Magical Thinking - Augusten Burroughs [87]
Though it’s only a matter of time before straight guys start taking steroids. Because while it annoys many straight guys to be the object of a gay guy’s affection, it’s far more alarming to find that no gay guy in the room would sleep with your flat-chested straight-guy ass.
Another reason gay guys take steroids is because many were nelly, femmy little sissies when they were kids, and now they have the chance to transgender into masculine men. They get everything they never got as kids: aggression, respect, and bulk. Of course, the illusion is shattered once the mouth is opened and the sibilant s’s leak out, but when your body is that good, who’s listening to you yammer on about something you saw in French Vogue anyway?
Then there are the guys like me: the fat-girl guys. The nerd guys who were never attracted to bodybuilders, who didn’t feel particularly swishy but who felt like they were cheated: too thin and bitter about it.
As a teenager I ate ice cream by the half-gallon in the hope of adding a few pounds to my tall, lanky frame. I spent hours looking at my flat, non-ass in the mirror and wondering if the padded underwear I saw advertised in the back of GQ would really work. I endured comments from large women like, “I would give my right arm to be as skinny as you” and “If you were a woman, you could be a fashion model.”
Really, there is no difference between being fat and being skinny. They are two sides of the same Oreo. This is why I have always had a special affection for overweight people. Because while I may not look like it, I am every bit as miserable as the woman who wakes up in the morning with dried frosting in her hair, clutching a spoon.
By the time I was twenty, I was able to disguise my scrawny frame by wearing the baggy, fashionable clothes of the era. But I would always feel deep shame when I had to undress in front of somebody. Out of my Willi Wear suit, I had the body of a twelve-year-old.
So when I was twenty-four, I joined a gym and hired a personal trainer. He was a hunky, bulging Italian who pitied me but also saw my determination. Three times a week I met him at six in the morning, and he worked me through a grueling hour-and-a-half routine to develop my chest, arms, legs, and back.
After six months, I did see a difference. After a year, my body was transformed. But only from Auschwitz into lean.
I was still tall and thin, and this made me depressed. No amount of bench pressing could give me the large, round chest I desired. The chest where your nipples point down, that’s what I wanted and what I could never have. I could do squats until I couldn’t walk anymore, but I still had praying mantis legs.
I’d reached my genetic potential, it seemed. Until my best friend, Pighead the AIDS Baby, gave me his testosterone patches. His doctor had prescribed them so he could gain muscle mass and stop wasting away. But Pighead didn’t want to take yet another drug, so he gave me the patches. “You want these? They seem like something you’d be into.”
I placed the man patches all over my body so that I resembled a fish. I wore a scale suit of patches. But I only had enough of them to last a month.
Pighead offered to go back to his doctor and ask for more man patches, but then thoughtlessly died before he got the chance.
A number of years later, I started to notice that every gay man in the city seemed to be getting larger. At the gym where I’d gone for years, guys who had previously been as skinny as me had ballooned into Mayflower moving men. There were now men walking the streets of New York with breasts that Pam Anderson would envy. Overnight, it seemed, biceps were in. But where had they come from?
At the same time, I noticed every gay man suddenly had acne. Not a blemish here, a pimple there. But a rash of angry zits spreading across both shoulders and up the back of the neck. Fifty-year-old men suddenly appeared on the sidewalk shirtless, their ripped abs glistening in the sun. I wanted to corner one of them,