Skipping Towards Gomorrah (21 page)

If I weren't such a fan of sin and self-indulgence (and bacon and chocolate cake), I would join Jenny Craig and Tommy Thompson in condemning American gluttony, wagging a self-righteous, skinny finger in the faces of my fat-assed fellow Americans. If I were a skinny cultural conservative, perhaps I could find a few somber lessons in a breakfast-cereal-size box of Cracker Jack. Where is our self-control? Our sense of proportion? Whatever happened to the virtue of moderation? But who am I to stand between American gluttons and their pleasures? If William J. Bennett, Jerry Falwell, and Robert Bork want to pursue happiness by stuffing themselves with carbs and saturated fats, well, that's their inalienable right. Seeing as how these men deny themselves so many other pleasures, from drugs to infidelities, I couldn't live with myself if I came—even rhetorically—between Robert Bork and his Krispy Kremes.

In a way, I admire Falwell and other conservatives for letting themselves get fat; it's something I wish I could allow myself to do. If I could let myself get fat, I wouldn't have to monitor the foods I put in my mouth or go to the gym anymore. Yes, fat kills people, but we all gotta go sometime, and someone who goes out eating at least goes out smiling, so when it comes to gluttony I wish I could be more like Falwell; I wish I could let myself eat and eat and eat. There are things I'll put in my mouth that Falwell would never put in his, Lord knows, and one look at Falwell tells me that he's putting things in his mouth that I
want
to put in mine and won't let myself. As a pro-sin and pro-self-indulgence American, I have to admire Falwell's gluttonous abandon—and for the purposes of this book, I'm going to try to emulate him.

To indulge myself in the sin of gluttony Falwell-style, I decided to surround myself with world-class, guilt-free gluttons, the kind of people who eat and eat and eat without guilt—the out, proud, and loud members of the National Association for the Advancement of Fat Acceptance (NAAFA). Founded in 1969, NAAFA is “a human rights organization dedicated to improving the quality of life for fat people.” In order to make the world a better place for fat people, NAAFA's fifty chapters battle three “myths” about people who are fat: “If they really wanted to, they could lose weight.” “It's not healthy to be fat.” “Fat people are ugly.”

On NAAFA's Web site I learned that they were holding a “celebration” over Memorial Day weekend in San Francisco, aka “Sodom by the Bay.” Actually, NAAFA's convention wasn't really
in
San Francisco. Instead of meeting in a hotel downtown—close to San Francisco's restaurants, tourist attractions, theaters, clubs, and museums—NAAFA was meeting in a soulless concrete bunker about a mile from San Francisco International Airport. At NAAFA's weekend-long celebration, I hoped to commune with the guilt-free fatties who swell NAAFA's ranks. I love food, and my adult relationship with food is extremely unhealthy. Maybe eating with folks who don't obsess about the consequences would help me embrace the one and only sin that Falwell, Bennett, and Bork find so easy to swallow.

 

“I
t's mostly women here,” the large woman sitting next to me said, smiling up at me, picking bits of paper from the bottom of an oily bran muffin. “Lots of women, no men,” she sighed, before she turned and gave me a wink. “That's good for you, but bad for us.”

Teresa introduced herself and then introduced me to her girlfriend, Shawn, who was sitting to her right peeling the bits of paper off the bottom her own oily bran muffin.

“So is this your first time at a NAAFA event?” asked Teresa, batting her eyes and popping a tiny piece of bran muffin into her mouth. I nodded.

Still picking away at her muffin, Teresa asks why I wasn't at last night's dance.

“Late flight,” I lie.

My flight was late, as are all flights into San Francisco. I missed Friday night's sit-down dinner (“A Mexican feast!”) on account of my delayed flight, but the dance was still going strong when I arrived at the hotel shortly after midnight. Thumpa-thumpa-thumpa dance “music” drifted down the hall from the hotel's ballroom as I waited for the elevator, room and mini-bar keys in hand. I intended to head up to my room, brush my teeth, change my shirt, and then head back down to the dance. But as I sat on the edge of the bed, flossing bits of airline food from between my teeth, a grim CNN anchor warned me that the home video I was about to see was very disturbing. A mass of people at a wedding reception were jumping up and down on a ballroom dance floor when all of a sudden the dancers seemed to dip in unison. The dance floor collapsed under their weight, and the dancers disappeared in a cloud of dust. When the dust cleared, there was a black hole where the dance floor used to be. People screamed, the tape ended, and the anchorwoman informed me that twenty-five people were known dead, and many, many more were buried under the rubble. Suddenly dancing with a lot of fat people in a hotel ballroom didn't seem like the best idea.

The next morning, I headed down to the hotel's ballroom for a buffet breakfast and a speech by Bonnie Bernell, author of
Bountiful Women: Large Women's Secrets for Living the Life They Desire.
I rode an elevator down to the lobby with three hugely fat women. Two appeared to weigh somewhere in the neighborhood of three hundred pounds—fat, yes, but reasonably robust looking—while the third must have weighed upwards of six hundred pounds. She didn't look healthy; she looked like a woman dissolving in a vat of oil. My perception may have been colored by the fact that this woman was too fat to walk. She sat in a motorized chair and chatted with her friends as we rode down the lobby.

The urge to do the math was irresistible.

The posted weight limit in the elevators at the San Francisco Airport Westin is 3,500 pounds. Exceed an elevator's posted weight limit, and its cable will snap, I assume, sending the elevator and everyone on it plunging down the elevator shaft. Why post a weight limit otherwise? Quickly doing the math in my head, I figured that seven—count 'em, seven—five-hundred-pound women would have to join me on the elevator before we exceeded the weight limit, snapped the cable, and plunged to our deaths. While there was no shortage of five-hundred-pound women at the NAAFA convention, I didn't need to worry about plunging to my death. The Westin's elevators were pretty small; you would need a shoehorn, a snowplow, and a fifty-gallon drum of vegetable oil to wedge seven five-hundred-pound people into one.

The hall outside of the ballroom was full of fat people—some reasonably fat (think Bennett), some distressingly fat (think Falwell) —and almost all of them were women (think Michael Medved). The gender imbalance struck me as odd, as there were plenty of photos of fat men on NAAFA's Web site, including famous fat men, like Winston Churchill, Orson Welles, John Candy, and Santa Claus.

Feeling rather conspicuous, I made my way to the registration table, where I picked up my information packet and meal tickets; then I headed to the ballroom. I was anxious to share my first meal with people who didn't feel guilty about eating, and looking forward to the first guilt-free Danish of my adult life. According to my information packet, NAAFA members were fat, happy, healthy, and attractive. NAAFA's FHHA membership rejects anti-fat bigotry, celebrates people of all sizes, and does battle with the evil airlines, a biased medical establishment, and the diet industry that, according to NAAFA, actually makes people fatter. (Not that there's anything wrong with being fat, of course. But if you don't want to get fat, NAAFA argues, then you shouldn't diet.) NAAFA's three-day convention would be a series of seminars broken up by meals—glorious, indulgent, delicious guilt-free meals, according to the brochure.

Some people may think that the battle for fat acceptance is over, with NAAFA the clear victor. In 1969, the year NAAFA was founded, only 25 percent of American adults were overweight or obese. The percentage of American adults who are overweight today is 61 percent and rising. Fifty-four percent of the 1.4 million Americans in the armed forces are overweight, according to a report released by the Pentagon in January of 2002, a 10 percent jump in just six years. A report in the
Journal of the American Medical Association
warned that “American children are getting fatter at an alarming rate.” In 1986, researchers reported, 8 percent of black children were overweight, 10 percent of Hispanic children, and 8 percent of white children. By 1998, twenty-two percent of black children were overweight, twenty-two percent of Hispanic children, and twelve percent of white children. Those percentages are surely higher now. How many Americans will have to be clinically obese before NAAFA declares victory and passes out the Cinnabons?

The floor of the ballroom was intact, having withstood last night's dance. Saturday morning's breakfast lecture was in a small ballroom. Breakfast itself was laid out over three long tables: bagels and cream cheese, Danish, oily muffins, small boxes of sugary cereal, whole milk, sweetened yogurt. Best of all, there were warming trays full of buttery croissants stuffed with scrambled eggs and bacon. The buffet was open when I came into the room, but no one was in line—everyone was ignoring the food. I was hungry, though, having missed last night's Mexican feast, and headed straight for the buffet table. I loaded up a plate and found an empty seat at a nearby table.

 

W
hen Teresa told me I was in luck—so many women, so few men—I smiled and nodded and said nothing. She was right. Lots of women, not many men. But I wasn't really sure why that was lucky for me—oh, hey, wait a minute. . . .

It can take me a moment or two to realize when someone is flirting with me. Gee, I thought to myself, this attractive woman with shoulder-length black hair who appeared to weigh about 250 pounds seems awfully interested in my flight. I mean, she was leaning towards me, nodding her head, and listening. . . . Hey, wait. . . .
She's putting the moves on me.
Even in places where I can reasonably expect to be flirted with (bars, clubs, confessionals), I'm pretty slow on the uptake. Being fat as a kid damaged my self-esteem and self-image. (I'm still fat in my head.) In the looks department, I place myself somewhere between (on a bad day) porn star Ron Jeremy and (on a good day) conservative commentator Tucker Carlson. I'm even slower to come to the realization that I'm being cruised when the person doing the cruising is someone I would never sleep with—like, say, a woman, any woman, big or small, fat or thin, living or dead. I hadn't anticipated getting hit on at the NAAFA convention, and I began to panic. Picking away at my bagel (oh, glorious carbs!), I silently prayed the speaker would begin and put an end to our conversation.

“Have you been to any BBW events up in Seattle?” Teresa asked. “I hear they have some really good BBW parties up there.”

BBW?

“Big, beautiful women, silly,” said Teresa, patting my forearm.

When I told Teresa that this was my first BBW event other than normal family functions, she feigned amazement.

“So what brings you to the convention?” Shawn interjected, leaning towards the table to get a better look.

“Oh, I don't know,” I stammered. “I guess, um, I was just, you know, curious.”

“You came all the way down here for your first event instead of going to one in the town where you live?” Teresa said, giving Shawn a nudge. “Don't you want to meet a BBW who lives a little closer to home? Someone you could actually date?”

I smiled and shrugged, unsure of what to say. While I knew I would be a very thin person at a very fat convention, I naively assumed I would blend in and I hadn't prepared a lie to justify my presence in case I didn't blend in. There would be a lot of people coming and going, I thought, so who would even notice skinny lil' me?

“So how long have you been an FA?” asked Teresa.

An effay?

“Fat Admirer,” said Teresa. She laughed and turned to look at Shawn. “He's not very up on the lingo, is he?” Turning back to me, Teresa said, “Well, we're just going to have to teach you everything you need to know. Everything.”

Teresa explained that some FAs like pear-shaped women, like herself, while others prefer apple-shaped women, like Shawn.

“So what's your preference?” Teresa asked, batting her eyes. “Apples? Or pears?” (Suddenly I was Tony Curtis in
Spartacus
being asked by Laurence Olivier if I preferred oysters or snails.) Teresa and Shawn were both looking at me, waiting for an answer. Apples or pears? Which one of them was going to get lucky this weekend?

“I'm not sure which I prefer,” I replied miserably.

Now I've been hit on by women before, and while I would normally clear up the confusion immediately—“See here, miss, I am a faggot. . . .”—I felt obligated not to shoot Teresa down. I was at a fat
acceptance
convention, for Christ's sake, and I didn't want Teresa to think I was rejecting her because she was, you know,
fat
. So I kept right on smiling, nodding, offering polite, one-word responses to her questions, which only dug me in deeper. I felt like a hiker cornered by a bear who lies down on the ground and plays dead in hopes that the bear will go away and then suddenly remembers that he has a candy bar in his pocket.

“Are you going to the pool party tonight?” Teresa asked. She leaned forward. “There's a hot tub by the pool, and that's where the action is these weekends.”

Holy Christ.

Playing dead wasn't working, so I did what I had to do. I confessed that my preference was for banana shapes.

“Of course, the only halfway decent-looking guy here is gay,” Teresa said, throwing her hands up in mock despair. “And I've been sitting here making a fool of myself.” She took what I thought would be devastating news—that I was unavailable—in ego-shattering stride.