My dad walks into the house from the grocery store and immediately sits in his chair and turns on the TV quietly with the closed captioning on. Since Mom’s gone into menopause, he's developed a hearing problem. That’s the best proof God exists, or maybe just a great example of how our species adapts to survive the elements.
“Hi, Kid.” He says and hugs me, before turning back to the TV. “Ya, hungry?”
Dad makes himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, with the hand-canned, homemade grape jelly of his late mother, who made it in anticipation of her death. She made enough to last us into 2003.
Martha Stewart would have approved, but not Janice (“Just call me Jan.”) Hetherington “Your grandparents lived like homeless people, who we are not.” Mom says in disgust. “Now go put on a jacket. You must be starving. We have a coupon for Sizzler.”
Dad is watching reruns of 90210 and switches to Fox News during the commercials. He’d defend his late mothers jelly, but he loves my mom too much to argue and he is this close to falling into a state of exhausted R.E.M sleep on a Saturday after mowing the two yards, washing the white clothes and (possibly) trying to figure out how to commit the perfect murder.
Friday, July 31, 2009
Chapter 30
I wanted to run in terror most days from dumbbells dropping, screams of pain, and a lot of red-striped spandex.
5,000 square feet of machines, plates, and perspiration is a little, tiny dot that does not set the bar of a person, but when you've lost seventy pounds in that tiny dot, it starts to seem much bigger. I was tired of the intimidation factor in such a small space. Some of it caused by others but most of it was in me, based on what I thought: that 24 Hour Fitness Downtown Sacramento decided a persons long-term value.
As I started to see what was going on in the gym, it made me less likely to compare my stomach to hers, my chest to his. Some people have to work out harder, longer, louder than others because it's all they have. I learned the key to fitness:
You don't need to wear a sign that says, "I have a tiny penis." Just wear a weight belt and grunt long and loud at the gym. We'll get it.
5,000 square feet of machines, plates, and perspiration is a little, tiny dot that does not set the bar of a person, but when you've lost seventy pounds in that tiny dot, it starts to seem much bigger. I was tired of the intimidation factor in such a small space. Some of it caused by others but most of it was in me, based on what I thought: that 24 Hour Fitness Downtown Sacramento decided a persons long-term value.
As I started to see what was going on in the gym, it made me less likely to compare my stomach to hers, my chest to his. Some people have to work out harder, longer, louder than others because it's all they have. I learned the key to fitness:
You don't need to wear a sign that says, "I have a tiny penis." Just wear a weight belt and grunt long and loud at the gym. We'll get it.
Chapter 5 excerpt
“Wave goodbye to the house, Two.” Mom orders me. “You may never see it again.”
“Why’s that?” I ask. We are all hunched in the front seat of my dad’s giant GMC King Cab on the way out of Folsom toward the airport where we will begin a seven day family vacation in Nashville, leading up to my move in to the dorms.
“Because,” she sings. “Who knows? What if you get killed or decide never to come home?” Mom wrinkles her face. She's not kidding.
Every once in a while, Mom starts purposely, or maybe not consciously slurring her words and she sounds like a little girl with a speech impediment. So right now, as she says the word “home,” it sort of sounds like a drunk version of Little Orphan Annie. It usually happens right before long crying spells or big whoops of laughter. You just never know what’s going to happen. It reminds me of the hot weather before an earthquake.
“Why’s that?” I ask. We are all hunched in the front seat of my dad’s giant GMC King Cab on the way out of Folsom toward the airport where we will begin a seven day family vacation in Nashville, leading up to my move in to the dorms.
“Because,” she sings. “Who knows? What if you get killed or decide never to come home?” Mom wrinkles her face. She's not kidding.
Every once in a while, Mom starts purposely, or maybe not consciously slurring her words and she sounds like a little girl with a speech impediment. So right now, as she says the word “home,” it sort of sounds like a drunk version of Little Orphan Annie. It usually happens right before long crying spells or big whoops of laughter. You just never know what’s going to happen. It reminds me of the hot weather before an earthquake.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
The doctor delivers
“Lose weight, or you die. It’s that simple.”
“Like, from a heart attack?” I ask
“Sure. If that’s you’re pleasure,” He hits my knee with a reflex hammer and it bounces up. “Or cancer, pick your poison on that one.”
“Pancreatic-” he lists.
Grandma had that one.
“Colon,” he says.
Dad is scared of that one. He gets tested yearly.
“Whatever you want,” he deals. “Maybe you’ll get diabetes or just get hit by a car because you run too slow,” He smiles a wicked grin. I look away and I run my finger across the dirty, carpeted wall.
Lose weight, or you die. It’s that simple.
I’ve never heard anyone say it was simple before, so feigning a fixation on the textures of the wall I ask what part of losing weight is simple.
“Just stop eating before you’re full.” It does sound simple when he says it. My chart says I’m around 95 pounds overweight and I wonder how quickly I can lose that by eating only until I’m satisfied. I’ll start tonight, and maybe by Christmas I’ll be down 20 pounds or so, since it’s so simple. He writes me my refill prescription for Xanax and leaves. If I take one of these rights before dinner, I’ll fall asleep before I’m full. Simple.
“Like, from a heart attack?” I ask
“Sure. If that’s you’re pleasure,” He hits my knee with a reflex hammer and it bounces up. “Or cancer, pick your poison on that one.”
“Pancreatic-” he lists.
Grandma had that one.
“Colon,” he says.
Dad is scared of that one. He gets tested yearly.
“Whatever you want,” he deals. “Maybe you’ll get diabetes or just get hit by a car because you run too slow,” He smiles a wicked grin. I look away and I run my finger across the dirty, carpeted wall.
Lose weight, or you die. It’s that simple.
I’ve never heard anyone say it was simple before, so feigning a fixation on the textures of the wall I ask what part of losing weight is simple.
“Just stop eating before you’re full.” It does sound simple when he says it. My chart says I’m around 95 pounds overweight and I wonder how quickly I can lose that by eating only until I’m satisfied. I’ll start tonight, and maybe by Christmas I’ll be down 20 pounds or so, since it’s so simple. He writes me my refill prescription for Xanax and leaves. If I take one of these rights before dinner, I’ll fall asleep before I’m full. Simple.
Chapter 8 excerpt
A year after my reunion, As I look out the window passing Anderson’s Pea Soup in Santa Nella, California, I think about turning back and heading south on I-5. I could just forget this crazy idea and pretend it never happened. I could even go into Anderson’s and get that tuna melt I love so much, with fries and a chocolate--no Neopolitan shake, too. A woman named Flo would probably call me “sweetheart” and offer me extra ice cream from the silver cup. I’d drink it because it’s a gift and besides my mother never breastfed me, so milkshakes are making up for lost time.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
The quote at the beginning
"Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist."
George Carlin
George Carlin
An excerpt from chapter 3
“Fine.” I answered. Tony kind of looked like the Ultimate Warrior without his face paint. He had on a tight baby blue polo t-shirt with dark navy horizontal stripes, something I could never wear. His body was tanned, far more than it needed to be since he was obviously already dark-toned. He had new-tire black hair that he’d styled with gel to look like Superman. The tight polo forced the veins in his biceps to pop out of the sleeves all the way down to his forearms. His body amazed me because I had never seen that big of muscles on such a tanned body in person, except for when I stood in line at this very gym a year ago to get WWF Superstar Razor Ramon’s autograph when the gym opened. Since TV was the only place I’d ever seen a chest that big, I couldn’t even make eye contact with him, for fear that he would read what I was feeling when I looked at him: that my fat body was now as light as a feather, and that I wanted to fall from the sky slowly toward him, and right before landing peacefully mouth the words to him, “Hold me.”
An Excerpt from Chapter 4
I drove through the pick-up window at Adalbertos and got a burrito with chicken, steak, sour cream, beans, rice, extra cheese, and hot sauce. I parked in the parking lot and took my foil-wrapped midnight snack outside with me onto the curb. I opened the hot sauce and stuck my finger in the sauce then smeared it on my lips like it was Blistex and felt myself tear up from the inflammation. I wanted a moment of catharsis, and this was the only way I knew to cry. I’d been so numb and lied for so long to myself and my friends and I knew that as soon as I finished my burrito I’d be doing it again, probably in perpetuity. My life would forever be a lie and the only time I would ever sit with the truth would be in these private moments with good food. By the time I finished the burrito, I didn’t remember what it had tasted like. I’d remember that night in bed, as I burped the aftertaste while I couldn’t sleep.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Excerpt from Chapter 9
Red Hot Blues are a blue corn tortilla chip that always made me feel better. They come in a bag wrapper with lots of reds (top and bottom) and filled in with a light yellow southwestern mural of Incan design and a transparent brick where you could see the crispy, spicy triangles sleeping. Made by a silly company called “Garden of Eatin,’” they are best used six months from now.
In the old days I could go to Ralph’s or Safeway and buy a party sized bag or two, and have enough chips for two days as long as I hid it from my roommate. This meant not only keeping it in the bottom drawer of my bathroom sink, but also drinking a cup of water before putting a chip in my mouth, to dull the crunch so that no one could here me chewing. Then I could keep them all for myself. Party-sized was a perfect name, because I didn’t go to many parties, but when I did, they never had enough chips for the party I was hosting in my belly. In my party, ladies did not drink free, but the band played until the host had indigestion and passed out from a sleeping pill just before dawn.
I liked that no one I knew from Folsom had ever eaten a Red Hot Blue chip. They were too healthy for my family, very LA. It said right on the bag “No genetically engineered ingredients” and that spelled D-I-E-T to the Hetherington family. So even though the calorie count was about the same, I knew that eating an entire bag of 240 chips in under 45 minutes made me just a bit more of a yuppie than the Average Joe. My chips are blue, and are not flavored to taste like Ranch dressing. They are made with real chili flakes, and organic corn and smoked tortilla yeast.
Putting a Red Hot Blue in my mouth felt better. I crunched away the days stress. It was like gnawing on my teeth, but I was awake and I got full. It was spicy so it felt slightly masochistic, but dulled just before I screamed by the sunflower and canola oils. I was both rewarding and punishing myself for being so present in my food addiction, and I knew it. I just didn’t have time to think about it. I was starving.
I knew it was bad for me, and I tried everything I could to only eat one serving of 15, but I’d have to use a measuring cup. I’d over serve myself anyway, then I’d say, “What the hell” and give myself another cup. Then another. Then I’d go for a walk to burn the calories. When I’d get home I’d see the bag still out and go make friends with it again…
In the old days I could go to Ralph’s or Safeway and buy a party sized bag or two, and have enough chips for two days as long as I hid it from my roommate. This meant not only keeping it in the bottom drawer of my bathroom sink, but also drinking a cup of water before putting a chip in my mouth, to dull the crunch so that no one could here me chewing. Then I could keep them all for myself. Party-sized was a perfect name, because I didn’t go to many parties, but when I did, they never had enough chips for the party I was hosting in my belly. In my party, ladies did not drink free, but the band played until the host had indigestion and passed out from a sleeping pill just before dawn.
I liked that no one I knew from Folsom had ever eaten a Red Hot Blue chip. They were too healthy for my family, very LA. It said right on the bag “No genetically engineered ingredients” and that spelled D-I-E-T to the Hetherington family. So even though the calorie count was about the same, I knew that eating an entire bag of 240 chips in under 45 minutes made me just a bit more of a yuppie than the Average Joe. My chips are blue, and are not flavored to taste like Ranch dressing. They are made with real chili flakes, and organic corn and smoked tortilla yeast.
Putting a Red Hot Blue in my mouth felt better. I crunched away the days stress. It was like gnawing on my teeth, but I was awake and I got full. It was spicy so it felt slightly masochistic, but dulled just before I screamed by the sunflower and canola oils. I was both rewarding and punishing myself for being so present in my food addiction, and I knew it. I just didn’t have time to think about it. I was starving.
I knew it was bad for me, and I tried everything I could to only eat one serving of 15, but I’d have to use a measuring cup. I’d over serve myself anyway, then I’d say, “What the hell” and give myself another cup. Then another. Then I’d go for a walk to burn the calories. When I’d get home I’d see the bag still out and go make friends with it again…
The current opening page to 100 Pounds
The statistics on permanent weight loss are almost as grim as the effects of long-term obesity. Eighty-five percent of people who attempt to lose weight don’t, and the rest put it back on within five years. Then those people die, younger than “normal” people.
People are more hopeless about exercise than ever, and diets have become a joke. And many overweight men and women actually increase their weight after the frustration of failed fat-burning sets in. Chances are if you are fat, you will stay fat and you will get fatter every year. The odds are against us.
I don’t have the answers to losing weight and this is not a dieting book, but I did it. I fucking lost 100 pounds and I’ve kept it off for six years. This is my story of beating the odds.
This book is not to help you lose weight, it’s storytelling that keeps me thin. I keep the weight off by telling my story over and over again to anyone who will listen, so please--read it every Thursday because Friday Morning is my weigh-in.
Still, this book is for anyone who has even a shred of low-calorie hope and just a little something more. Maybe its fear, or maybe its determination. Maybe its vanity, ambition or maybe its a good therapist. Whatever it is, I hope you get it and I hope it lasts and multiplies and evolves so that you may live a long life and not die a really fat virgin.
She’s always lived for tomorrow
She’s never learned how
To live for today
She’s dyin’ to try something foolish
Do something crazy
Or just get away
Something for herself for a change
Is there life out there?
So much she hasn’t done
Is there life beyond
Her Family and her home?
She’s done what she should
Should she do what she dares?
She doesn’t want to leave
She’s just wonderin’
Is there life out there
From Is There Life out There sung by Reba McEntire
People are more hopeless about exercise than ever, and diets have become a joke. And many overweight men and women actually increase their weight after the frustration of failed fat-burning sets in. Chances are if you are fat, you will stay fat and you will get fatter every year. The odds are against us.
I don’t have the answers to losing weight and this is not a dieting book, but I did it. I fucking lost 100 pounds and I’ve kept it off for six years. This is my story of beating the odds.
This book is not to help you lose weight, it’s storytelling that keeps me thin. I keep the weight off by telling my story over and over again to anyone who will listen, so please--read it every Thursday because Friday Morning is my weigh-in.
Still, this book is for anyone who has even a shred of low-calorie hope and just a little something more. Maybe its fear, or maybe its determination. Maybe its vanity, ambition or maybe its a good therapist. Whatever it is, I hope you get it and I hope it lasts and multiplies and evolves so that you may live a long life and not die a really fat virgin.
She’s always lived for tomorrow
She’s never learned how
To live for today
She’s dyin’ to try something foolish
Do something crazy
Or just get away
Something for herself for a change
Is there life out there?
So much she hasn’t done
Is there life beyond
Her Family and her home?
She’s done what she should
Should she do what she dares?
She doesn’t want to leave
She’s just wonderin’
Is there life out there
From Is There Life out There sung by Reba McEntire
Monday, July 27, 2009
An excerpt from 100 Pounds
“I just don’t want you to be the only boy in your class who can’t skip!” she says on the way across town. “And besides, if there is something wrong with you, it’s better to know now.” Mom nods at herself, seeming to prepare herself for the worst, and then she pushes play on her car stereo tape player.
She’s singing along with Dolly Parton’s song “Apple Jack” and seems happy. She loves singing to country music, and I love hearing her sing along with it. “Apple Jack” is the first song I remember hearing and mom usually plays it when we drive in the car from a tape she recorded off the radio. It’s got Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers’ “Islands in the Stream,” too, and I insist on singing the Dolly parts, but so does Mom. So we sing to Kenny and he sings back to us. We are just like the Judds.
“I honestly don’t understand how they can have so many handicap spaces here” she wonders, “I mean, where the hell are we supposed to park?”
We pull into Easter Seals. “Can you believe this, Number Two?” As she signs the endless paperwork and writes a donation check, I read a sticky Highlights magazine article about safe woodworking with missing pages and I adjust myself.
Easter Seals is a series of small, white rooms that all smell like hot dogs.
My crotch area is very uncomfortable right now because on the way to Easter Seals, mom stopped at Macy’s to get me Spandex bicycle shorts so that I’d be more comfortable learning proper hand/foot/eye coordination with the Sacramento area’s most courageous amputee war veterans, autistic children, and seniors. The shorts I’m wearing now have neon blue stripes on the side.
“See? Isn’t black slimming!” she had said hours before Easter Seals when she held the shorts up to my face to make sure they matched my eyes. Since they had black shorts with three different varieties of neon colors there was no reason not to get every color to wear with a nice black tank top, especially on a hot day like today when we’re going to Easter Seals. “Just go put the blue ones on in the dressing room and give me the tag,” She commands. “I’ll go pay so you look nice today!”
A very pretty woman in beige Docker pants and a red bob haircut named Peggy tries to get me to walk back and forth between two raised wooden beams in another small tiled room with puffy, dirty faded blue mats. I fall down after three steps, my belly falling out of my spandex shorts each time. I’m clumsy, Peggy observes, probably because my history of middle ear infections. Peggy says I’ll grow out of it. “I’m not so sure.” Mom says. “He also doesn’t seem to like sports,” she says. “I just wonder if he has some kind of, disability.” I agree with mom, on this. I usually do.
On my fifth try on the beams, a group of every kind of Easter Seals patient, a woman on a walker, a very feminine older man in a navy cap, and a boy with no hair and a head brace are gathering near the beams to cheer me on. When I fall, they let out a collective, “OH!” and the boy with cranial braces starts licking my hand. “Excuse me!” mom interrupts and grabs my hand and we walk out. “Keep the donation check. There are people here who need it more than us.” She says loudly and looks around the room giggling and whispering, “I’m not letting some retarded boy lick my baby!” She tells me, but everyone can hear.
“Now, where in the Hell did I park?” she asks. “Well,” she says as she walks to her side of the car, “When you fell down those mats matched your eyes and your new shorts, that’s for sure!”
In the car on the way home, I sink into the seat of her BMW325es embarrassed and itchy. The radio was playing my favorite country song by a male artist, Eddy Rabbitt’s, “I Love a Rainy Night” but I won’t sing. It’s my first memory of being embarrassed by both my body and my clumsiness. “I just can’t believe I kept you there for more than five minutes.” She says. “You’re not retarded at all,” she seemed to realize for the first time. “You’re just uncoordinated. But at least you got a new outfit to wear to school tomorrow, huh?” I look down at my thighs as we get out of the car back in Folsom. At nine years old and 200 pounds, I have visible cellulite racing out of my Spandex thighs, and every time I hit a Tether ball my big love handles crept of my shirt like a Big League Chew gum bubble, and you could see my stretch-marked hips from the front yard.
She’s singing along with Dolly Parton’s song “Apple Jack” and seems happy. She loves singing to country music, and I love hearing her sing along with it. “Apple Jack” is the first song I remember hearing and mom usually plays it when we drive in the car from a tape she recorded off the radio. It’s got Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers’ “Islands in the Stream,” too, and I insist on singing the Dolly parts, but so does Mom. So we sing to Kenny and he sings back to us. We are just like the Judds.
“I honestly don’t understand how they can have so many handicap spaces here” she wonders, “I mean, where the hell are we supposed to park?”
We pull into Easter Seals. “Can you believe this, Number Two?” As she signs the endless paperwork and writes a donation check, I read a sticky Highlights magazine article about safe woodworking with missing pages and I adjust myself.
Easter Seals is a series of small, white rooms that all smell like hot dogs.
My crotch area is very uncomfortable right now because on the way to Easter Seals, mom stopped at Macy’s to get me Spandex bicycle shorts so that I’d be more comfortable learning proper hand/foot/eye coordination with the Sacramento area’s most courageous amputee war veterans, autistic children, and seniors. The shorts I’m wearing now have neon blue stripes on the side.
“See? Isn’t black slimming!” she had said hours before Easter Seals when she held the shorts up to my face to make sure they matched my eyes. Since they had black shorts with three different varieties of neon colors there was no reason not to get every color to wear with a nice black tank top, especially on a hot day like today when we’re going to Easter Seals. “Just go put the blue ones on in the dressing room and give me the tag,” She commands. “I’ll go pay so you look nice today!”
A very pretty woman in beige Docker pants and a red bob haircut named Peggy tries to get me to walk back and forth between two raised wooden beams in another small tiled room with puffy, dirty faded blue mats. I fall down after three steps, my belly falling out of my spandex shorts each time. I’m clumsy, Peggy observes, probably because my history of middle ear infections. Peggy says I’ll grow out of it. “I’m not so sure.” Mom says. “He also doesn’t seem to like sports,” she says. “I just wonder if he has some kind of, disability.” I agree with mom, on this. I usually do.
On my fifth try on the beams, a group of every kind of Easter Seals patient, a woman on a walker, a very feminine older man in a navy cap, and a boy with no hair and a head brace are gathering near the beams to cheer me on. When I fall, they let out a collective, “OH!” and the boy with cranial braces starts licking my hand. “Excuse me!” mom interrupts and grabs my hand and we walk out. “Keep the donation check. There are people here who need it more than us.” She says loudly and looks around the room giggling and whispering, “I’m not letting some retarded boy lick my baby!” She tells me, but everyone can hear.
“Now, where in the Hell did I park?” she asks. “Well,” she says as she walks to her side of the car, “When you fell down those mats matched your eyes and your new shorts, that’s for sure!”
In the car on the way home, I sink into the seat of her BMW325es embarrassed and itchy. The radio was playing my favorite country song by a male artist, Eddy Rabbitt’s, “I Love a Rainy Night” but I won’t sing. It’s my first memory of being embarrassed by both my body and my clumsiness. “I just can’t believe I kept you there for more than five minutes.” She says. “You’re not retarded at all,” she seemed to realize for the first time. “You’re just uncoordinated. But at least you got a new outfit to wear to school tomorrow, huh?” I look down at my thighs as we get out of the car back in Folsom. At nine years old and 200 pounds, I have visible cellulite racing out of my Spandex thighs, and every time I hit a Tether ball my big love handles crept of my shirt like a Big League Chew gum bubble, and you could see my stretch-marked hips from the front yard.
From Chapter 1
I lay on my bed reading an article in Country Weekly about Crystal Gayle’s favorite meatball recipe when the phone rings. My bedroom is covered in posters of Reba McEntire, from her various magazine covers to her tour posters. I’m eighteen and have already seen her in concert at least six times and have a poster from each. They’re all classy, colorful pictures of Reba in yellow jackets, brown boots with her jeans tucked in, and I even have the unlicensed Reba wall clock that my Dad bought from in front of the Long’s Drugs store two summers ago. She’s wearing a red dress in that one. As I look across toward my closet at the record cover from the “Greatest Hits Volume Two” LP that I’ve scotch taped to the mirrored doors, I’m sure of it. The voice I am speaking to on the other end of this phone is that of the real life Miss Reba Nell McEntire. This is surreal.
“Hi,” she pauses, and then probably looks down at a piece of paper or to her assistant reminding her of my name. “Is Sean there, please?” I know its Reba because “please” sounds like “plays”. I feel my heart beating fast and a warm internal wave slides across my back, a similar feeling to one of my grandmothers many wooden back massagers shaped like a turtle, crab, and/or Koala Bear Head.
“This is Sean.” I answer, about to burst into the kind of bright gleeful balls of sparks in those flower fireworks that Red Devil makes. I can’t believe it. My lungs and heart are beating my chest as hard as my feet beat the ground begging her for an encore during her visit to Sacramento when she played at the Arco Arena. She could hear the smile in my voice whether she knew me or not, which she doesn’t. She can also hear my deep, heavy breaths in between sentences, and that’s embarrassing, but I’m rolling with it, and so is she. I’m glad she’s on the phone with and not sitting with me in person, though.
***
Since the last time I was at her concert, I’ve gained about twenty pounds, and I never think about gaining weight until twenty pounds creeps up around these sorts of milestone moments.
The last time I had contact with Reba, I was in the sixth row of her concert appearance in Reno, just two hours away from my hometown, Folsom, California with my best friend Nate Affleck. I was still seventeen years old and had just graduated high school. I was 230 pounds then and around a forty inch waist or so, depending on the brand, Lee Jeans or Levis, but I turned eighteen last fall and my community college is next door to an El Pollo Loco which is where I go between classes. I feel bad going in just to study, so I usually get a quesadilla and a chicken bowl with extra guacamole. But, sometimes I forget to study. They have a credit card reader here, and it’s only $1.29 for rice and guacamole, and I now have my very own student Mastercard. One day, after a particularly aggressive eating binge at El Pollo Loco I came home to enter a Reba McEntire trivia contest on the very first version of America Online.
The winning entry with correct answers to 10 questions about Reba would get a phone call and an autographed tour jacket from her 1996 concert.
Question 1. Where was Reba Born?
“Duh.” I thought and wrote:
Chockie, Oklahoma.
Question 2. What is Reba’s husband and manager’s name?
“Hello? So easy.”
Narvel Blackstock.
Question 3. What was Reba’s first number one hit?
Can’t Even Get the Blues No More.
“Who doesn’t know this? It was in Ladies Home Journal!”
Question 4. Who discovered Reba and where?
Red Stegall, National Finals Rodeo.
“I’d write 1976 but there’s no room left.”
These questions were too easy, I had thought in between bites of chocolate pop tarts I’d smeared with peanut butter and jelly. Why don’t they ask hard questions, like, “What is Reba’s preferred hair color accent dye?” which I’d read online and verified in Vogue magazine later. “Copper Penny.”
A month later, in an email from Starstruck Entertainment I was congratulated for beating many thousands of Reba fans and winning the grand prize.
“Hi,” she pauses, and then probably looks down at a piece of paper or to her assistant reminding her of my name. “Is Sean there, please?” I know its Reba because “please” sounds like “plays”. I feel my heart beating fast and a warm internal wave slides across my back, a similar feeling to one of my grandmothers many wooden back massagers shaped like a turtle, crab, and/or Koala Bear Head.
“This is Sean.” I answer, about to burst into the kind of bright gleeful balls of sparks in those flower fireworks that Red Devil makes. I can’t believe it. My lungs and heart are beating my chest as hard as my feet beat the ground begging her for an encore during her visit to Sacramento when she played at the Arco Arena. She could hear the smile in my voice whether she knew me or not, which she doesn’t. She can also hear my deep, heavy breaths in between sentences, and that’s embarrassing, but I’m rolling with it, and so is she. I’m glad she’s on the phone with and not sitting with me in person, though.
***
Since the last time I was at her concert, I’ve gained about twenty pounds, and I never think about gaining weight until twenty pounds creeps up around these sorts of milestone moments.
The last time I had contact with Reba, I was in the sixth row of her concert appearance in Reno, just two hours away from my hometown, Folsom, California with my best friend Nate Affleck. I was still seventeen years old and had just graduated high school. I was 230 pounds then and around a forty inch waist or so, depending on the brand, Lee Jeans or Levis, but I turned eighteen last fall and my community college is next door to an El Pollo Loco which is where I go between classes. I feel bad going in just to study, so I usually get a quesadilla and a chicken bowl with extra guacamole. But, sometimes I forget to study. They have a credit card reader here, and it’s only $1.29 for rice and guacamole, and I now have my very own student Mastercard. One day, after a particularly aggressive eating binge at El Pollo Loco I came home to enter a Reba McEntire trivia contest on the very first version of America Online.
The winning entry with correct answers to 10 questions about Reba would get a phone call and an autographed tour jacket from her 1996 concert.
Question 1. Where was Reba Born?
“Duh.” I thought and wrote:
Chockie, Oklahoma.
Question 2. What is Reba’s husband and manager’s name?
“Hello? So easy.”
Narvel Blackstock.
Question 3. What was Reba’s first number one hit?
Can’t Even Get the Blues No More.
“Who doesn’t know this? It was in Ladies Home Journal!”
Question 4. Who discovered Reba and where?
Red Stegall, National Finals Rodeo.
“I’d write 1976 but there’s no room left.”
These questions were too easy, I had thought in between bites of chocolate pop tarts I’d smeared with peanut butter and jelly. Why don’t they ask hard questions, like, “What is Reba’s preferred hair color accent dye?” which I’d read online and verified in Vogue magazine later. “Copper Penny.”
A month later, in an email from Starstruck Entertainment I was congratulated for beating many thousands of Reba fans and winning the grand prize.
Another Chpter 24 excerpt
And then the first day at the gym happened.
I’m walking on the treadmill at the 24 Hour Fitness on Arden Way and Hurley. It’s the smaller location and it’s farther away from my house. I like it because I don’t know anyone here. No one from high school will see me try to bench press on my own, lifting only the bar, maybe. No one I know will call me a girl, or laugh at the way I run on the treadmill.
Who am I kidding? Run? I have never run on a treadmill in my life. Today will not be the first time I do, that’s for sure. I didn’t put Talcum powder on my thighs to prevent a rash. Speed walking makes my groin red and burn. Running would act as kindling to a brush fire.
Turning a treadmill on is weird. You get on the damn thing, and it’s got an old strip of rubber that rolls over and over on itself. This is where you put your legs. 24 Hour Fitness treadmills are old, and especially at the Arden location. The belt is flimsy, and it reminds me of a fruit-roll up, a never ending, tire-flavored, revolving fruit roll up. If I fall down on this I will never get out of bed again. I will be too embarrassed to ever leave my house, and that could happen if I’m not careful.
I can picture it happening right now. I let go of the handles for less than a minute, because Judge Judy is the guest on Larry King Live, and I love her and it is showing in the back of the room, reflected on the mirror in front of me with closed captioning. I look down at myself in the mirror for a brief moment, not paying attention to my untied shoe, which gets caught in the fruit rollup and rolls over, and over again and again maybe--yanking my shins down, my head shoving down into the bar next to me, shoe flying off into the back wall. All of a sudden, people are ducking and trainers look up from their texting, asking their own clients if they heard a thud.
“This is why fat people shouldn’t go to a gym,” the thin, marginally sweaty girl in a green sports bra would think to herself next to me as she skis the elliptical into her forty-fourth minute of exercise. She’s probably going to be on this for ninety minutes, and then go meet her boyfriend and have sushi and talk about the status of her application for the civil engineering masters program at Sacramento State University. “This fat fuck fell off a treadmill,” she’d snarl in between swabs of wasabi on her Yellowfin tuna roll. “It was like, hilarious, Chad” she’d say to him while he ignored her and finished watching the basketball game behind the sushi bar.
This scenario reminds me to keep the incline at zero, or no hill. Flat land. My speed should be normal. I have big feet and a wide frame. I don’t need any funny business. I’ll walk two and a half miles an hour. I’ll decide what’s funny, thank you.
An almost middle-aged couple walks in wearing wedding rings and shares a wallet. They do not speak to each other. They seem bored, even pissed off by the task of swiping their membership cards to gain admittance. They walk toward the treadmills next to me. The wife sees me, maybe noticing my sweat beads around my neck, sensing how uncomfortable I am. Or maybe she thinks that because I’m a fat guy in a gym, I’m a pervert just waiting to leap off of this and hump her leg. “Let’s go the front.” She says to no one, but her husband knows he should hear it, and they take the treadmills in front of me. She’s at least twenty pounds overweight. He has a little belly, and a little bit of bald spot in the front of his head. They look miserable together. I decide that this is what couples do when they are ready to divorce. They go back to the gym. They’re here to renovate before going back on the market, and it’s a serious race against each other.
First they meet after years of exercise, hoping to ready their bodies for the perfect soul mate. They find each other so hot and so sexy and then about three months into the relationship they start eating out more, exercising less. They share desert, they fight over who gets to feed the other one the last piece. They charm each other, they indulge each other. They probably cuddle after morning sex for hours and then catch a cab to work because they’ve lost track of time, so there can be no walk to the light rail station. They email each other song lyrics all day. It’s Stevie Wonder in the morning, and it’s the Goo Goo Dolls in the afternoon.
They move in together. They put a TV in the bedroom.
They get chubbier, and it’s not immediate. It’s gradual over months, years even.
They get married. They feel bored because there’s nothing new about the relationship so they have a baby. She never loses the baby weight. He’s replaced sex with pizza. And they begin to fight over the last piece of cake. Now it’s about who gets to eat it themselves. Fights end when one says the other isn’t the same as in the beginning. They join a gym and it’s a race to fitness. Whoever loses fifty pounds first gets a lawyer. Whoever stays fat gets to keep the van.
I picture the wife, with her step-side haircut tossing a banana peel onto the treadmill, then laughing hysterically as her husband slips off and gashes his forehead open, just below where his hair is thinning. She pats him dry with her matching sweatbands and sarcastically calls him baby. I picture him adjusting her mp3 player to maximum volume before she gets on the stationary bike, blasting her ears out as she turns it on to listen to Celine Dion’s “That’s The Way it Is.” This deconstruction of these strangers’ partnership gets me through the first six minutes of my treadmill walk, and I’ve decided to stay on for ten minutes total. Yes, I will be on here for ten minutes. I will add a minute every day until I get to forty-five minutes.
I’m walking on the treadmill at the 24 Hour Fitness on Arden Way and Hurley. It’s the smaller location and it’s farther away from my house. I like it because I don’t know anyone here. No one from high school will see me try to bench press on my own, lifting only the bar, maybe. No one I know will call me a girl, or laugh at the way I run on the treadmill.
Who am I kidding? Run? I have never run on a treadmill in my life. Today will not be the first time I do, that’s for sure. I didn’t put Talcum powder on my thighs to prevent a rash. Speed walking makes my groin red and burn. Running would act as kindling to a brush fire.
Turning a treadmill on is weird. You get on the damn thing, and it’s got an old strip of rubber that rolls over and over on itself. This is where you put your legs. 24 Hour Fitness treadmills are old, and especially at the Arden location. The belt is flimsy, and it reminds me of a fruit-roll up, a never ending, tire-flavored, revolving fruit roll up. If I fall down on this I will never get out of bed again. I will be too embarrassed to ever leave my house, and that could happen if I’m not careful.
I can picture it happening right now. I let go of the handles for less than a minute, because Judge Judy is the guest on Larry King Live, and I love her and it is showing in the back of the room, reflected on the mirror in front of me with closed captioning. I look down at myself in the mirror for a brief moment, not paying attention to my untied shoe, which gets caught in the fruit rollup and rolls over, and over again and again maybe--yanking my shins down, my head shoving down into the bar next to me, shoe flying off into the back wall. All of a sudden, people are ducking and trainers look up from their texting, asking their own clients if they heard a thud.
“This is why fat people shouldn’t go to a gym,” the thin, marginally sweaty girl in a green sports bra would think to herself next to me as she skis the elliptical into her forty-fourth minute of exercise. She’s probably going to be on this for ninety minutes, and then go meet her boyfriend and have sushi and talk about the status of her application for the civil engineering masters program at Sacramento State University. “This fat fuck fell off a treadmill,” she’d snarl in between swabs of wasabi on her Yellowfin tuna roll. “It was like, hilarious, Chad” she’d say to him while he ignored her and finished watching the basketball game behind the sushi bar.
This scenario reminds me to keep the incline at zero, or no hill. Flat land. My speed should be normal. I have big feet and a wide frame. I don’t need any funny business. I’ll walk two and a half miles an hour. I’ll decide what’s funny, thank you.
An almost middle-aged couple walks in wearing wedding rings and shares a wallet. They do not speak to each other. They seem bored, even pissed off by the task of swiping their membership cards to gain admittance. They walk toward the treadmills next to me. The wife sees me, maybe noticing my sweat beads around my neck, sensing how uncomfortable I am. Or maybe she thinks that because I’m a fat guy in a gym, I’m a pervert just waiting to leap off of this and hump her leg. “Let’s go the front.” She says to no one, but her husband knows he should hear it, and they take the treadmills in front of me. She’s at least twenty pounds overweight. He has a little belly, and a little bit of bald spot in the front of his head. They look miserable together. I decide that this is what couples do when they are ready to divorce. They go back to the gym. They’re here to renovate before going back on the market, and it’s a serious race against each other.
First they meet after years of exercise, hoping to ready their bodies for the perfect soul mate. They find each other so hot and so sexy and then about three months into the relationship they start eating out more, exercising less. They share desert, they fight over who gets to feed the other one the last piece. They charm each other, they indulge each other. They probably cuddle after morning sex for hours and then catch a cab to work because they’ve lost track of time, so there can be no walk to the light rail station. They email each other song lyrics all day. It’s Stevie Wonder in the morning, and it’s the Goo Goo Dolls in the afternoon.
They move in together. They put a TV in the bedroom.
They get chubbier, and it’s not immediate. It’s gradual over months, years even.
They get married. They feel bored because there’s nothing new about the relationship so they have a baby. She never loses the baby weight. He’s replaced sex with pizza. And they begin to fight over the last piece of cake. Now it’s about who gets to eat it themselves. Fights end when one says the other isn’t the same as in the beginning. They join a gym and it’s a race to fitness. Whoever loses fifty pounds first gets a lawyer. Whoever stays fat gets to keep the van.
I picture the wife, with her step-side haircut tossing a banana peel onto the treadmill, then laughing hysterically as her husband slips off and gashes his forehead open, just below where his hair is thinning. She pats him dry with her matching sweatbands and sarcastically calls him baby. I picture him adjusting her mp3 player to maximum volume before she gets on the stationary bike, blasting her ears out as she turns it on to listen to Celine Dion’s “That’s The Way it Is.” This deconstruction of these strangers’ partnership gets me through the first six minutes of my treadmill walk, and I’ve decided to stay on for ten minutes total. Yes, I will be on here for ten minutes. I will add a minute every day until I get to forty-five minutes.
Chapter 24 excerpt
I’m charmed by flashy lights in a way that skinny people aren’t. You see a hiking trip as a really good time, and I’m at Big Boy’s Hamburgers because they have bright red Strawberry Sundaes and a 50’s car show on Friday nights. You want to go to a museum, but I want to sit in the caboose inside the Spaghetti factory and eat the managers special because it comes with a giant polish sausage, tomato pasta, fried chicken and the Mizithra cheese noodles. It’s just a great value. And it keeps you busy, especially if you order it with a bottomless Shirley Temple. Your art gallery is a lot of walking and thinking, and you don’t get to sit inside a train.
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