Terror Stalks the Fat Farm

Nothing in the appearance of the manor alarmed me. A large former estate on the banks of the Hudson. But I had entered too many institutions not to experience a tremor of irrational dread. True, I was signing myself in. More, I was paying for the privilege. But I have known those who committed themselves to Bellevue and, having met some real crazies and reassessed their own sanity, were not allowed to leave.

The main lounge was Hogarthian--a half circle of enormous women, many in their night clothes, staring sullenly at a small television set where As the World Turns was cranking dismally. I had somehow stumbled into a herd of ruminating hippos temporarily mesmerized by the flickering gray light. Several looked up at me briefly, then turned away with apparent indifference. Later, I understood their apathy, but at the time I was puzzled.

In the office, a bulletin board was posted with the schedule of every movie theater in a 20-mile radius and a hand-lettered sign advertising the Samadhi Boutique. Samadhi is the ecstasy finally achieved after years of yogic discipline, and the name seemed about as appropriate and tasteful as the Blessed Sacrament Discount Store. A girl with Fifties lacquered hair told me to settle into my room; the doctor would be by to see me presently.

I was assigned outside the main building in an addition obviously built from the plans for a small motel. My room didn't fail the comparison. Unit-construction furniture, two single beds and two small gray Utrillo reproductions. I later learned the same two paintings hung in every room. I put my clothes away and lay down to stare at the ceiling. Here I was. An essentially uxorious and home-loving man who had sentenced himself to two weeks in this plastic cell.

• • •

I had talked to the doctor on the phone--first to determine the exact regimen he practiced and then to make my reservation. I had him sketched as a cool and remote man and this rendering pleased me. I was drowning in my own fat and in sore need of discipline. I had once spent some time in San Quentin and I have always blamed this experience for my heightened sensitivity to food. I entered jail as a slender young meso-morph and I remained slender through those years because an important part of the corrective misery is the punitive dullness of the food. It will maintain life, but it's less than a joy to eat. Prisoners, like vegetarian Hindus, don't so much dine as refuel. And I refueled for many years.

Dick Gregory has remarked, in another context, that for those with size-eight feet who have been forced to wear size-seven shoes, there quickly comes a time when nothing but size nine will do. I left prison with the beginning of a writing career, some money I had already earned for my first novel and a clamoring size-nine appetite to support. I began to eat and drink and carry on like Babe Ruth trying to play Henry the Eighth. In a few years I larded on 70 pounds. My waist exploded from 28 to 42. I learned to answer to Fatso. The missionary position was out. If I wanted to check my dork, I had to stand on a mirror. In my heart I was still a slender young man, but the light step of youth had become--too soon!--the dull plodding of instant middle age.

So I entered the era of the Great Diet--if I wasn't on one, I was telling myself that I should be. I leaped at every fad and worshiped each new prophet who rose in the nutritional East. But nothing is duller than dieting, and in this time of permissive promise, it reeks of old-fashioned self-denial. The so-called Mayo Clinic Diet (mostly grapefruit and spinach) would have warmed the chilly heart of John Calvin. Further, only the chronic dieter becomes fully aware of the concern most people lavish on food. Friends seldom meet without eating or drinking together, and business is frequently managed over lunch. The day is ordered and highlighted by meals. The way to bed is graced with a snack.

The dieter's day is as trackless and dull as the Sahara. And still your life revolves around food, if only the food you haven't eaten, and you go to bed wondering if you'll ever again be able to eat all you want. This is the critical time. Many a perfect diet day is murdered in the 11th hour when you wander, in an agony of boredom, through the kitchen and find yourself tearing apart the refrigerator. Or on the way home from the movies, where you have virtuously denied yourself popcorn, you find yourself helplessly lured off course by that treacherous beacon that floats above the Colonel Sanders' Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises or that painted fiend that bobs above the Jack-in-the-Box take-out stands.

An innocent walk on city streets leads past pizza parlors, hamburger stands and hot-dog carts. If you stop at your neighborhood bar to throw darts and talk with friends, a chaste glass of seltzer or a comparatively innocent white wine leads to a reckless double Scotch, which explodes in your empty and shrinking stomach and hours later, wavering on the edge of oblivion, you find yourself up to your elbows in a plate of barbecued ribs.

Dieters are bores and their failures are comic, even to me, but it remains amusing only as long as you can ignore the fat steadily building in your arteries, while your only brain cells, starved for blood, flicker out like stars going nova. Then a once-excellent memory begins to develop curious lapses, like you suddenly can't remember your dog's name, and new information pours through without leaving a trace. And your doctor tells you your blood pressure is creeping up while your life expectancy is edging down. Vanity and comfort become distinctly secondary considerations.

• • •

At this critical point, I began to remember those times in my life when I had always lost weight. Whenever I was thrown into a county jail. In weeks I would drop 20 or 30 pounds, because the food is so vile not even the most abject wino is able to eat it. Clearly, I couldn't break into a county jail, not even for the therapy, because they have a curious habit, once they've got you, of not letting go. So I began to cast around for some civilian equivalent and started considering a stretch at a fat farm. Here--delicious irony!--I would pay to be confined and deprived and only my conscience could act as parole board. I sent away for brochures.

They arrived in a flood. They stressed luxury: glistening swimming pools, P.G.A. golf courses and horseback riding. They spoke of free massage, Jacuzzi whirlpools and sophisticated equipment that conditions you effortlessly while you hang on for the ride. There were dinner dancing, juice bars and before-bed snacks. There was no mention of regimen. Instead, they promised haute cuisine with between-meals "perk-me-ups."

In all the lavish illustrations, there wasn't a single fatty. Slender, tanned middle-aged men on the tennis courts, handsome couples on the dance floor, a trim blonde in a leotard astride a mechanical horse, young people hand in hand running into the surf. All, apparently, perfect cures.

The hidden offering was clear--a guilt-free vacation. One could go saying that it was to lose weight, trim up and preserve health. What could it matter if, in addition, one had a pleasant and pampered time? But I had the certain feeling that if I were to be paid a dollar for every pound lost in these spas, it would take me years to save the price of an extra-large sweat suit and a jump rope.

I needed iron discipline and grim purpose, a fat farm operated by former Nazis. High walls topped with barbed wire and broken glass and attendants who would take delight in watching me starve. Finally, I contacted a fat farm in Upstate New York. Its ad had seemed austere, if not outright grim.

A brusque and impatient man answered the phone. Yes, they helped people reduce and they guaranteed weight loss between ten and 20 pounds a week. "What diet do you use?" I asked.

"Water."

"Oh, you mean you use the Stillman Water Diet?"

He snorted impatiently. "No, no, we use water. For two or three days, we put you on nothing but water, then we add a few vegetables."

"Oh...."

"There's no meat here. None at all."

"I see."

"And absolutely no smoking."

I considered. His tone seemed to imply contempt for those weak and self-indulgent enough to allow themselves to become fat, a testy and stern saint who had dedicated himself to ridding the world of lard. He wouldn't try to make his clinic seem attractive--if you wanted salvation, here it was, but the way was hard.

Finally, I asked, "Will I be locked in at night?"

There was the slightest pause, as if he were weighing the merits of such a policy, then he said, "No, of course not." But, of course, he wouldn't admit it right out, would he? And even if they weren't (continued on page 200) going to lock me in, I could still hope they might turn me out several times a night and whip me with wet towels.

• • •

Dr. Moss came by just as I was beginning to grow impatient. He knocked and threw the door open before I could answer, and stood smiling, looking me over with mild interest. My image of a stern Torquemada faded. He was in his middle years, but nothing clued his precise age. Trim, as he would have to be (who could invest confidence in a fat diet doctor?), with light-brown eyes that, while not precisely tired, seemed to convey some quality of fundamental disinterest. Like all doctors and jailers, he was used to examining human wreckage. I was only one more abused and neglected machine in search of a miracle.

He carried a book--a recently issued biography written by a former patient who had described his experience at the manor. "He was going to fast for forty days," Moss told me solemnly. "Christ fasted for forty days and he saw no reason why he couldn't, but we took him off after thirty-seven days."

I tested the incredible weight of 37 days without eating and wanted to ask why the fast had been terminated so short of the goal. But Dr. Moss pushed the book at me, inviting me to look at the photo of the author. I thought I recognized a certain type of desperate middle-aged man who has starved and exercised himself into near emaciation. Was this my own future?

At this moment, Dr. Moss caught sight of a woman walking by my front window. A pleasant-looking girl, dressed for town. Moss stepped quickly to the door and I heard him ask her where she was going. I couldn't hear her reply. "Remember," he warned earnestly. "This is your twenty-first day!"

He sat down on the corner of my bed and looked at me directly for the first time. "You can't trust these women," he said, still holding my eyes, as if certain we could agree on this most fundamental truth. "They're always sneaking around. They're always trying to use people. Even one another. Some of them"--he gestured toward the main house and I immediately saw the fat, unhappy women dozing through The Dating Game--"some of them have been all over the world to different clinics. Nothing helps for long. It becomes a way of life." His eyes shifted away. "Now, you, you've got a chance to effect a permanent change---"

He went into a canned number on fasting and the danger of obesity, and I pictured the globs of fat floating in my blood stream. He skipped with practiced adroitness from one booming generality to another. He didn't offer to examine me. He didn't even weigh me. Twice he asked me if I smoked. Twice I lied and said no. I had fought that battle a year before, but I could hardly say it was won.

Impatiently, I asked, "How long do you expect me to fast?"

He seemed to grow attentive. "How long can you stay?"

"Two weeks."

He sighed. "That's not very long."

"It's all the time I can spare."

"Well, you should fast for five days, eat lightly for two and then fast for at least five more."

I nodded glumly. Moss smiled briefly and stood up. "The girls will see that you have fresh water and make up your room. Take it easy, Malcolm. Spend as much time as you can in bed. You'll lose faster that way."

He opened the door, then turned back. "You don't smoke, do you?"

I affirmed my purity for the third time and thought about how often he must have been deceived by hard-core smokers with several cartons hidden in their luggage. "Don't smoke," he said mournfully and closed the door behind him.

My impression of Moss, formed on the phone, had undergone major revision. Instead of the icy monster I had hopefully imagined. I'd found a bland and distracted man who seemed to run his health manor with the same unsuccessful pretense of authority and competence I had learned to associate with third-rate automobile mechanics. I sighed, as I did with the mechanics, and hoped for the best.

A young girl in a white uniform brought me a pitcher of ice water. I later learned that both of her older sisters had worked here before her and both of them had married patients. I drank a glass of water. Already hungry. I had eaten a light breakfast before leaving home, thinking to steel myself, but a few miles short of the manor I had broken down at a roadside stand and wolfed two garbage-burgers. These would now be my stomach's last evidence that my throat had not been cut.

I paced my room, telling myself how much more comfortable it was than a cell. I stopped in front of the mirror, threw a joke flex and tried to remember how it had been to weigh 160 pounds. I couldn't recapture my own former self with any clarity. Dismayed, I stretched out and fell asleep and dreamed my wife and friends were with me in the room. They were frying potato pancakes.

• • •

Another girl, older and also reassuringly disguised as a nurse, woke me in the morning with a fresh pitcher of water. She wanted to make the bed, but I was naked and unwilling to get up. I said I'd make my own bed, and she stared at me with confusion until I told her I didn't like to be waited on. I don't. Prisoners are too close to servants, and I imagined everyone must hate doing another's humble chores as much as I had.

I felt major hunger, not far from the point where boiling and eating my belt would begin to seem reasonable. Searching for a distraction, I took a shower. Tacked to the back of the bathroom door was a list of rules. The first rule stipulated: No loud talking. Loud noises were intensely irritating to those who were fasting. My confidence waned as I imagined myself gritting my teeth over the ticking of my alarm clock or goaded into a mounting frenzy by the rush of the toilet flushing in the next unit.

The rules were signed Dr. Moss. This was interesting. A small itch was growing in my head. The literature I had received through the mail (and so subject to Federal displeasure with fraud) didn't indicate that Moss was a doctor or, indeed, possessed any higher degree. A paragraph in small print shyly confided that he had attended universities both here and in Europe. Surely a weasel phrase. Perhaps he had taken a few courses in civil engineering or business ad, and perhaps he had only stood briefly in the lobby or stolen a book from the library.

I dressed and looked outside. It was raining. I tried to read. If a character were described as wearing an orange dress, I would flash the fruit, vivid and succulent, and if the weather were described as roasting, my head filled with the smell of beef.

Moss came by and began to tell me about the biography again. I sat through it, nodding, wondering if I should ask him if he were a medical doctor. He went on to drop a few more names. Lady Jean Campbell, Mailer's third wife, had fasted here. Right in the next unit. Pointing out the exact spot on the road to Damascus where Paul had been standing when God zapped him. Pete Hamill, José Torres, Dick Gregory. They had all been here.

As he talked, he took my pulse. He seemed to have difficulty finding it. He asked if I had been under a strain lately. I shook my head, wondering in an immediate chill of dread what disaster was building inside my chest. He grunted and nodded and I knew he was going to play the old doctor game: Keep silent and let me stew. "What's the matter?" I asked automatically.

"Nothing; your pulse isn't strong." He regarded a spot a few inches beside my head. "We go only by the pulse here. I'm sure yours will grow stronger as your fast progresses. Take it easy. Try to stay in bed."

As soon as Moss was gone, I checked my own pulse. It felt like something kicking inside my wrist.

Minutes later, the morning girl brought me a slender paper-bound book titled Therapeutic Fasting. Fasting would cure anything from clap to cancer. This manual was obviously the manor's raison d'être. I checked the bibliography: two pages dense with sober scientific titles, but most of the source works were published before 1925 and a substantial number were issued before the turn of the century. The section on how to break the fast held a note of low comedy--one subject had ended a 40-day fast by eating six boiled potatoes. The potatoes had to be removed surgically.

I knew that fasting was one of the current fads, but few were using it simply for weight control, they were clearing and cleaning the body to free the mind. Some people had told me I would get in touch. I might even get high. I might begin to glow in the dark and float six inches above the ground. But so far I wasn't high. Only very hungry.

When the rain slowed, I went out for a walk. The other units were quiet, drapes drawn, and I imagined the subjects, deep into their fasts and now too weak to get out of bed. The grounds were not cared for, leaves unraked, an empty gazebo in need of paint. I walked up and down the gravel driveway just as I had once walked the exercise yard. I hadn't been alone in a long time and was surprised to discover it made me just as sad and uncertain as it had years before in San Quentin. Something whispered to me that I wouldn't be allowed to leave here until my sentence was over. I kept walking. It's less boring to wander aimlessly than it is to sit still.

The girl Moss had spoken to came out of the room next to mine. Now I could see she was still fat, but she had a nice face. I wanted to ask her what it was like not to eat for 22 days, but when I waved, she smiled perfunctorily and went on. I watched wistfully as she entered the main house. Then I went into my own room to treat myself to a glass of water.

That night I rented a small television set and spent the evening playing viewer's roulette.

I went to bed and, thinking of the girl next door a few feet away, I jerked off, which pulled my head out of my stomach for a few minutes. Sometime that night, I woke up with my mouth so full of saliva it ran down my chin.

• • •

The next day the girl remained elusive, but I made friends with the fellow in the next cell. If I were the man without shoes, he was the man without feet. No more than 5'6" and well over 300 pounds, he was a rubbery ball who--another delicious irony!--was a deputy sheriff assigned as a guard in the county jail. He had grown too fat to buckle on his gun without acute discomfort and the sheriff had told him to either lose weight or lose his job.

Johnny and I walked together, bud-died up as everyone always buddies up in jail, and he described entire meals he had eaten. He could have written copy for Del Monte. He was in the second leg of a 15-day fast and suffering. He sounded like a little boy sent to bed without supper who is hoping his mom will slip into his darkened room with a peanut-butter sandwich and a large glass of cold milk.

Johnny wanted us to watch television together, but I didn't want to talk about food. I once did 60 days on bread and water and my partner in crime and I described every meal we had ever eaten. This can lead to madness. I hadn't eaten now for three days and I didn't seem to be quite as hungry as I had been. Therapeutic Fasting, among the other promised miracles, said the victim would begin to lose appetite after the second or third day. It seemed to be true.

Another symptom put an effective end to any adventure I had hoped to stir up with the girl next door. I was going into ketosis. I couldn't grasp the chemistry, but the metabolism of stored fat apparently produces acetone, which is eliminated in the breath. My tongue tasted like unclean fur and my breath smelled of cat piss. No amount of brushing and gargling helped. I was grounded, but, then, so was she.

• • •

The morning of the fourth day, Moss came in and took my pulse again. He nodded reassuringly and told me, "It's beginning to come through stronger." Something in Moss's smile persistently reminded me of a man who had tried to sell me an expensive watch in the Greyhound bus depot.

But I wasn't hungry. I felt weak, clearheaded and strangely resigned. It was almost as if I had never eaten. I felt about food as I imagine Dean Swift must have felt about sex--except occasionally a brief but intense wave of hunger swept me, much as desire must have sometimes rocked and disturbed Swift.

The girl next door checked out and Irving moved in. Irving was close to 70 and a second-timer here. He wanted to lose 20 pounds so he could gain it back eating his way across Europe. A recidivist, Irving knew enough to bring his own car, and he, Johnny and I went for a ride. It seemed strange to be riding again. Irving talked constantly and in an hour we had most of his story. He had gone through two wives and was now a lonely old man watching television night after night with a stewed chicken for comfort.

Every second business along the road seemed to be a restaurant. Irving pointed out a steakhouse and began to describe the standing rib they served. I was immune, but Johnny groaned and asked, "How do you know that?"

Irving said, "You think no one ever slipped out of that place to sneak a meal?"

"I knew it," Johnny said. "I see those old broads drive out and I know they're eating somewhere."

"Everyone around here knows the fat people come from the manor. They don't say anything."

Johnny said, "Let's stop somewhere for a cup of tea." Irving shook his head. He was just starting. He was strong. "Just a cup of tea," Johnny pleaded. "What could that hurt?"

"No," Irving said. "We can't go in somewhere and just order tea."

"Then maybe we could have a couple of poached eggs."

"They're full of cholesterol," I said.

Johnny looked as if I'd just told him the drinking water was poisoned. "Do you know," I continued, "that gallstones are almost pure cholesterol?" It wasn't something he wanted to know.

We decided to go to a movie that evening and Irving walked with me to the main house to look at the schedules. The fat women apparently hadn't moved in the four days I'd been here. "Do you know what it is with these women?" Irving whispered.

I shook my head.

"Their husbands send them here to get rid of them."

• • •

I spent the afternoon reading magazines. One ad for Foster Parents showed a miserable little boy posed under the lead: Juan lives on 14 cents a day. It was surely one more symptom of our insane world that I was paying over $30 a day to lay around here and drink water.

My wife and several of our friends came to visit. We sat around uncertain of what to say. It wasn't quite like a visit in a hospital or a visit in jail, but it had some of the qualities of both. When we kissed, my wife frowned and said my breath was awful. I tried to explain ketosis. Someone asked me if I was high yet, and I said no, but if I stood up suddenly, it was a big rush. My liver was sending out emergency directives. I had been thinking about fasting and it is a normal part of any animal's life cycle. Drought and famine are ancient conditions and the mechanism to survive and wait for better times must be well oiled in wild animals and at least residual in ourselves. Grazing horses grow fat and sleek in the summer and gaunt in the winter and it's all just part of hanging in there.

My wife and friends nodded wisely and, doubtless, went home and ate dinner.

Irving, Johnny and I went to a tiny art theater in the nearest town and sat on folding chairs to watch an old Humphrey Bogart flick. Not one of the good ones, but it did open with a sequence of Bogart escaping from San Quentin. He's one of the few who ever has. It was eerie how my past was signaling. I stared at the familiar walls and gun towers, thinking that all institutions are essentially the same.

Leaving the theater, we had to pass the back door of a restaurant. They were charcoal-broiling steak. The aroma was intense and my hunger blazed. And we stood, three gray-haired and portly men, grouped around the door like a pack of hard-luck hyenas watching a pride of lions enjoying its kill.

• • •

The sixth day. Moss woke me with a glass of Tang and warned me to drink it slowly. I let it sit, savoring my power over my instinctive greed. But when I did drink, I became angry. I had paid handsomely to sit in a third-rate motel room and drink water. A health manor that served fake orange juice was about as reassuring as an armed priest.

Later, one of the girls brought a grapefruit. Just that. I had pictured it cut, neatly sectioned, with a cherry set in the hub of each half, all bedded in shaved ice. But they had tossed me a grapefruit as zookeepers pitch whole cabbages into the stumpy maws of hippopotamuses. I was on top of my appetite, so I split the grapefruit with Johnny, who was still suffering.

For dinner I had a small cup of cottage cheese and a salad that seemed to have been made from balsa wood. I'm confident my goat wouldn't have touched it. I managed to eat almost half of it. Irving was sick on the third day of his own fast and unable to get out of bed. I offered him the rest of my salad, but he didn't want it.

"That's it," he said, indicating the salad. "All he has in that kitchen is grapefruit, salad, cottage cheese and, once in a while, a baked potato. He doesn't overstock."

• • •

During the second five days, I was rarely troubled by hunger. But I was weak, lonely and oddly restless and I began to spend too much time on the phone calling everyone I knew. No, I told them, I wasn't high. I was very tired and I spent a lot of time sleeping like a hibernating bear. But the big news was that my pants no longer fit.

A strange indentation in the middle of my body that I had once called my waist began to reappear, and I took to standing in front of the mirror to strike early Steve McQueen poses--hip shot, with my thumbs hooked into my belt where my thumbs wouldn't have squeezed in a week before. I looked younger, more vital and I was sorry I was too weak to go out and run a mile or two.

On the tenth day of my visit, Johnny disappeared. He left with four days to go. He didn't say goodbye, so I have to assume he was ashamed. Irving and I figured he walked out to the road and caught a bus home. I asked Moss about it and he looked at the floor while he told me a lot of us didn't make it. I remembered Irving's saying, What did he care? Johnny had paid in advance.

Irving continued sick and spent most of his time in bed. I wondered how wise it was for a man his age to push his system around. But he hung on grimly. If he had asked me to go out and buy him a hamburger, I wouldn't have hesitated. But he stuck it out. So did I. I borrowed Irving's car several nights to go to the movies. I was able to walk by the snack bar without a quiver. I was prepared, at that point, to live the rest of my life on lettuce and green tea.

On the 12th day, Moss told me I had done so well I owed it to myself to stay another two weeks. I said I thought fasting a reckless way to lose weight and that one shouldn't attempt it without the supervision of a doctor. That hung in the air. Then Moss sighed and said, "People take their own chances in this life." That was surely as true as anything he had said to me yet.

I didn't see him the last two days, except once driving by in his car. The Chevy. My final day I decided to weigh myself. There was a medical scale standing in the laundry room, but I had carefully avoided it. Whenever I have weighed myself during a diet, the loss has never been as dramatic as I had hoped, and I had finally persuaded myself that I wasn't dealing with numbers on a dial but with how I looked and felt. Now, however, I decided I'd earned a peek at the statistics. My first rush came when I found I no longer needed to start with the 200-pound balance. I had lost exactly 20 pounds, and it was a while before I stopped to consider I had 40 more to go.

• • •

My wife picked me up and was delighted with the partial transformation. I said goodbye to Irving. He wanted me to take his number and call him when I was in the city. I did, but I knew I wouldn't call, just as I had never called any of the friends I had left behind in jail. Once you were out, it was all different.

We drove home into a gathering snowstorm. We stopped to pick up a hitchhiker--a young man carrying an Army-surplus bag, wearing a striped railroad engineer's cap. He settled into the back seat. I was still full of my incredible feat and retailing my slender store of fasting lore.

"I just finished a fast," came a pleasant voice from the back seat.

"Oh," I said. "How long?"

"Only twenty-five days. I know a girl who fasted for fifty days. At the end, she just seemed to glow, she was transparently beautiful. It's a heavy spiritual trip if you're reach for it."

Maybe somewhere out there, after 30 or 40 days it becomes spiritual, and maybe I simply wasn't the spiritual type. But I was grateful to have broken a lifelong obsession with eating. It was good to know. Maybe we're heading into another major depression and I'll be one of the most cheerful people in the soup line.

• • •

A week at home and I was eating like a bandit. I started with a few spoons of low-fat cottage cheese and in six days I was socking away two helpings of spaghetti. So I'm into another fast, and Irving was right--it is cheaper to drink water at home.