When I was a kid, I never climbed a tree or learned to swim. When I was in my twenties, I never took a girl home from a bar. Now I''m fifty, and I''ve never hiked a mountain or ridden a skateboard or done a cartwheel. I''ve missed out on so many adventures, so many good times, because I was too fat to try. Sometimes, when I could''ve tried anyway, I didn''t have the guts. I''ve done a lot of things I''m proud of. But I''ve never believed I could do anything truly great, because I''ve failed so many times at the one crucial challenge in my life. What the hell is wrong with me? * * * What the hell is wrong with us? As I write this, the Centers for Disease Control estimates that seventy-nine million American adults--forty percent of women, and thirty-five percent of men--qualify as obese.
That''s more than the total attendance of every Major League Baseball game last year. Our kids are right behind us--the obesity rate among American children is seventeen percent and climbing. Our collective waistline laps over every boundary--age, race, gender, politics, culture. In our fractured country, we all agree on one thing: second helpings. Fat America runs on the fuel of easy and cheap junk food, motivated by constant ads for burgers and beer, soothed and sated by oversized portions. At most movie theaters now, a small soft drink is thirty-two ounces. No reasonable definition of small encompasses a quart of Coke. The English language, like my elastic-waisted cargo shorts, has stretched to fit our expanding country.
As every fat person knows, there''s no such thing as a cheap buffet--you always pay later, one way or another. Fat America comes with a devastating bill. According to government estimates, Americans pay $147 billion a year in medical costs related to obesity. That''s roughly equal to the entire budget for the U.S. army. But the money is just part of the cost. Every fat person, and every fat person''s family, pays with anger and heartache and pain.
For every one of us who can''t shed the weight, there are spouses and parents and kids and friends who grieve for us. We carve lines in their faces. We sentence them to long years alone. I know this from experience. I also feel it like a burning knife right now. Because my sister, Brenda Williams, died on Christmas Eve. * * * One of the great joys in our family was getting Brenda to laugh. If somebody cracked an off-color joke, her eyes cranked open wide and her eyebrows flew up her forehead like a cartoon.
Sometimes she let out a low cackle that tickled me even more. She and her husband, Ed Williams, had been married forty-three years and raised three kids. Brenda was never happier than when she had a houseful of the people she loved. But she didn''t laugh as much the last few years. Her weight scared her and isolated her and eventually it killed her. Brenda was sixty-three and weighed well north of two hundred pounds. Her feet swelled so much she could hardly wear shoes. Her thighs cramped so.