Thomas Wictor

I saw a man in the hardware store. He was unremarkable from behind, but when he turned around, I initially couldn’t identify what I was seeing. It simply did not compute. Then I almost screamed. He was only a few years older than me and didn’t have an ounce of fat anywhere else on his body.

This cartoon is in no way an exaggeration. It’s true to life. I had to draw him because he haunts me. That’s because I have my own weight problem. The fattest I ever got was in 1995, when I made it to 275 pounds.

Unlike the man in the hardware store, I have an evenly spread layer of fat that inflates and deflates like a pressure suit. When part of me is fat, all of me is fat. I try to keep myself at a reasonable weight and level of physical fitness, and I’ve accepted that I probably won’t ever have a washboard stomach.

I’ve even developed the ability to look in the mirror without wanting to throw up. My remaining paranoia/body dysmorphic disorder centers around what some people call the “love handles.” I worry that mine might someday get as big as basketballs. On bad days I imagine that my forearms rub against them as I walk.

My weight problem began when I was nine. I climbed a tree to watch some nocturnal construction work, fell out, and broke my right arm in three places. Mom took me to a hospital in Maracaibo to have a temporary cast put on, and then we flew to Miami so my arm could be set by Herbert Virgin Jr., an orthopedic surgeon who was also the team doctor of the Miami Dolphins. Tim took this photo the day I got back to Venezuela.

What looks like zombie makeup is huge, black circles around my eyes that lasted for weeks. The shattering of my arm, the trip to the hospital in Maracaibo, the flight to Miami, the surgery, and the flight back all took their toll.

Somehow I managed to knock the bones out of place, which was revealed by checkup X-rays. I had to be flown back to Miami for a second operation. Altogether I spent three months in casts. Since I’d always had a very large appetite, and now I couldn’t play outside and burn it off, I got fat. I didn’t know that once you develop fat cells, they stay with you the rest of your life. Unless you have them sucked out.

At some point in my early fatness, Dad gave me the nickname “Pork.” I immediately stopped eating pig meat of any kind. Years later I saw two TV shows that finally helped me understand why. The first was about a woman with a pet potbellied pig. She thought it was funny to feed it slices of ham. That really bothered me; turning an animal into an unknowing cannibal was obscene.

The second show was a documentary titled Hitler’s Private World: Revealed. A deaf-mute German programmer developed lip-reading software that was used on Adolf Hitler’s silent home movies to see what he was saying. One clip showed Hitler describing a meal he shared with Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring.

“I looked at him across the dining table, and then I knew that what they say was true, that pigs eat the flesh of their own.”

Being christened Pork made me swear off pig meat because I was afraid that people were going to start making cannibal jokes about me. This paranoia also explains my dislike of restaurant signs with pictures of happy pigs wearing chef hats.

It was tough getting through Lord of the Flies in eighth grade. We had to read the book and watch the movie. Seeing all these skinny kids picking on the fat one and calling him “Piggy” was extremely unpleasant.

Three months of inactivity made me fat, but my right arm was sticklike after the second cast was taken off. It was frozen at a ninety-degree angle. All I could move were my fingers. The wrist and elbow were locked solid. A neighbor named Mrs. Wilcox—a former nurse—came over to our house and spoke to my parents.

“He’s got to move that arm,” she said grimly. “If he doesn’t, it’s going to be permanently withered. He may even lose it.”

So we had to go to a hospital in the town of Tamare, about ten miles away. There they had a stainless steel whirlpool tub that I sat next to, keeping my right arm in the warm, swirling water. I wanted to leave my shirt on, but they wouldn’t let me. I had to sit there in my pale fatness for an hour, trying to get my arm to work again.

A man with a mustache walked back and forth on errands. Every time he went past me, he’d say the same thing.

“Muevete el brazo, gordo.”

Move your arm, fatso.

We went three times a week for two months. Eventually I regained most of the mobility of my arm. I still can’t straighten it completely.

It’s also much smaller and weaker than my left arm, and the elbow joint clicks. The way it healed created a kind of bone ratchet. Doings pushups in PE class was always embarrassing because I listed to the right, like a capsizing ship.

But the arm is at 85 percent, and nobody’s called me Pork or Fatso in years. So I’m happy. I’m slowly returning to my fighting weight, where I was before Mom and Dad got sick. A low-fat diet and daily exercise are what work for me.

This ad was on my homepage today.

That’s…not a pill. And I’ve never seen one of those with green mold on it. Maybe they make the Holy Grail pill out of that mold.

I’ll stick with a low-fat diet and exercise, thanks.