So, seriously. I’m not fat. I could stand to lose a few pounds. There’s just a bit more of me to love.
Wow. That sounds way lame.
All right. So you know I have an average penis and I’m not a ripped Adonis, nor am I hairy bear man. That’s a good start, I think. What else is there?
Well, I have black hair that I keep short because it starts to curl when it gets longer and looks like a homeless poodle died on my head. Sometimes, when I’m feeling really adventurous, I spike it up with gel, but usually, I don’t do a whole lot with it. I don’t have dandruff, which is good. And my hairline is not receding (yet), which is even better.
I have blue eyes and I could tell you that they’re the color of ice that covers a frozen lake in the Himalayas, but that wouldn’t be exactly true. I bought contacts to give myself ice-blue eyes one time, but they made it look like I had big cataracts in my eyes, so I took them out. Nothing says “Hey, would you sleep with me?” like milky cataracts. But mine are just a plain old blue, like most everyone else in the world.
Um, what else. Oh, I’m five foot ten, though I like to tell people I’m actually six feet tall because it sounds so much bigger. I don’t wear my glasses like I’m supposed to because I think they make my face look too wide, so I tend to squint a lot. I can be shy around people I don’t know, unless I’m drunk and then I can’t seem to shut up at all. I like video games and loud action movies that pretend to have plots but really are about blowing shit up (oh, and just between us, I’ve probably seen every romantic comedy ever made—hello, I’m gay. It’s a requirement that we pretend to like Jennifer Lopez when she’s playing a maid in New York who still happens to look like Jennifer Lopez. J-Lo, no one believes you when you try to play working class, so knock it off). I tend to have a bit of a swish when I walk, and sometimes I wave my hands too much when I talk. I’m a homo, but sometimes I can be a big homo. I’m not effeminate. I’m just… animated. But I can be totally butch if I wanted to. Like, way butch. Like “going outside and taking off my shirt to chop some firewood for winter” butch.
As you heard earlier, my name is Paul and I’m almost thirty years old. My last name is Auster. Family legend says that our last name was Austerlitz, but it was changed after World War II because my dad’s parents didn’t want anyone to think they were Nazis when they fled Hamburg to come to America. I suppose I should thank them for that. I don’t need people asking me if I’m related to Hitler.
That would not be a good start to a friendship.
But my grandparents are dead and I never met them, so I can’t thank them unless I was into psychics and mediums. I’m not. Well, not anymore. Not since I dated a guy who told me my house was haunted with the spirit of a woman who had her period over and over again and moaned continuously about menstrual cramps while she wandered between my bedroom and the bathroom.
George lasted six dates before I couldn’t take it anymore (“There’s just so much blood!” he’d moaned to me, huddled in the corner of my couch). I kicked him to the curb and went on the Internet to find out how to get rid of menstruating ghosts. Funny, no one could really tell me. So I just bought a box of heavy flow tampons and made a big deal about putting them under the bathroom sink, telling my ghost Flow that she could use them whenever she wanted. Needless to say, two weeks later all tampons were still accounted for and I was slightly disappointed that I didn’t really have a ghost haunting me, even if she was on the rag all the time.
Am I worried about turning thirty? Nah. Maybe. Sort of. Okay, I’m freaking out. Because when I was sixteen, I’d sit in front of the mirror and sing “Some Day My Prince Will Come” while brushing my poodle curls, sure there was a big strong man out there for me, just waiting to whisk me away to his castle on a beach in Cabo San Lucas. One who would pick me up with his massive arms and cradle me against his chest and tell me, in varying accents (sometimes he was Cuban and other times Chinese—I didn’t use the Chinese one too often because I couldn’t stop giggling at the Chinese voice I’d hear in my head. Don’t ask me to do it. It’s way wrong.) all the things he just couldn’t wait to do to me once we got to my Dream Castle. We’d live there happily ever after and he would love me for the rest of my days while feeding me grapes and tickling my nipples.
Oh, by the way, I have very sensitive nipples.
I certainly did not expect to be almost thirty and working a dead-end job as a claims adjuster for an insurance company. I’m not going to tell you which one; suffice it to say you’ve probably seen our commercials on TV and chuckled once or twice until they played over and over and over again and you wanted to dropkick the stupid little animal spokesperson. You think the commercials are bad? Try working here. Sometimes, they have some idiot dress up in the animal mascot costume for human resource events. The person in the costume is always chipper and waving hysterically as if they’re under the impression that if they stop, their hands will be chopped off. I hate that damn costume. And, I’ll admit, it scares me a bit. I was the kid who never wanted to have birthday parties at Chuck E. Cheese because I was sure the animatronic monsters that were Chuck and his friends were actually real and when my parents weren’t looking, they’d jump down off the stage and snatch me, taking me back to their dungeon where they would eat me slowly. I was the life of every party, let me tell you.
Sorry. I got distracted again.
Where were we? Oh, yeah. My job.
My soul is slowly being sucked dry in a cubicle that is smaller than a prison cell. Trust me, I measured it. But of course, management was not impressed when I brought this up. They tend not to like it when I speak at staff meetings. I understand why, though; what starts as a simple observation usually leads to another of one my “tirades.” Their word, not mine. I can’t help it. I get loud about things that matter to me (“We’re donating to the Salvation Army again for Christmas? They hate gay people! Those bell ringers are nothing but homophobic ex-junkie fascists in disguise! Why are we even donating to a religious organization at Christmas! Jesus was born in April!”). So yeah, they prefer if I don’t speak in staff meetings.
I never expected to still be living in Tucson, Arizona, land of the Border Patrol (aka the Fascist Regime), home of 115 degree temperatures (but at least it’s a dry heat, we always say). I’m too pale to live in the desert. I don’t tan. Instead, I get pink, so much so that I look like one of those oddly disturbing hairless cats that nobody wants to own. I went to a spray-tan salon once, but the woman at the front desk was orange and I was convinced that I would get melanoma just by breathing the same air as her, so I left immediately, after accidentally telling her she looked like a perky blonde carrot. She didn’t think that was very funny. Either that or she normally looks like she’s perpetually pissed off.
When I was younger, I thought I was going to get a ten-picture deal from Paramount, where I’d be paired with all the handsomest leading men in Hollywood and travel all over the world in my yacht. After a hard day of filming a gay action adventure along the lines of Romancing the Stone (called Fluffing My Jewels) we’d all retire to my yacht and have an orgy filled with riotous passion.
Instead, I live in a small adobe house right smack-dab in the center of a middle-class neighborhood. The neighbors t
o my left are a husband and wife, and they’re seventy-year-old nudist racists who like to have swinger parties in the hot tub of their backyard. They’ve invited me over for a couple of the parties, but I’ve seen the type of people that show up. When that much of your body has fallen because of gravity and you’re still wearing clothes, I can only imagine what your balls will look like hanging down by your ankles. I politely decline each invitation. Each time there is a party, though, I sit at my front door with a spray bottle filled with water, ready to spritz any randy old people who want to have a bone sesh in my driveway. So far it hasn’t happened, but I did wake up one morning, went outside to get the mail, and found an empty travel-size lube packet near my mailbox. I went back inside, got gloves and bleach, and scrubbed down the mailbox, trying hard not to gag at the images in my head of two old people wearing chaps boning against it.
After that guy told me I had a ghost who perioded (that’s a word I just made up; doesn’t it sound gross?) all over my house, I thought it best that I get a pet to protect me and keep me company since I decided to swear off men for at least seventeen years. I briefly considered getting a cat, but then decided against it because I didn’t want to be one of those people. You know what I mean. My grandmother, Gigi (Mom’s mom), was one of them. She’d make tuna fish and then sit in her old chair, which smelled like Bengay and broken dreams, and chew it, then open her mouth and let her cat eat it right then and there. She said it was because Mrs. Tingles was too old to chew her own food and she wanted to give her a treat. I told her I was the only person in the world who had a grandmother who made out with her cat and smelled like fish while doing so. My grandmother wondered aloud if that made her a lesbian.
When she died, I was kind of sad. The cat, not my grandmother. Gigi is still alive. She has a homophobic parrot now. His name is Johnny Depp. When I went over to her house to meet him for the first time, the first thing Johnny Depp did was squawk at me, “Pray the gay away!” while my grandma giggled from behind his cage. Gigi swears up and down he was like that when she got him, and I almost believe her, because she doesn’t have a hateful bone in her body. She likes everyone, for the most part. But it’s kind of hard to go to see her now, since Johnny Depp screams, “Here comes the rump ranger!” every time I walk into her house.
So instead of getting a cat to make out with or a parrot that is one step away from committing hate crimes, I went to get a dog. I told myself when I went to the shelter that I was going to get a big dog because big dogs make you manlier. No teacup Chihuahuas for this homo, no, sir! I stomped into the ASPCA and told them in my deepest voice that I was there to adopt a German shepherd! No, a Rottweiler! No, a pit bull! I told the lady I would take the manliest pit bull they had and that I would name him Snarl or Stab or Meat Eater and I’d get him a collar with spikes on it.
The lady at the front desk asked me calmly if I was part of a dog-fighting ring. I felt properly rebuked and apologized, telling her no, I just needed a dog to live with me and my menstrual ghost. She must have thought the phrase menstrual ghost was somehow referring to me because she asked if I was pre-op or post-op transgender. I almost reached over and plucked the two gross black hairs growing out of her chin. But she looked so pleased with herself that she was showing the world how open-minded she was that I couldn’t bear to rip out those gnarly hairs or break her heart, so I told her I was post-op and that my name used to be Chaz Bono and that I missed my menstrual cycle more than I thought I would. She reached over and rubbed my arm soothingly and told me she’d help me find an “animal companion” to help me forget all about the vaginal bleeding. “After all,” she said, laughing, “we women have to stick together, even if one of us has an artificially constructed penis now. Girl power!”
A golden retriever named Duke caught my eye almost right away. His coat was so bright and pretty under the lights, and he sat there and preened when I smiled. He chuffed a bit, obviously playing up his part. He knew he looked good and he knew I knew it. I almost said he was the one, but then I heard a squeaking noise coming from the next cage. Duke turned his head to the right and growled and then looked back at me with soulful eyes. The squeak came again and Duke all but snarled.
I was curious so looked into the next cage. Inside was a mutt of some kind, pretty small and scrawny-looking. He was almost all black except for random white spots of hair on his back and face. His front right leg was white, like he was wearing only one sock. But then I saw he didn’t have back legs and that the squeaking sound I’d heard were the wheels of a little contraption that hooked to the back of his body and allowed him to move. When he saw me looking in at him, he started wiggling his butt back and forth, causing the wheels to tilt every which way and clack on the cement floor. It was only then I saw he didn’t have a tail, either.
“What happened to him?” I asked the woman.
She smiled fondly down at Wheels (I’d already named him in my head—highly, highly original, I know) and told me he’d been hit by a car months before and had to have his legs and tail amputated. No one had claimed him and the shelter couldn’t find anyone to take him. Since he’d been a survivor, they called him Lucky, which I thought was the stupidest name ever.
Duke, the golden boy in the next cage, was pissed he wasn’t getting more attention from me and growled at Wheels. It was then I understood that Duke was nothing but a big golden bully and Wheels was the little guy that no one wanted. I was just enough of a sentimentalist that I could relate, so of course I adopted him. And named him Wheels. No child of mine would be named Lucky! We would make our own luck!
I was feeling pretty good about myself when I brought Wheels home. I turned my back for a minute, listening to his wheels squeak throughout the house as he explored while I set up his food bowl and water jug thing that the cute stock boy at Petco said I just had to have. I went looking for the new addition only to discover he’d pooped in the middle of the living room and then tracked it through the rest of the house after rolling through it with his wheels. I threw up in my mouth a little when I had to clean it up, but I figured it was still better than a homophobic Johnny Depp calling me a fudge packer.