>>2072>>2148>>2074Apologies for the delay, guys! The first paragraph makes a reference to a previous plotline, but after that the context doesn't matter. Here it is:
You try to confess to the crime, but in one of those all-too-common twists of fate, no one believes you. They roll their eyes and say, "Uh-huh, sure you did." Unbelievably, nobody recognized you that night -- maybe because of the apple-green wig or the dark bruises or because everybody was tweaked out on meth. Plus Blackjax! insists you weren't at the party. That bitch, he tells police. She stayed home that night. She didn't kill anyone. She's just turning this poor guy's death into some "cry for help" performance art -- she just wants attention. What else is he going to say? He's an accessory.
After that, things fall apart. It doesn't seem to matter how awful your work is, or what a jackass you are, you can do nothing wrong. Your career continues to rocket forward. It makes you sick. Every scene you cause, every bucket of tar or barrel of chicken parts you spill on a gallery floor -- it's all interpreted as the work of a genius. A genius. You're about as far away from a genius as you are from a gay iguana, but as the man said, people believe what they want to.
You start to gain weight. Deliberately. It's your new work -- the boundaries of love. How much, I mean how much does the public love you? Will they still love you at one hundred eighty pounds? Two hundred pounds? Four hundred pounds? Because one thing you know for sure is New Yorkers make room for the avant-garde and the strange and the bizarre, but they will not make room for the *fat*. They believe being fat should be reserved for Texans and Midwesterners. Sort of like their cultural heritage. Fat fly-over people who live in fat fly-over land.
You pack on about three pounds a week by giving up all physical activity and eating six meals a day, which is not as easy as it might seem. Your gallery owner yells at you. "What are you doing?" she says. "You need new clothes. You're spilling out of everything!" You tell her that's the point. You eat until you become big and bloated, your skin splotchy and coarse. You expand and swell. Everything becomes thicker -- your wrists, your ankles, your neck. You sleep twelve hours a day and try to remain immobile for the rest. That's not hard to do -- remain immobile -- since just walking up a flight of stairs wears you out. You'd rather lie on the couch and watch television with everything you need (remote control, a bag of Doritos, a six-pack of Coke, a box of creme-filled Krispy Kreme doughnuts).
As you gain weight, to your satisfaction you fall off a few choice party lists. (See? Insincere bastards.) People stop calling you and your next show is inexplicably canceled. You can feel this invisible wall go up around you -- only it isn't invisible, it's anything but. The wall is made of skin cells and blood and your very DNA. Your body is the wall. No one calls you, no one comes over, no one even makes eye contact. You can't sell your work anymore, you can't get a show, and so now that you've made your point, it's time to drop the weight. When you are normal size again you can do a whole piece on perception and self.
Except you can't seem to lose the weight. You can't stop eating now. If you try, your hunger comes back like a sharp-toothed saw cutting into you. You're hungry all the time. You try and throw out all your food, you try and eat only one meal a day, but you break down every time and run for a bucket of fried chicken or a stack of buttered waffles. Broke, friendless, and tipping the scales at three hundred fifty pounds, you move back to the Midwest where you'll blend in.
You move in with your parents, who can't look at you. They just don't understand. They think it's a choice you're making to stay this fat. Every time you lose five pounds, you gain back seven. Your parents get you a dietician and a trainer, but nothing works. You try and be an anorexic, try to vomit up your food after you binge, but every time you put your fingers in your throat, you get grossed out and stop. You need support from people who can empathize with you. So you put an ad in the local paper, calling all local big girls to the first official Fat Grrl club. Admission is free, but everyone is weighed to gain entry, and the starting acceptable size is two hundred pounds.
Twelve women show up to the first Fat Grrl meeting. Together you weigh a collective twenty-nine hundred pounds. One woman comes in a special-size motorized wheelchair and brings an entire bucket of deviled eggs. At first the women are shy, unsure of the situation and generally apologetic about everything -- but after a few rounds of margeritas a certain festivity falls over the group. Someone once asked Queen Latifah what the world would be like without men and she shrugged and said, "I don't know -- but there'd be a lot of fat, happy women."
You talk about the issues. How to lose weight, how to not care about losing weight, how to get a man -- if and when you do get a man, what sexual positions will conceivably work. (Pillows are apparently key.) "I stack a bunch of pillows under my ass until she angles up," a woman named Linny says. They all laugh and slap their thighs. It feels good to laugh. It feels good to make fun of everyone else, like you have your own club that nobody else can join instead of the other way around.
The Fat Grrls meet once a month and you grow in numbers exponentially. You start a Web site, which gives personal counsel, advice, diet tips, physicians' notes, and messages of hope. A word-of-mouth wildfire explodes once you're interviewed on Good Morning America and the entire nation knows about you. After that you're the number one weight Web site in the world, known for its thorough diet investigation, balanced recipe reviews, and candid advice.
Despite all your good work and helping thousands of women fight their struggle with weight, your own weight issues come and go the rest of your life. Toward the end it looks like the weight has won when you have a massive heart attack and the fire department has to saw through the living room floor in order to get you out of the basement. They're too late, of course; they've arrived to find you cold dead, legs straight up in the air, skirt over your head with a Mallomar clutched in one hand.
There isn't much pity from the firemen, who are used to their own hard lean bodies doing exactly as they're told. One guy discreetly snaps a digital image of you, 'funny fat lady upended on the couch,' and sends it around the Internet. The Fat Grrls get revenge by suing the city for defamation. The money that they win from the suit builds the first Fat Grrl center, the mother ship for many more satellite centers just like it, where women come for free counseling and advice.
In heaven you get to vote for who you want to be in the next life (as we are all just reincarnated over and over again, in God's attempt to make us better and better spirits). After you vote for what you want, your ballot is reviewed by the board (strict angels), who make a recommendation to God, and God makes the final decision on what you're going to be in your next life and why. "Well, you're not going to be fat again," he tells you. "What in the hell were you thinking? Do you think that's what I gave you a body for? To drown it in Velveeta cheese sauce?" He hands you a reincarnation slip, and even though you'd chosen to be a "genuinely talented expressionist artist," the slip says you're going to be a third world rice farmer so you can learn temperance and equanimity... and to not be so fat.
