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This writing was accepted for publication in the 84 page perfect-bound issue... Down in the Dirt magazine (v110) (the September 2012 Issue) You can also order this 5.5" x 8.5" issue as an ISSN# paperback book:

Order this writing in the book Falling (a Down in the Dirt collection book)		get the 230 page Sept. - Dec. 2012 Down in the Dirt magazine issue collection 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback book:

Coming Out
The saga of Russell Kelly

Rex Bromfield

    Russell Kelly weighed himself every morning. He weighed himself twice in the afternoon, too, even though deep inside he knew there would be no change—certainly no net weight loss, that’s for sure. And every morning and twice in the afternoon Russell would learn, to his dismay, that his weight continued to hover mercilessly in the neighborhood of 460 pounds.
    Since he’d purchased his luxury condo on the twenty-first floor of the exclusive Executive Towers on Front street, he’d broken three of the sturdiest, most expensive bathroom scales that could be ordered on line. Now he had one of those heavy-duty hospital scales set up in one corner of his spare bedroom along with some snazzy gym equipment including a bench press, a treadmill and a full set of weights that the neighbors downstairs would have surely complained about if they’d ever heard them hit the floor. They didn’t; Russell’s weight loss equipment was as new as the day it had been delivered.
    And Russell was loaded in more ways than one; he had plenty of money. In fact he was rich. When he was only six, his parents were killed in a head-on collision with a drunk driver and not only had they left their entire fortune to him, their only child, but the pay out from the insurance policy and the punitive award imposed upon the other driver left Russell entirely without want.
    For years Russell lived the good life and to all intents and purposes still did—except for one thing; he hated being fat. Along the back wall of his enormous living room, four large bookshelves held a library consisting of every book that had ever been published on weight loss, dieting and the psychology of obesity. Among the volumes were the biographies of Orson Wells, John Candy, Robert Morley and Sidney Greenstreet. He had Sweatin’ and Tonin’ to the Oldies, all five of Oprah Winfrey’s books, everything by Denise Austen, Jillian Michaels, Jack LaLanne and Robert Atkins. And diets? He had tried them all; The Hollywood Diet, The Master Cleanse, South Beach, Apple Cider, The Zone, Grapefruit Volumetrics... He even had two paperbacks on postpartum weight loss. Russell wasn’t one to deny his condition in any way and he’d spent the last fifteen years of his life in a quest to lose the extra mass that hung on him like four fifty-pound bags of Yukon Gold potatoes; those nice big fat ones that are perfect for barbecuing and smothering in sour cream, real bacon bits and chopped chives... Or better still, nice strips of grilled prosciutto broiled into perfectly browned Gruyere and...
    Anyway, Russell had given up on losing the weight. Back when he was a mere 290 he could tell himself, and others, he could drop the fifty or sixty pounds it would take to get back to some normal sort of shape any time he wanted. But now it had become simply hopeless. He’d tried every wardrobe trick he could think of to conceal his bulk, or at least he thought he had until the night the cable TV went out while he was watching Celebrity Chefs (and taking notes), and he was at once left to ponder his own reflection in the huge windows that looked out over the pitch black lake. There he was overflowing the giant leather La-Z-Boy in the glow of his Italian designer reading lamp like some Earthly urban Jabba the Hutt. And there he was again in the next window pane of the slightly-curving room. The two images together made him look like an even bigger two-headed hulk. As he stared at the gargantuan caricature of himself he felt his will to live trickling away. Was this to be the way the rest of his life was to play out? Trapped here in this high-rise hell hole, forever shackled inside the mountain of deprivation that was his body?
    You see, Russell was, at heart, a social animal with a real need for human contact. In slimmer days he’d been the life of the party; a big jovial man of quick wit who could cajole and entertain and make people laugh at the drop of a hat. He commanded the attentions, if not the caresses, of women one fifth his size. Even in the male pecking order he was respected in some odd way. His affable, infallible ability to get the party going got him into social gatherings beyond his station and at large dinners, organizers would hotly debate where and with whom to seat Russell knowing that his table would invariably be at the center of the most raucous part of the room. His witticisms and stories would have the stuffiest guests in hysterics in spite of themselves. But his most infamous quips involved food and, in a most self-deprecating way, usually hinted at his own condition. He would say things that no one else in the place could get away with like “In side every thin man there’s a fat man screaming to get out, I’m proud to say I had two”. He would comment on the state of American health care by saying “You know, recently a Seattle ferry company had to reduce their seating capacity by thirty-five percent.” He would insist that the huge overweight community would save the national economy. “Did they have to bail out the fast food industry? No. The textile industry? No.”
    It was all fabulous as long as it lasted but, somewhere around the time that his weight started to creep over three-eighty or so, the party and diner invitations began to dwindle and as he approached four hundred they stopped altogether.
    Now he was socially malnourished. Starved for normal human interaction, he craved that laughter he loved so much, the unrestrained cheer of acclimation that signaled the unanimous approval of the company.
    But beneath the bravado and the devil-may-care attitude dwelt a sensitive man who secretly resented the hushed whispers and the furtive glances of the anonymous public. As his weight increased these became more frequent and pronounced evolving into insults from crews of cruel teens who would follow him, pelting him with nasty epithets and, eventually, rocks. In the end he elected to stay home altogether.
    Home.
    What kind of life was this? The few ethereal acquaintances he had in the online community Second Life were a lie. The men he met there were morons and the women seemed mostly to be looking for intelligent, caring, handsome, fit men.
    Handsome.
    Fit.
    Those were the areas where Russell was definitely in deficit. Any time someone suggested meeting in person, Russell would dissolve quietly into the electron background. Pretty soon he made his avatar female; a lithe, smartly dressed young business woman whose bold conversations were daring and risqué. In this way he managed to attract a small circle of smart female cyber friends and for a while, at least, this seemed to satisfy his need for social contact. In a vague sort of way he was admired by women and respected by other men but it was all fake. What he really wanted was to get out and mingle; walk among his peers; come and go in the daylight as a normal person. This was something he hadn’t actually done in years. From his lofty perch on the twenty-first floor he’d watched three whole seasons come and go with no more human contact than was presented on the big Sony, his computer screen and in the persons of three delivery men who came to his door with boxes and bags overflowing with pies, both sweet and savory, huge roasts of lamb, beef and pork, condiments of every kind, bountiful baked breads and cakes and all manner of frozen delights.
    This had become the entirety of Russell’s existence and as much as things were changing inside his body, things were slowly going awry in his mind. In his solitude he had struggled to compensate for the gaping hole in his being, but his reality had gradually liquefied. He was losing track of where he ended and his tiny condo world began. Often he felt that he was his apartment.
    There he was, sitting alone in the dark, silently pondering his two-headed image in the glass, his universe shrinking in around him, the buzzing night life of the city spread vast below. For Russell it couldn’t have been farther away if it were on the far side of the moon.
    But there was something about that double reflection of himself in the adjoining window panes... was it the way the two figures joined at the shoulders, two people who appear as one...
    Wait a minute! That was it!
    In one delirious and insanely creative inspiration, he had found a way to join once more with mankind without attracting the unwanted attention and harassment.
    He would disguise himself as two people.
    Yes.
    No one would even notice him. No one bothered to look too closely at two people walking together down the street, especially at night. It was completely normal. Of course he wouldn’t actually talk to anyone, that would be too risky, but he would, albeit in a limited way, be able to exercise his right as a citizen to go about freely in the world. At this stage of his devolution the idea of strolling casually and inconspicuously down the street was absolutely exhilarating. He would be like an alien who had recently arrived from a distant planet and whose mission it was to get out among the people of this world and observe. While he was at it, perhaps he would pick up a few snacks to tide him over till the next grocery delivery. There was a pizzeria with very poor lighting on the corner a block away. They had this fantastic four cheese potato, leek and pepperoni gourmet pie with the onions browned just so, on top of a liberal blanket of Béchamel sauce, ricotta, mozzarella and goat’s cheese—the Parmesan was baked onto a perfect crust lightly flavored with oregano, mmmmm... This would do nicely as a first expeditionary mission.

—

    Russell worked on his disguise for more than three weeks, but he just couldn’t get it to look quite right. Sometimes, in the dark, if you didn’t look too closely the rig did almost make him look like two people, but he could never keep the head of the second person from waggling around too much on his right shoulder like the painted paper-mâché blob that it was. Practicing the walk in a twenty foot room was no easy thing either, but the year of dance and mime classes he’d taken as a child came in handy.
    At first he thought he would disguise himself as a pair of identical twins but there were a lot of drawbacks to that. First, twins would attract as much attention as he would on his own. Second, simulating four legs was a real technical and performance challenge. It was while fretting over the legs that he struck on a workable solution. He reworked his concept to simulate a man and a woman in love. That would explain why they seemed to be in a close perpetual embrace. And, as he had observed many times, people didn’t really like to stare at lovers—especially fat ones. (Russell was never going to look like two thin people—he would have had to disguise himself as a threesome to do that.)
    Finally he got the whole thing to work just right. She was dressed in a hippie-type full length skirt in tie-died pastel shades. A billowing blouse crudely sewn from a pair of flowered silk shirts finished it off. The hippie motif was sensational because it allowed her a large floppy hat that would cover the ridiculously inadequate head and face, though the plastic Lady Gaga Halloween mask ordered on eBay helped a lot.
    The man was dressed in a gray suit cut down the right side to accommodate his “mate.” This was one of the three suits that Russell once wore to formal affairs. The man’s head was Russell himself.
    And now, finally, they were ready.
    It was now or never.
    He checked himself one more time in the window reflection. In the dimming evening light, he did actually look like two people.
    As he stepped out the front door of his apartment and looked down the dark hallway his knees went all rubbery. He had to steady himself against the wall to keep from falling. The elevator arrived quickly and swallowed the two up and Russell was on his way, without realizing that he had left his apartment door hanging wide open for anyone to walk in and examine the traces of his sad life; to poke through his things with rubber gloves and photograph every corner of his seclusion. That’s exactly what the police investigation team was going to be doing in less than fifteen minutes.
    Russell stood in the lobby at the big front doors and looked out into the sea of surging humanity passing steadily by on the rush-hour sidewalk outside.
    Suddenly a cab pulled up outside. A young woman got out and headed his way. Thinking quickly, Russell drifted over to the half light of a waiting area and the woman passed through without so much as a second glance.
    Perfect. This was going to work.
    His heart fluttered like that of a young transvestite going out in public for the first time. He steadied himself, breathed deep, pushed open the door, then, one step at a time, set forth.
    One step, two steps, then suddenly, there was a gust of wind and the big floppy hat camouflaging the artificial features of his female companion flew off and sailed out over a parked car. Without thinking Russell lurched after it, off the curb then three steps, four steps between two parked taxis, another step into the road and before he knew what was happening a horn blared and Russell caught a glimpse of a speeding florist’s truck before he was slammed broadside and thrown ten feet back onto the sidewalk.
    The small truck was stopped dead too, as if it had hit another vehicle head on.
     Russell wasn’t sure what was going on as he lolled on his back on the pavement gaping up at the black sky. The collision had rattled his already fragile thinking so when he looked to one side and saw the crinkled face of this vaguely familiar women he seemed to be with he wondered if she was his sister—he’d forgotten he was an only child. But he knew this woman, from somewhere. Was he out on a date?
    He was quickly surrounded by onlookers then two cops. When one of them knelt down and peered into his eyes Russell said “Yes cabby, please take us to the Elgin Theater.” He heard a siren approaching. The last thing he remembered before losing consciousness was the voice of a paramedic calling in to request a bigger ambulance.

—

    With three stainless steel pins in his left leg, three broken ribs and a re-sectioned liver, Russell was suddenly the reluctant recipient of a cruel hospital diet and a strict regimen of rehabilitation. He regained some semblance of normal consciousness fairly quickly and within days his sense of humor began to return. He laughed and joked with his doctors and nurses. Hector, the man who came each morning around eleven to mop the floor, gave Russell’s private room an extra special cleaning so he could get “my laughing every morning” as he would say in broken English.
    A few days after admission he had himself moved to a ward with five other patients. The seventh floor staff wondered at the hoopla coming from Russell’s room and soon two psychologists from the University arrived to further their research into the affect of laughter on surgical recovery.
    When they wheeled in lunch Russell grasped the cart as it passed and said to everyone else in the room “Don’t worry, I won’t start until they’ve brought yours.” Everybody roared.
    The society he loved so much and craved so desperately had come to Russell’s rescue. When his recovery was complete, everyone on the seventh floor was sad to see him go but he promised to visit. Somehow, now, from the back of his cab, the world looked new and friendly.
    Within six months Russell was hovering just above the 350 mark. The exercise equipment in his spare bedroom was finally getting used and whether people liked it or not, Russell was doing his own shopping. Not the usual stuff mind you; Russell had learned a few things from the hospital dietitian who visited him every other day and he started doing all his shopping around the outside of the supermarket avoiding the center aisles where the poisons are. It was six blocks to the store and at first he would jump into one of the cabs that prowled the front of his building, but one beautiful spring day he decided to walk. The experience was so pleasant that he walked from then on, even in the rain.
    He befriended a biggish woman from the fifteenth floor who was desperately trying to lose twenty pounds so she could get back into her expensive size nine wardrobe. Why she confided in Russell in the first place that day in the lobby Russell didn’t know but she became his first dinner guest in years. The two entered a kind of weight loss contest together and she was in her size nines in a matter of weeks. Russell too was shedding the pounds at a slow but steady rate.
    He would make it.
    Within a year, Russell was seriously looking at 250.
    And he didn’t forget his new friends at the hospital. Not only did he donate all of his books to their meager library, he shelled out $50,000 to have the facility expanded to include the Russell Kelly Reading Lounge.
    Russell had delved into the depths of darkest despair and survived. It was a new life for him. There was still work to be done, but with the support of his new friends and neighbors, he was definitely up to the task.

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