Cum Gutter Summer?
I will not live through 2003 again
In November, I hired my former college roommate, now an Equinox trainer, to design a nutrition plan for me. I had recently seen the pictures from his first bodybuilding competition, and they were harrowing. He looked like the after-effects of the Scream Extractor, from Monsters, Inc: enervated and drained of all the vital, juicy life forces that give a body its vim, vigor and radiance. Naturally, I hired him immediately.
We used to have a Great Dane named Conan. He was 180 pounds, and had a brain the size of a McNugget. From his point of view, he was a toy, no bigger than a Chihuahua: he’d crawl under the coffee table, knocking it over instantly; sit on our laps, to bone-crunching effect; leap up and greet mailwomen, leaving them mauled and prone to litigiousness.
I know how he felt, only in reverse. I always though of myself as big as my action figures, as big as the guys I’d top. I viewed mesomorphs as “real men,” unbreakable, solid, fortified. And no matter my weight or physical desirability, when I looked in the mirror, I only saw my seventh grade reflection: my frozen selfhood, at the peak of abuse and violation, weak, flabby and incapable of changing my fate.
This eating plan would change all that.
And one more thing: why couldn’t I, why shouldn’t I, have abs? Must I be denied, by my genetic legacy, the one thing which I know, indisputably, would release me from the burden of my intelligence, which would allow me to access the highest echelon of humanity available, and to look like the superheroes I so adore? After nearly a decade of lifting weights, why shouldn’t I get something out of it?
“Beauty's overrated, Sarah.”
NARRATOR: Brad had meant this to be comforting.
But at 3:00 in the morning, it had precisely the opposite effect.
He had a beautiful wife,
a knockout, and she was sleeping beside him right now.
Only someone who took his own beauty for granted
would have been able to say something so stupid,
and with a straight face.
-Little Children
When I’d encounter a muscly-bottom — like my friend Paul, who currently resembles every WWE wrestler I had tingly feelings for in 1997 — I didn’t just desire them; I wanted to be them. The inherent safety, and perhaps the ability to overpower their so-called dominator, is a hot reversal. If I could feel weighted, hardened, whole, then I could be safe in my own body, and then I could enjoy it, all of it — sex, intimacy, what my therapist used to call the “affect experience” of being alive.
Anyways, for $200 a month, my former roommate built me a meticulous eating plan, with an ever-updating google spreadsheet. I would have to follow it to the letter, weigh myself every day, and send him progress pictures once a week of me posing in my underwear, a sideshow too grotesque to be shared, even on this Substack.
I was in heaven, delighted to be controlled by a straight man, to be told what to do, and to have some rigid constant during the most turbulent, chaotic time in my life. In this one instant, I would not be chained to the War Rig of Fate, a bottom for the cosmos, with no recourse in my destiny. If I wanted abs, I could grow them.
The first two months felt like Rosemary’s Baby. As I stuffed myself with hormonally-mutated chicken breast and cartoon quantities of white rice, I felt like my body was being invaded. I always knew that to get bigger — even more muscular — would be to play with volatile magicks. I may lose everything in the process, and by everything, I mean thinness.
While visiting my parents, my father witnessed me weighing my food. For a second-generation Holocaust survivor, this was too easy. He made sure to plant the right traps in my psyche. You know we have high cholesterol on our side. Of course, for anyone in my family to say anything about eating disfunction to anyone else is farcical. But indeed, the damage was done, and since January, I’ve suffered psychosomatic chest pains and am convinced that this eating regimen will cause an early heart attack.
Whatever. As the months progressed, people had nice things to say, and I wasn’t being regarded as so petite anymore. This body was being validated, but, as always, it still felt like it wasn’t mine, like they were complimenting something out of my sight. My sex life stayed the same — any magnificent night came down to chance, chemistry and confidence, not to the number on the scale. I was the same, too. I still felt exhausted, suicidally depressed, rapturously happy, in the same cyclical progression as ever.
As for the abs, bubkis. At the Fratboy Crunch on Ave A & 6th, Dexter and I commiserated over this bullshit. “I can take a bullet,” he said. So why doesn’t it show? The nutritionist said that they’d materialize after I went through the “cutting” phase. Yikes.
Around Passover, Marky became a born-again vegan. It took immediately: he looks like a glow-worm. Over a non-filling dinner at Caravan of Dreams, he reminded me about how one is supposed to cut out meat and dairy before an Ayahuasca ceremony. Maybe all this processed, battered, tortured, injected meat I was eating was blocking my intuition, my initiation? And what about my ethics? How good could one possibly look to necessitate this No-Face-level of consumption? How long would this last? What if my ectomorph body didn’t want to be transfigured? What if my body knew what I needed more than I did?
Something broke in my last days in the city. Braindead on the subway, I scrolled my phone and found a picture of myself in October — just before I volunteered for the gulag. My heart lurched. Whenever my mother saw an image of herself, she’d say: Is that what I look like? It was the same. In the picture I look…fine. Great. Not requiring edits. What had the last six months even been about? What had this gained me? And where was the fucking six pack already?
I think it gave me an illusion of autonomy, at a time when I’m called to sacrifice everything to the unknown. It made me feel like I could hold something back from the devouring waters. But, like it or not, that’s the assignment of a Mars in Pisces, and I must accept it: I am cinematic, I am oceanic, I am an annihilating current. I am not to be shaped or molded. I am to be protected.
Two weeks ago, I fantasized about bottoming for an eternal crush of mine — whom I’ve already had sex with — and imagined myself John Cena-sized, steroidal. Then I’d feel safe. But not now. Why not now, after putting on 14 pounds? Finally, I decided to take it further and ask: what if I skipped the David Cronenberg body modifications and just…felt safe?
So I prayed that night, to Dionysus and Saturn, to remove the negative consequences stemming from the abuse, to set me free inside myself.
This is my final week on the meal plan, then I experiment with trusting myself. It’s likely that little will change in my looks or lifestyle. But now I know my limit, and I know what all of this can never give me. While living in a city of Sephardi sex gods from the Dimension X, I’ll have to accept that every chiseled man I come across is a mystery, not an ideal to be photo-copied. Let them dazzle me. I can’t escape myself by becoming them.