The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead

with all the answers and explanations, the well-informed benchwarmer who knew how zones were supposed to work but had nothing to contribute on the floor himself. To my father’s deep disappointment, I not only was not going to become a professional athlete; I was becoming, as he had been on and off throughout his life and always quite happily, a sportswriter. Listen to this trip-down-memory-lane piece he wrote a few years ago for his local paper:

Seventy-five years ago I was on the staff of the Thomas Jefferson High School newspaper, Liberty Bell, writing my slightly less than deathless prose about the school’s athletic teams and activities. Our baseball and football teams were perpetual losers; they made a science of the art of losing. But our basketball teams were something else; twice they won the borough championship and, in my senior year, they were in the city finals.

We played Evander Childs, a school in the Bronx, for the New York City title. The final score of that game was 27–26. That’s right, 27–26. In 1928 and for a dozen more years, there was no 45-second rule when you had the ball; there was a center jump after each made field goal; and the two-handed set shot was the only shot players took.

We lost that game in the final seconds when George Gregory, Evander Childs’ All-City center, slapped the ball backwards into the basket on a jump ball from eight feet away. I cursed and sobbed, by turn, for the entire hour-long subway ride home. I continued the “I-won’t-or-can’t-believe-what-happened” tone the next day when reporting to my buddies on the block.

Other times, other values.

I make sure to visit my father in the spring so he and I can watch the NBA playoffs together. He’s a huge fan of guys who try to do it all on their own—Kobe Bryant, Allen Iverson. Solo acts. At the same time, and completely contradictorily, he tsk-tsks over every bad pass, every example of matador defense, compares every team’s esprit de corps—or lack thereof—to the 1970 New York Knicks. He lives for the body in motion.

Dying Just a Little

Whereas many boys want to be superheroes who dominate the world, anorexic girls retreat from the world and sexuality. Adolescent boys are trying to become strong and aggressive, but anorexic girls are trying to become weak and fragile. Anorexia, the feminine flip side to masculine violence and heroic fantasy, comes directly from pubescent peer pressure. Teenage girls develop anorexia in specific response to sex changes. Girls become anorexic because they’re trying to meet a cultural ideal of extreme thinness and/or desexualize themselves. They don’t want to develop hips and breasts, and they’re afraid of their bodies getting fat. The anorexic girl, wasted, tired, not menstruating, her secondary sexual characteristics slowed by poor nutrition, thus delays her entry into adulthood.

A superstition among “primitive” peoples: if a woman touches a cadaver, she’ll stop menstruating.

Ninety percent of anorexics are female. Seventy percent of women say that looking at models in fashion magazines causes them to feel depressed, guilty, and shameful. Ninety-five percent of people who enroll in formal weight-reduction programs are women. Ninety-eight percent of women gain back the weight they lose by dieting. Women regard themselves as fat if they’re 15 pounds overweight; men don’t think of themselves as fat unless they’re 35 pounds above the U.S. average. My father has always been girlishly proud of his quite thin waist; the first thing he comments upon whenever he sees me is whether I’ve lost or gained weight. His most rapturous praise: “You’re slender as a reed.” Eighty percent of people who have part of their small intestines removed in order to help themselves lose weight are women. Fifty-five percent of adolescent girls believe they’re overweight; only 13 percent of adolescent girls are actually overweight. Anorexia has the highest fatality rate of any psychiatric illness. Eleven percent of Americans would abort a fetus if they were told it had a tendency toward obesity. When asked to identify good-looking individuals, 5-year-olds invariably select pictures of thin people. Elementary school children have more negative attitudes toward the obese than toward bullies, the disabled, or children of another race. Teachers routinely underestimate the intelligence of fat kids and overestimate the intelligence of slender kids. Corpulent students are less likely to be granted scholarships. Anorexics often grow lanugo, which is soft, woolly body hair that grows to compensate for the loss of fat cells so the body can hold in heat. Anorexics have many of the physical symptoms of starvation: their bellies are distended, their hair is dull and brittle, their periods stop, they’re weak, and they’re vulnerable to infections. They also have the psychological characteristics of the starving: they’re depressed, irritable, pessimistic, apathetic, and preoccupied with food. They dream of feasts.

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Girls and women quoted in Kim Chernin’s The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness:

“I’ve heard about that illness, anorexia nervosa, and I keep looking around for someone who has it. I want to go sit next to her. I think to myself, maybe I’ll catch it.”

“One of my cousins used to throw food under the table when no one was looking. Finally, she got so thin they had to take her to the hospital. I always admired her.”

“I’m embarrassed to have bulimia. It’s such a preppy disease.”

“I don’t care how long it takes. One day I’m going to get my body to obey me. I’m going to make it lean and tight and hard. I’ll succeed in this, even if it kills me.”

“To have control over your body becomes an extreme accomplishment. You make of your body your very own kingdom where you are the tyrant, the absolute dictator.”

“Look, see how thin I am, even thinner than you wanted me to be. You can’t make me eat more. I am in control of my fate, even if my fate is starving.”

“I get lots of compliments. My friends are jealous, but I’ve made new friends. Guys who never considered me before have been asking me out.”

“I hate to say this, but I’d rather binge than make out.”

“In all the years I’ve been a therapist, I’ve yet to meet one girl who likes her body.”

I was in my mid-20s. Before taking off her clothes, she said she needed to tell me something: she had herpes. Madly in love with her witchy bitchiness, I found occasional enforced celibacy insanely erotic, the way a chastity belt glamorizes what it locks out. We wound up living together, and as we fell out of love with each other, her herpes became a debate point between us. She suggested that we just get married and then if I got it, I got it, and who would care? I suggested she at least explore some of the possibilities of which modern medicine availed us.

For a multitude of reasons, the two of us didn’t belong together, but what interests me now is what, for lack of a better term, a free-floating signifier the virus was. When I was in love with her, it eroticized her. When I wasn’t, it repelled me. The body has no meanings. We bring meanings to it.

As psychologist Nancy Etcoff says, in Survival of the Prettiest, “In a context where only a king can control enough food resources and labor supply to eat enough and do no physical labor so that he becomes fat, prestige is conferred by signs of abundance. A thin person is a person too poor to afford the calories, and maybe one who does so much physical labor that she cannot keep weight on. When poor women are fat (because junk food is so cheap and available, and they are less educated about its hazards and unable to afford expensive healthy foods), then it’s in to be thin and dietary restraint and physical exercise become prestigious.”

“I can’t stand fat women,” a thin woman says in The Obsession. “If one of them has been sitting on a chair in a coffee shop, or on the bus, and there’s no other place to sit, I won’t go in there or sit in that place.”

“It’s like watching a death’s head,” another woman says about a fat woman at the market. “The co-op ought to pay her to get out of here. Who can go home to a good dinner with that in mind?”

My father’s term of derision for big-bellied men: “watermelon smugglers.”

Laurie and I stage monthly dieting competitions, though neither of us is overweight. “Want a second helping?” “I made some banana bread for you.” What’s going on here? We’re each saying: you’re beautiful; I, though, am wanting; I will do anything for love.

Fasting frees one from carnal needs and desires, prepares one for visions and trances. Moses fasted 40 days