Benjamin Hale - The Fat Artist and Other Stories

The story was also very short, and while I quite honestly did not read very much of that book, I did at least read that story, and the beginnings of several others.

• • •

After Olivia terminated relations with me — citing as she did some pointed critiques of my personality and lifestyle — I gained a tremendous amount of weight.

Should you ever want to nearly treble your magnitude in a relatively short period of time, I recommend the following regimen: morbid depression, sleeping thirteen or more hours a day, addictions to alcohol and barbiturates, and lots of eating.

I spent much of the next year in bed. My finances were comfortable. I could afford it. I disappeared from public life. I ordered food in daily. Initially I relied heavily on pizza and Chinese food. Sometimes I ate large quantities of fried chicken. Sometimes I ate four to five canisters of Pringles snack chips in a single sitting. Sometimes I ate two or three gallons of ice cream for dessert. A typical day during this period might go something like this:

4:30 P.M.:

Rise, shine

5:00 P.M.:

Pick up phone, order three pizzas

5:10 P.M.–9:30 P.M.:

Sit on couch, watch TV while eating three said pizzas

9:35 P.M.–1:15 A.M.:

Naptime

1:15 A.M.–5:00 A.M.:

Wake up sobbing and chilled in sweat with wildly beating heart. Gobble fistful of benzodiazepines and crouch over laptop, drinking whiskey, eating ice cream, smoking cigarettes, and enjoying pornography until sleep comes again to take the artist away from this awful place

Groceries, drugs, liquor, laundry, etc. — it was almost astonishing how nearly everything that might require my leaving my home I was able to have someone from the outside bring to me (only in New York!). I spent most of my time in the nude; I donned a bathrobe to meet deliverymen at the door (sometimes). I kept the curtains drawn. No light came into my space. I did not wash my sheets either. They grew sticky, filmy. I expanded rapidly.

Ten months later, I weighed nearly five hundred pounds. Not that I was keeping track. This initial period of massive weight gain, while I was dimly aware of it, was more or less unintentional. I was not yet a Fat Artist — I was merely an artist who had allowed himself, by way of a largely sedentary and unwholesome lifestyle, to become extraordinarily fat. I was merely a fat artist.

Throughout this year I communicated with practically no one. It was surprisingly easy to drop off the face of the earth in a luxury loft apartment in a converted warehouse in Greenpoint. I did not come out, I called no one, never returned a call, nor did I answer anyone by e-mail or any other medium of communication, and I quickly became — by choice — friendless.

What drew me out of my malaise was not love, nor was it fear (not, at least, for my life), nor was it the intervention of friends or family, as I had no real friends and was estranged from my family. Rather, what drove me back into the world was the most powerful but prosaic mover in human civilization: money.

I was broke. I had been consuming a great deal, and I’d had no source of income for nearly a year. I had not sold a single piece, I had not done any hobnobbing, I had not appeared in a single photograph holding a single cocktail in Artforum ’s “Scene & Herd.” I was missing in action in the art world.

I did not realize at the time that my refusal to communicate with anyone or even leave my home for a year had lent a mysterious luster to my absent celebrity. I had not been — as I had thought (as I probably should have been) — forgotten. Rather, my long and unexplained absence had acquired a strange quality of presence. I had created a vacuum of myself. At every gallery opening that year to which I had been invited and did not attend, there was a Tristan Hurt — shaped hole in the room, a phantom, a shadow, a void that was more glamorously conspicuous than my presence would have been. As if my prolonged disappearance were in fact an ingeniously crafted publicity stunt. Clearly an artist who chooses to abruptly vanish from society before the zenith of his career must be a creative genius locked in a fit of feverish productivity that ordinary people cannot ever hope to truly understand.

I do not know if they thought I was working. I do not know if they thought I was in a torturous state of nerves, for which I needed the dark romance of my solitude. I do not know if perhaps they thought I was sleeping until four in the afternoon each hateful day and then spending my waking hours shoveling gooey clumps of General Tso’s chicken between my industrious jaws and watching videos of big-dicked men ejaculating onto the waiting faces of girls while I soporated my brain with Ambien and bourbon with my listless penis sleeping in my hand like a beanbag. I do not even know if this knowledge would have detracted from, or in fact somehow added to, their newfound romantic notion of me as an eccentric recluse.

• • •

But as I said, it was nothing more — or less — romantic than a matter of grubby economics that drove me from my long hibernation. I had not checked up on my personal finances in many months. I simply had not been thinking about it. I’d had so much money at the outset of my long period of torpidity that I had somewhat blithely assumed my bank balance would remain always as inexhaustible as the horn of plenty of legends old. I did not open my mail for nearly a year. I kept a year’s worth of unopened mail in a black plastic trash bag in a closet. Whenever a piece of mail arrived, I immediately stuffed it in the bag. For a year I was, on some level, distantly terrified of how much money I was spending, and so I was disinclined to look.

Tax day came and went without my so much as bothering to call my accountant. Eventually I received an unpleasant call from the Internal Revenue Service. This prompted me to finally steel enough courage to investigate the state of my accounts.

With great trepidation fluttering in my weak heart, I exhumed the contents of the garbage bag in which I had been keeping all my unopened mail. I ensconced myself on the floor and ripped open each cursed envelope. Every piece of mail I opened revealed my financial situation to be graver than the last. Over the past year, the fortune I had acquired had diminished to nil. It was gone. Gone! Gone up my nose and down my gullet, gone through my idleness, gone into images of naked women subjecting themselves to hideous acts of willful degradation, gone into my brain and my veins and the fat of my body and splurted out of my anal sphincter and my penis, often into my dirty socks. The cost of the pornography alone that I put on my credit cards came out to something in the order of nine thousand dollars per month, to say nothing of the drugs, the alcohol, and the food, the food, the glorious food.

I was destitute!

I looked around my home. What did it look like? First, imagine a loft space in a converted warehouse in Greenpoint with twelve-foot ceilings, large, arch-shaped west-facing windows, a beautiful view of Midtown Manhattan, white walls and warm-toned glossy oak floors, track lighting, designer furniture, granite countertops, everything tastefully accented with objets d’art. Now make it dark. Draw curtains shut over windows so that no light gets in. Take considerable quantity of soiled clothing, drape pell-mell over furniture, scatter across floor. Fill room with empty beer bottles, empty whiskey bottles, stacks of oily pizza boxes. Moldy, soiled dishes should litter floor, coffee table, dining table, countertops; heap high in sink. Leave to rot for many consecutive months. When artist runs out of clean dishes, add top layer of paper plates, soaked transparent with grease. Add thick stench of sweat, semen, smoke, garbage, etc. Add generous quantity of cockroaches. Add mice. Add rats. Allow mice and rats to skitter freely across floor. Cease to care about cockroaches, mice, rats. Cease to notice cockroaches, mice, rats. Add cloud of flies. Do not even attempt to swat/shoo flies if/when said flies land on artist’s skin.