Curveball

Kill the Umpire”, the fan cried to open the 1996 baseball season in Cincinnati, and 7 pitches later, the man behind the plate, John McSherry, was dead, all 320 pounds of him screaming for more oxygen to feed his struggling heart. He’d been killed by his poor health, by a billion molecules of sink-clogging cholesterol that fed on his coronary artery and sucked up his life’s blood like a vampire at midnight. The next day Howard Stern had characteristically railed that the antidote was obvious. It was the same for all fat people: “DON’T EAT”, he howled. As if the ump hadn’t known. The fact was he couldn’t stop. He loved the taste of food – every sugary, starchy, carbohydrated morsel. The first bite was an ecstasy, as was the last, and everything in between. The man, it seemed, was a Cuisinart with 4 limbs.

Franz Kafka wove a tale 100 years earlier that was a mirror image of McSherry’s tragedy. His “A Hunger Artist” described a professional faster – a sideshow freak in 19th century Europe who attracted attention and spare coins by withering away inside a wooden cage. The gapers marveled at his shriveled skeleton – stuck their hands through the bars to nudge his bony ribs – and awed at his resolve to starve himself to the precipice of self-extinction. “I always wanted you to admire my fasting”, said the hunger artist, “but you shouldn’t have. (The fact is) I have to fast, I can’t help it. I couldn’t find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I would have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else.”