Hell-Bent (15 page)

Joseph is upside down, having just glided up into a handstand. He stays there for a second and then pours himself back onto two feet. “He’s still there. I just wish I could go back and tell him things. You know, you don’t have to be the way you were brought up to be. Your life doesn’t have to be that way.”

A few weeks after talking to Joseph, I start having these visions.

The first time it happened, I was in a Wawa convenience store. There was an extremely fat woman behind the counter. Her body was swollen tight against her clothes. When she turned, it looked like her ass might contain lions—it bulged in torment. Her face bulged too, almost disorienting to look at. The same universal human features we all share were blown up and distorted.

But when I got up to the front to pay, got face-to-face with her, the disorientation went away. Suddenly—and weirdly, and unsettling in its clarity—when I looked at her, I saw a skinny twelve-year-old girl. Her fat remained, but it had lost its dimensions of human skin. It became something of a gelatin: molded on but not attached to another face below. We exchanged our pro forma pleasantries, she swiveled to get my change, but what minutes before had seemed like a physical property suddenly looked as artificial as a puffy winter coat. Her fat was a costume. When she turned back, I saw both her jawlines at the same time, overlapping each other: one swollen, one slight.

I’m not given to spontaneous visions, or even staring into other people’s eyes for prolonged periods of time, so this whole interaction unnerved me. I literally had to push off the counter to check the length of my gaze.

I collected my change and shuffled out.

But then it happened again. And again. To paraphrase
The Sixth Sense,
I saw skinny people. Not everywhere, not even often, but every once in a
while when I wasn’t expecting it. I would look at someone, catch their eyeball, their eye socket, and suddenly feel like I could see a face within their face. A younger face.

Crack-up. It was weird.

Anyway, before it sounds like I started throwing my visual stimuli in with the dietary police and other health fascists, I want to be clear that, one, these were visions, and thus a sign that I was going a little crazy. And two, they didn’t happen with people just because they were monstrously obese. There was no organizing principle. It just happened.

Either way, I am sure it would have been all a minor fascination, a phase forgotten, until it happened with my friend Sol.

Not only does Solomon King Prophete undeniably have one of the all-time greatest names, I’m going to go out on a corny limb and say he has one of the all-time greatest hearts as well. Sol is a Dominican-Mexican mensch. Community seems simple when you’re with him. He likes people. People like him. There is not a store within walking distance of his home where the shop owner doesn’t greet him by name. There’s not a neighbor in his building who hasn’t stopped by his second-floor apartment for a conversation on their way up the stairs.

I met Sol in college. We lived down the hall from each other freshman year. Sol grew up in a housing project just off 125th Street in Harlem. I came from suburban Maryland. This is probably the only way our lives would have intersected, but luckily for me, they did. Sol tutored me for my first G-chem exam. I played video games in his room. We got high together and threw cake from the rooftops of buildings. We got drunk together, and I puked out his window. Fifteen years later, I was in his wedding party when he married the cute blonde who lived across from him on our freshman floor, Ashley.

Sol’s fundamental goodness operates on many competing levels. As a husband, he does the dishes and keeps the kitchen immaculate. As a Super Bowl host, he gets up out of his chair to give you the best view of the game. He is a seriously good son. His father passed away when he was young, and Sol rose to the occasion. He does his entire family’s taxes. He cares for his sister’s mental health. At one point, while I was busy getting fantastically drunk and
sleeping through my classes, Sol dropped out of college to pay for his mother’s bills. He got a forty-hour-a-week job with benefits and funneled money toward her rent. Later he dropped back in and graduated. But even then, I realized Sol was a man, in ways I wouldn’t have to face for years.

But when it comes to describing Sol’s fundamental goodness, one particular story stands out from the rest.

Back before their marriage, when Sol was dating Ashley, she bought a pug puppy. Pugs, for people who don’t know, look nothing like dogs (more like weird furry larvae) but are fantastically cute anyway. Ashley loved this pug, named him Mu-shu, and he became something of a sensation in our friend group; I immediately thought I’d be hilarious and feed him Kahlúa, resulting in a memorably hard slap from Ashley.

Anyway, Ashley was devoted to this pug, Sol was devoted to Ashley, and one weekend Ashley asked Sol to pug-sit while she went into the office. Sol dutifully responded. He walked Mu-shu to the local dog park, chatted like a mensch with some strangers on a bench, and then watched appalled as a pit bull, off his leash, walked up to Mu-shu and bit half his face off. Everyone at the dog park started screaming.

Sol shook off his initial shock and grabbed the pit bull by its jaws. Blood was leaking out, but the grip was too tight. So Sol dropped the snout and began kicking. As he kicked, the owner of the pit bull ran up and tried to push Sol away from her beloved pet. But Sol kept at it. Finally with Sol kicking, the owner pushing, and the whole park screaming, the pit bull just kind of gave up and coughed. Mu-shu rolled out. Sol scooped him and ran. Then he ran back to pick up Mu-shu’s left eyeball, which had popped out of its socket and scooped that up too.

At this point, regardless of how you think he handled the situation so far, Sol assumes superhero proportions in my eyes. At the edge of the park, cradling Mu-shu’s limp body under one arm, he stepped directly in front of oncoming traffic, his other arm straight out.

A woman slammed on her brakes, and Sol climbed in her passenger seat. He showed her Mu-shu’s body and said, “Lady, I need you to take me to my vet.”

They bonded on the way, and celebrated later on the phone when, against
all odds, Mu-shu pulled through. The detached eyeball was implanted successfully. The vet, impressed with Sol’s heroics, charged the young couple only one hundred dollars for the whole four-hour operation and follow-up visits. And eight years later, Mu-shu is still going strong, both his bulging pug-eyes intact, perpetually scanning the world for food.

Anyway, as a long digression about a pug demonstrates, it’s hard for me to say enough good things about the man. I’m sure you have someone like this in your life. The point is, Sol is that guy in mine.

The other point, in relation to this book, is that Sol had also been getting really fat. Not by the Wawa standard; Sol wasn’t buying multiple tickets on airplanes or anything. But he was heading that way. Quickly.

In many ways, this is a totally unfair observation, a backhanded maneuver from a historical ally. For years, I had been one of the more unhealthy influences in his life. If Sol wanted to order an extra beer, I got us a shot too. If we went to the movies, I smuggled in the jumbo bag of peanut butter cups. We once, on a whim, on a bored Sunday whim, had an eating contest where we each ate (in order): fifty buffalo wings, two ice cream sandwiches, a beef patty, about a quarter of Ashley’s fabulous 7 Up cake, and, AND an entire tray of Entenmann’s Raspberry Strudel.
¹⁵
I know that is exactly what we ate, because we cared about it. We took pride in it.

But even back then, I always balanced my eating with exercise in a way Sol never did. I would wolf down two plates of hash browns and eggs during a 4 A.M. trip to the diner. But then I would hit the gym the next day. Punishing myself for the indulgence, minimizing the damage to my waistline.

Sol never did any of that. Instead of the gym, Sol would hit a fat Dominican cigar. Instead of minimizing damage, Sol would zone out to late-night CNN. Lately, in fact, Sol was barely walking. Their pugs, fantastically round themselves, would get walks around the block. Sol would return breathing heavy from the trudge up his single flight of stairs.

Anyway, all this came to a head in my head, one evening over dinner. Ashley is from Memphis, and cooking is her stress relief of choice. Her food is phenomenal but never ever healthy. Ashley vocally believes in a culinary principle that requires the use of butter and bacon in every dish, including most desserts.

This particular dinner was at the height of my yoga honeymoon. Ashley knew I was trying to eat healthy, and so instead of her usual potpie, meat loaf, or ham-soaked collard greens, she made a salad. Naturally the salad was heavily mulched with shredded bacon. But I appreciated the effort.

Years ago, in college, Sol had shown me his high school identification card. On it there was a picture of an absurdly skinny Mexican kid staring back. Even back then, Sol was pretty heavy, and the picture looked nothing like him.

But sitting across from him at dinner, munching on that bacon-infused salad, that’s who I saw. The skinny kid. Not the whole time, but in flashes, especially as Sol chewed. I hadn’t seen the ID card for years, but my vision was so vivid, I had no problem placing it instantly.

I didn’t know what to do with this vision. So I sat on it. I figured I’d wait and see if it was there the next time I saw him.

It wasn’t, but that’s because the next time I saw him, he was in the hospital.

Only a few days after our bacon-salad dinner, I get a call from Sol. Ashley has gone to walk the dogs, and I was about to walk into the subway on my way to work. But then there was Sol on my phone.

“Hey, man.” He sounded faint. “I’m really sorry to ask you this. But do you still have that van?”

I hadn’t had a van in years.

“I was thinking if you do—” He stopped talking for a long five seconds. “—if you do, it would be great if you could come pick me up. … I need to go to the hospital. It’s really bad.”

This is not a phone call you ever want to get from your friend. Not only was Sol not making sense, his voice was so quiet I could barely understand
what he was saying. So I did the only sensible thing a friend can do in that situation.

“Sol, what the fuck are you doing calling me? Hang up and call 911 right now! Can you do that? Do you need me to do that for you?”

It turned out he had an extreme gall bladder infection and was delirious from pain. It had exploded on him all at once while Ashley was out walking the dogs. He went to the hospital for emergency surgery, and the next time I saw him he was under heavy sedation: a massive mound of gray flesh with a sheet draped over him, breathing quietly. Sitting there, with cheeks sagging and eyes shut, he had that essentially ageless helpless quality hospitals cast over newborn babies who look exactly like grandparents, and grandparents who suddenly revert to infancy. Only Sol was twenty-eight and sick, so it was very hard to look at him for too long.

The gall bladder is involved in processing fat. It stores bile from the liver, which is the body’s primary means of breaking down fat during digestion. And while it is impossible to know what caused his particular infection, the fact that he was morbidly obese and consumed absolutely stunning amounts of fats, at the very least, could not have helped things.

A week later, when he was back home, deposited on his comfy chair in front of the television, basically intact, albeit slightly paler and with a grotesque little drip bag plugging through his skin to collect fluids his body could no longer process, I took him aside. It was something I was thinking a lot about.

“Would you ever be interested in coming to yoga with me? Might help get you back on your feet.”

Sol sat there thinking. I felt like I had just proposed to him.

“You know,” I continued. “I’m working on this book, and I’m hearing a lot of amazing things.”

He shook his head and said, “Me, yoga? You gotta be kidding me.” And then to my eternal surprise, “Why not?”

There were a few problems with this: One, Sol was lazy. Two, Sol hated pain. Three, Sol worked a lot.

Four, one or two yoga classes wouldn’t do anything for Sol. He was in deep.

But it was worth a shot. Any sustained form of exercise would be good for Sol at this point. And we had one really big asset on our side: Sol practically lived on top of a Bikram studio. It was literally a thirty-second commute door to hot room.

With that in mind, we created a schedule for sixty days of yoga over approximately two months. It would start after his recovery was complete, after the little bag of drippings had been removed and the incision healed up. Each week, Sol would do six days in a row and then have a rest day. He wouldn’t change anything else about his life. He would eat the same, drink the same. Just add ninety minutes of bending first thing in the morning.

The reason we decided to keep diet and beer the same was not some misguided attempt to make this a scientifically controlled experiment. That would be folly. Sol was one big man, not a cohort. We left diet the same because the one thing I did not want was for Sol to attempt to radically transform his life in one heroic shot.

When a dedicated fatty goes on a health kick, odd things happen: Headbands come out. Short walks turn into impromptu jogs. Vitamins get popped. Whole bottles of soda find their way down the drain. At first, in all these little things there is a mini–snowball effect. The fatty starts feeling good! Health breeds health, he hums to himself, having figured it all out. And suddenly abstaining from little poisons like a doughnut in the morning or three Skittles proffered by a coworker seems like the easiest thing in the world. In fact, during a health kick, something like a doughnut starts to feel crazy. As in, why on earth would anyone every want something like a doughnut? Are we all mad?

But then almost invisibly it all starts creeping backwards. First there is complacency based on the modest success. Then complacency gets replaced by frustration. Hormones out of whack from years of poor eating are screaming biologically misguided messages to eat. Eventually the fatty fudges, perhaps literally, perhaps just a bit. But if the fudge is big enough and progress lost sad enough, hopelessness takes over. Suddenly little poisons like doughnuts are basically the only things that make sense. At least
they taste good! At least they stop the feeling that I’m starving myself! And finally, the fatty ends up fatter than ever and more demoralized.