funniest goddam thing i've seen all week

i rarely post videos just for the hell of it, and you've probably already seen it, but if not, swallow anything you don't want coming out through your nose before pressing "play".

i'll have this one up at ruby ridge under a tinfoil hat in no time

so tonight i'm talking with a guy who works security at our building.  28, smart, charming, well-educated, straight (dammit), new to this country and a pleasure to pass a few random minutes with on my way to and fro (partially because of that smile, but mainly because he soaks up my welcome-to-america advice like a wide-eyed sponge).

but this night, he's dragging--seems he's crashing from a recent sugar-rush, and feeling it.  and thus, my opening.

what did you eat tonight, isaac?

"i stopped at burger king on the way to work, had a whopper, french fries and a coke, and they had this oreo brownie ice cream thing that looked so good, i had to try it.  it may have been a mistake."

you like american food, huh?

"oh my god, yes--it's incredible, and so easy. we don't have anything like this at home."

oh, yeah?  what do they eat back in uganda?

"oh, you know--grains and vegetables, mostly, some plantain, some nuts.  we don't eat much meat or sugar because of the cost of such things."

have you noticed it's just the opposite here?

"oh, yes!  hamburgers, soda and candy are so cheap here, but if i want to buy an avocado or a bunch of greens that would cost nothing at home--forget it, it's too expensive."

have you also noticed that you think about food a lot more here than you did there?

"now that you mention it, yes.  i mean, there, we ate when it was time to eat. but here?  i'm always snacking or thinking about it."

how much weight have you gained since you came here, and how's your mood and energy?

he's now gazing at me with that wide-eyed look of dawning understanding i so crave.

"it's driving me crazy, mike--i'm puffy like i've never been before (although he coulda fooled me). i've always run for miles whenever i felt like it just for the joy of the feeling, but i almost never do that now.  i thought it was maybe because of trying to adjust to this night shift that i'm so tired all the time.  but you're telling me it's the...food?"

and thus primed, i let him in on the dirty little secrets of this land of plenty, scared his ass back onto the diet on which he'd thrived his whole young life, and congratulated myself on saving at least one from the western disease.

and then i went upstairs and ate a bag of m&m's.

why i'm sitting this one out

in 2008, guttermorality began life as a political blog, and i published dozens of posts during that year leading up to the election, operating as i then did under the delusion that such things still mattered.

no more.

amuse yourselves if you wish with this year's diversion, and argue endlessly over contraception and gay marriage and how best to get the economy moving again (or whatever other straw men they throw out there for you to squabble over), and why your guy is a better servant of the people than the other guy. knock yourselves out.

me?  i'll continue doing what i've been doing since my eyes opened--trying to figure out the real game, and hiding what little non-paper wealth i have in safe places.

 

faggots

tyler, texas, autumn 1978

i had come home from school that weekend--i was always coming home back then--and, finding myself out of cigarettes, ran across the loop to the 7-11 as i had done countless times since grade school.  chatted with mrs. evans a minute as she rang up my smokes, and, on the way out, stopped to spin the little rack of paperbacks by the door, more out of habit than anything else.

i dunno what i was expecting to find, because it was always the same old shit.  a jobber came by every couple weeks, filled the racks with an assortment of trashy bestsellers, romance novels, true-crime pulps and westerns--whatever he had left over after servicing the more lucrative drugstore accounts on his route--and that day the selection was no different than it had ever been.

except for the one, whose bright-yellow cover screamed a gay slur at me from the confinement of its little wire restraint.

i stood there stunned, the blood turning cold and then hot in my closeted virgin veins.  how this book with its brazen, outlandish title had ever found its way into my dry, baptist little corner of east texas, i did not know.  what i did know was that i had to have it.

the other thing i knew was that i couldn't just walk up to the counter, set it down in front of mrs. evans and pay for it.  which presented me with a quandary:  dare i try it again?  because the consequences of failure this time would be far greater in every way than the last.

see, mrs. evans and i had a history.  plump and jovial, she had managed the 7-11 across the street from my house forever, and her daughter bennie and i had been classmates from fifth grade all the way through high school.

but she had another, much tougher side, did mrs. evans, as i would discover in my fourteenth year the day a friend and i tried to lift a couple packs of swisher sweets when we thought she wasn't looking.  i'll never forget it--as we cruised toward the door, clean getaway assured, i felt a steel vise clamp onto my bony little shoulder, and an equally steely voice say, "give 'em up, mike."

i froze, slowly turned, looked up into a face that was no longer smiling but hard as nails, and meekly did as i was told.

"now, you're gonna go straight home, you're gonna tell your mama what you did, and you're not gonna set foot in this store for three months, because i figure that's about how long it'll take before i can stand to look at you again"

because that's the way such matters were handled in small towns in those days.

of course, there was no need to tell my mother when i got home--mrs. evans had already taken care of that.  and just to add the icing to the cake, my jubilant little brother happened to be the one who answered the phone.

but that was then, and it had been a couple packs of cigarillos.  if she caught me this time, with this, i wasn't worried she'd call the cops.  she'd do something far worse:  she'd tell her daughter, who'd tell everybody.

all this flashed through my mind in the instant it took me to slip the book from its rack and down the front of my jeans with a deftness the artful dodger might've admired, wave at mrs. evans without looking back and walk out the door.  clean getaway assured.

*     *     *     *     *

austin, texas, morning after halloween, a year later

the phone rings.  

"hey, mark, what's up?", and then, "what's wrong?"

turns out, a lot.  seems the night before, after a raucous party, my little brother had piled a bunch of people into his new jeep and taken off across a field near his apartment, hit a mogul and flipped the thing, throwing himself and everybody else hither and yon--except the one girl, whose left shoulder had been crushed when the roll bar landed on it.

"please don't tell mother, ok?"

i tell him, "too late--she's sitting here next to me,"  because she'd come down for the weekend.

an hour later, i'm on my way to dallas in her car, not sure what i'm gonna do or say, but knowing i have to be there for him.

see, my relationship with my brother had always been strained, and we'd never been easy with each other. he was the jock, the good-looking one, the cocky asshole

he went to new york the summer after high school, walked into the only modeling agency he'd ever heard of, slapped a few polaroids of himself on the counter, asked the girl at the front desk if they were interested, and, when the higher-up she'd immediately called assured him that they were, laughed and said, "i just wanted to see if i could" as he walked out the door

who'd never understood why people didn't warm up to him like they did me.  and he'd never much looked up to his older brother, not that i'd ever given him reason to.

when i pulled up, he was carrying a bag of trash down the stairs of his building with a jaunty tweed newsboy cap on the back of his head, looking every inch the model he always had, greeted me like he couldn't figure out why i was there.

it wasn't til we were back upstairs that he broke. "i almost killed her, mike--another couple inches and it woulda been her neck."  and then

"you know, everybody in our family tells me i'm the strong one--i'm the one who's like our dad.

well, thanks for that little insight into how everybody sees me, little brother

"but i don't feel very strong right now.  i hate this life--i don't know what i'm doing.  i don't know why i'm here."

i'd never seen this side of him.  i remember driving back to austin the next morning, crying, asking god why we were all so fucked up.

a month later--girl on the mend, no lawsuit because they didn't do that back then--he's quit his job and is on his way down to stay with me for awhile, because i'd told him he could.

i prepare--not much to clean, not much to hide.  only the book, which goes into a box on the top shelf of the bedroom closet.

it's awkward at first--loft apartment meant for one (or a really close couple), and we're all over each other, no privacy at all.  but i tell myself it's only for a few weeks, until he gets himself straightened out.

but he stays, and stays--never asking, just presuming.  depressed, and brooding.  and judging--i can feel it.

it's not all bad--there was that day we cheered the US olympic hockey team on to victory over the russkies.  that was fun; for a minute we were close.

the weeks turn into months, and it's not until the school year and my lease end in may that i manage to shoehorn his ass outta my life.

he's gone, and i'm packing, and i suddenly remember the book.  pull the box out of the closet, dig through it--nothing.  it's not there.

*     *     *     *     *

since then, out of the catalog of resentments i could cite, the thing i think i've resented most about him

besides what he did to our little sister, which is a post for another day

were the little digs, the out-of-his-way efforts to make me look bad in front of people.

i could always see it coming--we'd be with a bunch of people, he'd get that smirk on his face and start reminiscing, and i'd think, "here it comes".

and, sure as shit, it always did.  usually it was little things, like the time in high school i got drunk and came home and vomited all night, or some other such stupidity--all in good fun, of course.

or the time when my mother excitedly announced to a table full of relatives that i was in san francisco for the weekend and he snorted, said, "yeah, i'll bet it's not the first time."

but it wasn't until that night when his kids were older and just starting to look up to me and he said, "lemme tell you about the time your uncle mike got caught stealing cigars at 7-11" that i really started to hate him.

maybe i'm just paranoid.  god knows i'm an absent-minded sort--that book coulda ended up any number of places.

but i know exactly what happened to it.

of all the books i could've come across as a young, repressed homo to introduce me to the life, the fact that it was this one explains a lot, does it not?

the noblesavage ironclad rule of attractiveness

from a comment made by said faithful reader awhile back:

The hotter the outside, the messier the inside. 

We could say "uglier", but that is not really right. What I mean is that it takes a certain level of discipline and hard work to look really good...to have the perfect hair, the perfect body, just the right clothes and all the rest. 

It takes a lot of time and effort, and normal guys--guys who are kinda content with life--just never have that kind of obsessive hunger to do crunches all the time, or never eat mayo. 

That obsession usually comes from a certain neediness inside. This is not always true, I suppose. But I have yet to see an exception.*

and he would know.

as i've related previously, noblesavage and i started coming out at roughly the same time, but that's about all we had in common. while i was gay pretty much the same way i'd been straight (i.e., solitary and disheveled), he, ten years younger, went the circuit-boy route (minus the drugs, thank god).

in addition to hours in the gym honing his body to perfection, he spent untold fortunes on supplements, clothes, CDs, accessories, haircuts, highlighting, potions and unguents for hair and skin, and trips to circuit destinations (got those student loans paid off yet, babe?).

me? my idea of a workout was cruising on foot, my toilette consisted of whatever bar soap was on sale that week, and my idea of getting ready to go out was digging a clean t-shirt outta the laundry pile. i shopped at goodwill and cut my own hair, usually without a hand mirror to check the back (which generally turned out pretty much as you would imagine).

but lemme tellya, all noblesavage's work, time and money paid off. at his peak (which is not reflected in these pictures--that would come 20 pounds of muscle later), he was stunning to behold. i felt like a mudhen standing next to him.

and he ran, of course, with a similar crowd. one night when our worlds collided and i remarked on how hot one of his friends was, he gave me a sardonic smile and said, "always remember, mike--the hotter, the messier." i didn't know what he meant at the time--they all seemed so confident and together--but i'd find out.

it happened one night at a bar at the glitzy end of west hollywood. i was standing there by myself, holding my drink, fish outta water in my t-shirt, jeans and nikes while all around me preened the peacocks.

he was over by the dance floor--looking at me, looking away, laughing with his friends as they cast sideways glances my way. i thought, "hmm, pretty boy wants to go slumming, huh?", and first time i saw him alone, i approached, complimented him and immediately caught the mood shift, sensed the chill. fuck.

i knew from past experience how it would play out: three minutes of increasingly-awkward chit-chat with me trying harder and harder as his eyes drifted from mine and around the room, ending with his suddenly saying, "excuse me, i need to find my friends", no doubt so he could tell 'em, "can you believe that creep who was looking at me actually tried to pick me up?".

not having patience for the game that particular night, i cut myself off in mid-sentence, said something like, "you know what? i don't need this. good luck with whatever pencil-dick you end up with", gave him a winning smile and turned to walk away.  instantly, he was all over me, grabbing my arm--"wait--where are you going? what's wrong?"--and that's when the light came on, and thus was born

the guttermorality indifference technique

for bedding a guy 4 points hotter than you

1.  never, EVER tell him how hot he is. as counter-intuitive as this may seem, the way into this guy's pants is never through flattery--he takes it as a given, hears that shit all the time and will be over you in an instant. 

2.  never show a moment's weakness. he must be the weak one, even if only secretly. 

3.  seeming indifference is key. his insecurity script will kick in--the one he's been playing all his life--and he'll do anything you want to win you over (of course, the minute you indicate he's succeeded, it's all over, so make sure you can keep this up at least until you get your pants back on).

why does the above hold true, over and over? who knows--maybe because these beautiful men felt inadequate as boys and are now overcompensating, or they're still stinging over daddy's rejection--whatever; that's their problem and it's not the point of this post.

*     *     *     *     *

i went home with that guy that night (after reluctantly allowing him to talk me into it), and have since used this technique with fair success whenever i wanna bag one of his type (a case in point being this one, who will not leave me alone).

problem is, i don't enjoy holding back, treating guys like shit--it's not my nature. i'm an affectionate trick, and when i like a guy, i like to show him and tell him so. which is one of the reasons i tend to avoid well-kept guys who are 4 points hotter than me, even when i know they're haveable.

but you? if you like trophies and that's the pond you wanna fish in, trust me--this is the way you have to play the bait.

____________________
*the possible exception to this rule being the very young, who, thankfully, can be hot without having to work at it.