Best Gay Erotica 2005

by Richard Labonté

  Everyone loves a fat man, and I use that to get under their skin. (“Fitness isn’t about muscles—hey, look at me! Ha-ha!”) Half the time I think they want to sign up to prove they’re better than me. Whatever. I’m a fat fag in my late twenties (really) with an extremely useful Masters in Performance Studies but too much of an anxiety disorder to pursue an academic career. But on the job I’m this badass top, and I make these fucking birdies do what I want: sign on the dotted line.

  The downtown location where I work used to be a boutique gym, but we bought them out. Fussy place built inside a renovated 1930s bank building. When you leave the locker rooms, you step through a big, round vault door—like the giant safe on The Beverly Hillbillies—to find a waterfall cascading into a hot tub. It’s totally gay, but it’s good bait. Folks ooh and ahh when they first see it, then never use it after they join.

  The gays loved this gym under the old management. They think chain gyms and their fat suburbanites are trashy. I catch the eyerolls and smirks, hear the clucking tongues and sotto voce comments. Lots of old members are leaving. I’m signing up new ones twice as fast. I may be fat and live in the ’burbs, but I pull a paycheck that doesn’t bounce, which is more than the previous employees could say.

  Between giving tours and sealing contracts, I hang at the desk with Neal, the other fag here. It’s low-impact but, hey, if you’d spent the last two years arguing about Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi K. Babha, you’d be up for a little low impact. Neal is eighteen, bald, adorable, and I think he’s a virgin. He’s not fat, but he’s a good buddy.

  Neal and I were alone at the front desk one late afternoon, big chunks of pinky-yellow light slipping between skyscrapers and through our plate-glass windows. Neal folded towels; I waited for my next appointment. The evening crowd trickled in, flashing IDs at our scanner, snatching the thin, white towels from Neal’s hands before trundling downstairs to the locker rooms.

  “His dick is, like, totally curved.” Neal nudged me, indicating a tall guy in his thirties with spiky blond hair. “Bang a boomerang.”

  Frequently Neal followed guys he was hot for into the locker room. He’d pretend to mop or pick up towels while they changed. Sometimes they waved their dicks at him, but Neal would scurry back upstairs to the desk. He’s funny that way, fiercely curious and socially inept. He’d make a good academic.

  Neal nodded toward where the rubber-tiled free-weights area met the carpeted Hammer Strength section. One guy was trying to figure out the anterior-delt half of a combined seated pec/anterior-delt machine. Next to him, another guy, flat on a bench, flapped his arms doing dumbbell flys (in terrible form). They studiously ignored each other.

  “Caught those two in the dry sauna again last week,” Neal said. “They’re all, like, ‘Don’t know you!’ on the floor.”

  “You ever join in?”

  “Ye gods!”

  Did I mention Neal was a theater queen? He was always quoting The Music Man or Oklahoma! in the most disconcerting ways.

  “Why not?”

  “I’d lose my job.”

  “The fitness team hardly ever goes downstairs.”

  Neal sniffed. “I just like to look.”

  He’s kind of a prude. So was I at his age. But notice he didn’t even bother to ask me if I ever fuck around with clients.

  “But hel-lo!” Neal snapped a towel in the air. For a second it billowed in front of us like a childhood blanket-fort we hid inside. He shot me a mischievious look. The towel descended, and a new birdie stood before us: tall, skinny, early thirties, Middle Eastern guy with close-cropped black, curly hair and deep, dark brown eyes looking straight at me.

  “Hello,” he said. “May I speak to someone regarding membership?”

  “That’d be me—Carter,” I said, extending my hand with a dumbfuck grin as my role overtook me. “You like a tour? Neal, buddy, if my four-thirty shows up, can you give them a brochure and page me? Great!”

  Neal blushed, staring into the towels, and nodded.

  “So you’re looking for a new gym…?”

  “Hanif.”

  And away we went: Cybex, free weights, studios, meet the spin instructor, cardio cardio cardio, voted one of the top gyms in the country in 1997 (before we owned it but omit that detail), blah blah blah. He nodded but seemed a little impatient. I brought him to my office.

  “So, Hanif, are you new to Seattle or just switching?”

  I keep a pair of fat calipers on my desk. Like any torture implement, they’re rarely used—the mere sight of them usually induces the desired reaction. Eat out of my hand, sexy little desert birdie.

  “I just moved down from Vancouver.” He leaned forward in the chair, eying me. He propped his elbows on the desk, shoving aside the calipers and now finally smiling, unlike during the tour.

  “Well, I think you’ll find that Ripe Fitness….”

  “Right. It’ll do. It’s got everything, and my office is across the street. Would you get a contract for me to sign?”

  I pulled a birdcage from my desk, three pages of legalese, but felt a little put out. It’s no fun when birdies give themselves up like that; I like a little resistance before snaring them. And he wasn’t even giving in; he was telling me what to do. Not sure what I thought about that at all.

  “So, you liking Seattle?”

  “It’s lovely,” he said, ripping his signature across the forms. “But I miss pubs. Seattle has clubs, but not really any proper neighborhood pubs. You know Vancouver?”

  I nodded.

  “I miss the Royal: big, friendly, unpretentious, you know? Can’t find a place like that here yet.”

  Oh, I thought, surprised. We’re gay.

  He pushed the contract back and leaned in, eyes deep and liquid, his black, bushy eyebrows nestling closer together. I wondered about his hairy chest.

  “You can suggest a place perhaps,” he told-rather-than-asked me.

  “Well, R Place….”

  “Carter, you’re disappointing me; I thought you a bit brighter than that.”

  Who the hell did this guy think he was? I rose to the challenge. “Well. Have you been to Madison Pub? Smallish, neighborhoody, mixed, some working boys but not too seedy, pool and trivia, definitely off the map of the A-list queens.”

  “Brilliant.” He stood and brushed off his lap, basically rubbing his crotch right in my line of sight. “Why don’t I come by when you get off, and you can take me there.”

  That was not what I normally hear at work. This was not a typical day for Fat Fag at the Gym.

  Madison Pub was one of those dark, long narrow places with a bar and TVs up front, pool table and bathrooms in back. It used to be only a quasi-dive. But during Seattle’s dot-com boom all the true dive bars got razed or rehabbed, leaving the Madison to carry the banner. Any dive connoisseur would turn their nose up at it. Yes, there were hustlers, johns, drunks, and slumming straight kids; and, yes, they had no top shelf to speak of and served hot nuts in paper cups. But unlike the old Seattle dives, there were no tranny hookers or amputee drag queens, not even back-corner blow jobs or patio water sports.

  Hanif had called the gym before I got off and told me to meet him here. It sounded like the prelude to a brush-off, but what was I going to do, say no? I steeled my nerves, then took a Xanax and an inconspicuous seat at the bar. Amazingly, the TVs displayed not Friends but something I had actually studied in college: “This American poet lived most of her life in Brazil.” I grabbed a trivia-game handset and selected “4. Elizabeth Bishop” as soon as she appeared onscreen.

  “Hey, sexy.”

  That was not an address I normally respond to, but it was panted in my left ear like some breathless dog, so I couldn’t help but turn around, and there he was. His arm encircled me and squeezed; he kissed my lips. There was a sheen of sweat across his face, and he smelled odd. Chemical. It added a new note to the bar’s dusty musk of cashews and cigarettes.

  “Hi….”

  “What’s this? Aren�
�t you happy to see me?”

  “No! Yeah, very glad. Just—ah, I’m not used to being addressed that way.”

  “Well, you should, you’re a hot fellow.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  He was peppier than when I first saw him, bouncing and weaving, as if a little boxer inside him was trying to get out. The bartender came over, and I watched closely for the important first-impression drink. I do bottles of Whatever Lite. I hate it, but wines and white liquors aren’t at all butch, only the brown ones are, and I hate those. The things you do to appear fuckable.

  He ordered seltzer. Recovery?

  “Thanks.” He took a sip and looked at me, his head bobbing, and swallowed, then hummed. I’m not kidding, he hummed at me laciviously, an “mm-mm good” sort of humming, while checking me out, top to bottom. This freaked me a bit, so I went, “Are you excited about living in Seattle?”

  “I’m excited about sucking your dick.”

  Luckily this was a Xanax occasion, so my shock sat four stools down instead of doing Riverdance in my head.

  “You come on strong,” I told him.

  “Yeah, sorry about that. You mind?”

  “Are you a chubby chaser?” I asked, point-blank.

  He shook his head. He wagged his fingers in the air, searching for words, thoughts racing. He looked like an evil hypnotist.

  “F-first off,” he stammered.

  I turned on my stool to face him and braced my back against the bar.

  “First off,” he said, “I despise that name. ‘Chubby’ is fucking cute, and cute does not fuck. It’s Campbell’s Soup kids, Augustus Gloop from Willy Wonka, Spanky from The Little Rascals. It sounds like some pedophile lurking in the kids’ section of a department store, near clothes labeled ‘Husky’ or ‘Pretty Plus’—pretty plus what?!”

  I shrugged. Whoa.

  “Second, there’s no such thing as a ‘chubby chaser.’ There are fellows with a hard fetish for obesity, you know—queer and straight, with their own porn and such. There’s all that Feeders and Gainers nonsense. There are Joes who wallow about in some bear’s hairy, working-class belly. But I’ve never met anyone who actually referred to themselves as a ‘chubby chaser.’

  “That’s not me. A fetish is finding only that thing hot, like a Asian guy who only dates white guys. Or when that thing makes anyone hot, like a guy who’s boring until you hear his Aussie accent.

  “Okay,” I said, palms up. “Sorry. I’m not used to guys coming on like that.”

  “I can understand being defensive. Fags are awful. I’m defensive. Am I freaking you out?”

  “A little, but it’s a nice change of pace.”

  “Good, because you make me quite hard.” He smiled and stretched up on his tiptoes. “But what sucks is telling you that, here, for a second, I feel paranoid, like I’m breaking the law. I’m not ashamed; I’ve done plenty of fucking that I am ashamed of, and I know the difference. But when I’m cruising a fat guy, part of me feels like I need to get all furtive, like what I’m doing is illegal. Is it cool I say ‘fat’? I hate being all PC with ‘of size’ or such.”

  “I regularly refer to myself as a Fat Fag Bottom,” I said, and raised my drink to him. Although self-conscious about his volume, I was digging this guy. And, shit, he wanted me.

  “Nice,” he said. “Because it’s like, you get caught—see? I said, ‘you get caught,’ like I’m doing something wrong—you get caught checking out some fellow, and your friends or whoever you’re with, some asshole will be all, like, ‘Oh…?’ ” He said it with an accusatory fagstyle lilt.

  “I’m sorry, but basically, I’m a big slut and find lots of guys hot. Including fat guys. They’re not different from other guys I fuck except for how much they freak out everyone else. Hey, there’s a booth free.”

  He grabbed both our drinks and bolted, sliding in one side of the booth. I took the other. He got back out and slid in beside me, rubbing a sweaty palm along the inside of my thigh.

  “Sexiness is all about carriage,” he said, still talking whiplash fast but deeper, more intense. “When some guy meets your eye with that cold, let’s-rut stare and he’s not sucking his gut in? Hot. When he’s so confident, he lets his sides bulge down over his belt, his thick tits sag? He’s not all sculpted and defined because he’s got better things to do than spend fifteen hours a week at the gym stepping to last year’s Kylie megamix. And the fat-equals-lazy thing is crap. Look at all the construction workers with big guts. All a gut means is: I’m a man, not a boy.”

  I vacillated between taking offense and doing a spit-take, but his hand kneaded my dick through the rough canvas of my Carhartts, and that was the bottom’s line for now.

  “Picture a fellow in dirty, baggy jeans with no belt, an untucked T-shirt, scuffed trainers. Now wash him up, tuck in the shirt nice and tight with the sides folded, belt those jeans, and what have we? FUSSY. Same thing: a tight gym body is FUSSY. Sloppy clothes are hot because they mean the guy is confident enough to know he’s hot no matter how he dresses. Ditto with a sloppy body. You do coke?”

  “What?”

  He shrugged. “Coke, you want some? In case you can’t tell, I’m high, that’s why I’m talking nonstop. I’m going to do another line if you want some. Are the bathrooms safe?”

  I hadn’t been offered coke since college. How bizarre. Right on. “Yeah…no,” I said. “They let hustlers work here, but part of the deal is no monkey business in the bathrooms.”

  “No mischief?”

  “No tomfoolery.”

  “What about hijinx?”

  I shook my head with mock gravity. “Not even a suggestion of hanky-panky.”

  “Well,” he said, giving my dick a squeeze, “since I’d go for more than a soupçon of shenanigans, let’s go out to my car.”

  We climbed into the front seat of his Volvo wagon, which was a relief because if it had been a pickup, a Jeep, or, worse yet, a Hummer, I’d have known he was a total bottom, too. He chopped up lines with a grocery store savings card on the case of Kelly Osbourne’s CD and asked me to roll up the dollar bill. I was charmed that he gave me a single instead of trying to impress me with a large denomination, which would’ve been the tipping point for this whole doing-coke-in-the-car-in-the-Bank-of-America-parking-lot-where-people-at-the-ATM-can-completely-see-us thing.

  He told me to roll it tight, and I thought, Like rolling enchiladas, but said nothing because that would’ve been such a fatboy thing to say. It might have scored me points, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to, that way. Despite what he said, I certainly felt fetishized, exoticized, eroticized. But was that wrong?

  I looked away as he vacuumed along the CD case; it felt rude to stare. Big globules of rainwater gathered along the lip of the passenger window; I leaned away as they fell, nearly knocking Kelly out of his hand.

  “Suck it up, baby.”

  I gingerly slid the dollar into my nose and pressed the other nostril closed. I snorted a long, hard intake, trying to suck the whole line from Kelly’s mug. Everyone’s cheering her as a role model for fat kids, I thought, but how come no one claps for Jack?

  An acrid drip crept down the back of my throat, bitter like aspirin and vomit—lovely!—but soon I felt really calm and together, not spacey like from my meds. His hand went back to my crotch, unzipping and pulling out my dick. Of course, he was talking again.

  “Yeah, fat guys usually have hot dicks,” he said. “It’s the contrast, the difference, you know?”

  “Yeah, difference,” I murmured, too high on the coke rush and his stroking to articulate anything more thoughtful.

  “Your body’s curving and pliable, but your dick is this hard little bitch, this obstinate jackass standing up at attention while everything else is sagging down. It calls attention to itself, like a homeboy’s crotch-tugging or a leather daddy’s assless chaps.

  “Oh yes, and the ass. Big ones are brilliant. You’re standing there stroking your dick, and it’s wonderful to have this big, meaty target to d
rive it into. And you can be rougher with a big fellow. You can grab those heavy hips and just ram into him, slapping your thighs against his backside, shoving your dick all up inside, your balls swinging like mad. It isn’t fetish, it’s physics: You’ve simply got more leverage.”

  He proffered Kelly up under my nose with one hand, the other still on my dick. I took the dollar off the dash and inhaled one of the lines, then held Kelly for him. He did the other and wiped her clean, rubbing residue on his gums. We sniffed and sniffed, and it was too ’80s, not that I’d know, but when I turned on the radio it was Duran Duran, which really was too ’80s, so I spun until I found some downtempo, and he went into it again.

  “Fat guys’ bodies tell a story.” Sniff! “They haven’t been cleaned up and edited into blandness. Is he the aging jock gone to seed? The fellow who labors at work but not enough to burn off that belly? Plus when I’m with them, I feel all a right little piglet. There’s more there, you’re soaking in it, wallowing. Because it’s so socially wrong to be fat, it feels transgressive, outsider, freaky, and that’s hot. You’re saying fuck it to Chi Chi La Rue and Advocate Men, I’m gonna get dirty with this piggy guy who’s confident with who he is. Oh, fuck.”

  He shoved his face down on my cock and sucked deep and long, and it was fantastic. I raced along with the coke but felt so clear, so focused, and he gave great head, which also shut him up. Only the urge to talk passed to me. I spoke slowly and with secure enunciation. I felt razor-sharp, needle-pinpricked focused, and I loved it.

  “But I do not do that,” I told his rising and falling head. “I am not confident. I do not carry myself like that. I’m fat. I’m shy. And I hate myself. I’m not some big tough Daddy who can carry it off. I’m twenty-eight, and I’m a bottom. I have Generalized Anxiety Disorder and take Paxil daily, Xanax on special occasions, and Vicodin on very special occasions—and no, you can’t have any. I’ve had too many guys promise sex for drugs then can’t fuck because of the drugs. Although, considering this situation, I guess I owe you. Anyway, so what am I supposed to do? I’m not the butchest thing in the world, so why the fuck are you sucking me off?”