When I Was Fat
- Izaak David Diggs
- Jan 1
- 4 min read
I decided to splurge and have McDonalds delivered. Eating it reminded me of being on the road, those nights I stayed in hotels and would order an obscene amount of McDonalds: A Double Quarter Pounder and four McDoubles. The McDoubles I would microwave through the night and save one to heat up in the morning. This was my hotel night ritual when I was travelling in my van which I wrote about it in my book, No Signal.
I have food issues. At one point I weighed 234 pounds which is borderline obese for someone who is five-nine and small boned. After I graduated high school and left home, a good job at Fifty State Security paid my bills. The boss’s name was Joe Ahab; I’m pretty sure he was into meth. But, the job paid well and I could indulge in all the foods I had missed out on as a kid, every kind of fast food you could think of including Twinkies and pies. Never developed a taste for soda, thank God. Being fat crept up on me. My Toyota became uncomfortable so I bought a second hand Chevy Lumina…I was just another fat guy stuffing his face as he drove around in a Chevy Lumina. I lived with my grandmother then. She voiced her concerns in the form of remarks about how my well fed state reminded her of being a girl in Arkansas, specifically the hog calling contests. I could scarcely heard her wizened voice over the sound of my chewing and I was always chewing: Jack in the Box. KFC. Taco Bell (I ate twenty tacos once). Pizza Hut for Jabba the Hutt. The only exercise I got when when a milk maid chased me three blocks, luckily the pail slowed her down.
The job at Fifty State Security was steady, but Joe Ahab was a live wire, the sort that always manages to find the puddle of water you’re standing in for kicks: He was up for days at a time. Became more micromanaging. His garb switched from cheap, button down shirts to cableknit sweaters and sailor caps. My boss started watching me suspiciously, following me around the office with his eyes. He started wearing an eyepatch and smelled noticably of salt water. Did I see the signs, no? I just continued my life, my fat life, waddling from day to day like a walrus late for a Zoom meeting.
Needing some extra money, I entered some wet t-shirt contests. It was a good way to meet beautiful girls...beautiful girls that hated me after I shoved the prize money in my ample cleveage. I needed that dough, man, because things had gotten unbearable at work. The boss was having us mend sails on our downtime. My back started hurting real bad so I went to see a doctor. I thought the pain was from bending over to mend sails.
“Uh, no, Izaak,” the doctor looked at me like I was the village idiot. “You have a harpoon in your back.”
He removed the harpoon and I celebrated by spending nineteen hours in a buffet and putting it out of business. If I close my eyes I can still smell the hasty meatloaf and hear the sobs of the owner. I went back to work and pointed a thick finger at Joe Ahab, accusing him of violating my person with a something long and hard. Oh, he denied it, but you could see the guilt in his one visible eye. Something changed for me then. I knew I had to change my lifestyle, take off some weight or there would be more harpoons, more sobbing restaurant managers, and more women angry because I looked better in a soaked Hanes t-shirt than they did.
First, I needed some scratch. I was out of work and trying to wean myself down from a $30 a day fast food habit (it’d be about $100-125 today, I’d imagine). I found a flyer on a telephone pole in Carmichael for a Taiwanese reality show that was looking for rotund persons such as myself. Carmichael is full of fat folks so the show had posted wisely.
The show was called Dance, Fat American, Dance and it was filmed in San Francisco so I pointed the Lumina west with crossed fingers and a passenger seat brimming with Hostess pies.
“Your ass is completely square,” the producer said admiringly. “It’s like….a perfect cube of fat pushing your back pockets to the side of your legs.”
I lasted three episodes until being booted off due to personality issues. The producers wanted either jolly fat people or fat people who cried all the time and I fit neither category. But, I developed a love of dancing. Man, at one point I was dancing three hours a day. I got down to 145 pounds at my skinniest. Around that time I got into cooking, making reasonably healthy food and stopping my fast food binges.
That was half a lifetime ago. The Lumina is probably in a junkyard somewhere or some fat dude in Carmichael may be keeping it going with baling wire and chewing gum.
And yes, this is a true story…at least a lot of it. Or some of it….
You can find No Signal and my other books here:
hahahahaha.....good one & thanks for sharing. vvvmltybm