Don't Get Too Comfortable (17 page)

There is nothing so intimately known as our own face. Even the most deprived existence provides opportunities to gaze into a reflective surface now and then—puddles of standing water, soup spoons, the sides of toasters. We know what pleases us, and also have a fairly good sense of what we would change if we could. Sometimes, though, we just get it plain wrong. Ellenbogen shows me a photo of a young man in his twenties; a pale, strawberry blond with the kind of meek profile that gets shoved into lockers. “This kid came in and wanted me to fix his nose. ‘It's too big!' he said. I told him, ‘It's not your nose. I'll prove it to you. I'll build out your chin. If you don't like it, I'll take it out and do your nose for free.'” Ellenbogen was right. The merest moving forward of the jaw has made the nose recede. The change is remarkable.

The fellow may have been focusing on the wrong feature, but at least he wanted
something.
There is a reason that both Fisher and Ellenbogen were so reluctant to suggest procedures to me. An unspecified and overarching desire for change speaks to a dissatisfaction probably better served by a psychiatrist. One surgeon I spoke to will not treat people in their first year of widowhood for just that reason. To briefly rant about
The Swan,
the television show that takes depressed female contestants—all of whom seem to need little more than to change out of their sweat suits and get some therapy—and makes them all over to look like the same trannie hooker: what makes
The Swan
truly vile is that for the months that these women are being carved up like so much processed poultry, all of the mirrors in their lives are covered over. Such willing abrogation of any say or agency in how they will be transformed
by definition
means that in the real world, they would not be candidates for surgery. It is the very sleaziest of all the plastic-surgery makeover shows—quite a distinction, that; like being voted the Osbourne child with the fewest interests.

Garth Fisher, in what might be considered an unconscious act of penance for contributing to the culture in which something like
The Swan
can exist (he is the in-house surgeon for the comparatively classier
Extreme Makeover
)
,
has created a five-hour DVD series called
The Naked Truth About Plastic Surgery.
Each hour-long disk is devoted to a different procedure and region of the body—breast augmentation, brow lifts, etc.

In spirit,
The Naked Truth
is more educational tool than sales pitch. It is refreshingly up front about the complications that can arise, like bad scarring, hematoma, numbness, pigment irregularities, infection, skin loss, even embolism and death. In the liposuction section, there is a shot of Fisher in the operating room. The backs of the patient's legs are shiny brown from the pre-surgical iodine wash, and crisscrossed with felt-tip marker. Fisher is sawing away under the shuddering skin with the cannula, a tool resembling a sharp, narrow pennywhistle attached to a hose. There is a savagery to his movements, the way one might angrily go back and forth over a particularly tenacious piece of lint with a vacuum cleaner. He looks up at the camera, his arm going the whole time. Although wearing a mask, his eyes crinkle in an unmistakable “Well, hello there!” smile.

There are shots of clear plastic containers of extracted fat—frothy, orange-yellow foam floating atop a layer of dark blood—and pictures of postoperative faces looking like Marlon Brando after he's been worked over in
On the Waterfront.
Such footage might have once had a deterrent effect but is now familiar to any toddler who has ever been parked in front of The Learning Channel. That these images have to be followed up by the cautionary tone of a narrator who says, “just because something
can
be done does not mean it
should
be done” and “if you can reach your goal without surgery, then you are better off,” speaks to how far down the rabbit hole we've tumbled. It's as if the whole country regularly watched newsreel footage of buses full of children going off of cliffs and was still blithely picking up the phone to make bookings with Greyhound.

I might be more apt to drink the Kool-Aid if I was more impressed by the results. The before and after photos of liposuction, for example, do show a reduction in volume. But if I were to endure the risks of general anesthetic, the pain, the constriction garment that must be worn like a sausage casing for weeks after the surgery, and the months-long wait for final results, I wouldn't just want a flatter stomach with no trace of love handles. I would insist upon the tortoiseshell reticulation of a six-pack, that abdominal Holy Grail. That's hard to achieve with liposuction. There is a procedure that replicates the look, called “etching,” where the coveted tic-tac-toe pattern is suctioned out of the adipose tissue, giving the appearance of musculature with no muscles present; morphology absent of structure, like the false bones in McDonald's creepy McRib sandwich. Garth Fisher doesn't recommend or offer it. Gain weight, he points out, and the artificially differentiated lobes of your fat expand and rise from your stomach like a pan of buttermilk biscuits.

IN THE END
, it is neither thrift nor fear of the knife that deters me. Far more than the physical transformation, it would be the very decision to go ahead with it that would render me unrecognizable to myself.

I once bleached my hair almost to platinum for a part in a short film. It lent me a certain Teutonic unapproachability, which I liked. But as it grew out, it faded to an acid, Marshmallow Peep yellow and my head started to look like a drugstore Easter-promotion window. Dark roots and straw-dry hair look fine on a college kid experimenting with peroxide, but I looked like a man of a certain age with a bad dye job clutching at his fleeting youth with bloody fingernails. I could see pity in the faces of strangers who passed me on the street.
Mutton dressed as lamb,
they were thinking. To all the world, I was the guy who broadcasts that heartbreaking and ambivalent directive: “Look at me, but for the reasons you used to!”

It must be murder to be an aging beauty, a former Tadzio, to see your future as an ignored spectator rushing up to meet you like the hard pavement. What a small sip of gall to be able to time with each passing year the ever-shorter interval in which someone's eyes focus upon you. And then shift away.

FASTER

I
t was turning out to be an anxious Christmas season. Too many were the early mornings spent sitting at the table, insomniac in the gray dawn, thinking to myself,
Eggs would be good.
Not for eating but for the viscous wrath of my ovo-barrage. It seemed only a matter of time before I was lobbing my edible artillery out the window at the army of malefactors who daily made my life such a buzzing carnival of annoyance. I could almost feel the satisfying, sloshy heft of my weapons as I imagined them leaving my hands and raining down upon my targets: the pair of schnauzers two doors down, with their loathsome, skittish dispositions, barking and yelping all day long; their owner, with her white hair styled like Marlene Dietrich's in
Blonde Venus,
who allows them to pee freely on the garbage that some poor sanitation worker then has to pick up; the leather-clad schmuck immediately next door, a cigar-smoking casual life-ruiner with his mufflerless motorcycle. All would taste my All Natural, Vegetarian Feed, Grade A Extra Large brand of justice!

Clearly, actions would have to be taken. Such short-fused intervals are an occasional and inevitable by-product of city life, but they are usually the kind of private ravings best kept to oneself. When fractured logic threatens to make the leap from fantasy to reality, and from dairy case to gun show, the center is not holding. I have never been a poster boy for serenity, but I knew I needed to restore some semblance of inner peace. In search of a fix much quicker than my weekly forays into the talking cure, I came upon an ancient and proven practice, one that exists in every culture and religious tradition as a means to attaining calm and an alternate plane of consciousness: an extended fast. Buddha did it, Jesus did it, even Pythagoras and George Bernard Shaw did it. It's like a Cole Porter song from the world's least-fun musical. Can the gulf that exists between me and a placid equanimity really be bridged just by not eating for a little while? I would find out, or possibly die trying.

I found my program on the Web. This sounds more irresponsible than it really is. All of the fasts I researched follow much the same model and promise much the same results. I simply chose the place that looked most legitimate, that has been around the longest and had the most traceable address. As a first-timer, I opted for the shortest one offered, twenty days. Actually, “twenty days” is a bit of a misnomer, it's really only two weeks of eating truly nothing, with three transitioning days of restricted eating on either end. For about $300, I am provided with an exhaustive regimen that includes the recipe for a special broth I have to drink that will provide me with much-needed potassium and electrolytes so that I don't keel over like Karen Carpenter, a schedule of when I am to drink it, along with the times for the juices and herbal teas that will make up the rest of my diet, as well as a plan for healthy eating for the remainder of my life post-fast. It's like a correspondence spa. Guiding me is the center's founder and president, a man I will call Brian. Based in California, he will respond almost immediately to the questions I send him by e-mail.

It briefly crosses my mind to start before the holiday parties are done with, as an added test of my ascetic resolve. I have visions of myself standing in crowded rooms, my hands folded modestly in front of me, my friends draining their glasses of Yuletide hooch while I quietly and beatifically turn away one cute waiter after another. In the end, I realize that such public and grandiose abstemiousness would miss the point of the whole enterprise. I go through the season swilling back liquor, scarfing down canapés, and vainly making eyes at the catering staff, exhausting myself and feeling crapulent, ready to begin in early January. The clean, white muslin of a new year.

The transition in—three days of two meals per day, one of raw fruit and one of raw vegetables—is easy and pleasurable. I drop a pound each day. I walk uptown from my apartment one morning, taking in bracing lungfuls of icy air. The spire of the Chrysler Building glitters in the distance, the bare limbs of the winter trees in Gramercy Park glow ochre against the cloudless blue sky. My head sings with clarity.
I can do this,
I think excitedly.

Forty-eight hours later, Day One of the fast proper, I rise and begin what will be my new daily ritual for the next two weeks. My mornings start with the showstopper: an enema of warm water, chamomile tea, and eight drops of lemon juice. This ritual will soon become a necessity when, after a few days of taking in no food, my brain's evacuation impulse will shut down. I will have to help my body along. I am to hold it in for fifteen minutes, lying on a towel on the bathroom floor. This is followed by a dry skin rubbing with a natural bristle brush (circular movements beginning at the extremities and progressing in toward my heart), a shower (switching to lukewarm/cool for the rinse to close my pores and prevent colds), and breakfast of eight to twelve ounces of broth. At other points during the day—I cannot say exactly when because this is proprietary, copyrighted information—I will consume fruit juice, vegetable juice, herbal tea, and, finally, more broth just before bed. All liquid must be of a waterlike consistency. Apparently even the merest trace of pulp or puree would be enough to kick my brain's appestat mechanism back into gear, making me hungry. I buy a fine-mesh strainer and filter my broth with the concentration and devotion of a Trappist monk.

By 11:00 a.m. on the first day, I already feel like a dog's breakfast; light-headed and lousy. Not hungry by any means, but sleepy and in the vise grip of a headache. Even conversation is taxing. I become hyperaware of the effortful deflation of my lungs that speech requires. My breath gives out by the end of my sentences. It's easily endurable for now, with my raft still in view of the shore, but what about the third day, or the ninth, I think? I get scared wondering how I will manage, even though I have been told repeatedly that it all changes by Day Four—hunger dissipates, energy increases, and the true brilliance of the experience begins to manifest. The prospect of what I might find has me quite excited, in those moments when I can focus on it, but right now, I cannot fathom two weeks of this. It all seems unattainably theoretical.

To better understand the physiology of what I'm feeling, I speak to Lisa Sanders, a doctor at Yale who spent five years analyzing the science behind more than seven hundred different diets. Apparently my sluggishness has everything to do with the sudden drop-off in my consumption of carbohydrates. With no incoming fuel in the form of food, my body is beginning to make the switch to consuming its own fat sources, known as ketones. The shift is not automatic. It takes place over the course of a few days. Until then, I will feel tired and out of sorts, but once the ketones kick in, Sanders says, people report returning to feeling quite normal. Even better than normal. According to what I've been reading, I expect I will feel downright marvelous. I ask Sanders why that might be.

“Ketones reduce your appetite, and they are your brain's preferred fuel. Maybe something about that makes you feel good,” she says.

My fasting-center reading materials explain the feeling shitty and subsequent elevation in mood quite differently. Ketones, carbohydrates, and switching fuel sources never come up. It is all about toxins. As an urban North American living in the twenty-first century, with a fairly omnivorous diet—including the occasional dreaded hamburger—I have a surpassingly toxic body, with an average of five to ten pounds of toxins housed in my cells. My nerves and organs are so coated with this ubiquitous, sludgy film of judgment-clouding, character-distorting poison that I am living a less-than-optimal life. Chemical fertilizers, pesticides, old vaccinations and X-rays, remnants of medication, heavy metals, artificial colorings, flavorings, sweeteners, preservatives all conspire to make me less than the best David I can be. Apparently the reason I feel so rotten for the first few days of my fast is that the poisons are leaving the relatively inert resting places they have carved out in my cells and are passing through my skin and, most important, my colon, once more exerting their noxious effects. Stuff that hurts going in will hurt coming out, I am told.

And it's all about stuff coming out, so to speak. Every fast I research is intensely concerned with notions of purity and cleanliness, and the need to flush out these supposed pollutants, whether through laxative teas and chugging a gallon of salt water, a technique that basically consigns you to the toilet for the better part of an hour, or, in my case, the enemas.

“We live in a dirtier and dirtier world, and yet our lives are longer and longer. Go figure,” says Sanders, pointing out the central paradox at the heart of the fasts. But five to ten pounds of toxins? That's the size of a robust newborn baby. It seems like an awful lot of poison in an ostensibly healthy person.

“It seems unlikely,” says Sanders. “Things you take into your system are incorporated into your cells, there's no question about that. That's why red dye number five has been banned. How long they stay there is not as clear. Our cells are pretty selective about what they take up as far as we've been able to tell.”

Whatever the reasons, by Day Four I do feel much better, just as predicted. I go to the movies where a woman two aisles over has what appears to be an entire Chinese dinner right there in the theater and I do not mind. Later that same evening, I sit across from my friend Rick in a restaurant as he enjoys a perfect meal of a fancy pressed sandwich and a low dish of butterscotch pudding, washed down with a flute of prosecco with pomegranate seeds being batted about in its helix of bubbles. I am conscious of his food, but I don't feel ravenous as I drink my peppermint tea. At no point does he morph into a huge pork chop on legs. I am not hungry, and my headaches and listlessness are largely gone.

But that's it. No golden shafts of light piercing the clouds, no strange hallucinatory visitations. It's still early days yet, I know, but this lack of something larger has me feeling a little concerned. Perhaps I'm doing it wrong. My fasting notebook recommends that I pass the fifteen minutes of holding my enema by reading some sort of spiritual literature. I have been opting for
The New York Times
instead. I cannot believe that staying engaged in the world is the thing standing between me and my glorious uptick. The accounts I've read and heard convince me that it is all but inevitable. Eventually there will be nothing for me to do but embrace this brilliant, beautiful thing that will overtake me, whether I like it or not. It has to happen. Physiology will out. I'm just not that special.

On Day Six I finally feel something unmistakably different, and it's not what I expected. I am up early, my energy is high. I feel great. I stand in the bathroom on top of the spread-out newspaper and give myself my weekly haircut. And then, suddenly, my heart begins to race. I am overcome with a shaky weakness and the distinct feeling that I cannot trust my body to do what it is meant to do. Or rather, that what my body is meant to do in that moment is to pass out and have me crack my head against the cold, unforgiving edge of the tub. My upstairs neighbor very kindly walks with me to see my doctor a block away. I buy a banana on the way, just in case everything goes to hell and I have to end this thing.

My blood pressure and my pulse are both normal. My doctor's not crazy about the idea of me fasting but tells me that I am essentially fine. I could, in fact, go for a good long time without food. I probably just had a moment of hypoglycemia. This reassures me and I go home. I drink a little extra juice and return to feeling fine in a matter of minutes. The banana sits on my table, an uneaten taunt, like Chekhov's loaded gun, introduced in the first act that must perforce be fired before the curtain comes down. I peel it, wrap it in foil, and stick it into the freezer out of sight.

I will not lie, there is a brief interval of joy while walking to the doctor, when I think I might be forced to return to the wonderful world of mastication, although I also know I would feel like a failure if I pulled out eight days early. Now that I am facing fully another week with my fast intact, I am back to square one, wondering how I will manage to get through this.

THE BROTH IS
a beautiful ruby color and smells wonderful. I'm probably fooling myself, but it feels like I can taste the minerals, sense them rushing through my body, exerting their healthy, sustaining influence. I look forward to each mug as though it were a full meal. The broth has to be made every two days. It goes rancid if kept longer. It involves a good deal of washing, chopping, boiling, and straining. It clears my mind and allows me to think. It becomes a moving meditation. I'm turning everything into a moving meditation at this point. There's a slight desperation to this constantly taking the pulse of my world. I'm investigating and palpating everything, trying to find my way back to the bed in a dark, unfamiliar room. Is this my shiny, rosy-hued epiphany, my hands blindly searching in front of me? Is this?

Day Nine. Maybe this is it. I am curiously relaxed, as if my bones had been removed. It's wonderful, but it's a surface calm. I am still aware of my set of First World Problems and their underlying causes. It's not like I just now realize that they are trivial—I always knew they didn't amount to a hill of beans—but my physical anxiety response is gone. It is lovely, but hardly seems worth the effort. If this is all there is, then I hate to say it, but Miss Peggy Lee was kind of right. On the street, a bike messenger zooms by dangerously close to me, nearly shearing off my kneecaps. Where once I might have hissed it, I can now only mutter “Jerk.” I cannot physically work myself up into a lather. Do I think,
Hello, fellow enbicycled human. Come, ride freely, let the wind carry you like a seedling, like a bird
? No, what I think is,
Schmuck. I hope you are crushed beneath the wheels of a bus.
But the difference is the venom that pulses through my veins now has the restful back-and-forth rush of the ocean's waves.

MY FASTING PROGRAM
warns me to stay vigilant against unhealthy ego investment and unjustified feelings of superiority. Just because I am an ethereal creature of light and air I should take care not to pass by the falafel stand, for example, and look down disdainfully from my slender, Olympian perch at the weak-willed humans who feel the need to stuff their gullets with something as earthbound and disgusting as solid nourishment. I know what it's like to groove on avoiding food. I derive some of my deepest pleasure in life from forgoing pleasure. I get off on self-flagellation and various little acts of bourgeois penance, like doing my laundry or skipping meals. Especially skipping meals. But that's not about feeling superior to others so much as asserting a steely personal control. It's a white-hot fire of self-abnegating virtue which, when it overtakes me, is one of the great joys of my life. By all accounts, I should be having it now. I am not just taking in less food, I am taking in none. I am fully ten pounds lighter. But fasting hasn't lessened my usual feelings of venality and guilt. If anything, it has increased them, what with my days being little more than a narcissistic rumination about my intake and, ahem, output. Between the hours of making the broth and giving myself the enemas, this is one of the most self-obsessed things I have ever done in my life, and I say that as someone who wrote an entire book about myself.