From One Third Off, by Irvin S. Cobb, Illustrated by Tony Sarg; New York: George H. Doran Company, 1921; pp. 55-64.
CHAPTER V
On Acquiring Some Snappy Pores
THAT night on the sleeper a splendid resolution sprouted within me. Next morning when we arrived home it was ready and ripe for plucking. I would trim myself down to more lithesome proportions and I would start the job right away. It did not occur to me that cutting down my daily consumption of provender might prove helpful to the success of the proposed undertaking. Or if it did occur to me I put the idea sternly from me, for I was by way of being a robust trencherman. I had joyed in the pleasures of the table, and I had written copiously of those joys, and I now declined to recant of my faith or to abate my indulgences.
56All this talk which I had heard about balanced rations went in at one ear and out at the other. I knew what a balanced ration was. I stowed one aboard three times daily — at morn, again at noon and once more at nightfall. A balanced ration was one which, being eaten, did not pull you over on your face; one which you could poise properly if only you leaned well back, upon arising from the table, and placed the two hands, with a gentle lifting motion, just under the overhang of the main cargo hold.
Surely there must be some way of achieving the desired result other than by following dieting devices. There was — exercising was the answer. I would exercise and so become a veritable faun.
Now, so far as I recalled, I had never taken any indoor exercise excepting once in a while to knock on wood. I abhorred the thought of ritualistic bedroom calisthenics such as were recommended by divers health experts. Climbing out of a warm bed and 57 standing out in the middle of a cold room and giving an imitation of a demoniac semaphore had never appealed to me as a fascinating divertisement for a grown man. As I think I may have remarked once before, lying at full length on one’s back on the floor immediately upon awakening of a morning and raising the legs to full length twenty times struck me as a performance lacking in dignity and utterly futile.
Besides, what sort of a way was that to greet the dewy morn?
So as an alternative I decided to enroll for membership at a gymnasium where I could have company at my exercising and make a sport of what otherwise would be in the nature of a punishment. This I did. With a group of fellow inmates for my team mates, I tossed the medicine ball about. My score at this was perfect; that is to say, sometimes when it came my turn to catch I missed the ball, but the ball never once missed me. Always it landed on some tender portion of my anatomy, so that my average, 58 written in black-and-blue spots, remained an even 1000.
Daily I cantered around and around and around a running track until my breathing was such probably as to cause people passing the building to think that the West Side Y. M. C. A. was harboring a pet porpoise inside. Once, doing this, I caught a glimpse of my own form in a looking-glass which for some reason was affixed to one of the pillars flanking the oval. A looking-glass properly did not belong there; distinctly it was out of place and could serve no worthy purpose. Very few of the sights presented in a gym which largely is patronized by city-bred fat men are deserving to be mirrored in a glass. They are not such visions as one would care to store in fond memory’s album. Be that as it may, here was this mirror, and swinging down the course suddenly I beheld myself in it. Clad in a chastely simple one-piece garment, with my face all a blistered crimson and my fingers interlaced together about where the third button of the 59 waistcoat, counting from the bottom up, would have been had I been wearing any waistcoat, I reminded myself of a badly scorched citizen escaping in a scantily dressed condition from a burning homestead bringing with him the chief family treasure clasped in his arms. He had saved the pianola!
From the running rack to the medicine-ball court I would repair to the steam room and simmer pleasantly in a temperature of 240 degrees Fahrenheit — I am sure I have the figures right — until all I needed before being served was to have the gravy slightly thickened with flour and a dash of water cress added here and there. Having remained in the steam cabinet until quite done, I next would jump into the swimming pool, which concluded the afternoon’s entertainment.
Jumping into the cool water of the pool was supposed to reseal the pores which the treatment in the hot room had caused to open. In the best gymnasium circles it is 60 held to be a fine thing to have these educated pores, but I am sure it can be overdone, and personally I cannot say that I particularly enjoyed it. I kept it up largely for their sake. They became highly trained, but developed temperament. They were apt to get the signals mixed and open unexpectedly on the street, resulting in bad colds for me.
For six weeks, on every week day from three to five P. M. I maintained this schedule religiously — at least I used a good many religious words while so engaged — and then I went on the scales to find out what progress I had made towards attaining the desired result. I had kept off the scales until then because I was saving up, as it were, to give myself a nice jolly surprise party.
So I weighed. And I had picked up nine pounds and a half! That was what I had gained for all my sufferings and all my exertions — that, along with a set of snappy but emotional pores and a personal knowledge 61 of how a New England boiled dinner feels just before it comes on the table.
“This,” I said bitterly to myself, — “this is sheer foolhardiness! Keep this up for six weeks more and I’ll find myself fallen away to a perfect three-ton truck. Keep it up for three months and I’ll be ready to rent myself out to the aquarium as a suitable playmate for the leviathan in the main tank. I shall stop this idiocy before it begins making me seasick merely to look down at myself as I walk. I may slosh about and billow somewhat, but I positively decline to heave up and down. I refuse to be known as the human tidal wave, with women and children being hurriedly removed to a place of safety at my approach. Right here and now is where I quit qualifying for the inundation stakes!”
Which accordingly I did. What I did not realize was that the unwonted exercise gave me such a magnificent appetite that, after a session at the gymnasium, I ate about three times as much as I usually did 62 at dinner — and, mark you, I never had been one with the appetite, as the saying goes, of a bird, to peck at some Hartz Mountain roller’s prepared food and wipe the stray rape seed off my nose on a cuttlefish bone and then fly up on the perch and tuck the head under the wing and call it a meal. I had ever been what might be termed a sincere feeder. So, never associating the question of diet with the problem of attaining physical slightness, I swung back again into my old mode of life with the resigned conviction that since destiny had chosen me to be fat there was nothing for me to do in the premises excepting to go right on to the end of my mortal chapter being fat, fatter, and perhaps fattest. I’d just make the best of it.
And I’d use care about crossing a county bridge at any gait faster than a walk.
Nowthis continued for years and years, and then here a few months ago something else happened. And on top of that something else — to wit: The Great Reduction.
Of the Great Reduction more anon.