FOR YEARS—years—because it started when I was thirteen, I was made gravely aware of my being the wrong thing to be: plump. The first remark was my father’s precise assessment that what I had wasn’t “baby fat.” He said, “It’s candy fat.”
It was. It was M&M’s, Milky Ways, this special See’s candy they sell mainly in L.A. that was so fancy I actually had to save up for it, and Three Musketeerses. It was also the crumb rolls they baked at our junior high. It wasn’t that I actually was fat or anything, it was just that I wasn’t supposed to be eating all that candy—it showed. It showed at the beach. It showed in “tight” skirts. It showed in gym. But I was never dumb enough to think I was Fat; because I wasn’t, I just wasn’t perfect. And I have never liked perfect things, they give me the creeps. So, altogether, I didn’t feel that awful, because you couldn’t tell in a loose skirt; and, besides, in those days, people were so preoccupied with breasts that they could hardly take their eyes off mine long enough to notice my waist wasn’t a slinky willow branch. I was gravely aware, by the time I was thirteen, that my waist should be a slinky willow branch, to give me an hourglass figure; but being gravely aware and being seriously disturbed enough to stop eating candy are two different things.
Everything went OK until the Beatles’ amphetamine skinniness. Then I stopped eating candy. But by that time it was too late because, to be Beatley enough, you had to have been raised on English boiled cabbage and milky tea. Anyway, by the time the Beatles trotted out onto Ed Sullivan’s stage with those heartrendingly sexy toothpick legs—THWAP—everyone had toothpick legs. Except mine weren’t right. The heart of the problem wasn’t really my legs; for, actually, alone, my legs could stand by themselves. The heart of the problem was my ass. It was no good. It was there, for one thing; and no serious Beatle person’s ass was there. But mine was worse, I’d never seen one like it even in a Rubens painting. It’s low. Someone once told me that it’s got a name: “saddle-ass.” It seemed about right.
I discovered that, if I took a lot of uppers and didn’t eat anything, I could get myself down to 132 and people would begin to make approving remarks like “That’s more like it. . . .” Usually, I weighed ten pounds more. I’m 5'7".
Finally, when I was in my late twenties, I discovered the “Drinking Man’s Diet.” Because I drank like crazy, this seemed exactly the right premise for me. With the diet, amphetamines, and the gentle augmentation of cocaine, I, for a month, weighed 128. It was a triumph. Photos document the occasion.
Of course, this couldn’t last. Amphetamines make you lose all your friends, and my life fell apart. I even resumed smoking cigarettes after having quit for four years. Only I didn’t lose weight when I smoked—so I was back to 142 and smoking and then, when one day about six months ago it said on the scales that I weighed 154, I decided that something would have to be done—so I gave up scales. And I was drinking like crazy every minute.
One day, having given up scales, I decided to stop drinking. It seemed to me that my perceptions were always coming in as they would to a drunk person and that drunken perceptions had been fully covered by brilliant minds like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Malcolm Lowry, Hemingway, and, well . . . just everyone, more or less. Most writers, it seemed from what they wrote, drank all day and all night. And they were really good. They had Being Drunk, Hangovers, Bitter Martini Quarrels, and Guilt totally monopolized as far as writing about those things was concerned. Especially that guy who wrote The Lost Weekend. That guy, I thought, was as drunk as anyone was going to get and live to tell. So, it seemed to me that perhaps I should stop drinking and that way maybe some opportunities for different points of view would happen by, ones that so far had not been Mailered.
It turned out strangely I’d been such an alcoholic that the first six weeks, the amount of time allotted for your liver to rise from the dead, were like being on this ocean liner traveling through fog that cleared. Giant liftings drifted away with each moment. I didn’t feel I had to move, hardly; I was on the edge of my chair, bolted wide-eyed with amazement at the procession of clearer and clearer marvels.
It didn’t even matter that my nerve endings were sticking out of my skin an inch and a half. Or that the softest breeze ruffled against my skin like fire. It didn’t matter that the first four weeks found me crying due to lost numbness. It didn’t matter that the clearness made me weak; because the next clearness made me wildly joyous, and the one after that made me tenderly peaceful. All of these were very different from Numb-Brittle-Coarse-I-Love-You type evenings that came from fashionable alcohol.
So I sat on the edge of my chair in the middle of this giant marvelous incredible movie. Now and then I’d feel hungry and eat whatever was around, until I’d feel really hungry and have to go to the store, which was not too bad because the movie went to the store, too; it just wasn’t as intense to me in the supermarket as lying on my couch looking at the ceiling, or talking on the phone to my friends who turned into different people as each day brought more and more vivid clarity.
Some friends, unfortunately, became blurrier. They were patches of fog that burnt off my ever-changing adventure to find the source of the Nile. Some friends, it turned out, could only be tolerated if I were numb. It wasn’t their fault, it was just that when they drifted grayly by my exhibition, everything had to stop while they were dull. When they weren’t looking, I’d steal off to my barge; and, when they called, I told them I was “busy,” although what I actually was doing was lying on my couch looking at the ceiling.
Now, after about four weeks, I stopped crying my usual two hours a day and virtually could count on being able to go into public without being triggered accidentally into water-water-everywhere. Not that I minded water-water-everywhere; and, I discovered, other people didn’t really mind either. I could just say, “Look, I’m afraid I’m going to cry, but it’s not about you or anything, it’s just crying . . .” They’d pause, about to raise their soup spoons to their lips, and—seeing it was serious, they’d take my word for it and finish their soup.
I walked very carefully at that time, like an invalid, which is why, probably, I didn’t really hurt myself the first time my elastic-waist trousers tripped me. They went under my shoes and tripped me. “What is the matter with these pants,” I wondered, “they’re falling down!” Maybe the elastic is old, I thought, and safety-pinned them more securely.
Only it wasn’t just those trousers, it was all my pants. Every one of them was falling down. I had to keep holding everything together so I wouldn’t trip or blow away, in spite of my invalid pace that kept me edging along, holding onto the railing.
“You’ve changed,” the few people who saw me said.
“Please . . .” I’d say, shyly, “. . . just go on with what you are doing. I’ve been sick.”
Somewhere in the fifth week, a sort of unearthly stamina took hold of me. Things I’d never even turned to grapple with because they were too complicated and demanded a concentration beyond my known range became simple as pie. All my writing people—my agent and my editor and those who knew what to do—had been harping at me that if I were going to write, I had to write a “novel.” A NOVEL!? Have you ever thought about what it takes to write a novel? It takes a concentrated intensity, an idea that you can hang things on for one city block at least. It takes a strong rope that knows what it’s doing with a major tree at either end. It takes something that could keep me in front of a typewriter for more than three hours. Three hours was all I could do before my concentration broke and nothing could hold me longer except amphetamine.
Writing on amphetamine is tricky because Mein Kampf has been done already, better. A long time ago, I saw photographs of three spiderwebs in Scientific American: One was done by a regular spider to catch flies, and it was OK—not great, but it’d catch flies; the second was done by a spider on LSD, and it was a perfect mandala—perfectly centered and equally radiating from the middle so that, even though it was creepily perfect, it looked as though it’d catch flies all right; the third one was done by a spider on amphetamine, and it was a fantastic undertaking, convoluted stratagems, nineteen possibilities-taken-care-of; however, they all took place over in the bottom right-hand corner—at least nine-tenths of the space was empty; flies could swoop through and never notice the wonderful trap in the corner. So amphetamines weren’t what you’d want for writing a novel. A novel has to be its own world, to fill its loom. If you know what I mean.
On the fifth week, a rope-end fell into my hand and it appeared to be knotted at the opposite end of the city block to a tree. All I had to do was tie it to a second tree where I was and anything would hang on it. It was an Idea, a novel, a simple tale of outrage, lust, and drawing-room faux pas—a sure thing. The chapters were so simple, a nice seven. It seemed hardly necessary to write them down; but, on the other hand, why not—so I did. In fact, since I was “why not” about the chapters, I figured “why not” about the entire deal; and, in the next eighteen days, to sparkle up the time, I took notes, so that when I recovered from the voyage certain aspects would be recalled. Four hundred and thirty-two pages of openhanded observations. If you slanted them in a certain way, some people might call those notes a novel. I sent the manuscript off to my agent, who dropped dead.
“This,” she telephoned to say, “may be a novel.”
“This,” my editor at the publishers said, “is a novel. Do it over; and, for God’s sakes, don’t get bored. I can’t wait to operate on it.”
I thought it was a little greedy of her. After all, I was the one who’d gotten the corpse from the guy in the alley at midnight; and now she wanted to dissect it all by herself, and I hadn’t even finished drinking the blood.
My book had a title that didn’t bore me, a title you could wake up to on mockingbird hill and not yawn and clean the oven. I decided to call it—simply—SEX AND RAGE. It was not the kind of title that those accustomed to my breezy landscapes were, at first, about to say “yes” to. They thought it sounded like Bondage & Desire. I insisted it was more in the category of War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, or Dombey and Son. I could hear them frowning at me over the phone all the way from New York. They were bartering with a difference in my soul.
For, from my cocoon of sobriety and obsession, had emerged this 119-pound blinking fawn, caught, for a moment, in a shaft of misty sunlight.
“WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU?”
“WHAT DID YOU DO?
“YOU LOST WEIGHT!”
“Is that you?”
Accusations barked from the mouths of friends: I’d lost weight! And, I was shy enough already—naked like that, my skin un-numbed and fresh to the air. I backed away hastily from diabolically turning civilization inside out, turning out the way I had. I was supposed to be this numb white-wine-drinking robust woman who wrote short pieces. Now I was this slinky willow—a shy, vulnerable, Perrier-with-a-twist fawn who looked like a dewdrop starlet. An irresistible impulse made me wear black mascara and peachy rouge and lighten and wave my hair like some fifties picture of innocence they used to “groom” over at Fox. No one had seen me in such a long time, they thought I’d pulled out to do this to them on purpose.
One night, my lover and I went to a party; it was Halloween, so my wavy hair, stockings, black mascara, and adorable nose were OK. This particular set of friends hadn’t seen me in six months. Most of them were writers, but Jewish writers of comedy who didn’t drink like crazy. Most of them were “plump” and forever up or down on the weigh scales.
The way those people treated me was as if I’d won the Nobel Prize for Literature—or is it the Pulitzer? They approached me as though I were, from some dramatic collision of circumstances, now the Queen—whereas before I’d been this droll woman they could pal around with who was often better with one-liners than they.
“How did you do it?” they demanded, “you really look great!”
They were not spouting accusations. Each one had a romantic notion that by losing all that weight, he or she too would turn into a fifties starlet. The transformation was so utterly a stumbling block that they sidled; they could hardly look at me, because they didn’t know me.
“My dear,” my mother said at lunch, “it’s so lovely since you stopped drinking. You look your age. Sixteen.”
I weigh less than I did when I was sixteen. I can eat candy these days and stay this weight. I can eat potatoes, rice, bread, meat, ice cream, chocolate mousse, it all! My drinking metabolism had been so out of kilter that it had been turning celery into fat, because I drank on my “Drinking Man’s Diet” a trifle too enormously. My lover, who is skinny, calls the way I now consume dinner “pigging out.”
When people come to me to say that I am how I am because of “weight,” I am at a loss as to what to tell them. It’s not weight. It’s me. It isn’t because I lost those pounds and my pants tripped me, it’s because I am a new person and they are right not to recognize me. I don’t know me.
People, bearing grudges from the olden days when I used to get drunk and insult people, approach me at parties—drunk—and insult me. They say hard things, things you have to be numb to laugh about and to return with wittier insults. Then, something happens to them; they sort of begin to explain that I had once said such-and-such and that’s why they said what they said. A case of mistaken identity, they suddenly see. I am not the same person. They go away in strange shame for what they’ve said to a person they didn’t know.
The hardest part of all is being “beautiful.” I stopped drinking because I hoped to find some place that hadn’t been done—wasn’t being done—better. A place where I wouldn’t be automatically on a low rung. It’s hard to know what to say to people who ask how I did this; so, when they accuse, “You look so wonderful!” I answer, “Well, so do you.” My lover thinks I’m rude, that I should say, “Thank you.” But I cannot bring myself to act as though how I look is something I set about to do, when it was an accident, this perfection. I told you I never liked perfection. I, myself, would never set about to become a slinky willow . . . . All I started out knowing was that the most fashionable hotels were full, their bars were jammed. I didn’t know Versailles was empty. The ceilings all have cherubs, blue skies, and white clouds—the beds are enormous—and I’m Queen.
Vogue
September 1977