Monthly Archives: February 2012

My album cover art.

Exactly a year ago today, I publicly accepted the challenge of running a 5K, pushed–to the edge of reason, a fatter Brian would claim–by a drunken email from Steve asking me to run one. Then, I could not confidently say I was a runner, unless what I was running towards was a couch, a meal or a bus bringing me closer to a couch and a meal. At the time, I had already lost 30 lbs., mainly by walking and Wii Fit-ing my ass off, but I wasn’t really fit, wasn’t someone who ran and had little muscle beyond what was required to shuffle around my almost 250-pound frame.

A year later, running no longer requires a flag checkered with pepperoni pizza and a finish line conveniently located beside a couch. What once inspired shame now feels like a necessity. When I put on those muddy sneakers and slap band-aids over my bloody nipples, I know I have accomplished something a new hole in a belt and a number on a scale can’t quite capture.

Since I began training for the 5K a year ago, I have lost almost another 50 lbs. and have gained an understanding of myself and an acceptance of my body that some people spend a lifetime of therapy, fad diets and yoga trying to reach. There’s still more ahead of me–I’m running more than 4 miles now and want to run another 5K, then a 10K in the next year, and ultimately, I want to get below 200 lbs. for the first time since I was in middle school.

But today, I want to enjoy what I’ve accomplished by looking back at the last year of posts, my greatest hits, and sharing them with you, a blog version of a mixtape, with short “liner notes” for each post because I always love reading those:

Brian with an I: Greatest Hits Volume 1.

Side A.– The “I Can’t Believe I’m Going to Run for Something Other Than the Bus”/ “Holy Shit! I’m Going to Be a Dad” Side

“That Vest Makes You Look So…Fat.” Steve is half-naked and alone in his apartment with me, but he will regret more that he agreed to run a 5K wearing a 50 lb. weight vest.

“A Post Wherein I Tell You More About My Nipples Than You May Want to Know” Training for the 5K has begun, and I have the bloody nipples to show for it. No pasties are used.

“The Day I Found Out Santa Claus is Real” This one’s about the first ultrasound, also my first post about the pregnancy. Vaginas deserve a Supporting Actress nomination for their role in this post’s performance.

“When Girl-on-Girl Goes Wrong” The slow realization that I am going to be a father crashes head-on into the growing understanding that I never had a father. Also, more vaginas.

“The Toilet Hates Me” Training for the 5K–shit is getting real. Graphic descriptions of my pained body included.

“Because ‘I Don’t Give a Shit What You Think’ Would Be Too Easy” My ridiculousness goes from unrecorded legend to blog post.

“Getting Over My Fears, One Step at a Time” Let the emotional evisceration begin!

“RWF: A Recap of the 5K” I ran and lived to tell about it. This is that.

Side B.–The “Holy Shit! I Ran a 5K!”/ “Holy Shit! I’m Still Becoming a Dad” Side

“I Really Hope My Baby’s Mama Doesn’t Beat Me Up for Posting This” Fear the pregnant for they do not care what you think!

“A Dick Thing to Do” My most-read post, one about circumcision. Also, the comments from all the foreskin-lovers are hilarious!

“How Running Gave Me Happiness” More emotional evisceration!

“#grownfolksproblems” About to turn 30, I continue the emotional gutting.

“99 Problems But a Baby Ain’t One” A reflection on the day of Sonny’s birth.

“On Being Content with Failure” I didn’t reach my weight loss goal but in failing I gained so much more.

“The Reveal-ations of Brian McGuigan” Because I hadn’t gutted myself in awhile and I was on a roll with these three prior posts. Also, some guy leaves a comment about my mother, I reply, and this becomes my third most-read post. People are still telling me that guy was an asshole.

“On Realizing People Believe in Me” My last post and one of my personal favorites. Of the emotional evisceration variety but with less bowel.

And now shouts-out, my other favorite part of the liner notes:

Album shout-outs almost always start with thanking God, but since I spend my Sundays between September and early February on the couch and not at church, I’ll start by thanking football, especially the New York Giants. Jaime, of course, my dick-punching queen. Sonny–keep smiling, little man. And Steve, whose drunk emails, most of which I don’t share on this blog, are inspiring. And, thank you, everyone, for following me on this journey over the last year. Volume 2 will be even better.

That's where all the magic happens, in my office just above the sign.

For almost the last decade of my life, I have served Seattle’s writing community in various roles at Richard Hugo House. I have scrubbed toilets and shoveled snow before slapping a button-up and sportscoat over my sweaty frame and introducing performances by local writers for whom I would have done just about anything if they had asked. I have pulled award-winning writers from the ledge of anxiety before sold-out readings, pumping them up with, “I invited you for a reason. Because I know you’re going to be great,” and I have had to level with some folks, too, like the brilliant teen poet with aspirations to be the next Kerouac, whom I told, “Partying will always be there, but if you want to be a writer, you have to make the time for reading and writing.” Some days I feel like a therapist for writers and others like a hitman, picking off letters of recommendation, proposals for events and emails of gratitude with a single clip.

That is my job.

But, as a writer, I have often found myself at a crossroads with my work at Hugo House, supporting so many other writers that I have neglected my own, spending hours in the office and out, working well over the typical 40, creating successful programs while forgetting that I am a writer, too. For three years, when I first went full-time (If you’ve ever worked at a nonprofit, you know full-time basically means you’ve surrendered most of your waking life.), I didn’t write at all. Most nights, in those early years, I’d come home after an inspiring reading and want to stroke those keys, but was too exhausted and worn. When you work with words all day, writing and reading can seem like more toil than pleasure. I lost sight of the joy I found in discovering that powerful image hidden within something crappy I wrote on the bus or rereading part of a book because the writing was so good. I even thought about quitting writing altogether. Maybe I found my calling; maybe I was just an arts administrator.

It wasn’t until a couple of years ago when I finally hit my stride as a writer after Cienna Madrid, who’s a reporter for The Stranger and was a writer-in-residence at Hugo House, invited me to write something and pair it with a slideshow for a gig she was producing at Central Cinema. That’s when I debuted the earliest pieces of “Fat Fuck” with little intention of doing more with it, at first. Later that year, my dear friend and little sister, Kate Lebo, invited me to write something about pie and read it at her book launch, which turned into a personal essay about my childhood love of Ninja Turtle Pies and stealing. Performing more “Fat Fuck” at Bumbershoot followed and more inquiries to read and perform would come. Then, I was shortlisted for The Stranger Genius Award in Literature, and although it was for my work, and not my writing, the recognition motivated me further. I wanted to win that award–and the sheet cake that comes with it!–but knew, like everything else, it would require hard work, determination and, of course, writing, which I’ve done more of over the last two years than ever before.

Maybe it wasn’t working at Hugo House that was stopping me–I just hadn’t quite discovered the story I needed to tell, the one I wanted so badly to keep from everyone, though all it took was one look at me to see I was a fat fuck. (In the time between then and when I first began working at Hugo House, I had gained 80 lbs., and while only one person remarked on my weight gain, an unnamed–for now!–editor with a reputation for rudeness, I could tell from the looks in peoples’ eyes that they were surprised by my size.)

Telling this story has been immensely powerful for me personally as well as for my readers and audience members who, after learning about how I was bullied, how I hated myself, how Haagan-Dazs was my best friend, have wanted to share their secrets, their pains, too. The self-discovery I’ve undertaken through writing “Fat Fuck” and this blog is a treasure hunt where the Xs only lead to more maps of the uncharted lands of my psyche, my heart. While my waist line has shrunk, my understanding of myself and my addiction has grown, not to mention that word count, increasing, like the number on the scale has decreased, almost daily.

Which is why, two years after I first dipped into the old shoeboxes and scrapbooks for relics of my fattest years, those days when dinner was a well-worn bridge between two pints of ice cream, scrapping together pictures for a slideshow that would detail visually the cross I carried since grade school, splintered with slices of pizza and two-liters of Sunkist, I’m proud of how this one project steamrolled into a one-man show, so many blog posts and what I hope will eventually be a book.

But more than that–I’ve learned that people actually believe in me, this kid from Queens, who didn’t think he’d amount to much of anything.

They really like me!

I came to this realization just this week when Sarah, a client services rep at Golden Lasso, a marketing/design firm on Capitol Hill that has graciously offered to develop the branding and visual concepts for “Fat Fuck,” plus use of their space for a performance on April 19 (More details to come!), sent me a Schedule and Creative Brief, an email I forwarded to my wife immediately with “I HAVE A DESIGN TEAM!!!!!!!!!!” (Yes, in all caps with 10 exclamation points.) in the body of the message. Golden Lasso believes in my work and from the Creative Brief, I could tell immediately that they get me, something I was worried about because, after all, my show is called “Fat Fuck” and includes pictures of hemorrhoids, nipples and half-naked men. Sarah alleviated those concerns when she confessed, “We’re all happy we can say the word ‘fuck’ around the office now.”

I guess I should have known before, but as someone wrought with self-doubt, I haven’t always believed in myself, so having people believe in me, much less a design firm, comes as a surprise and inspires me to work even harder. The 4Culture grant I received last year helped, too, as well as seeing the writers I’ve supported during my career at Hugo House rally around me–like Keri Healey, who’s out of the blue Facebook message in late 2010 turned into her being my director (4Culture money well-spent!); Suzanne Morrison, who, if she wasn’t already working on her own book, could be my publicist with the way she toots her horn for me; Nicole Hardy, who constantly asks about my nipples; Marya Sea Kaminski, who, in a performance class four years ago, told me, “Don’t be afraid to make your audience uncomfortable,” and has stuck by me ever since; and so many of my close friends, Steve, Elissa, David, Ross, etc., reading, keeping tabs on me, encouraging me. It has all helped me understand why I do what I do. Supporting someone chasing their dreams can be almost as fulfilling as chasing your own.

I’m still not done yet. There’s more writing to come, more Xs to uncover leading to more maps, more self-discovery, more pain and certainly more failure, but, as a writer, I truly feel the support of a community that I’ve devoted so much of my life to as an arts administrator.

I’m glad to be one of you now.

Someone needed more hugs when he was a kid.

Being a father of a two-month-old gives me little experience to speak confidently about parenthood, but sometimes you see something that’s so outrageous all you can think is, “This is how the shitty people of the world are made.” And, by that, I mean: bad parents make bad kids who grow up to be bad parents, a cycle often only broken by birth control, therapy or a whole lot of hugs. So, with that in mind, some observations:

1) Right after Sonny was born, Jaime and I lived on the couch in a haze of food, diapers, short bursts of sleep and TV, mainly “30 Rock” and “Parks and Recreation” most evenings and a series of reality shows during the day–”Storage Wars,” “Dr. Phil,” various fix-it shows and “Supernanny,” a show that can simultaneously make you believe you’re the best parent ever and make you frightened you even became a parent.

For those of you who haven’t experienced “Supernanny,” the show is basically “The Dog Whisperer” of children and, more importantly, parents, ones who are poor at setting boundaries, don’t utilize nonviolent consequences, or act like their kids owe them something because they gave birth to them. In the UK version, Supernanny’s name is Jo, who looks like a member of L.W.A. (Librarians with Attitude), and in the U.S., her name is Deborah, a Michelle Obama-archetype. Both are firm, caring women, and neither can be thwarted, whether they’re dealing with a knife-wielding hyperactive or a little boy that curses and spits at his mother. The worst episode of all though was the one with the father who told his two toddler daughters they were “little bitches.” Yes, you read that right–LITTLE BITCHES! Like, to their faces.

Thankfully, Supernanny shut that down quickly, and by the end of the episode, the father understood he was wrong, discovered a form of discipline other than spanking and established boundaries for his children, so they could learn what was right and wrong rather than being spanked and called “little bitches” for everything. If Supernanny hadn’t saved the day, there’s a good chance those girls would grow up to have low self-esteem, suffer from anxiety and depression or possibly end up in clear heels. (A Chris Rock reference worth the 1:35 it’ll take you to watch this clip, which should be required viewing for all men about to have a baby daughter.)

What I’ve learned from “Supernanny” is simple: there are so many things in the world that will fuck up your kid. Do your best not to add to it.

2) In the last few weeks, I’ve seen three separate incidents where parents were smoking around their babies. All three involved couples–in one case mom was smoking while pushing the stroller, flicking the cigarette between her fingers just above her daughter’s head, and the other two were dads, one smoking while mom pushed and the other with his baby, younger than Sonny, tucked in a Baby Moby against his chest.

Don't act like you don't know!

This isn’t “Mad Men,” people! Everyone knows cigarettes are bad for you. There’s even a reminder on the package in bold: lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema and may complicate pregnancy. And guess what? Second-hand smoke is even worse, especially for children. Don’t take my word for it. The Surgeon General’s got the scoop.

If you are smoking around a baby, stop, or you may make a dead baby joke come true.

3) Last weekend I heard a woman walking past my yard yell “Shut up!” and when I looked up from the patch of grass I was raking (Fatherhood, at least early fatherhood, comes with yard work duty.), I saw she was yelling at her daughter, who was maybe three-years-old. She then said it again. “Shut up. Stop whining.” And when the little girl asked her a question I couldn’t hear, “I don’t know. Shut up.”

WTF.

Telling your child, your daughter, to shut up, especially when she has a question doesn’t help her learn anything, understand the world positively or empower her to speak. This little girl was taught to be seen and not heard, ensuring she’ll grow up like generations of girls before her, probably like her mother, ones that had little or no voice, who weren’t allowed to question, who were taught to obey, stop whining, shut up.

What I most look forward to, besides Sonny’s first word (I’m a writer! What do you expect?), is when he asks his first question, seeing his boy mind make an observation and then he’ll wonder, “What is that, daddy?” When he wants to know something, I won’t tell Sonny to shut up–in fact, I won’t even give him an answer at first. I’ll reply, “What do you think it is?” because I want him to think critically, analyze and reason, speak his mind and tell his own stories. I’ll need something to write about.

We have more in common than I ever realized, though Nomi has nicer boobs.

There’s a lot you don’t know. It’s not because I don’t trust you–I’m just not ready to tell you, not yet but not never.

I’m not pushing you away, I promise. I just haven’t quite processed all my feelings to the point where I can distill my own truths, like when I wrote, “My own mortality becomes realer when I realize I’m no longer living for myself” or “I’m… happy, content with the man I am, one at peace with his imperfections, which makes failure easier to cope with and finding the motivation to continue on towards excellence easier, too.”

I knew how I felt when I wrote those posts, when I turned off the “No Vacancy” sign above my heart and let you in, showed you to a room maybe you’d only pay for by the hour if you didn’t know it was my motel, if you didn’t know those stains on the sheets were tears, not something gross and detectable with a black light or a CSI.

I’m telling you this now because the other day two of my best friends asked about my mother, who, after almost five years of unreturned phone calls and letters, finally wrote me back, a short note with a huge package of baby clothes, all boy’s clothing because she wrote, “McGuigan’s make boys.” She didn’t even know we had a son.

Despite all the beer, which normally turns my filter into an open spigot, I couldn’t say much about my mother, still can’t really (Again, not never–just not now.), but I’ve already said more here, on this blog, to people I may or may not even know, friends, acquaintances, colleagues, a contestant on “Heavy”, than to two people who’ve seen me at my worst–and promised not to put those photos on Facebook! (On a side-note: If you’re a regular here, leave me a comment. Say hello. I’m curious who YOU are now that you know so much about me. Please?)

I have always had difficulty letting people in, or, probably more appropriately, I have always done well at pushing people away. Throughout my childhood, the closest people to me disappeared, the explanations of why, if I ever received them, too vague for my Ninja Turtle- and baseball-obsessed brain to understand. So I withdrew–food, rap music and sitcoms coached me into high school where I kept my relationships on the surface. The few people, mostly girlfriends, I didn’t push away hurt me anyway, and the ones who didn’t I cut off once I moved to California, knowing it was easier to forget what I had than pine for what could be. My adult relationships have been no different. Get too close, and I shut down–I assume you’ll just leave anyway–so instead, I keep everyone within earshot, a proximity where you can hear me, feel like you know me, but far enough away that when I do feel exposed you won’t see, like walking around the house in your underwear with all the windows open when you know all your neighbors are at work.

Recently, I was talking with Dave Schmader, whose new solo play, commissioned by Hugo House, explores his HIV-positive diagnosis, gay marriage and how Prop 8 divided his husband’s Mormon family, about letting people into your stories, into parts of your life you’d just as soon forget if your mind allowed it, and Dave said, “I have to get used to feeling naked on stage in front of everyone.” The nudity overwhelmed him, yet Dave knew that feeling meant he was onto something as an artist.

Oddly, it’s easier for me to blog or get up on stage and share these intimate, emotional and embarrassing stories of my life than to tell my closest friends, or sometimes even my wife. For me, telling the deeply personal through writing and performing clothes me, but to sit before you, looking into your eyes, and say, “I lived a life of self-doubt and anger, regularly allowing fear of failure to prevent me from taking on a challenge and then being mad at myself for quitting or not even trying” seems too personal, like I’m sharing a secret. To tell you myself, one-on-one, is basically stripping, bearing it all in one of those private rooms where you look anywhere but the floor.

Now that I have Sonny, I don’t want to push people away anymore. I want the relationships, the closeness, I’ve never allowed myself to have, and I know that means being as vulnerable in my life as I allow myself to be through my art, and accepting the inherent risk of loss and hurt that comes with loving people.

Eventually, I’d like to tell you more, too, about my mother and my father–at least what I actually know about him–more about my childhood, how there were times when I didn’t want to live, more about my family and the one night when it all changed, about the nightmares that shook me awake for two years, the burglaries and stick-ups, the job that ultimately taught me how to be a hustler, or what I call an “arts-get-shit-doner.”

I’m just not ready to share these stories. Bear with me. I need more time. I only ask that you be there for me when I’m ready. Don’t disappear.

(This is it, the last part in the series of interconnected stories about fatness. The first part is here, and the second part is here.  I would start there, but, you know, I wrote them, so I have to tell you that.)

III.

People have asked me, “How’d you do it?”, as if I know something they don’t, as if everything they have been told was a lie, and there was something else out there that will make them lose weight like I did.

In the beginning, I said simply, “Water,” an uncomplicated answer, advice anyone in a First World Country could follow. Other times, I’d summarize it with “Lifting weights”; “Running”; “Chia seeds,” only a word or phrase, something simple, the truth, yet only part of it. The first time I lost all the weight, I was more confident, I’d say, “I’m just all man,” flex my muscles, pumping below all that extra skin. Maybe I haven’t fully explained how because I don’t want anyone to get their hopes up, to think, “Brian stopped drinking so much soda, started benching and eating grass-fed beef”–that’s all it took. (If only.)

I have also never wanted anyone to hear my weight loss stories as advice, to look at me as a blueprint, a man who lost a lot, only to gain so much back, and lose it again. If anything, I’m a role model for what not to do. Don’t lift until you hurt yourself. Don’t beat-up-yourself into a depression. Don’t do weird stuff with Preparation-H. And definitely if you lose it, keep it off, in my opinion, the hardest part of all because if you’re like me, food is Jesus, only microwave-safe.

So, recently, when a friend told me he/she was on a diet (I’m trying to be discreet.), trying to lose weight for a trip by eating one meal a day, anything, it sounded like, and living off of protein shakes, water and fiber the rest of the time (In my case, it was Colon Cleanse, which I’m pretty sure has the same make-up as the brown stuff he/she was taking.), snacking on almonds when starving, I didn’t want to tell him/her: I’ve already done something like that, and it doesn’t work. Those diets aren’t sustainable. You can’t eat two meals worth of powder for the rest of your life. The missing sensation of chewing alone, passing bites from incisors to molars, will make your body rebel, your mind grieve. And if your goal is to lose weight quickly for a trip–where, if you’re truly having a good time, you aren’t eating powder–once it’s over, your body will rebound, back where you started, which is worse for you than just staying where you were in the first place.

When I first moved to Seattle, I was about 250 lbs., working my way down from 339, and before I even had a job, I had a gym membership, an expensive package deal, charged to my credit card. Eating protein shakes and bars and what I wouldn’t call a diet but a strict regimen–fruit, vegetables, pasta, chicken, turkey sandwiches, lettuce and a small assortment of low-fat yogurts, soups and snacks. I wasn’t drinking. I wasn’t eating butter or bacon or cheese. (To understand the heft of this, you must understand: I FUCKING LOVE CHEESE!) I wasn’t doing much of anything fun, and although I was dropping weight quickly and looking leaner than I ever have, I wasn’t happy. By virtue of my diet, I began shutting the world out, losing the love felt through food, the community of sharing a meal together with family and friends.

I could tell my friend wasn’t happy either when I looked in his/her eyes while biting into a huge cheeseburger and, the night before, sipping on a glass of wine, both he/she declined because they didn’t fit the diet, although later there was a glass of wine and a few fries off someone’s plate. Just to curb the urge. I know the feeling well. Maybe he/she doesn’t beat herself up over it like I did.

I wanted to tell my friend, too, that you can’t spot reduce. You can’t exercise one muscle group and expect to drop pounds on that part of your body, like if you have what I have come to know as a “badonkadonk,” you can’t lose it by running stairs and walking, or if you want to lose the weight in your stomach, you can’t do crunches until your nauseous, like I have. The weight comes off everywhere, which is why some of us will avoid horizontal stripes for life.

I also didn’t want to tell this friend that he/she was fine just the way he/she was because that’s what my mom told me, until I was too big even for her, though that didn’t stop her from feeding me. (Love has its limits, and food was within them.) Anyone who thinks they’re fat has spent enough time looking in the mirror to think they’re not fine the way they are and won’t buy that line. So, I didn’t try, even if I believe, as a fat person (Some might say “fat fuck.), that my friend wasn’t one of our kind, wouldn’t make one last stop at a drive-thru on the ride to the pearly gates. (I’ll need the biggest order of french fries you have here!)

Instead, hunched over a burrito the size of a purse dog and purple-lipped drunk on cheap wine, I offered some unsolicited advice to my friend about losing weight, unlike what I was told that Halloween night.

“Fuck that diet shit. Look at me–I’m eating a huge burrito and I’m drunk and I feel stronger than I ever have in my life. Just do what I do.”

Then, still holding my burrito, I flexed my right bicep and took a bite.

(This is part two in a series of interconnected stories about fatness. The first part is here. I would recommend starting there. Part three, the finale, is forthcoming tomorrow. I would come back for that one, too.)

II.

In the years after that trick-or-treating gone wrong, so many people told me I was fat, needed to lose weight, probably shouldn’t be eating whatever I was eating, definitely should get up, get out, do something. Doctors, teachers, my classmates, complete strangers, people on the subway, in the mall, diner waitresses with the extra syrup, checkers at the grocery store discerningly ringing up the food they knew–I knew–I shouldn’t eat.

What they didn’t say to me I could read in their eyes, widening at my size, my appetite, the heaviness of my breath when I took the stairs, thudding on each step. I was a boy who could out-eat men, outweighed many twice my age, a third more my height, but none close to my belly size, which was, throughout my teen years, large enough that I needed more than a seat on the train, where the leers were intense, passengers hoping I didn’t end up in the one next to theirs, surrounding them with a wall of fat and sweat.

I could recount each incident, like the one with the woman on Halloween, where someone thought they were doing me a favor–“You just have to walk.” Or maybe it was run. Push-ups. Sit-ups. Eat right–wheat bread, juice, low-fat this or that, V-8. Cut out the red meat, the sweets and all the snacking. And don’t forget to watch my cholesterol, take my vitamins, drink less soda. It worked for their mother, their father. An aunt or brother or cousin, a friend, someone at work–the Atkins, Weight Watchers, a Bally Total Fitness membership. Everyone told me I should lose weight and how to do it, how whatever I was doing was wrong, how I should and shouldn’t eat, should and shouldn’t exercise, but I never listened, some reminded me.

No, I listened. I heard everything said. Repeated it in my head. While looking at myself in the mirror. Heard it repeated to me by my mother, only nicer, by my classmates, only meaner. I was fat as a house, a car, a cow, an elephant, Chubby Checker, Chunk from “The Goonies,” Private Pyle, Richard Simmons before he lost the weight and started wearing all that teal mesh. Earthquakes were born with each of my steps. Elastic waist bands cried when they saw me coming. The only thing left after the Apocalypse would be Styrofoam, roaches and me, and then I’d eat them both. But I could lose the weight if I just did what everyone told me to do.

I listened, but couldn’t–wouldn’t if you asked some, maybe– do it because what they all told me made me sadder than I already was (A simple equation, really: no dad + depression x too much food=fat, young Brian.) and when I was sad, I ate. And even when I tried–cut out the ice cream, walked to school, passed up seconds, thirds, I still wasn’t happy. I would always be what everyone didn’t want me to be–fat. There was nothing I could do.

(Editor’s–err, Blogger’s–Note: This is part one in a series of interconnected stories about fatness, which will be posted over the next three days in three parts. Enjoy!)

I.

I will eat your face!

I don’t remember the first person that called me fat, but I do remember the first adult–it was Halloween, and I was almost 13 years-old, dressed as a devil, but a last minute one–maybe just recently fallen and didn’t quite have the look down yet–a red t-shirt and sweatpants, not even the same shade of red, the shirt of the firetruck variety and the pants more a maroon, with two horns traced on and cut from construction paper taped to my head and a tail, also construction paper, stapled to the ass of my pants.

The previous Halloween, I had sworn, would be my last as a trick-or-treater. I was a year from high school and should have graduated from part-time treater and part-time ghoulish hooligan to full-time egg bomber, toilet paper thrower and shaving cream shooter before my tour of duty in middle school had ended. But that morning when I woke up and saw the bowl of candy in the foyer set out by Norma, our landlord, who lived in the apartment below ours (By this point, we had fled the basement from my last post for higher ground, a turn-of-the-century Victorian converted into a split-level, only two blocks north, but practically a new continent without the growl of the J rattling our only window.), I knew I’d be back at it, the outlier of trick-or-treaters, parting the younger Ninja Turtles and princesses with my changing voice and odd facial hair.

Of course, I headed north, where the apartment buildings became split-levels which became actual houses, single-family homes, where the mailboxes bore last names in an elegant script, doorbells chimed instead of buzzing and the cars, not a crack in the windshield or a dent in the fender, came to rest in garages. Now I wouldn’t call these people rich, but then, compared to how my mother, whom whenever I asked for something would say, “Who do you think I am? Rockefeller?”, and I lived, they might as well have founded Standard Oil.

The first few houses were lucrative–Snickers, Crunch, Three Muskateers, one place even had full candy bars, not the snack-sized minis normally handed out on Halloween. Droves of kids, all younger and in far better costumes, trolled the sidewalks, moms and dads in tow calling after them by their real names, not the Michelangelos (the turtle, not the artist) and Princess Jasmines they were that night. Alone, I rung the doorbell of a house I’d passed before on my way to and from the park where I played basketball and three years later would smoke pot for the second time. I didn’t know who lived there, but figured, based on the size and location of the place, a big brick house off Park Lane South, that whomever answered would have good candy, none of the knock-off stuff my mother bought at one of the 99-cent stores on Jamaica Ave.

“Trick or treat?” I screamed at the woman who answered the door, laying it on thick since I believed I had reached the age cut-off for trick-or-treating already.

The woman, holding a plastic Jack-o-lantern of candy, looked startled. Maybe it was my costume, obviously a hastily thrown together get-up, one I had been using for a few years, ever since I lost whatever cuteness that caused mothers to make sure their child looked like the best Ninja Turtle or princess a costume shop and sewing machine could muster. For me that day, it was either a devil or Jason, from the “Friday the 13th” franchise, and I assumed my construction paper tail was more adorable than a blood-smeared hockey mask that probably still had yolk from last year crusted on it.

“Trick-or-treat,” I said again, almost an ask this time.

“Aren’t you a little too fat to be trick-or-treating?” the woman asked, refusing to give me any candy.

I was stunned and unsure of what to say. Did this woman, older than my mother, wearing what I would come to know as “mom jeans” and a Halloween sweater embroidered with pumpkins, witches or ghosts really just say I was fat? Too fat for candy? I had comebacks for when kids at the park or school called me names, but nothing for this woman, an adult. The silence only ended when a group of children came up behind me, trick-or-treaters she would not deny.

“Now move along,” she told me.

I didn’t keep trick-or-treating; instead, I went home, feasted on my small bounty of candy alone in my bedroom, feeling sad for myself, yet finding comfort in what caused my sadness, the cheap, sugary chocolate, a delicious, little shoulder to cry on. By nightfall, I’d eaten everything–my own candy, all the good stuff in the bowl downstairs and had started in on the knock-offs my mother bought–and was properly fueled with refined sugars to begin the second half of Halloween night, the hooliganism.

I wish I could say I bombed this woman’s house, eggs, fresh from my pants’ pockets, the shells warm to the touch by the residual heat of my doughy white thighs, cracking against her window panes and brick siding, my mother’s scented shaving cream spelling words she’d hate me for using on the woman’s garage, toilet paper dripping with yolk from the trees in her front yard. I thought about doing all of it, but didn’t because, even though I was angry, I knew the woman was right. I egged another home, someone’s car, and left hers untouched.

Look at that smile!

I was never much of a smiler after the summer I cracked my front teeth. I was nine or ten years-old, playing a rough game of tag outside the apartment building in the shadow of the el tracks where we lived in the basement when Julio, my nemesis, the other fat kid on my block who lived right upstairs from me and always seemed to have what the rest of us saw on TV but couldn’t afford, pushed me down the cement front steps where I landed mouth-first on the last one, revenge for beating his ass in our almost daily boxing matches, egged on by our friends.

My teeth, of course, were fucked. My front two cracked into jagged halves, blood trickling out where the broken pieces had punctured the skin of my gums. I blacked out, came to in a fit of tears, one of those deep, undulating child cries that seem to last eternally, with everyone on my block standing over me. Then my mother ushered my shaken body to a mirror to see the carnage, insisting it could be fixed in that anxious tone mothers have when trying to soothe even when they know otherwise.

But my teeth were never fixed. I refused, at first, because I was afraid of the dentist, having been in for two fillings a couple of summers before with a regular Dr. Giggles. My earliest memories of dental work were blacking out (again) and waking up with blood all over me in an empty room of some back alley dentistry, all my mother could afford without insurance. I wouldn’t go to the dentist next until my freshman year of college.

Once in my teen years, my teeth became a badge of honor, yet one I rarely showed off because, by then, I had stopped flashing my big cheesy smile altogether and practiced a more subtle one, standing in front of the bathroom mirror holding my upper lip down over my broken teeth. I wanted to smile without letting the world see my damaged pearly whites. I didn’t want everyone to think we were really poor. Eventually, I developed a half-smile where I barely opened my mouth at all, just a little crook of the lip, a flash of dimple. My teeth were a secret I wanted kept, something I hoped girls wouldn’t notice and boys wouldn’t tease me about, though, as fat as I was, there were other options.

There he goes again...

It had been years since I thought about my smile, no longer awash in that teenage self-consciousness overselling every imperfection on the psyche, until recently when I was shaking this dumbbell rattle over Sonny’s head, and his little lips perked into a huge smile that made me cheese out the way I did before my teeth were broken. Then, the funny faces began, opening my mouth real wide, wrinkling my nose, doing crazy shit with my eyebrows and tongue (See Exhibit A.; Exhibit B.; and Exhibit C.), hoping to earn the precious reward of another Sonny smile. The boy relented, cooing and giggling, swinging his sausage-like arms around in excitement.

That night, after Sonny was asleep, I was brushing my teeth and began making funny faces in the mirror, toothpaste foaming from my jowls. Quickly, I understood what made Sonny smile: my face did look kind of funny. Fifteen years ago, what would have embarrassed me so much is now a source of happiness for my son, something I’d do again and again just to see that little smile of his, toothless and perfect, his chubby cheeks like two mounds of rosy gold surrounding a treasure worth letting go of all that childhood shame.

I still won’t have my teeth fixed. They remind me of where I came from, that basement apartment in Queens where the roaches squatted in the cupboards and the roar of the J above made the ground quake beneath us, and where I am now in a house with a clean, well-lit living room where Sonny has space to stretch out on a shiny purple toy mat while his dad shakes a rattle and works on new funny faces for him, ones only Sonny sees because his smiles deserve the best.