Sam Lipsyte - The Fun Parts

All the time I spent denying this, tracing the source of the lie, I could have read some inspirational book, had the world opened up to me. The world never opened up to me. It just sat there. It needed a little salt.

* * *

Cigarettes, a girl I was eavesdropping on told her friend, cut your appetite. I bought the brand I’d once spotted while going through my babysitter’s purse. Later I learned they were women’s cigarettes.

This affected me.

Eventually I moved into the basement. It was meant to be a sign of independence, being nearer to the boiler. I could conceivably control the temperature of rooms. Here, far from the sidelong sadness of my progenitors, I learned to ungirl my manner with a cigarette, to teach myself a disrespect for fire.

“Are you smoking?”

A shift in aromatics had brought my father to the door. He always sniffed at things — his breakfast, his wife. He liked to pinkie out his earwax, whiff it. He said the smell contained important information about his health. Most of his knowledge was of this order. He’d come from strivers, made the Ivy League, but this is what he’d whittled it down to. I was a major admirer.

“I’m giving you a chance to answer me,” he said now. “Are you smoking cigarettes down here?”

He’d been prelaw in college, and I remember thinking that since he was not a lawyer, he would die prelaw. I crushed out the burning Capri in my pocket.

“I’ll ask you one more time,” he said. “Are you?”

We squinted at each other through the smoke.

“No,” I said.

I felt a part of his world then. Men lied to his face every day.

* * *

It was hard to believe how big I was. I wasn’t quite obese. Those types were to be pitied, the ones we saw at the mall when my mother drove me over for new fat-boy pants. We’d circle the parking lot, the inseams of my corduroys planed down or outright split, my hands cupped over pressured bars of crotch flesh.

“It’s glandular, poor things,” she’d say, point them out for me, the obese kids hobbling past our windshield with their mothers. “It’s not their fault.”

Me, on the other hand, I was definitely my fault.

I spent long minutes on the bench outside the ladies’ room, listening to my mother’s voice above the flushes, the faucets. She’d strike up talk with other mothers. Maybe some had come for fat-boy pants. You didn’t really need your fat boy along for buying fat-boy pants. There were not a lot of choices to make. There were not a lot of colors. It was just a matter of getting really big pants. Maybe a sweater.

* * *

I knew some Catholic kids from the Catholic school down the block. They called me names, but not fat names. They called me kike, Christ killer. Finally, real friends. I sat with them on the bike rack behind their school and smoked.

One of them was huge, too. He said we were both going to hell for gluttony. The idea seemed to make him giddy. I told him my parents had parented me to understand that you pay for everything here, in your own time, in your own home, even. They were humanists. They got special magazines in the mail.

My ass, my thighs, my belly, my breasts, it was all becoming an ethical question, a great humanist dilemma. Also, there were these big, moist boils on my chest. My father said not to worry. The same thing had happened to him. Then one magical summer the weight just melted away. He’d even written a prizewinning children’s book about it.

We had to read this book in school.

The boy picked to give the report on it stood in front of the class and stared at me.

“The author hopes to show how gross his son is.”

* * *

The new boy, he was Brody. He was mall obese. He was beyond mall obese. He had a new kind of body, something never before seen. When he walked through the hallway, everyone whispered “glandular,” as though they were saying “Holocaust” or “slavery,” all hushed and sorry.

Brody was holy, made by God, hands-on. They figured him for the fattest boy in the world. Me, I was fat for the town, the county. I was Fat Shit, Lard Ass, Tits, Tub. Brody was the wonder of glands. He’d been put on this planet to teach us. Even the real torture freaks wouldn’t touch him. They’d compliment his sneakers. If Brody dropped a ball in gym, some jock would jog over, hand it back to him. Brody could not pick up the ball himself, but he had other vital work. Any ball I dropped I got back hard in the nuts.

Sometimes I wondered what Brody’s mother told Brody when they circled for parking at the mall.

Did she point me out, and say, “You, my darling Brody, are glandular, but that boy there, he’s just weak”?

Is that what she said?

Whore.

* * *

They put us back-to-back, yards apart, each yoked to the looped end of a tug-of-war rope. Such was physical education in our school. The coaches least known for copping feels, the cruel, unperverted ones, had thought it up. Students cut lunch, free periods, to attend. They came in sick to see.

We stood there on the hardwood floor. Light poured down from the high gym windows. I couldn’t see Brody, but I could feel him test the rope. It tightened at my hips, burned up my belly, went slack again. I heard his sneakers squeak.

We waited for the whistle. When it came, we would charge up out of our crouches and one of us would topple in shame.

There were hundreds in the bleachers now.

They were chanting for him, for Brody.

They were sorry about Nagasaki, I guess. Babylon, Union City.

I was sorry my father ever found my mother, smelled her, found her.

Now I heard that little ball begin to rattle in the coach’s whistle and I knew the next thing I heard would be Brody falling, crashing.

I could always hear things. Smell, I couldn’t smell much since the cigarettes, but I could hear the quietest of things, things coming out of the quiet, sounds before they were sounds, names before they were shouted after me.

It took all the coaches to carry Brody to the nurse’s station. Word came soon of a concussion.

* * *

Brody was out for a week, and then it was winter break. I’d waited days to be treated like a hero, but no dice. I was a dick. I’d hurt the huge Christ.

I saw him at the mall a few days after New Year’s. He had a neck brace, a plastic halo fanned out behind his head. He waddled up in a version of my pants. A more benevolent color.

“Brody,” I said.

He shot me this look of brotherhood, as though together we could shoulder a great burden of sorrow. We could forget everything that had happened between us, enter the kingdom of kindness hand in hand.

I punched him in the gut. He leaned up on the wall, held his belly, kneaded it as though to push the sting out. Blood drained out of his face. I pictured him at home that night in bed, everything collapsing from a dead point in the center of him, dying like a star dies. Or maybe he would die right here, slide down dead against the wall.

I took up the rolls of his throat.

“Brody,” I said.

My arms quivered, and I noticed the hair grown back. A revolution in technique, its dividends.

“Brody,” I said, squeezing, squeezing.

“Brody,” I said, “you fat fucking fuck.

“Brody,” I said, “you’re killing me.”

I was squeezing and squeezing.

Our mothers approached, ladies from the ladies’ room, chatting.

Classic American story: I was out of money and people I could ask for money. Then I got what the Greeks call a eureka moment. I could write a book for children about the great middleweight Marvelous Marvin Hagler. My father had been a sportswriter before he started forgetting things, such as the fact that he had been a sportswriter or the name of his only son, so my idea did not seem crazy. Probably it’s like when your father is president. You think, If that fuck could do it …