Читать книгу Weightless - Gregg McBride - Страница 13
ОглавлениеGod got it wrong.
In his infinite wisdom he created magnificent mountains, shimmering oceans, and Sandra Bullock’s smile. But when it came to food groups, he screwed up big time. I mean, why can’t carrots be high in fat and chocolate be good for your eyes? What was the Almighty thinking? Then again, what was I thinking?
At six years old, I was a scrawny, skinny little kid. All I would eat was hot dogs and oatmeal—and not necessarily on the same day. I have vague memories of being coerced into eating more by my parents who were worried about their growing boy. Needless to say, I taught them a thing or two about growing.
My father was an officer in the Air Force, so we moved around a lot. I was born in Germany, then we moved to Indiana, where my sister Lori was born, and later to Tennessee. After Tennessee we moved to Hanscom Air Force Base in Bedford, Massachusetts, where we stayed for a number of years while the military sent my dad to Harvard to earn his MBA.
As a child, a lot of my eating habits were self-taught. In fact, once I started gaining weight, I was forbidden from having any snacks or sweets. Because I wasn’t allowed to have “junk food,” I was drawn to it in every eating situation that occurred when my parents weren’t around. I would use my allowance to buy contraband candy, and that became my addiction—my drug of choice, if you will. All because I never learned moderation.
By the time I turned eight, I was indulging in cheating cycles. Anytime I purchased snacks or junk food with my allowance, I knew I had to eat it by the time my parents got home. At age six, I couldn’t drink a whole can of Coke, but by age eight I could down eight Mr. Goodbars in one sitting. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was already cultivating the fine art of bingeing.
Eight-Year-Old Gregg’s Typical Binge
8-pack of Mr. Goodbar Chocolate Bars
1 Charleston Chew Candy Bar
2 cans of Pepsi
As the years went on, so did the weight (well, it added on, anyway).
I remember in third grade, I was actually the center of a mini-gambling syndicate due to my size. My classmates were making bets based on how heavy they thought I was. And at the time, I couldn’t have been prouder. I was amused by it all and, being a wannabe celebrity, or at least a wannabe popular kid, I was beginning to embrace any form of attention, no matter how negative the spotlight may have been.
I waited happily until all the bets were placed, there was usually a lunchtime deadline, and then stepped on a scale outside of the gym during lunch hour. I had to weigh before I ate my lunch—that was the rule. The smart set began to bet that I’d always be heavier. And they were right. I was soon weighing in at over 175 pounds.
My mom was in the hospital off and on during this period due to complications from what we were told was multiple sclerosis, putting my father in charge of cooking. He used to serve me cottage cheese, lettuce, and a burger patty—the “official back-in-the-day diet meal.” After dinner, I would retreat to my bedroom and indulge in my secret stash of cookies and candy. I would also buy gallons of ice cream and keep it hidden in my closet until I could eat it. Needless to say I would more often end up drinking rather than eating it.
With my mom in the hospital, my dad seemed to be suffering from a lot of anxiety, which is perhaps what led to his increased drinking, often at all times of the day. Fitness is a big deal for the military-minded, and the last thing my dad wanted was an overweight son. But the more he pushed for me to get thin, the more I ballooned. His rules got more and more rigid, to the point where I wasn’t able to have any food from the bread group. This included rice, potatoes, and anything else of a starchy nature.
One late afternoon, before my father got home from work, I pulled out a box of “forbidden” saltine crackers and some cheese slices. After putting mayonnaise on the crackers I placed a piece of cheese on top, followed by a pickle slice. I guess I always was a junior Emeril Lagasse at heart! I laid all of my hors d’oeuvres out on a plate and prepared to take it to my bedroom, the safe haven for my undercover munching.
Suddenly—tap-tap-tap. I looked up at the window (we lived in a basement apartment) and saw my dad banging on the window, smiling sarcastically, proud to have caught me “cheating” on my diet. He came inside and made me sit at the kitchen table to watch him enjoy the snack I had worked so hard to create.
“I’m not going to punish you,” he said. “Instead, I’m going to thank you for fixing me such a delicious snack.”
That’s okay though. Because, boy, did I show him.
The next morning, while my dad was in the shower, I took a ten-dollar bill from his wallet and spent it all on candy after school. Back then ten dollars actually bought quite a bit of snack food. After coming home, I went deep into the woods behind our building and proceeded to force the entire contents of the bag of junk into my belly. I was so sick when I finished eating that I felt like throwing up. I didn’t know much about supermodels or eating disorders at that time, so I didn’t realize throwing up on purpose might have been an option. An unhealthy option, but an option nonetheless.
While I learned to hide what I was eating, I was having more and more trouble hiding its effect on my body. My parents now had to order my clothes from the Sears big and tall catalog, and once, at a grade school birthday party, I was eating a slice of birthday cake when the wicker chair I was sitting on buckled and collapsed.
The other kids laughed, while the kid’s mom who was hosting the event launched into a lecture on how I was eating too much cake. I don’t remember any specific parts of her lecture. As she pointed her finger and ranted, I ground my tongue into the roof of my mouth, still able to decipher the granules of sugar that had been in the frosting. Sugar saved me from feeling completely mortified.
I realize now that was about the moment I began to hate my body. It seemed like the bigger I got, the more my parents (and others) became comfortable with letting me know that I was not only differently, but also incorrectly sized. It wasn’t difficult to see the disgust in other peoples’ faces or the disappointment in my parents’ eyes. I seemed to be failing everyone. And it was apparently my growing belly’s fault. So I reasoned, if they hated my body, why shouldn’t I?
I remember one time, after getting yelled at by my mother for eating some of her candy (which she kept hidden in her bedroom and I was forbidden to touch); my father confessed that he was the one who had eaten it. While my mom and dad stood in the kitchen, debating whether or not I should still be punished, since in their eyes I must have been guilty of sneaking some kind of food since I was continuing to gain weight, I remember listening to them while coloring in the living room. I began to write “I am bad. My parents are good. I hate myself” in the coloring book. It was soon after that “incident” that I started to keep a private journal, knowing I couldn’t risk my newly discovered self-hating thoughts getting into my sister’s (or worse yet my parents’) hands.
While I occasionally made a spectacle of myself when encountering wicker furniture and was now battling a case of chronic self-loathing, I was still fairly popular at school. By the fifth grade, I had assumed the position of class clown, always a fitting complement to excess poundage. While kids were busy making money from my ongoing weight gains, I was also charging kids ten cents each to watch me kiss my “girlfriend,” Ann, behind the big rocks that sat at the base of our grade school.
Can you guess where my earnings were going?
Unfortunately, Ann’s and my passion for each other was fleeting. Our love affair ended not because I wasn’t Catholic, the reason fifth-grade Ann gave me as to why we could never marry, but because people began to make fun of Ann for kissing the fat kid. Our breakup was a terribly sad experience. Luckily, Little Debbie and her cavalcade of snack cakes saw me through that painful period.
Learning to “eat my problems away” was a pervasive habit I developed early in life. If I had any cause to be anxious, depressed, or worried, I’d head to the store and spend ten dollars on ice cream, cookies, chips—you name it.
Just around the time I learned that I could “eat away” my depression, I was faced with more things to feel depressed about. My father’s alcoholism was becoming a noticeable issue, and it was escalating. He was facing legal action from the Air Force for one-too-many DUIs. Meanwhile, my mother, who had been recuperating from years in the hospital due to complications from her MS, saw fit to forget her worries by having an affair.
My younger sister Lori, who happened to be thin and beautiful, and I had a succession of baby-sitters who were around more often than our parents. I remember one in particular, Sue, who would let me sit next to her while she watched television. I was actually allowed to snuggle up to her, something I was never encouraged to do with my parents. I felt Sue’s warmth and affection, and most importantly, her acceptance. I was further delighted by Sue’s obsession with dunking potato chips in mustard. I thought it was genius.
Pairing two unrelated snack foods together? Sign me up.
Some of my happiest childhood memories are of dunking potato chips with Sue.
The baby-sitter situation turned ugly when my parents hired George, a seventeen-year-old, who sexually abused me. After the first incident George said that if I told anyone he would kill me—a threat that seemed very real at the time. He showed me his pocketknife to prove the point. I believed him. And I was terrified.
When my parents arrived home that evening, I got up out of bed and went into their bedroom where my mother was taking off her make-up. I told her I needed to talk, and she told me that if I didn’t get back to bed I was going to get a spanking. I tried to reason with her but she wasn’t responsive at all—and clearly was very serious about the spanking. I went back to my room and cried myself to sleep.
George continued abusing me whenever he would baby-sit. My parents didn’t understand why I would get “testy” whenever it was announced that he would be watching us. I kept a drawer full of candy bars at the ready on nights when I had advanced warning of George’s visits. During his abuse, I would detach from what was happening and think only of the food that would comfort me when the ordeal was over.
Eventually George went off to college and I was safe from his abuse at last. But by that point I had formed an unbreakable bond with food, and food promised to “be there” for me and to protect me from any of life’s future unbearable situations.
This was about the time my parents decided that they wished they had never met one another—much less had children together. My sister Lori and I had a sense that our presence was bothersome. The situation was made worse when we moved to North Andover, Massachusetts, where we had to make new friends in the middle of a school year, a time when most school friendships are already cemented.
To Lori’s and my credit, we began to counter the negative feelings at home by excelling in theater programs at school. Lori had the advantage of being thin and beautiful, assuring her of leading roles. My weight kept me relegated to the “ha-ha” character roles or in the last row of the chorus. But that was good enough for me. Even without any lines to speak, I could still be someone else on stage. Not being me for an hour or two felt like an enormous relief.
When my mom and dad did direct their attention toward me, they were on me to lose weight. One day they’d yell at me, the next they would try and bribe me with the promise of some new gadget just to “encourage” me to lose weight. None of it worked. For in the world of junk food, I was safe, warm, and loved. No one could harm me while I was eating candy and chips, no matter how sick I felt after eating too much of them.
There were some surprising benefits to bingeing. When all I could think of was how sick, bloated, and close to “exploding” I felt, I wouldn’t have to think of anything else. I didn’t have to think about being ignored by my parents, or about being molested by the babysitter, or about the fact that most kids at school wouldn’t look in my direction, much less talk to me. I’d discovered a safe, if physically painful, haven where not even my thoughts, memories, or fears could do me any harm.
I continued taking money from my dad’s wallet to fund my ever-growing junk-food habit. He must have been confused about what amount he’d spent at bars the previous night to notice that money was missing. And that was fine by me.
By sixth grade, I was spending roughly ten dollars a day on junk food, which bought quite a bit on a military base since food prices are discounted for service people and their families. I would turn down offers to go play with my few friends after school so I could buy junk food instead and go home and eat it in front of the television.
Sixth-Grade Gregg’s Typical Binge
1 “party size” bag of Hershey Miniature Candy Bars
1 large bag of Lays Potato Chips
1 bottle of Barbecue Sauce (for “dip”)
1 can of Whipped Cream
1 gallon of Neapolitan Ice Cream
6-pack of Fanta Orange Flavored Soda
My fondest memories of being in sixth grade are when I pretended to be sick and stayed home from school. I would be home alone since both my parents worked, so I would go to the store to buy a ton of junk food and then watch Brady Bunch reruns during the noon hour.
Oh, what joy I experienced—until the day when my dad came home midday and caught me sitting up, eating nine different things and watching TV. Being sick in our home meant you were supposed to stay in bed all day without any television.
Dad asked me for an explanation. I said I had just woken up and that the TV was already on and that it was somebody else’s food on the coffee table.
Dad stared at me for about a half a minute and then proclaimed, “Somebody must be setting you up.” He told me to go back to bed and never mentioned the incident again. He did confiscate my stash of junk food, however. But no matter, one quick trip to his wallet the next morning and I was able to replenish my supplies.
My “chronic sickness” bit me in the butt when my parents finally consulted a doctor, who checked me into the hospital for two days to undergo a series of tests, determined to find out what was wrong. I was terrified the tests wouldn’t find anything physically wrong with me, but I have happy memories of being in the hospital for those two days. It was Easter weekend and candy stripers kept dropping by with candy and cookies. Even in the hospital my binge behavior worsened; just ask the sick kid I shared my room with who had his Easter basket ransacked, while he was sleeping, by the “sick” kid lying in the bed next to him.
The tests didn’t reveal any hidden sickness, but they did confirm a severe dust allergy. I was relieved the doctor’s found “something,” so I wasn’t exposed as the kid who was just constantly playing hooky.
FOREIGN AFFAIRS
By seventh grade, we went to live in Singapore for a year. Having clothes tailor-made there was cheaper than buying off the rack, and as a result I don’t think anyone in my family noticed that I kept getting bigger and bigger. There were no bothersome size labels to document my progress.
My father’s drinking continued to escalate, as did my mother’s affairs. I was only eleven years old at that point and didn’t yet have the mental capacity to understand the reasons for all the angst in our home, but things were getting so dysfunctional that in between eating and bingeing, I would often attempt to run away from home.
The problem with running away from home in Singapore is that the island is only twenty-six miles wide and sits in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
Where did I think I was going?
I would take a bus to the edge of the island, get scared, and then take a cab back home. Of course I didn’t have money for the taxi, so I’d have to go into the house and ask my parents for the cab fare. Then I’d get in trouble not only for running away, but also for needing the cab money.
I ran away from home more than seven different times over the course of the year we lived in Singapore. One night I tried scaling down the side of our house from the second floor. Needless to say my 225-pound girth kept me from being successful. I got stuck on a window ledge and had to call for help until my parents finally heard me and grudgingly came to my rescue.
Seventh-Grade Gregg’s Typical Binge
4 Hot-Dogs-with-Everything at the local A&W
2 large orders of Onion Rings
1 large A&W Root Beer
1 Chocolate Milk Shake
1 Vanilla Milk Shake
My favorite friend in Singapore also happened to be named Sue. She was our full-time housekeeper—a luxury far more affordable in Singapore—and boy, oh boy, could she cook. What’s more, she was delighted to see me enjoy food as much as I did, and she was always willing to fix me something to eat. Food equaled love. And I wanted all the “love” I could get.
My father’s drinking continued to affect his career in the Air Force, and it wasn’t long before we were transferred again—this time to Landstuhl, Germany. This was about the time all hell broke loose at home.
My father was on TDY, meaning “Temporary Duty Yonder,” the military’s slang for a business trip, which kept him away from home most of the time.
Meanwhile, my mother was plotting to become the most desired “natural” blonde in our small military community. We were sternly instructed to say that blond was my mother’s real hair color even though we knew it came from a box. She was working for the public affairs office at Landstuhl Hospital, where she became the belle of the ball. Men, both single and married, began calling the apartment in droves. It was at this time that my mom hatched what she thought was an ingenious plan for me to screen her calls.
Mom insisted that whenever the phone rang, no one was to answer it but me, and that I was to assume the identity of Sue, our female maid in Singapore, who still lived there and had not traveled with us to Germany. My still-high-pitched voice and tendency toward theatrics fit into her plan very nicely. Being twelve, I had no real understanding of what I was doing.
So I would answer the phone, pretending to be Sue, the female maid, and basically handled my mother’s dating schedule. It got to a point where various men would call “Sue,” i.e., me, for advice on how to win my mother’s affection. And when my mom would blow them off, they even started asking “Sue” out on dates.
I thought I was handling this insanity perfectly fine. I enjoyed the thrill of performing and, more importantly, I had my secret world of food ever at my disposal. Now I also had the “bonus” of my mom’s approval and perceived affection for doing her bidding. Little did I realize at that point my mom could have given a Disney-inspired villain a run for his or her money when it came to cruel ways to parent a child.
Since Mom was always away from home on dates, including overnight stays and long weekends, I was able to maintain a nice stash of junk food. It began to extend beyond sweets and candy. Whenever I could, I would fix whole meals for myself—no matter what time of day. My typical breakfast during those years was really more like lunch or dinner.
Eighth-Grade Gregg’s Typical Breakfast
1 large box of Spaghetti
1 large jar of Spaghetti Sauce
1 whole can of Parmesan Cheese
1 loaf of White Bread
Butter and Garlic for the Bread
At twelve years old I was running the household—cleaning, fixing dinner, making sure that Lori and I got to school on time and that we stayed out of my mom’s hair, all while coordinating my mom’s social life over the telephone by pretending to be “Sue.” I was writing notes to teachers and signing school permission slips by forging my mother’s signature when necessary. I was a one-stop-shop, and Lori and I were a good team.
My favorite memories from that period were of Saturday mornings during the winter. My mom would usually leave around 4:00 a.m. to go skiing with the man-of-the-moment. Lori and I would pretend to be asleep until she left and then we would get up immediately afterward.
I’d race to the kitchen and fix us a big pot of spaghetti complete with tomato sauce and Parmesan cheese. It would be about 5:00 a.m. at that point. Lori and I then sat down with a tape recorder and a nearby stereo system and made an audiotape of our own version of a television variety show—ingeniously titled The Gregg and Lori Show. We had lots of special guests (whatever cassette tapes we had of our favorite performers) and would insert canned “applause” into our recording to make it sound like our “musical guests” were performing live.
During our recording sessions we would chow down on the spaghetti. I always ate much more than Lori, who continued to maintain a healthy weight, while my own weight continued to skyrocket.
Ramstein Junior High School, where I commuted to via bus from Landstuhl, was an interesting place. A school full of military brats (a common nickname for the kids of military personnel), each of whom was convinced that his or her father outranked all the others’.
I didn’t have any close friends, so when I discovered that a kid at school named Mike shared my love of superhero comic books I used some of my precious food money to buy a few comics for him in the hopes it might bring us closer together. It worked, and before too long I had a new “best friend”—though Mike never used that exact phrase. I had never really had a good friend before, not to mention a thin friend. In some weird way, I felt a little more validated as a person.
Look, world. Someone likes me even though I’m fat!
Mike and I used to sit around and quiz each other about science fiction television episodes and comic books. We were happening guys.
Adding to this newfound social life? Girlfriends. One for Mike and one for me. Suddenly I wasn’t solely focused on food anymore and it felt fantastic. My girlfriend’s name was Judy. She had blond hair and a wicked sense of humor. Mike and his girlfriend, Kim, and Judy and I would French kiss like there was no tomorrow.
While I could tell Judy liked me, I never forgot the fact that I was fat and she was not. I was obsessed with finding out why she would have a “fat guy” as a boyfriend. Mike agreed to do the detective work for me.
One day after lunch I was waiting in the school hallway to go into class when Mike approached me with the news. Apparently Judy wanted to date me because since I was the fattest guy in school, I “probably had the biggest dick.”
Never mind the compliment of my perceived appendage—my growing belly had kept me from seeing my penis when looking down for years. I was mortified at being singled out as the “fattest guy at school.” I waited outside Judy’s fifth period class to quiz her on these events. And she confessed. She had indeed said that.
I felt compelled to break up with Judy. Not so much because of the fat remark, but because I was somewhat disgusted by her candor. I wasn’t ready to move that fast. Especially as I watched my mother demonstrate the ills of illicit sex by staying away from home night after night and gaining a public reputation for being a “slut.” This word was used by more than one caller giving “Sue” a piece of his mind in regard to my mother blowing them off.
Soon after my breakup with Judy I also “broke up” with Mike. He said his mother had accused me of buying his friendship by constantly purchasing comic books for him. I told him that wasn’t the case at all, and subsequently stopped buying him comics. Funny enough, he stopped being my friend about the same time he stopped getting my comic books. Go figure.
INWARD BOUND
I had a journalism teacher who caught on to something not being quite “right” with me. She assumed the problems were occurring inside me, rather than stemming from my home situation. She signed me up for the school-sponsored Outward Bound program, where I was forced to experience nature with a group of other “troubled” kids.
In actuality only a few of the kids were genuinely “troubled.” Most of us were simply adjusting to adolescence in one random way or another while living on a military base overseas. We were the European equivalent of Gossip Girl—without the cocktails—even though, ironically, all of us could buy beer off the military base at a German bar or pub. Its availability meant few of us military brats ever abused alcohol—and besides, I was too busy abusing food.
The Outward Bound trip proved a good way for me to get to know a few people in school. When Mike and I stopped being friends, I became very shy and withdrew into myself.
Interacting with people this closely was a new experience for me. I remember our first morning there, where five of us were assigned to the same room. There was a fellow eighth-grader, Glenn, who I became fascinated with. This was before I realized he was one of the most popular kids in school.
What fascinated me most was when Glenn was changing his shirt. The fascination wasn’t sexual. His athletic body intrigued me because it was so unlike my own. Unlike my puffy, curvy, Pillsbury Doughboy body, Glenn was totally fit. He had a tight chest, so different from my growing “breasts,” and he had a taut stomach. Not me. I had a huge stomach and flabby body. Even my penis, the one Judy had been so interested in, was receding into itself due to my belly’s full roundness.
Seeing Glenn up close like that, I began to hate my body even more than I had before. Standing in front of the mirror, I grabbed chunks of my blubbery flesh, wondering why I couldn’t look more like Glenn. I chronicled all of this in my journal—describing how my body was so much different from Glenn’s.
There was hell to pay for those journal entries. On the bus ride home from the Outward Bound week, some of the kids managed to get their hands on my journal and began reading it out loud to everyone on the bus. Every last detail of my comparing my flabby body to Glenn’s fit body was recounted for a bunch of eleven-and twelve-year-olds. I tried to get the teacher’s attention but she wouldn’t intervene. You can imagine the razzing I got. I was mortified. After that incident I held my head very low while walking the halls of Ramstein Junior High School.
Post humiliation, I showed that journalism teacher a thing or two about how “troubled” I was. I volunteered to sell yearbooks at lunch, and I was a hell of a salesman. The only caveat? I was stealing about twenty to thirty dollars a day from the profits in order to fund my food stash. My ten-dollar supply was no longer enough to satisfy me despite feeling that I was going to “explode” almost daily. I needed more money for more food. And since my parents were rarely around, I no longer had their purse or wallet as an ATM-like resource.
Each day at school, after I’d “sold” yearbooks and kept most of the profits for myself, I would run to the nearest food market during lunch, store the bags of food in my locker, then tote the groceries with me on the bus ride home. Once I got home to our apartment, I would fix whatever concoctions I wanted to create for my palate. I was now eating huge amounts on a daily basis.
Gregg’s Typical Yearbook-Funded Binge
1 gallon of Chocolate Ice Cream
(which I would wrap in foil to keep cold and less messy since it had to be stored in my locker until I went home)
1 jar of “Hot” Fudge Sauce
1 can of Whipped Cream
Bananas
2 large bags of Barbecue Potato Chips
1 large pack of Nutter Butter Peanut Butter Sandwich Cookies
1 large pack of Oreo Cookies
Eventually the journalism teacher tried to get to the bottom of who was stealing money from the yearbook fund. Based on how often I volunteered to man the yearbook sales table she suspected it was me, but she couldn’t prove it. So she gathered the class together to talk about shame, deceit, and how awful a person must be to sink so low, all the while visually indicating in my direction.
Then she left the room, leaving the class in charge of deciding who stole the money and to determine the thief’s punishment. With all my practice of being “Sue,” I was able to act innocent and, despite accusations, I never buckled under pressure. I don’t think anyone really bought my act, but there was no way of proving that I had been the one stealing the money. After all, I had eaten the evidence.
In the meantime, my mother found “true love” with an army man named Keith, and he was up for meeting Lori and me. Keith decided he wanted to spend the evening at our apartment, cooking dinner for the three of us.
Dinner? That made him A-okay in my book.
The night Keith came over Mom had to work late and “Sue” had the night off. So he prepared dinner and then we waited with him in the living room. Keith quizzed Lori and me about our backgrounds. We told him all about Massachusetts, Singapore, and basically our whole life story. We loved to talk about ourselves. After all, we were the hosts and stars of The Gregg and Lori Show and had the cassette tapes to prove it.
To our surprise, Keith suddenly lost his appetite, told us to give his apologies to our mom, and left abruptly. When Mom came home she asked us to recount the details of the evening and then she hit the roof. She was furious that Lori and I had shared our “life history” with someone we were meeting for the first time. It turns out she had spun a web of lies for Keith. Among them, that my father didn’t exist and that Lori and I were adopted.
My mother forced me to call Keith and say that Lori and I had made up all those stories about our childhood because we were ashamed of being adopted. I had to tell Keith that I had a chronic problem with lying. Finally, I was instructed to beg that he not hold our lying against our mom and ask him to forgive my sister and me. He wouldn’t.
Neither would my mother. Ever. As I would soon learn.
Safely back in my bedroom, I proceeded to eat a bar of chocolate as tears streaked down my face. I told myself it couldn’t get any worse than this.
I was wrong.
ANOTHER PERSPECTIVE ON GREGG AT THIS TIME
By Lori McBride, Gregg’s Sister
It was surprising for me, when I read these pages, to discover that Gregg felt insecure about his weight when we were children. I was younger, so maybe I wasn’t always aware of the nature or the extent of the elementary school taunting, but he always seemed “larger than life” to me. No pun intended . . . really. It was as though his resiliency made him that much more determined to be noticed for something other than his weight.
Growing up in the military we moved a lot and it was thanks to Gregg’s outgoing personality that we made new friends quickly wherever we moved. He always took charge in a creative way—if you wanted to have fun, you wanted to be with Gregg. He was always making a way of escape, whether by producing elaborate home movie “blockbusters,” or fabricating tiny items to stock the shelves of a Barbie store, or by “producing” The Gregg & Lori Show. He was so quirky and original. From my viewpoint, looking up to my big brother, it seemed like everyone wanted to be his friend.
Living in Singapore as children was amazing. I remember Gregg getting a lot of attention wherever we went. The combination of his red hair, freckles, and excess weight was unusual to see in that Asian culture. He often wore football-style T-shirts that had a large number on the front and back, which seemed to bridge any language gap. Whenever we were in town, people would call out whatever number happened to be on his shirt as a way to get his attention . . . or to ridicule him . . . I guess we’ll never know.
I was aware of some of Gregg’s bingeing. Occasionally I was included—if only to buy my silence on the matter. One time, I remember Gregg eating ice cream in his bedroom, having emptied the carton into a Tupperware bowl. Our mom knocked on the door, so he hurriedly stashed the bowl on the floor of his closet. When he opened the door, our Irish setter, Mac, bounded in, and his nose quickly found that bowl. He began crazily lapping up the ice cream, so Mom investigated . . . and Gregg was busted.
Our parents' well-intentioned efforts to control the binge eating only served to light the fire under it. They installed locks on our kitchen cabinets and routinely inspected the garbage cans. If any contraband wrappers or containers were discovered, they were kept until weekend afternoons, when we were whipped with a belt for each offense. The ensuing misery required more binges to help him forget.
Some of the details of our upbringing are pretty hard to re-live. Through the years, it seems Gregg and I have honored an unwritten pact, as fellow survivors. The pain of our childhood can't be taken off like a coat, but must be shed more like skin . . . cell by cell.
