to thirty dollars a day from the profits in order to fund my food stash. My ten-dollar supply was no longer enough to satisfy me despite feeling that I was going to “explode” almost daily. I needed more money for more food. And since my parents were rarely around, I no longer had their purse or wallet as an ATM-like resource.
Each day at school, after I’d “sold” yearbooks and kept most of the profits for myself, I would run to the nearest food market during lunch, store the bags of food in my locker, then tote the groceries with me on the bus ride home. Once I got home to our apartment, I would fix whatever concoctions I wanted to create for my palate. I was now eating huge amounts on a daily basis.
Gregg’s Typical Yearbook-Funded Binge
1 gallon of Chocolate Ice Cream
(which I would wrap in foil to keep cold and less messy since it had to be stored in my locker until I went home)
1 jar of “Hot” Fudge Sauce
1 can of Whipped Cream
Bananas
2 large bags of Barbecue Potato Chips
1 large pack of Nutter Butter Peanut Butter Sandwich Cookies
1 large pack of Oreo Cookies
Eventually the journalism teacher tried to get to the bottom of who was stealing money from the yearbook fund. Based on how often I volunteered to man the yearbook sales table she suspected it was me, but she couldn’t prove it. So she gathered the class together to talk about shame, deceit, and how awful a person must be to sink so low, all the while visually indicating in my direction.
Then she left the room, leaving the class in charge of deciding who stole the money and to determine the thief’s punishment. With all my practice of being “Sue,” I was able to act innocent and, despite accusations, I never buckled under pressure. I don’t think anyone really bought my act, but there was no way of proving that I had been the one stealing the money. After all, I had eaten the evidence.
In the meantime, my mother found “true love” with an army man named Keith, and he was up for meeting Lori and me. Keith decided he wanted to spend the evening at our apartment, cooking dinner for the three of us.
Dinner? That made him A-okay in my book.
The night Keith came over Mom had to work late and “Sue” had the night off. So he prepared dinner and then we waited with him in the living room. Keith quizzed Lori and me about our backgrounds. We told him all about Massachusetts, Singapore, and basically our whole life story. We loved to talk about ourselves. After all, we were the hosts and stars of The Gregg and Lori Show and had the cassette tapes to prove it.
To our surprise, Keith suddenly lost his appetite, told us to give his apologies to our mom, and left abruptly. When Mom came home she asked us to recount the details of the evening and then she hit the roof. She was furious that Lori and I had shared our “life history” with someone we were meeting for the first time. It turns out she had spun a web of lies for Keith. Among them, that my father didn’t exist and that Lori and I were adopted.
My mother forced me to call Keith and say that Lori and I had made up all those stories about our childhood because we were ashamed of being adopted. I had to tell Keith that I had a chronic problem with lying. Finally, I was instructed to beg that he not hold our lying against our mom and ask him to forgive my sister and me. He wouldn’t.
Neither would my mother. Ever. As I would soon learn.
Safely back in my bedroom, I proceeded to eat a bar of chocolate as tears streaked down my face. I told myself it couldn’t get any worse than this.
I was wrong.
ANOTHER PERSPECTIVE ON GREGG AT THIS TIME
By Lori McBride, Gregg’s Sister
It was surprising for me, when I read these pages, to discover that Gregg felt insecure about his weight when we were children. I was younger, so maybe I wasn’t always aware of the nature or the extent of the elementary school taunting, but he always seemed “larger than life” to me. No pun intended . . . really. It was as though his resiliency made him that much more determined to be noticed for something other than his weight.
Growing up in the military we moved a lot and it was thanks to Gregg’s outgoing personality that we made new friends quickly wherever we moved. He always took charge in a creative way—if you wanted to have fun, you wanted to be with Gregg. He was always making a way of escape, whether by producing elaborate home movie “blockbusters,” or fabricating tiny items to stock the shelves of a Barbie store, or by “producing” The Gregg & Lori Show. He was so quirky and original. From my viewpoint, looking up to my big brother, it seemed like everyone wanted to be his friend.
Living in Singapore as children was amazing. I remember Gregg getting a lot of attention wherever we went. The combination of his red hair, freckles, and excess weight was unusual to see in that Asian culture. He often wore football-style T-shirts that had a large number on the front and back, which seemed to bridge any language gap. Whenever we were in town, people would call out whatever number happened to be on his shirt as a way to get his attention . . . or to ridicule him . . . I guess we’ll never know.
I was aware of some of Gregg’s bingeing. Occasionally I was included—if only to buy my silence on the matter. One time, I remember Gregg eating ice cream in his bedroom, having emptied the carton into a Tupperware bowl. Our mom knocked on the door, so he hurriedly stashed the bowl on the floor of his closet. When he opened the door, our Irish setter, Mac, bounded in, and his nose quickly found that bowl. He began crazily lapping up the ice cream, so Mom investigated . . . and Gregg was busted.
Our parents' well-intentioned efforts to control the binge eating only served to light the fire under it. They installed locks on our kitchen cabinets and routinely inspected the garbage cans. If any contraband wrappers or containers were discovered, they were kept until weekend afternoons, when we were whipped with a belt for each offense. The ensuing misery required more binges to help him forget.
Some of the details of our upbringing are pretty hard to re-live. Through the years, it seems Gregg and I have honored an unwritten pact, as fellow survivors. The pain of our childhood can't be taken off like a coat, but must be shed more like skin . . . cell by cell.
Moving to a new town and new school right before the fourth quarter of eighth grade was no picnic. Although it did offer some relief, considering that Ramstein Junior High considered me to be a petty thief, with perhaps the biggest penis, thanks to Judy’s ruminations. I had stopped stealing money for food at that point, but I never managed to regain my honor before leaving town.
Our new hometown of Wiesbaden, Germany, offered a brand new world, but one that wasn’t too receptive given how late in the school year it was. After an uncomfortable quarter in junior high, I finished the year without making any new friends in the area.
Lori and I continued to lead an active fantasy life at home—constantly singing and acting into the tape recorder—ready for discovery by Hollywood at any moment. We were too clueless to realize there weren’t a lot of Hollywood talent scouts in Wiesbaden, Germany.
During the summer before high school, I volunteered for the Red Cross where I met two of my soon-to-be good friends, Diana and Rhodonna. It was our shared love of Charlie’s Angels reruns that brought us together. We spent the summer bringing playing cards to hospital patients and practicing our dancing when no one else was around.
I was volunteering