Heavy Duty

If you’ve grown up a boy with a weight problem, you may never fully shed your identity. But you may learn to make peace with life’s pleasures.

I’ve always been interested in people who make ugly work for them. Take the poet WH Auden, whose face became so wizened with age that David Hockney said after painting him, “I kept thinking, if his face looks like this, what must his balls look like?” Then there’s Jesse Plemons, gifted actor and dad-bod owner, whom the non-comely study for clues because he landed Kirsten Dunst.

We pay attention to the unconventionally attractive and to those in public life at the shallow end of the glamour gene pool, because so many of us feel that our outsides do not match our insides. We sneak to the rear during group photographs and hope to hide most of ourselves behind Tim, the six-foot-six pituitary case from the corporate office. It’s easy to grow maudlin, moving in this direction. Nuts to that. You learn to make the most of what you are given. I found a look, if of a limited sort, and in my own Plemons move married a woman so far above my station that even our close friends think there must be some sort of Stockholm-syndrome thing going on. “Ugliness, like beauty, is something you must learn how to use,” Sammy Davis Jr commented. Easy for him to say. Sammy Davis Jr. radiated enough heat to power a seven-nation army of Zippo lighters. More useful to me across the course of my life have been Ezra Pound’s words, from The Cantos: “Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.”