The first time I flew on a commercial airplane was when I was twenty-three. My friend Perry Beard had won the ticket lottery to the 1987 Final Four in New Orleans. There were lots of firsts on that trip: first visit to the French Quarter, first beignets, first time approached by a hooker. (Hooker: “Buy me a drink?” Me, stammering: “Uh, we were just, uh, leaving.”) My friend David Duclos drove out there from Georgia with me, but he had to go home early, so I booked a one-way flight back. The plane was half-empty. The guys from a band called Big Audio Dynamite—you might know them as Mick Jones’s offshoot of the Clash—sprawled out behind me, dozing and moaning. If you fly out of New Orleans in the morning, chances are most people on the plane will be hungover.
Nobody else was in my row, so I had room to stretch out. But when I went to buckle my seat belt, the two halves wouldn’t reach. I didn’t know about seat belt extensions. My panicked (and possibly hungover) twenty-three-year-old brain didn’t even know to ask. So I covered my lap with a blanket. The flight attendant did her preflight check and walked right on past—she might have been hungover, too. So I white-knuckled the takeoff and landing, gripping the armrests like barnacles.
I dreaded getting on a plane again. But the next time, as soon as I sat down, a flight attendant brought me an extension. I looked at it as if all the mysteries of the universe had been explained.
By now I’ve learned to navigate my life as a fat man. I know what to ask for when I need it. I’ve figured out escape hatches and work-arounds. But that low note of dread never goes away when I have to make my way through public spaces. Nothing ever quite fits.
Now, when I get on a plane, I catch the flight attendant’s eye and make a little seat-belt pantomime. They always know what that means. Sometimes they hand me the extension without looking, as if they’re passing me a bag of weed on a street corner. Part of me is grateful that they don’t make a fuss. But part of me feels like it really is contraband, like something I’m not supposed to have, because this is a place where I don’t belong.
• • •
One other quick seat-belt story.
A few years ago I went down to spring training in Florida with my longtime friend Joe Posnanski and three other writers: Chris Jones, Kevin Van Valkenburg, and Michael Schur. We all bonded right away, talking about storytelling and sports, laughing over two-hour breakfasts, watching baseball in the sun. It was one of the best weeks of my life. Except when we had to ride in the car.
Joe had rented an SUV, so he drove. It was clear that I would get the passenger seat and the other three would squeeze into the back. Chris and Mike are normal-sized. Kevin played linebacker at Montana. Those guys got to know one another well.
I felt terrible for them. But the worst part was that my seat belt wouldn’t fit around me. I adjusted the seat and sucked in my gut as tight as I could, but the latch stopped an inch from the buckle. When Joe started the car, the warning bell would ring.
Ding. Ding. Ding.
Every couple of miles it tolled again.
Ding. Ding. Ding.
We ignored it, talked over it, but sometimes we were quiet for a minute and—
Ding. Ding. Ding.
—I knew what everybody was thinking.
It took me a whole day to figure out what to do. I slipped the belt behind my back and buckled it. If we wrecked, I’d have a faceful of windshield. But at least the goddamn dinging went away.
Some people pick their cars for the engine, or the color, or the gas mileage, or the stereo. The first thing I check is the seat belt. About half the time, it doesn’t fit. And if it doesn’t fit, nothing else matters.
• • •
As a people, we are getting too big for our britches.
Companies that supply furniture to schools are having to sell big-and-tall desks because kids can’t fit into the regular ones anymore.
Ballparks are making their seats bigger. When Notre Dame recently updated its football stadium—which opened in 1930—it gave up more than three thousand seats by redrawing the boundaries on the benches in the stands. Now the seats are eighteen inches wide instead of sixteen, to make room for wider Fighting Irish butts.
Movie theater seats are even wider—twenty-three inches on average these days, up from twenty inches in 1990. The aisles are deeper, too, and most theaters have armrests you can lift out of the way.
Ambulance companies now build gurneys that can hold up to 1,600 pounds, up from the old standard of 800; they’re pulled into the ambulance by a winch. CT scanners have grown from sixty centimeters in diameter to eighty because people were getting stuck inside.
The average width of an American casket used to be twenty-four inches. Now it’s twenty-eight, and a company called Goliath Casket makes a coffin fifty-two inches wide that can hold one thousand pounds of flesh and bones. They ship out half a dozen a month.
Poking around on Goliath Casket’s website, I found a page with advice for funeral directors. The page is titled “Solving the Problems.” A few highlights:
The easiest way to handle an obese funeral is to refer the family to your competitor, but that rarely works, especially if you picked up the body strapped to two hospital mattresses (oh—the pain!) . . .
It goes on from there to tips for moving the body—turns out an engine hoist works well—to double-checking the size and location of the burial plot, just to make sure there’s enough room.
You might read that and decide on cremation. Good luck. Many crematoriums can’t handle oversized bodies.
Fat people are trouble all the way to the grave.
• • •
Not long after Alix and I moved into the house we live in now, we redid our guest bathroom. Our house was built in 1929, and the bathroom had a crack in the floor that turned out to be a symptom of a bigger problem underneath. We had to rip everything out and get a new bathroom built. (It’s still the nicest room in our house.) We liked it so much that we started taking showers in there. After a few months, I noticed that water was pooling in one spot in the middle of our new tub. It was the place where I stood when I showered. I had bent the floor of the steel tub.
Of all the places I end up during a normal day, I worry about bathrooms most.
If it’s a public restroom, I head straight for the handicapped stall. One of these days I expect to finish my business and open the door to find a pissed-off guy in a wheelchair. But for me, most regular stalls are like trying to squeeze into a Porsche. If I have to sit, I ease down slowly and listen for creaks. One of my greatest fears is sitting on a wall-mounted toilet and having it snap under my weight, dumping me on the floor and soaking me in pee and toilet water.
I have to stand up to wipe. Sitting down, I can’t reach.
Over the years I’ve busted multiple toilet seats. I’ve worn out the springs on several easy chairs and at least two couches. I mash down my side of the mattress so much that Alix rolls downhill toward me in the night, which works out great for me but is not so fun for her. One time I leaned back too hard in my old Chrysler LeBaron and broke the bucket seat. I jammed a milk crate behind it to prop it up and drove that way for years.
In college, at the apartment of a girl I was trying to impress, I sat in her wooden chair. I could hear it start to crack but I couldn’t get out of it fast enough. The whole thing exploded into tindersticks.
NASCAR drivers talk about “driving with your ass.” Their cars are slung so close to the ground that their butt muscles can sense how the car is handling the track. I drive with my ass any time I sit in an unfamiliar chair. I’m constantly gauging how it feels under me, if there’s any hint of bending or cracking. When a rickety chair is the only choice, I sit as lightly as I can, and I sweat, and I pray. Another recurring fear: A chair will crack into pieces under me, and one of the shards will impale my thigh. I’ll die right there on the floor, from blood loss or embarrassment.
My friends know all this instinctively. The other night a group of us went to a coffee shop with mismatched chairs. They left me an armless chair that looked like it was made from butcher block. If we sit at a rectangular table, they’ll save me a spot at one end. It’s our unspoken contract.
Bottlenecks make me nervous—doorways, turnstiles, anywhere people are trying to crowd from one place to another. I’m not claustrophobic. I just can’t shake the feeling that I’m in the way. “Everybody’s in the way,” Alix says, and of course she’s right. But I’m always swiveling and shuffling and looking for a way to the edge. I’m useless at crowded parties. My voice doesn’t carry to begin with, and I’m constantly worried about clogging the flow of traffic. Most of the time I end up in the corner, inspecting the host’s book collection.
Here’s one that happens four or five times a year. I’ll be in a hotel or office building somewhere and punch the button for the elevator. The doors open, and it’s crowded inside—tight but not completely full. I could probably wedge my way in there. But I can always see a couple of people looking at me with dread. Somebody will glance over at the panel. I know what that person is looking for. The load limit.
It doesn’t matter if I’m running late, or if I’m tired of traveling and just want to get to my room. I never get on that elevator. I just take a step back and say I’ll wait. Somebody always sighs in relief as the doors close.
• • •
If I’m going to a concert or a ball game, even a movie, I get there early. Part of it is that I like watching things get set up—baseball players taking batting practice, roadies working on the drum kit. But mostly I want to make sure the seat works.
The first time I went to Fenway Park, on a baseball trip with Perry, I couldn’t buy an aisle seat. The game was sold out and we had to buy tickets off the street to get in. Fenway was built in 1912 and most of the seats are the same ones they had back then. Based on the room in the seats, Americans used to be about a third of our current size. Fenway is the best ballpark in American sports, a place I’d always dreamed of going, but I was crammed in like a champagne cork—if I had popped out, I’d have landed on the pitcher’s mound. I’ve been back a few times since then, and have had better seats, but I still get a little shudder when I see all those fans mashed together on TV.
I’m obsessive about knowing where I’m going to sit. When I was music writer for the Charlotte Observer, it drove me crazy that I never got to pick where I sat. My seat was whatever the promoters had left once they’d taken care of VIPs, employees, radio contest winners, and so on. It was usually near the front, but almost always in the middle of a row. When Janet Jackson played the Charlotte Coliseum, I was stuffed into a seat directly behind Stephanie Mills, the star of the original Broadway version of The Wiz. My legs were sticking out and spread wide because I couldn’t fit all the way back into the seat. The back of Stephanie’s head rested a couple inches from my crotch. Sometimes I wonder if Stephanie ever goes inside a sweaty gym and the smell reminds her of “Rhythm Nation” for reasons she can’t quite place.
Not long ago I was back in the music game for a bit, doing a story for Our State—a magazine about North Carolina—on singer Rhiannon Giddens. She was playing in Charlotte at the McGlohon Theater, a beautiful old church converted into a concert hall. This time I had bought a ticket—five rows back on the aisle. But the McGlohon’s seats are irregular. It took some wiggling just to get into the seat. Then I got up to talk to some friends. When I came back, just before the show was about to start, a large woman was in the seat next to mine. Both of us would’ve been miserable.
Slow panic.
I headed for the balcony, climbing a couple flights of steep stairs. When I got to the top I was washed down in sweat. The houselights went down. I slipped into the back of the balcony and asked the usher if there was any open space. He pointed me to a couple of rows in the back, the only unsold seats in the house. I found a place and sat down just as Rhiannon started singing. It was still a good spot—the McGlohon isn’t a big theater—and the music was so powerful that, like any great art, it pulled me out of time and space. I took my notes and did my job and only once in a while did I look around and notice that nobody was sitting anywhere near me.
This is where being fat leaves me. Panicked and sweaty. Isolated and alone.
• • •
Husky is the first size I remember. It was on the tags of my shirts. I would always cut out the tags, and the little stubs left behind would make my neck itch. It was worth it. The evidence of my huskiness was gone. As if you couldn’t just look at me and tell.
It’s not hard to remember the clothes I’ve really loved. It’s a short list. My brother, Ronald, gave me an old football practice jersey that I wore for years—until the day in a pickup basketball game that a guy reached for the ball, hooked the jersey instead, and ripped it in half. I had a three-quarter-sleeve Hawaiian Tropic shirt that I wore until it shredded. I had a T-shirt for Penn tennis balls that lasted until the collar came off. I had a green corduroy hat from the Masters that fit just right—hats are hard for me to find because my head is a size eight. It drowned in the river on a fishing trip.
Fat people find clothes in weird places. One time I found a stash of 6X polo shirts at a gas station in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. I didn’t really need gas station polo shirts, but I almost bought a couple because who knows when I’ll find one next? In small towns overweight people might have to go to the army navy store or the discount outlet, where they mash a rack of pants in between used car parts and last year’s toys. The year we were in Boston, the best big-and-tall shop was in the basement of an old shut-down public library. I don’t buy clothes online unless I’m ninety-nine percent sure they’re going to fit, because most things don’t. I’m one of five American white guys over fifty who don’t own a pair of Dockers. They don’t fit my thighs. If they did I’d be fine with wearing Dockers every day, even if it meant a sudden urge to listen to Huey Lewis and the News again.
Many guys like me shop at what is now known as Destination XL—I’ll always call it by its old name, Casual Male. In many cities it’s the only place for men to find big-and-tall clothes. Up until a few years ago, Casual Male’s shirts topped out at 6X and pants topped out at size sixty. Those are my sizes. There are other guys in Charlotte who must be the same size, because sometimes every 6X shirt will be gone. I’ve learned to call ahead. I used to worry that if I kept getting fatter, I’d never be able to buy clothes in a store again. But Casual Male’s sizes have gone up. You can routinely find 7X or 8X shirts, or pants up to sixty-eight or seventy. People who wear those sizes probably weigh more than five hundred pounds. Now there are enough people like that to put those clothes on the rack. The place I went to in Boston—it’s called the Big Men’s Stout Men’s Shop—carried waist sizes up to eighty-eight, and shirts up to 12X. Basically, clothes for people who can no longer leave the house.
Casual Male makes good stuff, the prices are reasonable, and the salespeople help but don’t hover. The doors of the dressing rooms have little chalkboards on the outside, and the clerks mark the occupied rooms with sly affirmations: SUPERSTAR or BOSS or PLAYA. Sometimes I’ll take half a dozen shirts and three or four pairs of pants in there. Sometimes nothing fits. I can count on one good meltdown a year in the Casual Male dressing room.
A few years ago Casual Male expanded from clothes and added a division called Living XL. Now you can buy a bicycle made with reinforced steel and an extra-wide seat. Or if you’re a little less active, a camp chair that holds up to a thousand pounds. Or if you’re less active still, a recliner that tips forward to help you get out.
Scrolling through the catalog is a glimpse into a nightmare future: Yep, I could use that . . . nope, don’t need that yet . . . God, I hope I never need that.
In a way, I’m glad this stuff exists. It used to be impossible for fat people to find something as simple as a comfortable chair. Now, if you have the money, you can outfit your whole house. Right now I’m writing this from a supersized office chair that probably did not exist twenty years ago.
The problem is not that all this stuff exists. The problem is that it needs to. Destination XL is a destination where no one wants to go. But millions of us are walking that way, stopping every so often to rest.
• • •
Overweight people are now a solid majority in America. So it makes sense that there’s an increasing movement to defend fatness, and even celebrate it.
The National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (which has been around since the sixties) fights “to eliminate discrimination based on body size.” Fat-positive advocates demand more selection in stores and more people who look like them in magazine ads and on TV. The attention has worked. Dove, the beauty-product brand, has curvy regular women (not models or actresses) in its ads. Sports Illustrated featured the gorgeous plus-sized model Ashley Graham in its swimsuit issue. All this gets filtered back through the columnists and bloggers and YouTubers who tell their own stories of dealing with being overweight, struggling with how the world sees them, and finding joy and peace in their own bodies.
Part of this is common sense. Overweight doesn’t always equal unhealthy. Some people carry extra pounds naturally.
Part of it is anger. A lot of fat people feel they don’t get the jobs and promotions they deserve, and studies tend to back them up. Fat people are tired of being made fun of. There aren’t many jokes you can tell in our sensitive society without getting in some kind of trouble, but fat jokes are always safe. My stance on fat jokes is the same as my stance on every other kind of joke: Nothing’s out of bounds. Humor is risk. Just make a little effort. Most fat jokes are lazy. A political writer I admire—one of the best in the world, smart and insightful—can’t help himself when he mentions Chris Christie. He goes for the fat joke every time. It’s like waving a ribbon in front of a cat.
So I understand the impulse to stick a flag in Plus Size Nation and tell everybody else to fuck off. It’s my own impulse sometimes. I’m thrilled for people who are happy and healthy and content with their size. I admire writers such as Lindy West, who in her work (especially her amazing book Shrill) makes the body-positive case with such logic and force that it’s hard to argue otherwise.
So I’m not going to argue. I’m just going to speak for myself.
I don’t want the world to expand to make room for me. It’s not good for me, and it’s not good for the world. I need to make myself fit. That’s not conforming to some outdated notion of what the human body should look like, or aiming for some unattainable standard. It’s just trying to walk through the world without a headwind. It’s being not so goddamn worried about going to every new place or trying any new thing.
All of us, I think, have this disconnect between the face we put out to the world and the one we wear alone. I try my best to hide my fears at all the ways the world doesn’t fit me. It doesn’t always work, and even when it does, I’m constantly looking around for the next thing I might break, the next place I’m too big to squeeze through. Maybe I should just elbow my way through the tight spaces, mold the world to my shape. That feels liberating. It also feels like giving myself permission to live the life that’s destroying me. The world doesn’t fit me because I’m not supposed to be this big. Maybe other people are. Not me.
That word husky has stuck with me since I was a kid. It makes me think of a literal husk, something that’s supposed to be let go when the time is right. My husk has hung on way too long. For me to find peace, I have to shed it.
Alix and I spend our anniversary in Greenville, South Carolina, one of the most underrated towns in America. It’s just a two-hour drive from Charlotte, but we’d never hung out there. The one and only thing we’ve regretted about getting married is that we picked the wrong month. Everywhere we’ve been for our anniversary has been brutally hot. We should have gone with October, but we got married in a fever. We went with July. And in Greenville it’s ninety-six degrees.
Still, we walk all day. We walk up the street to the Saturday morning farmers’ market for breakfast. We walk down to Falls Park, where a wide and beautiful waterfall runs right through the middle of town. We walk over the falls on the Liberty Bridge. We walk to the ballpark where the Greenville Drive minor league team plays. No game that day, but the park is gorgeous. Shoeless Joe Jackson’s old house is right across the street.
This is the way we’d always pictured our life together. We love strolling through downtowns, poking around in galleries and bookstores, people-watching. Sometimes we curl up on the couch together and daydream about the places we want to go, the things we’ve never seen, or haven’t seen together. Machu Picchu. Greece and Rome. Yosemite and Yellowstone.
Then I get up on my creaky knees and hobble to the bathroom.
My weight is our roadblock. We have tempered our dreams. Peru will have to wait. For now it’s Greenville.
Even a place like Greenville, on a day as hot as this one, can wear me out. Today, though, I can tell the difference that comes from half a year of exercising and eating better. We have a light lunch at a French place and a little frozen yogurt, and we tote bottles of water around. I feel like I can go all day.
We walk on into the night, doubling back through the downtown streets, ending up at a coffee shop watching a bluegrass band called Conservation Theory. It’s the first day in months that I haven’t spent any time in a car. My feet are aching by the time we get back to the hotel, but it’s a good ache, an earned ache, instead of the hurt of just being fat and old.
On days like this I can see a different life so clearly. I don’t have to be limping around, drenched in sweat, scanning around for the nearest bench. Somewhere under all that lard is a pair of strong legs. They can take me to a better place. There are so many rewards for doing it. But there aren’t any better than walking around holding hands with the woman I love. She’s glowing, she’s so happy.
Just before bed, I check the Fitbit. It shows 11,921 steps—a personal record. I can’t remember a day when I’ve been more satisfied. It’s the day I’ll think of when I try to remember the man I want to be.
Weight on June 30: 444
Weight on July 31: 437
For the month: -7