Fat and Happy

Ever since British dandy Beau Brummell, in observing the entrance of the Prince of Wales at a party, leaned over to the hostess and asked, “Who’s your fat friend?” the English-speaking peoples of the world have been obsessed with obesity.

To be slim, we have concluded, is to be beautiful. To be slim is to be healthy. To be slim is to be witty, wise and in touch with a universal truth that binds all living things. To be slim is to be linked with the cosmic knowledge that God is a sylph.

The subject came up one night at a Santa Monica restaurant called Panache that specializes in gourmet health foods but also serves a vodka martini of such splendor that one is able to tolerate the nutritional balance that follows. Panache, I am pleased to say, has discovered the perfect blend of Pritikin and Smirnoff.

It was therefore an appropriate time for discussing health. I was busily denouncing oat bran, tofu and the uplifting qualities of Willard Scott when someone mentioned fat paramedics. As you might know, a suit has been filed against the city of Los Angeles by four paramedics suspended from the Fire Department for being overweight.

One of the dinner guests, a proponent of the cosmic-linkage theory, suggested that the suspensions were justified because fatness is a crime against nature. “Has anyone here,” she asked, “ever seen a fat daisy?” “Has anyone here,” I added, “ever seen a skinny grizzly?” The party dissolved from there.

The next day, however, I began thinking about fat paramedics and decided to talk to some. Let me say first that I am not obese. Genetic default has cursed me with a pot belly and one leg shorter than the other, but I have learned to live in amiable coexistence with a handicap that causes me at worst to seem slightly tilted.

I mention this only to establish that we are all flawed, and being fat is no more a deficiency than being bald, although if television’s Roseanne were both fat and bald, as well as dumb and crude, I would find even greater reason to dislike her.

The paramedics with whom I spoke, however, are neither crude nor bald and certainly not dumb, though by some standards they might be considered fat. Kathleen Hegwer is 5-feet, 3-inches and weighs 228 pounds. James Just is 6 feet tall and weighs 230. The Fire Department wants Hegwer to weigh 160 and Just to weigh 219--or for both to grow several inches taller in order to bring their height and weight into appropriate balance.

They have a combined 28 years as paramedics and their performance ratings are beyond reproach. Both say there is nothing they can’t do in the performance of their duties and to punish them for being too fat is like beating a kid for being too short. It may satisfy the beater but it’s not going to make the kid any taller.

“Penalizing me,” Just says, “makes it seem as though I’ve made a willful decision to be a toad. I’ve been through two weight control programs and I’ve had my stomach stapled. But they still suspend me.”

“If the department is worried about our health,” Hegwer says,” they’d do something about our workload. My rescue unit handles an average of 445 calls a month where 350 is considered excessive. Who gets suspended for that?”

Both Hegwer and Just are convinced that weight standards are applied only for cosmetic reasons. L.A., they suggest, is the Land of Slim & Pretty, and the Fire Department wants its paramedics to live up to the image set by the old television series “Emergency!” in which there was not a fat person in the crowd.

I mentioned that to Battalion Chief Dean Cathey and the chill that ensued suggested I might have interrupted an otherwise pleasant conversation to ask if he’d ever had sex with a duck.

“They are absolutely wrong,” he said in a tone bristling with indignation. “Sure, a fit and lean work force is a good public image, but that’s not what this is all about. To be healthy and productive is the issue, not looking good.”

The paramedics are an elite unit. In order to be one you’ve got to be able to crawl into smashed cars, lift heavy weights, climb to high places and still care for those who have managed to get themselves into sticky situations. Maybe Hegwer and Just can’t do it all, but who can? Being skinny is no guarantee of physical dexterity either.

The bottom line is this. If I need rescuing, I won’t care whether the paramedic is Botticelli buxom or Hollywood trim. The name of their game is to keep me alive and I will accept something less than Morgan Fairchild in the quest . . . though, please God, don’t make it Roseanne.