FAT
CHANCE (May 1999)
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BY
PETER KURTH
Eek! Just 226 days to go before
the big Zero, Zero, Zero, and the only thing I’ve stocked up on so far is body fat. I’ve been sitting at my desk since January 1
writing a book. When I’m not writing, I’m eating, so you can imagine -- well,
you can imagine. I think this is what they mean when they say "rubber
tire."
Thankfully,
owing to my no-longer-invariably-fatal-chronic-manageable-illness and the
gallons of rarefied rat poison I ingest every day to keep HIV in check, I’m
entitled to say that my spreading middle is "protease paunch," a
side-effect of medication, in which abnormal fat deposits collect around what
everyone is pleased to call my "gut." Protease paunch is the same as
"Crix belly," Crix
being short for the protease inhibitor Crixivan,
which I’m sure ought to have one of those ® marks after it. But they can go
ahead and sue me.
Merck,
the maker of Crixivan, enjoyed an 18.9 percent rise
in profits in 1997, the last year for which figures are available, for a total
of $26.3 billion dollars. God knows how many others have needed the junk since
then, but the cost of not dying hasn’t fallen any. The drug companies insist
that they can’t lower the price of AIDS -- or any -- medications, because it
would interfere with "research and development." But they've never
developed a thing without a federal subsidy. The
My
cholesterol count has gone screwy, too, another insidious effect of the wonder
drugs. Having been instructed for ten years to eat anything and everything with
fat in it in order to avoid wasting away to nothing, I’m now told to eat
lettuce with lemon juice and, if I like, a delicious carrot or two at bedtime.
"You don’t want to drop dead of a heart attack after all this time,"
the doctors say.
Very funny. I should only be grateful I don’t have
"buffalo hump," where the fat gathers in a blob between the shoulder
blades quicker than you can say Quasimodo. I’m vain, but I’m not ready for
liposuction.
Anyhow,
to make a thin story fatter, I jump about three feet in the air every time I
see my naked image in the mirror. You can make whatever jokes you want about
this -- I can only assure you it wasn’t always the case. My partner, knowing
the screeching torture of boredom that awaits him down the road, nevertheless
has started "working out" again. He forbids me to specify or even
generalize about his body, but admits to being annoyed by the "unnecessary
buffness" he sees at the gym. Good children of
human services, we both agree that we have some body-image work to do. We also
have some deep-shame issues standing in the way of our spiritual growth, but
they can’t be resolved without help from Glinda, the
Witch of the North. And you girls have got to understand that.
Forgive
my frivolity, but I’ve just spent a three-day weekend at the Hilton hotel in
Crystal City, Va., an indescribable warren of cul-de-sacs and concrete bunkers
outside Washington that looks like a transplanted Twilight Zone set and
serves as an upscale shopping and convention center for the recently renamed –
can you stand it? --
At
Reagan National, the new US Airways terminal is an oppressive, mock-millennial
calamity in puke-yellow steel, where you can buy a blueberry muffin for $6.95
before having your knees rammed up to your chin in a roaring sweatbox for as
many hours as it takes to shovel you home. For this you get a handful of
peanuts. On Sunday, the first class passengers were complaining that there
wasn’t any room in the cabin to hang their furs, while the rest of us would
have been more comfortable in the overhead bins. They wouldn’t let me on the
plane at all until I gave them my "office number."
"I’m
self-employed," I said.
"But
we need a business phone."
"That
is my business phone."
Finally,
I gave them the number for the switchboard operator at
In
the meantime, I don’t want to hear another word about Kosovo until the airlines
install bathrooms you can stand up in.
Tasteless? I’m so sorry. Fat deposits must have
collected on my brain, but here, at least, I’m not alone.
"No
people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election
on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument
[of] the Incorporated National Will. ... When our dictator turns up you can
depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything
traditionally American. And nobody will ever say `Heil' to him, nor will they
call him `Führer' or `Duce.' But they will greet him with one great big,
universal, democratic, sheeplike bleat of `O.K., Chief! Fix it like you wanna,
Chief! Oh Kaaaay!'" -- Dorothy Thompson,
1935