Fat (10 page)

     They missed a great fireworks show.                     

PARK BENCH

     Running has to be the worst activity ever.  Propelling oneself for the sake of propelling oneself is idiotic.  I feel like crap during the entire run – a little lightheaded, eyes blurry from sweat, nose and throat filled with a slurry of spit and snot, chest burning, nipples chafing, stomach cramping, sore butt and thighs, noodle-y legs, shin splints, and achy arches.  Then I feel great when it’s over.  I guess I have to do it because my masochistic body tells me it’s good for me.  I anticipate today being no different: feeling awful for forty minutes, then getting a wave of satisfaction for pushing my body past some self perceived limit.  I guess some of the high has to do with the fact that I’m pre-paying the penance for the chocolate shake I’m going to have after dinner tonight.  Cave men always stayed in shape from needing to run everywhere to catch food. I have to run to get rid of food. 

     I usually run near a park by my house.  It is a pleasant patch of grass; usually there is some little league game stirring and some dogs chasing Frisbees and some pretty girls dozing on their backs getting some sun.  Usually a sure bet for some great scenery to keep my mind off how much I hate running.  But, not today. 

     It looked like Xander and Xander’s twin wearing a long blonde wig were sucking face on a park bench.  They looked like they were frantically trying to climb to the top of each other.  They both had asses in the front and back.  It was a squash humping a gourd.       

     I am sure Xander got sick of being alone.  Every male starts out thinking he can sex Heidi Klum.  Movies always have some awkward geek being able to win over a gorgeous woman with just his sparkling decency and uniqueness.   Hell,
Knocked Up
had Seth Rogen sexing Katherine Heigl.  But then, as the rejections start to add up in the real world due to physical or financial or personality status issues, Heidi starts to become Tara Reid to your friend’s mom to Jill the Burger King girl.  Xander must’ve got fed up with putting lipstick on his left hand and calling that his girlfriend or spending hours searching and downloading internet porn so he could use his robotic vagina simulator in front of his computer screen.  So he hit upon this girl, and decided to take it.

     Regardless of who the woman was, Xander is lucky; women are more tolerant of big bodies than men.  Fat chicks have to accept being tossed aside or start getting really slutty, irrespective of their personality, just to make it with the typical male sensibilities.  And they will likely never be considered the dream girl; at best, just an okay-for-now-while-I’m-drinking-and-horny girl.  Fat dudes only have to worry about trying to attract a girl with their status, money or personality, and not so much their physique.  No amount of money and status will get Rosie a spot on
People
’s “50 Most Beautiful” list, but a little paunch has never hurt Russell Crowe with the ladies; a few pictures of a heavier Jessica Simpson get national coverage while a pudgy Val Kilmer in swimming trunks gets placement at the bottom left on page thirty surrounded by blown up pictures of a possibly cottage-cheese thighed Tyra Banks.  Fat men can become successful and earn the option to shoot for the stars and see what they can hit; fat women usually have to take whatever they can get given their present deviation from society’s stereotypical image of attractiveness, regardless of moneyed status.  Pavarotti’s ladies were beauties with bodies; Rosanne got Tom Arnold.  Xander was no Pavarotti, and was probably about double that tenor’s size.  His body would test even the most tolerant of women.  Yet he still found one.   

     Even for him, food was not enough to satisfy everything.  He got to this body size because, for a long while, he got off on eating so much that it far superseded the pursuit of any sensation that he could have gotten by putting his flesh into a warm, soft, wet orifice.  Someone that has worked to blow up to over three fifty does not have attracting the opposite sex as a high priority.  If Xander thought humping a cooling Bananas Foster felt as good as eating it, he would be much trimmer.  Even in movies, crotching a pie was not sweet enough to stop the pursuit of sexing a real female.  The need to feed his simmering sexual starvation eventually grew to an extent that it won out over his need for gustatory overindulgence.  A love of food gave him the weight, and the weight made him tired at recess, tired walking to class, tired walking at graduation, tired walking up office steps, tired walking to the buffet, and eventually tired of walking alone.

     This current scene at the park only proves the adage (my adage) that save for the odd fetishist, the obese usually come in pairs – similar to intra-sexual insects, wherein only they will tolerate mating with someone that may potentially eat them.  Go to any family dining establishment and there will be plenty of families where clearly a three hundred pounder mated with another three hundred pounder and created little future three hundred pounders.  Of course Xander himself was a new mutation, weighing as much as Kate and Albert put together, but if he is able to procreate with this girl, there will be another litter of Xander’s born.  She may be pregnant right now, she could be 8 1/2 months pregnant for all I know, but her girth makes it impossible to distinguish a bulge of abdominal fat from a bulge of fetal life.  No one could comment for fear that their congratulations on a baby-to-be are instead congratulations on ingested Krispy Kremes.  It could be that she does not even know if she was carrying a little Xander, ignoring nausea as a bad Big Mac and her lack of menses to her baseline metabolic dysfunction from obesity, leading to one day when she gets bad cramps after eating a full package of Oreos with a gallon of whole milk, then runs into the bathroom expecting to BM and instead comes a toilet baby.

     Obviously they need to somehow have sex to create a baby.  The usual simple task of insertion becomes a bastard task between morbidly obese persons and makes getting sperm to ova their miracle of life, rather than the actual birth of the baby.   Mounds of flesh obscure genitals and create mushy obstacles that necessitate superhuman angles to align penis and orifice.  Abdominal panni has to be lifted and moved aside, and rhythmic movements make for an ever shifting plane, like trying to keep an avalanche of mayonnaise from overwhelming a small pubic village during an earthquake using just your hands.  The physics of obese intercourse are mind-blowing, but it must occur because this park’s playground is filled with their progenies; little rolys taxing swings and monkey bars with faces smeared in chocolate and hands sticky from earlier ice cream snacks.  How does a morbidly obese man’s penis ever physically get into morbidly obese vagina?  How does sperm ever get to that egg?  Does the man fill a kiddie pool with ejaculate so the woman can take a fertilizing squat?  Or is it related to why my local megamart is always selling out of funnels? 

     It looked like Xander and his lady were eating each other.  This was way too much tongue and heavy petting for a mid-afternoon on a public bench.  Both Xander and his lady were wearing black T-shirts with “Fat is Beautiful” on the front in block lettering.  The tees were like every tee on the morbidly obese, in that the bottom of the shirts were unable to get all the way over the expanded belly and instead only able to stretch near the apex of the protrusion, unable to fully cover the hanging fleshy mass that was now flopped over their respective groins.  I knew those exact shirts from the Fat Awareness Club that had a vocal membership at the nearby college, where I heard Xander had enrolled a couple years ago.  The shirts were their uniform.  This club always has cupcake giveaways most spring and summer weekends on the town’s sidewalks, yelling out “Fat is Beautiful!” on megaphones while handing out the baked goods with their “Fat is Beautiful” slogan in icing on the top and with pamphlets attached espousing anti-fat discrimination bullets – the latest pamphlet pushed into my hands had on it articles titled “Would you call your grandmother a fatass?” and “Buddha had a belly”.  The cupcakes were damn good, though; I didn’t expect anything less from true connoisseurs of sweets.  The club also had fundraising car washes a few times a summer with some of their more topside voluptuous female members in bikini-tops and flowing wraparounds as the sudsy spongers.  It was a militant obesity club – less about a support group to become healthier than about forcing everyone to acknowledge their right to be overweight and be considered beautiful.  It was really just a club of people that found it too hard to change their own habits, so they were efforting to try to change everyone else.  Yes, it is an inalienable right to be fat, but it is an absurd notion that people should be forced to behold another person’s idea of beauty.  “True beauty is on the inside” -- that is empty rhetoric everyone can get behind for show, but in actual practice beauty is a visual medium.  No amount of cupcakes and megaphoning in slicked up size 20 bikinis fronting double D’s are going to convince me that a three hundred pound woman in a purple miu-miu dipping bon-bons in drawn butter is the same as Victoria’s Secret models slowly licking away lollipops.  Beauty beholding is in itself also an inalienable right.  That subjectiveness applies to everyone, regardless of girth: I think Kate Moss looks closer to an alien than a supermodel, but my college roommate stickied every picture of her he could get in his left hand.  It isn’t that the world is filled with shallow people, as much as that theorem is used as reason for obese self-loathing, it is that people are evolutionarily hardwired to be attracted to their perceived versions of healthy people.  The chances of producing future generations during harder times was exponentially smaller if someone was unable to move fast enough to catch food or chronically sick with organic diseases or dead decades before healthier peers. 

     Xander apparently views any mate as healthier than loneliness, and that mutated axiom made this overfilled bag of wet laundry irresistibly arousing.  He couldn’t stop his hands from fondling the mounds of flesh underneath every letter of the silk-screened slogan on the front of this girl’s T-shirt.  He was also fondling every inch of her backside, which had every bit of full breasts as her frontside, made from the pouching of excess skin over her scapulas.  These back breasts were equally engorged in fat cells and glandular mass, but were never going to nourish any infant.         

     I am reminded of a charity dinner I attended recently for the local children’s hospital at Morton’s, which was emceed by the very attractive local 5 o’clock news anchor and her new husband.  I remember them sharing a quiet moment at their table after her duties were done, and exchanging a few loving kisses and caresses.  Very sweet.  Xander pawing at neck rolls, with his hands occasionally disappearing into skin flaps, while he received a dry handjob by getting his front-ass rubbed by overstuffed sausage fingers was criminally indecent.  PDAs should be better regulated by law for the sake of society’s mental health; no one wants to see Jabba suck face with Grimace.

     Full breasts were on both Xander and his lady, and both sets blended on top of bellies into mounds of flesh indistinguishable from ass.  Man should be distinguishable from woman by the existence of breasts in the least – even “A” cups perked under a shirt have the distinct silhouette of a woman’s – but breasts in these two had long disappeared into androgynous wormholes of adipose.  Breasts, back-ass, front-ass, and genitals all disappeared into flaps of fat. 

      Kate has great breasts – a supple palm-full withperfectly proportioned areolas and reactive nipples.  I enjoyed their every benefit in high school.  She started out as a little fat girl in grade school that would pass on playing outside to eat donuts in front of cartoons, but after years of her brothers calling her King Kong Kate, she went vegetarian for a while in junior high and became a gym rat.  She got slender and fit just in time for high school.  Lucky for her, the weight didn’t come off her chest.  Lucky for me, too.  As an added bonus, she still held twinges of the self-esteem of a fat girl.  Low self-esteem at an age where making a boy happy makes self-esteem?  I didn’t know it at the time, but that was how a scrawny geek like me snagged her back then.  Though that ended in a sour flash.  The last time I saw her breasts in the flesh was at the start of senior year: me walking into a laundry room at a party, Kate topless, on her knees, in front of a pant-less James Keene.   At least she married the next guy she went out with after dumping James a couple weeks later.

     I am feeling nauseous from this run.  

     Xander brought his dog to park too.  This little guy was tied up to the corner of the bench, seated contently in the grass, checking out the scene out at the park while his master was porking.  This puppy was panting heavily.  Out of breath from sitting.  He was a Sharpee, all extra skin and rolls, but also was an overweight Sharpee, so he looked like a furry Xander.  This guy looked like one of those dogs that would keep eating whatever food he could get into his paws; fill a bowl with a cup, he’ll eat a cup, fill it up with two cups, then two cups gone, spill a bag of Iams, better buy another bag tomorrow.  I’m sure he was getting a ton of table food.  Eating Xander’s daily scraps would be a full meal in itself for any dog, but it looked like this furry guy was using it as a supplement to his dry dog food meal.  The best hope for this dog would be if he got into a bad batch of dirt and snagged a tapeworm.  Then maybe Xander will unknowingly pick up some infested doggie poop, contaminate his hand, then forget to wash up before dinner and eat a few sloppy joes seasoned with tape worm – instant weight loss plan.  Then again, his calorie intake may overcome even the tapeworm, so all Xander would be left with is a fat ass tapeworm living symbiotically in his lower intestine.