Woe is Me

60 lbs. This game is relationship building; sweating, then making love on her days off. It seems I turn a corner but

Use Me

after she finds out I cheat on her - after we sign a lease on an apartment - she stabs me. Getting stabbed is probably the only time being fat is a good thing, the knife incising an inch into my back, making me bleed like a brown pig but not at all life threatening.

I call it a flesh wound, but really it is the first time our love is tested. I lie to the police and tell them I “fell,” on my knife. Something every man who cheats should consider.

What actually happens is, even though she feels obliged to give me a second chance and, even though I feel obliged to make amends and treat her right, I will go back on the pizza diet, back on the super burrito regimen and stop using the gym.

If she agrees to keep with me then she will suffer my appetite, a ravenous habit born of psych meds and poor impulses, causing me to involuntarily shut off my “off switch,” always hungry, needing to be full. The weight comes back like a bad relative, wraping around my waist, stuck around my neck. She often thinks back to how I lost all those useless inches, thinking that it was my way to make her love me.

See what I can give up, half of me!

Now when I am eating out I am eating out and eating her cooking. “Are you hungry?” She asks. Me, not wanting to miss out on her good food, always able. But now I am eating double. Lying to not abandon a good meal, but too damned piggy to not wait for it in the first place.

One time after she goes to sleep I buy Taco Bell. I am eating cheap tacos in front of my computer. But when she comes out of the room I quickly throw the food under my desk, hard-shells tumble aleaf with shredded lettuce in the corner of her eye. In her kind way she laughs about my behavior, probably because when she was a kid she was fat and, would save her allowance to buy pizza, chicken strips and treats when no one was looking.

But now that I am found out, she comes up with a solution to deal with my food doubt.

My food drought goes on for weeks. I am so hurt and pissed off I make a triptych, three painted panels of bleeding ovens drowning in a vast sea. It isn’t funny to her.

2. She cultivates an organic garden: heirloom tomatoes, broccoli, lemon cucumbers, zucchini, squash. Our back yard smells like a salad bar, but my palate is pepperoni.

I do my part digging holes, hoeing dirt, watering the fruit and vegetable babies and keeping the dog out of the crop. So many wonderfull meals are culled from our urban market, she like an alchemist, turning prickly earth-meal into delicious dinners I am too stubborn or, deserving, to enjoy.

“I am not cooking for you anymore.” She tells me with conviction.

“I’ll go on a diet,” I lie to her and myself.

My diet is made of granola bars and cereal. Not healthy at all. I have not even brought myself to cut an avocado, eat a carrot or drink more than two glasses of water in a day. Her food contains the only veggies I allow myself and without them, without her tender-judgy tone and seemingly vicious criticism, what will become of me?

Fuck, now I’ll never choke down a spicy salad!

3. She prepares food for the children with love. Carefully trimming unwanted crust, removing the pitch from the orange, the seed from the sweet body, each item on their plate is painstakingkly curated. Like a bastard toddler I can’t help but to be jealous of her service, the unwavering love.

I remember how my mom usedto cut my father’s meat. This is an act that infantilizes him in my mind. And I am in no way wanting to be babied, but I work long hours, I make her dentist appointments and sometimes I need my fucking fruit cut like a child. Me, the knuckle dragging bafoon, too damn brut to not grotesquely, ravage an orange peel.

My food insecurities are born out of habit but also design. My siblings and I fight over the last Dairy Queen, Dilly Bar; Mom makes a game out of it.

“Whomever is the first to eat all their broccoli gets the ice cream.”

We hesitate but force bites down our throat, my step-sister gorges on over-cooked vegetables, her mouth a receptacle. By the time the contest is over, she has puked green slime all over the kitchen walls, wretched and foul. She retires with the last ice cream and, we learn that vomit is a fundamental part of “good,” health.

4. Why can’t I just be bulimic?

I quip to myself. Pizza, tacos, fried rice, cinnamon rolls; they don’t just go down, they come back. It might solve some of my problems. True, I would have a new problem on my hands but at least I wouldn’t be fat, I’d be invested.

In a baking frenzy: 3 dozen chocolate chip, gingerbread cookies; I eat 14. They are probably the best, most spicy confection I make. Later that night I have a few shots of Vodka. I’ve put it to myself to enjoy as much of the simple pleasures as possible. Like a child the night before a dentist appointment, I go to bed quite weary. My bad food habits and doses of Vodka are brutal on the rebound.

The next morning I wake to the most painful vomit fit I’ve ever known. Slobbery, violent, earned.

5. Cookies aside, I’ve been throwing-up alot lately. Good food, bad food, anything mixed with too much spirit has got me in a rough way. I take all of the up-chuck, all of the fast food neurosis and erect a monument to my wretching, vile, sorrow. This 17 foot painitng, ripe and rainbow, expresses me vomiting behind an oven in a hoard of fast food trappings, organic garden in the background, hand of God dragging fingers in the soil.

I mount the painting at my Advancement to Candidacy Exhibit, Dinner Theatre, at Sacramento State University. I don’t tell my cohort, who are enraptured with the allure of spectacle and Abstraction’s commodity, that my work is not a fantasy, not a cartoon. I have lived the life of the sitter, encraoched by my own refuse, pained by my own troubled way of eating my problems. And it hurts.

6. She wants me to change, to find a way out of my urge, a way out of the gutter. She offers a hand, cooks a vegan meal, a vegetarian meal, Soyrizo tacos so good they’d be unrecognizable as tacos.

You want a salad? She offers.

Spicy onion, juicy tomatoes, cucumber, hardboiled egg, orange, red and yellow sweet peppers, crunchy crutons, nutty sunflower seeds and creamy ranch dressing. Her plate is heavenly, spiritual, elongating.

I eat the food she prepares like it is a last meal, scraping the plate. I want to be the man who cut his weight when we first dated, lost his superfluous gearth like a Samurai cuts away the fat to save the lean.

I do not acquiesce. I do not quit. I am learning and still growing. But not in the way socks and underpants stretch when you are over-weight. In the way a sensitive man can grow from learning a better way to be whole. A way not too hard but, not exactly easy when your hunger is alive, wild and recalcitrant.

I’m Not Cooking For You Anymore, triptych (digital from painting), on watercolor paper, painting), acrylic, solid marker, cel vinyl, charcoal, spray paint

120 x 72 inches, 2014

Can I go down on you?