The Art of Starving Read online

  I spent fifty cents on a side of tater tots, not intending to eat them.

  “Hey, Matt,” Ott said, swiveling on his seat. His voice had the high commanding tone that demanded his fellow barbarians come to attention, that signaled he’d be hurting someone for their benefit and amusement.

  I didn’t say anything. I picked up a tater tot, dipped it in ketchup, put it back down.

  Do your worst, Muggles, I thought. Sooner or later someone will come along and tell me I’m the Chosen One. And then you can be damn sure I’ll punish every one of you who hurt me. Me, and the people I love.

  “Been wondering something.”

  I turned to look at him. Bastien grinned and leaned forward, the slick, haughty haircut of a filthy rich kid cocked sideways. Tariq stared deep into his phone. Beyond them, dozens of people who don’t matter licked their lips or started up text messages and status updates to report the coming fireworks.

  “How’s Maya? Haven’t seen her around in a little while.”

  An oooooh went through the crowd.

  “She’s fine,” I said, and, in a panic, stuffed three tater tots in my mouth.

  “I’m really glad,” he said. “Because . . . that’s not what I heard.”

  Bastien asked, “What did you hear, Ott?” in the loud, practiced tone of a perpetual accomplice. I hated him more, somehow, than Ott, even though I hated Ott an awful lot.

  Ott, at least, was dirt poor, like me, with his mom working shit-shifts at Wal-Mart and his dad a hog-farm grunt like my mom. They both worked at the same slaughterhouse where Bastien’s dad made a cool million a year as a manager, his feet up on a fancy desk all day while she and a couple hundred other grunts swung hammers against the skulls of pigs and used massive knives to tear heavy strips of flesh.

  A word, perhaps, will be useful here, on the respective bullying styles of these three. Bullying is an art, too, and their styles say a lot about who they are.

  Ott is all physical. Big and dumb and broad-shouldered, he is at his best when he is punching things. There is no finesse to Ott’s abuse, no intellect. Thick curly black hair and the pouting lips of Roman busts in our history textbook—he is the thug Caesar of the high school hallways.

  Bastien’s brutality is all verbal. Emotional abuse is where he excels. As far back as second grade, Bastien was stringing words together to watch people weep. Most of the time those words include faggot, or other equivalent snatches of hate speech, but he can be eloquent where eloquence is more effective. Slim-hipped and blond, with the chiseled cheekbones of an underwear model (from hell), Bastien is the kind of smiling psychopath you could very easily imagine becoming president or the villain in a Lifetime original movie.

  Tariq’s bullying style is more abstract. He watches. He witnesses. He sees what they do, his friends—he validates them with laughter or silent approval. He never tells them to stop. He is their audience. The one they perform for. He, by the mere fact of his presence, makes whatever they do that much worse.

  It goes without saying that I hate them all. What is perhaps less obvious is that I also desire them, desperately. By some cosmic joke, they are all heart-hurtingly beautiful.

  Like I said. Nature is a jerk. Your body is a total asshole.

  “What did you hear, Ott?” Bastien asked again, rubbing his hands together, leaning forward when Ott went in for the kill.

  “I heard she ran off with one of the eight different guys she sleeps with.”

  I stood up, stepped toward him.

  But suddenly, it was gone. Whatever I’d tapped into that morning, when I’d been able to see right to the heart of his trembling cowardice and take him down effortlessly with words, it had vanished.

  The tater tots. They stuck like mud in the gears of my body’s engine. I sputtered uselessly for five or six seconds that felt like infinity.

  I made a noise. Maybe a gasp, maybe a sob. Whatever it was it made people laugh.

  “Dude, Ott, chill with that,” Tariq muttered, very deliberately not looking up from his phone, working hard to hide the guilt on his face.

  Laughter boomed in the stinking cafeteria as I turned and ran.

  RULE #3

  Eating slows you down.

  This is basic biology. Evolution at work. Animals exert a lot of energy hunting and killing food, and afterward they find a nice place to curl up and doze off. High blood-glucose levels switch off the brain signals for alertness. Blood gets rerouted to the stomach and the intestinal tract to support digestion. Your mind and senses dull.

  The diligent student of the Art of Starving will be strong enough to resist both evolution and emotion.

  DAY: 1, CONCLUDED

  My mother is a magnificent monster. Round and terrifying and able to shout louder than anyone you ever met in your life. When we were little and it got dark out and she called for us to come home for dinner, the echo of it boomed for miles. People made fun of us for it: our mother the foghorn. Muscled-up from a couple decades down at the hog farm, there’s probably no one in town she couldn’t pound into submission.

  Except, you know, life. Life has got her down for the count, and it’s counting slow. The rent, the mice in the walls, the cold, the loneliness, the threat of the slaughterhouse shutting down, they all teamed up on her. And when life couldn’t beat her fighting honest: Maya happened. Maya running off might be the death blow. Ever since that, Mom seems to be losing her light.

  When I let myself in to the low-ceilinged one-story house we call home, she was passed out on the couch. She was passed out on the couch most days when I came home from school. It was why she still hadn’t figured out I was walking home, instead of taking the bus. The air inside was smoky from the woodstove, and the cigarettes she said she’d quit. The television gurgled mindlessly.

  “Food in the fridge,” she said, when the front door shut behind me. Even in her sleep, the woman doesn’t miss a beat.

  “Thanks, Mom,” I said, and stood over her. She didn’t stir. Her hands smelled like blood. The smell never comes out, not all the way, no matter how hard she scrubs. But I like it. It smells like love, to me, and power. Her brow was furrowed, her lips pressed tightly together. Stressed out over something. She doesn’t set her burdens down, not even when she’s dreaming. I spread a blanket over her, but it was so warm in the room I took it right off.

  And there I was, in the long wide gilded mirror on the opposite wall. Mom had found that ridiculous oversized thing by the side of the road and single-handedly wrestled it onto her pickup truck, something so big and beautiful it somehow made the rest of our home less shabby. As far back as I could remember, there he was: that boy, in the mirror, happy and laughing, until a couple years back when he started going all Portrait of Dorian Gray on me.

  I shrank back from the sight of him now, that boy, that body, stooped and limp-wristed, doomed to never be desired. I envied Dracula, who at least didn’t ever have to worry about seeing himself and knowing how gross he looked.

  “The power of Christ compels you,” I said, making the sign of the cross. My exorcism did not work. Probably because I’m Jewish.

  Mom knows. She’s got to know I’m gay. Mom knows everything. Hears everything. It’s a small town, and she’s friends with everyone. I know I’m gossiped about. But until I actually tell her, she can convince herself it’s untrue. Malicious slander. Small-minded hicks who see a sensitive smart boy and say faggot. But to Know, to know for sure, I think, would kill her. Not because she hates gay people. It would kill her because she’s spent her whole life worrying about How She Messed Up Those Kids, and what better proof of her failures as a mother than a son condemned to a miserable life of abuse and loneliness?

  Raising us on her own, everybody told her she’d Mess Those Kids Up. A boy needs a man in his life, they told her, again and again, like I couldn’t hear them, sitting in the shopping cart in the supermarket, building a wall of baked-bean cans. No telling how he’ll turn out otherwise.

  Mom said, All he needs is l
ove, every time; All he needs is me.

  And she was right. But tell that to Hudson’s army of backseat-driver moms and men incapable of minding their own business, self-righteous gossips and SUV commandos. All of whom would have the final victory in the moment when I told Mom how damaged I was.

  If Maya leaving came damn near breaking her, finding out I’m gay might finish the job.

  Knife blades poked and prodded at my stomach. Hunger made me wobble. My stomach never really stopped hurting lately, but by now it was starting to worry me. The three tater tots from lunch hadn’t lasted long.

  And then I saw it. The photo, stuck to the side of the fridge with a magnet I made in first grade (a crescent moon, made of dried macaroni spray-painted gold). A photo I’d seen a thousand times without truly seeing. Very small, very old; in color but so faded you could barely tell. My mom. My age. Smiling. Skinny.

  “Obese” is maybe the wrong word to use to describe my mother now, but it isn’t completely wrong. How had she gone from super skinny to super . . . not? And did that mean the same metamorphosis was waiting like a genetic time bomb inside of me?

  I couldn’t say why I noticed it now, when it had been staring me in the face for so long. Something to do with the pain in my stomach and the pleasure it gave me, that small bit of control when Maya’s absence made me feel so helpless.

  I scurried down the hall, avoiding eye contact with the fridge—but I could still smell tuna fish in the air, smell the lime-juice-and-too-much-mayonnaise mom used, smell the soft challah sliced too thick.

  Maya’s favorite. The day she left, Mom went out and bought a loaf of challah and made it all into sandwiches, so they’d be ready for her when she got back. Yesterday they were approaching the edge of staleness, so she brought them to work to share with her fellow grunts, and bought new bread, and made new sandwiches, so that when Maya walked in the door her favorite comfort food in the world would be waiting for her.

  Even in my room, even with the door shut tight, the tuna smell persisted. I never liked the stuff, but I’d eat it when Maya made me. I always did whatever Maya told me to do.

  She was no delicate flower, my sister. When she was around, no one dared to say a word about me. She cut her hair short at fourteen. She beat up a boy once. She has badass dropout friends. She has metal spikes on her jacket, on bracelets, on collars and boots. Spikes everywhere.

  She’s had boyfriends, but none of them the assholes who go to our school.

  She would have had a dazzling takedown in response to Ott’s lunchroom insult, a brilliantly delivered profanity-packed lecture about how boys are allowed to sleep around but girls get punished for feeling desire. And then she’d have punched him in the throat for good measure.

  She’s in a punk-rock band, plays guitar, sings scary songs. She’s her mother’s daughter.

  That’s why I know that whatever Tariq did, it was something terrible. There was no other reason that my sister would be gone, would be this quiet, this long.

  Without even thinking about it, my body booted up my computer.

  So I want to skip this part, gloss over it and get right to the next day, when my real work began, when my darkest and most horrific fantasies began to really take shape. But what kind of Rulebook would this be, if I left out the ugly parts? I need you to understand what you’re up against, when you’re dealing with the care and handling of a human body. When you’re trying to master the art of starving.

  They were endless, those sixty-or-so seconds while my computer came to life. I spent them looking around my room, shocked to see how small it was, how cluttered, how sad its walls were with their crooked posters that belonged to Ten-Year-Old Matt, Thirteen-Year-Old Matt, Now Matt.

  Whales; The Nightmare Before Christmas; Venom and Spider-Man grappling; Albert Einstein. I don’t even remember how or when he got here.

  Every night, I sent Maya an email. Sometimes something short about how my day was, sometimes something in-depth and ultra-whiney, throwing a typed temper tantrum because I wanted her to tell me what happened, how I could help, when she’d be coming home.

  She rarely wrote back. When she did, it was in single sentences. Everything’s great talk to you soon.

  Bullshit.

  I opened my browser.

  I always start with video games. Wholesome, childlike pursuits. I do homework. Lurk around social media sites. Look at Maya’s Twitter and Facebook to see if she’s said anything. Browse fan art sites, look for loving graphic beautifully rendered illustrations of my favorite gay ’ships (Harry/Draco; Zuko/Sokka; Selina Kyle/Harley Quinn). Sometimes I’ll go to chat rooms, find like-minded people to talk to. There’s a Hudson one, even, for gay guys in my same small town. Lots of people use these spaces for finding hookup partners, but I don’t dare. I know how this really works. They’re all faking it, all trying to trick me and any other actual homo, and lure us to a dark place where they can take their long slow painful time murdering us.

  And then—somehow—I can never pinpoint when, or how, or figure out what triggers it—BAM! My screen is full of naked.

  Boys. Men. Men alone, looking moody on beaches or beds, holding themselves lewdly, leering at me, saying You will never have this; you will never be this. Men together. Doing unspeakable, marvelous things.

  I moaned, out loud, when the first ones shuffled across my screen.

  I wish I were strong enough to stop. But really, porn isn’t the problem. I only got a hand-me-down computer in my room six months ago, and I was feeling miserable about my hideous self long before that.

  Every television commercial, every movie, every photo in every magazine showed me what my body should look like. Every walk down the Hudson High halls confirmed I would never be one of those jock boys with the perfect hair and clear skin and jacked stomachs and invincible confidence. I’d never be Bastien, never Ott, or Tariq. But I had this. This this, oh god, this.

  When it was over, when I looked down at the mess I had made, when I once again snapped back to reality, terrified that my squeaking chair had made too much noise and awakened my mom and she was standing in the doorway Disappointed In Me, I was almost crying. Because I was so goddamn hungry, because I was breaking my mother’s heart, because I was disgusting, because my sister, because my body, because Tariq . . . because life.

  I stood up. With Lust momentarily sated, Hunger returned. Black stars bloomed and faded in my peripheral vision. My legs wobbled; the room dimmed.

  Finally, I thought. It’s happening. I’m breaking through, escaping the physical world, becoming a ghost, unencumbered by this ugly body.

  I am dying.

  But my body was strong. It fought back, held tight to the here and now. Stabbed me in the gut again and again, the stomach pain so sharp this time that I doubled over.

  Barely seeing, I stumbled down the hall. Mom had gotten up off the couch and gone to bed at some point. All was darkness. I didn’t need light, though. I knew my way in the dark. Ninja-silent, I moved through the house.

  When I opened the door, the fridge blinded me. Bright, clean white light. A crinkled landscape of tinfoil-capped casserole pans and cookie tins and deep glass bowls. So much food, from so many different hands. Food was love. All these people—they loved my mom, loved Maya, and they wanted to help, and the only way they knew how was to make food. I wanted to throw up.

  So much food, so many of my favorites, but there was only one thing I wanted. Only one food could make me feel better. The one thing that was irreplaceable.

  Sobbing, squatting on the floor before the open refrigerator, I stuffed tuna-fish sandwiches into my face until there were no more.

  RULE #4

  The warrior well versed in the Art of Starving understands that while the body is the enemy, it is a worthy adversary. It is to be respected and listened to. You are not always on completely different pages. Hunger, you should fight—but fear, you should listen to. Fear is the place where your interests and your body’s interests will usually overlap
. Fear, you should listen to. Not dying is a goal you both share.

  Usually. We’ll deal with that later.

  DAY: 2

  TOTAL CALORIES: 500

  The next day, I was sealed up tight inside a straitjacket SCUBA suit made of chewed-up tuna fish.

  My edge was blunted. The sandwiches had sealed up my nostrils, caked shut my ears, rubbed Vaseline into my eyes. The dirty high school hallways boxed me in. Also, someone went and filled the halls up with invisible marshmallows, thick billowing clouds of them, and I walked through them in slow motion, sound coming at me, muffled and stretched out. The trophies in the trophy cases mocked me, laughingly whispering, This is what normal boys and girls do, they win things, you’re only an embarrassment, a source of shame.

  At least my stomach had stopped hurting. My body had won that round and could afford to sit back and gloat.

  I thought about puking up all those sandwiches once I saw what I had done, but that’s a line I won’t cross. If you make yourself puke, you have a problem. Not that I’m above making myself puke—gym class bullying in freshman year of high school made me an expert at the Teacher-I-Don’t-Feel-Good-May-I-Go-to-the-Bathroom technique, followed by a precision finger-throat combo, followed by a trip to the nurse’s office to get a pass saying I was excused for the period.

  Me and the nurse got to be good buddies that way.

  But I know myself, and once I start down the road of allowing myself to eat, and then puking it all up, I’m done for. I’ll do it at every meal, and I’ll be dead in a week.

  So when I mess up, I force myself to deal with it.

  I am in total control.

  See? I told you I don’t have an eating disorder.

  Due to the tuna incident, the whole day was a slow-motion nightmare. Only dread pierced my walking coma—constant, banal, barely-worth-mentioning dread.