Fat Kid

I do not remember the first time I was called fat as a kid. I remember in third grade, Danny, a rail thin kid calling me fat mercilessly. I complained to my mom about it, she listened, and eventually offered that I could make fun of him for being so skinny. Offering the quip, “you're so skinny you have to run around in the shower to get wet.” My mother and I laughed about that, but the reality remains that the fat kid gets made fun of, and the skinny kid doesn't.

Like the extra weight that earned my monicker, “fat kid” stuck. Eventually, I would learn to appreciate being called fat over other names, because I was not trying to hide being fat. In fact, I owned being fat. While other kids were fatter, I could comfortably hate myself publicly for not having a perfect body. Beyond the body shape, I think much of it had to do with being bad at sports. My fatness stemmed not necessarily from my body mass index, but from my inability to hit a small leather ball with a wooden rod, or to not be able to put an orange ball through an elevated orange metal ring. Could I have worked on these, my brother did, so probably, but I can think of nothing less interesting than a group of people committed to the movement of a ball on a court or field.

This attitude does not win prized pecking order posts within the school age community. I was picked last for every game in PE, which was almost always matball, a variation of kickball that I was no better at than the original. Even amongst my cousins I was the game loser in the group of four. Fat transcended the states, and while I was certainly the fattest of my two cousins and Jason, it was really commentary on my prowess at the games that we played.

Accordingly, I abhorred the playing of team sports, and really the existence of these sports in general. In high school, desperate to fit in, I shot rifle, a sport that is “team” only once the scores are tallied. While shooting is not easy, the ability to lay, kneel, and stand in one place for many hours fails to convince almost everyone of unfatness. To increase my marketability to my peers, I was talked into playing baseball my freshman year.

For many of the baseball games that season I was player number ten, meaning that my presence on the team ensured that we would not forfeit. The coach could not be begrudged to play me saving the one inning that another player angered him to the point that he put me in to punish him. Given our record that year, there may have been more dignity for the team if they had forfeited, but Jason got to play baseball his senior year, so wearing tight pants, and watching his games was worth going out.

I never actually played long enough to have a record, and I don't think anyone but parents and girlfriends ever came to a baseball game. Accordingly, baseball did nothing to save me from being a fat kid. What did was Landen. Landen was a smart kid with little ambition in his studies, who chose instead to apply himself to the avoidance of school. To help him and his friends, he needed the credibility of a nerdy kid who never did anything wrong. Landen got my services, in an unspoken exchange of credibility. I could give his antics the cover they needed, and in return he could give me a moniker that was not derogatory. Fat kid, fag, and nerd were nearly replaced by Bad Ass.

Bad Ass, a misnomer that fit my initials, and “BA” for short, became more commonly used than my own name. It was so pervasive in the high school that adults began calling me BA to avoid confusion with the other Brians of my small home town. While the names changed, and somehow being known as Bad Ass seemed to trick a few people into perceiving me as being bad ass, inside, I knew that I was not Bad Ass, I knew that I was still the same fat kid that had been ridiculed for his entire public life.

The fear of being found out is, in many ways, worse than the fear of actually being something. While I was never happy being the fat kid in my class, I was not afraid of losing much. I was already at the bottom of the pecking order. Once I became BA, I had something to lose. I began attempting to hide myself even more than I already was. I was no longer trying to preserve myself as fat, but as actually some sort of cool. I embraced the idea of a Chris Farley or John Belushi, certainly nerdy, certainly not athletic, but cool all the same. The problem with this is that I was not cool, and I knew it.

Belushi and Farley tried to be cool so much that they killed themselves in the process, so even my role models saw the flaw in their cover. My escape was not drugs, but college. In the later years of high school I segregated myself from the students that I had spent my life with. I worked jobs with fervor, and avoided contact with people outside of a small group of friends. I took less than a full load of courses, and graduated early to move away from the fear of being discovered. What I had not realized is that I had become accustomed to running.

In university I would restyle myself as a climber, and general outdoors enthusiast. Like today's hipster kids, I was desperate to find a group that would never think to discover my weaknesses. If everything I did was physical, no one would think that I was actually the fat kid. I started riding my bike, and in an attempt to impress a girl, started running. I was active in white water, and a bunch of clubs. I was anything but the fat kid, and I would sometimes start to trick myself into believing my own cover story, like the undercover cop in so many movies.

With time I would find mountain biking, and distance running. These days I do not climb very much, and my mountain bike sits disassembled in a storage unit in Western Washington. I keep running though. My weight fluctuates with other factors in my life, but I have been able to do some long and beautiful runs. Rationally, I doubt many of the kids who called me fat so long ago could keep up, but that does not matter. Out on the trail, running for the joy of running is never far ahead of running away from the insults of childhood. Sometimes I find myself putting a hand against my stomach, comforted and disgusted to find that my gut has not magically faded since the beginning of my run. Instead I feel an extended truffle shuffle, jiggling along the trail with me. Some days this motivates me to push a little harder, to run a little faster to stay ahead of the past, but most days, a voice inside of me says, “I know who you are, you're the fat kid,” and my run slows to a defeated walk.