The Last Big Sin
by Kit Reed
—Sylphania, AZ, June 3, 200-
Look what I was promised, see what I got. Toxic puce coveralls so the locals can pick you right off if you run; nobody walks free from this place until they're saved. Oh, yeah, the fluffy beach towel, like this was ever a beach. Flip-flops, and that's it, and for this I am paying through the nose. Welcome to Sylphania, the Reverend Earl's high ticket desert spa, I sold short to buy in here, and what do I get? Rusty trailer at the perimeter, a few yards off from the abandoned sweat lodge and dog years away from the clubhouse where the Reverend Earl and his special anointed chosen ripple their abs in the Jacuzzi or flex their pecs in the cloverleaf pool between takes. They get wraparound shades and gourmet lunches and bathrobes with the logo in gold for they are the stars, and fat boy here, a.k.a. me? My chances of scoring a walk-on in the 24/7 evangelical infomercial? Pretty much nil. It is the genius of the Reverend's establishment. The clubhouse is heaven—the Afterfat—and we the converts are somewhere south of purgatory, because only the buff and perfect enter there. Success, the Reverend Earl preaches. Success through sacrifice.
I started this journal because it's gonna be a while. If I tank here I do the exposé: networks, life story to Imagine, the works. Even strip searches won't find this trusty PDA; when you're my size no matter how much you lose, there are folds.
At inspections the Reverend gravely assesses me. Not worthy. Again.
I stand there shivering. "I lost the weight."
Icy, he is icy. "Some."
"Most of it."
He pinches more than an inch. "There's flab." That glacial blue glare is killing me.
"I'm dying here." I am a mess. I am ashamed. I will do anything to please him. "I will do better."
"Yes." Ice crystals glitter in the air between us. "You will."
Now on TV the Reverend comes on all warm and loving, preaching from the crystal cathedral on a perpetual loop. When he talks the talk the man is hot—hotter than early Billy Graham and the Reverend Al Sharpton and Tony Robbins put together; he is the last great persuader, and just when you're off guard he sticks in the knife: "Look at yourself," and you do. He goes on, "You're disgusting," and you blush. Then when you are shaking with shame and guilt Reverend Earl exhorts you, "You don't have to be that way!" while a heavenly choir of emaciated angels hums backup and digital clouds skate across the sky behind the great glass arch; fix on those polar eyes and, zot, you are mesmerized. Hours later the Reverend Earl and his choir hit high C as the sun comes up via satellite relay beamed into every living room and trust me, your heart swells and you believe! Next comes the testimony of the converted, stories a lot like yours, even though the Reverend's gaudy converts look nothing like you. They step up to the mike like Ghosts of Christmas Future, I would do anything to be that thin. They were never this fat … you think, but they were. One by one the chosen testify. And the Before pictures: wow. Fatter than you!
Like certain religions, the system is built on guilt.
We're not talking Sodom and Gomorrah here. Now that pretty much anything goes in that department, nobody much notices what you do to get your kicks. Except for the one thing. The Reverend Earl has hit on the last great vice. It's so big that it leaves the Seven Deadlies in the dust and us feeling all dirty and glad, writhing with delight because it's our secret and it's so terribly wrong, and it's … Think soft cheeses in gobs: baked Brie and triple creme dripping off your knife; think Porterhouse steaks, so richly marbled that the fat goes straight into your heart valves; think chocolate in any form.
Food is the forbidden fruit.
It's the ultimate seduction, the guilty secret you keep—that box of Godivas you sneaked before sex, the ice cream after and none for her—the joy of scarfing hamburgers on the sly, secretly larding your veins because you know it's bad, and being bad is such a rush. It's the last guilty pleasure and the hell of it is, most people get away with gorging because they work out or they scarf and barf and nobody knows.
The unforgivable sin isn't overeating. It's getting fat.
Which brings us to me.
I know you look at me and go, eeewww. I see you leering, like I'm a walking piece of pornography. You're excited to look, you're ashamed because you get all evil and lascivious and OK, superior: Oh man, I am never going to get like that. You want to touch but you're afraid to touch; you'd like to poke that finger at my belly and see how far in it goes because I am the physical expression of your own secret, cherished vice. You are excited and revolted, shrinking as I pass, like I am overflowing into your personal space, and the difference between us? Body weight.
Shrink says I'm overcompensating. Mom says I was born big-boned. I blame thyroid. Those pesky brown cells.
OK, it was the food: sausage grinders and pizza at midnight, the B.L.T. but with two pounds of bacon on it instead of two strips; special ice cream sundaes at four A.M., quart of Ben and Jerry's Everything But, with hot fudge sauce and smashed white chocolate and pork rinds crumbled on top so it isn't too sweet; buy out the candy at the movies and take two buckets of popcorn into the midnight show and gobble it in the dark, and this is exclusive of my daytime three squares. See, foodaholics are no different from that bunch confessing over coffee at AA: when you want it all the time because you're seriously addicted, nobody sees you binge. At mealtimes I was a model of restraint. Seconds only. Sweet'n Low and no milk. Even Mother wondered; OK, I lied. The rest, I sneaked, in the dark hours when nobody sees you and they can't hear you belch; close the door softly and tiptoe downstairs after your lover goes to sleep, if she wakes up she will reproach you: wasn't I enough?
In daylight, nobody knew. Listen, when I dress for business, clients treat me with respect. So what if I shop at Big Men Outfitters, the XL rack? The black suit, I had hand tailored with matching vest, vertical pinstripes, and if I do say so I look impressive. Like Gibraltar. Like, who wants to buy life insurance from a young guy? But no matter how successful I am, I hear you muttering as I go by.
I have not gone without women. Amazing what turns some people on. Girlfriends came into my life and then they went; it was a mutual conclusion arrived at over time. I had my needs. No woman could compete.
I moved back home after the last breakup, because in the settlement Nelda took the apartment and all my stuff. I would be there still if it hadn't been for Mom. After her Saturday night macaroni and Belgian waffles, Mom nudged me into the Barcalounger. She tipped me back and flipped on the tube. "Be good. Have fun." She stuck the remote in her pocketbook and left. If you want to know the truth at that angle I had leverage issues. I couldn't get up to change the channel. I was stuck in the recliner until she got back, staring at hours and hours of the Hour of Power, featuring the Reverend Earl.
This is how he works you, the unconverted. He rubs your nose in it. The way you look. "You're disgusting." Every bite you ever ate. "Stop," I said; I would have done anything to cut him off but the recliner kept my feet higher than my head. I struggled but I was stuck, looking up at the Reverend Earl between my feet. I threw my can of beer nuts at him, begging. "Please stop." My five-pound fruitcake missed the screen. "Stop it. Just stop."
It went on for hours.
"You can do it." The Reverend Earl bored right into me. "But you need my help."
By the time the sun came up over the Crystal Cathedral, I was shaking. I could swear somebody had oiled the choir and dusted them with gold. Good thing my Nokia was charged. Nelda was still on my Speed dial. Late as it was, she picked up.
I was raging. I shouted into the phone. —Nelda, was this your idea?
She tried to get off the line. —Oh, Jerry. I was just … She couldn't think of an excuse.
—Was it?
—Can't talk now, I have to see a person about a thing.
—Nelda, it's the middle of the night!
—Not really. They're waiting, gotta go.
I said to Nelda, —What can I do to get you back? Mind you, Nelda was not the first, she was just the next.
—Lose the weight, she said, and I am here because she made it so clear that she didn't much care: that sigh, right before she finished and hung up, like, what's the use. —Just lose the weight.
I shook the phone, we were in separate states of mind at the moment, so she has no idea how mad I was. —That's easy for you to say.
What are the stages of death? I went through denial and rage to acceptance. By the time Mom came home I was in tears.
"Well Jerry," she said, "Did you like the show?"
I was too beat up to speak. "OK," I said. "OK."
I sent for the brochure.
You know how sometimes you decide do a thing just because they say it's going to be hard? Like hard is a religion. I sold everything and came here. Who knew it would be this bad? Think maximum security. Think detox. Think results guaranteed.
"Yeesh," I said on the first day.
When the guy in front of me shook his head his jowls flopped and the ground shook. He said, "Pretty much." His name is Nigel Wilson, and his nickname, that no longer fits? I saw what he put down on the form. Nickname: Slim. "It's what the Reverend wants from all of us. Thinness."
Yitch, I thought as he waddled up to the Armed Response box where the nurse-trainers were waiting. I'm never going to let myself get that bad. But I had, and I did.
The evaluation makes getting into the Green Berets look like an ice cream social and the physicals at Fort Benning and Parris Island look like church. There's the carbolic shower; one of the Rev's trusties comes in with a loofah and scrubs all those parts you've gotten too bulky to reach. OK, I'm here because I hate myself for being fat. I hate it and I am ashamed. You sit in the waiting room for hours. And then and only then, when you are at rock bottom, the entrance interview.
"Look at yourself. You are disgusting." The Reverend Earl fixed me with those eyes. If you want to know the color, look into the heart of an iceberg and look hard. "Jeremy Hale. What do you want?"
Everything in me welled up and I croaked, "Thinner!" I wanted to look amazing and live in the clubhouse and testify on the infomercials as advertised, and maybe I wanted Nelda to come begging so I could blow her off, but I was too beaten down to say.
"And what will you give to get it?"
He was my leader; I would do anything he said. I said what he wanted. "Everything."
Thinner, yes, but at what cost? Oatmeal at five, take seconds and they axe your lunch. It's pathetic, grown man like me reduced to stealing food. Scrub your mess tray with sand and do a mile on the track before the motivational speech; step aerobics and encounter group followed by work detail. Tiger's Milk for lunch, laced with the Reverend's special Herbal Compound. I don't know what-all they blenderize but you end up starved. Meanwhile the Rev's hand-picked favorites lounge, scarfing Mai Tais and lobster salads before taping, greasing each other's lats and triceps in preparation for the shoot. The chosen put on gold thongs and parade for the camcorders daily while I pull duty in the silo or in the herb processing shed followed by dinners that would make a rabbit puke.
I will spare you the details of the daily humiliation—huge mirror, naked you—sordid food diaries, where you list every bite you'll eat in a given week, with confessions and public shamings if you stray. Oh yeah, the motivational bikini trunk show, like any of those mink thongs will ever fit. Plus random cavity searches and sermons and inspirational hymns piped in nonstop while we slaves to body image mix the Reverend's Herbal Compound.
I do everything he wants! So why am I shambling around out here in the wilderness with my skin hanging off me like an extra coverall, while up at the clubhouse … Oh, never mind. To make it worse we're separated from the women by a half mile of desert, so there are no saving graces in this place, no sweet touches, no woman's hand like a scented scarf trailing across your face. Nothing but hunger and the discipline and the Reverend Earl promises that we sold everything to pay for, the glamour of life in the Afterfat. And all I can think about is food. I'm hungry all the time.
Did you ever get exactly what you want and find out it's not what you wanted at all?
· · · · ·
—July 4, 200-
Today was visiting day. Don't ask me why I was hoping for Nelda. Mother brought brownies. I couldn't look at them. I couldn't not look at them.
I said, "Mother, what are you trying to do to me?"
"Eat," she said. "I baked all night."
"I'm not supposed to." I was brave. I pushed them away.
She pushed back. "It's practically your birthday. Go ahead."
"I can't."
"You've been so good." Mother as Satan, unless it was Eve, going, "One little taste won't hurt."
So now we are up against it. The fundamental fact. In regular detox, you do without your drug of choice until you can do without it. Alcoholics, if they never take another drink they can hope never to take another drink, but foodaholics? Stop eating and you die. When food is your drug of choice, temptation is every day.
"I made them special." Mom's chin was quivering. "Just one bite."
She stared at me until I opened the tin. I didn't care if the trusties turned me in, I tore right through them, three dozen in all. Mom said, "I miss you, honey." She thought I didn't see the look of contempt slipping down over her face like the act curtain at a bad play.
I wiped my mouth. All gone, and so soon! I tried to stare her down. "But this is all worth it, right? I mean, I look thinner, right?"
"I don't know, Jerry." She shoved another tin across the table. "You look about the same to me."
"Bye Ma. Gotta go."
She called after me. "You forgot your present."
It was fudge.
—Aug. 15, 200-
Don't pretend you're better than me, you out there tapping your flat belly and sneering because I don't fit the template. I've seen you picking at your salad and eyeing my platter at those business lunches where I walk away richer and you leave feeling superior, you are fucking starving, I can see. You know damn well that you keep yourself strong by mocking people like me. Well, I know your dirty secret. When you can't have a thing, you think about it all the time. Face it. Food is the new sex. The last thing people lust after that it's wrong to have.
I think about it all the time. You'd think I'd miss Nelda more but I'm too hungry to think about anything else. But can I raid the kitchen or steal a car and loot an all-night diner? Not likely.
Results guaranteed. The Rev's trusties clubbed the twin converts they caught in the kitchen. They dragged in one runaway sobbing at the end of a rope. And me? I am in so tight that I yelled along with the rest of them. "Let that be a lesson to you."
Then why do I feel trapped? And what happens when I finally get a gold star at the weigh-in? Too hungry to know.
—Sept. 30, 200-
It's harvest time and we are packaging the Reverend's patented mix for shipment to high end shops worldwide. I slap labels on the herb packets as they come down the assembly line and for the first time since I hit Sylphania, I've met the women and trust me, they're nothing like the ones on the Hour of Power. You only see the winners: Britney and Eve, the sleek bikini brigade and the Earlettes, his anorectic choir, but do you care? You're leering at the Before pictures—chubby porn. Admit it, you get off on Food Channel excesses too, bare naked Bananas Foster and Nipples of Venus and Christmas pudding bombes. Girls come easy for you, but fat women are a forbidden pleasure and desserts, you can not have. See, the women I work with are all Before pictures. Pudgy girls who'll never make it to the Afterfat shuffle around in pink coveralls that hang off them in folds, like the skin off my belly. I hardly look. When you're starving, you have bigger things on your mind, although … I mailed Nelda on my PDA, even though she never answers back.
—Oct. 4, 200-
I found a Hershey's kiss taped to one of the packets slithering toward me on the conveyer belt. I looked up. Who called? At the head of the line, where girl converts were heat-sealing the packets and throwing them back on the conveyer belt, a great big redhead caught my eye and smiled.
—Nov. 15, 200-
It's all changed.
She came to me in the night. Someone huge leaned on the outside of the trailer; I felt it rock. It was somebody to be reckoned with. The whole thing shook. I woke up hungry and excited. I stuck my head out. "Who's there?"
"Me."
It was too dark to see. She had a beautiful voice. "What do you want?"
"Same thing as you." It was rich and smooth as melted butterscotch. "And I have it."
I was faint from excitement and shaking all over. "You do?"
"Didn't I just tell you?" She had a rich laugh too. "Now, are you going to let me in?"
"Why me?"
"I know you from the shop." she said. "You know, the Hershey's kiss? Now let me in."
I could still taste it. I thought about the situation: my exposed position in the trailer, the Reverend's acolytes patrolling: trusties collecting points so they can fly up the food chain and join the choir. "I don't know."
"Don't you want it?"
"Of course I want it," I said, so low that only she could hear. "But we can't do this here."
"Where?" Her voice flowed like cream in the darkness. I don't know what had happened to the moon. "Hurry, I can't wait much longer."
"Oh, lover. Where?"
I came outside and quietly shut the door on my trailer and weeks of loneliness and heart-starved misery. We were two big shadows out here in the dark. I swallowed hard. "I know a place."
It was pretty much fated. We moved as one. Her shadow joined mine like a partner in infidelity, which is what she was. We crept across the midnight desert and into the abandoned sweat lodge. The Reverend gave up his smoky macho rants after somebody overheated and died. The entrance was boarded up so we cut a slit in the hides. I could feel her sweet breath on my face. "Now?" Her voice trembled with anticipation. I felt her vibrating, the friction of coverall against coverall with intimations of the flesh beneath. I was on fire. We were both shaking. She murmured, "Now?"
"Not yet. Wait here." I circled the sweat lodge, looking for hidden entrances, for alarms and pitfalls, anything that would betray our presence here because exposed like this, sneaking around in the night in the Reverend's tightly organized kingdom, we were in imminent danger of discovery and I'd die if anything happened to interrupt what we were about to do because it had been so long for me and for her too. I remember what she looked like on Induction Day, majestic in that brocade slipcover thing with shoulder length earrings of white jade. She was splendid. Now she looked diminished.
I whispered, "You've suffered."
She whispered back, "So have you."
We tiptoed over to a soft place and stood trembling, listening, tense and excited and crazy with desire to complete the act.
Her voice was electric in the hush. "Is it OK? Is everything OK?"
"Yes," I said and we fell down together on blankets in the shelter of the slanting hides. Panting and tremulous, we began.
Forgive me, she had an entire Black Forest cake.
For the first time since I got here, I feel good. The Reverend relies on guilt and repentance and conversion for his pitch. I've tried all three and frankly, I'm sticking with guilt. Nothing beats the rush that comes with hiding and lying so you can take your pleasures. The delicious feeling you get when you're done, because you had to sneak.
Monday I flunked the weigh-in.
Nigel Wilson, who is a trusty—one foot in the clubhouse—looked at me with a cold eye. "Three pounds. You've picked up three pounds."
"Water." I was lying and I liked it. "Replacing fluids after a workout, like the Reverend says."
"As if."
"What makes you holier than thou?" OK, I do not like the man.
He mauled my flank. "Flab! I haven't pinched more than an inch in months. Three pounds." Another week with the Universal Gym and the Abdomenizer and Nigel will join the heavenly choir. Thong bikini with his name on it, plush bed in the clubhouse, steak and lobster for breakfast, lunch, and Christmas. He sneered, "You've got a week."
"OK," I said, because he had put the fear in me. No more getting caught like this. The minute we finished I was going off to the bathroom to practice putting my finger down my throat.
He slitted his eyes with that judgmental, skinny-guy scorn. "Are you seeing somebody?"
"Who, me?" The sensation was delightful. I was excited. Scared. "Hell no."
"You know what we do to people like you." He was in my face—closer than people got when my belly still stood between me and them. "Are you?"
I blinked. Lying. What a rush! "Absolutely not. No way. No."
"You know what happens when you get caught, right? First we strip you naked for the public shaming. Then there is the confession piped everywhere on closed circuit TV followed by the running the track bareassed. Then there is the showing of that tape in the mess hall at every meal for weeks. Ready yet?"
Nigel's breath smelled like fermenting cucumber. I backed away. "No."
But Nigel was on a roll. "Then of course there is the purging and starvation, and I ask you, whoever she is, is it worth it?"
I couldn't exactly answer.
"Is it?"
You bet it is. "No."
Of course we are meeting regularly. I have become a bulimic virtuoso, and she? Does my lover secretly do the same? And where—where does she get the food? Last night we fell down together in the sweat lodge and it was wonderful: chocolate mousse cake and Russian white chocolate ice cream and the proximity of our bodies. I touched her smeared cheek. "You never told me your name."
"Zoe," she said. "I thought you knew."
"Zoe, we can't go on meeting like this."
All her soft places pressed against me and she murmured, "I know we can't, Jerry. But we will."
"Oooh, yes." I think I may love her. I think if we keep on meeting like this, one of these nights when we've finally had enough to eat, we will have sex.
—Nov. 22, 200-
My throat is sore and my mouth is sour from barfing; I gargle before and after I meet Zoe, but as long as she doesn't have to know … after all the trouble she went to, Zoe would be revolted and frankly, so am I, but I have my position to think of. The final fitness training—tucks if necessary, to take up the slack in my hide. The clubhouse and the show.
—Nov. 30, 200-
So I made it to the clubhouse, but not like you think. For our sins, the gravest of which I think was the three-tiered fruitcake, Zoe and I are indentured here. We scrub pots in the Reverend's kitchen, for our sins, and the level of exposure to temptation makes it clear that he doesn't care if we topple and get fat.
"I think I love you," Zoe said last night, right before it all came down. The Last Good Time. We'd polished off the last pie—blueberry; even in our niche in the darkened sweat lodge, safe in our nest of blankets, I knew our teeth were turning blue.
"Yes." Full for once, full and happy, we rolled toward each other and I murmured, "Now?"
Snaps popped; the pink coverall was open. I could feel her warmth. "Oh, Jerry, I'm afraid you'll think I'm too …"
"Don't say it. Don't say anything." I buried my face in her beautiful, soft neck.
Zoe blushed; I felt the heat. "What if you think I'm too fat?"
I laughed deep inside. "Not the way we've been burning it off, baby. Come on, this way, that's it …" I ripped my coverall open. Now, I thought, but a question stopped me. "About the food. You never told me where you get the food."
"It's not important."
"I nee...
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