Читать книгу Weightless - Gregg McBride - Страница 14
ОглавлениеMoving to a new town and new school right before the fourth quarter of eighth grade was no picnic. Although it did offer some relief, considering that Ramstein Junior High considered me to be a petty thief, with perhaps the biggest penis, thanks to Judy’s ruminations. I had stopped stealing money for food at that point, but I never managed to regain my honor before leaving town.
Our new hometown of Wiesbaden, Germany, offered a brand new world, but one that wasn’t too receptive given how late in the school year it was. After an uncomfortable quarter in junior high, I finished the year without making any new friends in the area.
Lori and I continued to lead an active fantasy life at home—constantly singing and acting into the tape recorder—ready for discovery by Hollywood at any moment. We were too clueless to realize there weren’t a lot of Hollywood talent scouts in Wiesbaden, Germany.
During the summer before high school, I volunteered for the Red Cross where I met two of my soon-to-be good friends, Diana and Rhodonna. It was our shared love of Charlie’s Angels reruns that brought us together. We spent the summer bringing playing cards to hospital patients and practicing our dancing when no one else was around.
I was volunteering at the same hospital where my mom had gotten a job, but for some reason she did not want me visiting her office. So I would call her from time to time from within the same building. Oddly, her receptionist used to correct me when I would ask for “Diana McBride.” She’d say, “You mean Dee-ana.” Looking back now, I realize that at that point my mom’s metamorphosis into the blonde vixen of the Wiesbaden Military Hospital was already under way. But back then, I just thought the receptionist was being passive aggressive.
As my dad was no longer on TDY (away on business), the plan was for him to live with us at the apartment.
One big happy family. Not.
Dad was still drinking heavily and would come home late at night from his alcohol binges at the Officer’s Club. He’d wake up early in the morning and leave for work and return very late at night. We barely saw him.
My mother used this time to paint a terrible picture of how “bad” my dad was. One morning I woke up to her telling me that my dad had completely disgusted her. Delighted to have my mother confide in me and seeing it as a potential bonding experience, I asked her what was wrong. She told me she had gotten up in the middle of the night and had found my dad in the kitchen, masturbating while looking at the bra section of the Sears catalog.
Why my mother, any mother, would tell an impressionable adolescent boy this story—about his own father, no less—is beyond me. It skewed my view of masturbation and sex for years to come.
Soon after that my father moved out and lived away from home—though we were not allowed to admit that to anyone. If we did, we’d risk losing the military housing we were living in, since the service person in question wasn’t actually living there. Lori and I were instructed to act like we were the normal military family, which, ironically, we were—marital strife is quite rampant among military families.
So Lori and I pretended Dad still lived with us for the sake of our military-sanctioned housing. While I no longer had to be “Sue,” I was still the appointment secretary for my mom and dad. Eventually my mom instructed me to answer the phone with “Diana McBride’s residence.” And so I did. Every time the phone rang, I’d answer “Diana McBride’s residence.”
I was never as good at saying “Dee-ana” as my mom’s receptionist at the hospital. Perhaps that’s why Mom would acknowledge the receptionist’s presence in public, but would barely acknowledge mine.
Dad came around once a week, usually on Saturday mornings. He would pick up the grocery list and go shopping. I was responsible for compiling the list. Needless to say I couldn’t request any type of sweets or junk food—in fact, I was supposed to be on a strict diet assigned, via a badly Xeroxed handout, from a doctor at the hospital.
The diet’s day plan was a joke. That a doctor would put a growing teenage boy on a diet like that is a testament to what the medical community did not know about dieting or healthy eating at the time.
High School Gregg’s Joke of a Diet: Typical Day
BREAKFAST
2 pieces of Wheat Toast
Pat of Butter
½ Grapefruit
LUNCH
½ cup Cottage Cheese
Lettuce Leaves
1 sliced Tomato
1 Fruit of Choice
AFTERNOON SNACK
No afternoon snack, you’re fat!
DINNER
½ cup Tuna Fish
1 tbsp. Mayonnaise
Lettuce Leaves
Canned Vegetables of Choice
1 Fruit of Choice
EVENING SNACK
½ cup Bouillon
I developed my own interpretation of the diet.
High School Gregg’s Joke of a Diet: Typical Day (Gregg’s Variation)
BREAKFAST
2 pieces of Wheat Toast
Pat of Butter
½ Grapefruit
LUNCH
½ cup Cottage Cheese
Lettuce Leaves
1 sliced Tomato
Fruit of Choice
1 can Fresca Diet Soda
AFTERNOON SNACK
1 large bag of Potato Chips
2 Hot Dogs
2 to 4 Candy Bars (any variety)
DINNER
1 can of Zucchini in Tomato Sauce
1 can of Tuna Fish
1 large package of Cheddar Cheese, melted
1 can Fresca Diet Soda
EVENING SNACK
1 gallon of Chocolate Ice Cream
1 bag of Oreo Cookies
(Mixed together—way before “Cookies and Cream” was a thing—someone stole my original idea!)
6 cans of Fresca Diet Soda
The diet “additions” I would procure myself. My dad would only buy food at the market that he deemed “healthy or diet-approved.” Dad’s weekly shopping routine was always a drag.
After he brought the groceries home, we would gather in the living room as a family. This was when my mother would present my father with a list of what I had done wrong the previous week. Dad would then take off his belt. I would have to drop my pants and underwear. And then my mom would watch as my dad spanked me for a week’s worth of bad deeds.
It was horrible and I would always end up crying. I’m not sure which was worse—the physical pain or the mental anguish. One time I was crying so loudly that Mom told my dad to stop. For a moment I thought she was rescuing me from his forceful blows. Instead she said, “Hold on a minute. We don’t want the neighbors hearing him cry.” They waited for me to calm down and then resumed the spanking.
Lori didn’t suffer this wrath as often as I did. I was doing my best to form a protective layer around her. And for some reason, my parents seemed to respect that. It was as if anything my mom or dad had to say to Lori would be disseminated through me. I was basically in charge of raising both Lori and myself. Dad wasn’t there except for Saturdays, and Mom was never around, except when she brought stray men to the apartment for torrid sex sessions.
From time to time Lori and I did have major arguments. I was always “on” her to get dressed or to do her homework. I was the “parent” in charge of making lunches, cooking dinner, and doing everything else in between. But even during the arguments, Lori and I always remained a team—along with our Irish setter, Mac, who loved us both dearly.
All this time Mom and Dad continued harping about my weight. Cheating on my diet was worthy of a spanking or two on Saturday afternoons. My father took me to the hospital to have the doctor assign me a new diet (which equated to a new Xeroxed copy of the old one). Or when grocery shopping, he still purchased only what he deemed “proper diet food.” My mother, meanwhile, tried to threaten me by saying she wasn’t going to buy me any new clothes and that when I grew out of my current size, I would be out of luck.
I knew I wasn’t going to be walking around naked in two months. Their threats meant nothing to me. In fact, they taught me a wonderful lesson: Gaining weight makes the parents unhappy.
So screw you, Mom and Dad. I’m eating a box of Twinkies.
I was making daily trips to the grocery store just a couple of blocks from our house. I would come home with a full bag and immediately take it to my room. If Mom or Dad happened to be around, I would have to be careful to hide the food from them. This meant being stealth-like about the trash as well; I couldn’t risk them discovering any empty junk food packaging. Luckily I was in charge of all the household chores.
High School Gregg’s Typical Daily Binge
1 large pack of Nutter Butter Peanut Butter Sandwich Cookies
1 large pack of Chocolate Chip Cookies
6 cans of Snack Pack Chocolate Pudding
8 Hot Dogs (eaten raw or cooked)
8 slices of American Cheese
Ketchup, Mustard, Miracle Whip
1 gallon of Chocolate Ice Cream
6-pack of Coca-Cola
I was no longer stealing money to fund my habits. Instead, I was earning it by baby-sitting. I became quite good at it, and soon discovered that other families kept delicious foods in their houses all the time. I couldn’t believe that families I baby-sat for put up with how much snacking I would do while watching their children.
I would wait for the kids to go to bed before I began my binge. By the time the parents came home, I’d be so stuffed that it was all I could do to not to buckle over in pain. And yet they had me back, time and time again.
Whenever I was too “hungry” to wait for the kids to go to bed, I would tell them we were going to play hide-and-seek. They would hide somewhere inside the apartment or house while I counted to 100 in the kitchen. While they scurried off, I’d begin stuffing myself with whatever food I could find. After a while, the kids would call out to me “Are you at 100 yet?”
“Not yet,” I’d yell from the kitchen while chewing, as I continued to stuff my face.
There were families who, after a while, did stop calling for my baby-sitting services, as I was literally eating them out of house and home.
Soon I weighed over 275 pounds. My mom was miserable about my weight and embarrassed to be seen with me in public, which, lucky for her, was seldom.
I made my best attempts at preserving what little bit of self-esteem I had left. When getting dressed for school, I would ask Lori if I looked “FFAFK” (Foxy for a Fat Kid). I don’t remember how that phrase came to be. I knew it was silly, especially given the old school use of “foxy,” but my intent was earnest. I knew I was fat and that I couldn’t wear the same kinds of clothes other kids did, but I still wanted to look my best.
“So, Lori, do I look foxy for a fat kid?”
“Yes,” she’d always respond. Lori was one of my biggest fans.
Starting high school was scary. Ours was a big school with lots of students I didn’t know. To make matters worse, I was a freshman, the lowest of the low within the armed forces high school system.
In one of my first classes, the teacher had us sit in a circle and share our future career goals with each other. Everyone took turns explaining how they wanted to be a doctor, architect, businessman—you name it.
When it was my turn, I leaned forward and proudly told the class I wanted to be a movie star—not an actor or someone working in show business, but a movie star.
The kids erupted into laughter and one remarked, “Forget star . . . he’ll be a planet.” I had a difficult time remaining in that circle of students for twenty more minutes. The worst part was that the teacher didn’t jump to my defense. But in hindsight, it probably wouldn’t have helped.
I was forced to face facts. I was fat and unpopular.
LIGHTS, CAMERA, ATTRACTION
I knew I had to do something. I decided to parlay some of my baby-sitting riches into a home movie camera. I bought a cheap version, because I still wanted to have money left over to keep me in my grocery supplies.
What was I going to do with my new camera? Why, become the next Steven Spielberg, of course. I hatched a master plan. I was going to make a movie and cast the high school’s most popular kids in all the roles. This would be my opportunity to click in. And guess what? It worked. It seems that if you cast a few star football players and their cheerleader girlfriends in your cinematic opus, you suddenly acquire a little respect. It didn’t matter that these popular types weren’t really my friends. The fact that I was getting face time with them meant something to my other classmates—especially to those who seemed repelled by me because of my excess weight.
My cinematic masterpieces were never truly recognized for their greatness. The subject matters? A twenty-minute feature documenting the lives of Charlie’s Angels when they were still in high school, complete with their first crime to solve and a short movie about the exploits of Tabitha, the daughter from Bewitched, in high school. What can I say? I was a child obsessed with reruns.
I made several more movies over the next couple of years. Including a space adventure with the oh-so-original title of The Third Encounter, and a disco version of The Wizard of Oz titled Discoz. Since I lived in Germany, I had no idea that the similarly themed The Wiz already existed. I promise there’s no need for a copyright infringement suit.
I cast my sister in several roles, as I always wanted her around me. We had lots of fun making movies. I would spend days editing them and then created musical soundtracks.
Neither my mom nor dad ever wanted to watch my celluloid creations. Whenever I announced that I wanted to be a filmmaker I would get in trouble. I guess they never saw me reaching such lofty goals and so didn’t want to encourage them.
But it was thanks to the movie-making that I started developing some self-confidence—all despite my girth and shyness. My increasing popularity was further aided by my continued theater arts work. On stage I was boisterous, funny, and blessed with what I was told was an incredible tenor singing voice. Here was this huge kid with a “lovely” singing voice.
Opera, anyone?
Throughout high school, Lori never had a problem with her weight. But she did get the bad acne inherited from my father’s gene pool. And while the wide-spanning ears I had as a toddler went “back” on their own, Lori’s wide-spanning ears eventually had to be surgically pinned back.
About the same time that Lori got surgery to have her ears pinned back, my mom got her nose done for “medical reasons.” She was continuing her morph into a hip, single chick who had all the guys crooning and swooning—or so she thought.
My mother could’ve given Cruella de Vil a lesson in depravity, but I had been brainwashed by her to see my dad as the reason we didn’t have a normal childhood—I had been trained to see him as the enemy. I thought he was the reason for all the turmoil at home. Mom never hesitated to remind me that Dad was a drunk who was ruining his career and our family’s reputation.
I didn’t want to admit that my mom was getting quite a reputation of her own. Every now and then I would hear other kids in high school make comments; kids who had overheard their parents talking. Apparently my mother was the biggest flirt at the hospital. And her act was working with most men, especially the married ones.
Often she would stay away from home for days at a time, which was fine by Lori and me. Other times, she would call in the middle of the night to make an announcement.
I’d wake up and answer the phone, “Diana McBride’s residence”—to find it was her calling from some bar, telling me she wanted me to sleep downstairs in the basement “maid’s room.” We were living in a third floor apartment and each apartment was assigned a small storage room in the basement that had previously been used for maids.
My protests were to no avail. Mom would scream at me to get down to the basement immediately because she was bringing someone home. She instructed me to bring my clothes and books for the next school day and that I should ring the doorbell in the morning, and pretend to be a neighbor’s kid who was there to walk the dog.
What could I do? It was usually between 2:00 and 4:00 a.m., and I’d gather my clothes and head downstairs. Little did Mom know that I’d watch for her from the basement window. Sure enough, about twenty minutes later, she would walk by with some shadowy guy. It was generally a different man each time it happened.
The maid’s room was a scary place to be. Since all of these small rooms were now used for storage, there was no one else residing on that level and it wasn’t a secure area. I would hear lots of noises from the street. Or were they coming from the dimly lit hallway outside our maid’s room door? I could never tell. And that unknown terrified me.
The very first time this scenario happened, I got so scared that I went back upstairs to our door to ring the doorbell. My mom answered the door, saw it was me and shut the door in my face. I just stood there, not knowing what to do.
Inside the apartment, I heard her and her man du jour talking. He asked who it was. I heard her tell him that it was “Just some neighbor kid I pay to walk the dog. He’s here very early.”
Yeah, it was very early—like 4:00 a.m. very early!
A moment later the door opened. My mom handed me the dog leash with Mac attached. I returned him after the walk in the same fashion.
Just some neighbor kid . . .
The next evening I was admonished for coming to the door at that hour. My mother told me never to let it happen again, and then went on to instruct me that when it was an appropriate time to walk the dog in the future, I should ring the doorbell from downstairs, outside the building, as if I really were a neighbor’s kid and didn’t have a key to the building.
“Okay,” I told her. I didn’t know what else to do.
There were times when she would have a steady man in her life and after a while I was allowed to sleep in the apartment. This situation wasn’t much better.
Bernard, a young Frenchman, and my mom would disappear into her bedroom for wild bouts of noisy sex. One night I was awakened by loud, scary yelps. I got out of bed and pounded on my mom’s bedroom door, convinced that Mac (who usually slept in my mom’s room) was in the throes of a rabbit-chasing nightmare.
The yelps stopped. But it was then that I realized Mac was in the living room looking just as confused by the questionable sounds as I was. The errant sounds had been coming from my mother.
Yuck.
One more reason to detach sexually from society and myself. I later realized that my layers and layers of blubber were assisting me nicely with this particular objective.
CENTER STAGE
Lori and I had both become extremely active in community theater, and we were developing a following due to our singing voices. We appeared in several musicals and even received some glowing write-ups in local newspapers. Lori was being cast in lead or ingénue roles because of her “normal” size and beauty. And I was still relegated to the chorus or the occasional character role because of my size.
But even from the back of the chorus, I would sing loudly enough that people could hear me. It was immature of me, but at that time I just wanted to be heard, if not seen. I don’t deny I’m a ham. That’s a trait that always came naturally, despite my intense shyness and my conviction that everyone was judging me because of my size.
The best part of community theater was meeting and becoming friends with lots of different people. I always gravitated toward the adults in their twenties and thirties, as there were few teenagers in our productions.
One of my favorite friends was Vickie. She was a wild-eyed redhead who had all the guys crushing on her, even though she was happily married at the time. I baby-sat for her a lot and became good friends with her family.
On days that I would baby-sit for Vickie, I would go to her house early just to hang out or to have her cut my hair. She was a woman of many talents.
One day I sat in Vickie’s kitchen as she cut my hair. We giggled and talked and giggled even more. I was relating stories of Massachusetts and Singapore. As I went further into the stories, I noticed that something was bothering Vickie. Her tone had changed and she suddenly seemed very concerned.
Soon she put down the scissors, sat in front of me and took my hand. “Gregg,” she began, “it’s okay. I know you’re adopted. And I still love you anyway. You don’t have to make up stories about your family and pretend anymore. We all know.”
Adopted? I was anything but adopted.
I pleaded with Vickie to believe me, but my mom had once again done a terrific job of convincing everyone in our military community that I was adopted. The story went that she was too young to have had a high-school-aged son—she was lying about her age, too. I’m guessing at this point Lori was being claimed as my mom’s actual child. But not me; I was still “adopted.”
I was mortified after that. I didn’t bring it up again. Everyone thought I was adopted. It was just a known “fact” within the community.
To this day, I don’t think Vickie believed me when I told her I wasn’t adopted.
The funny thing is, whenever anyone publicly attacked my mother because she was sleeping around with almost everyone in the community, I would jump to her defense. She had trained me all too well. It was my father I was supposed to hate. Not her.
Dad wasn’t doing anything to help my skewed perspective. He was a drunk. Something people enjoyed gossiping about because of his high-ranking officer status; however, by then he was continually being passed over for promotion.
My dad would come by on Saturdays to do the grocery shopping. The spankings had stopped, usually because Mom wasn’t around to report how “naughty” I was the previous week. Dad was usually in and out of there like a bullet.
Meanwhile, sparks of love were flying at the community theater.
We were in rehearsal for a musical theater show, Purlie, and there was someone in the chorus who caught my eye. She was thin and beautiful. Because she was wearing a scarf wrapped around her hair, I initially assumed she was some random housewife, but it turned out she was my age and attending the same high school.
Her name was Amy. And she liked me too. I thought she resembled the young Phoebe Cates—the actress from Gremlins and Fast Times at Ridgemont High—and I liked the fact that someone so pretty was interested in me.
Despite having other crushes on several popular girls, I soon asked Amy to be my girlfriend. We were together for quite a while by high school standards—much to the chagrin of her parents.
Amy’s parents saw me as double trouble. First, because of my fat “problem,” they could not understand how their daughter could be attracted to someone so big. Second, because Amy’s father was a doctor at the military hospital and was all too familiar with my mom’s dicey reputation.
Amy’s parents also thought I was adopted and Amy would struggle to defend me to her overprotective parents. They felt I was lying about not being adopted and that I had conned Amy into believing the same.
Amy loved me. And I loved her. But my detachment from any sexuality left Amy with much to be desired. I just couldn’t get close in that way. Even kissing and making out was difficult for me. Whether to chalk it up to the sexual abuse in my early childhood, my mom’s accounts of Dad masturbating while looking at the Sears catalog, or my mom, herself, wailing like a banshee while having sex with her Frenchman, I was now officially afraid of any kind of intimacy.
I was too young to realize that this fear could have something to do with the layers of blubber I added to my body—almost a barrier of sorts that I worked to maintain through my constant eating.
Amy was patient, kind, and understanding. Even so, her affection was often put to the test. One night we went to the movies and I sat down next to her in my theater seat—only to have the seat instantly buckle and break from my excessive weight.
I was mortified. But true to form, I played it off as any class clown would. I looked to Amy and said loudly, “Amy, I can’t believe you broke that seat.”
I guess the tone of my voice was funny because people actually laughed with us. Amy wasn’t angry at me for jokingly diverting the blame to her. But underneath my smile I was horrified. A horror I didn’t share with Amy at the time. Even with her I needed to be the class clown. Being escorted to another pair of seats by the angry manager was not pleasant. But I kept a smile on my face the whole time and throughout the movie. Amy wasn’t the wiser.
Amy remains fascinated by that incident to this day. And who can blame her? It’s not every day you date someone with killer thighs . . .
Amy was also the one who tried to discuss my mom’s reputation with me. She tried to help me admit out loud what I already knew deep down inside. I shared with Amy the stories about how my mom abused me, but I hated it when Amy would verbally attack her. I was embarrassed because I knew what a tramp Mom was, and her reputation around the hospital where Amy’s father worked was sordid indeed.
One Christmas day, Amy joined my mother, my mother’s boyfriend-of-the-moment, Ken, along with my sister and me for dinner. My mother had toiled all day on her festive dinner, a very rare occurrence, and the mood was jovial. True to form, Mom had prepped me and Lori with the day’s lies—to be told for Ken’s benefit.
Mom had prepared a magnificent turkey, but we were to lie and tell Ken it was goose because that was what she had promised to make for him. Before dinner, I had slipped to Amy that the main course was indeed turkey but that mum was the word.
Well, during dinner, Amy mentioned the “T” word and my mom choked on her saliva. Amy then talked about her and me being in high school together.
Oops. Too much information!
Within seconds, Amy and I were summoned to the kitchen and met with a menacing glare as Mom hissed through clenched teeth that we were not to verbally ruin her special dinner for Ken. Apparently Amy’s “admission” that we were in high school played against whatever stories my mom had been telling Ken. And, believe it or not, I was mad at Amy and not my mother. In my fragile view of the world, Amy had ruined my closest shot at being like one of those pretend families on television, even if just for a moment.
I loved Amy but couldn’t be there for her as a real boyfriend. It took everything in me to protect my self-esteem, which sometimes made me come off as a stuck-up person. Amy might argue that it wasn’t just “sometimes.”
Well, heck—wasn’t I “foxy for a fat kid?”
After a while, my romance with Amy fizzled. Mainly because the romance aspect of our relationship had never really taken off. But we remained just as close, sharing the evil tales of both our wicked mothers. We nicknamed mine “Diana Doll” (the Barbie-like doll that comes complete with bleached hair, blue eye shadow, and spring-form legs).
We did have our fights; especially whenever Amy attacked my mom or even Lori. In my mind I still envisioned my family as The Brady Bunch. I wanted so badly to live up to that happy TV-family standard. With only one military-run channel that showed American TV in Germany, we were often exposed to reruns as opposed to the current TV fare that was airing in the United States. But my family never could live up to the Brady’s—or any TV family’s—standards. Amy saw this and tried to enlighten me. She saw my potential for depth. But I wanted to remain in the dark, literally, and eat contraband junk food while there.
COMING IN FOR A LANDING
One day my dad came to Lori and me with “exciting news.” He had met a flight attendant from Scotland and they were going to live together. We couldn’t have cared less and couldn’t, for the life of us, figure out why he was telling us this.
We both stared back at him with blank faces. “So?”
Soon, Bonnie and my father were living together. She had quit her job with the airline and left her family in Scotland to live with my dad. I didn’t know it at the time, but she and I weren’t that many years apart in age.
Bonnie was nice enough, but she had a problem with the fact that my dad already had a family—not that she would have to worry, since my dad never really acknowledged his said family in any way.
Since the legal driving age in Germany was seventeen, there were still times that Lori and I needed my father to drive us to certain places. One Sunday afternoon, Dad had promised to drive us to the movie theater. He came to pick us up with Bonnie in tow. We were on our way to our destination when Bonnie burst into tears. Apparently, they had been at an afternoon party and then had to leave early so Dad could drive us to the movies.
Bonnie was hysterical over this, pleading with my father and asking when she wouldn’t have to put up with his “abusive behavior” anymore. Lori and I were watching this drama unfold from the backseat of the car.
My father leaned over and said to Bonnie in a reassuring voice, “Soon these kids will be out of our lives. I promise.”
I don’t think my father realized then or to this day what it was that he said in front of my sister and me. While Bonnie tried to calm her tears, Lori and I held our breath until we arrived at the movie theater. Dad had been late picking us up, so we rushed inside after buying our tickets. We had to assure dad that we’d take a bus home—not that either my sister or I knew how to take a local bus in Germany. But neither of us wanted to get back in that car again.
Once inside the movie theater, Lori and I looked at each other and laughed. As I reflect on that event today I realize that it might appear to be an odd reaction, but I guess it was the only response that allowed us to continue with our lives and not completely lose our minds.
Soon after that Dad and Bonnie got engaged. She went home to Scotland to officially apply for her visa to live permanently in Germany. While Bonnie spent her last bit of time in Scotland, my father moved from their apartment into our buiding’s maid’s room. He wanted to save up his money so he and Bonnie could afford a nicer apartment once she came back.
Meanwhile, my ever-expanding girth was close to 300 pounds, but it didn’t seem to be hurting my growing popularity. I was excelling in school, and had been accepted to the private college of my choice. I received several drama and solo singing awards in all-Germany-High-School competitions and continued to appear in local community theater productions to standing ovations. People especially enjoyed it when Lori’s and my voice were paired together, such as when we played Roger and Jan in the stage musical Grease.
Our parents never attended our shows—neither high school nor community theater—and never shared in or even acknowledged our successes. We didn’t care. We had done what we could to inoculate ourselves from the apathy and cruelty of our parents. Instead, we embraced the acceptance and love from the community.
The local press’s terrific reviews of Grease came pouring in. Neither of us were in the leading roles, but Lori and I had still become the standouts in the show. As a result, a reporter interviewed me for a story that appeared on the front page of the local paper.
One night my mom’s boyfriend, Ken, was sitting at the dining room table when I walked in. I said, “Hi,” quickly trying to rush my bag full of groceries past him.
Ken asked me, “So . . . how does it feel to be in high school again?”
“What?” I asked.
Ken referred to the newspaper article about me, which mentioned my high school activities, and said that my mom had told him I was upset about the article since I was an adult going to college.
Ever the chameleon and quick on my feet, I covered my mother’s lies adeptly by telling Ken that the reporter who interviewed me was German and may not have understood my answers since English was his second language. I then disappeared into my bedroom, unable to wait to attack the food in my grocery bag of comfort.
Later I found out that my coverage of Mom’s lies wasn’t as adept as I had thought. She was furious with me because Ken had become suspicious. She screamed at me at the top of her lungs, and ordered me to call Ken and tell him that I had purposely lied to the reporter.
I refused to do it.
Mom stuck her wicked-witch-of-a-finger in my face, waving it around while reminding me that she was “the boss” and if I didn’t do what she said, then she would never let me be involved in any other community theater productions. I could hear Lori crying in her room as my mom and I fought. Mom went on to threaten my college and every other dream I held dear.
Enough was enough. I snapped. I shoved her pointing finger out of the way and rushed to the phone. I didn’t know who to call. I was in a foreign country. So I called the military police.
A man answered the phone and I told him I was reporting an emergency. He asked what the nature of the emergency was.
Trying not to cry I said, “My sister and I are victims of child abuse.”
“What kind?” he asked.
I was stumped. It had been a while since my last belt beating. How could I describe this current abuse? A long pause and then finally I replied, “Mental.”
Another long pause, this time from the other end of the phone. No response, just dead air.
Then, clearing my throat, I gave him my name and address, but I could tell the call and the information exchange had been useless. Looking back I realize that it was a different era, and the military police operator didn’t know how to process what I had described.
After I hung up the phone, I turned around to find my mother standing behind me, breathing fire. She told me to go down to the maid’s room and “Get your father.”
I headed down to the maid’s room to find my dad out cold. It took me forever to wake him up. The stench of alcohol seeped through his pores as he tried several times to pull himself upright. His legs wobbled when he stood up, and then he stumbled as he made his way upstairs to our third-floor apartment. I cried and pleaded with him to take my side. He was disoriented and nothing I said seemed to be reaching him.
Once I finally got him into the apartment, Mom proceeded to tell him what I had done. “He gave them our address,” she said in a panicked tone. My dad just stood there, bleary-eyed and dumbfounded.
After a moment I was ordered to go to my room and never to repeat that behavior.
As soon as I got to my room I searched for food. It was all gone. There was nothing there. Nothing to eat. Nothing to comfort me. Nothing to help me smash down my pain. Nothing for me to force-feed my sadness and hopelessness. My stomach felt like it was eating itself. I tried to cry some more—subconsciously I knew I needed to vent my fear and frustration. But, by then, my tears had dried up.
I’ve had a difficult time crying ever since.
The police never responded that evening. Or ever.
None of us spoke about that night again. But for the first time I began to realize what a true and utter monster my mother was. And that my father was a monster as well—for letting my mom get away with her abuse.
It’s amazing that Lori and I excelled as much as we did in high school. We never had any encouragement from our parents. They weren’t even around to make sure we went to school.
I never got involved with alcohol or other drugs while attending high school. There were many opportunities since the drinking age in Germany was much lower than in the United States, not to mention that no German bartender would bother to check IDs as long as you had the money to pay for whatever drink you were ordering. But my drug—or libation—of choice continued to be Twinkies and other delectable goodies instead.
Upon my high school graduation, I learned that my parents’ four-year-long divorce proceedings were final. Along with this came another revelation. Over the years Lori and I and our parents had contributed to two different savings accounts—one for Lori’s college education and one for my own. As far as my sister and I knew, these funds were available and earning interest to fund our higher education. Now it turned out my dad had spent most of the money on his drunken binges and attorneys fees to defend himself against the various DUI charges he’d faced.
This was my mom’s explanation as to why both savings accounts were now defunct. My dad claimed it was used to pay for travel expenses. No matter the real reason, fact was the money was gone and Lori and I would now have to seek financial aid and student loans if we wanted to attend college.
It was the summer before college, and I was still determined to attend. I was equally determined to take off the weight and be thin, gorgeous, and loved (in that order) before I embarked on my journey of higher education.
Consequently, this became the summer when my sister and I discovered the marvel of diet drinks called Sego that were sold in the local military-operated grocery stores. With this over-the-counter liquid diet plan, you were to drink four twelve-ounce cans of “great-tasting” fluid a day (so great “you’ll forget you’re dieting!”). That was it. You were to consume nothing else.
The fact that my parents would let an eighteen-year-old boy and a fourteen-year-old girl go on such a harsh dieting regime boggles my mind today, but of course, neither of them was really around to put a stop to it. So long as it wasn’t deemed “junk food,” Dad would buy anything that was put on the weekly grocery list.
The Sego drinks turned out to be one of the first diets I was able to stick with. It was simple. There was no thought required and little temptation during meal preparation, which consisted of popping off an aluminum lid. For two whole months, Lori and I downed those chalky-tasting beverages in place of balanced meals. No chewing. Just drinking. I’m not sure why Lori even enlisted in such a program. She was hardly overweight. Perhaps it was moral support.
Despite an intake of less than 900 calories per day, I hardly lost any weight. My metabolism seemed to slow down to a virtual halt, all the while I was growing taller, inches-wise. But the inches around my belly remained.
Still, I stuck with the program.
The summer was uneventful by our family’s standards. My mom traveled a lot with her boyfriend of the minute. It was at the Sego two-month mark that she and her current boy-toy showed up at our apartment, eating lunch.
That night, while I was throwing away my last can of Sego diet drink of the day, I found a half-eaten, crumpled up bag of Cool Ranch Doritos in the trash can. They were past their “enjoy by” date. My mother had thoughtlessly left the bag there, knowing Lori and I were on liquid diets and were trying to keep the apartment free of temptations. I stared into the trash can for about an hour.
And then . . . I reached into the trash, got my hands wet with various forms of garbage, grabbed the bag of Doritos, and ate the chips with abandon. They were stale and tasted like cardboard. Still, I devoured the whole remainder of the bag, sitting on the kitchen floor, feeling like Quasimodo who had snuck down from the bell tower.
I was never able to return to the confines of the liquid diet after that incident. My food intake went right back to cheese, cookies, and other high-fat foods. The little weight I had lost came back. Soon I shot up past 325 pounds.
At the end of the summer I was preparing to leave for college, and my mom and sister moved into a rented condominium situated closer to downtown Wiesbaden, outside of the military housing area. Neither parent was willing to travel to Florida with me to help me settle into college life—something they had promised to do, since I was nervous about living in the States again after being away for so long.
But I was on my own. Business as usual.
I weighed 335 pounds and I was nervous about traveling so far by myself. But as I boarded my flight for Florida everything besides those minor issues seemed right with the world.
Momentarily, that is.
ANOTHER PERSPECTIVE ON GREGG AT THIS TIME
By Amy Wright-Israel, Gregg’s High School Girlfriend
I’m not sure when exactly it hit me: I was dating the high school “fat kid.” I don’t deny that it was a little disconcerting to have classmates walk by and holler, “Skinny and Fatty!” when Gregg and I were walking together. But I wasn’t after the popular vote, so I wasn’t too fazed. Gregg had charisma. He made me laugh. He was indeed, as he liked to say, “Foxy for a fat kid.” While I was shyer than shy he just seemed to have no fear. He would talk to anybody. Do anything. Even outrageous stuff. That got my attention.
My parents made the mistake of saying, “Well, somebody needs to love him. Look at him. Obviously he’s miserable.” I think I took that as a challenge.
Gregg? Miserable? If he was, he hid it well. He somehow managed to be popular and fun. I was actually jealous of him. He was also incredibly talented so we were in community theater, in honors chorus, and on the yearbook staff together. I think his sister hated me. His mother was straight up weird—pretending he was adopted and forcing me to uphold that lie if I ever spoke to her boyfriend. It was ridiculous, because they all seemed to look alike to me. Who was she kidding?
My dad worked at the same hospital where Gregg’s mother worked and he would share rumors about her being the office “tramp.” Her nickname around the hospital was “Passionata Von Climaxx.” I was rather horrified.
“Dee-ahhhna”—as she insisted on being called at the hospital—pressured Gregg to lie about his age and say he was in his twenties. I sucked at lying. I screwed up at a dinner with her and her boyfriend and accidentally told the truth about us being in high school. That resulted in a trip to the kitchen for a stern lecture.
Gregg’s mom had him terrified and forever jumping through hoops for her. There was nothing he wouldn’t do. He would get on me for not playing along. I don’t think I realized how evil she was really being to him. My own mom was very strict, and Gregg and I would commiserate and fantasize about sending our moms to the “island of bitches” so we could live a life free from both of them. We were teenagers.
Despite her strictness, my mom was normal compared to “Dee-ahhhna” and her bizarre fantasy world. I think her delusional lying warped Gregg’s view of himself. Everything was about portraying an image. And it was all about lying, despite the elephant in the room: The elephant in the room often being Gregg.
Yes, Gregg really did break that damned movie theater seat and hollered out: “Amy, my God . . . I just can’t take you anywhere!” It was funny and it was sad at the same time.
I remember how disturbing it was when I found Gregg devouring a gallon of ice cream that he’d taken from my parent’s fridge. Back then I had no clue he treated food like a drug, and that he tried to numb himself by wrapping a wall of fat around his pain.
I had my own pain I was dealing with. My relationship with Gregg had always been a doomed love affair; for one, I wouldn’t play snob and pretend to be something I wasn’t. Gregg found the popular kids in high school for that. I couldn’t understand why he needed their approval and would feel used and unloved as a result.
I also didn’t understand his loyalty to his psychotic mother and to his sister. Fortunately, or unfortunately, Gregg had a confused perspective on what was going on around him. No matter how hard he tried, there was no denying the hell that was his world.
As our relationship developed, I became increasingly frustrated because I loved him. Every single pound of him. And I wanted him to love me. To really love me. I wanted him to notice me. But I was a pawn in his play for attention. I just refused to follow orders and didn’t behave the way he hoped I would. For most of our time together, Gregg seemed most interested in being “popular.”
After graduating high school, Gregg and I were in and out of touch over the years. We always find each other again as friends because of his damned sharp perspective and his blazing wit that can make me, literally, pee my pants.
I never would have thought that Gregg would fight his protective weight and take it all off and allow himself to be naked to this harsh world. Though I do remember when he once confessed how taken aback he was by something my father, a doctor, had said, “Fat people almost always die fat.”
