We sat in a cold room and the surgeon explained how he would cut my throat.
The larynx is sort of a triangle, he said, sketching a top-down view on a sheet of paper. We’ll have to take off about this much. He drew a line across a corner of the triangle and most of the way up one side. The line marked off forty percent of my voice box.
We hope you’ll be able to talk again, the surgeon said. But I can’t guarantee it.
This was the beginning of 1993. The paper had hired me back. I had a new job in the Big House as a feature writer, focusing on pop music. I sat next to a theater critic who told great dirty jokes and a movie critic who sang opera in the men’s room. My new apartment was five minutes from the office. Everything felt right except for my voice. It sounded like laryngitis but it wouldn’t go away.
I went to a regular doctor who gave me a quick exam and shrugged. He sent me to Dr. Donald Kamerer, who I found out later was the best ear, nose, and throat guy in town. He found a polyp in my voice box. They’re almost always benign, and he said he could snip it out in outpatient surgery. We made the appointment for a few days later. The surgery went quickly, as he promised. But while I was in the recovery room, Dr. Kamerer took a quick look at the polyp in the lab. He knew I was headed to Georgia to spend time with family while I healed up. As I was being wheeled out the door, he said in sort of an offhand way: Maybe come back sooner instead of later.
I tried not to think too hard about what that meant. I didn’t want to borrow trouble. But I came back after a long weekend. I made an appointment to meet him at his office down the street from the hospital. And now he was drawing the diagram in that cold examining room and telling me I had squamous cell carcinoma. Throat cancer.
I had just turned twenty-nine.
Most people get throat cancer from smoking. Mama and Daddy were both heavy smokers, but I never smoked and it’s rare to get that type of cancer secondhand. Alcoholics get throat cancer. So do people with chronic acid reflux. None of the triggers fit me. When you look at the stats for the causes of any disease, there’s a small percentage of people who get it for strange reasons or in unknown ways. They get labeled as Other.
I was Other.
I stumbled out of his office like a zombie and got in my car and cranked the heater up. It didn’t cut the cold. I sat there in the parking space and cried.
Dr. Kamerer had said this type of cancer wasn’t life-threatening. But that didn’t change the fear that was grinding a hole in my gut. They could find more cancer. Something could go wrong and I could die on the table. I’d barely gotten my life started. Part of me was furious at my shitty luck. But part of me thought it must be punishment for getting so fat. Maybe I’d wrecked so much of my life that God was just cutting his losses. You wanna see a wasted life? I’ll show you a wasted life.
For the thousandth time, I vowed to lose weight and get in shape. This time it came with a coda: Just let me live.
I got second and third and fourth opinions on how to get rid of the cancer. In the end, there were two options—surgery or radiation. Radiation would preserve my voice, but there was a smaller chance of getting all the cancer. Surgery would get all the cancer, but there was a chance I would come out the other side with no voice.
I picked surgery. Mute was better than dead. But I wondered what the prospects would be for a reporter who couldn’t talk.
• • •
During one of my office visits, Dr. Kamerer turned to talk to a nurse and I could see the notes he had taken on my case. Two words jumped out: morbidly obese. I’m not sure I had heard that phrase before. It was definitely the first time I had thought about it as a description of me.
In medicine, it’s a technical term: somebody who has a body mass index of forty, which usually means at least a hundred pounds more than ideal weight. But there’s a literary jolt to the phrase. Morbid means “dwelling on death.” Morbidly obese meant I was so fat that my fat would probably kill me. Unless cancer cut in line.
Because of my morbid obesity, there was some discussion about whether it was safe to do the surgery at all. Anesthesiologists don’t like fat patients. It’s hard to keep the airway open. Because the surgery was going to be on my throat, they would have to do a tracheotomy. Keeping me breathing and sedated would be complicated. But the morning of the surgery, Dr. Kamerer was calm and positive. They wheeled me in on my back and I looked up at the lights and after a minute or two I went under.
Every hospital recovery room feels the same. Thin curtains between the beds. Nurses in clogs padding around. Some old guy moaning. I woke up with a slash across the left side of my neck, fastened with staples. I breathed through a hole in my throat. Some kind of milky Ensure-looking stuff was being pumped through a tube in my nose. I would end up losing ten pounds in the hospital. The Cancer Diet is surprisingly effective.
They didn’t have a hospital gown big enough to fit me. They had to snap two gowns together to make something that ended up looking like Homer Simpson’s muumuu. It had to be changed a lot because green gunk drained out of my wound and down the front. I had bought a new red bathrobe to wear over the gown(s). It got funky after a few days so my brother took it to a Laundromat. Ronald doesn’t do much laundry. He washed the robe with my whites. So my daily outfit ended up being a gunk-coated double gown, a washed-out bathrobe, and pink underwear. I have yet to see this ensemble at Fashion Week.
I couldn’t talk, so I wrote in little spiral notebooks. I wrote notes to the doctor and the nurses and my visiting friends and Mama, who slept beside me almost every night in a chair next to the bed. It’s hard to talk in real time on paper. The thoughts come out too fast to write them down. One time I squabbled with Mama over some little thing and chucked my notebook across the room. She let it lie there. That shut me up.
Hospital time, science has proven, moves ten times slower than regular time. Every hour felt like half a day. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t drink, couldn’t shower. I felt like a country ham hanging in a barn, growing mold. A nurse came by and washed me a couple times, which I’m sure was a joy for her. My friends at the paper had bought me a Game Boy and I burned hours playing Tetris. I saw falling blocks on my eyelids when I tried to sleep. My friend Clint Engel came by to watch the Charlotte Hornets’ playoff game against the Boston Celtics. It turned out to be the greatest game (so far) in Hornets history—Alonzo Mourning, our six-ten center, hit a long jumper with time running out to win it. His teammates dogpiled on top of him, and the fans at the Charlotte Coliseum went crazy, and Clint jumped and screamed in my room, and all I could do was pump my fist in silence. Somewhere underneath that slash in my neck, my body was deciding if I would ever get to scream and cheer again.
On my seventeenth day in the hospital, they took out the tracheostomy tube. A bunch of doctors and nurses gathered in my room. Dr. Kamerer told me to hold my hand over the hole and try to say something. “One small step for man . . .” would’ve been nice. Maybe “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.” But I hadn’t thought it through. I was exhausted and scared. Whatever happened next would push my life in one direction or another.
I took the deepest breath I could.
“Hey,” I said, and sound came out.
The doctors and nurses cheered. Mama cried.
Greatest word of my life.
After that it was time to undo all the things they had done. A nurse came in and took out all twenty-some staples, one by one, each one pinging into a metal bedpan. The IV came out. The drains with the green gunk came out. At some point they pulled out the feeding tube. I had been sedated when it went in and had no idea how long it was. It felt like a thirty-foot garden hose coming out of my nostril.
Then I got to eat.
Here’s what I figure hospitals think about food: If you’re in the hospital you might die anyway, so there’s no point wasting a good meal on you. Lunch for the patients that day was roast beef sandwiches. Have you ever seen the translucent sheen of gas in a puddle? The roast beef had that sheen. The lettuce on top of it had long since fainted. Even I, in a normal moment, might have taken a pass. This was not a normal moment. I bit off a chunk and chewed. There have been ten thousand better meals in my life. But I’ve never had a single bite that tasted as good as that little piece of crappy roast beef sandwich.
For a moment it made me forget about the hospital and the scar already itching on my neck and having cancer at twenty-nine and being the Other. A big enough pleasure can push back any pain. I guess I always knew I ate as a salve against the wounds of the world. But it never felt as direct as it did there in the hospital bed. I was alive and could talk and could eat. No pill from God or Pfizer would have made me feel that good.
• • •
It took months of voice therapy, blowing on pitch pipes and throat-humming like Billy Bob Thornton in Sling Blade, just to build up to the voice I have today—a raspy, thin thing that wears out fast. Some women say it’s sexy. To me it sounds like an obscene phone caller in training. At least twice a week for these last twenty-plus years, some stranger has asked if I have a cold, or if I yelled too much at the ball game. Most of the time I just say yes.
In the long run, the limitations of my voice made me better at my job. People had trouble hearing me on the phone, so I got out of the office to see them face-to-face. I couldn’t shout at a press conference, so I pulled people over to the side. Most important, because my voice wore out if I talked too much, it made me shut up and listen. I moved in close so people could hear me. It made the conversation more intimate. Even before the surgery, I preferred big stories about little moments. Now I needed those little moments to survive as a writer.
The same lessons crossed over into the rest of my life. I’m useless at a party unless I can get to a quiet place, away from the crowd. The conversation you have on the porch is different than the one you have in a busy kitchen. My voice shapes how I write because it shapes how I live.
I spent the next few years mostly covering concerts. It was a thrill to see great live music and get paid for it. Sometimes it was better to see bad live music and get paid for it. One night I went to see Courtney Love’s band Hole. She half-assed the music, did an impromptu audience poll on sexually transmitted diseases, and waved around a stuffed elk head to the point I thought she might impale the bass player. God knows where she got a stuffed elk head to begin with. After I panned the show in the paper, I got a letter from a group of Hole fans that began:
Dear Tommy Tomlinson,
You suck.
And proceeded to list ten reasons why.
A couple years later, in 1996, the paper shuffled some jobs and there was an opening for a local columnist. It was the best job at the paper and something I’d always wanted to try. A bunch of people applied, inside the paper and out. We wrote sample columns and the paper published some of them. Then there were budget problems. Then management indecision. A year and a half went by. I figured that if they were going to pick one of us, they’d have done it already. My friend Joe Posnanski told me about a sportswriting job at the Kansas City Star, where he was working at the time. So I flew out there and interviewed. When I got back, the Observer’s managing editor, Frank Barrows, invited me to breakfast. We met on a Saturday morning at Anderson’s, a diner that’s now closed but used to be the place where deals got done in Charlotte. I ordered sausage patties and grits. Frank offered me the columnist job. I said yes before he got to the period.
A columnist is the conduit between a paper and its readers. You get to say what you think, praise the praiseworthy, call out corruption and meanness, reveal a little bit of yourself. I was thirty-three and probably one of the youngest local columnists in America. But over time I built a following. People started to notice me on the street. My friends David and Cathy Duclos came to visit one weekend, and when we went out to dinner at LongHorn Steakhouse, we noticed a woman staring at our table. She finally walked over, wobbly from a couple of drinks. She blurted out how much she liked my columns and asked for my autograph. David, who has known me since I was a doofus drunk freshman at UGA, had this astonished expression on his face the whole time: What the hell is happening?
There were lots of nice moments like that. I kept expecting somebody to notice me on the street and take a swing at me, but it never happened. Correction: It hasn’t happened yet.
• • •
When I became a columnist, my picture started running in the paper. In my case it was just a mug shot, but it was enough to show my extra chins. So from day one, every time I had a piece in the paper, I could count on some version of the kids back at elementary school hollering Fat ass.
Writing for anyone but yourself requires two skins. One has to be soft and porous, to let the feelings of the story flow through you. The other has to be solid and flameproof, to shield you from the blowback. Anything you write that matters enough to be loved will also be hated. Most of the letters and emails and phone calls I got as a columnist were kind. Some were criticism I needed—thoughtful disagreement with what I’d said, fair points about things I’d missed, critiques of my style and grammar. One poor retired English teacher beat me with a verbal stick every time I wrote the word ain’t. But underneath all that was the crawl space where readers went straight for my weakest spot. Some wondered how I dared to judge anybody else when I couldn’t keep my own weight under control. Others said they were disgusted to see my face in the morning. One regular would end her letters with a sentence or two about how karma would make things right one day by giving me diabetes or a heart attack. (She was a nurse. I wondered about her patients.) Some days there might be one email like that, some days there might be a dozen, but they were always there. Most were just little stings, like those staples plucked from my neck in the hospital. But some readers were cruel and skilled. They’d slide the blade between my ribs in a way that would make me burn quiet tears at my desk. Once or twice I looked up a reader’s address and fantasized about showing up at his front door. I’m right here, I’d say, fists already balled. Say it to my face.
I say all this knowing that in many ways I got off easy, because I’m a white guy. You don’t want to see the emails the black women at the paper get.
To soothe the hurt I prowled the newsroom, scavenging for snacks. The Observer had some kind of party just about every day—a birthday or an award or a going-away for somebody leaving. Gary Wright, the court reporter, kept peanut butter crackers in his desk. There was always a bowl of M&M’s around, or leftover Halloween candy. I’d bring a stash back to my cubicle, bandaging the cuts to my heart with tortilla chips or sheet cake. Sometimes I’d intend to use the snacks as rewards—make that difficult phone call and then have a cookie. But once the goods were laid out in front of me, I couldn’t resist. Phone call, later. Sugar high, right fucking now.
There are lots of different ways to write a column. I tried to get out of the office, be a reporter, take on all the big stories. Sometimes that meant driving straight into darkness. I headed to Virginia Tech after the shootings there, the body count rising on the car radio as I drove toward Blacksburg and it started to snow. I covered the memorial in Charleston after nine firefighters died in a fire at a furniture store. I stood in a bare room at Central Prison in Raleigh after midnight, watching through a sheet of glass as a man who’d murdered his wife with a screwdriver died by lethal injection. My phone rang one January afternoon after a vice president at Wachovia Bank stabbed his twin five-year-old daughters to death. Every reporter in town was trying to find his wife. She called me.
I was drawn to those stories even as they kept me up at night. They felt like my duty. Readers, and editors, wanted me to try to make sense of the worst of the world. But I also wanted to sort it out for myself—not so much why people kill, or why the world can be so heartless, but how people deal with the pain. Being a fat guy was small and meaningless next to parents who had seen their children die. If I put myself in the middle of someone else’s troubles, maybe I could find a way out of mine.
In 2005, the paper sent me to Louisiana to be part of a team writing about Hurricane Katrina. Every hotel was full so I slept in my rented SUV. I had covered several hurricanes and kept a duffel bag with the essentials: rain gear, flashlights, a radio, a good knife, toilet paper. Perishable food was no good—you couldn’t count on power or ice—so I packed peanut butter, cans of Chef Boyardee, bottled water, and beer. Hundreds of reporters were in New Orleans so I veered south of the city to the bayous and the destroyed little fishing villages. I was driving on top of a levee one afternoon when I saw a man peek out of a ruined house. He had hidden in his attic with his dogs and cats when the hurricane came through. After we finished talking, I asked him if he wanted a beer. I had eighteen Budweisers left. Yes sir, he said, he wouldn’t mind taking them all.
One morning I heard a rumor on the radio that twenty-two people in a little town called Violet had drowned together, lashed to one another by a rope. Violet is down in St. Bernard Parish, southeast of New Orleans. I drove around washed-out roadbeds and past packs of stray dogs to get down there. I asked if anybody knew about the people who died. The sheriff did, somebody said. He just left. I spent all day one step behind him, not able to reach him by phone, going deeper and deeper into wrecked country on flooded roads. A couple times I got to crossings where I couldn’t see bottom. It was stupid to drive on. I drove on.
Late in the afternoon—I had driven at least a hundred miles by then—I made it to a shipyard where somebody told me the sheriff might be. A guy on the dock pointed me to a riverboat. I stepped onto the deck and found the sheriff in a vast ballroom, empty except for a deckhand pouring Diet Coke into the first ice I’d seen in days. It was like finding Colonel Kurtz on a cruise ship. I came in, unshowered and caked in mud, and told the sheriff what I was looking for. He hadn’t seen the bodies but he confirmed the story. No other reporter was down here. Nobody else could possibly have it. It was a huge scoop.
The day was running out of light and it would take hours to backtrack. So I pushed ahead, looping back toward Baton Rouge, praying for unbroken roads until I could find electricity and cell service. After a while I ran into Interstate 10 east of the city. The road was empty, so I stopped the SUV in the median and got out to pee. Dozens of cars were abandoned on both shoulders. The land was flat and the horizon stretched out for miles in every direction. I was the only living creature I could see. There weren’t even birds. I pissed on the highway and wondered if the rapture had happened and I was the one left behind to go to hell.
In a few miles I got to Lake Pontchartrain. About a mile across the bridge I slammed on the brakes—a section of the bridge was blown out. Now I was starting to panic. I didn’t want to spend the night out there with whatever might come out of the swamp. I looked to the west and saw a second bridge running parallel. I doubled back, found the other highway, and crept out onto the second bridge. It was solid. I drove across the vast lake at ten miles an hour, alone.
On the other side, at the entrance to the town of Slidell, was a National Guardsman with a rifle. He quite reasonably wanted to know what the fuck I was doing out there. Slidell was blocked off and barricaded. But I told my story and he let me through with one instruction: Don’t stop. I drove through slowly, looking at a whole town that Katrina had turned into toothpicks.
Back toward New Orleans, a few places had power. I made it to a Chinese restaurant and called my editor. By this time, I was starting to doubt the sheriff’s story. I wanted to wait until we found somebody who had seen the bodies. The editor wanted to run the story—the sheriff had confirmed, and that was enough. We both knew it was a big story, we were both too tired to think straight, and I didn’t have much fight left in me. I wrote the story on the hood of the SUV, taking what the sheriff had told me as fact.
You can probably guess how this ends. The sheriff had bad information. The whole story turned out to be false. We had to write a huge correction. Just about every piece looking back at Katrina mentions the Violet story as an example of how wild rumors ended up as actual news reports during the first days after the storm. I never should’ve written that story, especially at the end of that surreal day. Sometimes, in my dreams, I find myself stuck out on that empty highway, surrounded by abandoned cars, lost and alone.
My last night down there, they finally found me a place to sleep, with a group of LSU students who were renting a house in Baton Rouge. I knocked on the door and one of the guys let me in. There was a dog with him. The dog started growling. I looked toward the kitchen. There, in the doorway, was a goat.
The guy shook his head sadly. “That dog don’t like that goat,” he said.
I fell asleep in some student’s bed with a pair of panties tacked to the wall, and wondered if the whole week had been a bad drug trip. I left the next morning, found some boudin and eggs, and pointed the SUV toward home. I was luckier than a lot of the people who had gone through Katrina. I had a home to head for.
• • •
I’ve made the job sound too bleak. Many days were a joy. I loved to write about the small kindnesses of life—one of my favorite columns was about a woman whose car died in the pouring rain in a mall parking lot, and how dozens of people stopped by to help. The writing gods brought gifts by the basketful. One day we found out that a loose group of amateur criminals had stolen seventeen million dollars from a Loomis Fargo armored car, then spent it on things like breast implants and a house with a velvet Elvis. The guy on the inside had fled to Mexico, where he hid out in a hotel eating M&M’s and listening to “Hotel California.” (All this ended up as a Zach Galifianakis movie called Masterminds, which was not nearly as good as the real story.) I was there in the courtroom when the tale first unfolded. “These folks are not exactly the brightest bulbs in the chandelier,” I wrote, and that turned out to be accurate.
The best thing that happened was just a couple months after I took the columnist job. The Observer still had bureaus in smaller towns all around Charlotte. I wanted to know about those places, so I offered to visit each bureau, talk about writing, and swap some ideas. The bureau chief in Hickory, an hour north of Charlotte, was a friendly and sharp editor from Wisconsin named Alix Felsing. She wanted me to talk to the staff and give her some writing advice—she was getting ready to leave for a new job at the paper in Columbia, South Carolina, and was working on her farewell column.
Alix and I had both started at the Observer in 1989, eight years before, but we’d never worked in the same office. We’d see each other at the Mothership every so often, or bump into each other at a party once or twice a year. I always figured she had a boyfriend, and I found out later that she always figured I had a girlfriend. When we started talking, there in the bureau in Hickory, I could tell right away that I’d missed out on someone special. She touched all four bases that mattered most to me—she was funny, smart, sexy, and kind. After I talked to the staff, we went into her office to talk about her farewell column. She mentioned she was going to the Hickory Crawdads minor league baseball game that night. Would I like to go and talk some more? Absolutely. She changed into shorts and I noticed she also had great legs. I snuck looks the whole game through my sunglasses.
We did not consider this a date. Everybody in her office considered it a date.
That weekend, I took her to a party at our friend Dan Huntley’s house on the lake so she could say goodbye to friends. We did not consider this a date. Everybody there considered it a date. We hugged hard at the end of the night. She was moving ninety miles away. Best not to think about her. I kept thinking about her.
She wrote me a note thanking me for the company. I turned the note over and over in my hands, thought about whether I should say what I really wanted to say. I’d dated around, had a couple of girlfriends, but most of the time, when I really wanted someone, they didn’t want me back. And to be honest, looking at myself in the mirror, I figured they were making a good call.
But I couldn’t stop thinking about Alix. I wrote back and told her how I felt. She wrote back and said she felt the same. We arranged for me to stop by her house in Columbia on the way back from a reporting trip to Florida. She opened the door and I kissed her. A thunderstorm came in the night and hail bounced on her front lawn. That was our first date. It was the summer of 1997. We’ve been together since.
The first trip we took together was just a few weeks later—a flight to Wisconsin to meet her extended family on their yearly camping trip. It was the first time I ate sauerbraten. I’m pretty sure it was the first time I had seen sauerbraten. One afternoon Alix and I went for a long walk in the woods. After a couple of miles I felt a familiar sting in my right thigh. It comes from my gut pressing down on the nerves at the top of my leg. My doctor calls it a gunslinger—people used to get it in the old West from the weight of the guns on their belts. The pinched nerves set my leg on fire. We stopped and sat on a low stone wall.
“You need to know,” I said. “I’m damaged goods.”
By then I was thirty-three and weighed more than four hundred pounds. Alix was in great shape and went running just about every day in the South Carolina heat. I was falling hard for her. I could feel her falling for me. But I couldn’t understand how. All I could see was the disgusting man all those readers wrote about. Never had I felt like any woman I’d ever dated was going to stay. Alix felt like she might stay. I needed to warn her.
“I’m damaged goods,” I said again.
“No, you’re not,” she said.
On the flight back home she slept with her head on my shoulder. I didn’t tell her I loved her until later. But I loved her right then.
We got engaged six months after we started dating, and got married six months after we got engaged. I wrote a column that ran on our wedding day. People still come up to me on the street and talk about it. Some of them keep it in their pocketbooks. Others have passed it to their children. There’s a special joy that comes out of loneliness rescued by love. I know Alix rescued me. Here’s the column:
Unless I screw up between now and “I will,” sometime around 6:30 this evening I will become a married man.
Little problems mean nothing today. If I lose the rings we’ll use tinfoil. If I forget my tux I’ll go naked. If I have a flat tire I’ll jog to the service, and my bride-to-be knows how much I hate jogging.
Alexandra Dawn Felsing (she goes by Alix) knows a lot of other things about me. She knows I like to stack my towels in an alternating pattern, colored, white, colored, white. She knows I wiggle my right foot when I get excited, like a dog getting his belly rubbed. She knows I cry more than the average guy.
I know things about her, too. I know how her eyes light up when she finds a cool piece of fabric at Mary Jo’s in Gastonia. I know how she ditched piano lessons as a kid to go outside and play softball. I know how she likes her privacy and is probably getting twitchy just thinking about these words on the page.
We are opposites in so many ways. I’m from Georgia, she’s from Wisconsin. I like bright shiny colors, she likes browns and greens. I like music, she likes Neil Diamond.
But we have lots in common, too. We think the Lord invented summer nights for minor league baseball, and created newspapers as a place to put the comic strips.
Lately we also have the habit of just staring at each other, amazed that all this is really happening, astonished that the fullness in our hearts is not a trick of nature or a fleeting attraction but the soft steady drumbeat of love.
I always hoped I would find someone and we would fall in love. But I didn’t think I had much to offer, especially in those first few moments where you make an impression or you slink back across the room. I came to believe I was just a fat guy with bad teeth, and I pretty much quit trying.
The only reason my heart didn’t get broken is because I rarely took it out of the box.
Alix and I had both worked here at the Observer for years, but the paper has offices in several towns and we never worked in the same place. Last summer I found out she was moving away. I knew her just well enough to want to say goodbye.
I visited her office in Hickory. We went to a ball game that night, then a party that weekend. Then she left town. And I couldn’t stop thinking about her.
Still, I planned to let it go. Long-distance romances don’t work, that’s what I told myself. But what I really believed was: She’s out of my league.
But a few days later she sent me a thank-you note. It took me two days to muster the guts to write back. I filled the letter with escape hatches and exit doors, giving her every chance to let me down easy. But somehow I sputtered out that I had been thinking romantic thoughts about her.
A couple of days later I got a note from her, saying she had been thinking the same thing. I got up off the floor and called her.
And here we are.
I don’t pretend to know how love works. I can tell you a thousand things I love about Alix, but none of them are exactly why I love her. The why, I don’t have words for. It’s a code we decipher every time we hold hands, a secret song we hear when we look in each other’s eyes.
It’s really true. You just know.
The point of this is not to brag about my good fortune. It is simply to say that no matter how lonely you are, no matter how much you think you’ve missed your chance, there is hope, always hope, everlasting hope.
Today my fondest hopes come true. And sometime around 6:30 this evening, I’ll become the luckiest man alive.
On our wedding day, as I squeezed into my rented tux, I promised myself that I’d earn the trust Alix put in me. We committed for better or worse, but to hell with worse. I’d get in shape. We’d run together. We talked about it on long car rides and on slow Sunday mornings with our legs tangled together on the couch. Every young married couple dreams. Those were our dreams. They depended on me doing something I had never been able to do.
• • •
In 2008, I hit the professional lottery—I was chosen for a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard. It’s designed for midcareer journalists who need a break and want to study something in depth. You get a full school year away from work to audit classes, go to lectures and concerts, hang out on the Harvard campus, and make new friends from around the world. Plus, they pay you. It’s ridiculous.
A few weeks before we left for Cambridge, I stopped by my doctor’s office for a physical. Part of the physical was an ultrasound of my heart, a routine procedure for someone my size. (Even though I’ve always been fat, I’ve never had a hint of heart trouble.) I was lying on my side on the examining table when the guy doing the ultrasound said “Hmmm.”
You never want anybody giving you a medical exam to say “Hmmm.”
He went to get my doctor, Al Hudson. They said “Hmmm.” Dr. Hudson called in a heart doctor who worked in the same building. They all said “Hmmm.” I did not think Hmmm. I thought Oh, shit.
They consulted briefly and nodded in agreement. Then Dr. Hudson told me I had a tumor in my heart.
It’s called an atrial myxoma. Google it sometime. You can even find video. It’s a benign tumor that grows inside one of the chambers of the heart—usually the left atrium. It’s held in there by a little tether of tissue, like a balloon on a string. The tumor wasn’t causing any damage—nobody knew it was there before the ultrasound. But it was taking up a lot of room in the atrium. The doctors said it could shift and plug the atrial valve, or break loose and cause a blood clot. Either of those things could kill me. The rule among doctors is, once you know it’s in there, it has to come out.
Dr. Hudson was excited. I was the first atrial myxoma he’d ever had.
I was not excited. Especially when they said the words open heart surgery.
Everybody assured me this particular type of open heart surgery was no big deal. The surgeon would be inside my heart for just a few minutes, long enough to snip out the tumor. The hardest part would be cutting open my chest.
I was also not excited at the words cutting open my chest.
It had been eleven years since Alix and I got married, and I had made all those promises to her to get in better shape. I hadn’t kept a single one. I’d do OK for a while—take long walks, shoot some hoops, eat more broccoli—but before long I’d backslide. Now I had to tell her about this. I called her at work and asked her to meet me in the parking lot under the building. I drew the little diagram of my heart, the same way Dr. Kamerer had drawn the little diagram of my voice box fifteen years before. We sat there in the car, too stunned to say much, knowing the words underneath the words: Even if the surgery itself wasn’t dangerous, I made it dangerous because I was still so fat.
I asked the anesthesiologist about it. “Yeah, it would be easier if you were two hundred pounds lighter,” he said. Not reassuring. I was OK until the night before the surgery, trying to sleep in the hospital room, worried that my weight would cause a crisis on the operating table and I would die there, having finally fucked up for good. I started crying and couldn’t stop. Alix crawled into the hospital bed next to me.
I woke up in a recovery room just like the one I’d woken up in fifteen years before. Instead of the slash in my neck, there was a column of stitches down the middle of my chest.
The doctors were right—the surgery went fine. I was up and moving around right away. I went home a couple days later. We have so many good friends and neighbors, and they brought comfort food. Two friends from church brought a shepherd’s pie big enough to feed every shepherd in Europe. It tasted so good. I wasn’t on any dietary restrictions from the surgery. I pulled the same old con on my brain—it’s just one meal, you deserve it, you can get in shape later. I piled it in, putting more work on my newly scarred heart.
• • •
I had pretty much healed by the time the fellowship started. Harvard was good for my soul and, it turned out, my body. Alix and I lived a half mile from Harvard Yard and we walked everywhere—three or four miles a day to classes and concerts and movies and parties, plus walking Fred two or three times a day. The fellowship provided lots of free food and Sam Adams. I learned to love sushi, which they fed us almost every Friday. I ate a tankful of lobsters. Still, I lost twenty pounds and felt as good as I had in years. Our tribe was large—twenty-five fellows, plus spouses and kids and the Nieman staff—and our friendships deepened over walks in the snow and long nights of drinking and talking and decoding the mysteries of the world.
Each fellow has one night during the year called a sounding, where you basically tell your life story. Everybody eats a meal you provide. We found a place in Boston that had a pretty good take on North Carolina barbecue. We made two special Southern dishes ourselves—pimento cheese and banana pudding. I put a sign next to the pimento cheese:
SPREAD OF THE GODS
CHEESE + MAYO + PIMENTOS + OLIVES = HEALTH FOOD!*
*MAY KILL YOU
We also made banana pudding the way I remembered it from home—layers of sliced bananas, vanilla pudding, vanilla wafers, and whipped cream. Apparently banana pudding is not something they serve in the far reaches of the globe. “WHAT IS THIS?” our Russian friend Andrei said after his first bite, as though his spoon had unearthed a vein of diamonds. Every scrap was gone by the end of the night. There were other big meals at the soundings, but ours won the prize for the highest calorie count. Where I come from, it was just an ordinary Sunday supper. I felt like Mama feels when she has our big family over for a meal—like I was sharing the most valuable treasures we had. There has never been better food created anywhere than the food of the American South. There has never been any food that will make you fatter. Sometimes I wonder if I’d still be fat if I had been born in Sweden or Ecuador or anywhere else but the bottom right corner of the USA. It’s one of those unanswerable questions they talk about in philosophy class. Nature vs. nurture. Man vs. pimento cheese.
• • •
We got back from Harvard in 2009 and I wanted to try new things at the paper—blogging, longer features, maybe some sportswriting. Being a columnist is in some ways like being in a popular band. Some of your fans love it when you veer off in other directions, but most of them want you to keep playing the hits, because that’s why they became fans in the first place. It has always been important to me to work hard no matter what—being a professional means doing the job even on days when you don’t feel like it. But after a year or two back at the paper, I was drifting. My creative energy for columns was tapped out. I turned into the type of reporter who used to piss me off—staying in the office, missing deadlines, moping at my desk. I hit the snack tables at work even harder. Sometimes that wasn’t enough and I’d go downstairs to the vending machines. I’d buy a pack of Ruffles and three candy bars and stuff it all in my pockets so nobody could see my gluttony. I’d try not to get caught in any long conversations on the way back to my desk. If I lingered, my body heat would melt my Snickers.
My career changed with a single story. I had been doing a little freelancing on the side so I could write different kinds of stories and make a little extra money. In early 2011, I couldn’t stop reading about a bizarre tale out of Alabama. The Alabama-Auburn football rivalry is the most hateful feud in American sports. In 2010, Auburn quarterback Cam Newton (now an NFL star with the Carolina Panthers) led a huge comeback to beat Alabama—the Tigers were down 24–0 and came back to win 28–27. That night, a crazed Alabama fan named Harvey Updyke drove to the Auburn campus. At the entrance to the campus were two ancient oak trees called Toomer’s Oaks. The trees symbolized Auburn—old college friends reunited there, and legions of Auburn men had proposed under the oaks. They were also the spot where fans gathered after a big sports win. Fans would roll the oaks with toilet paper whenever Auburn won a big game. Harvey Updyke hated Auburn and so he hated Toomer’s Oaks. In the middle of the night, he slipped into Toomer’s Corner, where the oaks stood, and poured poison on the two trees—enough to kill an acre of brush. Nobody knew he had done it until months later, when he called in to the Paul Finebaum radio show and bragged about it. By then it was too late for the trees. They were going to die.
College football is the sport I love most. I have spent my whole life watching SEC football. I understand what Alabama-Auburn means to that state, how the rivalry burns like a bonfire all year long, how that heat creates somebody like Harvey Updyke. I could hear the story’s heartbeat. Joe Posnanski, my friend from the Observer bureaus, had landed at Sports Illustrated. He connected me with his editor, Chris Stone. I pitched the story, and when Chris hesitated, I took vacation time to drive to Auburn and do reporting on my own dime. Chris bought the story. I wrote it on nights and weekends after getting home from the paper. It ended up making that year’s edition of The Best American Sports Writing. It also gave me the creative juice I’d been missing at the office. It felt like the next step I’d been waiting to take.
A few months later, in 2012, Joe took a job as the first writer for a start-up site called Sports on Earth. He recommended me, and they offered me a job. I had been at the Observer for twenty-three years, and I felt guilty for wanting to leave. The paper tried to keep me. But I didn’t want to get to retirement never having tried something new, wondering what I’d missed. They threw a big going-away party. I gave a little speech and said something I still believe: When you write for the paper—or when you create anything, really—you make yourself immortal. In our business, the place where they store old clip files is called the morgue. But really, it’s the opposite. It’s where we live forever.
A few years ago, when newspapers started shedding employees, the Observer started a beautiful tradition. On your last day, when you walk out, everybody in the office stands and applauds. So on my last day, I had one last plate of newsroom food, sent out a farewell note, grabbed the box of stuff I had cleaned out of my desk, and left with Alix to a standing ovation.
I should have been the one applauding them.
I still miss writing for the paper, but more than that I miss just coming to the office every day and shooting the shit with all the funny and smart and weird and fantastic people who make up a newsroom. I’ve felt like an outsider my whole life. I’ve never felt more like I belonged somewhere than I did in that newsroom. And, yeah, I miss the free cheese cubes.
• • •
Sports on Earth struggled to find readers and make money. Most start-ups fail in one way or another. I knew the risk when I took the job. A year and four months after I started, they fired me, and pretty soon they fired just about everybody else. It stuck around a few more years, a sliver of what it was, and a sliver of a sliver of what we hoped it would be. But I’ll always be glad for the chance.
Since then I’ve been a freelancer, working from my home office or a coffee shop or a hotel room somewhere. I’ve spent so much of my life staring at a blank page, looking for the right words. Almost all of them have been about other people. It’s weird to be writing about myself. Part of the magic of writing is that it helps you discover what you think. Here’s what I’ve discovered so far, by writing all this down: I’ve had a good life. But it would have been so much better, at every step, if I hadn’t been dragging all this extra weight around.
Being fat made me a kid who turned inward. Being fat made me stand out to people inclined to be cruel. Being fat made me think I’d never find love. Being fat made me doubt every good thing about myself.
Being fat made me.
The past tense is wrong there, I know. I’m still fat, so it still makes me what I am. But part of what I’m trying to do is drag the past back into the past. From here on out, I have to unmake me.
It’s Pi Day—3.14.15—so we go looking for pie.
Alix and I aren’t much for big celebrations. We did each other right on our fiftieth birthdays—I got her best friends to come from out of town on hers, and she threw a surprise party with a houseful of friends for mine. But other than that we’re low-key. Christmas is a book or tickets to a show. We’re just not big on stuff. Instead we have a lot of little celebrations. Pi Day is one of those little nerdy things we love.
So we head to our favorite diner in Charlotte, a place called the Landmark. Guy Fieri’s face is spray-painted on the wall—he came here a few years ago for Diners, Drive-ins and Dives. (As you might imagine, Triple D is one of my favorite shows.) The 2:00 a.m. people-watching at the Landmark is unparalleled. Sometimes you’ll get a church choir in one corner and a bunch of bikers in another. When we go there, we usually get a late breakfast—eggs and bacon or pancakes. But like most classic diners, they have a giant display case of sweets just inside the door. The layer cakes and cinnamon rolls pull like a tractor beam. On Pi Day we let ourselves be sucked in.
Alix gets key lime. I get banana cream. Each slice could feed an orphanage. I cut through the whipped cream on my slice and hit something solid. It turns out there’s an entire banana hidden along the outer rim. We wash it all down with coffee and fall straight into a sugar coma.
We are actually celebrating something more than Pi Day. After months of thinking about it—and not quite three years after I quit the Observer—Alix put in her notice at the publishing center where she did copyediting and design for the Observer and two other papers. They were getting ready to let go twenty percent of the staff, and the severance was pretty good, so she raised her hand to be laid off. She struggled with leaving the same way I did. Newspaper life is about all we’ve ever known. But she has spent the last four years taking classes at night and getting her master’s in organizational development. As part of that, she earned a certificate to be an executive coach. She wants to use those skills in new ways. It’s a big leap for her and for us. For nearly all our adult lives, we’ve had steady salaried jobs with benefits. Now neither one of us has a full-time gig.
Part of making this work, we agree, is cutting expenses. Our biggest expense besides the bills we have to pay is going out to eat. When we go out with friends, it’s worth it for the experience and the good company. But too often we go out when we’re tired or brain-fried or bored with whatever’s in the fridge. The whole concept of a restaurant is comforting. Just sit right here, honey. We’ll bring you something good.
The other thing is, restaurants are willing to do things that you would never do yourself. “You know why restaurant food is so good?” our buddy Dan Huntley, a journalist turned caterer and barbecue god, told us one night. “Ghee.” Ghee is clarified butter—like butter concentrate. Put enough ghee in the pan and you could make an old shoe taste good. Restaurants use big chunks of ghee, or shit-tons of regular butter. Some places fry stuff in lard. Just about every place uses a heavy hand with salt and sugar and cream. And you pay them to do it.
At home we’d never make a banana cream pie to begin with, much less one with a whole banana in each slice. But at the Landmark, on Pi Day, somehow it makes sense. Pi, as far as we know, has an infinite number of digits. Pie, we know for sure, has a tremendous number of calories. My best guess, after consulting with my Fitbit guide, is that my slice of banana cream had 700. I can almost hear my little black wristband going nooooooooo.
We know better than to celebrate the big moments in our lives with food. We know better than to go out to eat so much. It’s bad for both of us. But it’s hard for us to tear away from tradition. It’s as tasty and seductive as a mouthful of pie.
Weight on February 28: 452
Weight on March 31: 456
For the month: +4