Baggage Check



My elementary school phys. ed. instructor, my "gym creature", was the bane of my childhood. The banality of him is still with me. I just found out that he is retiring from teaching - or torturing, if you endured him - this year. I think I'll send the school district a card of congratulations. I think I'll send him a truckload of cheap suitcases, signifying the baggage he has saddled me with.



I was a cute kid. No one can deny me that. I played kickball with the best of them, until age 6 or 7. Then things went in a different direction, and my youth would never again be the rose-colored utopia that the romantics expound upon.

I was a fat kid.



Growing up a fat kid is not far from the exaggerated jokes of Crystal Bernard's character, Helen, on "Wings" or the schtick of Joan Rivers. Life with layers is a tough row to hoe, and the wisecracks of adult survivors, if you listen very closely, are merely bottles of vintage pain corked with punch lines. Food was a reward, from me to me if I felt I did something good, from others if they thought the same; a retreat in the face of fear, loneliness, depression or anxiety; a party favor, whether the guest list contained many names or just mine; an anaesthetic; a crutch; my friend. In a stable two-parent home of German descent on the upper-lower/lower-middle class cusp, it was the only guarantee in a day's time. It would be all around you, on the table like clockwork, arms outstretched. I liked it that way.



Waiting for gym class was like a stay of execution in that it eventually ran out. The morning bell would ring, we would count to four (not five, four) and the tell-tale knocks on the glass of the classroom door would strike terror into our little hearts. Couldn't that man rap on the wood like a normal person?



We'd wait in line like lambs boarding the mutton train and we'd tumble, we'd cartwheel, and we'd vault a pummel horse that was higher than our foreheads. The insults and emotional root canals were endless: "You're so fat you'll have to be carted around in a wheelbarrow one day"; "One day you won't be able to find clothes to fit"; "You'll be dead before you reach high school" . . . and he'd push me farther and farther into my private world, with its caramel-covered sidewalks and cotton candy clouds. I was the happiest miserable kid I knew.



In the fifth grade, when everyone was choosing what instruments they wanted to play, my fingers yearned for the ebony bores of a clarinet while my lower lip pouted for the silver plate of a flute. But fat kids don't play skinny instruments, I was informed. I went home with a saxophone that was uncomfortable to play and a bitch to carry. My svelte friend Greg got a clarinet, and I was forever jealous, all the way through our senior year when I wore the second-largest uniform the school band owned. The largest was worn by a fellow saxophone player who was clearly larger than me, and I made sure to stand next to him as often as possible, paling in comparison. I remember hitting the pierogie stand with him during third quarter breaks of football games.



Now there was a mixed-up kid. He was an incessant obsessor, trying to land this girl or that girl, deluding himself into thinking that there was a chance. A snowcone's chance in the Kalahari, maybe. I remember a school trip, an overnighter nonetheless, during which he tried to slice his stomach with a razor blade. It was more a cry for help than a 911, but the impetus was the same festering pit of confusion, pain and abuse from within and beyond that I, too, was sinking in. To this day he's larger than ever, but still alive.



To say I was "turned off" in the hormone department requires in-depth explanation. Think of me - well over 200 pounds and skirting my hurting with all the comic relief roles I could play in the school plays and musicals - as an appliance. I was simply left unplugged. While all the other kids were copping feels and swapping spit, I was dunkin' donuts in Yoo-Hoo and trying to stack up all of Lisa's last names on "As the World Turns". The proms rolled around and I could not have cared less. I rationalized it like this: why drop a few hundred dollars for a few tight-collared hours of constantly checking my lapel for vinaigrette stains? I would have looked like a funky soccer ball anyway. My fantasy refuge got larger and larger, as did my Levis. The God's-honest truth was that I didn't want anyone. Or, perhaps, I simply convinced myself that I didn't want anyone because the reality was that no one wanted me.



Speaking of soccer balls, exercise was a ball and chain that I refused to lug ("and you can't make me!"), though climbing a flight of stairs broke a sweat. That qualified, didn't it? How I marched a parade in Epcot center in the Florida heat of July wearing a 10-pound wool uniform, I'll never know, but I did manage to suffer through 792 gym classes, give or take a few stressed-out sojourns to the nurse's office.



The real kicker came sophomore year, circa 1985. My theatrical delusion of grandeur was being dangled in front of my face like a carrot cake: my nondescript high school was going to put on "West Side Story". I was beside myself, and there was barely room for one of myselves. All the summer before, I played my mother's original cast recording until it was a part of me. I envisioned the entire production, even performed it in my bedroom with my accordian-style radiator for a balcony, me in every role.

Except Maria. Let's not go there.



I worked on my New York drawl, my gum cracking, my hair slicking, my "Okay, Daddy-O!" until I was sure that one of the final bows would be mine. What I didn't work on was my physique. Little high school on the prairie or not, the director wanted realism. I wanted the part of "Action".



I didn't get West Side sqwat. I managed to walk on stage a few times here and there, getting cut halfway through the "Dance at the Gym" because "it just isn't working", but always able to turn the pages for the accompanist or schlep a seamstress dressform on and offstage. Mr. Dependable I was to everyone else. Mr. Face Pressed Against the Glass I was to myself. It was the musical director who delivered the blow that will make my head swim until my dying day.



Not long after the cast list was posted, he took me aside between classes one day to ask me why I didn't try to lose weight. He made it abundantly clear that I would have been Action or even Tony if I had looked like an Action or a Tony; but I looked like me, so I played the equivalent of a Greenwich Village tree. When I share that dreadful chitchat with friends, they say "Great! What talent you must have! What a tribute!", to which I reply "Wake up! Smell the Slim-Fast! I was denied the greatest event of my youth because I was fat, and then my nose was rubbed in it!" Pay tribute to THIS, thankyouverylittle.

And I swear to you, right hand up to God, that I have let go of most of my bitterness from those years.



College came and went, not the Animal House I envisioned it to be, but a nice little niche by the end. I went through a wild hair phase, a black wardrobe phase and, at long last, a weight loss phase. Something finally snapped, and I was on my way to physical recovery. Maybe it was the sum total of fifteen years of muck and mire, underachieving and overindulging. Whatever it was, it made me change all of my ways, from the minute I wake up to the minute I fall asleep.



That was age 21, poundage 240. Today, at age 29, I lilt on the scale at 150, having put on some muscle after a long stay at 138, which frightened even me. I did it intelligently and slowly, though no one believed that I wasn't purging and starving. The naysayers tend to be those who were used to the old me, the comfy, baggy sweatshirt me that became the clingy, silk tee me. At times, it feels as if they're not happy for me, that they want me to put it all back on and be their familiar old flotation device. Many of these people do not welcome change, so I attribute their lack of enthusiasm to that. Fear is funny. It throws a roadblock right in front of you when you just want to shove the pedal to the floor. I still fear walking into a crowded room, the eyes I will meet, the whispers that scream synonyms for "bloated" and "pathetic", the lack of a hole big enough to crawl into. That much baggage doesn't check easily, and I can't count on the self-esteem airport to lose it for me.



So, to the attractive strangers of the night I never took to bed, the musical director, my gym creature: I will not thank you for the neglect, the backhanded compliment, or the abuse. I do not owe my size 31s to you and I dare you to pay proper attention to me now; it would be far too little and way too late to get even a nod from me. I used to run my daily miles with a vengeance, but now I run with exhilaration. We all wish we could go back and do things over, bearing the 20/20 of hindsight. Even if the genie in the bottle said it were possible, I still would not go back to my school days, gym class, or West Side Waste of my Time.



Life for me may never be the tequila shots and little black books that it is for many of my friends. They couldn't possibly understand, but that's okay by me. I'm recovering, and so help me, I will be happy . . .

Somehow, someday, somewhere.




SoshBfly@aol.com