son Kyle had just become the Quiz Bowl math person. To him, I was surely a Good Kid, one of those straight-A’s-and-piano-lessons types. I stood before the dizzying array of diet aids (one of which, a box of little chocolate squares that looked like it had been on the shelf forever, was actually called “Ayds”), trying to decide which would rocket me fastest to a life of green pants (or slacks, as it were) and glory. Finally I grabbed the Dexatrim, just as the commercial had instructed.
I paid for them with my head down, buying a pen and notebook at the same time so that maybe Kyle’s dad would think I was picking up something for my mother while buying school supplies. When he greeted me warmly, I mumbled “Hi,” then stuffed my purchases in my backpack and got out of there as fast as I could. In geometry, while the rest of the class talked about isosceles triangles, I pulled open the box, folded down the cardboard flaps, pulled out a shiny blister pack, and began what would become my love affair with speed, glorious speed!
Diet pills rapidly became the holy altar at which I prayed. Dexatrim all but eliminated my need to throw up, because if I took enough of it, I never needed to eat. Within a couple of weeks I was wearing the aforementioned slacks. And, except for the fact that I was always cold, always sick, always grouchy, barely speaking to my parents, had no friends, and still lived in Prairie Grove, things seemed pretty much perfect. Like I said: just as long as nothing was more important than food. This is how anorexia can save you. This is also how it can kill you. This is where living and dying become the same thing.
6
AT AGE THIRTY-SIX , I finally went to Oaxaca, Mexico. Oaxaca City is a bizarre and beautiful place, with such traditions as Noche de Rabanos, the “Night of the Radishes,” when the town square is taken over by intricate figurative sculptures carved from the red fleshy roots. But the Day of the Dead is its own glitter-spangled underworld celebration. On Halloween night, children in costumes ranging from skeletons to Ninja Turtles parade through the streets of a city alive with orange marigolds, mariachis, and creepily out-of-tune brass bands.
Of course this sort of occasion calls for a tattoo, so I spent the evening in the studio of Dr. Lakra, whose assumed name is slang for both “filthy” and “scar.” He inked a large, colorful sugar skull on my left calf, and when I returned to the U.S., Denise’s apprentice Frank Ash tattooed words around it: “Take what you have learned here back to Krumville,” Spalding Gray’s reference to his own small town in Swimming to Cambodia. Never forget the place you left, and when you return, tell stories of other lands.
I was sixteen years old, five feet six inches tall, and 98 pounds when I first went to see Dr. Philip J. Thornton, Ph.D. It was an October afternoon when crepe-paper leaves danced down the stained-glass windows of the Episcopal church where he saw his patients.
I rattled through the door of his office.
I had taken to wearing a dozen rosaries and an antique stopwatch around my neck. I liked feeling them whack against my collarbones, and I liked that rosaries were a symbol of a religion other than Baptist (Catholicism being, like Judaism, one step away from Satan worship in the dominant theological paradigm). Just that morning I had sewn two darts in the waistband of the green pants. My hair, except for the long bangs that covered half my face, was chopped into two-inch spikes. This was an homage to my favorite book of the moment, Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden , in which a man and woman, wanting to become indistinguishable from one another, get the same boyish haircut. It was also a rebellion against the prevalent hairstyle of the time, spiral perms topped with what I called “donut bangs.” The other girls in Prairie Grove fanned out their curled bangs around a central circle of scalp, which was the donut hole,
I paid for them with my head down, buying a pen and notebook at the same time so that maybe Kyle’s dad would think I was picking up something for my mother while buying school supplies. When he greeted me warmly, I mumbled “Hi,” then stuffed my purchases in my backpack and got out of there as fast as I could. In geometry, while the rest of the class talked about isosceles triangles, I pulled open the box, folded down the cardboard flaps, pulled out a shiny blister pack, and began what would become my love affair with speed, glorious speed!
Diet pills rapidly became the holy altar at which I prayed. Dexatrim all but eliminated my need to throw up, because if I took enough of it, I never needed to eat. Within a couple of weeks I was wearing the aforementioned slacks. And, except for the fact that I was always cold, always sick, always grouchy, barely speaking to my parents, had no friends, and still lived in Prairie Grove, things seemed pretty much perfect. Like I said: just as long as nothing was more important than food. This is how anorexia can save you. This is also how it can kill you. This is where living and dying become the same thing.
6
AT AGE THIRTY-SIX , I finally went to Oaxaca, Mexico. Oaxaca City is a bizarre and beautiful place, with such traditions as Noche de Rabanos, the “Night of the Radishes,” when the town square is taken over by intricate figurative sculptures carved from the red fleshy roots. But the Day of the Dead is its own glitter-spangled underworld celebration. On Halloween night, children in costumes ranging from skeletons to Ninja Turtles parade through the streets of a city alive with orange marigolds, mariachis, and creepily out-of-tune brass bands.
Of course this sort of occasion calls for a tattoo, so I spent the evening in the studio of Dr. Lakra, whose assumed name is slang for both “filthy” and “scar.” He inked a large, colorful sugar skull on my left calf, and when I returned to the U.S., Denise’s apprentice Frank Ash tattooed words around it: “Take what you have learned here back to Krumville,” Spalding Gray’s reference to his own small town in Swimming to Cambodia. Never forget the place you left, and when you return, tell stories of other lands.
I was sixteen years old, five feet six inches tall, and 98 pounds when I first went to see Dr. Philip J. Thornton, Ph.D. It was an October afternoon when crepe-paper leaves danced down the stained-glass windows of the Episcopal church where he saw his patients.
I rattled through the door of his office.
I had taken to wearing a dozen rosaries and an antique stopwatch around my neck. I liked feeling them whack against my collarbones, and I liked that rosaries were a symbol of a religion other than Baptist (Catholicism being, like Judaism, one step away from Satan worship in the dominant theological paradigm). Just that morning I had sewn two darts in the waistband of the green pants. My hair, except for the long bangs that covered half my face, was chopped into two-inch spikes. This was an homage to my favorite book of the moment, Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden , in which a man and woman, wanting to become indistinguishable from one another, get the same boyish haircut. It was also a rebellion against the prevalent hairstyle of the time, spiral perms topped with what I called “donut bangs.” The other girls in Prairie Grove fanned out their curled bangs around a central circle of scalp, which was the donut hole,
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