Fat Boy In Love

Pretty doesn't get hungry

I'm not feeling morbid, but i still think about some pretty strange things. Things like "If I were to blow my brains out with a shotgun, it's such a pity that instead of a whole other world coming into existence all people would get is a mess of blood and bone and grey matter to clean up and put in plastic biohazard bags." I think a lot of these kinds of thoughts are a byproduct of insomnia- I only get an hour or two of sleep and my brain seems like it's constantly on overdrive, but generally can't come up with anything useful or productive.

I finally started writing a book. I haven't told anybody I'm writing a book. I remember living in Los Angeles and every asshole at the Coffee Bean or Starbucks with a Macbook was busily "researching aspects of the characters in their new screenplay," while never actually producing anything. A whole lot of “research” gets done in L.A, that's for sure. Looking up neurological disorders with the online DSM and tacking them on to John Q. Everyman isn't writing, just the same as an acoustic guitar and three chords at the beach isn't music. If you want to pick up women, i guess you're doing it right, but I still hate you. 

That being said, I am sitting in a Starbucks right now, typing on my Macbook. Without purchasing a beverage, because this is Fort Collins, Colorado and you can still loiter here (provided you aren't drunk or look homeless). I'm not doing it for attention. There isn't an internet connection at the sober living house i'm staying at, and even if there were, there are 48 other people living there and I share a shoebox of a room with another guy who's always home. So while I may look like a poser and a schmuck, sitting at starbucks typing on my expensive machine, believe me when I say that I'd rather be entirely by myself doing this.

There's a picture I took of my arm when I was eighteen, nineteen, I cant remember exactly how old I was. My ex girlfriend, Nichol, had broken up with me a few months before I took the picture. I remember that. She was my first real love; the girl I lost my virginity to and the first girl I had ever experienced any depth of emotion with. In the relationship I felt excitement, both physically and psychologically, desire, elation, anticipation, comfort, and confusion. There was also fear, anxiety, crushing despair, possessiveness, rage, spite, and finally, loss.

The year before we started dating, I began a physical transformation. I was 270 lbs and sick of girls referring to me as a teddy bear. I was sick of my dad making casually cruel comments about my burrito consumption at Taco Bell. Once, my stepmother mistook an earthquake for me running up the stairs, and bitched at me until I was standing in front of her while the house shook.

I was sick of my friends making fat jokes when we were drinking around the campfire in the Swedish cemetary or whenever when we went out to eat (even though I ate less than any of them). I hated the fact that I was too slow and fat to catch the bastards who made fun of me because of my weight and beat seven shades of shit out of them, and once I had hit my limit of shame and self-hate, I quit eating.

I had chemical assistance with this; my body, regardless of how healthily I ate, always seemed to go back to at least 250 lbs on its own. I didn't eat much as it was, and I was a vegetarian, but somehow I still stayed fat. This was back when ephedrine was still legal, and was sold at Rite-Aid in the supplement aisles. My boss at Papa Murphy's pizza turned me on to these pills that looked like vitamins (I can't remember the name of the supplement), full of ephedrine and god knows what else, that made my appetite disappear and still gave me enough energy to walk everywhere and live my life. There were some adverse effects: poor circulation, heart palpitations, panic attacks, tremors and the like. I remember one day in college (I was sixteen and enrolled in an alternative program) I had taken like four of these things and drank a big gulp's worth of black coffee. I was sitting outside my English classroom, waiting for my professor, when I really started to shake. This raver kid was crouched against the wall a few feet away from me, high as a kite. When the shaking started, all I could think was “Oh shit, I overdid it this time,” and from the look the raver kid gave me im pretty sure he was thinking the same thing. I popped my headphones off just as a large lady in a blue dress ran by screaming, “Oh my GAWD, it's an earthquake!” and I broke out laughing, relieved that I wasn't in the middle of an overdose.

The nine months leading up to my seventeenth birthday weren't very exciting, although I remember taking so much ephedrine and adderall that I felt cold all the time even if it was 90 degrees out. I functioned well enough; I re-enrolled in regular high school and got good grades in all my classes. I had various jobs I would go to for a while and quit unexpectedly (apparently even large quantities of adderall can't make me enjoy work). My parents had put me on something called an “At-Risk Youth petition” when I was fifteen, which basically meant that they had the final say on anything I wanted to do, under penalty of incarceration. The petition got me to stop smoking pot and taking handfuls of various unidentified pills (for the most part) and kept me in at night. The stimulants I began taking after it went into effect, along with the lack of energy from not eating, kept me docile and focused enough to stay out of trouble.

I made a point of not being home as much as possible. I made a few friends in high school, and spent most of my free time with them. We did stupid, harmless things like spend whole afternoons or evenings at Denny's, smoking cigarettes, (I refuse to set foot in a Denny's since they banned smoking) drinking coffee, and trying to make some sense of the people we were growing into. My friend Danny was on a bowling team back in Astoria or someplace, and he had a job, so a few days a week we would go to the bowling alley and spend an hour or two throwing balls at pins. My improvement was definitely not in proportion to the amount of time I played the game.

When you lose an enormous amount of weight over a very short period of time, your brain doesn't automatically adjust. When I was 160 lbs, I still thought I was fat. When I was 150 lbs, I still thought I was fat. Throughout the process, I received praise from just about everybody in my life; they must have thought that I was working out and eating healthier or something. At 145 lbs, my dad (who just a year before would poke my belly and giggle) would tell me when full grown women were checking me out in the grocery store, which as it turned out happened a lot. All this, and I still thought I was fat. It was like walking around under the impression that I was, in fact, horrifically deformed and everybody was too polite to mention it.

Fatass

By the time I was seventeen and a half, I had gotten down to 140 lbs. At some point during this rapid weight loss, I started dating all sorts of different girls. I never slept with any of them, it was just nice to have some sort of intimacy with someone who thought I was worth their time. I'd never had that before. I still had a horrible self image, and it affected the way I handled just about every situation I found myself in, including relationships. I would date girls for a very brief period of time and break up with them, seemingly at random. Even now I couldn't tell you what made me quit seeing most of them, but I remember thinking that when I broke it off, I was doing them a favor. I was a fucking mess and I knew it, and then I met Nichol.

A close friend of mine named Selena was Nichol's cousin. They lived about a mile away from each other in Kenmore, and had kind of a catty, passive/aggressive thing going on. Selena liked to talk a little shit about Nichol, about her sexual promiscuity and so on. I was seventeen and a half, and while all my friends were out getting laid, I had been losing weight. I thought about sex enough, but despite myself and how I wanted to think about it, I had it in my head that I had to wait for the “right one.” Some antiquated, puritanical notion coupled with my own dysmorphia, I think.

Selena and I used to talk on the phone for hours at night, because we were teenagers and of course we did. Over the course of one of our nighttime phone sessions, the subject of Nichol came up, and I asked if she was single, almost as a joke. I had seen Nichol a year before, while I was sitting at my friend Gavin's computer with a nose-bleed from snorting ritalin all day, and she was hands down the most beautiful girl I had ever laid eyes on. Even if she was single, she was so far out of my league I'd have a better chance of winning the lottery than sleeping with her. Selena missed the joking tone in my voice, and got really quiet for a few moments. I could tell that she was thinking, and I pushed ahead with it. I asked her for Nichol's number, and if she could put in a good word for me, as it were. I didn't even think about it then, but setting me up with her cousin was probably the most heartbreaking, selfless thing she had ever done: Selena was in love with me. I didn't know it, and if I had I don't know how much I would have cared. That was the kind of guy I was, I guess. And I'm not proud of it.

I can't remember how many nights Nichol and I talked on the phone before we actually met up, but it was enough to pique her curiosity. Her dad was (justifiably) protective of his little girl; she was gorgeous and even though Nichol thought her parents were clueless about her sex life I'm pretty sure they knew more than they were letting on. She had to get permission from them to meet up with me, and there were rules for the meeting. She had to have her friends with her, and we had to meet some place in Kenmore.

I didn't have a problem with this, even though I thought Kenmore was trash. I wanted my friends with me too though, because in my experience nothing good could come from trying to bear up to the scrutiny of a potential mate's best friends without some backup. The bowling alley was too trashy in my opinion, which left Denny's (I apparently had no concept of irony at seventeen) and the docks. So that's what we did; it turned into what we always did. Denny's and the docks.

I showed up early, with Dan and Danny. We spent a lot of time at that Denny's in any case, and I'm pretty sure that in Danny's mind, he was doing me a particular favor by being there for this thing. Danny never had a lot of patience for things he considered stupid or a waste of time (which was also ironic, considering the things he made a priority. One time we were sitting at his apartment, he had Selena in his bedroom, literally begging him to fuck her, and his response was “I'm eating macaroni and cheese! Shut up!”).

Danny and me in Selena's front yard

Nichol walks in about fifteen minutes late with her friends Jenny and Andrea (both of whom I would come to hate for their constant henpecking and Andrea's eventual seduction and subsequent subjugation of Dan). Nichol told me later that she was expecting me to resemble what I had looked like a year before when we had met briefly at Gavin's house, and didn't recognize me in the restaurant. I found this particularly funny; the last time she saw me I was sitting in a computer chair, wearing a ripped up dress shirt with the words “ I Fucking Hate The Beatles” in big block lettering on the back, cursing at the monitor while stuffing kleenex up my bloody nose. I recognized her, though. I'll never forget that moment; I got out of the booth and walked straight up to her with the most honest grin on my face and said “Hi!”

Nichol had a number of personality traits I found very appealing. A number of physical ones, too. She wasn't very quick on the uptake though, and when she looked at me it was funny to watch her expression change from complete confusion to vague recollection to relief that I was indeed Ian. We hugged, introductions were made all around, and we sat at Denny's talking for a while.

Nichol told me on the phone that night that when she walked in to the restaurant, she didn't see me. She saw a lean young man with dark clothes and hair smiling and laughing with his friends, and since I didn't show up, she was going to try her luck with him. This confused me, but I took it as a compliment.

Anyways, that's how Nichol and I started dating. I fell in love, and I fell hard, with absolutely no idea what I was getting into.

The breakup was so hard for me... The cost was too high. When I say I had no respite from the despair and emptiness for months, I'm not over-exaggerating. I couldn't take it; the sleepless nights, driving around aimlessly for hours on end thinking that maybe I would run into her somewhere. The complete loss... I didn't know what happens after you die, and I really didn't care. All I wanted was to not feel, because every feeling was loss. Not sleeping, not eating, taking whatever drug I could get ahold of, I was going crazy.

I took this picture two weeks after they let me out of the hospital and I could unwrap the bandages. The other arm looked pretty much the same. It's the only picture I kept from the whole incident, and now is the only picture I have from my and Nichol's relationship, which is a shame because regardless of how it ended and how i lost it afterwards, there were actually a lot of good things we did together.

After the suicide attempt, my friends tried being there for me. None of them knew I had seriously tried to kill myself, and i didn't tell them for a while. I was so broken, and they were all still friends with Nichol. The only friend I had who actually succeeded in making me feel better was Arwain, who introduced me to Josh, who introduced me to heroin, which killed the despair long enough for me to recover from the heartbreak enough to keep breathing.

I never wrote about this before. I wrote songs and poetry and alluded to it frequently, but I've never taken the time to just lay it all out there until now, over a decade later.