And I've put on 50 pounds since high school
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- July 2, 2022
- 596
In another context, perhaps, it might seem cruel, but hear me out.
One of the reasons I try to get to the beach at least once a week during the summer is to laugh at people, to make fun of them.
I think that’s one of the reasons my wife and I get along so well.
We both find humor in the foibles of others.
Let me cite a case in point but be forewarned what follows is unapologetically judgmental, not to mention shallow and unkind.
With that disclaimer out of the way, I want you to imagine a really fat, morbidly obese guy, tattooed and bearded, the kind of shambling hulk who, if he were decked out in his biker leathers and surrounded by fellow outlaws, would be rather intimidating.
But the beach has a way of leveling the playing field because, well, your appearance says a lot about you. You’ve chosen to put yourself on display and, rightly or wrongly, that opens you up to criticism. You can’t just wear your diploma or flash your brass knuckles. Folks will be looking at you and, well, you’re fair game.
I often wonder what deep-seated character flaw causes me to think such callous things about my fellow ocean-going humanoids, what sort of nasty combination of hubris and black-hearted meanness enables me to make sport of the way other people appear. I can’t be right when I think, upon setting eyes on a woman woefully overweight yet dressed hideously skimpily, “Wow, she had to actually think about wearing that bathing suit in public.”
Or “How in the world does a person allow herself to get so fat?”
But that’s the kind of thing that passes through my diseased mind as the parade of flesh passes in front of me, blotting out the sun.
My wife is not in my camp when I say demeaning stuff like that.
She’s much more likely to use her education and background in nursing to offer excuses like “It’s probably a glandular imbalance” or “She could be pregnant” or “It’s all about her genetics.”
Which was why I found it so amusing when she turned her attention to Flabby Appleton when he waddled into our view. Ordinarily so circumspect in matters of personal appearance, even she took a keen interest in what I’d describe as an unfair battle between bulk and the weight-bearing capacity of a beach chair.
Few things are more mortifying than making a fool of yourself in public. That kind of shame has its roots in grade school, and it can create scars people carry well into adulthood. It’s hard to get over, for example, being the last guy picked for kickball or the girl who only receives a Valentine when everyone has to get one.
By the time high school rolls around, you’re better equipped to handle that kind of whispered ridicule, but even armed with a stoic I-don’t-care-what-anyone-thinks armored suit of self-defense, there’s a layer that lurks beneath that feels the pain of ostracism.
As the Four Tops memorably put it, “Beauty’s only skin deep,” to which crueler minds responded, “But ugly cuts down to the bone.”
Which brings us back to the beach.
No one who was basking in the heart of a late-June afternoon sun or riding the Atlantic’s gentle, comforting swells wanted to make a spectacle of him or herself, but sometimes an unseen hand takes a gleeful, random spin on the wheel of fate, and then, God help us all.
Fatty McGee’s beach chair had only seconds before it was junk.
There’s really no easy way to lower yourself onto the waiting webbing of synthetic material that’s been laboratory tested but not really exposed to the real world. Salt spray not only corrodes the metal framework, but it will, over time, weaken the chair’s support.
The thing is you don’t realize that until it’s much, much too late.
I could have called out to Portly O’Tubby, “Hey, dude! Don’t sit down!” but I was way, way too invested in witnessing a bit of public abasement. Call me Wretched Flea, a term my mother reserved for her attacks when I had gone way, way past even her flexible margins of decorum. I mean Mom wasn’t always nice.
Then again, I think even she would have gotten a kick out of seeing that overfed 300-pounder completely flatten that chair. At first he tried to pull himself from the wreckage, going as far as propping his arms behind him and pushing up against gravity.
This was hilariously pointless because the chair had taken on the characteristics of a charcoal grill rack, flat and baking in the sun.
By the time he had scrambled out of the wreckage and taken on the helpless posture of an upended turtle struggling to right itself, I had to turn up the volume on that day’s CD of choice, “Exile on Main Street,” so that the Rolling Stones would drown out my laughter.
It was then I noticed my wife looking my way.
“What?” I asked, pretty much knowing what she was about to say.
“That,” she said, looking at me over the bridge of her sunglasses, smiling that secret smile of hers, “absolutely made my summer.”
There’s all kinds of fun to be had at the beach. Join us if you can.