wanted me to sleep downstairs in the basement “maid’s room.” We were living in a third floor apartment and each apartment was assigned a small storage room in the basement that had previously been used for maids.
My protests were to no avail. Mom would scream at me to get down to the basement immediately because she was bringing someone home. She instructed me to bring my clothes and books for the next school day and that I should ring the doorbell in the morning, and pretend to be a neighbor’s kid who was there to walk the dog.
What could I do? It was usually between 2:00 and 4:00 a.m., and I’d gather my clothes and head downstairs. Little did Mom know that I’d watch for her from the basement window. Sure enough, about twenty minutes later, she would walk by with some shadowy guy. It was generally a different man each time it happened.
The maid’s room was a scary place to be. Since all of these small rooms were now used for storage, there was no one else residing on that level and it wasn’t a secure area. I would hear lots of noises from the street. Or were they coming from the dimly lit hallway outside our maid’s room door? I could never tell. And that unknown terrified me.
The very first time this scenario happened, I got so scared that I went back upstairs to our door to ring the doorbell. My mom answered the door, saw it was me and shut the door in my face. I just stood there, not knowing what to do.
Inside the apartment, I heard her and her man du jour talking. He asked who it was. I heard her tell him that it was “Just some neighbor kid I pay to walk the dog. He’s here very early.”
Yeah, it was very early—like 4:00 a.m. very early!
A moment later the door opened. My mom handed me the dog leash with Mac attached. I returned him after the walk in the same fashion.
Just some neighbor kid . . .
The next evening I was admonished for coming to the door at that hour. My mother told me never to let it happen again, and then went on to instruct me that when it was an appropriate time to walk the dog in the future, I should ring the doorbell from downstairs, outside the building, as if I really were a neighbor’s kid and didn’t have a key to the building.
“Okay,” I told her. I didn’t know what else to do.
There were times when she would have a steady man in her life and after a while I was allowed to sleep in the apartment. This situation wasn’t much better.
Bernard, a young Frenchman, and my mom would disappear into her bedroom for wild bouts of noisy sex. One night I was awakened by loud, scary yelps. I got out of bed and pounded on my mom’s bedroom door, convinced that Mac (who usually slept in my mom’s room) was in the throes of a rabbit-chasing nightmare.
The yelps stopped. But it was then that I realized Mac was in the living room looking just as confused by the questionable sounds as I was. The errant sounds had been coming from my mother.
Yuck.
One more reason to detach sexually from society and myself. I later realized that my layers and layers of blubber were assisting me nicely with this particular objective.
CENTER STAGE
Lori and I had both become extremely active in community theater, and we were developing a following due to our singing voices. We appeared in several musicals and even received some glowing write-ups in local newspapers. Lori was being cast in lead or ingénue roles because of her “normal” size and beauty. And I was still relegated to the chorus or the occasional character role because of my size.
But even from the back of the chorus, I would sing loudly enough that people could hear me. It was immature of me, but at that time I just wanted to be heard, if not seen. I don’t deny I’m a ham. That’s a trait that always came naturally, despite my intense shyness and my conviction that everyone was judging me because of my size.
The best part of community theater was meeting and becoming friends with lots of different people. I always gravitated toward the adults in their twenties and thirties, as there were few teenagers in our productions.
One of my favorite friends was Vickie. She was a wild-eyed redhead who had all the guys crushing on her, even though she was happily married at the time. I baby-sat for her a lot and became good friends with her family.
On days that I would baby-sit for Vickie, I would go to her house early just to hang out or to have her cut my hair. She was a woman of many talents.
One day I sat in Vickie’s kitchen as she cut my hair. We giggled and talked and giggled even more. I was relating stories of Massachusetts and Singapore. As I went further into the stories, I noticed that something was bothering Vickie. Her tone had changed and she suddenly seemed very concerned.
Soon she put down the scissors, sat in front of me and took my hand. “Gregg,” she began, “it’s okay. I know you’re adopted. And I still love you anyway. You don’t have to make up stories about your family and pretend anymore. We all know.”
Adopted? I was anything but adopted.
I pleaded with Vickie to believe me, but my mom had once again done a terrific job of convincing everyone in our military community that I was adopted. The story went that she was too young to have had a high-school-aged son—she was lying about her age, too. I’m guessing at this point Lori was being claimed as my mom’s actual child. But not me; I was still “adopted.”
I was mortified after that. I didn’t bring it up again. Everyone thought I was adopted. It was just a known “fact” within the community.
To this day, I don’t think Vickie believed me when I told her I wasn’t adopted.
The funny thing is, whenever anyone publicly attacked my mother because she was sleeping around with almost everyone in the community, I would jump to her defense. She had trained me all too well. It was my father I was supposed to hate. Not her.
Dad wasn’t doing anything to help my skewed perspective. He was a drunk. Something people enjoyed gossiping about because of his high-ranking officer status; however, by then he was continually being passed over for promotion.
My dad would come by on Saturdays to do the grocery shopping. The spankings had stopped, usually because Mom wasn’t around to report how “naughty” I was the previous week. Dad was usually in and out of there like a bullet.
Meanwhile, sparks of love were flying at the community theater.
We were in rehearsal for a musical theater show, Purlie, and there was someone in the chorus who caught my eye. She was thin and beautiful. Because she was wearing a scarf wrapped around her hair, I initially assumed she was some random housewife, but it turned out she was my age and attending the same high school.
Her name was Amy. And she liked me too. I thought she resembled the young Phoebe Cates—the actress from Gremlins and Fast Times at Ridgemont High—and I liked the fact that someone so pretty was interested in me.
Despite having other crushes on several popular girls, I soon asked Amy to be my girlfriend. We were together for quite a while by high school standards—much to the chagrin of her parents.
Amy’s parents saw me as double trouble. First, because of my fat “problem,” they could not understand how their daughter could be attracted to someone so big. Second, because Amy’s father was a doctor at the military hospital and was all too familiar with my mom’s dicey reputation.
Amy’s parents also thought I was adopted and Amy would struggle to defend me to her overprotective parents. They felt I was lying about not being adopted and that I had conned Amy into believing the same.
Amy loved me. And I loved her. But my detachment from any sexuality left Amy with much to be desired. I just couldn’t get close in that way. Even kissing and making out was difficult for me. Whether to chalk it up to the sexual abuse in my early