Leith, William Page 9

  I felt sick. I knew about herpes; to me, it was a black area of terror locked away at the back of my consciousness. I didn't think I had herpes but, on the other hand, who knew? The symptoms were awful painful crusty sores on the genitals. Sometimes the sores didn't arrive for a couple of weeks after transmission, sometimes not for years. My friend told me that, if you looked closely, you could definitely tell. What you had to look for were tiny red itchy spots. This was the beginning. After this, the sores became crusty. Then you were finished. The disease was incurable.

  When I got home, I knew I would examine myself, and I knew what would happen if I examined myself. I tried to go tosleep and forget about it, and I tried drinking from a bottle of whisky, but I still could not go to sleep. I drank more whisky. I wandered around the house, lay on the sofa, made myself a cup of coffee, drank more whisky, looked at my sallow, unshaven face in the mirror. My eyes were distant, crazed, inaccessible.

  I started examining myself. And there it was a tiny red spot. Possibly a mole, but possibly not. I poked at the red spot. Was it itchy? Yes. No. I poked a bit more.

  A mole?

  Or not?

  I poked. I drank. The night slipped by in a trance of hysteria, psychological meltdown, insane feelings of guilt and self-loathing. I went to the kitchen cupboard, and found some spaghetti, and decided I did not want to eat the spaghetti, and, listless, tried to put it back in the cupboard, but dropped it all over the floor, and kicked the fallen strands into the sides and corners of the room, so as not to make a mess.

  There was a point when I decided that it might be a good idea to see a doctor, just to get myself checked out, and a point, sometime after sunrise, when I began to believe that it was my moral duty to see a doctor. It struck me that there might be a doctor in the neighbourhood. I found myself reaching for the telephone book, writing down the number, dialling the number. It was 7.30 a.m. A man's voice answered.

  `Hello?'

  `Hello. Is that Dr Rosenberg?'

  `Yes. Who is this?'

  `Yes. I've just been checking, uh, I was going to, to see you.'

  `Is this a medical matter?'

  `Yes.'

  `Have you made an appointment? Because . .

  `I'm a neighbour.'

  `Is this a serious matter? Are you the patient in question?' `Yes, I am.'

  `Is it an emergency?'

  `It might be.'

  `Where do you have the trouble?'

  `Where?'

  `Which part of the body?'

  `My, um, penis.'

  `What has happened to your penis?'

  `Well, you see, I wanted to get it checked out. I just live around the corner. I could come and see you.'

  There was silence for a while.

  Dr Rosenberg said, 'Well, I'm not at my surgery. I'm at home. This is my house.'

  `That's fine. I could come and see you now.'

  `Are you injured?'

  `Well, I thought, you see, I could just ... pop round.' Dr Rosenberg said, 'If you're not injured, it can wait until I

  get to my surgery. I have an appointment mid-morning.' `That's too late.'

  `Are you a patient of mine?'

  `Well, you see ... yes. I am.'

  `OK. Just turn up at my surgery. You know where it is. Ask the receptionist for the eleven-thirty appointment. And if she can't fit you in and only if she can't fit you in I'll see you at eight-forty-five.'

  `Could you remind me of the address?'

  `It's 54 Castle Street.'

  `Of course.'

  I drank some more whisky, and drank some coffee, and then some more coffee. And then a nip of whisky, and more whisky. The red spot appeared to have got bigger. It felt itchy. There was something wrong with me. I put on my shoes and jacket and walked along the early-morning streets. My head was full of static. I was weaving slightly. People were calmly closing the doors of their houses, checking their pockets, opening and closing the doors of their cars.

  At the surgery, Dr Rosenberg's receptionist told me that I could have an appointment at eleven-thirty.

  `Ah,' I said. 'The thing is, I was talking to the doctor a few minutes ago, and he said it was crucial to see me at eight-forty-five.'

  `Well, if that's what he said.'

  At eight-forty, a small dark man walked into the lobby. The receptionist greeted him and he walked through a door, which he closed. The receptionist followed him into the room the surgery. I could not hear everything that was being said. One of the things being said was: 'But I told him explicitly. I told him ... half-past eleven. I told him explicitly.'

  The receptionist reemerged from the office and sat down at her desk, head bowed.

  The door to the surgery opened. Dr Rosenberg said, 'Well, you'd better come in.'

  I walked in. The static in my head was increasing in volume. I felt a surge of joy, of liberation.

  `You're not my patient, are you?'

  `Well, yes.'

  `You're not my patient, are you?'

  `Well, not exactly. But I was about to sign up.' `Where do you live?'

  `I've just moved into the area.' I gave Dr Rosenberg my parents' address.

  Dr Rosenberg nodded. He moved behind his desk and sat down. 'OK. What's the matter with you?'

  `I don't know.'

  `You said it was your penis.'

  `Well, I just thought ... I just thought I should get it checked out.'

  Dr Rosenberg picked up a pencil and a pad of paper. `Have you had any discomfort?'

  `I don't know.'

  `Any discharge?'

  `Well, not ... really. Not as such.'

  `Any itching?'

  `Yes. Possibly.'

  Dr Rosenberg wrote on his pad. I moved towards him. `What are you writing?'

  `Notes. Now. . .'

  `What are you writing?' I moved across to the desk and looked at the pad. In a tiny script, Dr Rosenberg had written, `Penile itching?'

  I could feel my small reserves of self-control slipping away, slipping away. I said, 'Penile itching? What does that mean? Is that bad?'

  Dr Rosenberg said, 'Now look. You're not my patient.I'm doing this as a favour. I need to ask you a few questions.'

  `Fire away.'

  `Have you been having unprotected sex?'

  `Yes.'

  `I can refer you.'

  `I just want you to check me out.'

  `I'll refer you.'

  Dr Rosenberg walked around the desk, and towards me, ushering me out.

  `Just have a quick look.'

  `No. As I say, I'll

  `Please!'

  `No!'

  `It will just take a minute!'

  Dr Rosenberg said, 'OK! Take your trousers down.' He took a torch from his desk. He checked me out.

  `There is nothing wrong with your penis,' he said. `There's nothing wrong with me?'

  `That's not what I said. There is nothing wrong with your penis. But your sex life has led to an extreme reaction. Your promiscuity is causing you mental problems. I recommend that you see a psychiatrist.'

  A snapshot from the slim world. I was not fat. But I was the

  same person who had got fat, who would get fat again. I backed away from the doctor. I felt joyful, unhinged. `So there's nothing actually wrong with me,' I said as I

  backed into the waiting room.

  `******* Atkins Diet!'

  The waiting room of the Atkins Center is large, about the size of two squash courts, and exudes the bright, hopeful air of the 1970s. High ceilings, low furniture, white walls. The paintings on the walls are the sort of thing a rock star might buy huge canvases encrusted with jagged clumps of paint. Walking towards the reception desk I'm apprehensive, wondering if I look fat, wondering if people will think I've come to see Dr Atkins because I'm fat.

  A cartoon has been clipped from a newspaper and stuck to the reception desk. It depicts Santa Claus, having come down the chimney, looking at a plate of food that has been left out

  for him. The ca
ption is, 4 .11.11 11, * * Atkins diet!'

  A woman arrives, introduces herself, and tells me that she will introduce me to Dr Atkins, and for a moment it doesn't occur to me that the unobtrusive, ghostly presence hovering just behind her might actually be Dr Atkins, so I say something about this being fine, and I nod, and I back away, distracted.

  `This is Dr Atkins,' she says.

  `Oh,' I say.

  We shake hands.

  `Oh,' I say.

  Atkins is a 72-year-old man, very pleasant-looking, the sort of old guy who would be the decent grandfather in a heartwarming movie. He does not look at all slick or bombastic or over-confident; he does not look like a diet guru. For a man who has sold several million copies of his latest book, he is not expensively dressed; he is not wearing the celebrityarmour of Armam or Prada. His cream shirt does not look like a rich man's shirt made from sumptuous sea-island cotton. He wears a black tie and a stiff dark tweed jacket with long, broad lapels and a single button at the waist, the style popular a dozen years ago. His shoes are spiffy tasselled loafers made from very fine leather, with thin leather soles like pork rinds. He looks to be just under 6 feet tall and around 200 lbs not skinny, not thin, but definitely not fat. The jowls around his neck and chin are fairly minimal, signs of age rather than excess weight.

  The doctor points me towards the lift, and tells me we'll do the interview in his office upstairs. We walk across the 1970s-looking room, which reminds me that Dr Atkins, as a diet guru, was originally a phenomenon of the early 1970s, the era when people wanted to believe in hedonism without consequences Atkins' original 'no hunger' Diet Revolution was a counterpart to Erica Jong's `zipless fuck', hippies openly smoking dope in front of the cops at Woodstock, and Timothy Leary saying that LSD was good for us. What Atkins said was that, if you avoided carbohydrates, you could eat more or less what you wanted.

  No hunger!

  No cravings!

  No need for restraint!

  Since then, he's fallen into disrepute, and been reincarnated. Over the years, the Atkins diet has been radical, trendy, wildly popular, disapproved of, reviled, buried, resurrected, again radical, and again trendy. Now it's wildly popular again. According to history, a backlash is imminent.

  Right now, though, as Atkins presses the elevator button,

  his diet has good ratings in some parts of the science community. The New York Times has recently run an article in praise of fat, entitled 'What if it's all a Big Fat Lie?', quoting Richard Veech, a prominent scientist who studied under the Nobel Laureate Hans Krebs, who formulated the Krebs Cycle, a scientific account of how energy is metabolized. Veech says that ketosis, the state in which the body burns fat when starved of carbohydrate, ' . . . is a normal physiologic state. I would argue it's the normal state of man.'

  And Walter Willett, the eminent Harvard epidemiologist, having studied the consistent failure of low-fat diets, says, `The emphasis on fat reduction has been a serious distraction in efforts to control obesity and improve health in general.'

  Atkins has been enjoying a boom time in the boom-andbust cycle of the media, too. 'Welcome to a city in the throes of Carb Panic,' declared a recent edition of New York magazine. 'Socialite psychiatrist' Samantha Boardman says, `The moment the waiter comes to the table with bread, everyone is like, NO! before he can even put it on the plate. It's almost hostile to serve pasta these days because everyone is on Atkins.' Kim France, editor-in-chief of Lucky magazine, tells us, 'My younger brother is always going on and off Atkins. He refers to Wheat Thins and bread as the white devil.'

  How long will this mood last? Perhaps the backlash is already beginning. Some people are starting to say that going on a lowcarb diet, which dieters refer to as 'doing Atkins', is a fad that it will come and go, like it came and went before, to be replaced by something else, possibly the avoidance of another food group. Nobody will be surprised when a newdiet guru tells us that potatoes are the answer, or that eating fish is the answer, or that you'll get slim if you eat lots of fruit, or nuts, or beans. One day, somebody will say that all food must be consumed on the move, and before long a company will invent a tray you can hang around your neck, and everybody will be walking around the park with trays around their necks. One day, the Cabbage Soup diet will make a comeback.

  Naturally, Atkins himself does not think that Atkins is a fad. On the contrary, he thinks that low-fat diets the diets that buried him in the 1970s, and presided through the 1980s and 1990s were the fad. His scientific reasoning is that low-fat diets don't work it was during the low-fat decades that we got so very fat. 'Nowadays,' he writes in the new edition of his book, 'the tide is flowing strongly in my favour.'

  The Only Diet We Knew

  Anyway, why should a lowcarb diet be a fad? After all, it wasn't a fad for our ancestors, from the Neanderthal era to the Stone Age. For tens of thousands of years, humans ate a lowcarb diet. We hunted animals and gathered fruit and some root vegetables, such as sweet potatoes. With an opposable thumb, an upright posture, and a panoramic field of vision, we were designed for walking long distances, throwing projectiles, and reaching up into thorny bushes for berries.

  Early humans walked several hours every day, ran and jogged when their prey was in view, and carried animal

  carcasses on their backs for long distances. To survive, they needed to eat a lot of meat, and a lot of fruit three or four times as much as we need to eat today. When they didn't die of infectious diseases or trauma, or in childbirth, they lived into their sixties and seventies, and the few senile Stone Age bodies we've found preserved in peat bogs don't show signs of the modern diseases that afflict us diabetes, osteoporosis, cancer, arthritis, and heart disease.

  Ray Audette, author of NeanderThin: Eat Like a Caveman to Achieve a Lean, Strong, Healthy Body, tells us that, if you want to lose weight and keep it off, you should do what he does, which is to 'eat only those foods that would be available to me if I were naked of all technology save that of a convenient sharp stick or stone'. His Neanderthal-style diet, not unlike Atkins in principle, is, he says, what we have evolved to eat. 'For the majority (at least 99.5 per cent) of human history,' writes Audette, 'it was the only diet we knew.'

  There has never been any evidence to suggest that Stone Age people ever needed to lose weight. Sure, they ate a lot of food. Sure, they would gorge themselves after a successful hunt. And, of course, they had evolved big appetites and ,thrifty genes' a love of food and an ability to store fat, in order to survive lean times. They ate a lot, they exercised a lot, their diet was very low in carbohydrates, and they didn't suffer from obesity.

  `The NeanderThin rule concerning snacking is very simple,' writes Audette. `If you are hungry, eat. Just be sure that your snack foods are within the dietary guidelines could I eat this if I were naked with a sharp stick on the savanna?'

  Fries no.

  Bagels no.

  Steak yes.

  Fish yes.

  Vegetables yes.

  Atkins, of course, is thoroughly pro-Stone Age. He writes about Stone Age man 'eating the fish and animals that scampered and swam around him, and the fruits and vegetables and berries that grew nearby'. There is no mention of being naked, or sharp sticks.

  The elevator arrives and the doors glide open. Atkins steps inside. I step inside. My stomach magazines are safely inside a bag. Atkins presses the button for the top floor. The doors glide shut.

  The Seeds of Trouble

  Standing in the elevator, I'm thinking about how the seeds of trouble, the trouble with carbohydrates, were sown, quite literally, around 10,000 years ago, when humans started to farm. There we were, hunting and gathering, effectively doing Atkins, and then we started to plant and harvest crops, particularly wheat. We became what anthropologists call `food producers'.

  Why did we do this? The answer is not at all obvious. As the evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond tells us, 'Most peasant farmers and herders, who constitute the great majority of the world's actual food producers, aren't n
ecessarily better off than hunter-gatherers.'

  Studies, as Diamond points out, have shown that primitive food producers spent more time planting and tilling and harvesting than hunter-gatherers spent hunting and gathering the food for their primitive version of the Atkins diet; archaeologists, furthermore, 'have demonstrated that the first farmers in many areas were smaller and less well nourished, suffered from more serious diseases, and died on average at a younger age than the hunter-gatherers they replaced.'

  Anthropologists disagree about the origins of farming there are, according to the Oxford historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, 'thirty-eight distinct and competing explanations of how farming came about'. But the smart money is on the most sinister explanation of all: farming might not be good nutritionally, but it's great if your tribe wants to kill people and take their territory.

  Farming facilitates war. You can imagine an ambitious Stone Age leader putting it together in his mind. Farming leads to a greater density of human population, because it enables a tribe to settle in one place. Unlike hunter-gatherers, farmers don't have to carry their children around with them, so they can have twice as many. Farming enables members of a tribe to have separate jobs some men produce the food, while others are free, as Jared Diamond puts it, to 'engage full-time in political activities'. Farming enables food to be stored, so that fighting men can radiate outwards from their original settlements and concentrate on fighting, while their hunter-gatherer opponents must hunt and gather as well as fight.

  And farming is, of course, addictive. Farming creates what anthropologists call a 'ratchet effect'. Once you start, youcan't stop. Your tribe grows. Wheat creates a need for wheat. Also, if you belong to a hunter-gatherer community, and your neighbours start to farm, you have two options run away, or become farmers yourselves.

  The advent of farming it's the most important, not to say the most destructive, revolution in the history of mankind. Early farmers in northern Europe seemed to sense this; they regarded the ploughing of fields and the sowing of seeds as an infernal act. Before ploughing, farmers invoked the mercy of Odin, god of gods, and planted the skulls of their slain enemies along with the corn. Farming, they believed, was unnatural, a rape of the earth, something they might have to pay for in the end. When the wheat was harvested, the last sheaf was treated like an evil spirit; people jeered it and mocked it, rather like inmates of fat camps putting a hex on pizzas and hot dogs and tubs of ice cream.