Food and Loathing by Betsy Lerner

Author:Betsy Lerner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2003-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Six

Shooting the Moon

Sunny von Bulow, it was rumored, was resting peacefully in an adjoining wing of the hospital I checked into that bitterly cold January day. It was said that she had a full-time staff of nurses and beauticians who provided makeup, coiffure, manicure, and pedicure every day of her comatose life. It seemed a sad irony that someone in a coma had her appearance more under control than I did.

In the days following my admission, there was much that I had to face. Not least of which was my weight. When the nurse weighed me, she did this slow dance up the scale a few pounds at a time, moving the balance to the right. For my whole life, every time I’ve been weighed, it seems to drag out this way. Some nurses have commented that I’m heavier than I appear, but this doesn’t exactly make me feel better. Sometimes, just to get it over with, I blurt out my weight. This time I just stood there staring at the number: 176. Oh, my god. There was the fact that I had voluntarily signed myself in, and no longer had the right to sign myself out. I had arrived with nothing but my wallet and a poem—no clothes, no books, not even my address book. I had to deal with Mizner’s anger, which I had felt radiating from the emergency room phone. And my poor parents—how could I face them? Still, I remained focused on my unwieldy body. The Joan Baez lady at the eating disorders unit had taken my food problem seriously. When I described the torture of failing again and again in OA, she had nodded emphatically.

“Your depression and your compulsive eating are inextricably linked,” she said, weaving her fingers together the way we used to in playing “Here is the church, here are the people.”

But there was something else as well. I felt relieved. Not that I wasn’t scared; I had certainly done it this time. I had put myself in a place where I could no longer hide the terrible truth that I was a person who wanted to die, who courted death, whose breath was sour, whose skin smelled pasty.

I immediately wanted out and tried to persuade the nurses that I didn’t belong here. But I also wanted in. Where else could I go? My childhood bedroom? The crawlspace beneath the stairs? Hadn’t I eaten every corn chip and cupcake from every deli between 116th Street and the tip of Manhattan? There was nothing left to choke on. Where was I supposed to turn—another OA meeting, another qualification? One more sad story of a person destroying his life and building it back with the help of the goddamned Almighty? Was I really supposed to go back to Mizner’s office and cry more wolf? There was that peak above the Hudson, the place that was shaping up to be my stairway to heaven until a messenger arrived, stepping out from behind a decidedly nonburning bush, in the form of a guy beating off.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.