fat fan

Not unlike most teenagers, I too was ultra-sensitive about everything.  What is it about the newly formed, hormone ridden passages in the pubescent human mind that twist reality in such a way?  In the winter of my sophomore year of high school I had put on a few extra pounds.  In retrospect, the weight was minimal at best, but my teeny bop mind blew 10 pounds into 100 in much the same way as a helium tanks works its wonders on colorful plastic orbs.  I felt as if my world was ending and everybody knew it.  I envisioned people on the streets stopping to stare at my mammoth being in disgusted awe.  Their mouths would collectively gape widely as my flabby arm fat would flail wildly in the breeze framing my rubenesque figure.  My life was in a shambles and calories were the enemy. 

It was the summer before my life shattering weight gain that my Uncle Barley discovered a real life sweat lodge.  The lodge was quite a marvel for the small town hippies of the day.  It was actually an adobe hut with a huge volcanic rock fire pit in the center.  Rows of cedar benches lined its dimension and in the extreme heat of it all, melded their odor with the earthy mud walls that formed the hut. Off to the left upon entering sat the stainless steal horse trough that held the water to create the sacred steam.  The trough didn't look like the equine water source that it had originally been intended for.  Instead, it had been upgraded with the same earthen adobe of the hut itself, and on the front were three large hooks to hold different sized copper sauce pans for scooping the water to the fire pit.  The sheer heat factor upon entering would shock the lungs, creating an instantaneous primordial panic soon calmed by salty sweat oozing from every available pore.

The lodge or hut as it were, seemed to stand guard by Lake Cristo.  Nestled by the single-largest mountain chain in this country, the waters that formed Lake Cristo were a sight to see.  On calm days the lake would mirror its pristine mountain neighbors with near perfect accuracy.  When a breeze would come up the images on the lake would bend and fold like a sublime Renoir.

The most significant thing about the hut, however wasn't its size or location, it was the fan.  At the very top of the lodge was a fan that would periodically suck out the hot air.  It would click and surge to life every now and then startling every sweat soaked being in the hut.  The fan became absurdly known by my alcoholic uncle as the fat fan.  I'm sure the whole thing started with him and his stoned cohorts sweating and laughing it up in the hut.  In their minds the sweat secretions carried fat by the pounds out of the body and up through the noisy fan.

The fat fan became my nemesis that year, and the current that spun its dull, rusty, blade was good ol' Uncle Barley.  "Turn on the fat fan", he would exclaim in the character voice he had chosen to use for what was, at that time, his favorite phrase.  As if the phase itself wasn't quite offensive enough he would squeeze his cheeks together and squeal like a pig.  "Turn on the fat fan you portly little varmint".  Often he would pinch my cheeks or slap my ass for added effect.  I couldn't walk by him without his piggly wiggly voice screeching, "Turn on the fat fan!"

When that fat fan rhetoric would come out my sharp teen age mind would usually retaliate with something ingeniously clever like, “Well at least I won't blow away in a strong wind", or the dreaded, "If you stood sideways and stuck out your tongue you'd look like a zipper."  To that he would just grin from ear to ear, eyes glazed over with the cigarette half out of his mouth , ashes over an inch long.  Better turn on the fat fan Pam, you're growing another ass.

The cruel, yet just, twist of fate that followed five years later shouldn't have been a surprise.  I like to think of it as Americanized Karma. Back then Uncle Barley had no need for any weight loss measures.  He was a rail of a man actually.  I have read that alcohol in and of itself actually burn right out of one's system even while sleeping.  According to that theories, passing out in complete inebriation after a wild night of gin martinis will allow those crazy booze-type calories to simply burn away like the water in a steam engine climbing up a steep mountain pass.  It's the snacks that'll get ya.  Beer nuts and pizza, popcorn and pretzels....oh they'll gather on your backside for sure. Your steam engine might very well be burning the boozy calories, but make no mistake, everything else gets stowed away in a separate compartment.  Uncle Barley steam engine was always running on the empty, booze-type calories.  When he opened his bar it became his water source, and with a side order of cocaine, his menu was complete.  It goes without saying that he would have been lucky to have been over 3% body fat.  But that was then.