Everything Is Awful Read online

  I’m sure there are plenty of mommy bloggers today who know the exact mixture of peanut butter, vegetable oil, and angel tears you need to get gum out of a kid’s hair without resorting to the nuclear option, but this was 1998 and all we had was a dial-up connection. We weren’t about to wait thirty minutes for the computer to connect to the Internet so we could figure out how to get gum out of hair the fancy way.

  So, having protested that I would rather live with the mangled, patchy hairstyle of an off-brand clown than shave it all off, my mother proceeded to perform spot surgery and literally hacked the gum from my head until every sticky trace had been excised. We spent the next several days traveling from one suburban Supercuts to another. At every stop, my mother would spin me around, point to the spot where she’d taken an axe to my skull, and look expectantly at each stylist to see who could conjure enough magic to make me whole again. But the desecration had been too deep. My crown had been broken. And there was no fixing the damage that had been inflicted on my soul.

  It probably grew back in like a week, because kids’ hair grows like mold on old bread. But I learned a valuable lesson that day. Hair can never be trusted, no matter how religiously you wash it, condition it, wet it, part it, and hairspray it. The second it gets the chance, it’ll gleefully ruin your entire goddamn life. One chopped gummy patch at a time.

  • • •

  As I got older and the children who once knocked on my hardened hair grew into judgmental teenagers eager to pounce on anything even slightly unordinary, I abandoned my hairspray in favor of the more relaxed, no-frills vibe of a thirteen-year-old with split ends. Which is to say, I spent most of high school with hair that had the consistency of straw because it had been blow-dried to within an inch of its life every single morning. But it worked for me.

  Of course, my hair, knowing full well that I’d found some sense of equilibrium in life, couldn’t let well enough alone, and began conspiring with my hormones to bring life new hellish meaning. Hair began appearing in places it had never been before, bringing with it fresh new odors and itchiness and discomfort.

  As a Bellassai, I’m at the end of a long line of Italian men (and women) with body hair thicker than lush forest moss. I used to lie awake at night and wonder why we couldn’t have turned out like the oiled, hairless men in the Dolce&Gabbana ads. I’m sure they never had to shave their necks beneath the collars of their shirts, or tweeze obsessively between their eyebrows, or brush the fur on their toe knuckles. I bet their shower drains didn’t look like they were trying to flush the decaying carcass of a trampled wildebeest.

  When my father took off his shirt, it looked like he’d covered himself in glue and rolled around the floor of a veterinarian’s office. I used to wonder how he ever fully dried himself off after swimming in the pool. And this is what I inherited.

  My hair didn’t grow normally, though. The hair on my face didn’t all decide to arrive at once, at the same, even length. It grew one at a time, starting with one very ambitious strand that grew from the dead center of my cheek and coiled before I’d noticed it. It was long enough that a girl at school reached out and physically plucked it from my face, before she said, “Awww, look who’s becoming a man,” an event that continues to haunt me to this day, but mostly because she had no idea if maybe I wanted to keep that whisker as a souvenir or if I’d been growing it out as an experiment.

  When I eventually had enough hair to shave, I pressed way too hard with the electric shaver, and had my first lesson in the searing pain of razor burn, which is just another one of hair’s backhanded gifts. Hair ushers you into adulthood, welcomes you with the new responsibilities of maturity, and then, when you finally muster the confidence to deal with it, takes a layer of your skin clean off on its way out.

  • • •

  Sometime around my twenty-second birthday was when I first realized that the hair on my head was beginning to thin. I noticed it, as you notice most things in life, in the reflection of my head on the blank screen of my phone. At first I thought it might just be the angle—nobody looks like they have much hair when they’re looking at themselves from beneath a triple chin. But when I brought up my grip, I saw that the hair at the front of my head seemed just a little less thick than usual.

  My hair had always been thick, thick enough that the stylist at Supercuts was forced to use thinning shears just to work with it, but perhaps because of the amount of chemicals I’d put in my hair since birth, or the aggressive way I combed it every morning, or my general lack of a healthy diet and exercise regimen (but probably not), it was undoubtedly starting to grow thinner. My mother blamed the woman at Supercuts for her indiscriminate use of the thinning shears, but I suspect she was just angry I’d started going to a salon rather than have her cut my hair in the laundry room with the same scissors she used to groom the dog, and was looking for a reason to prove me wrong. She had cut my hair until I was nearly twenty years old, and the betrayal she felt when I finally announced I’d be going to a strip-mall beauty parlor reverberated for months. She still blames those Supercuts thinning shears for my receding hairline, despite the fact that it’s receding in the same fashion as my father’s and his father’s before him, in what some might call a pattern of male baldness.

  It’s been a handful of years since then, and I’m glad to say that I still have a fair amount of hair on my head. (And, for the curious, a thriving amount of hair everywhere else.)

  But here is hair’s final twist of the knife. I’m now an adult gay man, at a point when hair is of premium importance in life. After all, in the gay community, for better or worse, hair defines everything. It is virtually the single most ubiquitous characteristic in the gay taxonomy: there are twinks, bears, otters, cubs, wolves—all defined one way or another by the presence or lack of hair. And I fit neatly into none of those categories, which means if I ever do porn, they won’t even know what part of the website to put me in. (For the record, if I had to categorize myself, I probably most closely resemble a bear, but like Paddington, because I always keep my clothes on, so the porn thing will have to be artsy, like for guys who get off on watching other guys eat meatball sandwiches.)

  The gay community has had a long obsession with grooming, and for many, a proper, professional gay needs to be waxed, shaved, and styled to perfection—all before getting out of bed. Beards, which are now the defining symbol of gay hotness, should be trimmed and shaped to emulate no less than the Spartans themselves. And of course, manscaping is an absolute must, and body hair of any kind should be expunged, besides perfect, decorative topiaries above the genitals, beneath the armpits, and along the arms. Failure to meet any of these specifications will result in the immediate destruction of one’s gay card.

  So now, with a mop of thinning ginger fur, I must endure hair’s latest streak of sabotage. It wasn’t enough to plague me through childhood, to cast a dark and itchy shadow over puberty, or to bring home bugs that one time we went swimming in an unfamiliar lake. It looms over me still, now armed with the sharpened knife of the gays’ piercing judgment, staring back at me in the mirror every morning with an ever wispier glare.

  Maybe I’ll just wear wigs.

  ON BEING “THE BIG GUY”

  I first discovered I was fat the day I no longer fit beneath the bed. I was playing hide-and-seek, and this was my go-to spot, mostly because it was dark and quiet and I could pick at the fuzzies that dangled from the bottom of the box spring. But this day, I couldn’t quite squeeze my stomach beneath the metal frame. To be fair, my family had very thick carpeting and very short bed frames, so the space between bed and floor was very difficult to squeeze into to begin with. But still. One day I fit, and the next day I didn’t.

  It’s a harsh way for a kid to discover he’s fat, especially when there’s a kid in the next room counting down from ten, which is a really short amount of time to both process your newfound fatness and also find another equally sufficient hiding spot. There should really be a hide-and-seek rule for a
scenario like this. Like “The hiding countdown may be extended from ten seconds to twenty-five years in the event of an existential crisis of the body. Adjust accordingly and may God have mercy on your portly soul.” But let’s face it, the rules of hide-and-seek were never that solid to begin with.

  In my parents’ eyes, I was never fat, I was just a “growing boy” with a healthy appetite who needed to eat whatever he wanted in order to grow big and strong. Never mind that I went up three pant sizes each year, or that I could barely run across the backyard without suffering severe stomach cramps, or that I was developing my own petite little boy breasts. This is what happened to all little boys. We’d grow into it, the logic went. For now, eat your burgers and fries (read: protein and vegetables), because little boys need all the nutrients they can get.

  You can pinpoint the year I got fat by looking at my school pictures. You can clearly see the year my metabolism realized it was in for a lifetime of grueling hard work and gave the fuck up. In first grade, I had discernible cheekbones and the hint of a jawline; by second grade, puffy red cheeks and the beginnings of a double chin.

  The thing is, I’ve always loved to eat. I mean, yes, technically, everybody likes to eat. We’re sort of biologically engineered to like it or we die. I just happened to like eating beyond the point where eating was necessary for survival and into the point where you’re only stuffing your face with cold mac and cheese because there’s nothing better to do at three in the morning on a Tuesday. It didn’t help that I was also generally averse to any and all types of physical activity, and preferred watching reruns of Three’s Company with a bag of potato chips indoors over running around with the neighborhood kids outside.

  My family never had an unhealthy relationship with food, but we weren’t exactly the picturesque vision of American vigor. We’re midwesterners, which means we liked food and we ate it more than we did anything else. Sure, we never had the best diets, but never for lack of trying. We ate our vegetables, if “eat your vegetables” meant “eat your gravy-covered mashed potatoes and broccoli casserole.” We ate healthy snacks, if healthy snacks included a heaping bowl of sugary breakfast cereal as a midnight treat before bedtime. And we sustained consistent, stable diets, if consistency included being regulars at the local Dairy Queen. Seriously, we could walk into that place and leave with extra-large Brownie Blizzards without having to say a single word. Plus, our diets were economical. Whenever Oreos were on sale at the grocery store, my mom stocked up like we were preparing for the zombie apocalypse and the only means of survival was hidden between layers of cookies and cream.

  We also weren’t a particularly active family, and the activities we did participate in usually revolved around food. The year McDonald’s released those Beanie Baby Happy Meal toys, my mom drove us to every McDonald’s franchise in the greater Chicago area, until we tracked down every last piece-of-garbage Beanie Baby in the set. (Maybe we didn’t have problems with food. But we did have problems with Beanie Babies.) And yes, obviously, we ordered Happy Meals at every stop, but only because you had to order the meal in order to get the toys. Still, we ended up with enough burgers to last for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the next three years.

  Meanwhile, I was aware I was growing larger and I felt inferior because of it. My brother, chastised for the litany of insults and taunts he frequently lobbed my way, resorted instead to calling me “big guy,” which was, technically speaking, not actually an insult like “fatso” or “tubby,” but a fairly benign (and accurate) description of my growing frame. “Nice one, big guy,” he’d say whenever he wanted to see me angry. “Having a snack there, big guy?” And I’d stomp my chubby feet and blow air through my nose and demand that my mom make him call me something less insulting, like “four eyes” or “baby Hitler.”

  It didn’t help, though, that he was right. I was big, and getting bigger. In the winter of 1999, my brother and I went sledding on the hill across the street from our house. I squeezed into the pair of overall snow pants I’d worn the year before, except this year, it felt like a corset. I could barely fasten the zipper along my bust and stomach. I could feel my lungs straining against my gallbladder. I managed to cover myself securely enough, but the second we got outside, I bent over to position my sled, and those snow pants ripped open right along the butt with a deafening tear. The white stuffing from inside the pants gushed out like I was shitting dust. “Good going, big guy,” my brother yelled as I ran back to the house, covering my gaping ass in humiliation.

  It wasn’t until high school that I began to feel serious shame for my weight, beyond the boyish taunts of childhood. By that time, I’d started to succumb to all the usual changes that plague young high school boys. Things were reshaping, hair was growing, limbs were extending. And high school was when I joined the rest of adult America and started taking antidepressants, which made my fleshy man boobs even fleshier. (Which is a legitimate and cruel side effect of antidepressants. Oh, you’re feeling sad because you’re growing up all chubby? Here, take some meds that’ll make you need a man bra.) Until then, of course, I could hide my girth beneath a heavy T-shirt or a jacket. The only people who had seen my bare stomach or thighs were my family, and even then, I’d kept my weight as concealed as I could. But high school locker rooms are where insecurities go to be exposed. It was the first time I could see the raw evidence of my body compared to other boys, how my stomach, which hung just slightly over the seam of my underwear, was nowhere near as flat or as toned as everyone else’s, that my muscles (or whatever there was of them) were hidden beneath a doughy layer of padding, that my thighs jiggled slightly more, and that I needed a thicker T-shirt.

  It’s also the first time I started noticing men’s bodies as more than just bodies, but as objects of desire. Young gay kids are plagued with the dual struggle of wanting to be with the bodies that haunt us and wanting to be like them, those desires often irrevocably tangled up in one another. I didn’t know if I was watching the other shirtless boys because I wanted to look like them, or because I liked the way they looked, or both. I didn’t know if the shame I felt was about my own body or my own desires. And the confusion made it all not worth thinking about at all. And so, I ignored my own body. I ignored its growing size. I ignored that the food I was eating was related to the rate my body was expanding.

  And so, I brought my weight and its baggage to college, where I discovered dining hall waffles and new depths of stress and caffeine and alcohol and more mature, cut bodies and eating burgers at midnight and ramen noodles and boys with cute, muscled thighs and brownies from the dessert station and chugging cheap beer. I gained the freshman fifteen for four students all on my own, because there was too much to worry about besides my weight. And my body escaped me.

  Meanwhile, I came out as gay (but not as fat) in 2011 and started learning how much gay culture favors the thin and the fit and the muscled. It’s the first time I went to a gay club and saw people who were gay like me, which was at once liberating and suppressive. It was the first time I saw how important it was for gay people to look like some unattainable ideal. “Look at all these thin people being thin together” was my most searing thought, and part of the reason why I never seriously tried dating after that night. Dating felt too much like putting myself on sale at a deli counter, to be picked alongside finer, shinier pieces of beef. I felt too much like a wedge of ham surrounded by beautiful cuts of prime rib.

  That summer, I decided to try to take control and joined the gym across the street from our house. And if you’re thinking, “The gym was just across the street this whole time and you didn’t go before then?”—yes, that’s exactly where it was, but any gym that was not directly beneath my body at any given moment might as well have been in another country. But, motivated by the insecurity of my newfound gayness, I walked over to the gym one morning, paid the necessary seven-million-dollar membership fee, signed my name in blood, and committed myself to looking like Matthew McConaughey by the end of the summer.
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br />   Of course, that dream lasted for about forty-five minutes, which remain some of the worst minutes of my entire life, for about a thousand reasons.

  I mean, going to the gym isn’t a particularly pleasant experience to begin with, because all gyms are terrible, even the good ones. They smell like hot milk and old rags and garbage bags full of sweaty rubber. There’s always a grown man in the corner grunting wildly at his own reflection, a teenager running dangerously fast on the treadmill so that you’re scared to go anywhere near him, and an old woman who insists on making flirtatious eye contact with you during the entirety of your workout, and you know it’s flirtatious because she’s constantly licking her lips. Plus, none of the machines come with instructions, so you may very well spend an entire hour pulling on what you think is part of a machine that trains your shoulders but is actually just a piece of duct tape attached to a laundry machine that nobody told you not to touch. Gyms, generally speaking, are designed to humiliate and terrify you into emotional vulnerability so that gym employees can get you to buy things you don’t actually want or need.

  Already emotionally distressed, I was an easy target for their hunt. Gym employees, like prowling lionesses, can detect weakness, and they smelled my fragility from miles away. They pounced the second I limped through the front door.

  “Welcome,” a man with dazzling white teeth and a tight T-shirt shouted when I walked up to the front desk. “Would you like to start off your membership with a free personal training session?” This is the gym predator’s trademark maneuver.

  Determined as I was for McConaughey-like results in less than ten weeks, and inclined as I am to accept any free thing that is offered to me, I accepted.

  “Wonderful,” he said. “Let’s set you up with a trainer.” And he whistled over a man he introduced as Tim, who led me deep in the gym, far enough away so that I could no longer see the front doors or the light that poured in from outside.