The Big Weight

by Gary Phillips

There were the angry tweets recently by filmmaker Kevin Smith getting kicked off a Southwest flight by a Captain Leysath for being a safety risk for being too fat. This wasn’t a matter of his weight, it was about girth. The deal is on Southwest you have to be able, once your big ass is in a seat, to bring the arm rest down. Smith had bought two seats but had sought to get on an earlier flight where only one seat was available. On the Nightline of 2/16 covering the incident, Mimi Roth of the National Action Against Obesity argued the oversized were expecting special treatment. In case of an emergency Kevin Smith and his fat brethren would be blocking the aisles for the lithe folks such as her to get out of the plane. Yeah, wouldn’t want to be helping them or the infirmed as you jogged to safety, eh, Mimi?

not Gary

Following this was a piece on Morning Edition on 2/22 on NPR on why we gain weight as we age. About the various factors at play as to why you just can’t pound down those bacon double-cheeseburgers you used to as a 22-year-old and not see the effects around your middle—let alone acid reflux kicking in. Apparently aging muscles, according to no-relation Cheryl Phillips, president of the American Geriatrics Society, increases the amount of fat we store in our bodies. Phillips said you could take a woman of 70 and, even if she weighed the same as she did at 25, she would have less percentage of muscle than when she was younger.

Now being a large fellow somewhere in the Warren Sapp (former 300 pound pro football defensive lineman and twinkle-toed wonder on Dancing With the Stars) to Cleveland Brown (though lacking that cartoon character’s cool ass ’stache—mine being too wispy, dammit) body type, and this year already figuring I better schedule my next colonoscopy, I do think about my weight as I get older. I’ve always been overweight, though it helped that one summer between my freshman and sophomore year I grew in height so went from pudgy to bulked up, enough to be a starter in high school football on the defense.

For by the time I was in what we called junior high back then, the boys department at J.C. Penney’s and Sears just wasn’t cutting it, even given the husky sizes they carried. I was resigned to work pants and corduroys, old men’s tasteless shirts, and industrial-style shoes. My feet were big and flat. My dad had once taken me to a podiatrist when I was eight or nine who had me put these inserts for my arches in my shoes. I got tired of that and figured flat feet were better than the discomfort of those damn inserts. By the beginning of high school I was consigned to being the fat kid with thick glasses and the ill-fitting clothes. Yet tied to the growth spurt, as has happened various times in my life, the cathode ray tube glow of television beckoned me to come hither.

I remember seeing this white-haired local sportscaster, not Vin Scully, but a cat whose name I can’t remember now, talking on a commercial. He wore what were called Eisenhower-style jackets and matching pants as he was advertising this fashion gem available at a place called Eagelson’s Big and Tall on 3rd and Spring in downtown L.A.

not Gary

My dad, not overweight ever let me add, took me down there and, as Redd Foxx would say, I was a happy as, well that would be politically incorrect, but suffice it to say it was nirvana. Unlike my other experiences in the men’s sections of department stores, where if I was lucky if I’d find one set of trousers to fit me, here was plenty. Not only were there stacks of jeans and flared pants in my size, hell, there were stacks and stacks of pants in sizes way bigger than me. Good gravy. The best items in the store were the shirts and the boxer shorts.

I think I’d already switched to boxers from briefs by then because my dad wore boxers but also because of how cool they looked on tough guys in movies. It wasn’t like I was frequenting gay cinema on Santa Monica Boulevard for my undergarment ideas, not that there’s anything wrong with that. But I had this image of Paul Newman as private eye Lew Harper (based on the Lew Archer character from the Ross Macdonald books) in the opening scenes of Harper as he gets up to make coffee; he’s wearing boxers. Eagelson’s just didn’t have white boxers but multi-colored, multi-patterned ones—big roomy rascals a growing lad could, you know, look manly in.

And the shirts were striped, solids, long-sleeve and short, and ones with epaulets. I got hooked on shirts with epaulets (WTF huh?) and I could have my fill of them at Eagelson’s. Shirts that weren’t tight across my chest but fit correctly and weren’t some shapeless, out-of-date stodgy item. I don’t know anything about the three Eagelson brothers, apprentice tailors from Ireland, who began the store in the 1920s in San Francisco, then L.A. Maybe one of them was a big fella, maybe all three, but God bless ’em.

Since those days, like many a man my size, there’s been a small cadre of places I’d go to do the majority of my clothes shopping. In South Central near the Sports Arena and Coliseum there used to be Bell Sales and Supply on King and Menlo. This was home to shirts to the 5 and 6 XXL range, and where you could find tables of Levi’s and Wrangler jeans in the truly plus ranges.

As hip-hop brought on the big pants/big T-shirt thing, you’d find regular sized guys in there with us extra-sized shoppers snatching up those XXXLs. Sadly, Bell Sales is gone, replaced by a concern that still sells the bigger sizes, but not in the same variety. Eagleson’s became Repp and I frequented the store on Westwood Boulevard and sometimes the one in Torrance for years until the chain went under. Still there’s Casual Male, Rochester Big and Tall (in Beverly Hills, pricey but lovely selections), and King Size mail order. I guess too due to the widening of butts in general, I can even find jeans in my size at Target.

I’m all for regular exercise and watching what I eat (I know, the name of the column attests to how serious I must be about that). While Roth and her ilk figure I’m among the self-indulgent and weak-willed, let me assure the regular-sized folk if the plane or train I’m on crashes and there’s a rush to get out of that burning hunk of steel, I won’t be blocking the aisles ... I’ll have lowered my head and put my shoulder into it blowing through the line just like Coach Young taught me all those years ago.

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