Tamanaco Tennis

“Wear this for the picture,” my father said, handing me a white, short-sleeved T-shirt. It would be too tight on me and he knew it - that was the point.  I slunk into the bathroom of my parents’ master bedroom to change into the shirt and a pair of skintight long underwear, also white. The color, my father told me an hour earlier when he summoned me for the photo shoot, was to maximize the rolls and bulges that he would be capturing with his ever-present Polaroid Instant Camera – one of those on-the-spot developing cameras that took the late ‘70s by storm.

The full-length mug shots would not be for posterity, or even the heralding of a new diet (which he was fond of memorializing on celluloid). This time, the photographic evidence was poised to further my father’s insatiable appetite for lawsuits.

For the current legal entanglement he was embroiled in, I, or rather, my skyrocketing weight would be Exhibit A. His reasoning would have been amusing if it weren’t so hypocritical: my father’s business had recently tanked as the result of years of mismanagement that finally caught up with him. A stress-eater by nature, the emotional and financial fallout hadn’t exactly left him in a fit and trim way. My weight also rose during these chaotic years, but my fat was the only fat he chose to be aware of.

For many years, my father ran a successful summer camp business in the Adirondacks, an enterprise he took ownership of in the late ‘50s prior to marriage and fatherhood. To his credit, he grew operations from its original incarnation as a no-frills football training camp started by my grandfather, to a flourishing sleep-away camp for affluent boys from up and down the eastern seaboard and as far away as Venezuela and Colombia. When a nearby girls’ camp came up for sale a few years later, he pounced on the opportunity and doubled the size of his business.

Word quickly spread amongst satisfied parental customers, and sisters of existing campers hopped aboard. Clientele included children of politicians and CIA operatives, Wall Street magnates, and liquor-fortune scions.

It all looked like a glorious success from the outside, but trouble was brewing from the nether-regions of my father’s restless psyche. Call it a tragic case of class envy, because as much as he loved being a camp director, he loved emulating the lifestyle of his clients even more. An uncle who helped my father with the accounting, once confided he knew the bottom would fall out; the only question was when.

The discrete but desperate practice of borrowing from Peter to pay Paul financed my father’s off-season lifestyle, which included annual travels, for weeks at a time, through Florida, the Caribbean, and South America, ostensibly to secure repeat business, but always lavishing himself with five-star hotels, plenty of sunbathing, and high-on-the-hog dining.

He’d return in early March, tanned, rested, and brimming with animated tales of faraway lands, including the time he was stopped on the back roads of Bogotá by paranoid government officials and their machine-gun-toting underlings. As a consolation for his absence, my father always returned home with the requisite souvenir-cache from hotel gift shops: key chains bearing the name of a particular city, sun-shaped refrigerator magnets, ballpoint hotel pens, a box of chocolate alligators, and most recently, the white T-shirt from a luxury resort in Caracas emblazoned with ‘Tamanaco Tennis’ in royal-blue letters. He purchased the shirt following an afternoon on the courts, originally intending it for himself. After realizing it was to small for him, he tossed it my way. To me, it was an exotic treasure, which I wore proudly, until I, too, grew out of it.

The year was 1979 – two years after my uncle’s prediction became a reality. I was a freshman in high school and the turmoil from the camps collapsing was intense and filled with anguish, financial insecurity, three changes of residences, and resolute denial on my father’s part to accept any responsibility for the wreckage. With no money coming in and his wanderlust abruptly curtailed, he remained stuck in a singular gear: apoplexy over his bank foreclosing the camps because of a delinquent loan.

His rage was channeled into regular family meetings at the dining room table for the purpose of updating us on the machinations from his latest lawsuits (there was already a string of failed launches he didn’t like to speak of). The meetings concluded with a diatribe on unreasonable bill collectors insisting that he square his debts. My younger siblings and I listened with widened eyes at first, but after a solid year of monologues, gradually began to lose our once-fiery empathy, and ended up like our mother: staring blankly at the middle-distance as he pontificated.

Even under financial duress, my father refused to relinquish the guise of the good life. He doubled down and bought a bigger luxury car, spent his children’s savings bonds, ‘borrowed’ money from well-off friends which he never repaid, found reasons to travel for his new career as a life insurance salesman, sold wedding rings and family heirlooms, and insisted I join him on his intermittent crash-dieting missions. All that ever did, of course, was get both of us fatter and more frazzled.

Ever mindful of his ultimate goal, he managed to find a new lawyer in his quest for financial vengeance and I knew where the cache of Polaroids would be heading: to the office of his attorney du jour. As the oldest and by default, heaviest offspring, he pulled me aside to outline the updated plan of seeking damages and compensation for the family’s pain and suffering caused by the bank’s foreclosure.

I sighed as I assessed my bulging stomach and thighs in the bathroom mirror. My father was waiting for me with his camera. Our lives were in tatters, my body was paying the price, and I was sick of hearing that it was all the bank’s fault.

But my mother had a differing opinion. “Well,” she proclaimed, poking her head into the bedroom to see if we were finished.  “If you learned to control yourself, you wouldn’t be in this predicament.” Then she sighed and walked away.

It would take me decades to get my hands on some of the answers needed to decode such a mess of tangled wires.  A big reason it took so bloody long is, I kept returning to the well of behavior modification, that old tried-and-true formula of eating less and exercising more. Despite what the scale said, curtailing  a stress response was the last thing my aching soul was calling for.

Turns out, what I needed to do was simple but painful: acknowledge of how hurt I was by my parents’ disgust with my weight and their indifference to my suffering.

 When it comes to trauma and deeply embedded wounding, behavior modification does nothing but dig a deeper hole.  In fact, according to counselor and yoga trauma facilitator Candice Clark, those so-called bad behaviors are coping skills needed by the wounded to emotionally regulate through trauma and trauma triggers.

“We have far too much focus on behavior modification and not nearly enough understanding on the vacuum that is left behind,” said Clark. “The first approach in counseling is often to modify the behavior. The problem with that is, the behavior often serves a purpose.”

If only I’d encountered such clarity in 1979, but alas, my lot in life was to learn the experiential way. And in retrospect, I emerged unavoidably scathed, and also stronger and wiser…but not before my close-up.

“Stand where the light from the window is strongest,” my father directed as he peered through the camera lens.

“Face me,” he said grimly. Click-Click.

“Now turn to the side.” Click-Click-Click.

“Face the wall, now.” On these words I fought back the lump in my throat that held down tears of humiliation. I seethed, knowing that the part of myself I was most ashamed of was being zoomed in on and later would be tossed into my father’s briefcase for his meeting with the lawyer.

After it was over, he laid the photos across my parents’ white Martha Washington bedspread, impatiently waiting for them to develop from sheets of glossy grey into an outline of my 210-pound figure, made more unsightly by my tight apparel. The glare I laid on my father during his perverse channeling of Francesco Scavullo was reminiscent of Patty Hearst’s mug shot, only far more savage, because I wasn’t mollified by Stockholm Syndrome.

“Well,” he said, avoiding eye contact as he stared at the developing photos, “I think these will be helpful.” I didn’t wait around for them to blossom into full Technicolor focus; I fled to my room to change clothes instead.

After getting dressed, I heaved the shirt and long underwear into the hamper and slammed the lid so hard, it sounded like an exploding firecracker. This elicited a rebuke from my mother to mind my temper and be more lady-like. It was lunchtime and I was hungry, but there was no shot of getting my needs met with her patrolling the kitchen.

I returned to my basement bedroom, which, on that particular February day, seemed colder and darker than usual. It was another repetition in a chain of Groundhog Day Saturdays: no plans and no support system, other than my cunning reconnaissance missions to raid the kitchen when my mother went out for errands.

I crawled under the covers, turned my clock radio on to Casey Kasem’s countdown, and tried to get warm.

The emergence from darkness was a long way off…