Week #17 of My Liquid Diet: A Bitter Pill

Dissolving into feelings.

Not a lot to swallow:

• Beginning weight (July 14): 230 lbs.

• Weight at Start of Week #2: 222

• Weight at Start of Week #3: 218.4

• Weight at Start of Week #4: 215.3

• Weight at Start of Week #5: 215.1

• Weight at Start of Week #6: 211.2

• Weight at Start of Week #7: 208.1

• Weight at Start of Week #8: 204.3

• Weight at Start of Week #9: 201.9

• Weight at Start of Week #10: 199

• Weight at Start of Week #11: 196.8

• Weight at Start of Week #12: 194.4

• Weight at Start of Week #13: 193.5

• Weight at Start of Week #14: 190.2

• Weight at Start of Week #15: 185.6

• Weight at Start of Week #16: 183.8

• Weight at Start of Week #17: 182.3

• Weight at Start of Week #18 (current week): 179.4

Total weight loss so far: 50.6 lbs.

Thirteen weeks to go.

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I used to get headaches all the time, but once I started on this diet they totally stopped. Then the other day my head started throbbing a bit, so I took a couple of Tylenols — and all hell broke loose in my brain! It wasn’t from the medicine; it was from the pills’ sugary coating. After I’d gone months without sugar, that coating tasted so incredibly, intensely, deliciously sweet, it sent me into a giddy sugar high. And I wanted more! I had a strong impulse to empty the bottle into my palm and lick off the coating on each remaining pill, one by one.

I thought: What the hell is happening to me??! Has my body chemistry changed so much that I’m now a fundamentally different kind of being — Sugarless Josh? Do four out of five dentists now recommend me to their patients who chew Joshes?

This, in turn, cast my memories back to my super-candied childhood.

My father, Paul, had a theory that if you try to restrict children’s intake of sweets, you’ll just make them more desperate for sugary things. So he let me eat all the candy I wanted — which, let me tell you, was awesome! Except for what happened with my teeth, which became riddled with cavities. Like son, like father: my dad was constantly going the dentist — a guy he’d nicknamed “The Butcher.” Apparently Dad had worked out an arrangement in which The Butcher would overcharge Dad’s insurance and Dad wouldn’t have to pay anything. Alas, what he saved in money he paid in pain. I’d sit in the waiting room, listening to Dad’s heart-rending screams coming from inside The Butcher’s inner sanctum. I remember that on one occasion there was a new patient in the waiting room with me. I watched this gentleman grow more and more alarmed as my father kept yelping in pain from behind the closed door. When Dad finally emerged and saw the poor fellow’s terrified expression, he tried offering some reassurance. Forcing a smile, he said: “Oh, don’t worry — he’s a great dentist!” The man seemed unconvinced.

Photo: mapo.

Once, back in our apartment after a torture session with The Butcher, Dad couldn’t stop brooding about all the dental pain he’d endured. He said, “My son, always brush your teeth!”

I said, “No, I won’t!”

Where did this defiance come from? I almost never was at odds with my father, who, in our precious weekends together, made sure there was a nearly endless stream of love, laughter, hugs, storytelling — and, yes, candy. Honestly, the one other time I can ever remember saying no to him was years later when, as a teenager, I returned home from my first-ever actual date, which had been deeply disappointing to me. I’d gone early to the “TKTS” booth in Times Square, where you could get discount tickets to Broadway shows. The musical I’d wanted to see was sold out, so I got two tickets to Ulysses in Nighttown, a staging of an episode from Joyce’s Ulysses starring Zero Mostel as Leopold Bloom. My date — I’ll call her Nina — was quite late. By the time she arrived at the theater, the show was well underway. And it turned out that my half-price tickets were for excellent seats — the very center of one of the front rows. So I felt intensely self-conscious as Nina and I squeezed past all these seated folks in our row while I imagined the rest of the packed audience in this huge theater staring daggers at us. At the (literal) climax of the play, actress Fionnula Flanagan, as Molly Bloom, lay totally naked on an upstage bed, reciting her character’s famous soliloquy, ending: “… and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.” Imagine, if you will, 15-year-old me, overheating in his too-tight woolen shirt and nearly swooning with embarrassment. As I recall, after the show Nina and I exchanged only a few terse words before she quickly hailed a cab and zipped away.

Fionnula Flanagan and Zero Mostel in Ulysses in Nighttown (1974).

When I got back to my apartment, my father was watching TV with my stepmother, Sue, while my little brother, Jacob, did toddler things. Dad was so excited to hear about my date! Muting the show they’d been watching, he said, “So how did it go?” and smiled up at me expectantly from his recliner.

For a long time I just stood there. I wanted to give him a great, rip-roaring story. I wanted to reassure him that his first-born son was well on his way to becoming a man. My heart, as in Molly Bloom’s recollection, was going like mad.

Finally I said, “Sometimes people just don’t want to share things.”

I still remember Dad’s expression. Shock — as if I’d just attacked him. Punched him in the face.

As I slouched down the hallway to my bedroom, I was filled with remorse — not so much, anymore, at how poorly the date had gone but at how I’d hurt my father. Looking back at that scene, nearly a half-century later, I can cut myself some slack: I was asserting my right to privacy — to my own agency. This is my life!

Maybe that’s kind of what I was doing when I told my dad, back when I was four or five years old, that no, I wouldn’t brush my teeth. You might be my savior and protector — not to mention the supplier of endless amounts of tooth-rotting candy — but you’re not the boss of me! “No, I won’t!”

When I said that, Dad — probably still wracked with dental pain — picked up a wooden chair and slammed it on the floor, shattering it. Seeing the gentlest person I knew commit this violent act freaked me out: I ran into a corner of the room and huddled there, trembling. Dad immediately hurried over to me, slid down to the floor, and held me tightly. As I cried in his arms, I tried, futilely, to understand what had come over me: Why had I said “No!” to him when I clearly didn’t mean it? Why had I hurt him with my words when he was already hurting so much? Was I evil? Was I just an evil person?

Photo: Katrin Sauerwein.

And now — who am I now? With my sugary shell having dissolved from extreme dieting, am I a bitter pill?

I think not. There’s little bitterness in me. But I think I do feel more. I dissolve into tears — into all sorts of intense feelings — more frequently than I used to.

When I was 20 years old, my father, then 55, suffered a terrible stroke. Afterwards, I spent weeks and weeks in his room at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, just sitting at his bedside, waiting for him to emerge from a coma; I literally never left the hospital. I don’t remember ever crying in all that time. I do remember feeling numb. Maybe, if I just could remain stoic, neutral, the incomprehensibly cruel alternate reality that had thrust itself on our family, seemingly out of nowhere, would eventually melt away, returning us to our previous, halcyon days. By this time, my brother Jacob had been joined in the world by two ebullient newcomers: our sister, Amy, and the youngest, Sammy, four and two years old, respectively. My stepmother, Sue, shuttled back and forth between taking care of the kids and then coming back to the hospital to be with Dad. There were round-the-clock nurses attending to him — this was before the hospital’s administrators realized that Dad’s insurance had run out and expelled him to a Dickensian public hospital in the South Bronx — and one day one of them said, “Josh, you just have to get out of this hospital for a while! Take a break, honey!”

Photo: ugurv.

So when Sue arrived after dropping the children off at their school and preschool, for the first time since Dad’s stroke I went back to our apartment. Everything was quiet, lifeless. At some point I made my way to his and Sue’s bedroom, at the end of a long hallway. I sat down at his desk, where, pre-stroke, he would enjoy spending hours poring over various editions of the Bible (he considered Jesus to be the original Communist Jew, and had spent years working on a manuscript titled Jesus: A Marxist Meditation and a shorter companion piece called Sermon on the Mount: An Exegesis). There was his prized Underwood manual typewriter, on which, incredibly (given how hard it was to press down on the keys), he’d been able to type over 100 words a minute. There was his vast collection of well-used corn-cob pipes, along with tins and pouches of Prince Albert tobacco and packages of pipe cleaners.

And then I saw them. Lined up on a shelf were rows and rows and rows of empty Excedrin bottles.

I stared at all those empty bottles, stunned. I wondered how long he’d been having headaches, probably increasingly terrible ones, while self-medicating and, per usual, avoiding calling his doctor. As I was completing my junior year at college, Dad — who’d just endured the traumatic experience of being fired from the school he’d been passionately teaching at for years (he was always at odds with his bosses, to put it mildly) — had asked me (pleaded with me, in retrospect) to linger a couple of weeks at home in New York before heading to Chicago for an internship I’d scored at a cool socialist newspaper. I’d declined his request. I was too eager to go on this new journalistic adventure, to begin to forge my own path in the world — to do what, in subsequent years, so many therapists would tell me I should have done way earlier: start to individuate from the father I had worshipped almost unreservedly. To which I would say — to myself, if not to the therapist: But he needed me.

After staring at those empty pill bottles for I don’t know how long, I returned to the hospital. When I got back to his room, I rushed over to his bed, laid my head on his chest, and cried. And felt. And knew, in my heart of hearts: There was no other reality coming to save us. This was it. No sugar coating.

Sometimes people do want to share things. I want to share these things with you, even if — or is it because? — I don’t fully understand them. As I type these words, I’m sipping on a chocolate protein shake that doesn’t really taste like chocolate. In fact, it doesn’t taste like much of anything. But it’s sustaining me. And as I gradually reintroduce real food into my diet, I can imagine that there will come a time when I no longer notice the taste of Tylenol. Still, the incident will remain in my memory — a moment of recognition that amid all our worries and strivings there can be, at unexpected moments, a brief burst of sweetness.