Sunday, January 15, 2006

Sabrina

There used to be this girl, Sabrina. She's dead now. But we'll get to that later. I was friends with her, even though she was fucking obnoxious. Always whining and crying over something. Guys would get drunk and fuck her by mistake and she'd fall deep-creepy in love with them, then call me every night sobbing about how the guy didn't find it romantic when she showed up at his door at 2am, in her dirty pink coat like a tossed-out cat. I'm embarrassed to admit this since she's well, dead but we used to call her Sweaty Betty. Sabrina was fat, like 300 pounds. And she had that fat people smell since she couldn't exactly reach her ass to wash it clean. You know the smell. Like poo and cheddar.

My friend Anny used to have spaghetti night, every Thursday. She'd make a big, industrial sized pot of spaghetti and invite all our friends: Andrea, Johnny, Tom and Tina, Kelly and Drug-Dealer Nick. And of course, Sabrina. We'd eat until we were full and there'd still be half a pot of noodles left. Sabrina would guzzle the rest down by herself. Half an industrial sized pot full of noodles. Drug-Dealer Nick would always say, "Sweaty Betty loves her spaghetti!" It was almost like we kept Sabrina around as a standing joke.

Then all the sudden, she lost like 80 pounds in 2 months. She was normal sized. Guys were calling her back. She was asking to borrow my clothes. I've asked doctors, I've asked nurses, I've asked pharmacists and all of them say it's impossible to do that naturally.

Here, look at this:

No, it's not a scary tentacle monster with teeth. It's gastric bypass, a surgery that splits your stomach in 2. There's a big stomach and a little stomach. Food only goes to the little stomach, so you can't eat as much. Sabrina had this done. She wouldn't admit to it at first, but we knew. Me, her and Anny went out to Bill's Pizza after it happened and she barely touched her food. Said her stomach hurt. Sabrina had never refused a pizza before.

The great thing about humans is we're very stretchy. All our bones and organs stretch and grow. What happens with gastric bypass is that if you keep up your gluttonous eating habits, your stomach will stretch back to its regular size.

Sabrina wasn't stretchy enough. One night, after ingesting 15 platefuls of lasagna, her little stomach ripped open and poisoned her body with half-digested meatballs and marinara. With no stomach, there's no way to hold food, right? So Sabrina died of starvation.

Of course the crew was all there at her funeral, saying how cool she was and that they were sorry for calling her Sweaty Betty, though we all knew deep down she'd been a whining harpy who smelled bad. And of course the casket was closed, but still I pretended I could see through the wooden lid, see her bones and guts, dried out in a floppy bag of stretched out skin.

(Sorry for the crazy formatting.. me and HTML are not good friends.)

posted at 8:46 PM |