Leith, William by The Hungry Years

They were the guys who partied the hardest, who didn't want the party to end, because they had nowhere to go afterwards. (Fat guys who are not famous mostly have to pass on the promiscuity.) I knew fat guys who were incredibly smug and arrogant and brittle, always in on the joke, always quick to the punch, yet emanating a deep sense of unease, of distress. Fat guys who wore big fat rings and finely tailored suits, gangsterish shoes and hats. The fat-guy armour.
    Hey, Big Dave!
    Drinks are on me, baby!
    And I knew about the other type of fat guy, too the one who wanted to be left alone, the one who'd given up the ghost. This was the person who lived inside the fat-guy armour. Sometimes fat guys tried on the fat-guy armour, and couldn't deal with it, and took it off, and moved around their lives warily, furtively, like peeler crabs.
    A little over two years later, I started getting slimmer. How did I do this? I exercised. My diary at the time reads: '40 lengths. Football. Tennis.' That's all in the same day. I lived across the road from a tennis club. I hired a coach. Anna had told me that I was too heavy to get on top of her.
    Oh, and I met this other woman, and when I talked to her, or thought about her, I felt dizzy. She had pale-blonde hair and blue eyes; she looked neat and sane but with something in reserve, sort of like Sharon Stone. We became friends. She was about to get married. There was nothing I could do. Anyway, I started to lose weight. Just to look good at the wedding, I thought, would be something.
    I never wrote the article about fat guys. But I noticed something about Michael. He was beginning to get fatter. He put on 10 lbs, 20 lbs, 30 lbs. I remember one particular lunch we had in an Italian restaurant. I had a mixed salad. That was it. Just a mixed salad. Michael had a starter with bread rolls, a pasta dish, a pudding, wine, and coffee. I remember this meal because I had to leave early; I was on my way to France.
    `Send my best to Anna,' he said.
    Later, he broke his ankle in a fall and put on another 20 lbs. One day, he told me that he had decided to write the article about what it was like to be a fat guy. He'd had photographs of himself taken with no clothes on. They looked gross, he said.
    Michael told me that he wasn't going to write the article for a while. What he was going to do was this: he was going to lose weight. And then he would write the article.
    And Then, Click
    When it happens, when the terrible thing happens, it arrives quietly, surreptitiously, like the sort of storm that kills sailors because they can't see it coming. You see the clouds on the horizon, you notice the water getting choppy. But you press on regardless. You press on blithely. Blithe: showing a casual or cheerful indifference considered to be callous or improper. It's a pretty good description of the state of mind of the person who embarks on an eating binge.
    One minute you're fine, and then, click: you're in a different world. You might be walking along, more or less absolutely certain that you will not have any fries, will not duck under the golden arches, will not walk across the floor, smelling the oil and mechanically recovered meat smell, will not take in the dinky, bright-coloured tables and semi-comfortable chairs, will not approach the counter, will not look at the guy behind the counter, will not look up at him and smile. And while you're pretty certain you will not do any of these things, you allow your mind to dwell momentarily on the prospect. That's all it is. You sail towards the storm, and there's a moment when you can't quite walk along the deck with your usual assured swagger, because the boat is beginning to pitch a little, to yaw a little. And you tell yourself you're fine. And there's another moment when you have lost all radio contact. That's what it's like, inside a binge. It's like losing radio contact. It sounds silly, doesn't it? But that's what it's like.
    One minute you're fine, and then,