FatChyck

When the sitcom Roseanne first came on television in the ‘80s it made my mother cringe.

It’s true that Roseanne’s brash nasal harping made lots of people wince. But my mom couldn’t stand her for other reasons.

“Uucchh, look at her, she’s disgusting,” she would say.

Here’s the catch: My mom looked a lot like Roseanne. She had that same Russian-Jewish, almost-Asian straight black hair, a moon-shaped face with cheeks that broadened like the horizon with her smile, and a laugh that flew out of her apartment window to echo on the street below. She was barrel-bellied, and wide like Roseanne, but like the sitcom queen, had the energy of an Alpha girl.

At first my mom wouldn’t admit her hostility was because Roseanne was fat. She said it was because she was poorly dressed – which she was. My mom had a fabulous, flowy Maude-goes-lesbian fashion sense and couldn’t take Roseanne’s plaid shirts and stretchy pants.

But years later the truth came out. My mom visited me at college and praised me for becoming thin. There I was floating lightly about my hippie college wearing a skimpy tie-died tank top and Indian skirt, free of my years of Lane Bryant dowdiness.

But her praise wounded me. I knew in my heart that this skinny was on short loan. My diet wouldn’t last. I still saw fat in the mirror. And I didn’t want to be chided for who I had been and who I still was inside.

“You hate Roseanne, because she’s a tub of lard, you freak …” is what I suddenly hissed at my mom. We were sitting in the newly built, sunny student union eating German potato salad on a lovely spring day that just began to thaw Ohio.
“And you fucking look like her!” That’s how I really made her feel the pain.

I had no idea where the Roseanne comment came from. By that time in the late ‘80s, Roseanne had married Tom Arnold, her sitcom family had won the lottery in a Happy-Days-esque, shoot-the-dying-puppy kind of plot twist, and people were cooling off on their love-hate relationship with America’s first fat lady.

My mom became completely quiet. At first she looked like she wanted to scream at me as if I were a rude child. Then she narrowed her Asian/Roseann-Barr-ish eyes and said, “I hate her because she’s ugly and fat.”

“So you hate yourself.” I spat.

“Yes. I guess so," She responded.

She had lauded my thinness because she didn’t want to hate me ... the way she hated Roseanne.

On a bus to Baltimore last week, three college students sat behind me chatting. Their predictable banter alone annoyed me being that I teach students who confuse television sparring with real conversation everyday. But I was willing to allow them their 20s. Then the three—two young men and a woman—began talking about an unfortunate girl they knew that was “stalkerish and “a little strange” and, according the girl, “kind of fat and disgusting anyway.”
I don’t know why, but at that point I had to see what this girl looked like. I guess it didn’t matter whether a fatphobe was blonde or redheaded, but I needed to know. And sadly, because I too was reared in an atmosphere where women judge each other on looks alone, I was downright mortified when I cocked my head around to peek that the girl was FREAKIN’ UGLY. She was pimply, blotchy and her eyes sagged at the corners like a puppy. I was mortified that she was acceptable just because she was skinny. Now I know what I just said was phobic to all the pimply, blotchy, saggy-eyed girls in the world, but for whatever reason I couldn’t believe an ugly girl could have the NERVE to come out of her face with that crap on the Chinatown bus to Baltimore. The two guys she was with just nodded in agreement.

Then last night, I was in a trendy bar in Park Slope. Our table of teachers was loud and rowdy, joking about our students and fellow co-workers having inappropriate sex. I noticed another two-guy-chick combo at the table to the left of us. I quite frankly didn’t look closely at them, just registering them in my mind as another crew of Brooklyn drabby chic. How many Von Dutch caps can catch you attention in the world? At one point the three started talking about a male friend who couldn’t seem to stop following his ex-girlfriend around.
“He’s just a fat slob anyway,” I heard the girl say. And her two friends just started laughing.
And again, I had to see what she looked like.
And again … she should have been barking. Which satisfied me.

The petty part of me was pissed off that you can be downright ugly and still be considered acceptable because you are skinny. I know the old “beauty is in the eyes of the beholder” and other such trite messages that remind us to look at people’s content and not their outer appearance. But I also have always believed that when you are not perfect, you are warded by the forces of karma to be fair to others. My friends and I call this the fat champion syndrome. When you grow up fat, you tend to be the defender of the strange, friend to the different. You know that at anytime, in the middle of your senior prom, your first kiss, a swimming lesson where you finally learned to dive, someone could just call you a fat bitch and turn that happy memory into a nightmare. Therefore, we tend not to return the favor.

Of course there are fat girls that turn the other way and are rude to others to draw attention away from themselves. I tried that on for size one year, but it never quite fit. I learned my lesson the day that the special-ed girl on my block Alice Lee came outside on our stoop to talk to our crew. She was struggling to tell us a story, which was barely falling out of her mouth because of a speech impediment. Then her mama came downstairs to tell her to come up for snack. When her mama stepped out of the darkness of the brownstone vestibule into the sunlight, we saw a little brownish-red dead roach stuck in a clump of her hair. Alice saw it at the exact moment that we did, and we all caught eyes. The boys began to giggle, but I loudly guffawed. Alice was mortified, and she looked at me as if I had violated her. Me. Not the boys. Because she knew I owed her more. But I got my payback. Alice left, and we sat there and joked and laughed about her dirty mama for a good hour. But when the name calling got to its height, someone looked at me and began with, “You so fat that …” I got the message.

Either ugly girls don’t have the same code of honor, or they are more allowed to be unattractive than we are to be fat. Either way, both of those girls are lucky I didn’t return the favor.

A doughy-faced man-child who goes by the name of DJ Scorpio finally admitted what I had most feared about Big Beautiful Women (BBW) parties (the gatherings for fat girls and the men who admire them). “I went to a party for the first time and the girls swarmed to me like flies,” he said with a completely straight face.
“I guess that didn’t happen to you in regular clubs?” I asked, just as poker-faced. I knew well that a gig-challenged Reggateon DJ with a silver chain and no day job would get NO play anywhere else. At least he was honest.
“Nope, I get nothing.”
My friend Jodi’s allergic reaction to her first BBW party hit me like a ton of bricks. A few months ago, in an attempt to do research for a book, Jodi was nice enough to attend a Nancy Goddess event in lower Manhattan with me. I had been leery myself. I knew that Goddess had been hosting these parties for almost 20 years in New York City, but I was always deterred by my own images of a club packed with feederism-obsessed men overstuffing 400-pound women with cupcakes and then fucking them while crumbs tumbled out of their mouths. The saner part of me knew all the men couldn’t all be that bad. But “not that bad” still included used car salesmen, my seventh-grade social studies teacher Don who routinely brushed against our training bra-ed boobs, and the man I met in a Texas bar who within minutes of our acquaintance guided my hand down to his cock without ever changing his facial expression. On the other hand, I couldn’t help wanting to experience a club where people wouldn’t look at my fat in disgust, or even worse, completely ignore my existence.
So on a cold Saturday night, Jodi and I drove to Lower Manhattan, climbed the steep stairs of a nightclub on wobbly high heels and paid our $20 at a small make-shift box office table. The woman who took our cash was in a bra and she weighed 300 pounds. Before I poked my head around the wall that guarded that club, I had never seen anything like I was about to see. There in the dark, shadowy rooms I saw fat girls roaming. Curvy size 24s. Four-hundred-pounders in sequined nightwear, who needed canes to walk. Size-12 tweeners in tight jeans and cute boots. Flowing, curly hair. Short, bleached crew cuts. White. Black, Latina. One nation under a layer of fat. And there were random men scattered about in corners. Some were young and strong and fine. One was old and blind and wearing a bright red suit. One that I talked to really was a used car salesman on Route 9 in New Jersey. Who were these men? Did their friends know where they were? Were these women happy? Would they be going to the diner for a 5 a.m. breakfast or to the Sunday noon Weight Watchers meeting on the Upper West Side?
When Jodi saw the heavy female-to-male ratio, she couldn’t hold back.
“These men can have anyone they want. These girls are desperate.”
It felt like a punch in the stomach. I didn’t want these men to think they could control me because I was fat and desperate. I wanted choice and freedom and respect. After all, isn’t that why hundreds of thousands of Russians cram their families into tiny Brighton Beach apartments – for freedom and respect? Were we fat girls choice-deprived as if we lived in an anti-fat dictatorship?
In my life I had been lucky enough to attract good men. But I had also spent the better part of my alone time alone worried that I would never get a man, and planning a fabulous, but unaccompanied life. And I remember thinking that the connection I finally found with my husband was like good nutrition because I no longer had to dress up my rolls and trot my fat self out into a hateful world alone. Instead I could investigate stories for newspapers, teach college students and raise children.
So in response to Jodi’s fears I felt defensive of the girls in there. These large and feisty creatures were in a Manhattan nightclub dressed fabulously. They had cleavage. They had Lane Bryant’s finest. They had knee-high boots. And they were dancing their fat asses off. They didn’t seem desperate at all.
“but they all have on the same outfit,” said Jodi, who has ranged from thin to minimally chunky in her life.
“They only have three shops to buy clothes from, and they all look the same,” I had to admit.
I hadn’t noticed that the majority of women there had on wrap shirts –that hide your belly and boost your boobs. I have one myself. Actually four: Three wrap tanks and one black sweater. Jodi didn’t want to be desperate for her clothes or her men. Her feelings were valid. I left the party confused and unable to make sense of my experience there.
It all finally came together for me about a month later. Sometime in November an acquaintance of mine decided he had a crush on me. This shocked me partially because I had been feeling like a tired and haggard mom since my second child had been born. But it stunned me more because this man was the kind of hot that stops women in their tracks in the street.
I started to get curious about him -- not because I was interested. After all, my husband still wanted to do me after watching two babies get yanked surgically out of my belly. I wanted to know why this hot man wanted me. So I asked around. Did this guy have a history of dating fat girls? Was he some sort of fetishist? Did he have insecurity issues? Was he looking for a Mama? Did he secretly watch Karate movies and eat dry Capn’ Crunch all day on Sunday thinking that he wasn't good enough to be skating through Central Park with all the other beautiful New Yorkers? I needed to know because even after have ten years of a successful marriage and two fabulous children, the little fat girl in me needed to define my self worth in the dating world.
Upon asking around about my admirer, I learned that he dated skinny girls, most of whom he had met at the gym. Did I mention he is a personal trainer? No I swear this isn’t some weird fantasy. I got the information about my admirer from a friend of mine who went to high school with him and called everyone she knew to learn more. She called me on my cell while I was on my bicycle. “I can’t find anything wrong or abnormal about him,” she said. “I have checked in on everyone he knows and there is no weird past – although, clearly there is a problem with a man who hits on a married chick.” Good point.
That night, I had a nightmare about admirer. I wasn’t married and I was alone in a room with him. Our eyes locked and his neck smelled sweet. He was leaning in for a Danielle Steele style kiss when it clicked in my mind that I would have to strip in a minute. My mind raced through images of my bottom belly roll and the two rebellious pockets of fat that despite years of spin class still sit right at the top of my inner thighs just below my vagina. My heart was beating so hard it actually woke me up. As soon as my eyes opened I could feel Bruce breathing easily next to me. His warm little breath bursts felt like a sweet little heater on my neck. I laid there in the bed anxious and daydreaming. I had a sick image of admirer three years into our romantic relationship. We’re at a family Chanukah party and he is shooting me a hostile face to let me know I should NOT take another latke from the plate. He asks me on the way home how many times I have worked out that week, and he is not satisfied with my answer. Mid-fantansy I realize that in reality this man has fallen for me despite my weight. I guess my shining personality and brazenly stylish fat-girl clothes have done the trick. I also suspect he has had Svengali images of molding me into a thinner woman with my bold, big-girl personality. That personality would be the fabulous sense of wit many fat chicks develop to be the smartest and funniest in a room full of skinny folk. In my fantasy with admirer, I diet my rolls away for him, but that other me disappears with them and I am stuck with the sense of humor of a corpse and a mediocre body. Later my obit explains how I died in a steely and bright operating room mid-gastric bypass -- my asthma had taken over my lungs.
Suddenly the idea of a man who searched BBW parties specifically for fat girls didn’t seem so bad. Hadn’t I fallen in love with Bruce because I felt our bodies matched in bed? We had first connected during a student rally against Persian Gulf War Part 1. He was one of the rally’s leaders and I was a reporter for the campus newspaper. We talked for hours, and our intellects had fallen in love long before our hearts did. Just days into our friendship Bruce told me about his wicked crush on his 9th grade teacher Ms. Phillips. “She had the widest hips you have ever seen and an ass that stuck out like a fucking basketball,” he had said. He loved even more that this voluptuous body had been topped by a “school marmish” hairstyle and “the biggest bifocals you could ever imagine.” We were walking through the park, stomping through swampy puddles, and I remember thinking this was code for “I like ‘em big and freakin’ smart.” I had found my man.
Later his mother who showed me a picture of their family matriarchs – Bruce’s great grandmother and her three sisters sitting at a picnic table. I mentally dubbed them Bullet Betties because at least three of them looked as if they were hiding a wad of cash and possibly other hardware under their Double Ds. I thought about the Betties right before I walked down the aisle at my wedding. I was 316 pounds and Bruce stood next to the rabbi beaming at me as if I were the most beautiful woman in the world.
When I finally awoke from my nightmare about admirer, I realized I could never be loathsome of BBW parties again. Shouldn’t fat girls have a place to go where the men that hit on them are not settling, but getting exactly what they bargained for? And if some of the men there were like DJ Scorpio, couldn’t others be like Bruce – or even somewhere in between? Wasn’t it possible to walk in like DJ Scorpio and walk out with a woman who you genuinely cared about? And isn’t it true that skinny girls pick up manipulative buttholes at clubs too? The answer to BBW parties is caution. It’s like I tell my 7-year-old: “There are psychos and sweethearts on the playground. It’s your job to learn who’s who.” That goes for all of us.

Oprah makes me eat. Obviously she doesn’t come into my house and force me to unwrap my kid’s Halloween candy – ramming down Mounds mini after Snickers snack-sized. But some of her shows actually make me feel worse about fatness – and that makes me eat. This week, she had an updates show. Those shows are the evil cousins of the sitcom memory shows. In sitcom land the writers make the Cunninghams reminisce over every Aaaayyy the Fonz ever groaned. In TV journalism, it’s when producers reach back into old ratings-draw stories because they can’t think of shit-else to cover.
This week, one of the updates was about a girl who had been 300 pounds and had come on Oprah with her father, who at the time admitted that while he loved his daughter, he was deeply ashamed of her weight.
“So if your daughter never loses a pound, and maybe even gains ten, would she ever be good enough for you?” Oprah asked.
“No,” he answered.
Then the girl, wrapped in shame, admitted how angry she was at her father. And though she resisted tears, they rolled violently down her well-rouged, fat cheeks. The Oprah producers were good planners. They chose the perfect “You’d-be-so-beautiful-if …” girl. Those are the fatgirls with the stunning faces that people like to remind how fabulous they could be if only they weren’t whales.
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what happens next.
We switch from the old clip to Oprah sitting in her studio now.
“It’s been a-year-and-a-half seen we’ve met Fatgirl and her father Asshole. Since then, Fatgirl has made the very brave decision to undergo gastric bypass surgery. LET’S SEE FATGIIIIIRRRRRL!” Oprah does her signature, rolling intro. Out comes Fatgirl in her new skinny body, blonde hair bouncing and, quite frankly, an infinitely more confident gait. She is powerful. And her face looks like its been chiseled out of a wall of flesh. In fact, her features are nothing like they were.
“Now how much weight have you lost?” Oprah asks.
“I’ve lost about 170 pounds,” Fatgirl answers proudly.
“And what made you decide to do it?” Oprah continues.
Uh, hello, maybe because I couldn’t take the disgrace and pain of being abandoned by my own blood. Nope, that’s not what Fatgirl says at all.
“I just knew I had to do it for health reasons,” she says looking deeply into Oprah’s eyes.
Liar!
“And are you still angry at your dad?” Oprah asks.
“No, not at all,” Fatgirl says looking sympathetically at her Dad in the audience. “I understand that he was worried about my health.”
Now girl, please. Let’s recap. This is an update show after all. What he said was he thought you were an embarrassing fat cow and that he didn’t think you would ever be good enough for him. Now what does that have to do with your cardiovascular system?
Next Fatgirl goes on to tell us how much better her life is now.
“You have no idea how differently people treat you when you are fat,” she says. “People are horrible to fat people.”
“It’s true,” Oprah says. “It even happens when you’re known like me. People treated me totally differently.”
And now I am thinking about the time I carried my 250-pound, post-partum ass into a job interview for a health magazine. I had on a fabulous Lauren suit and my eyebrows were perfectly arched. I met the woman at a health food restaurant in Stamford, Connecticut for lunch. We had had three long conversations on the phone (I had been out of the TriState area). Out conversations has ranged well past editing skills and right into pregnancy experiences and our shared love for Reiki. When I walked in for the 2:30 p.m. lunch, there was no one in else in the place except her sitting at a table in the cozy, wooded room. She actually looked right past me. She knew it couldn’t be me. And when it became clear that it was me, she gave me a half-smile and looked at her watch. I didn’t get the job after our 25-minute lunch. I did however harass her ass until she hired me as a freelancer.
Oprah ends her conversation with the girl by admitting that discrimination against fat people is that “last accepted ‘ism” and that the girl should be so proud of herself.
I conclude from the conversation that instead of changing that “last accepted ‘ism”, we should all get gastric bypass and move on with our lives – except for the one in 200 of us who will die from it. My friend’s cousin Joan, who died swollen and septic in an ICU room not long after gastric bypass surgery is spinning in her grave now.

On very last minute deadline for a grueling business/technology article that pays a buck a word, I decide it is more crucial to move my car to a good spot for the next day than to write. I hop on bike to get to my car (only in NYC). A mile later, I lock my bike to a fence, race into my 11 year old Acura and just when I am about to pull out and beat the 5 p.m. rush, there's a CLANK, CLANK, CLANK on my passenger-side window. I look over to see this guy who looks like that cop on Hill Street Blues who bites perps staring into my window. He is whirling his finger round and round to get me to open the window. Yeah, right.
"What?" I scream, raising my shoulders old-Jewish-grandaddy style. No window opening.
"I have a question," he screams. Those Acuras really are solid. I can barely hear him.
"Go the f%#ck ahead," I shout back.
He starts whirling his finger around again. I didn't need Annie Sullivan the first time to get that he wanted me to open the window. I buzz it down a quarter inch.
"What?" Now I would rather be writing about tracking customer trends on the Internet.
"I'm shooting this video. I live in this building right here." He points behind him to what could be the last broken down building left on the Upper West Side.
"Now I get it," I am thinking. The rolled up woollen hat, the dingy, gray pants-coat with the pushed up sleeves. He's doing some late '80s/early '90s period piece and he wants to use my decrepit car as a prop.
"It's a Victoria Secret video," he shouts. "And we need a perfect size 14."
I start laughing. "I hate to tell you buddy, but size 20 is NOT the new 14, and I gotta go." I am rolling up the window when he forces his stubby finger in at the top.
"No it's you, you'd be perfect," he says.
Now he's manhandling my car.
"What do you think, this is some fucking After School Special and I'm going to follow you into your nasty apartment to get my big break?"
I am picturing me in my 4 o'clock ABC movie. I am the fat, sorta pimply teenager who just wants a boyfriend. Hell, I'll even settle for a real friend. I follow him into his dark, dirty apartment with the long, pale white hallway that leads to a bare room in the back. I lean against a stool and he takes up his camera: "Beautiful." He takes a few shots and then, "Baby, take off your shirt. Really, it's ok." And because I can't make it on the cheerleading squad, I do. I have a copy of "Go Ask Alice" in my back pocket.

I roll my eyes at the guy.
"I'm not interested."
"How do you know?" He's quick.
"I have two kids to pick up, I haven't bought Halloween costumes yet, and I have a very exciting article about why Wachovia Bank customers tend to visit the BMW site often. Can you get off my car now?"
"Oh, sorry," he grumbles, and backs off.
Musta been the Halloween costumes that freaked him out.

I quickly find a spot on the correct side of the street, and I can't seem to make my way out of the car. I am stuck remembering being 15 years, drifting down Broadway near 72nd Street on a cold, rainy night. I am shoving M&Ms in my mouth by the handful. My mother is at home breaking up with my other mother. My mom has found out she is sick and my sister is helping her apply for welfare. I don't know exactly where I am going, I am just walking and looking at all the Columbia U folks in their perfectly fitting Levis. I want a pair, but I'm already too big for regular sizes. I stop on the corner and some older hippie chick in a Guatemalan sweater comes up to me.
"Where are you going?" she asks, tilting her head like Bambi.
"I don't know. Just walking around."
"I am having a party upstairs. Do you want to come?"
"Ok." It looks like I could kick her ass pretty easily.
She shoves a flier in my hand. It spells out phonetically "Nam-myoho-renge-kyo" several times in a row. I get up to this Upper West Side apartment where there are all these unfulfilled actors sitting around in various rooms chanting. There are altars in each room. Some 40-year-old chick with hair dyed the color of orange saddle leather is telling me that she doesn't have to worry anymore because chanting lets her know that the universe will bring her what she needs. She even got a spot in a commercial this week. She tells me she is newly pregnant and the father is a fire chief who has a full family in the Bronx. She will raise her son alone in a room she rents on the Upper West Side. Wow. I want to pay her child support ... or give her an abortion myself.

Forty minutes of daydreaming later, I'mm still in my car, and I call my sister to tell her about my brush with plus-size porn fame.
"My God, how much of a lost soul do you look like today?" she asks.
"I don't know. I guess very," I answer, leaning my head against my car window and stuffing another handful of pretzels in my mouth.