Biggest Loser

So there I am at Target, minding my own business, making the usual $99 run for toilet paper, when this fat kid working the checkout feels a need to share.

I didn't used to object to fat people, especially fat kids. But then I started seeing them for what most of them really are, out-of-control carnivores, and it's no more Mister Nice Guy. Not that I ever was.

Americans are unconscionably embarrassing. When I traveled to Morocco back in the last century...I love saying that, I'm going to say that again...when I traveled to Morocco back in the last century, I noticed this: Americans are the loudest people on earth. Now we're also the fattest. And we're not just overweight, we're obese. And we're not just obese, we're morbidly obese. Make that obscenely obese.

What is wrong with us? Doesn't it matter that we're the laughingstock of the world? That we're portrayed as mouth-breathing porkers in foreign movies? That the rest of Western Civilization shakes their heads at our depraved appetites?

When I traveled to France last summer...I love saying that, I'm going to say that again...when I traveled to France last summer, I noticed this: the French are quieter and thinner. In cafes, in parks, on the street, in the adjacent hotel room, there were no fat cheeseheads hollering about the Packers as they stuffed Big Macs down their throats. Even the hoodlums in France appeared more subdued. Don't get me wrong, they weren't really subdued. But they didn't go around hollering in French about Les Bleus while stuffing Grandes Macs down their throats.

So this kid working the checkout at Target is like seven feet tall, tips the scales at about 350. I hand over my cloth bags and he narrows his bitty little eyes behind his glasses and stares at me.

"You'll have to hold those yourself," he says, stuffing a box of Honey Nut Cheerios into a plastic Target bag.

"Bu-ut..." I say, "I don't want plastic, that's why I brought these."

He sighs audibly, pulls the Cheerios out of the Target bag, throws the Target bag into the trash.

"Bu-ut..." I say, pointing to the discarded bag, "can't you reuse that?"

"Do you want to reuse it?" he asks, reaching toward the trash. Do I detect a wee bit o' attitude here?

"Will it get recycled?" I ask warily. This time he rolls his eyes.

"No," he says. "I mean, I don't know," he says. By now I'm standing there like Santa Claus holding my bag open as he stuffs shit in. Then he says,

"I don't believe in all that. Global warming and all that. There's no such thing."

I'm taken aback. I can't remember the last time I was taken aback. I didn't expect my day to end with this neanderthal supersizer at Target sweating all over my reusable market bags and sharing his cockamamie beliefs.

"Well good for you," I say in my most ironic voice. But the kid's a neanderthal, he doesn't get irony, let alone in-your-face sarcasm. He pushes his glasses back up his sweaty nose and continues sharing.

"I just throw everything away," he shares. "I don't believe in recycling," he shares. Then he shares again, louder. "There's no such thing as global warming."

Now I'm staring. I might even be staring slack-jawed. I can't remember the last time I was slack-jawed.

So there I am at Target, staring slack-jawed at this mouth-breathing porker working the checkout, to whom I should be gently explaining how his eating habits themselves are part of the problem, but that would take too long and anyway he wouldn't listen, and besides, I'm getting this image. I'm thinking of all those guys you read about who flip out and shoot up the workplace or the school or the courtroom or the inlaws' double-wide. I'm thinking this kid could definitely be one of those guys. I'm thinking maybe that's what this kid was reaching for under the counter. I'm thinking this kid could be a shooter.

But does this stop me? This doesn't stop me. I can't remember the last time anything stopped me. I turn to the woman standing behind me in line.

"Don't you just love Americans?" I say to her. I have to work real hard not to insert a "fucking" somewhere in that sentence.

But the woman behind me in line at Target is, you guessed it, an American. She looks at me like I might be the Anti-American she's been praying about. She's just heard the most nonsensical drivel spew from the mouth of this dinosaur in the checkout lane, and I'm the one she suspects. And she's not even fat!

I stagger out into the parking lot with my overloaded reusable market bags and it starts to rain. Actually it's a downpour. Actually it's a fucking deluge. I slog through the rising floodwaters toward the ark of my car and it starts to hail. Pinballs of ice ricochet off my head and collect in the crevices of my overloaded market bags. I can't find my car in the blinding torrent and then my shin finds it for me.

"Fu-uck!" I holler. Then I holler again, louder. "FU-UCK!!"

I look around, embarrassed. At least I have the wherewithal to be embarrassed. I can't remember the last time I had any wherewithal. But it's zero visibility. I'm alone, abandoned, an island awash in a sea of indifference, being pummeled into oblivion by a random act of climate change.

Finally, inside my car, hail jackhammering overhead, my purchases melting like glaciers around me, I look in the rearview mirror and gasp audibly. My hair is plastered to my head like seaweed, my eyes are black holes of mascara, black streaks run down my cheeks like scars. I look like a French hoodlum. And I don't even speak French!

There's nothing to do but wait it out. (Note to self: Keep emergency bottle of wine in glovebox from now on.) Now the windows are fogging up. By the time the storm is over, I've written "!PLEH" a dozen times on the glass. I wipe the windows with a handful of $99 toilet paper, look around at the aftermath, and start my engine.