I was able to scrape together some money by selling my clothes at vintage resale stores and being a subject for focus groups. For every product ever sold, companies do market research using focus groups. They basically ask desperate broke strangers to sit in a circle and talk about what they like and dislike about the product. The company paid fifty dollars cash on the day the group met and it was always around two in the afternoon, so you can imagine the types of people these groups attracted. And if you can’t, it was mostly drug addicts desperately needing cash, like, five days ago.
I was desperate for money, but the problem with me is that I’m also a type A codependent perfectionist, so I also truly wanted to help improve the products we were testing. I specifically remember a Neutrogena facial scrub brush. I was sitting in a circle of meth addicts who needed fifty dollars and needed it fast. They were saying whatever they had to say to get the discussion over with, but I kept raising my hand and pitching ideas for how to make the brush more compact, sanitary, and utilitarian. It’s actually secretly my dream to be an inventor, so I rattled off a bunch of what I thought were very good ideas: “What if it was also an eyebrow brush on the other side? What if it can shave your mustache but then shape your brows, too? And it could also be a pen!” I’m not sure if you’ve ever been nonverbally threatened by a desperate drug addict, but I don’t recommend it. Knowing how emotionally dyslexic I was back then, I probably mistook these homicidal glares as flirting.
The point is, for about two years I didn’t have more than eighty dollars in my bank account, which meant no more fancy Swiss Miss, poison potato chips, or dried mangoes. Once I was broke, I realized that having an eating disorder was actually kind of a luxury. Now I was starving because I had to be, not because I wanted to be. This ended up exacerbating my disease because it helped justify my food restriction and gave me a real reason to eat nothing. My brain now reasoned that starving myself was saving money. “I ate only five hundred calories today, I’m so frugal! Take that, Suze Orman!” I found the most cost-effective food to eat on a tight budget was, not shockingly, jerky. You name the jerky, I’ve binged on it. Turkey, beef, jalape?o beef, salmon, jalape?o salmon. As long as it was filled with the maximum amount of preservatives and antibiotics, it was in my body.
I started choosing “safe” foods that were hard to chew and would never go bad. I basically started grocery shopping the way most people shop for tires. The more durable and long-lasting, the better. I used to buy protein bars in bulk, hoping to ration them out for the week, but of course given the midnight bouts with bingeing, I’d wake up in my bed under a blanket of the half-eaten protein bars I had eaten in an evening stupor. As the food I was eating got less edible, my stomach got less tolerant. After eating four or five of these basically indigestible protein bars in one sitting, I’d wake up in a state of rigor mortis, paralyzed by stomach pain. I’d have to lie in a fetal position for most of the day, full of regret, Red #5, and methylgubane. I just made that last word up, but knowing our food industry these days, it’s probably a real ingredient.
This feels like the right time to mention that, at this point, I was so off the grid from what was actually logical, that I wasn’t really eating food conducive to being thin, especially when you consider the quantities that I was consuming. By the time I got to bingeing on protein bars, I was easily eating four thousand calories a day. At this point, my disorder had evolved into something less about restricting food and more about self-sabotaging in a way that got me stuck in a shame cycle that justified my extreme isolation. After I had eaten so many calories, my entire day consisted of making my stomach hurt and then needing to go to the gym for hours to burn it all off. My addiction being such a full-time job meant that I didn’t have to deal with reality, people, or, God forbid, intimacy with anyone.
Since I spent so much of my adolescence preoccupied with this eating madness, I of course hadn’t developed the social skills to have good friendships, but when I met Dori and Jenny the first year I was in L.A., they were so awesome that I was determined not to let my insane food restrictions and dark secrets mess it up. This was a struggle, given that I sometimes spent days in bed or at the gym. I would frequently cancel plans in a cryptic way, and when I did show up, I’d kill the vibe by not ordering food or by asking the waiter what was in every dish and if they could make me steamed vegetables with no oil. These days the most annoying people take photos of their food to post on social media, but ten years ago it was me, the person firing off a litany of questions to the waiter about salad dressing and begging them to make a delicious dish taste awful.
Dori and Jenny were the only people who really saw me eat anything. They never attacked or accused because perhaps somehow they knew that eating disorders just grow stronger when someone tries to fix them. That said, they would occasionally ask leading questions or gently drop nutrition information à la “Did you know that eating fat actually makes you feel full longer?” I know them well enough now to know that they’re way too smart and interesting to waste time talking about what makes someone feel full, so clearly they were doing it just to try and help me the only way they knew how.
One time Jenny was at my apartment off Sunset Boulevard. It was full of cockroaches and I saw rats on two different occasions, but it was within walking distance of The Comedy Store and that’s all I cared about. I saw at least two or three cockroaches a day; the only good news is that I didn’t have to worry about them going near my food due to how inedible it was. They never dared come near my cabinets. If your food is so full of chemicals that not even cockroaches will eat it, you need to regroup.
One day Jenny was over and for some reason ended up in my kitchen. I don’t remember why or how, but I remember her opening a cabinet. When she saw the food on display, she gasped. Her face went pale. Mind you, even when she’s not horrified, Jenny is already very pale. She has gorgeous alabaster skin and looks like an angelic doll a girl would have had on her dresser in the 1950s or that a creepy man would have on his dresser now. But after she took a good hard look at what I was putting in my body, her relentless smile finally fell to deep concern.
“Oh my god,” she uttered.