compliment of my perceived appendage—my growing belly had kept me from seeing my penis when looking down for years. I was mortified at being singled out as the “fattest guy at school.” I waited outside Judy’s fifth period class to quiz her on these events. And she confessed. She had indeed said that.
I felt compelled to break up with Judy. Not so much because of the fat remark, but because I was somewhat disgusted by her candor. I wasn’t ready to move that fast. Especially as I watched my mother demonstrate the ills of illicit sex by staying away from home night after night and gaining a public reputation for being a “slut.” This word was used by more than one caller giving “Sue” a piece of his mind in regard to my mother blowing them off.
Soon after my breakup with Judy I also “broke up” with Mike. He said his mother had accused me of buying his friendship by constantly purchasing comic books for him. I told him that wasn’t the case at all, and subsequently stopped buying him comics. Funny enough, he stopped being my friend about the same time he stopped getting my comic books. Go figure.
INWARD BOUND
I had a journalism teacher who caught on to something not being quite “right” with me. She assumed the problems were occurring inside me, rather than stemming from my home situation. She signed me up for the school-sponsored Outward Bound program, where I was forced to experience nature with a group of other “troubled” kids.
In actuality only a few of the kids were genuinely “troubled.” Most of us were simply adjusting to adolescence in one random way or another while living on a military base overseas. We were the European equivalent of Gossip Girl—without the cocktails—even though, ironically, all of us could buy beer off the military base at a German bar or pub. Its availability meant few of us military brats ever abused alcohol—and besides, I was too busy abusing food.
The Outward Bound trip proved a good way for me to get to know a few people in school. When Mike and I stopped being friends, I became very shy and withdrew into myself.
Interacting with people this closely was a new experience for me. I remember our first morning there, where five of us were assigned to the same room. There was a fellow eighth-grader, Glenn, who I became fascinated with. This was before I realized he was one of the most popular kids in school.
What fascinated me most was when Glenn was changing his shirt. The fascination wasn’t sexual. His athletic body intrigued me because it was so unlike my own. Unlike my puffy, curvy, Pillsbury Doughboy body, Glenn was totally fit. He had a tight chest, so different from my growing “breasts,” and he had a taut stomach. Not me. I had a huge stomach and flabby body. Even my penis, the one Judy had been so interested in, was receding into itself due to my belly’s full roundness.
Seeing Glenn up close like that, I began to hate my body even more than I had before. Standing in front of the mirror, I grabbed chunks of my blubbery flesh, wondering why I couldn’t look more like Glenn. I chronicled all of this in my journal—describing how my body was so much different from Glenn’s.
There was hell to pay for those journal entries. On the bus ride home from the Outward Bound week, some of the kids managed to get their hands on my journal and began reading it out loud to everyone on the bus. Every last detail of my comparing my flabby body to Glenn’s fit body was recounted for a bunch of eleven-and twelve-year-olds. I tried to get the teacher’s attention but she wouldn’t intervene. You can imagine the razzing I got. I was mortified. After that incident I held my head very low while walking the halls of Ramstein Junior High School.
Post humiliation, I showed that journalism teacher a thing or two about how “troubled” I was. I volunteered to sell yearbooks at lunch, and I was a hell of a salesman. The only caveat? I was stealing about twenty to thirty dollars a day from the profits in order to fund my food stash. My ten-dollar supply was no longer enough to satisfy me despite feeling that I was going to “explode” almost daily. I needed more money for more food. And since my parents were rarely around, I no longer had their purse or wallet as an ATM-like resource.
Each day at school, after I’d “sold” yearbooks and kept most of the profits for myself, I would run to the nearest food market during lunch, store the bags of food in my locker, then tote the groceries with me on the bus ride home. Once I got home to our apartment, I would fix whatever concoctions I wanted to create for my palate. I was now eating huge amounts on a daily basis.
Gregg’s Typical Yearbook-Funded Binge
1 gallon of Chocolate Ice Cream
(which I would wrap in foil to keep cold and less messy since it had to be stored in my locker until I went home)
1 jar of “Hot” Fudge Sauce
1 can of Whipped Cream
Bananas
2 large bags of Barbecue Potato Chips
1 large pack of Nutter Butter Peanut Butter Sandwich Cookies
1 large pack of Oreo Cookies
Eventually the journalism teacher tried to get to the bottom of who was stealing money from the yearbook fund. Based on how often I volunteered to man the yearbook sales table she suspected it was me, but she couldn’t prove it. So she gathered the class together to talk about shame, deceit, and how awful a person must be to sink so low, all the while visually indicating in my direction.
Then she left the room, leaving the class in charge of deciding who stole the money and to determine the thief’s punishment. With all my practice of being “Sue,” I was able to act innocent and, despite accusations, I never buckled under pressure. I don’t think anyone really bought my act, but there was no way of proving that I had been the one stealing the money. After all, I had eaten the evidence.
In the meantime, my mother found “true love” with an army man named Keith, and he was up for meeting Lori and me. Keith decided he wanted to spend the evening at our apartment, cooking dinner for the three of us.
Dinner? That made him A-okay in my book.
The night Keith came over Mom had to work late and “Sue” had the night off. So he prepared dinner and then we waited with him in the living room. Keith quizzed Lori and me about our backgrounds. We told him all about Massachusetts, Singapore, and basically our whole life story. We loved to talk about ourselves. After all, we were the hosts and stars of The Gregg and Lori Show and had the cassette tapes to prove it.
To our surprise, Keith suddenly lost his appetite, told us to give his apologies to our mom, and left abruptly. When Mom came home she asked us to recount the details of the evening and then she hit the roof. She was furious that Lori and I had shared our “life history” with someone we were meeting for the first time. It turns out she had spun a web of lies for Keith. Among them, that my father didn’t exist and that Lori and I were adopted.
My mother forced me to call Keith and say that Lori and I had made up all those stories about our childhood because we were ashamed of being adopted. I had to tell Keith that I had a chronic problem with lying. Finally, I was instructed to beg that he not hold our lying against our mom and ask him to forgive my sister and me. He wouldn’t.
Neither would my mother. Ever. As I would soon learn.
Safely
