Fat Kids

First: I’m so thrilled to be contributing to this blog. Meg is the funniest person I know, and I’m excited to get to work with her. I’ve also had really positive experiences with the few readers I’ve interacted with, which is a step up from the blog I used to co-write, which got death threats. (From one French-Canadian Orthodox Jew, so not like ACTUAL KILLING but still.) Co-Blogger Chris will be a hard act to follow, so if I fuck up I’ll start blogging in green and we can alllll pretend…

Second: Meg and I totally hooked up once. On Oscar nominee Abigail Breslin’s brother’s sofa. She’s good.

Third: I’m so pleased that my “sorr about the bag” thing worked. I think about “sorr about the bag” most days. My faves:

Meg pity-fucks a butter-face guy, but takes the usual butter-face precaution. She is sorr about the bag.

Meg gets a job tending a mountain hotel for the winter. As madness sets in, Co-Blogger Chris inspects her manuscript, only to find that it reads:

SORR ABOUT THE BAG

SORR ABOUT THE BAG

SORR ABOUT THE BAG

SORR ABOUT THE BAG

SORR ABOUT THE BAG

SORR ABOUT THE BAG

SORR ABOUT THE BAG

Meg vomits in a friend’s purse. “Uh… sorr about the bag?”

It even got the point where when I’d play video games and the characters would say their little pre-recorded taunts, I would respond “sorr about the bag” – aloud, to myself.

“If you seek to destroy the power of Apocalypse, X-Men, you must first defeat the Scarlet Witch!”

“SORR ABOUT THE BAG, WANDA”

The telegram was surprisingly expensive but totally worth it. Let’s make “sorr about the bag” the new “SIKE!” (“Psych?” I’ve never been sure…)

Fourth: Fat kids. I wanted to have this big amazing well-done “Ready or not… here comes Tulane Chris” post, so I half-wrote one about my funeral and one about what I would do if I were a TV executive. Neither of them quite worked, and I was worried I’d lost my touch, when I realized something,

I never told you about the fat kids.

Now, for me, fat kid is a state of mind. It is possible – just – to be fat, and a child, without being a fat kid. It is also possible – easily – to be an adult fat kid. (Full disclosure: in high school, I had junior year third period “Theatrical Design,” also called “dick around on the stage and paint AN prop.” We started bringing food to class – not like “oh here are some Ritz” but like RIBS – and I started calling it “fat class” and it became a tradition. I will, however, point out that I was the slenderest person in the class at the time.) Wherever broken dreams and empty Sno-Ball wrappers lay thick on the ground… there are fat kids. Wherever the smell of desperate sweat mixes with the heady tang of Cheez Curls, there are fat kids. Wherever a homosexual vegetarian in the tenth grade wearing short-shorts leaves a pint of ice cream on the counter for an hours and then drinks it before putting together THE most elaborate Christmas decorations in our entire town… there they are. (I absolutely went to high school with this kid.)

Anyway. Last summer, my boyfriend, hereafter known as Giant Camel, and I drove from central Texas to Philadelphia. It was a wonderful trip, blah blah, I love New Orleans and my boyfriend and seeing new places, whatever. The funny parts happened in Tennessee. Memphis was a nightmare, so we r-r-r-raced across long lean Tennessee to get to the highlight of the trip.

Dollywood.

Dollywood is wonderful. You don’t have to love Dolly to enjoy it, but if you love Dolly it’s the best thing in the world. It was the Tennessee sales-tax holiday so everyone else was at the outlet mall, so the park was thinly populated. Blah blah, one of the most nearly perfect days of my life, happiness isn’t funny.

So.

We get to the head of the rollercoaster line, and we see that the park people are having trouble closing the safety bar on this woman. At one point they actually – yes – lift her fat to try to get the bar to close under it. I could never do something like that. I would honestly rather die than say, “Ma’am? Let me just pick up your fat here, and we’ll try to get this bar down to your pubic bone.” I could lift the fat, but I could never say that. Anyway, she had to get off and wait for her friends to ride.

They made her wait in a little corral.

She couldn’t go back through the line and apparently didn’t want to leave without her party, so they shooed her back to a little area to the side with a chain across it, put her in, and rechained it so she wouldn’t get run over by the rollercoaster. This corral is in FULL VIEW OF ALL RIDERS, and when we finished our ride and got off there were three people in it. Three.

So, more Dollywood, and then we leave. As we go across the parking lot, a car passes in front of us, and in the back seat is literally the largest child I’ve ever seen. He’s slumped in the seat, bulging over the seatbelt, breathing shallowly. It was like watching a python digest a sumo wrestler.I have no idea what they did at the park, because I’m not sure this kid could walk, and I’m absolutely sure he was too big for the rollercoaster. Maybe that was why? A good dose of Corral Time and he’ll stop putting chocolate syrup in his Yoo-Hoo?

It was too hot to eat all day so we stop at the Ryan’s on our way back. Those of you who missed the greasy joys of a Southern upbringing may not know about Ryan’s. It’s basically Golden Corral, but not as fancy. If you’re too tired to dress up enough for Golden Corral, you go to Ryan’s.

Now, I am an eater from way back. I was dipping popcorn shrimp in honey mustard when I saw this, and I was still shocked. A family at a table near us had gotten up to leave, but one little girl was still at the table. I heard a shriek, and I turned to see this girl, red-faced, tears leaking out of her little screwed-up eyes, holding onto the table with both hands for dear life and hissing “I’m. Not. READY! I’m. Still. HUNGRY!” Everyone was staring. Everyone at the all-you-can-eat buffet in the Deep South was staring at this little girl’s gluttony tantrum. We had our choice of three kinds of pork, three gravies, and full access to a dessert bar, there was a bucket of ranch dressing in the room, and this eight-year-old girl was putting all us button-straining Confederate eaters to shame.

Ending posts is clearly my weak spot, as attested by the Terry Cooper “and then he bought a motorcycle” ending, which is true but lacks any and all dramatic tension. If this were a short story, I could make up a future for this girl, full of curly fries and boyfriends with beautiful brown eyes who say things like “I like a soft woman” and get employee discounts at Sonic. If this were CNN, I could end this post with some vague, not particularly helpful “tips” for making children marginally less overweight, i.e. “Take the refrigerator out of your child’s bedroom, or stock it with healthy snacks like chicken stock and raw yams.” And if I were giving a report to Ryan’s stockholders, I could just draw little pigs at a trough throwing cash in the air. As it is, I’ll just ask that, next time you enjoy a delicious meal, take a bite for the little girl at Ryan’s. She’ll thank you for it.

Coming of Age: The Adventures of Terry Cooper

Remember moving into the dorm freshman year of college and meeting your floormates? Remember how you were ALL BIFFLES for about six days, and then you realized you only liked two of them? Remember how you stopped trying to do names after about a week, and everyone became “Hunchback” and “Guy who shaves his legs” and “Anime kid?” I’ve forgotten most of those boys over the years, but one will always be fresh in my mind. For legal purposes, let’s call him Terry Cooper.

Terry Cooper was the squarest square in Squaresville, Wyoming, a square state. He tucked in T-shirts and made his bed in his college dorm. His eyes were beady and his lips pursed. He bought plants for his room to purify the air, not because he liked plants. Terry did not have a single decorative article in his room. Terry majored in Civil Engineering, and the other civil engineers made fun of how lame he was. If Terry Cooper were a figure from Greek myth, he would be a demon named Practicality whose three heads endlessly scream “Sobriety!” “Caution!” and “Prudent Financial Management!” and who kills by citing statistics.

Terry Cooper and his roommate were both so unpleasant that we nicknamed them “Sour and Dour” and imagined a passive-aggressive Itchy and Scratchy relationship.

SOUR: Did you move the remote? Did you, Goddammit?”

DOUR: Yes. I did it because I hate hearing you breathe.
SOUR: I hope you die.
DOUR: I hope your mother dies.

SOUR: [pointing] Cancer.

Our next discovery was that Dour was almost never there, because he hated Sour/Terry so much. We wondered about this at first, but then it became blindingly, archangel-descending-to-Earth-with-a-message clear. Our dorm walls were tiled, so people would leave messages for each other by the doors in dry-erase marker. Since we were a group of twenty eighteen-year-old boys, they were usually pretty salty. Terry would walk around and edit the profanity out of these, and one day he got so furious that he confronted a friend of mine about it. He knocked on the door after having edited a message I’d written, and when my friend answered, Terry, white-faced and shaking with barely suppressed rage, launched into a tirade about foul language. His last line was “Some of us were raised with CLASS!” before stomping off.

Terry was not done. Our dorm floor had the obligatory Kerouac-inspired guy who did drugs “to gain experience” instead of to get fucked up, and one day he posted a chart on his door inviting us to say how many illegal drugs we had done. Everyone had at least drunk underage, save Terry, the jewel of Lancaster County D.A.R.E. Terry’s Response read “Zero. I have legally drunk alcohol.” Underlined so we would know Terry followed the rules.

So, of course, whenever he came up in conversation someone would scream “Rules! RULES!” This wasn’t funny enough, so we started to speculate on his sex life and personal habits. We gave him an imaginary girlfriend named Matilda. Every night, she talked him into going down on her, and every night she waited until he got into position before farting right in his face. We imagined him looking up with tears in his eyes and saying, deeply hurt, “Matilda, you gave me your word!”

Eventually, this wasn’t enough either, so we decided that he had the worst case of irritable bowel syndrome in medical history. “I have to wear two pairs of Dockers shorts in case there’s an accident. I have to buy the outer pair a size larger so they will fit over the inner pair.”

Eventually, even shit jokes couldn’t mock this guy enough, so we started on child abuse. In our fantasies, young Terry carefully labored to make his mother a perfect martini, just how she liked them, and brought it to her on a spotless silver tray. Terry’s mother would take the glass, pause, and then fling the contents in Terry’s face. Every day.

We kept on like this until we stopped having to make anything up. Senior year, the ugliest girl I’ve ever seen transferred into our school. She looked like an Easter Island head in a dirty wig. She and Terry fell on each other like wolves on an ailing sheep. I wondered at the attraction until I sat near her in the cafeteria one day and overheard her say excitedly, “Guys! Come fill out these forms!” Easter Island Head was a “bisexual” “swinger” who was “into” “threesomes.” She actually used the phrase “into threesomes,” as though life were a cocaine-and-Zima fueled key party in 1993. She somehow roped Terry and some desperate or very kind-hearted woman into having a threesome. Terry was later overheard to remark, post-threesome, “I don't know what's happening to me... but I think I like it!”

The process continued. Terry now rides a motorcycle and wears a beard. He’s become an actual person, by all accounts, but I’ll always remember the beady-eyed little prig who couldn’t stand to see “fuck” written on a dorm wall.