A Weighty Issue, or A "Wadie" Issue

By the title, you may think I'm about to get on my soapbox and get into some long winded diatribe about the obesity problem in America. Not so. The only weight problem I'm here to tell you about is my own. Though I do think we are becoming a society of fat fucks.

I was once a fat kid. I was never the fat kid by the time I went to grade school, nonetheless, I may have been considered "heavy" periodically. As an infant, well that's a whole other matter.

When my son Cory and I were out visiting my father a couple of years ago, an old Jonathan Dayton Regional High School yearbook of my father's was unearthed. As Cory thumbed through it, an old photo of me and my sister fell from it's pages. My sister was holding my hand. I was no more than eighteen months old. I know this because I couldn't walk until I was eighteen months old. My sister would have never magnanimous enough to held my hand under any circumstances without some sort of dire threat from my parents. I obvious needed assistance. I would have tipped over. Hence, no picture could have been taken, leading to my father's wrath. So my sister got stuck holding my hand.

I was fat. No two ways about it. My head was as big as a basketball. Better legs had been seen on grand pianos. If a stranger had seen me at this stage of my life, they were liable to utter under their breath "look at that poor child with hydrocephalus." (Note: When looking up "hydrocephalus" I noticed Hubert Humphrey's picture next to the definition for "Humpty Dumpty).

Fortunately, my fat stage didn't last long even though I ate copious amounts of junk food. Ring-Dings, Twinkies, Sno-balls, a never ending supply of Charles Chips. There Fritos with Lipton onion dip, all washed down with enough Coca-Cola or every imaginable flavor of Yukon Club soda that I should still have a horrendous case of acne to this day. But somehow I was fortunate enough to avoid every teenager's nightmare. My weight was nothing playing outside everyday and a little hyperactivity couldn't take care of.

My mother would often threaten that all this shit I was eating would spoil my dinner. I still have trouble grasping the concept of anything spoiling what has just been freshly prepared. Not only did it not spoil my dinner, my ingestion of all that junk just seemed to grease the skids so to speak. At dinner I was often reprimanded for the amount I was consuming. That I "couldn't possibly still be hungry." I wish my parents could make up their minds. Do you want me to eat or don't you?

My eating habits accelerated just before I hit high school. Ed and Fred Kane was unfortunate enough to invite me to dinner one evening when I was in the seventh grade. A family outing to "The Pit Stop" a local burger joint. The events of that evening have so scarred the Kane brothers (god only knows how it effected Mrs. Kane) that when they "friended" me on Facebook a couple of years ago, the memory of that eating rampage was the first communication that came to mind nearly forty years later. I made reference to this fact, and they promptly "un-friended" me.

By the end of my sophomore year, I could eat a whole large pizza myself. I ate five Whoppers at a sitting. An innocent trip to McDonald's cost my mother a month's car payment. Two Big Macs, two Quarter-Pounders (no cheese), a large fry, an apple pie or two, and a large whatever shake. After eating that I found it necessary to go to Dairy Queen to have a little dessert. In June I was 5'10" and weighed 175 pounds. Come September when Junior year started I was 6'3" and weighed 215 pounds. You do the math.

After high school my weight fluctuated. I went through my cocaine induced "Redi-Kilowatt" phase where I was now shade taller than 6'4" and weighed 150 pounds. A brush with the law altered my diet dramatically. When I started acting school back in 1981, I weighed in at 180. I stayed around that until my first wife and I moved in together. I was laboring for a mason at the time and went to the gym frequently. I was tipping the scales at about 215 again, but arranged completely different than the high school 215. And then I had my motorcycle accident.

In the short space of 27 days, I lost 83 pounds. They cut off around 15 or so I was told. I was 132 and looked like a reject from some third world impoverished nation. So I went back to the gym, went back to eating everything that didn't eat me first, and got my weight back up to 215 where it staying until drinking replaced eating.

From 1993 to 2000 my weight hovered between 170 and 180. By 2001 I had quit drinking and decided to return to school; where, after six years of being pretty much sedentary, my weight ballooned to 257; it had finally caught up to the size of my head. My body was now proportionate except I needed to look into a full length mirror to see my nuts. On my wife Helen's suggestion, I returned to the gym for a third go around, and the trips there have been a regular part of my weekly regimen for the last three and half years.

My adult weight was finally stable. For 22 consecutive months I remained at 230 give or take a pound...until three months ago. My prosthesis started to give me grief. After twenty-six years as an amputee I've developed a symbiotic relationship with my what's left of my left leg. The first troubleshooting I did was step on the scale, I had been lulled into a false sense of security after so long at the same weight. When my weight fluctuates, my leg acts up. Lo and behold, much to my amazement I had lost six pounds. I still ate as if I was going to the electric chair. Yet, the stayed off.

I am not an alarmist but I was alarmed. Cancer. That was my first thought. I've smoked for over thirty years, but that wasn't it. My blood work is that of someone in their late twenties, so says my doctor. But I was feeling a bit weaker. A tapeworm, yeah, that's it! What am I, fucking loony, I don't live in a third world country. And then yesterday I got on the scale at the gym. A sense of dread washed over me. Here I am, in a predicament many overweight people would die for -ugh, bad choice of words- and I was concerned. The scale didn't lie, 229. Whew! What a load off, no pun intended. Maybe I'll watch what I eat from now on. Only kidding.