We’re all trailed by shadows. They’re the conversations our friends and families have about us when we’re not around, the things they think but never say to our faces. To see myself better, I need to know what other people see. So I asked.
I emailed a couple dozen friends, asking them a few basic questions: what they remembered about our times together, what they thought about my weight, whether they’d talked to other people about it without me around. Most everybody replied. My mom and my wife sat down separately for longer conversations. In the end I had more than a hundred pages of emails and notes and transcripts that gave me a window into my shadow life.
It took a while to get up the nerve to read it all.
• • •
Frank Barrows, my former boss and mentor, remembered a breakfast in Boston. He and his wife were waiting for Alix and me at a journalism conference. I got delayed for some reason, and Alix got there first. She looked at the chairs around the table and frowned. The chairs had arms and she knew they’d be too small for me. She went off and found one that would fit. The three of them didn’t talk about it. I got there a few minutes later, none the wiser.
David Duclos, a college roommate and one of my closest friends for more than thirty years, remembered me bringing special diet food to a tailgate at a UGA football game. We met up with David’s brother and his friends, who had set out a huge spread. I tossed my food in the trash and ate burgers with them.
Jon Bauer, who roomed with David and me in college, remembered his mother asking if I had a hormonal condition. John Prince and Clint Engel, my roommates in Augusta, remembered seeing a pizza box under my bed. Chris Jones, one of my writer buddies, remembered when we went to spring training together a few years ago. He had worried that I was in pain from squeezing into the seats at the ballparks. (He was right.)
“Someone will ask me how you are doing, which I guess is their way of asking if you have lost weight,” said Perry Beard, one of my two oldest friends. “I’ll reply that you are about the same.”
“It never seems to enter your mind to order the ‘diet’ plate,” said Gainor Eisenlohr, a friend in Charlotte. “I’ve always wondered if you thought about that.”
Several friends were surprised that they don’t see me eat more when we go out together. They’re baffled at how I’m so much bigger when we all order the same things. They don’t see me dive into the fridge when I get home, or stop at the drive-through for a second supper on the way back. Joe Posnanski, my friend for almost thirty years, told Charlotte magazine when they profiled me a few years ago: “There’s a public Tommy, the parts of him that he lets out. You can see what a funny guy he is and what a good person he is. But I think there are parts of Tommy that he protects.”
I built my life that way without knowing it. Some fearful part of me figured that once other people understood the real me, they’d leave.
That has created a distance between me and the people I care about. For years I’ve longed for the kinds of friendships I read about in books and see in the movies, where people have deep, soul-scraping conversations to help one another through the hardest times. I love my friends and I know they love me, but we just don’t talk like that. We get close, rarely, but then we veer off to talk about football or music or work. There have always been unspoken boundaries that none of us cross. Until now I didn’t realize that I was the one who drew the lines.
The other thing I didn’t fully understand was how much my friends worry about me.
“We wish you could lose some weight because we are worried about your health,” David said. “We like you a lot and want you to be around for a long time.”
“When you had your heart scare, some of us were almost hoping it would be weight related so you would be motivated to lose weight so you would be healthier,” Gainor said.
I worry about them, too. But they have more to worry about. The odds are that I’ll be gone before any of them will. That’s a terrible burden to put on a friend. With most of my friends, at one time or another, we’ve stayed up way too late together, drinking or dancing or talking. We specialize in the kind of nights where nothing much happens but you still remember it forever. Back in college, David and I spent a weekend in Atlanta with Perry and Virgil Ryals—my other best friend from seventh grade. The week before we went over, somebody had stolen David’s billfold from a dorm shower stall. While we were hanging out in Atlanta, the thief used David’s credit card to get a room at a Red Roof Inn across town and trash the place. The cops, of course, thought David had done it. We vouched that he had been with us the whole time. Each one of us had to write an affidavit about what we had been doing that Saturday night. We told the truth: We were eating takeout barbecue and watching Pee-wee’s Big Adventure.
We were not exactly wild men.
The point is, when you’re with the people you love, it doesn’t matter what you’re doing. You just don’t want the night to end. My time with my friends has been one great never-ending party. I don’t want to be the first to go home.
• • •
Mama is telling me about Marie Osmond’s diet plan. She saw it on TV. Marie Osmond says it works. How can you not trust Marie Osmond?
“You’d lose some weight on that,” Mama says. “The food’s already fixed.”
We’re sitting at her dining-room table. The two of us have spent untold hours at this table—eating, or talking about eating, or talking about trying to cut back. Mama is in her eighties now and she doesn’t cook much anymore unless she’s got company. She quit making biscuits after my dad died, because she made so many thousands of biscuits in her life that she got tired of looking at them. But she still makes the best cornbread you will ever put in your mouth. No recipe. She just eyeballs it. Smeared with a little butter, or dipped in the potlikker from some turnip greens, it tastes like home. I could eat a basketful. I have, more than once.
She spent most of her life cooking to take care of her family. These days she lives alone and doesn’t see much point in cooking for herself. Lunch might be a slice of bread with some cheese, and maybe mayonnaise and hot sauce. If she has the energy, she might fry an egg and make a little pot of grits. Before I sit down to interview her, we go to Walmart to pick up a few things. She asks me to stop by Taco Bell. She loves a Taco Bell taco. “It’s good for you,” she says. “It’s got lettuce in it.”
We talk about Daddy a lot. She remembers him making me homemade french fries as soon as I could eat solid food. She shakes her head at all those times he bought me chocolate milk and crackers at the SeaPak canteen on his way home. It reminds me of all those times I stop at Wendy’s on the way home from work. I guess it’s the only bad habit he ever taught me. Unless you consider a love of professional wrestling a bad habit. Which I don’t.
Whatever bad things he taught me about food mean nothing compared to all the good he taught me. It’s the same with Mama. Her big heart taught me how to treat people. Her toughness is with me right now as I try to claw my way out of this mess, even though I’ll never be as tough as she had to be. The one thing we can’t choose in life is our parents. If I ever got to pick, I’d take the exact same ones.
Mama tells me that she and my dad spent night after night talking about what to do about my weight. They couldn’t find a way to help me. “When you went to college, I kept talking to you about it, about your weight. I knew what you was doing. You was sitting around there with them boys hanging around and always eating potato chips, anything that come to hand, and I knew it. Every time you come home you had put on more weight. And I kept saying, ‘Tommy, please, slow down on your eating.’ You didn’t pay me no attention. It was like talking to the side of the house.”
That last line makes us laugh. We have always found a way to laugh about the fat in our family. Our sense of humor is part of my inheritance. We’ve cried about my weight, too, but there’s no sense crying all the time.
I remind Mama of a story she told me the last time I was here. Ronald, my brother, had come to visit. He was a star pitcher in high school and college, got drafted by the Baltimore Orioles. He’s in his sixties but looks a lot younger. Still, like pretty much everybody else in our family, he’s got a belly on him. He and his wife, Neca, spent the night at Mama’s house. They asked her not to cook breakfast. In response, she cooked a pound of bacon. He ate just one or two slices at first, but every time he came through the kitchen he grabbed one or two more, and by the end of the day it was gone.
“You didn’t have to cook that bacon,” I say.
She laughs. “I know I didn’t have to.”
“He didn’t have to eat it, but you didn’t have to cook it either.”
“Well, I knew they was going to be hungry when they got up.”
A mother’s logic.
Ronald and I are still her little boys. She is trying her best to take care of us, in the way she took care of her whole family from the time she was twelve. Food is the main thing she can still do to show us her love.
She knows a lot of foods are bad for you. But it’s hard for her to see eating as bad for you. When she was young and starving, food was survival. When she was older and striving, food was wealth. Now, in her fading days, food is love. These are the things she taught me.
As we talk, it starts to dawn on me: Food was my imaginary friend. I was an only child of sorts, a bookish kid in a blue-collar house. I spent a lot of time alone. That little square of cheese, the first thing in my life I remember: It looked like the sun. That was my light. It scares me to dim that light. Some part of me worries that I’ll end up alone again.
If life goes as planned, one day I will go to Mama’s funeral, and that will just about ruin me.
But it would ruin her more to go to mine.
• • •
Alix and I are talking and the recorder is running. She is remembering the first home project we ever worked on. When we were dating, she bought an unfinished coffee table for her house. She thought working on it would be a fun afternoon for us. We had to sand it before we could seal it. We stood in her backyard and sanded that thing over and over, with finer and finer grains of sandpaper, until my legs started to burn. I went and sat down without really explaining why. It hadn’t occurred to her that sanding a table would be too strenuous for me. I didn’t have the guts to tell her.
Now I’m trying to explain. “I guess I’m like a little kid,” I say now. “If I close my eyes maybe it’ll go away.”
“And I think that’s perfectly natural,” she says. “But upon repeated evidence that it’s not going away, what are you going to do about it?”
She says this with a smile in her eyes. She teases me about all this every once in a while—never about being fat, but about the doofus logic I come up with sometimes, or the dumb things I do, like dripping salad dressing on my shirt for the ten thousandth time. She has started to drip things onto her shirts, too. I tease her that she is turning into me, which would be a horrible outcome for both of us.
I make her laugh, and there is no sound in the world I love more than her laugh. She thinks I’m handsome, especially when I wear a suit. She appreciates how I treat people. She can lean into me and know I’ll hold her steady. One night early in our marriage, just before we went to sleep, she looked at me and said, “You made my life.” It was the most important thing anyone has ever said to me. It fuels my heart to this day. I want to live in a way that honors those four words and never makes her feel that she was wrong.
She didn’t marry me intending to fix me. But she had no idea it would be so hard for me to fix myself. Before we got married I told her over and over that I would change. We both remember a night at an Applebee’s where I told her I had joined the Y and figured out a diet and would get in shape for her, for both of us. This plan had some flaws. First of all, never make any pledges relating to health at Applebee’s. Second, I had said the same things countless times to Mama and Daddy and, most of all, myself. Making the promise to Alix should have mattered even more. She chose to spend her life with me.
“You sat me down and said, ‘Don’t worry, I’m going to take care of this.’ And then you didn’t,” she says. “I felt like that was understandable and it’s a hard thing to do. And on the other hand, I felt kind of like you broke a promise.”
By and large I’ve kept the promises I made to her, as she has kept the ones she made to me. We have honored our wedding vows. But I’ve broken the promise to get healthy so many times that there’s nothing left but dust and splinters.
The thing that bugs her the most is when I shut down. She’ll suggest something reasonable—a Saturday hike at the lake, maybe—and here’s what goes through my mind: It’s so damn hot already; my knee is bothering me; the Georgia game comes on at 3:30; we’re going to get eaten up by mosquitoes; she’s not even going to want a burger after we’re done, we’ll just come back home and have a salad with that lite vinaigrette dressing; why do I think this way I hate myself GAAHHHH—
But I don’t say anything. I just look at her blank-faced while a cumulus cloud forms over my head.
That would drive me crazy if I were on the other end.
The thing is, if I just tell her I don’t feel like going, we’re usually OK. She might persuade me to go anyway, or I might talk her into staying, or we figure out a third way. But instead of playing tennis with her, batting the ball back and forth, I take the ball and bite it in half. I don’t know why. Maybe because I don’t like conflict. Maybe because I know how silly I’d sound if I said those thoughts out loud.
I’ve told stories for a living long enough to know that pretty much every story boils down to the same thing: A character you care about struggles to get past an obstacle, trying to reach his or her personal pot of gold. My big obstacle is food. But my struggle with food has created another hurdle that’s almost as big—the distance I put between me and the people I love. Alix even has a name for it. She calls it the invisible wall.
The problem isn’t just that I can’t figure out how to get over or around or through the wall. The problem is that I built the damn thing myself.
• • •
My weight has hurt us in a million little ways, and in some deep ways I can never make right.
We tried and tried to have a baby not long after we got married. The natural way didn’t work, so we moved to IVF treatments. My part was easy: I went to the fertility clinic and jerked off into a cup, not especially helped by the eighties porn tape they provided. Alix had it harder. Every night for weeks, she stood there and took it as I jabbed a needle into her thigh, injecting her with the hormones that might help us have a child. The odds were against us. We were in our mid-thirties, older than most first-time parents. I had flipped our riding lawn mower a few months before and took a nasty shot to the groin as I fell. There are lots of possible reasons why our hopes died in those petri dishes. One thing I know for a fact is that my sperm count was extremely low, and my sperm were slow and feeble for a man my age. I will always believe it’s because I was so fat.
Most of the time we’re fine when we’re out somewhere and see new parents cradling a baby. Every so often we’ll glance at each other and things will get quiet between us. We tell each other it wasn’t meant to be. I don’t know what was and wasn’t. I just know what I did and didn’t do.
I have not been the lover she deserves. I get tired too soon. I can’t maneuver like a nimbler man. I don’t have confidence in my body. There is still something inside me, despite many years of evidence to the contrary, that finds it hard to believe any woman—even my loving wife—would want to sleep with me.
And so I have limited Alix’s life because of the limits on mine.
Sometimes she’ll plop down and watch TV with me instead of exercising, because she wants to spend time with me however she can get it. She has gained a few pounds she never would have gained if not for me. When we do go for a walk, sometimes she turns her ankle because she walks so close to the edge of the sidewalk. She walks along the edge because I take up so much space. She could walk so much faster than I do, but she lingers so we can walk together. Part of me wants her to go on ahead. Part of me worries that one day she will just leave me behind.
Our house is not as nice as she’d like because I get exhausted just thinking about painting our bedroom or digging a flower bed. We haven’t traveled like we told each other we would. When we do travel, sometimes I get so worked up about how far we have to walk or where I’m sitting on the plane that it’s not fun for either of us. When she asks me how she can help, I shut down again.
“I think when we—you—make decisions whether or not to do things, you’re making your decisions partly out of fear,” she says. “Because as you go out into the world, you run into situations over and over again where some random person will make a crack out of your weight out of the blue . . . and it leads you to make decisions out of fear about what you’ll do or where you’ll go and what kind of things you’re going to do. Because over and over again, it’s been proven somewhat unpredictable when you’re going to encounter that negative response. And so you—I think you withdraw a little bit and sort of in a way self-censor what you’re doing.”
It’s bad enough when I don’t even try to eat right or exercise. The worst part is when I use my size as a reason to close the door on everything else. I assume I can’t do something, or I think it’ll be too hard, so I never give it a shot. And so both of us delete another item from the mental list of the life we hoped to have together.
She says: “I’ve had to do some work on my own outlook and my own thinking in terms of what do I expect from a relationship, and what do I expect from another person, and where does my self and their self begin and end, and what’s reasonable to expect. Where do I need to say this is about me and not about you?”
I say: “Do you feel like you’ve gotten less than you hoped for?”
She says: “No. I think it’s all to the good. It’s all been much more than I had ever dreamed. I just didn’t know the best questions to ask beforehand to understand more fully what I was getting into.”
• • •
I used to give Alix nightmares. In the nightmares I died from something preventable, something that never would’ve happened had I lost weight like I promised. She was there in the dream alone, a young widow. She would wake up angry and scared.
One of the ways I know I’m slowly getting better is that she’s not having those nightmares anymore.
But we both worry about how much longer we have together. Her grandfather lived to be 101. She’s got great genes. If I don’t turn things around, she’s facing a long stretch of years after I’m gone. We have given each other our blessing to find another if one of us dies. We know the chances are she’ll need that blessing more than I will.
Most of the time we talk about these things in bits and pieces. It’s hard to talk about them all at once. Weeks later, when I read the transcripts of the conversations we recorded, I noticed the kindness of the person who typed them up. When Alix and I laughed, the transcriptionist wrote it down: (Laughter). When we cried, all it said was: (Pause).
Most days I think I’m the laughter in Alix’s life. Some days I worry that I’m just the pause.
This, most of all, is what keeps me trying. She deserves the best of me. She made my life, too.
When I’m needing signs of hope, sometimes I look at our old coffee table, the one Alix bought to mark our new life together. We finished it eventually, and it has now lived with us in three different houses and one apartment. It’s been the centerpiece of our living room the whole time we’ve been married. The edges are dented and chipped. But run your hand across the top and it feels as smooth as it was the day we sanded it. We worked hard on it and made it into a beautiful thing. It’s built to hold up.
Our terrible month starts with a few drops of blood on a towel.
Alix took Fred with her to visit her parents while I was on the road for work. When she got back home, she noticed blood on the towel she had draped over the backseat for Fred to sleep on. Then, when they got in the house, he sneezed and sprayed blood all over the bedroom floor.
We make an appointment with our vet. She doesn’t find anything. But she suggests we take him to a specialist where they can do a more thorough ultrasound.
They find something.
Fred has a big tumor, four by five inches, clinging to his liver. It’s most likely cancer. They could do surgery. But there might be more tumors in places the ultrasound can’t see. And in his condition—feeble, arthritic—the operation might kill him. He’s fourteen years old, ancient for a Lab. Even if the surgery works, chances are he won’t make it to fifteen.
So we talk about it and cry about it. And in the end, we decide not to do the surgery.
We had been married just three years when Fred showed up at the end of our driveway one morning, a stray puppy bloated with worms and crawling with fleas. He was so happy to see us. We didn’t have a fence, so we took him across the street to our neighbors’ house while we figured out what to do. As we were walking back, he showed up right on our heels. He had squeezed through their gate. We had a dog.
Our old house had a huge backyard. I’d let him wander back there in the mornings while I waited by the corner of our garden. After a few minutes I’d whistle for him and hold up a treat, and he’d take off running toward me. Watching him run that fifty-yard dash every morning, sliding past me as he jammed on the brakes, bouncing with joy when I reached down and scratched his ears, is something I’ll take with me until the day I die. I’ve never seen such beauty.
He got old and it snuck up on us. When he was young he would pull us around the block on walks. Then he walked beside us. For the last year or two, he has trailed behind. Now we sometimes have to lift him when he can’t get up by himself. He breathes heavy and hard in the night. To us, it all happened gradually. But when our vet sees him, after a gap of just a few months, she’s shocked at how much he has declined. After we go to the specialist, we come back to our vet and tell her about the tumor. She says we should pick a day and put him to sleep. At this point, no day would be wrong.
We pick a day in early October and pray he lasts that long.
Not long after that, on a Saturday morning, I get an email from ESPN human resources. It says they’ve learned that I’m leaving the company—in classic corporate-speak, they call it off-boarding—and that I should get my paperwork in order before I go. I figure it must be a mistake. My contract is up in November, but I haven’t heard anything but good things about my work. I leave messages for my editor and her boss, letting them know about the email but sort of laughing about the whole thing.
That afternoon I get a call from my boss’s boss. The first thing he does is apologize for the way I found out.
He says he’s trying to save my job, but ESPN is having to make budget cuts across the board. The end of my contract falls right at the time they need to cut. They still like my work. He says it’s mostly bad timing. But he can’t tell me if they’ll be able to renew my contract. I hang up the phone and just sit there for a while, poleaxed.
Journalism has shed tens of thousands of jobs over the past decade. Some of the best writers, editors, designers, and photographers I know are scrambling for jobs or have settled for some other field where they have steady work and benefits. It’s been just two years since I got let go by Sports on Earth. This time the stakes are higher, because Alix left her job at the paper in April. Right now she has some clients as a coach. But she’s still building the business. My deal with ESPN is part-time, but it’s my biggest contract and my steadiest work—and the people I work with are some of the best in the business. If I get let go, it’s going to hurt bad.
We are still grieving over Brenda, and heartbroken about Fred, and stressed about my job. The life we built feels as if it’s falling out from under us.
I take Fred for walks and try to talk it out. He’s mostly deaf, too, so he’s not much help. The one language he still knows is treats. Our neighborhood has a lot of dogs, so the neighbors down the street started leaving a water dish and a jar of treats on the sidewalk. Fred doesn’t want to walk far anymore but he always wants to make it to the treat jar. I reach in and grab him three or four. In the shape he’s in, he deserves something good in his life.
When we get home, I dive into my own treat jar—peanut butter and crackers, mostly. I quit wearing my Fitbit for a few days. It takes all my strength to stay away from Wendy’s. At the end of the month I step on the scale at the Y, thinking I’ve probably gained ten pounds. I’m surprised at the number. Maybe stress is a good diet plan.
Weight on August 31: 435
Weight on September 30: 435
For the month: no change