. . . I don’t like anyone whose total preoccupation is being <i> fit.</i> : Notes From the Fat Underground

A person I know in Woodland Hills reached over and patted my stomach the other evening at a cocktail party and said, “Hey, getting a little paunchy there, aren’t we?”

He was smiling good-naturedly and expected me to join him in the warmth and happiness his comment was intended to evoke.

I didn’t smile. I didn’t speak. I simply stared at him with an expression that encompassed half the hate in hell.

“Of course,” he said, the smile fading, “you know what they say about a comfortable paunch. . . . “ His voice trailed off.

For a moment, we faced each other in silence.

Then I said, in metered articulation, “Henry, if you ever touch my stomach again, I am going to strip you naked, spray your behind with pork chop fat and tie you to the ground among the wild dogs of Topanga.”

Henry didn’t quite know how to handle that. He stood there with a slice of lemon floating around in his glass of Perrier water and his skinny legs sticking out from under a pair of sky-blue designer shorts, wondering what to do.

He had heard, of course, of the wild dogs of Topanga and how they have grown accustomed to the taste of human flesh by eating the derelicts who sleep behind Joe Creek’s market.

And he was convinced that anyone who drank Scotch, which I was imbibing at the time, was capable of any atrocity that popped into his head.

“Well,” he said, backing away, “have a nice day,” and left.

My wife, who was standing not too far away and who had heard the exchange, looked at me quizzically and said, “Pork chop fat?”

It wasn’t entirely Henry’s fault. Granted, I don’t like the man, but then I don’t like anyone whose total preoccupation is being fit.

They abound in Woodland Hills, human skeletons who exist on nuts and berries, who jog, who work out, who have read every health book ever written and who will knock on the door of the house next door to ask the owner if he would mind not smoking.

They believe that fat people do not have a right to live and they are offended by the mere presence of a stomach among the stomachless.

I’m not really fat. I have, however, inherited my mother’s tendency to paunch and my father’s inclination not to give a damn.

Also, I am not a health nut. I smoke cigars, drink hard liquor and eat red meat. If that offends you, avoid me. But, I warn you, do not pat my stomach.

I do not like my stomach patted under any circumstances. Henry’s misfortune was to take a little pat on the very same day I had met with a leader of the Fat Underground.

I will call her simply the Fat Lady, because that’s what she calls herself. Not overweight. Not portly. Fat.

She is 39 years old and probably weighs 250 pounds. When I asked her specifically, she said, “I don’t deal in numbers. It’s irrelevant.”

She joined the Fat Underground 10 years ago, partly because on the day she was married, her mother-in-law said to her, “You have such a nice face. Why don’t you do something about your weight?”

“I am sick and tired of society’s attitude toward us,” the Fat Lady said. “Fat people are not considered pretty. Fat people are not considered healthy. Fat people are not considered intelligent. If we’re smart, why are we fat?”

What she calls the Fat Liberation Front is especially annoyed at a $50-billion-a-year health-diet-fashion-entertainment industry that has established the “anorexic look” as the American body standard. Especially in L.A.

“Film is the worst,” she said. “Heavy people are depicted as buffoons. James Bond never gets a fat woman at the end of the movie.”

She thought about that for a moment and then said, “You know what the pickup line is at singles bars now? Not, ‘What’s your sign?’ but, ‘Where do you work out?’ ”

The Fat Lady was convincing. She talked about fat discrimination in jobs, transportation and education. It was time, she said, for fat people across America to begin speaking up.

“A high, stable weight is not necessarily unhealthy,” she said. “Radical diets are. You don’t just lose fat, you lose protein, heart tissue and brain tissue. When someone says, ‘Isn’t it wonderful the weight you’ve lost,’ what they’re really saying is, ‘Isn’t it wonderful the brain tissue you’ve lost.’

“Who in the hell says you’re only whole if you’re skinny?”

She’s right. I’m not sure the world is quite ready for James Bond to roll around his water bed with a fat lady, but perhaps it is time to consider the ludicrous nature of our preoccupation with being skinny.

God didn’t create clones. He said Let there be short people and there were. Black ones, too. And brown and yellow and red and tall and fat and thin and big-eared and little-nosed.

Alfred Einstein was ugly as hell and Abraham Lincoln was no raving beauty. Eleanor Roosevelt did not look like Brooke Shields nor Golda Meir like Christie Brinkley, but they made it OK.

The Fat Lady has hit upon something that is the glory of humanity: the differences among us.

I hope Henry understands that now. If not, I already have the pork chop spray, and the wild dogs of Topanga like lean meat best.