Starf*cker: a Meme-oir (5 page)

It was the luckiest thing that ever happened to me.

I’ve never believed in the concept that some people are “blessed”—that makes it sound like you think God favors you over that starving kid in Africa. And the first time I heard, “Everything happens for a reason,” I knew how empty a sentiment that was. Everything does happen for a reason, just not the one you probably think.

But I definitely believe in and marvel at luck. Even as I beat myself up (I was my own bully) for being fat, I realized I’d always been lucky, and when I got into the gifted class, it became clear my good fortune started with being lucky enough to have a mother who on top of assuring me I was handsome and perfect had the ovaries to insist that others see in me what she did. An assertive mommy who is on your side is a chunky gay boy’s best friend. Second best friend: Diamonds. Actual second best friend: Mallomars.

My I.Q.
was
quite high, it turned out—it was about what I weighed at age nine. So even if I’d just been lucky that my mom pushed the subject, I was apparently a super genius in Huskies. And my new nickname was The Brain. People were talking about how exceptional I was, just like I’d always known myself to be. (And humble, don’t forget humble.)

So my intelligence was now just as apparent to my peers and my teacher as was my fondness for making Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups disappear forever. Maybe obesity and intelligence were linked? How else to explain my winning a school-wide competition for selling candy bars at least in part by purchasing them from, and eating them, myself? First prize was a chance at grabbing a fistful of dollar bills from a bowl in front of the entire school at a massive assembly, and as I’d figured, my fat, chocolate-stained paw did great—I grasped $24 one-handed.

Though I’d probably eaten fifty candy bars at a dollar apiece, so maybe my thesis on intelligence and obesity needs work.

One summer day, when my cognitive abilities weren’t busy being nurtured in my “gifted and talented” class (we’d been allowed to loftily name ourselves R.E.A.C.H., which stood for…something really grand but was apparently not for people with good memories), several of Miss Cosell’s brood were chosen for a little community-outreach program. I don’t know if her selection was a punishment or a reward. But either way, we were ushered behind the school to a long, low, brick building that shadowed the playground just a few hundred yards from the jungle gym. That place reminded me of a turned-over tombstone, the likes of which we had many in our historical town cemetery, where R.E.A.C.H. had gone to do rubbings of the ancient-seeming names and birth/death dates. Leaving a cemetery with a colorful rubbing of the engraved letters from someone’s final resting place had felt like a sort of communication, and visiting this place behind the school—called, somewhat euphemistically, Fostrian Manor—was also an attempt at connecting with the past: it was ye olde old folks’ home.

I was terrified of socializing in general, let alone by the prospect of being thrust into a situation where I’d need to make conversation with strange old-timers locked up against their will. If Fostrian Manor reminded me of a grave marker, I guess I thought it might’ve
been
one for familial warmth. “Giving a Shit About You—R.I.P.”

It didn’t occur to me that some of the people residing at the Manor may have been there due to an overwhelming flaw that their families just couldn’t handle—like dementia, or an incurable compulsion to criticize one’s second daughter-in-law. But visiting the Fostrians was a charitable act undertaken by the school every year, like collecting canned food for the poor people I never witnessed living anywhere nearby, or selling baked goods to benefit one of Flushing’s not especially needy churches, so I could not escape. Who says no to giving back?

I can’t say I’m shocked that my shotgun benevolence never netted me the Hugh O’Brian Award.

I don’t remember any of the other kids who went with me, I think because my terror was single-minded and insular. I just remember wearing a large football jersey (one of the few tops that would fit me even if to me, football was like the opposite of happiness staged on a field for an overlong period of time) and being escorted into an antiseptic lobby. It was more of a hospital than I’d imagined, complete with unfortunate odors, unwelcoming moaning, and hallways littered with skeletal elderlies in wheelchairs. We were greeted by a woman who would now be probably every bit as old as the wraith-like figures that were then seated all around under blankets and with blank faces once she had escorted us into what passed for a rec room. I stood there in my economy-sized jersey in the stultifying stuffiness of that room, grateful that the jersey was perforated so my skin could breathe even if I couldn’t. Holes in your shirt are a big plus if you’re prone to sweating at an age when most of your peers don’t even need to shower every day. Or every week. I imagine the pronounced cowlick on the right side of my head must’ve looked like some wayward spit curl on a dancehall girl waiting to be chosen for a ten-cent dance.

“I think you’ll talk with Martha,” the nurse who’d greeted us told me, a name I’d forgotten until this very minute that it fell on me to type it. I recall being told that Martha was in her nineties and not very communicative. She had thinning white hair, a matching white face, and stared a hole through me as I was seated on a footstool in front of her like a great big present she didn’t want. I began babbling—my name, my age, the fact that I went to school practically outside her window.

What else could we possibly have in common, outside being sedentary to the point of bedsores?

She didn’t budge. She sat there watching me and listening, or at least
hearing.
The look on her face wasn’t anger or bitterness or even despair, but past that and into an impatience, a conviction that life, which may have once been a pleasure but had at some point become a curse, should move on already. With no one else listening to me—my escort had vanished—and with my young classmates engaged in lively conversations with people old enough to have been besties with their distant ancestors, I became determined to get some kind of a response from Martha. I was supposed to be The Brain, so how could I not think of something that would work?

In the way we’ve all experienced, when speaking with someone who’s a reluctant conversationalist, I got exasperated, gave up on trying to say things smoothly and finally just blurted something out,
anything
.

“I like ice cream,” I said. “Chocolate is my favorite. What’s yours?” My obesity had trumped my intelligence.

There was a long pause, then she pursed her lips, gave up, and murmured, “Vanilla.”

I was thrilled. I’d made contact, even if she’d felt the need to come back at me with the opposite of what I’d said. It was like inventing a time machine that worked. But socially speaking, it was also evidence that I could talk to people I didn’t think I wanted to, a valuable skill to possess in this life.

In some ways, though she wasn’t a celebrity, Martha was my first interview, and knowing that anyone in the world—even someone fairly eager to leave it—would be willing to answer simple questions about themselves, to express opinions on things like ice cream, would also serve me well once I became the founding editor of a teen magazine decades later.

Then Martha nodded toward me like I was a cow she was deciding not to buy and said, “Shouldn’t eat too much ice cream, though—fat enough as it is.”

Correction: My first
hostile
interview.

But it’s okay. As scarring as it was in that moment, hearing something unexpected and potentially insulting was good practice for when I’d have to interview charmers like Avril Lavigne later on (“I’m
not
punk and never said I was.”), Clay Aiken (“I think
my
year on
American Idol
was more about
talent.
”), or Jacob Underwood from the ultimate prefab boy band O-Town (“We aren’t a boy band.”).

And as a recently certified smart guy, I sensed Martha hadn’t meant to insult me, in the same way my own great-grandmother hadn’t meant to insult my entire family when we met up with her in Missouri, where forty years ago #BlackLivesForSureDidntMatter. We’d arrived at her home after a sweltering car trip around the country that I think we should have sued National Lampoon’s Vacation for later copying, only to have her say in her creaky voice, “Y’all are just as fat as hogs!” She meant we looked well. Or at least well fed.

No, I think Martha was just socially rusty. She was as much of a misfit as I was in that moment.

As for my eerie intelligence, I later stopped reliably getting As and by high school had very solid but unspectacular grades. I don’t think I even made the Honor Society.

And as an adult, when I took a test for Mensa, I did not receive an invite.

But I’m not an idiot, and I’m smart enough to wonder if my mother pulled strings with her old classmate to get me into that gifted class. If so, it led to a wealth of stimulating experiences and it gave me reason to believe I had something that not everyone else had: a major shot in the arm for a kid who felt tractor-sized inadequacy in other areas.

Did I mention my mother’s I.Q. was once tested when she was a secretary at G.M. and is significantly higher than what mine reportedly is?

Chocolate is her favorite, too.

Being considered smart wasn’t going to be enough to truly distinguish myself since there were plenty of other eggheads in my subdivision—some of them even had the glasses to prove it—so I embarked on a new campaign for any kind of notoriety that would supersede my status as an object visible from space: I would become a literary wunderkind.

I started by telling everyone I wanted to be a writer when I grew up, a goal that replaced my previously arbitrarily selected goal of optometry. I might actually be able to retire someday had I stuck to my guns and become an eye doctor but, ironically, I was blinded by the prospect of being as famous as Jane Austen or Edgar Allan Poe without looking too deeply into their unglamorous finances and failure to hit their mid-forties.

To back up my goal of writing professionally, I began watching bad movies on TV and tried to copy their style in humorous script form. This didn’t work out too well when my mom and her sister came across one of my manuscripts, which had a scene in which a black butler (I saw Scatman Crothers in the part, but I would’ve left it to the casting director) giving his employer the finger. My mom was embarrassed and made me promise to stop writing R-rated things.

Anyone’s mom might’ve felt that writing about giving someone the finger was too raw for a kid, but I literally got away with murder in my two most famous short stories from the era, broadly funny yet psychologically suspect tales for which I would have been expelled 10 times over if I were in school now.

Case in point: In 1981, I wrote a short story with my pal Dan entitled “Murder In Room 304”. Our cool, creative teacher Mrs. Urnovitz—one of three Jewish people I was aware of in Springview, up from one at Elms—was on maternity leave, and we were torturing our fun substitute, Mrs. Plunkett, who had a slight weight problem and a husband with brain damage from a motorcycle accident. We knew this because Dan and I were inquisitive and because Mrs. Plunkett had a propensity to see precocious seventh-graders as a captive audience.

The gist of the story we created was that someone was murdering our classmates and Dan and I—as characters in our own story—had to solve the mystery.

The story is nonsense, very much like “Nancy Drew” trying to solve
Friday the 13th
, but the killings are brutal and graphically described:

“Matt flips on the lights to see the gored face and body of their missing classmate, Lori Harris.”

I liked Lori, but maybe the story was an odd way of working out aggression against my more popular peers, who might not have been aware that I was struggling internally with a major secret as well as with my more apparent external battle of the bulge. Popularette Pam Lingo didn’t fare much better:

“‘I’m sorry…she’s dead,’ exclaimed the doctor solemnly. All of the onlookers, including Pam’s parents, sighed in dismay. The doctor continued, ‘She died of several stabs in the chest and several more in scattered areas.’”

How quickly would you have had your daughter removed from any contact with us if you were Mr. and Mrs. Lingo after catching wind of that Freudian mess? And what missing student’s parents allow themselves to be just another two faces in the crowd at their daughter’s autopsy?