vituperation

Please bear in mind that the dialogue below is written from memory, and may vary slightly from what was actually said.

I opened the front door and the reporter stood there, smiling at me. She was blonde, with perfect white Chiclet teeth, and looked like a human Barbie. We exchanged pleasantries and she went to help the cameraman with his equipment.

Er, his camera equipment, I mean.

I led them through the house, asking them not to film much of it as my wife was out of town and would most likely shoot me for a stranger should I show the world the inside of our home after I’d been bachelorizing it. They laughed, and agreed to film as little of the house as possible.

The food was all piled on the kitchen table in bags and boxes, having been recently removed from the back of my Jeep, and I offered to unpack it for a camera shot. They declined, deciding instead to have me unpack several cans so they could film me loading them into a box.

“Can you sit here on the couch?” the reporter said, motioning to where she wanted me, “That way, we can have the food in the background while you’re talking.”

I obliged and sat down. While the cameraman set up his tripod and camera, the reporter attached a microphone to the collar of my shirt. She hooked the transmitter for the mic to my belt in the back, getting a nice feel of my damp shirt.

I don’t know if she checked out my butt or not.

She grabbed a chair from the kitchen table and situated it across from me, then sat down, affording me a view most of the way up her dress.

Not that I looked.

The cameraman turned on his light - his big, bright spotlight that instantly raised the ambient temperature in the room forty degrees - and aimed it at me.

“Light levels!” he called. The reporter jumped up and held a piece of white paper in front of my face for a couple of seconds until the cameraman nodded with satisfaction, then she took her seat again.

The cameraman waved his hand.

“So, Fred,” the reporter said, “you weighed almost 400 pounds. What was that like?”

I was incredible. So suave, so well-spoken; a true natural in front of the camera.

“It was terrible, Melissa,” I said, “I couldn’t do anything; I was tired all the time. I had to come home and rest every day after work, just because sitting at a desk all day made me so tired.”

The interview lasted for about ten minutes, and we talked briefly about many things: the rotting foot moment that caused me to wake up and realize I was dying, what I ate then and what I eat now, my junk food days, and the whole purpose of the big pile of food behind me.

“Why did you decide to buy the food?” she asked.

“The food is a tangible thing,” I said, “something I can look at and touch, that would keep me reminded of how far I’d come. Making such a transformation was not without its daunting moments. There were times when I’d think, man, I have to do this forever, and that can be a little overwhelming. This pile of food showed me how far I’d come.” I didn’t think I could possibly sound any better. I was incredible.

“What about giving it away?”

“I thought it would be good to share with people who might be going through hard times and have trouble making ends meet.” Damn, I was good. My voice was sleek and sexy, and had just the right level of masculinity in it to drive women across the valley wild.

At the end of the interview segment, she thanked me and we stood. Next, I had to be by the bags and boxes of food. Standing by them, sitting by them, sorting through them like a big dork. They had me unpack several cans and repack them. The lights shone and the camera rolled through all of this.

“What kinds of foods did you buy?” the reporter asked.

“Mostly I bought the sorts of foods I eat now, though I generally buy the vegetables fresh or frozen when I can, because canned foods tend to have more salt than I want. Fresh and frozen foods wouldn’t have lasted the two years I was building this. Mostly this is things like tomatoes, peas, beans, corn, pasta. There’s a single can of Spam in it somewhere sort of as a joke.”

“So what are the exact numbers, Fred? What was your starting weight, and what do you weigh now?”

“When I first started out, I weighed a little over 370 pounds, and these days I bounce around between 195 and 198,” I said, “because everyone’s weight fluctuates a little. The closest round number to what I lost is 175 pounds.”

“And how did you collect the food? Did you go every week and buy it?”

“Every 20 or 30 pounds, I’d grab extra food when I was doing my Saturday morning shopping. The cans were the hard part, because they don’t weigh a pound like the bags of beans and rice do. With the cans I just estimated, like okay, I’ve gotten ten of the 14- and 15-ounce cans, so I’ll grab an extra one to round them all up, so I don’t know how close the pile actually is to representing what I dropped. It might be a little light, it might be a little heavy.”

Next, they wanted to film me carrying the food out to my Jeep and loading it. I felt like Zoolander as I carted the food around, load after load. The cameraman followed me through the garage on the first load, then positioned himself in various locations for the subsequent trips. He filmed me through my BodySolid home gym, through my Smith machine, over the weight tree, by the stationary bike, and from the front of the Jeep through the windshield. Mostly I grinned like a buffoon, because I felt like one. Fortunately the camera was behind me during these shots, except for the one through the windshield.

By now, the neighbors were starting to watch circumspectly from their yards.

The reporter wanted to get some shots of me lifting weights - what is it with these people? - since that’s something I do regularly now. After much mulling, and me pointing out that I’d look downright stupid lifting weights in jeans and a button-down, the cameraman suggested they get a shot of the weight stack on the BodySolid gym crashing down with an impressive-sounding crack!

They filmed about ten takes of this. I felt like I’d gotten a second workout, and was starting to sweat.

“Let’s do the standup now,” the reporter said. Oddly, though they didn’t mean ’standup comedy’, I was laughing my ass off during the next segment.

The reporter wanted to know how much weight I lost each week when I was losing weight. I told her that it started out being a lot - 5 pounds or more a week - when I was really fat, then followed a downward curve to the point that it was more like a half pound a week or less near the end.

“So five bags of beans represent one week?” she asked, obviously wanting to use the most impressive number possible.

“Yes, but only at the beginning. If you’re looking for something that more accurately reflects the average, it would be about two bags.”

The reporter dejectedly walked to the back of my Jeep, cameraman in tow. She positioned herself so she was facing the bags of food, with her back to the cameraman. I stood off in the distance, watching raptly and wiping my face with a paper towel because I was sweating from lifting the weights in the hot-ass garage.

“Standup in three, two, one…” she said. At the appropriate time, she spun around to face the camera, bags of beans in her hand.

“THESE TWO BAGS,” she shouted, her voice rolling across my neighborhood like thunder, “REPRESENT ONE WEEK FRED SPENT IN THE GYM!”

I laughed. I couldn’t help myself. I laughed a lot - so much, in fact, that I had to walk around to the front of the house.

The neighbors continued to watch, from a distance.

“THESE TWO BAGS,” I heard from the driveway, “REPRESENT ONE WEEK FRED SPENT IN THE GYM!”

I debated calling Robyn, to share my delight with her.

“THESE TWO BAGS REPRESENT ONE WEEK FRED SPENT IN THE GYM!”

I wandered back around the corner, trying desperately not to laugh. The reporter and the cameraman were discussing the tease, the little piece that would air before the newscast to hook viewers into not shutting off the TV. They settled, and the reporter took a position next to the left rear taillight of my Jeep.

“Standup tease in three, two, one…” she said.

The cameraman filmed the food in the back of my Jeep for a couple of seconds, then panned the camera up to the reporter.

“THESE BAGS OF FOOD WERE THE INSPIRATION FOR ONE MADISON MAN TO LOSE A HUNDRED AND SEVENTY FIVE POUNDS! I’LL HAVE THE STORY AT SIX!” she screamed. I’m surprised she didn’t burst a blood vessel. Once again I had to walk away, laughing.

After several takes of the teaser, it was time to drive the food to the food bank.

They filmed me getting into my Jeep. At the food bank, they filmed me getting out of my Jeep. They filmed me opening the hatch. They filmed me walking across the parking lot with a bag in each hand, shoulders back and head high like the man’s man I am. What they didn’t film was the grin on my face because I felt so idiotic.

They filmed me walking into the food bank. They filmed me walking down the hall. They filmed me and a guy from the food bank unloading the rest of the food. The food bank had some industrial scales and they weighed the food pile. It weighed 204 pounds, so I was most definitely off.

“Yep,” I said, “that’s what happens when you have to guesstimate on the cans.”

The reporter agreed.

Finally, they got a statement from someone at the food bank, and we were done. I sidled up to the reporter and told her about the other web site, because I knew that when people saw the story they’d probably have questions.

And I have a book to pimp, you know.

She wrote down the URL to the site, that was that, and we went our respective ways.

Watch this, and see how the distortion begins.

Next time, Fred discusses how the story is shat from the other end of the media machine.