The Idler

FAT AND POOR

MAX CARLISH on life as a slightly effeminate version of Giant Haystacks at the crusty fag end of the twentieth century.
Taken from Idler 25, Winter 1999

According to the Jews it’s year 5758. Millennium? What Millennium?

I’d like to ignore it. But then I’m not properly Jewish. Being Jewish is matrilineal, you see - it passes through the mother. Like haemophilia. I’m not even a pure bred Brummie, despite my call to “paint things Brum” in a past Idler.

But I am fat. Or what my mother liked to call big-boned.

And as that hateful non-event, designed to make us feel worse about ourselves - y2k - looms, it’s inevitable that Basement Brum’s thoughts turn to how he came to this sorry pass.

For this is the first time in my life that I’ve been fat and poor.

These are my testing times. Christ was thirty-three when he faced his greatest trial. And guess how old I will be next birthday.

Being poor isn’t prophylactic against being fat. I have only to look out of the window of my dank basement (christened the “porn dungeon” by a friend) to see that those whom the Gods have condemned to live around or below the poverty line can also look like slightly effeminate versions of Giant Haystacks.

For I live in a paradigmatic British millennial square.
A cool Britannia cabinet minister and his wayward son enjoy round the clock armed protection on one mock-Georgian side. While a rag tag of pit-bull walking warriors, round-faced urchins and their fat mums live and quite often die of being fat and poor on the other prefab estate side.

There are enough examples of Rabelaisian trolls and beach ball kids playing just outside my window to prove that you can be fat and poor and even happy.
But I’m not happy.

Since I was given notice to get out of the porn dungeon about two months ago, I have been dramatically downwardly mobile, parachuting down a career ladder carefully constructed over the last eight years.

And I’d always thought that one of the few benefits of being poor was that you couldn’t afford to eat much.

I’d even joked in the past about going on the “D Plan” diet - d for destitution. In those days I had a ��250 a week expense account habit and was, as my boss put it, “lunching for England”.

I worked for a wealthy and famously accident prone media conglomerate, who were paying me an obscene amount of money to do something difficult in their television division.

After a year of working in an environment that made the movie Swimming with Sharks look like a Californian encounter group, I experienced the kind of corporate execution that the conglomerate was also famous for. At least I got a five figure sum and the chance to write the press release announcing my abrupt “departure”.

That was two years ago.

Since then, I’ve made six hours of television and drifted into what the TV industry laughingly calls “independent production” where 90 per cent of the time you’re totally dependant on the whim of one person.

I’ve also gone broke.

Because somehow I’ve ended up owing several thousand pounds to a temperamental rock star and about as much again to my bank. The bailiffs haven’t been round to visit yet, but there are others I fear more.

So I’m finding out new things. What’s the real value of money?
What’s it like to be really poor for the first time in my life?
What’s it like to suffer the legion of savage indignities that poor fat flesh is heir to?

Here are just a few of them.

Savage Indignity No.1

Being refused a credit card by High and Mighty, the outsize men’s clothes shop.
The man offered me free turn-ups, as if to rub in the fact that huge though my waist was, he still had to alter the trousers, and then told me that they would be free if I got a High and Mighty credit card.
I was weakened by the offer of ��8 and agreed to hand over my bank card. The man phoned a number and quoted my name and number and waited for a second. Then he discreetly but firmly told me that I wasn’t credit worthy enough.
That was a bizarre low point, a premonition of what was to come on my way down.

Savage Indignity No.2

The next thing involves cookingwhich I have had to learn since becoming poor. I’m not a very good cook and have never got past the pasta and dodgy sauce stage. I gave myself food poisoning once using a tin of squid that looked like it had been ship rations in a Russian trawler in the seventies.
I had perfected a form of garlic shaving based on the classic prison scene from Scorsese’s Goodfellas when Paul Sorvino slices it up with a razor blade so that it “liquefies in the pan”.
The pasta was coming along nicely, bubbling away in a soup of too much olive oil and enough salt to give an old people’s home strokes for a month. I sampled some pasta by twisting it round a knife and raising it high in the air. And then tried to lower it into my mouth.
Five steaming tendrils of pasta drenched in boiling water clamped round my face. I was blind with pain, weeping bitter tears of rage and olive oil, imagining for a few seconds that I must look like the character from Alien thrashing around in a sleazy basement kitchen.
I abandoned the pasta and dined on crisps and noodles instead.

Savage Indignity No.3

I haven’t had a proper girlfriend in five years. The last woman I was in love with said that 40 per cent of the reason that she chucked me was because I snored. Every time I open the Guardian Guide it falls open at the page with the Bravo ad quoting Shock Jock Howard Stern’s endearing attempt at a Haiku:
“An unattractive man with no money might as well cut off his penis.”
But to be fair, both to myself and women, I didn’t have a girlfriend when I had money. And I’ve even turned opportunities down in the last three hundred and twelve weeks. One or two.

Savage Indignity No.4

My GP has the bedside manner of Dr. Josef Mengele. Whether it’s inexplicable gastric explosions in the middle of the night, or violent eruptions of phlegm, caused, I’m told, by excessive snoring, he has the same diagnosis. It goes something like this:
“What do you expect you fat bastard?”
He’s also somehow managed to get hold of my personal records and never tires reminding me of my fancy university education which hasn’t saved me from being fat and poor at the crusty fag end of the twentieth century.

Perhaps It’s the Millennium’s joke on me; we can get this far as a people, as a planet, but there will still be failure and shame and ugliness and disappointment. The good end happily and bad do not. That is what fiction means.

Perhaps I’m expected to evolve through this, perhaps that’s the point of this. Be a proper grown-up for the first time in my life. Because that’s the other resonance of y2k - Kubrick’s monolith exhorting us to get better, be better, be responsible and for God’s sake grow up!

But I’m not really hard core poor. Not compared to Christopher from the Estate on the other side of the square, whose fat single mum died a few months ago with no warning. Despite looking like a little bruiser, he’s incredibly needy, pathetically grateful for any kindness or attention shown him.
He can play silly repetitive games for hours and still be delighted just because you’re passing the time of day with him.

I don’t mean to get all Holden Caulfield, but I really want to tell Christopher that life will get better. That’s the point of it in fact. A golden march to goodness and prosperity. But I can’t. Which is also what I think about when I think of y2k, and of being fat and poor.

What a load of bollocks.