When I get restless, I have to do something crazy and rash and risky, or as I like to call it: eating something sweet, then eating something salty, then something sweet, then something salty, then something sweet, then something salty, and so on, until I have stretched my stomach tighter than Joan River’s face. And unfortunately, I get fidgety a lot, and that means unless I employ an old friend, I go around most of the time looking thirteen months pregnant. The trouble is that my old buddy, my old pal— bulimia—makes me sick. Literally.
I’ve thrown up more times than all the living Miss America contestants and the Housewives-of-Wherever combined. Any kind of vomiting you can imagine, I’ve mastered. There’s the immediately-after-eating retch, the late-stage-digestion hurl, the binge-and-purge, the quickie-puke-after-ingesting-anything-whatsoever, the two-hour-heave-to-make-sure-you-got-it-all, the firehose (when you’ve had a lot of liquid), the fireworks (when you’ve had mostly dry goods), and the country-kleenex (when chunks come out of your nose). Some days, I would upchuck twenty times or more. To avoid being caught, I spent a lot of time cleaning the throne. When I left a restaurant bathroom, the toilet was clean enough to lick. (See, I didn’t even gag right there at the suggestion of licking a public potty. My gag reflex only works manually now.)
Although I have no idea how I knew innately the proper technique, I remember precisely the first time I voluntarily downloaded a dinner, and I recall why. Thirty years ago, after my philandering mother bulldozed my idyllic fantasy childhood façade, she further ruined my existence by demanding my company at her boyfriend’s house. Every. Single. Fucking. Night. I hated my life, and I had good reasons.
Good Reasons I Hated My Life
1) I was a teenager. Duh.
2) I was ugly.
3) And fat.
4) I never wanted to live with my mother in the first place. Even when she was married to my father. When she announced that she was divorcing him, she asked, “Who do you want to live with?” After I replied without hesitation, completely ignoring her mangling of the rules of English grammar, that I preferred Daddy, she shot me “the look” and said, “Change your mind or I’ll change it for you.” Ah. Democracy.
5) I despised Mother’s boyfriend. He had a really attractive bank account and inflamed skin. There was a glass of gin permanently fused to his beefy hand from the microsecond that he got home after work until he passed out at 10. He grilled some sort of meat every night, and because he moved at alcoholic-stupor-speed, we always sat down to eat at 9:30. Every night. Do you know what happens when you gorge on chicken and potatoes and buttery vegetables and fresh-from-the-oven rolls right before you go to bed? Do you? Well, I’ll tell you: You get fucking fat. Or fatter, in my case.
I had to do something to take control of one simple thing in my purgatory. So I began tossing my cookies on a regular basis. I loved the high I got from the rush of relaxing brain juices that flooded my system after I reviewed each day’s menu; and the knowledge that I was, in effect, giving my mother and her pickled pal the finger by flushing the food they forced me to eat, gave me power. Unfortunately, it also ate the enamel off my teeth, infected my salivary glands, and made me insane. Or insaner, in my case.
In 1986, I’d been regurgitating daily for almost eight years when Meredith Baxter Birney starred in a movie called Kate’s Secret, about a beautiful suburban woman, who—although she’s married to a successful lawyer and has a lovely daughter—only feels in control when she makes herself throw up after she snarfs down entire cakes. The film was released the day before my 23rd birthday, and I realized that I was just like Kate except for the beautiful part, and I didn’t want to have a heart attack and die so young on some nasty bathroom tile.
I woke my first husband, and hysterically confessed my affliction and my fear. He was in medical school, so I assumed he’d embrace me with physician’s compassion and pronounce that we’d get through it together. Instead he rolled back over and resumed snoring. I spent the rest of the night in our guest room, weeping and cutting my wrist with an old key. I kind of wanted to die, but mostly just liked the physical pain every time I dug the metal into my flesh because it masked all my emotional fractures.
The next morning, my husband scoffed at my blood-crusted wrist and scheduled me to see a med school colleague in her mental health residency. He drove me to my weekly appointments, and afterwards to an all-you-can-eat pizza buffet. I always left their toilets cleaner than they were when I arrived.
But after thirty years of bathing my esophagus and throat and teeth with a nice soup of hydrochloric acid and liquefied food, my teeth look like bloody hell, I have a Godzilla-sized case of GERD, and Chloraseptic ® should be sending me fucking stock options because of the amount of their throat spray I’ve purchased. I realized last year that I’d finally have to throw my sick sidekick out on its ass. I’d love to say I don’t miss you, you son-of-a-bitch, bulimia. But you were so easy. Now I’m going to have to try something radical. Like diet and exercise. Oy. Otherwise, Goodyear is eventually going to succeed. They keep trying to launch my ass over fucking Atlanta.
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