Heavy: An American Memoir(58)
When we pulled off on the Forest exit to the right of Interstate 20, we came to a stop sign. We made our way left onto Highway 35. Neither of us looked to our right at the tractor-trailer roaring toward the passenger side of the Nova. The truck driver pummeled the horn. You floored the brakes of the Nova, slung your right arm across my body even though you made me put on my seat belt before we left Jackson. Since you were not wearing your seat belt, your chest smashed into the steering wheel. I was four inches taller than you, and at least thirty pounds heavier than you at that point, but I didn’t try to secure you. I asked if you were okay before my body reached across your body to put on your seat belt. You told me you loved me as we headed down Old Morton Road to Grandmama’s house. I told you I loved you, too. We meant different things, but we meant I love you.
“It’s me again,” I say into your voice mail from the floor of my apartment. I am naked, holding my hip with my left hand, and holding my flip phone with my right. “Can you just call me back so I know you’re okay? I’ll be here waiting for you to call when you get ready. I won’t ask what happened to the money. I think something is really wrong with my body. Can you help me?”
PROMISES
You were sitting in front of a slot machine in Connecticut, looking nervously over both shoulders, while I was hiding fifteen feet behind you with ten dollars I’d stolen from Flora Wadley’s apartment in my back pocket. I had no idea how much I weighed. I just knew it felt like well over 320 pounds or well under 165 pounds.
We were both so far from home. You quit your job at Jackson State and moved just three and a half hours from Poughkeepsie and one and a half hours from the casino. Every weekend, you asked me to visit you. Every weekend I said no. I realized four years earlier you weren’t doing with my money what you said you were doing. I didn’t know how to be around you and not give you whatever you wanted. I wasn’t trying to punish you. I was trying to do less harm to myself. I never visited you, but I saw you so many times in that casino playing your same machine, looking nervously over your left and right shoulder the way you did the first time I saw you win in Vegas, the first time I saw you lose in Philadelphia, Mississippi. I didn’t say a word. I just shook my head and felt better believing you were worse off in your addiction than I was. Did you ever see me limping around the casino? Did you ever want to tell me to come home?
When the hollowness of winning and losing at Vassar for a decade got to be too much, and my body would not let me push it hard or far enough, it fell in love with the attention of tired casino dealers who pitied, prodded, and resented.
Always in that order.
After I lost nearly all the money I had on blackjack tables, I usually sat in front of slot machines, looking over both shoulders at folk watching me pray to flirtatious contraptions programmed to pilfer. Slot machines made twinkly promises to me in the language of bonuses, big wins, jackpots, and hits. If they made good on their promises, I loved them. If they did not, I hated them.
I watched strangers frame crooked smiles when I won. I watched strangers frame crooked smiles when I lost. Like you, I did not know how to win. I’m not even sure I came to the casino to win. “You up or down?” was the extent of the conversation with folk I called “my casino friends.” They didn’t know my name. I didn’t know theirs. They knew how I held my body when disgusted with what I’d made it do. I knew the same thing about them. “I’m here because I’m sad, lonely, and addicted to losing,” is a sentence never shared between casino friends.
I kept coming back to the casino because I felt emptier and heavier when I lost than when I won. I couldn’t win, because if I didn’t have enough to begin with, I could never win enough to stop. And if I won, I came back to win more. And if I came back to win more, I would eventually lose. And after I eventually lost, I would remember the thrill of winning. No matter what, I would always come back with the stated intention of winning, and the unstated intention of harming myself. Still, in a place where there were no metal detectors, where liquor was free, where money was being taken in mass quantities, and most people were losing, I wondered why there wasn’t more visible violence.
Flora Wadley never stepped foot in a casino before meeting me. She came to Vassar as an assistant professor four years after I started as an adjunct professor. Flora was brilliant and bold enough to still love Moesha, The Parkers, Girlfriends, Jane Austen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jem and the Holograms. But she never wanted to be the black Hologram. She wanted to be Black Jem. Like me, she grew up with a young, single black mother. Like me, she loved school. Unlike me, she lost her mother at ten years old. One morning Flora went to elementary school in Hartford, Connecticut, forty miles from the casino. A little before noon, someone came to her class and told her that her mother had died. She spent the rest of her life knowing the people you valued most could never abandon you if you always prepared to be abandoned. Flora did not expect to win, but she worked every moment I knew her to make sure losing hurt as little as possible.
The first time Flora and I went to the casino, we didn’t go to get away from work as much as to go somewhere shiny where we could hold hands. We’d put each other through hell and we were really trying to see if the relationship was something we should commit more time and energy to. We got a free hotel. We got free slot play. We didn’t spend a dime of our own money. We went home happy.