The slice of cheese is the color of the sun. I’m three or four years old, alone in the dirt yard of our little house on St. Simons Island, down on the Georgia coast, halfway between Savannah and Jacksonville. My mom is watching me through the kitchen window. Next door is a kindergarten called Alice’s Wonderland. Some older kids are over there playing kickball. They won’t pay me any attention. So I go inside and open the fridge and grab a slice of individually wrapped processed American cheese—waxy and square, yellow and orange, perfect and beautiful. I unwrap it and fold it into quarters so it will pass through the chain-link fence. I go back outside and now the kids notice me. A couple of them come over and take the pieces. One of them throws me the ball. We kick it back and forth over the fence until they have to go inside. Then I go back in to get a slice of my own.
From then on I knew: Food is connection, food is friendship, food is a certain kind of love.
There’s a photo of me from around that time. I look about the same now as I did back then. Same Shoney’s Big Boy haircut. Same belly stretching my white T-shirt. Same thighs too big for my shorts. At birth I was normal-sized—seven pounds, one ounce. But by the time I was old enough to know anything, I was fat. I’ve never been not fat.
We lived four blocks from the ocean in a house with a chartreuse fiberglass awning and a palm tree in the yard. Those years come back to me in smells. The salty funk of the breeze coming off the marsh. The rotten-egg stench of the pulp mills from over on the mainland in Brunswick. The DDT from the mosquito truck that rode down our street at dusk, blowing clouds of bug poison from a nozzle in the truck bed.
And, most of all, the aroma of catfish frying in our kitchen. You could hand me a bushel of honeysuckle and it wouldn’t smell as sweet as that grease in my mama’s cast-iron pan.
Rich people have always lived on St. Simons—it was once one of the largest cotton plantations in the country—and tourists come for a taste of salt water and Spanish moss. But in the early sixties a working man and woman could find a little wafer of land there and start themselves a life. That’s what my mom and dad did. They met on the job at SeaPak, a seafood processing plant on the island. My mom, Virginia, supervised one of the packing lines. My dad, L.M., fixed and maintained the big machines. When they got married in 1963, my dad had a cast on his left hand from getting his fingers mangled at work. When I was born, on January 4, 1964, the mortgage payment for our house was fifty dollars a month. We had a weary Pontiac station wagon and a VW Bug with holes in the floorboard. Nobody used the phrase working poor back then. But that’s what we were.
My dad wore blue work shirts with his name patched on the chest. He always looked a little caved-in, as if somebody had just thrown him a sandbag, and his shoulders were sloped instead of squared. But his forearms were creased with muscle, and when I hugged him, his back felt like an oak. He was built for work, not for show. He had a bald spot the whole time I knew him, and held his comb-over down with a greasy gel called Score. It smelled like spilled gasoline. I put it in my hair for years so I could be like him.
Old age has shrunk my mama some. I used to rest my chin on her head when I hugged her, and now I have to bend down to do it. I remember her with big hair and big glasses and sweat beading on her upper lip as she cooked supper or pulled weeds. She wouldn’t go to the movies because they wouldn’t let her smoke. Even now, on the back side of eighty, tethered to an oxygen hose, she is as tough as boat rope.
They had it about as hard as white people could have it in the first part of the twentieth century. They were born into Depression families of South Georgia sharecroppers, picking cotton on somebody else’s land. They bent over in the sun all day until the backs of their necks blistered—that’s where the word redneck comes from. Every day but Sunday, from the time they could walk, my people spent all day in the heat, dragging cotton sacks that got heavier with every row. Their fingers bled from the thorny seedpods under the cotton boll. Mama’s brother, my uncle Junior, would start fights with his brothers to get out of the field. If that didn’t work, he would stand on a stump and holler at God to send rain.
The men who owned the fields deducted the cost of every last seed and broken hoe handle. When it came time to settle up, the sharecroppers’ share vanished from the books. My mama’s family moved from shack to shack, one step ahead of the rent. My aunt Mae remembers the nicest place they ever lived being the one that didn’t need pasteboard to cover the cracks in the walls. The seven kids bathed in the same water, one after another, in a washtub. They got one pair of shoes a year and an orange at Christmas.
My dad was seventeen years older. The times he grew up in were even worse. He didn’t like to talk about it.
I never knew my grandfather—my mother’s father—but he was a one-man country song. One year he took the family’s payout from the cotton harvest, bought a car, drove it to Florida, and totaled it. He worked for a time as a cop, and later did time in prison for shooting a woman. My grandmother raised the kids mostly by herself. But when she was still a young woman, she had a stroke and lost the use of her left side. My mom was the oldest girl still living at home. So at age twelve, she took over the household.
The main job was keeping the family fed. Every morning she got up before light and made two or three pans of biscuits on the woodstove. She mixed some extra flour with bacon drippings for white gravy. That was breakfast. Then she’d pour water over black-eyed peas or lima beans and leave them to simmer while everybody went out to the fields. Those beans and cornbread were lunch and supper. If they were lucky, there was a hunk of ham to throw in the pot. Once in a great while they had a few chickens running around. One day, when she was little, Mama had to kill a chicken for supper. She wrung its neck and it broke her heart. She has refused to eat chicken ever since.
In every picture of my family from back then, the men and women are as lean and strong as deer. They didn’t have to diet. They had never heard of a gym. Their lives were exercise. When they weren’t picking cotton, they chopped wood for the stove or hauled water from the well. They had the stamina of triathletes. They shoveled in all the food they had just to keep them going. They could down half a dozen biscuits without an ounce of regret. Their eating habits landed hard in my DNA. Turns out you don’t burn off those biscuits so fast when you work at a desk in air-conditioning.
• • •
My mom had two kids from her first marriage—Brenda and my brother, Ronald Bennett. They were a lot older than me—out on their own by the time I was old enough to remember. I was my dad’s only child. He was forty-eight when I was born. He had waited a long time to be a father. He spoiled me as much as he could with the money they had. When I started to show an interest in basketball, he built me a goal out of plywood and plumbing pipe. He bought me the special G.I. Joes with the Kung Fu Grip even though he just about passed out when he saw how much they cost. I still have two of them in a drawer somewhere, naked and handless. It must have been a terrible war.
Every night, when he finished his shift at SeaPak, my dad stopped by the canteen and bought me peanut butter crackers and a carton of chocolate milk. Mama told him to stop, but he couldn’t help himself. He wanted to show how much he loved his boy. When I eat those two things now, in my mouth they turn into one—the milk softening the crackers, the crackers flavoring the milk—and in my mind that taste conjures a boy in short pants, playing in the dirt, waiting for Daddy to come home.
My folks often worked staggered shifts. Mama would wake me up at dawn on summer mornings to take me to my cousins’ house on her way to work. I’d lie on a pallet in their living room, the country music station on low, Charlie Rich singing about what goes on behind closed doors. Daddy would pick me up in work clothes stained with grease. Mama would come home smelling like shrimp.
My parents never got an education because their families needed them in the fields. Daddy stopped school in sixth grade, and Mama quit after one day of the fourth. But they both loved to read. My dad alternated between his two sacred texts: the Bible and the Bass Pro Shops catalog. My mom, to this day, reads two or three romance novels a week. All that reading rubbed off on me. Somehow I could read and write a little by the time I was two and a half, and I could name every car on the road by sight. The woman who ran the kindergarten next door found out about this and called the Brunswick News, the local paper. They came and did a story on me. My mom, of course, still has the clipping. “Tommy’s favorite pastimes are reading and writing,” the story says. “He spends a lot of time at his blackboard.” Today it’s a keyboard, not a blackboard, but my life is basically the same.
When I started school, I was ahead of most of the others in class but way behind on the playground. Donald Evans, the fastest kid in first grade, invented a sport that gave him endless entertainment: He’d slap me on the back of the head and dash out of reach, knowing I could never catch him. I couldn’t pull myself up on the monkey bars or clamber up into the live oaks in the schoolyard. (There was a time when schools let kids climb trees. This was before the invention of lawyers.)
The worst days were the ones with relay races. Even now the thought of them makes me sweat with dread. The teachers split us into two long lines. One kid at a time in each line, run to the pine tree and back. As soon as we lined up, kids would shift around to match up with somebody in the other line. I always ended up across from a girl named Pamela. She was as big as me. I’d glance at her, over in the other line, and she looked like I felt—full of fury and scared enough to pee her pants. I never ran harder in my life than during those relay races. I knew I was fat and slow, but I hated being the fattest and the slowest. I wanted to beat Pamela so bad. Sometimes I did, and I am ashamed of how much I enjoyed it. Other times she beat me and ruined my day. Either way, the same thing always happened: When we tagged the tree and turned toward home, the other kids would be laughing at us. Sometimes I wonder where Pamela is, and if she watches the relays at the Olympics, and catches a sudden smell of pine sap, and feels an ache in her gut.
No matter how much I do in life, no matter how far I’ve made it, it takes only an instant to snap me back to that field of dirt and sandspurs, churning as hard as I can go, still falling behind. All of a sudden I hear that elementary school laughter in my head, and know in my heart, despite all the evidence, that I am back in last place. I have felt that way with teachers and bosses, strangers and lovers. Out of nowhere, sometimes, I start heaving tears. I cry quicker and harder than a man ought to. As big as I am, it takes so little to make me feel small.
• • •
Grown-ups never made sense when it came to food. We ran laps in Midget League baseball to get in shape, but if we won a game, we got free snow cones from the concession stand. The go-to flavor was suicide, which was all the flavors mixed together. It tasted brown. When I was nine, and we won the first-half championship, the coach took us all to the Sizzler. I think it was the first time I’d ever been to a steak house. At the end of the season, when we had our team banquet at a fancy place called Bennie’s Red Barn, the coach got up to praise us one by one. “And Tommy—well, Tommy’s still over there eating,” he said, laughing. I looked up from my country-fried steak and noticed that everyone else had put their forks down. Where I came from, somebody talking was no reason to stop chewing.
I don’t remember making the connection back then between eating and getting fat. My first side hustle was selling Now & Laters—packs of taffy cut into little squares like Starburst. To South Georgia third graders, they might as well have been crack. I’d buy a pack of ten for a quarter at the little store near our house, then sell the squares for a dime apiece on the playground. I spent some of my profits on comic books but most of it on junk food for myself—Tom’s potato chips and Dreamsicles and tiny wax Coke bottles with little shots of fruit drink inside. Scientific studies have shown that there’s almost no limit to the amount of sweetness a child likes. I floored the sugar pedal. Sometimes I wonder if little grains of Pixy Stix are still wedged in my cells, waiting to get sweated out.
During the week, my folks didn’t have time to cook much. We ate what poor folks ate in the South. Hamburger Helper. Chicken potpies, ten for a dollar at Pantry Pride. Jell-O with fruit cocktail suspended inside and Cool Whip on top. Light bread smeared with Bama peanut butter and jelly, swirled together in one jar so you didn’t have to buy two.
What we ate more than anything was fish and seafood. My folks could get frozen shrimp from SeaPak for a dollar a pound. In the eighties, when trendy restaurants started selling shrimp and grits for twenty bucks a plate, it sounded to me like a prank on the Yankees. Shrimp and grits was what we ate if there was nothing else left in the house.
Sometimes we’d catch whiting off the St. Simons pier, or spot-tail bass—what they call redfish or red drum in other places—from the jetties on the beach. But we spent a lot more time in fresh water, mostly in the Altamaha River, which cuts a diagonal slash through southeast Georgia. My dad grew up on the river. He knew every bend in the channel and every overflow pond back in the woods. He had scraped up the money to buy a used bass boat, the fiberglass colored pale green like the hallway of an elementary school. We spent many a Saturday casting balsa-wood plugs and Dedly Dudly spinnerbaits among the cypress knees, looking for largemouth. One morning I pulled in a nine-pound bass on a black plastic worm. We didn’t mount it on the wall—we took it home, sliced it into strips, and fried them up like chicken tenders.
But bass were mostly for sport. When we needed to eat, we went for catfish. Five or six kinds lived in the river, and they all tasted different. Mud cats were the worst, then yellow cats, then blues. We wanted channel cats—they lived in moving water, instead of dead spots or eddies, so they weren’t as fatty. We’d tie our boat to a willow tree, bait the hooks with worms we dug that morning, and drop a line over the side until the sinker thumped the bottom. If we picked the right spot, within seconds we’d feel the stuttering pull of a channel cat. The younger, smaller ones tasted best. On good days we’d take home a coolerful.
Saturday night at our house, pretty much any weekend between 1970 and 1982: I’m out back with Daddy, skinning catfish and trying to keep from getting finned. (Catfish have fins as sharp as ice picks.) Mama is inside with the skillet, heating drippings from a can on the back of the stove, or maybe a scoop of Crisco. She dredges each fish in cornmeal, then places it in the skillet. If you asked me to narrow my whole childhood into one sensory wash, this is it: the hot bubbles outlining the fresh fish, the grease popping like angry rain, the smell of old river bottom and bacon once removed.
I ate thousands of those fish and have yet to taste anything better. Catfish, french fries, coleslaw, hush puppies, sweet tea. If I ever end up on the Green Mile, that’s my last meal.
• • •
Everybody in my family was an artist when it came to Southern food. The women cooked the most, but the men could swing a meal now and then—Daddy’s specialty was chicken and dumplings, with the dumplings made from crumbled-up soda crackers. The show of the year was the family reunion at Uncle Ted and Aunt Estelle’s house in Nahunta, Georgia, which is known (if it is known) for once hosting the World Armadillo Olympics. Uncle Ted worked in the pulp mills and played country blues on his guitar. Aunt Estelle, my dad’s sister, was rough as a cob. From the time I was about ten, every time we showed up, she’d take one look at me and holler: “You ain’t lost no weight!” And then she would call us to the kitchen, where we would add our dishes to heaven’s buffet.
Most of the time, the center of the table was a platter of fried chicken piled so high it would topple if you pulled out the wrong leg. There’d be pork chops, turkey and dressing, beef stew, maybe venison if it was hunting season. Then the white food group: mashed potatoes, potato salad, deviled eggs, rice with brown gravy. Biscuits and cornbread shining with butter. And then the vegetables: crowder peas and Kentucky Wonder pole beans, crookneck squash and fried okra, turnip greens in salty potlikker, sliced tomatoes picked five minutes ago. This paragraph is as close as I will ever come to writing porn.
There was no way to get all the goodness on one plate. Anywhere my family gathered, a normal meal was two helpings. Three if you hadn’t tried the meat loaf. If you stopped after one, somebody would ask if you were sick.
The desserts were off to the side on a counter. Somebody would have set out dessert plates, but most of us used our regular plates for the extra room, not caring if the carrot cake soaked up chicken grease. We’d have pecan pie, banana pudding, peach cobbler, pound cake as dense and rich as peat moss. One year in the early seventies, one of our cousins, who had moved to Minnesota, brought home her new husband. He was Japanese. I’m pretty sure nobody at that reunion had ever met a Japanese person before that moment, unless it was in the war. He showed up with a cooler of ice cream. We loved him immediately.
After supper was the time of groaning and unbuckled belts: “Time to sit around and sulk,” Uncle Ted would say. The women would clean up and gather around the kitchen table. The men would go outside and lean on the bed of somebody’s truck, smoking cigarettes or pinching off chaws of Days Work tobacco. As a kid I had a ticket to both worlds, the women and the men, and I’d hang around the fringes, listening to the stories. Sometimes the hero of the outside version was the villain of the inside version. Either way the stories always had pace, suspense, humor, and a lesson at the end. I’m the only one out of my family who makes a living telling stories, but in many ways I’m the worst storyteller in my family. I’ve spent my life trying to rework my family’s magic tricks, to take that sound and that feeling and turn it into words on a page. My kin, without knowing it, created a writer.
Without intending to, they also created a fat boy.
By the time I came around, the people in my family were off the farm, but most of them still worked with their hands and their backs. I was different. I never had to pick cotton or sweat out a shift at the mill. I ran around outside and played ball, but what I really loved was reading books. My soft life had no chance against a Southern supper table. A few people in my family were starting to grow potbellies, but most still had the jobs and the metabolism to burn off big suppers. I didn’t, but the food was so good I couldn’t stay away. I’d sneak back into the kitchen for an extra chicken leg or a hunk of pie I’d eat out of my bare hand.
The grown-ups would chase me off, but they weren’t serious about it. They were proud of what they grew and caught and cooked. None of us had money. But we were wealthy at the table. I ate better than anyone I knew. I also ate more.
My dad’s full name was Leonard Milton Tomlinson, but people always called him Tommy, and he figured that’s what everybody would call me. So my folks made it official—it’s Tommy on my birth certificate, not Thomas or Tom. From then on, I was Little Tommy and he was Big Tommy. It didn’t take me long to turn that into a joke. By the time I was twelve, I was bigger than him.
• • •
Right around then, in 1976, we moved from St. Simons to the mainland. My mom got hurt on the job at SeaPak—a metal rack fell on her and crushed nerves in her neck and shoulder. My dad had started to get work building houses. They both wanted a calmer life and a place for a garden. So they bought a cinder-block house right on Highway 341 in Sterling, ten miles north of Brunswick. When we moved there, Sterling had a single flashing light. Forty years later, there’s a full red light. Progress.
That fall my mom took me to Jane Macon Middle School to sign up for seventh grade. The principal herself enrolled me. The first day of class, my English teacher started talking about how exciting it must be to be starting eighth grade. I went up after class and told her there must be a mistake. It turned out I was so big that the principal assumed I was an eighth grader. When they checked my test scores, they let me stay in eighth-grade English. Our teacher, Lillian Williams, told us dirty jokes on the sly and gave me a stack of her daughter’s old Beatles singles. She also picked me to play the lead in the production of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. I sang a solo and made out with two girls in the cast backstage. God bless you, Mrs. Williams.
Our new house had an acre of rich black dirt—the people before us had kept horses. My folks knew all about gardens from their years in the fields. Soon we were swamped with vegetables. Mama canned peas and froze squash and made scuppernong jelly from our grapevine. We ate healthy more days than not. But by then I had a taste for sugar and fat. When we didn’t eat it at home, I found other ways.
My freshman year in high school, I started working two jobs. One was at the Jack’s Minit Market down at the traffic light. My main task was to load the racks in the long walk-up cooler that ran across the back of the store. I worked in the freezing-cold room behind the racks, wearing a jacket in the middle of summer, just as my folks had done at the seafood plant. Inventory control at Jack’s was not exactly precise, and I was out of sight in the cooler, so I’d pop open a cold drink as soon as I clocked in. I tried every potion Coke and Pepsi made, plus Nehis and RC Colas and Gatorade. Some of the first beers I ever drank were in that little room behind the racks. I came out just before the store closed at eleven. Right after we locked up, the nice old woman who worked the counter would go in the office to put the money in the safe. I took those moments to shoplift candy—mainly Chunky bars, which were easy to stuff in my jacket pockets. In bed, I’d gorge on stolen chocolate.
My other job was at the Sunset drive-in theater. I got that job through James Holt, one of the debate teachers at Brunswick High—his mom ran the theater. We specialized in first-run movies on their second run, grindcore horror films, and X-rated flicks with the X taken out. Not many customers at the Sunset cared what was on the screen. The front rows were crawling with kids in station wagons, and the back rows were full of weed smoke and muffled moans. It was a dream job for me: a small but steady paycheck, all the movie passes I wanted, and bushels of free food. I had a cup of Coke I refilled half a dozen times every night, and a bag I kept filled with warm popcorn. (After seeing popcorn “butter” in its unmelted state—it looked like a block of yellow birdshit—I ate my popcorn dry, and have ever since.) We also sold burgers and hot dogs and little pepperoni pizzas. Some nights, when I ran the projector and was the last one around, I’d make myself one of everything. On top of that, Mrs. Holt—who was born in Korea—would often bring in a big bowl of fried rice for the staff. Some nights I’d eat supper at home, then go to the Sunset and have fried rice and popcorn and hot dogs and pizza. I outgrew the company-issued white dress shirts. Mama had to buy me new ones and sew on the Georgia Theater Company patches.
Brunswick had just one big-and-tall store, a place called P.S. Men’s Wear. By the time I was in middle school, that’s where I had to get my clothes. It was the quietest place I ever shopped—nothing but fat guys and their wives or mamas, everybody’s heads dipped in shame. The dressing rooms there were the first time, but far from the last time, that I cried over clothes. Nothing ever fits right when you’re fat, and nothing that does fit is ever in style. If it was close, we bought it anyway. There was nowhere else to go.
I was always hell on clothes. My thighs rubbed together and wore through my corduroys, making me chafe in ways no amount of talcum powder would soothe. If I sat down wrong, or bent over funny, I’d rip a hole in the crotch of my jeans. My legs were too big to keep pressed together—I was manspreading before manspreading was a thing—so everybody could see where Mama had patched the holes with scraps of denim or old bandannas. It was Dolly Parton’s coat of many colors down there. It’s bad enough any time somebody laughs at your crotch. Worse when you’re fifteen.
None of this slowed down my eating. At the high school they had a regular lunch line, where they offered the hot meal of the day. But they also had a sandwich line. You picked up a paper bag with the side items—potato salad, an apple, whatever—and then chose a sandwich to put in the bag. Nobody staffed the sandwich line except the woman taking money at the end. It didn’t take me long to figure out I could grab a burger AND a barbecue sandwich AND a ham and cheese and stuff them all in the bag, and no one would check. Three lunches in one! Clearly I was a genius.
My lunches were supposed to be free. Our family income was low enough that I qualified for free lunches the whole time I was in school. When I was in elementary school, they didn’t think to disguise that from the other kids. At the beginning of every week the teacher would call a few names, and we’d trudge to her desk in our off-brand shoes to get our little blue punch cards. They marked us as sure as scarlet letters. Once it sank in that I was poor, and everybody knew it, I despised those blue cards. By the time I got to middle school, I wouldn’t take them anymore. Mama would count out a dollar or two every day so I could buy lunch. I’m sure it hurt our family. Those dollars added up. I didn’t care. I was ashamed of enough already.
Later, after my dad got sick and had to quit work, we stood in line for government cheese. It came in long blocks like Velveeta, except in brown institutional boxes. I hated what that cheese said about us. But it was damn good cheese. I carved it off the block in chunks the size of my hand.
• • •
Animal House came out my freshman year at Brunswick High. All my friends loved it, and the scene we loved the most was the food fight. Back then my best friend was another freshman named Nick Arbia, who knew where to get pot and was rumored to have had sex. I had never been close to either. Nick and I thought it would be hilarious to have a food fight at our school. Neither one of us was serious about it, but we talked it up a little and the idea got away from us. By the time the day we had picked came around, a Friday in the spring, the whole school knew about it. We sat down in the cafeteria that day and the whole place got quiet. Everybody waited for us to start something. I wasn’t about to start anything. I was too scared. It was like that for a minute or two. Then, from out in the courtyard, somebody threw a sandwich that splatted against the window. That was all it took. All of a sudden pizza slices and fruit cups flew everywhere. I never threw a thing, just hid under a table until it was over. Afterward, I walked back toward class, scared and giddy. Other kids were high-fiving me. I was a fat freshman with acne and crooked teeth, but for a minute I was a hero.
I had just made it through the breezeway and into the next building when someone spun me around. I never saw the punch coming—it caught me flush in the left eye. It staggered me but I didn’t go down and I went after him. Then somebody else hit me from the side and knocked me down. The two of them kicked me in the face until a couple of teachers broke it up. It turned out the first guy was the star running back on the football team, and the other was a starter in basketball. Somebody had hit the football player with an apple in the food fight. He and his buddy took it out on me. It’s the only real fight I’ve ever been in. I expect to retire with a lifetime record of 0-1.
It happened to be Fifties Day at school, and I had worn a white T-shirt like the Fonz. Never a good fashion choice, but especially not that day. The front was soaked in blood from my busted nose. They hauled all three of us to the principal’s office. We all got suspended—me for the food fight, them for the real one. The principal, a big sports fan, was worried most about the football player. He had hurt his knuckles punching me.
My mom came and picked me up. She drove me home in fury and tears. I couldn’t begin to explain what had happened—not right then, anyway. We got home and she cleaned me up and I realized: With all that food flying around my head, I never did get any lunch.
I was hungry.
• • •
That was the only really bad thing that happened to me in high school. There were so many good things. I found my tribes—the debate team, the Model UN, the kids who partied but still studied. Three great teachers—James Holt, Brenda Hunt, and Wayne Ervin—praised my work and pushed me to do better. I devoured books despite having to trudge through Thomas Hardy and Theodore Dreiser and those other novelists devised by English teachers in order to make kids hate reading. In my little group I even, to my surprise, found girls who were attracted to me. I spent more Friday nights than I expected out at the edge of the marsh, on a dark cul-de-sac in an unbuilt development called River Ridge, steaming up the windows of my ’71 Buick LeSabre. It was a big car. There was plenty of room in the backseat.
(Sex was always such a surprise. I saw myself in the mirror. I knew what I looked like. Even in the moment, in the sweat and the sighs, part of me would think: You’ve seen me up close, right? Are you sure about this?)
Things were good at home, too. I was lucky beyond words to grow up in a stable house with two parents who loved me. I made almost all A’s and went to Glyndale Baptist with my folks every Sunday morning. The worst trouble I ever got into was the first night I got drunk, which also happened to be the first night I puked after getting drunk. It was supposed to be an overnight party, but it broke up early and a friend took me home. I opened the door at three in the morning, bumfuzzled and shirtless, to find my mom and dad playing rummy with Uncle Hank and Aunt Hazel. Daddy gave me the silent treatment for a few days after that one. He could have beat me with a cypress limb and it wouldn’t have hurt as much.
My dad was wearing down by then from fifty years of smoking and all those years of work. He had a stroke and needed surgery to clear out an artery in his neck. His emphysema tethered him to an oxygen tank, and he couldn’t walk to the mailbox without giving out. We needed money, so Mama went back to work as a waitress in a hotel diner that eventually turned into a Denny’s. She toted trays with that injured neck and shoulder for eighteen years. The nerves down her back still burn. She would come home exhausted and drop into a chair, handing me her apron so I could empty the pockets and count out her tips. My mama and daddy broke their bodies to make lives for themselves, and to give me a better life than the one they had. It hurt their hearts to see me breaking my body over nothing more than second helpings.
The three of us ate most of our meals in the kitchen at a little table with a Formica top, one of those sets that would be charming and retro now. One night I sat down for supper and the aluminum legs of my chair gave way under me, like a horse kneeling to sleep. None of us knew what to say. I got off the floor, bent the legs back into place, and sat down as light as I could. Then I dove back into my food.
They talked to me over and over about losing weight—Daddy in his gentle way, sliding it sideways into a conversation, Mama head-on and blunt. I responded the way most every teenager does: I didn’t listen. I knew what they were saying was true—I felt the hurt when some girl I liked laughed at me, or when I hid in the back of the shower in P.E. class, or when I stayed home on prom night. I couldn’t parse out what was normal high school drama and what was special to me because I was fat.
By high school I was plenty old enough to make my own choices. Maybe all that chocolate milk and all those crackers, all that fried chicken and banana pudding, set me on a path. But at some point I decided to walk it on my own. It wasn’t—isn’t—my parents’ fault. I understood exactly what I was doing. I felt like two people—the smart kid with a sweet and lucky life, and the fool trying to eat himself to death.
On graduation night at Brunswick High, I drank a beer in the school parking lot as the principal drove by and scowled. I was eighteen, legal drinking age in Georgia back then, supposedly a man.
A few months before that, my dad sat me down in the living room and told me they had done the best they could but they didn’t have enough money to send me to college. I’d never seen him that sad. Maybe I could work for a while, he said, take a class or two at the junior college, save enough to pay my own way. I let him finish and told him something he didn’t know: They had these things called Pell Grants that could help families like us pay for tuition and books. Between that and a couple of scholarships I’d won, that might be enough. Daddy let out a long breath and I hugged him. Pell Grants are named for a senator from Rhode Island named Claiborne Pell who died a few years ago. I’ve never really had heroes. If I did, my mom and dad would be first. Claiborne Pell would be next.
On a Saturday morning in September 1982, I left Brunswick for Athens to start my freshman year at the University of Georgia. I had a ticket to the football game that afternoon, but no one had told me that game traffic around Athens is like Times Square on New Year’s Eve. I didn’t get to the city limits until the third quarter. So I listened to the great UGA announcer Larry Munson call the game on the radio as the Dawgs finished off BYU. On the way to the friends’ apartment where I was spending the night, I stopped at McDonald’s for a burger and the liquor store for a six-pack of Mickey’s malt liquor. Mickey’s came in grenade-shaped green bottles. It looked like something a college man ought to drink. It tasted terrible. It was the first of many terrible college beers, and that burger was the first of many terrible college meals.
I had nobody to answer to. I had nobody to catch me raiding the fridge at night. I was 270 pounds and about to get a lot bigger.
I start with a hunk of plastic and a plan.
The hunk of plastic is a Fitbit fitness tracker. The one I have is the cheapest version—the Flex, a black band that goes around my left wrist. There’s a little capsule inside that acts as a pedometer. The display is five white dots on a tiny screen. The more steps I take, the more dots light up. If I hit my goal for the day, the dots dance across the screen and the wristband vibrates. The technology is basically Pong. But it does what I need it to do. It holds me accountable.
The Flex connects to a website where I can log in what I eat every day. That’s crucial to my plan. I’ll talk a lot more about the diet industry later on, but for now just know what I have come to learn through painful experience: The only thing a trendy diet will help you lose is money. I have come to believe there’s just one true plan that works in the long term. I call it the Three-Step Diet:
1. Find a way to measure the calories you eat and drink.
2. Find a way to measure the calories you burn.
3. Make sure that every day, number one is smaller than number two.
This doesn’t have to cost you a dime. There are loads of free tools, online and at the library, to help you count calories in and calories out. I didn’t know, until I got serious about keeping track, that there’s a thing called basal metabolic rate: the calories your body burns just to keep your blood flowing and your lungs pumping air. You can find BMR calculators online, and they’re all just a guess—a doctor can get you a more precise reading—but in general, the bigger you are, the more it takes to keep the engine running. I burn somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 calories a day just to stay alive. Right now I’m a Chevy Tahoe. I’d like to be a Prius.
I paid a hundred dollars for the Fitbit because it makes keeping track easy—the pedometer counts my steps and sends the info via Bluetooth to the Fitbit website. The site also has a place to enter other types of exercise—swimming or biking or whatever. Then I just log in what I eat. It has calorie counts for pretty much everything you can think of, including stuff from most restaurant chains. This is where I found out that one of those little bags of tortilla chips they give you at Chipotle is 570 calories. Which means I no longer take the little bag of tortilla chips at Chipotle.
It makes such a difference—at least it does to me—just to write everything down. I’ve often told people that one reason I became a writer is that I don’t really know what I think until I sketch it out on the page. That’s what the Three-Step Diet forces me to do when it comes to food and exercise. It’s a daily journal of how much I care about leading a better life.
My goal, for now, is to keep my daily intake about 1,000 calories under my outgo. Theoretically, a pound equals about 3,500 calories—although, as I’ll talk about later, scientists disagree about this—so 1,000 calories a day equals 7,000 a week, or about two pounds. If I stick to the goal I could lose about two pounds a week, if I do the math right, and if my body conforms to the statistical averages, and if we even really know how many calories are in a pound to begin with. When you’re trying to lose weight, most phrases begin with if.
Lots of people take their longest walk of the year on New Year’s Day, trying to walk off the mistakes of a lifetime, or maybe just the mistakes of last night. Alix and I start the year with a stroll through NoDa, one of our favorite Charlotte neighborhoods. I find a golf ball and a debit card. Somebody had an interesting New Year’s Eve. Then we go home and make field peas and collard greens. It’s a Southern tradition on New Year’s Day—the peas stand for coins, and the greens for folding money. Most people cook the peas with rice and bacon in a dish called hoppin’ John. But we’re already making cornbread, cooked in one of my mom’s old cast-iron skillets, and we’re trying to eat better for the New Year. So we skip the bacon and rice. We wish for wealth in love and willpower.
After a couple days in Charlotte, I go back to Georgia to spend a week with my mom. Alix has to work so I go without her. I’m headed straight into the grief over Brenda’s death. It hasn’t been even two weeks yet. Everything’s still raw. Mama’s house is full of peace lilies that people sent for the funeral. They’re beautiful to look at, until I remember why they’re there.
I spend my fifty-first birthday helping Mama get one more day of distance from Christmas Eve. She goes to bed early and I watch Life Itself, the documentary on the film critic Roger Ebert. I admired Ebert for lots of reasons. He was a fat guy who thrived on TV through the force of his talent. He wrote about big ideas for a mass audience—something I’ve always tried to do. He poured out thousands of reviews and books and features and blog posts. He kept working through his terrible battle with cancer and its complications. I’ve always wanted to be more prolific in life—to write more stories, go more places, have more adventures. At the end, Ebert’s whole lower jaw was missing, but he was still churning out words and making the most of his life. Sometimes I think I make the least of mine.
People are still bringing food to Mama’s house. There’s a pan of baked spaghetti in the fridge, a couple of pies of unknown origin on the counter. I drive down to Brunswick to see my best friend, Virgil Ryals, and his mom. Mrs. Ryals bakes cakes that are restaurant quality. She sends me back with a slab of red velvet and a hunk of pound cake. It’s a forty-five-minute drive back to Jesup and they rest on a plate in the passenger seat, whispering their aromas in my nose. I feel like a drug mule moving cocaine up I-95. I could pull over and eat it all and Mama would never know. I make it back without touching the plate. It feels like a huge victory.
But I’m also finishing up a big piece for ESPN, and my nerves always kick in just before a big story comes out. It doesn’t matter that I’ve been doing this for thirty years. I still worry that there’s some huge error none of us caught. I worry that nobody will read the story. Most of all I worry that I didn’t capture the truth, that it slid out from under me when I looked away. When I get back home, the fear balls up in my gut. On Tuesday afternoon, after Alix goes to work, I go to McDonald’s. For the next few days I dive off the wagon.
At the end of the month, I weigh in at our local Y. We don’t use the Y nearly as much as we should—I did the math one time and we were paying something like thirty bucks a visit based on our monthly fees. Its main feature for me is the scale in the basement. It goes up to five hundred pounds. You can’t buy a normal scale at the store that goes that high—usually they have them just at doctor’s offices. This scale is the only one I have access to that fits me.
It has been an up-and-down month—more good than bad, I think, but I don’t know for sure. I hate reducing my life to a number. But right now, this number matters.
I step on the scale and watch the digits roll like a slot machine. Anything less than a month ago and I’m a winner.
The numbers stop.
I’m winning. So far.
Weight on December 31, 2014: 460
Weight on January 31, 2015: 455
For the month: -5