The Gag Reflex

Purging. It isn't just for breakfast anymore.

My duet acting partner Wendy and I come home from our two-day speech tournaments, usually on a Saturday night, and order ten or twenty items at Taco Bell. Then we vomit every last bit in the restroom before leaving. She finds it tricky to put her gag reflex back in gear when we start doing it since she has successfully learned to avoid gagging in order to give deeper blowjobs.

I generally use a toothbrush, which I carry around in a Ziplock bag.

My friend Donna is more delicate about the whole business. She won't even let anyone else vomit in her bathroom at home, which I think is terribly inhospitable.

It is just such a perfect system. What could be better than going for lunch to the all-you-can-eat lunch buffet at Pizza Inn and taking them at their word? Donna is perhaps a tad hefty but none of us is actually fat, we are just obsessive and controlling. For me the idea that I can eat without stopping whenever I want is intoxicating; especially considering my father and step-mother's crippling food dictates in my earlier years. My years as their hostage and kidnap victim.

The Naked Dad and his bride drag us into vile smelling health food stores, buying chalky carob bars and Tiger's Milk. (I am tempted to throw a party when I later hear that their guru, Adele Davis, dies from cancer in her early 40s. Her books make my life as a hostage into even more of a misery. Her early death is not forestalled by eating things that disgust me, so why should I torture myself?)

After my release from their custody I steadily get weirder about food under my mother's benevolent reign. She tries to get me to eat well, like a normal mother, like someone other than my step-mother who doesn't shave under her arms, like someone who loves me. But I digress. I eat to stuff down everything I feel. I eat in a fever of strangely exhausting exhilaration. I eat because I can.

Ice cream is the best binge (and purge) food, acting as a soft, liquid buffer, easing the way for any badly chewed chunks of tacos, hamburgers, or pizza that might hurt a bit coming back up. How clever we are to dream up this idea. How efficient the process is. Somewhere along the line we get wind of the fact that the Romans did it too, giving the whole mess a classical seal of approval.

This is my junior year; the year that will turn out to be my last year in high school, though I don't know this yet.

Donna and I become friends the summer after my sophomore year, where I attend a school called McCallum. We are both working on a summer theatre production of "Romeo and Juliet," me playing Mercutio and she designing costumes, which she later does professionally in New York.

My two years at McCallum are successful. They have an honor there called Torchbearer, given to the graduating senior boy and girl who are the highest achievers, determined through a complicated point system. I work on the yearbook staff and see how the system is scored. At the end of my sophomore year I have more points than the senior boy who wins the title that year. My problem is R.C.P., the Royal Court Players, which is the drama club at McCallum. It is run like a Peronist military state for twenty or thirty years by a stout, mannish woman rather improbably called Lady, who slicks back her short barbered hair and smokes brown cigarillos. She is now dead from cigarillo-induced cancer and emphysema. I am in power in my other extracurricular activities (speech, choir, journalism, sex) but Lady never wants to cast me in anything, believing that my intense ambition might upset the balance of her shows. I actually like her very much, and believe her early favor toward me as a freshman will be rewarded in my sophomore year but it hasn't been, and I am pissed. I don't want to be in the chorus of "Little Mary Sunshine" singing about being a fucking forest ranger. I want to be a star.

The summer production of "Romeo and Juliet" is directed by the drama teacher from L.B.J. and she invites me to transfer. I am filled with glee. I tell everyone I have been recruited, that she has promised me artistic freedom to pick and choose, though of course she does nothing of the kind, and I prepare to leave McCallum - a complicated process since one must reside in the district of a school to attend it. My first thought is to make my mother and step-father move to the new district. They actually give it some thought before sensibly refusing.

I now refer to this refusal as sensible. At the time I refer to it as a betrayal.

Finally I engineer it so that we tell the school district that my mother and step-father are going to be traveling a lot, and I will be living with a family in the district. We have to give them power of attorney over me and everything. I am fifteen years old and I have learned from my father that gaming the system is never a crime - not if you get what you want in the end.

My speech teacher at McCallum, a lovely woman named Gretchen Bullock, a minister's wife if memory serves, thinks I am insane when I tell her my plans to leave for L.B.J. How can I be taking all this so seriously at such a young age? "I just don't want to see you at speech tournaments, completely lost in your ambition, flitting about in your green velveteen jacket, oblivious to everything important," she tells me with an unexpected level of passion. I say I can't see becoming that person. She laughs and says, "You already are."