Noche Triste - A Memoir of Anorexia E-Book

Robert Radin

• Herausgeber: ibidem
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Serie: Edition Noema
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 143

Beschreibung

In Noche Triste (“Sad Night”), Robert Radin explores his struggles with anorexia in the 1980s. He also examines the history of self-starvation — its roots in rituals of religious purification, its development into an entertainment craze, its use as a tool of resistance — and, in the process, forces us to reconsider what it means to have anorexia. As his starving becomes an increasingly political act and he ventures to Mexico, alone, alienated from loved ones, we realize he’s in the grip of something dangerous that neither he, nor we, fully understand. Written in exquisite prose, Noche Triste is a devastating, revelatory chronicle of a complex illness. In this unflinching memoir, Robert Radin describes a painful struggle with anorexia that begins with the diagnosis of a friend’s sister. Interweaving his personal recollections with historical accounts of fasts, holy visions, hunger strikes, and force-feeding, he turns a lens on the role that hunger has played both in public and in private, not only in the realms of medicine and psychology but in art, culture, and religion. Ultimately, though, this is a strikingly intense and personal story framed within the larger context of an illness that continues to defy generalizations.  —Leah Browning, author of Orchard City and In the Chair Museum Robert Radin’s Noche Triste goes straight to the heart of anorexia and refuses to look away. It’s a heartfelt, fast-paced, often startling study of the disorder’s paradoxes, and Radin’s own passage through them. By disappearing you appear, he writes, and by appearing you disappear. I found it riveting. —Rosecrans Baldwin, author of Everything Now Robert Radin’s poignant, beautiful memoir tells the story of his quiet descent into anorexia with grace and sensitivity. Noche Triste is every bit as informative as Hilde Bruch’s classic The Golden Cage. When Radin reveals the traumatic antecedents of his eating disorder, his voice is clear and brave. —Robert Brandt, Ph.D., clinical psychologist and co-founder of The FACE Program

Leseprobe

ibidem Press, Stuttgart

For Amy and Max

Table of Contents

Part One: The Nutrition Almanac

Part Two: The Anorexia Nervosa of Franz Kafka

Part Three: The Land of Enchantment

Acknowledgements

Part One:The Nutrition Almanac

1. June 1978

It was cruise night on Van Nuys Boulevard and my friend Neil Baumgarten was heading over in his Nova SS and wanted me to ride shotgun.

I didn’t like cruise night. The glare of the streetlights. The Fords and Chevys with their chrome blower stacks. The bikers standing outside Arby’s, their choppers lined up at the curb. The girls driving in and out of the Bob’s Big Boy parking lot with their feathered blonde hair and their blue eyeshadow and their lip gloss and their tube tops and their zip-around jeans. But Neil was my best friend back then, so I said I would go.

I showed up at his house a few minutes early and his father invited me in. He told me Neil was still getting ready and I should wait in the foyer.

I saw Neil’s sister sitting on the couch in the living room. The curtains were drawn. Her mother was talking to her quietly, but it seemed like she wasn’t listening.

I realized I had walked in on a family scene I wasn’t supposed to be seeing. Part of me wanted to leave but part of me wanted to stay so I could make eye contact with Neil’s sister, so I could exchange a look that would tell her how I felt, let her know I was in love with her and that whatever it was she was going through I would be there for her. But she just stared off into the dark of the room.

Neil finally came out of the bathroom and we went outside and stood on his lawn and looked up at the sky. The clouds were mackerel, that deep-red shimmer everyone attributed to the high concentrations of carbon monoxide and soot in the air.

Sorry about that, Neil said. My sister has this disease. It’s called anorexia nervosa.

For many years these words would remain as strange and beautiful to me as they were that night, sounding more like the Latin name for a flower than a once-rare illness.

She can’t eat, he said. She keeps losing weight.

I asked him questions but he couldn’t give me answers. I imagined anorexia as some sort of virus that was eating his sister’s flesh from the inside, but it wasn’t a virus; it wasn’t something you could catch. Yet she was dissolving. She was wasting away.

We got in the car and drove over to Van Nuys Boulevard. When we were at the light at Kittridge a couple of girls pulled up next to us in a black Trans Am. They looked a little older than us, like maybe they’d already graduated from high school. The driver was checking Neil out. He rolled down his window.

I’m a male gynecologist, he said.

This was his standard pick-up line. He thought it was a double entendre.

The driver leaned over her friend. She had a messy henna-colored mane and sharp teeth. She looked like a vampire.

I’m Mona, she said. This is Gretchen. You guys want to go park somewhere?

We followed them across Ventura Boulevard, into the hills, and stopped on a dead-end street. Neil pulled up the emergency brake.

They’re into us, he said. So none of your bullshit.

He was referring to my habit of bringing up unsexy subjects at sexy times.

Fine, I said.

We got out of the car. Neil walked over to the Trans Am and talked to Mona for a few minutes. Then Gretchen got out and he slid into her seat and closed the door.

Gretchen approached me with a look of resignation. She had the same tangle of hair that Mona had, but she wasn’t a vampire.

Let’s get in your car, she said.

But it’s nice out, I said.

We sat down on the sidewalk under a streetlamp.

I’ve been thinking about anorexia nervosa, I said. Have you heard of it?

It’s when a girl starves herself, Gretchen said.

I was confused. Neil hadn’t described it like that.

I know someone who has it, I said.

Gretchen drew her knees to her chest.

Mona’s going to fuck your friend, she said. So we might as well do something.

As we drove home that night Neil told me he got to third base with Mona.

She knows what she’s doing, he said. I’m definitely going to see her again. Do you want to make it a double?

No, I said.

So you’re going to stay a virgin the rest of your life?

That’s the plan.

We drove past the Busch brewery. The red light on the south building was flashing, which meant they were boiling the malt. I rolled down the window and breathed in the hops. It was my favorite smell in the world.

I wonder if your sister’s still up, I said.

Stop talking about my sister, he said.

2. September 1978

I met Julia in Miss Ushijima’s 2-D art class. She sat by herself in the front of the room and I sat in the back with a group of stoners. I didn’t smoke pot but I knew if I sat with them Miss Ushijima would expect less of me.

Miss Ushijima was an odd bird. She was a gardener as well as a painter and would show up to class with dirt clods in her hair. She taught us color theory and how to blend and cross-hatch and stipple. I did a watercolor of a deer and a charcoal drawing of a potted plant. Miss Ushijima stood next to me and watched what I was doing, smelling of soil and dill, never saying a word.

Julia wore jeans and baggy sweatshirts, but I could see the tendons in her neck and the hollows at her jawbone. I would stare at her for half the class but she never looked up from what she was doing. Every once in a while she would go up to Miss Ushijima and ask a question in a barely audible voice; then she would walk back to her table, her head down and her shoulders hunched.

Miss Ushijima held a workshop at the end of each week. A couple of students would share their work in progress and ask the class for feedback. The week it was my turn I drew a tennis ball from three perspectives. My classmates mistook it for a baseball.

For her workshop Julia showed us a pencil drawing of a mother giving her young daughter a bath. Both the mother and the daughter were looking down into the tub, so you couldn’t see their eyes. This gave the drawing a certain intimacy. I still remember the detail in the mother’s housedress, the large cuffs at the sleeve, the buttons up the front. And I remember the mother’s hair, the way Julia was able to show the weight of it, pulled back in a bun, and the daughter’s hair, shining wet and plastered to her cheek.

It was inspired by Mary Cassatt, Julia said.

The class mumbled something. Nobody knew who Mary Cassatt was.

One morning we were drawing landscapes with pastels and I decided I needed olive green. I could have asked the stoners, but there was a good chance they had eaten theirs. Instead I pretended I needed to sharpen a pencil, and on my way back to my seat I made a detour to Julia.

I’m wondering if you have an olive green I might borrow, I said.

Julia searched my face to make sure I was trustworthy. Then she reached under the table and pulled out a small wooden case. She opened it and inside were trays of pastels, arranged by color and shade. They were so perfect, lined up next to each other like that, still in their paper wrappers. I felt the way I had as a kid when I opened up a new box of crayons. I didn’t want to use them; I just wanted to look at them.

Julia picked out the olive green while I studied the landscape she was working on. The trees were blue and the mountains were red and the sky was a swirl of orange and yellow.

It’s inspired by Art Nouveau, she said.

I love his work, I said.

When Julia stopped coming to class I searched for her in the hallways during passing periods and on the quad during lunch, but she was nowhere to be seen. I asked Miss Ushijima what had happened to her but she wouldn’t — or couldn’t — tell me anything.

3. January 1979

I decided I should bulk up. I’d always been skinny and felt self-conscious about it. No one kicked sand in my face, but a football player had kicked in the door to my locker.

I started going to the weight room during gym class. I’d never lifted weights before, so for the first few weeks I just watched other guys run through their circuits on the Universal machines and copied what they did. But after a couple of months they were all more massive than before and I looked pretty much the same. I couldn’t understand it. It was like we were different species.

Then I met Clay. He appeared out of nowhere one morning, standing in front of the full-length mirror in nothing but a pair of white tennis shorts, doing tricep curls, staring at his reflection. He looked like a centurion: His hair was brown and shiny and perfectly feathered and he had a Roman nose and a jutting jaw. I could tell that he’d been skinny once too, but somehow he’d defined his body. There was a deep cleft in his chest and his arms and legs were cut with muscle. As he pulled up the barbell he exhaled in short, determined bursts. His face turned red. He looked like he was going to cry.

The whole thing was unnerving. I’d never been able to look at myself in the mirror like that, with that much pride and that much purpose. I went over to the leg-extension machine and began my workout. I lifted the weight level with my hip and lowered it back down. Within a few minutes Clay was standing next to me, waiting for his turn. I felt like I had to work harder with him standing there, to show him I had as much right to the machine as he did.

You should do more weight, he said.

He knelt down behind the bench and adjusted the weight pin.

Try that, he said.

I could immediately feel the strain in my quads.

Do ten of those, he said. Then rest a minute and do ten more.

I thought my quads were going to seize on me, but when I was finished it felt like my legs had doubled in size.

Clay set the pin at 200 and lay down on the bench.

Oh shit, I thought. He’s going to do the leg curl. I contemplated running away.

The leg curl was the one exercise I’d never seen anyone do, because to do it you had to lie face down on the bench, brace the back of your heels against the pulley arm, and lift the weight with your hamstrings, and to do that you had to rotate your pelvis in a way that made it look like you were fucking the bench. But Clay didn’t care.

We started working out together. Clay had his regimen and I followed along. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays we did bench press, biceps curls, triceps curls, wrist curls, flies, lat-pulls, military press, shoulder press, skullcrushers, chin-ups, and dips. On Tuesdays and Thursdays we did leg press, hamstring press, squats, calf raises, deltoid raises, toe raises, inner-thigh lifts, knee extensions, and sit-ups. We worked out with free weights as much as possible because Clay said they gave you more definition and were a better measurement of real strength.

He explained to me the way muscle mass was built: The muscle tissue tore when you lifted something heavy. When it mended its mass was increased and strengthened. That was why you weren’t supposed to work the same muscle group every day, because the muscles needed time to heal. Working out was this gradual process of breaking the muscle down and building it back up. The burning you felt was from the lactic acid. You wanted that burn — when you felt it you knew you were building muscle.

Feel the burn, Clay would say. And though I didn’t really believe what he was telling me, though I thought it was a crude explanation for something that had to be much more complicated, I did what he said and made my body burn as he stood over me and yelled at me: Come on, one more rep, come on motherfucker, come on, one more, one more, one more.

My shirts were getting tighter. Sometimes I’d dare to look at myself in the mirror before I left the locker room, and I could see it was happening: I was developing Clay’s body.

The day Clay first bench-pressed 300 pounds he invited me to his house that night to watch Dog Day Afternoon.

It’s never been on television before, he said.

When I got to his house he introduced me to his parents. His mother was sitting on the couch, crocheting an afghan. His father was in the kitchen, hunched over the dining table, fiddling with a circuit board. He shook my hand and showed me a drawing he’d made on a paper napkin. It looked like a man screaming into his own ear, but he explained it was a diagram for a device he was making that would stop kids from siphoning gas from his car at night. He’d hook a motion detector to the gas cap, then run a circuit to the horn, the windshield wipers, and the headlights, and put everything on a timer, so it would all go off at once.

You could just park the car in the garage, Clay said.

I’m not changing my life around for a bunch of hoodlums, his father said.

Clay and I went to his bedroom. Like the rest of the house, it was done up inCountry American, with yellow wainscoting and blue gingham wallpaper. There was a desk, a bed, and a little television on the night table. The only real sign of Clay’s presence was the poster of Pumping Iron taped to his closet door.

He’d made a big bowl of popcorn and grabbed a six-pack of 7-Up. We sat on the bed and turned on the TV. He asked me if I loved Pacino and I said I did, even though I’d never seen a Pacino movie before. Not even The Godfather.

The soda made us gassy. We belched when Sonny’s mother was begging him to turn himself in, and again when Sonny was checking the limousine for weapons. When Sal died I started crying. Clay didn’t say anything.

When the movie was over Clay turned off the TV and went to his desk and opened the top drawer and took out a red envelope.

I got you this card, he said.

He handed me the envelope. The flap was sealed so tight I had to tear it from the corner.

The outside of the card had a picture of two men on horseback. They were wearing black breeches and red doublets and floppy hats. One of the men was pointing at something in the distance. I remember thinking they were from Renaissance times, which for me covered everything between the Middle Ages and the Industrial Revolution. The card was blank on the inside. I didn’t know why he was giving it to me, but I thanked him.

I knew you would like it, he said.

The next day there was a girl with purple hair in the weight room. She was on crutches, her right leg in a cast up to her thigh. She sat down on the bench press and the football coach introduced her.

Listen up, he said. This is Elsa. She broke her leg, so she’s going to be with us for a while.

Everyone held back their snickering until the coach had left. The color of Elsa’s hair meant she was a punk, and punks were lepers. I approached her and offered to show her how to use the upper-body machines. She thanked me but told me she was just there to kill time. Then she took a copy of Valley of the Dolls out of her backpack and started to read.

A few days later Elsa had a friend with her, a girl with spiky hair and lots of eyeliner. They were sitting on the bench press, talking about Bowie. Elsa said her mother had been obsessed with him but lost all interest after he abandoned his Ziggy persona. When Clay and I asked them if they wouldn’t mind moving Elsa introduced me to her friend.

This is Nicole, she said.

Nicole and I shook hands.

He said he would teach me how to lift weights, Elsa said.

The two girls started laughing.

The offer still stands, I said.

I love your hair, Nicole said.

She likes skinny boys, Elsa said.