Fat Man's Burden

Fat Man’s Burden


What does it take to turn a well-adjusted, extremely handsome, rugged, 28 year old guy like me into a bulimic 17-year-old girl? Two words: malicious ex. I haven’t eaten for 16 days. Needles to say I’m starving and it’s all because of this bitch.
It all started at one of my ultra-hip friends’ birthday party. It’s at functions like these that
I feel that, in the spectrum of NYC nightlife, I just might matter. Great music, beautiful women everywhere, an abundance of party favors, the right amount of celebrity sightings. There was even food, what more could I ask for? Just then who should hove into view but a long-time ex. Worse, an ex who I knew bore a grudge. It started innocently enough, the usual bullshit exchanges, “Hey, how are you? I’m doing really well, great…great…” Just as I thought the worse was over, it happened. She got me. “Wow, you got big!” she said. That’s what she said. What I heard was, “Holy shit, you’re fat!” Time stopped. My jaw fell to the ground. My rapier wit failed me. I felt like a naked man in a church, an obese naked man in a church filled with super models.
Now anyone who has known me longer than 15 minutes knows that I am possibly the most vain person in all five boroughs. With just four words, this chick had rocked my world to its core. Sure I was a dirty rotten scoundrel for the brief period that we dated, but to hit me in the vanity like that was just cruel. Cruel and unreasonable. Doesn’t she understand the pressures we men face to conform physically?
The phrase “Adonis Complex” was coined by a group of Harvard and Brown researchers, who maintain that the ideal male physique is so sculpted and muscled and toned and lean that it’s nearly impossible for any guy to achieve. Sly Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Brad Pitt have made us all feel like under developed schleps. Our fathers and their fathers before them certainly didn’t deal with these types of issues. I can’t, for the life of me imagine Sean Connery or Richard Roundtree ever sweating it out in a spin class. And since I consider myself to be a modern blend of those heroes, I don’t think I should have to sign up for any stupid aerobics classes. But the comfort foods that made me feel so at home in the months that followed September 11th now made me feel totally uncomfortable. Uncomfortable, unattractive and insecure.
My friends noticed. They said it looks as though someone had just walked over my grave. I told them I felt as if the whole party was whispering, “Damn! Brent packed on the pounds!” and “Shit! Eat a carrot, lard-ass! and “Stay the hell out of the kitchen, porky!” My friends dismissed it as just my imagination. They said I had misinterpreted her and what she really was saying was that I looked as though I had been pumping iron. You know, big! Bullshit! They were just being nice and I told them all to go to hell. How could they let this happen to me? The way I see it they should have been my first line of defense against packing on the pounds. Now I didn’t just feel not sexy, I felt totally betrayed and totally not sexy. If the shoe had been on the other foot and Sandra had gotten butchered at the hair salon, I would’ve done the right thing and something along the lines of, “ I hope you didn’t pay for that hair cut” or if Samantha was wearing a particularly heinous outfit, I would have said something like, “What, did you get dressed in the dark?” I would’ve been a true friend, unlike the bunch of Judas Iscariots that I associate with.
I admit that I do have some unresolved body and weight issues. Growing up and extremely overweight wise-ass I was used to being the (lard) butt of a lot of jokes. Since college, I’ve tried to turn myself into a lean mean fighting machine, so to find out the machine wasn’t as lean or as ready to fight, as I fondly imagined, was a total ass-burner. The closest thing I can equate it to is the pauper who suddenly becomes wealthy, dreads poverty much more so than the rich person who doesn’t know what it’s like to have been poor in the first place. I don’t want to go back. God, I don’t want to go back.
So I renewed my long-lapsed membership at my local health club. The genetically superior staff at the gym didn’t even have to hard sell me to re-up. I dropped that $1,000. on the counter like it was on fire. I’m actually going, as well. I’m on a strict diet of water, iceberg lettuce, and apples. By my estimates I’ll be back down to a svelte 170lbs., just in time for beach season and everything in the world will be as it should be.
Hopefully I won’t be running into any of my other disgruntled exes before then. I can’t take anymore of the emotional battering. And if, just if, I should be waylaid by one of them in some hip spot somewhere, I just pray she doesn’t bring up the money I liberated from her purse. Oh, did I mention the issues I have with my latent kleptomania?