Hyper-chondriac (5 page)

Most teenagers would have just forgotten about their debts, especially since the amounts being bet were ludicrous. But I was an honorable person, at least among people who didn't live in my house. Besides, as a compulsive gambler, I always thought my next bet would go in my favor and I'd dig myself out of the hole I'd created and buy back my dad's comics and everything would return to normal. Just the opposite happened. My debts grew and my father's comics shrank.

Then a very insane thought came into my head. One game, winner-take-all. Double-or-nothing. If I won, I wouldn't owe Eddie a cent. But if Eddie won…well…he'd get my father's
entire
comic book collection. I already figured out I'd suck up some of the blame by telling my parents we got robbed and that I
might
have forgotten to lock the front door while Rufus was in the backyard.

Why was I willing to sacrifice my father's prized Submariner comic based on how in sync my thumbs were in relation to a neighbor's? What was wrong with me? I later realized that I might have been trying to get back at my dad for being the ultimate Submariner, submerging his emotions. The truth is, he had to. If he let even a fraction of them out, he probably would've gone mad. Unfortunately, this also made him emotionally unavailable to us. But I couldn't blame him for that. It was his only way of coping.

Eddie and I hunkered down in his paneled rec room and I received the kickoff. I maneuvered my blip around the converging blips and flicked my thumbs around that little beige board as if I were having an epileptic seizure. At last, melodic chirps emanating from the one-inch speaker signified that I had scored a touchdown! Success! Then Eddie scored a touchdown while simultaneously popping a blackhead on his chin and listing the prettiest girls in our school in order. Then I scored again. And back and forth we went. Touchdown. Touchdown. Touchdown.

The first one to make a mistake would inevitably be the loser. And I assumed it would be me. I considered pressing the buttons really hard to try to break the game and then insist I'd won by default, since the upkeep of the toy should be Eddie's responsibility. Then the incredible happened. Kunoff threw an interception! I don't know if he felt sorry for me and my varicocele and did it on purpose or if that little defensive blip just out-deeked him. But I didn't care. All I had to do now was score from a scant twenty-two yards out and I'd have this thing in the bag.

He handed me the game, which nearly slipped out of my sweaty, panic-coated hands. As my heart's thumps matched the pulse of the game's thumps, my quarterback scrambled around, nearly getting sacked. Then miraculously, as if all the defensive blips had simultaneously pulled hamstrings, I managed to zigzag around every one of them until I had secured a first down, then continued along the sidelines for bonus yardage. I kept flailing my thumbs on the tiny directional squares in the hopes of hearing that loud buzz from the tiny Mattel speakers, indicating that the game was over. This meant that once I was tackled, that was it. I still had another ten yards to go. The pressure was unbearable as beads of sweat dripped from my forehead down onto the playing field, obscuring some of the players. Had this been Mattel Electronic Baseball, the grounds crew would've had to bring the tarp out. I had never been so frightened in my life. One inadvertent maneuver and my father would be superhero-less! Or worse, I'd have to sign over the title of my car. Either way, I'd never be able to afford to date again. My thumbs relentlessly slammed the squares as fast as they could until I heard the celebratory tones that indicated a score. Touchdown! The game was over and I was debt-free from Eddie. In fact, debt-free from everyone. And most important, my dad's comics wouldn't migrate twice in his lifetime.

I was so relieved I removed the batteries from Eddie's Mattel Electronic Football game and stuffed them into my pocket, so I wouldn't be tempted to play some more. I left the Kunoffs' rec room and, on my jubilant walk home, flung those double-A's down the sewer. And, despite my monumental losses, I felt as if I had gotten off easy.

But I hadn't. To get out of lugging more heavy furniture around to work off my debt, Eddie was the only person I had told about my varicocele and he assured me he'd keep it a secret. Not only did he not keep it a secret but he seemed to go out of his way to tell people. The story spread like brush fire in school. As I walked down the hallways, girls would giggle, point at my groin and scatter. Guys would mock me, both behind my back and to my face. “Hey, Frazer…you wanna play basketBALL!!!”

Then, forty-five minutes before I was going to leave to pick up Lisa, I got a phone call.

“I really like you,” said Lisa, “but I think we should break up.”

I nearly yelled out: Is it because of my ball! My hideous left ball?! It's my ball, isn't it?!! Instead I went for the more conventional, “Why?”

“Because…uh…I have to concentrate on Spanish.”

I pondered over whether it was because she'd heard about my sick testicle or discovered my gambling addiction and was worried that she'd come home one day to find all her Shaun Cassidy posters missing. Or maybe it was my mumbling. All I know is, it wasn't because of Spanish because she told me at Pizza City that she took French.

Within a week, the angst and stress of being teased about my ball and dumped overwhelmed my body. I became so weak and queasy I was sent home from school. It was a struggle just to drive the three miles. I had searing abdominal pain, coughing fits, a high fever, chills.

After some small talk about my testicle, Dr. Torino told me I had walking pneumonia—the first of five times I'd be diagnosed with this over the next two decades.

 

Although I soon got over Lisa Kulaska, the same couldn't be said for gambling. I continued to bet and lose increasingly large amounts of money I didn't have. And there was nothing that was too asinine to bet on: tetherball, how much strangers weighed, the number of watts in a lightbulb. A few months later, my mother picked up the other phone line and heard me betting on baseball with a bookie. She told me to “stop this nonsense immediately.” And I did. Cold turkey. And I never told my dad about how I used his comic book collection to try to feel up a teenage girl in a back brace. Instead, I cut the lawn every week, waxed his car without being asked and have always gotten him really good Father's Day gifts.

 

Years later, as I drove around my old neighborhood, I'd see that the Feldmans had a new deck, the Bevalaquas a new car and the Kunoffs new aluminum siding. And I wondered how much of that was because the Hendersons insisted to Richard Dawson that a couch
could
fit in a suitcase.

I hated being scrawny. I was skinny, in a “you can see the contour of my bones” way. My teenage arms were so thin I never left the house without wearing thick, tight sweatbands on my wrists so they'd squeeze the flesh up into my forearms, giving the illusion I had upgraded to actual arms. Then the summer between seventh and eighth grades things got worse. I shot up from five feet three inches to five feet ten. Now I was
tall
and skinny, which I hated even more because being the tallest kid in school just drew more attention to my skinniness. And besides, Fonzie wasn't tall.

Growing up,
Happy Days
was my favorite TV show. Like Richie Cunningham, Ralph Malph and Potsie Weber, I thought Arthur Fonzarelli was the coolest guy on the planet. I wanted to be exactly like the Fonz and I couldn't do it towering over everyone. I was now just two inches shy of six feet, a very un-Fonzie-esque height.

Every night before I went to bed I prayed to God that I would stop growing. I didn't ask Him for very much. Not only did I have the rabbi abandonment issue but if there was anything I really wanted or needed I'd just ask my parents. But enough was enough. So I prayed that God would give away some of my height to Larry Sadowski. He'd really appreciate it. I even slept curled up in the fetal position in case God needed a visual clue to my needs.

I rationalized that the more I could emulate Fonzie, the safer I would be. And I needed to protect myself. Yes, I know, being a Jew on Long Island wasn't the toughest situation in the world. However, inside my house, life was scary. I feared that my body was vulnerable, not only to internal forces like disease, but to external harm. My grandfather repeatedly told me: “When I was in Poland and the pogroms began, they went around beating up the Jews, but I fought back.” At five feet ten, 110 pounds, I didn't think I was capable of fighting back. Hell, Jews weren't exactly renowned for their physical prowess. I was scared. Despite being 5,000 miles and thirty-two years away from Hitler, I needed some help.

Luckily, help was five houses away.

Mr. Wilkington was a low-key, smiley sixty-seven-
year-old white-haired Cub Scout leader who lived down the street with his mother. My brother had known him for years from his involvement with the Scouts. I often ran into Mr. Wilkington while walking Rufus past his house. One afternoon he stopped me.

“Hello, Brian. I just got a new weight set for the troops. Would you like the old weight set that your brother donated a few years back?”

I had no idea my brother had lifted a weight in his life.

“Sure, Mr. Wilkington.” I smiled.

I dropped Rufus off at home and enthusiastically ran back to reclaim my brother's old weight set.

The collection consisted of a single barbell with about ninety pounds of concrete-filled plastic-coated weights. The red discs weighed twenty-five pounds; the blue, ten; and the white, five. I rolled the barbell down the sidewalk and was exhausted by the time I pushed it into my garage. But something had happened in that hundred yards. My legs ached, my arms had filled with blood and my shoulders became stiff and immobile. I felt awesome!

I started lifting steadily in my garage and before long I was seeing results. My shirts were tighter, my wrists were finally sweatband-free and my chest was catching up to my sister's. And, as my biceps grew, so did my anxiety. All I could think about all day was lifting. As I sat in homeroom, I'd map out each workout in advance and visualize myself going through every movement. I was extra attentive to training all parts of my body equally so I wouldn't be one of those idiots like Gary Goldstein with a huge upper body and chicken legs. I lifted until failure on every set, relishing the burning sensation of my muscles as the lactic acid dripped into my limbs. And to soothe the burning in my left testicle, I took warm baths whenever I could.

I soon owned several dumbbells, an incline bench, a chin-up bar and an additional hundred pounds of weights. The moment I got home from school I would open up the garage door and start lifting. People walking past my house just stared as I grunted. My parents were supportive of my new hobby, probably because it meant I wasn't in the house as much, so they could yell at each other in the presence of fewer witnesses.

People were starting to notice my new physique. Especially me. As I sat in Mr. Blouin's English class, I would wear skintight T-shirts and periodically pump each biceps an identical number of times and then inspect them to make sure they were still approximately the same size.

All the chin-ups began to widen my back, which meant that my arms were no longer pointing straight down like a normal person's. Instead, each hung from my shoulders at forty-five-degree angles, to make it readily apparent to any bystander that I was, in fact, a lifter. Or attempting to impersonate a pyramid.

When I tagged along with my father to strangers' homes to see if any of their old comics were worthy of purchase, they would inevitably make a comment about my body. “Wow, Sam…your son has some big arms there.”

“Now if only he could develop his mind,” my father would reply in his cadence-free manner.

One day as I was walking home from the bus stop with my new monkeylike gait, Mr. Wilkington stopped me.

“Hello, Brian!” he said as he checked me out. “I can't believe how much progress you've made.”

“Thanks!” I said as I flexed my arms in hopes of additional compliments.

“You should come over sometime so I can take your measurements.”

“Uh…sure…sounds good.”

I don't want to use the excuse of this sounding creepy in hindsight. Even back then I knew there was something inherently wrong with the scenario. I apprehensively walked down into Mr. Wilkington's basement, which was the messiest room I had ever seen in my life. Papers were strewn everywhere and the scattered Boy Scout memorabilia made it look as if a library had been ransacked by a bunch of Vikings who'd left behind their merit badges.

Mr. Wilkington had stacks and stacks of loose-leaf binders all filled with Polaroid photos of young boys flexing. Below each photo he'd written the date the picture was taken so progress could be charted. He flipped through several of the books to show me the dramatic growth of dozens of boys while narrating each of their backstories.

“Anthony here only weighed one hundred twenty when I met him. Now he's nearly one hundred ninety-five pounds with only eight percent body fat.”

“Barry put on thirty-five pounds in a little over a year and can squat over two hundred now!”

“Frederick has a forty-three-inch chest and a twenty-nine-inch waist.”

I felt inadequate.

As I fixated on other boys' pecs, Mr. Wilkington tapped me on the shoulder. He was holding a cloth tape measure and a yellow legal pad.

“It's time to measure you, Brian,” he pronounced, with a glint in his eye.

He proceeded to snugly wrap the tape measure around my biceps, triceps, chest, waist, thighs, neck and calves, meticulously recording the size of each on his pad. Then he had me take off my shirt and flex while he took several Polaroids. I felt self-conscious and awkward but did as I was told. Frederick, Barry and Anthony had obeyed.

“You'll come back in a couple of months and we'll see how you've grown!”

Sounds good, old creepy guy.

I put myself on a program I read about in Arnold Schwarzenegger's
Encyclopedia of Bodybuilding,
which incidentally weighed nearly thirty pounds. It was a workout just to carry it out of the bookstore. That Arnold was a genius. It's still hard to believe that as a teenager, he was my favorite author.

Throughout high school I kept buying more and more equipment, lifting and reading about lifting in my dank garage. I became so goal-obsessed, I felt that any day I didn't get bigger was a wasted day. I needed those endorphins flowing through my bloodstream or I felt like a deflated loser.

By my senior year I weighed close to 170 pounds and could bench-press nearly 260. And, because my pro-Fonzie prayers had been answered, I was still the five feet ten I had been five years earlier. However, the rest of my body had grown. Thanks to Mr. Wilkington's meticulous records, my biceps had gone from thirteen inches to nearly seventeen, my chest from thirty-three inches to forty, and my quads from twenty-two inches to twenty-seven. According to Arnold's encyclopedia, one's biceps, calves and neck were supposed to be the exact same size, so I became fixated with keeping the three in proportion. I think even Mr. Wilkington appreciated my attention to detail, perhaps more so when I wasn't around.

 

My penchant for lifting got even more intense in college. While all the freshmen at Emerson were drinking, fucking, joining fraternities and experiencing the euphoria of being away from their parents for the first time, all I did was lift. I rarely went to parties, bars or anywhere that didn't have a squat rack. I couldn't help it. I was an iron junkie, addicted to barbells.

I woke up at five-thirty every morning so I could lift for two hours before my eight o'clock classes. And I made sure I got to bed by ten so I could get my seven and a half hours' sleep. If I didn't, I felt that my subsequent workout was doomed. Although I could see improvements on a weekly basis, I was never satisfied. I had officially become a prisoner of my body, although my captivity was voluntary.

 

During Christmas break, I was back on Long Island doing one-armed chin-ups in the hallway outside my bedroom when I overheard my parents discussing someone named “Andrew.” At first I just assumed it was one of my father's unruly first-graders. With my ear pressed up against their bedroom door, I continued to hear them speak in hushed tones. But why were they whispering? What was so important about this “Andrew” fellow? I knocked on the door. The whispering turned to silence. I was onto something!

“What is it?” came a voice from the other side.

“It's me.”

“Yes?”

“Can I come in?”

The answer wasn't always yes. We had many a conversation through wood. My mother's door was practically always locked, as was the hallway bathroom, which was also connected to her bedroom via a second door. Unfortunately, in addition to my mother's other ills, she also had a bad stomach and would never be able to make it to the other bathroom downstairs in time should the upstairs one be occupied. Since the downstairs bathroom consisted of a sink and toilet but no bath or shower, we would have to check in advance with her to make sure “it was a good time.” So we often left for school without our maximum cleanliness potential—which bothered all of us except my father.

This time, however, my dad turned the inside knob to let me in.

“What is it?”

“Who's Andrew?”

“That's none of your concern,” droned my father.

Secrets were nothing new for my family. No one gave up information unless pummeled by questions or badgered incessantly.

“C'mon! Just tell me who he is. He must be important since you're whispering about him.”

“He
is
important, Brian,” my mother finally relented. “He's your brother.”

“I have a brother named Andrew? Wow!”

“He's dead.”

Talk about a buzzkill.

“You never knew about Andrew because he died before you were born,” she relayed.

“How did he die? Why didn't you tell me? What was he like?” I had hundreds of questions I wanted answered immediately.

“He was only seven months old when he died.”

“Oh my God! What happened?!”

“SIDS.”

“Oh. SIDS!” I had absolutely no idea what SIDS was, but I figured I could look it up in the
World Book
later.

“Sudden infant death syndrome,” my mother explained. “He died in his sleep.”

My parents had only one picture of him. It was a black-and-white Polaroid and he had dark hair and dark eyes and looked more like my mother and brother than my father, sisters and me. He wore a sad expression on his face, as if he knew he wouldn't be around very long.

I soon learned that when Andrew was born, one of my mother's brothers, who had a warped sense of humor, sent her a sympathy card as a joke. This infuriated my mother while Andrew was alive, but became even more distasteful after he was buried. My mother and uncle then took a thirty-eight-and-
a-half-year hiatus from speaking due to the misappropriation of a Hallmark product.

“When did he die?”

“About ten months before you were born.”

“So you guys actually had five kids. Wow! That's a lot for Jews.”

“Actually”—my mother sighed—“had Andrew lived, we wouldn't have had you.”

At that very moment, my entire perspective on life shifted. Not only could I potentially get sick as abruptly as my mother, I could die just as suddenly as Andrew. I was already a frenzied and frantic adolescent, but from that day I learned I was a replacement baby, I turned it up a notch and resolved to accomplish as much as I could as quickly as humanly possible before my time was up. Every hour would be rush hour.