Queen of the Fatties

I’m spending the weekend in a charming little town in rural New England. My host has a beautiful big house on top of a green, green hill with a swimming pond, a couple of cows, a couple dogs, a wife who cooks really well, and rugrats running all over the place. It’s really quite charming and, despite my deep-seated need for excitement and variety, I did feel a distinct pang of desire to live that life. It was a soft summer evening, the food and beer was flowing. We went for a dive in the cold pond, and at night set off some fireworks and then sat around the fire and drank wine and whiskey while the kids ran around, excited that the adults were too drunk to care that they were staying up past their bedtime. Perhaps I’ll settle down to something like that when I’m a little older.

But one night this week two friends and I also went out to sample the nightlife in this little town. Now, we weren’t expecting anything great. There’s no college here, and very little population base. But my friends are the kind of guys who like to live it up full bore no matter where they travel. One’s a crazy Central American guy — a farm-owner, a scientist and complete lady’s man — who laughs maniacally at the drop of a hat (it charms most people but also has the power to completely freak them out). The other is European — an economist and a wine connoisseur and quite refined — whose travels take him to the most remote corners of the globe of anyone I know (western Zambia, anyone?). Both are older than me, both pull hot women wherever they go, and both are models to me as to how I want to be when I am their age. I’ve traveled a lot for work with these guys, and between us, together and apart, we’ve hit up the night scene in at least 30 countries and God knows how many small towns.

Sometimes you are surprised at what you find (did you know that, if you judge on the quantity and quality of the women, the music, the drinks, the setting and just the general amount of fun one is liable to have, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, has one of the hottest club scenes in the world?) Other times the small, sleepy towns are just that: small and sleepy. But we still have fun drinking the local beer and chatting up the bizarre old lady tending the bar, or wandering around the streets with the local mad poet.

In this small New Englad town, however, I was depressed at what I saw. There were two little bars next to each other, each with a dance floor. The music was pretty fucking awful (who still plays that Usher “Yeah” song? That song sucked balls when it came out and that was five years ago). The guys were mostly skinny and pasty and half of them looked like they were on meth. And the girls? Oh my… fat, fat, fat.

With literally three exceptions, all of the few dozen girls we saw were seriously overweight. Many of them had what looked like once-cute faces, still young, being slowly enveloped in folds of chub, their eyes sinking bit by bit into that vast fleshy pool, and with their eyes — seemingly — their souls.

“Jesus,” said my European friend, looking around in dismay, “this is really depressing.” My Latin friend just sucked his rum and coke through his teeth and looked around nodding his head, like someone searching for something polite to say. This in particular made me a bit ashamed. As the “host” in this situation, I felt the obligation to make sure my foreign friends had a good time. Oh well, there’s that conference in LA coming up…

We hung out for a while, talked to a few locals and shared some laughs. I played a little “guess what country we are from” game with a mediocre girl sitting at the bar, out of sheer boredom. Outside on the sidewalk, smoking, I saw a girl who was a solid 6. I noticed her immediately because she was actually not fat (Hallelujah!) … and she may have been a 7. I couldn’t tell because she was wearing a lot of makeup and an awful, tragic poofy newsboy hat. At that point of course, I didn’t care. I talked with her for a while, watching her mannerisms and her mood.

What struck me was that she really seemed convinced she was ridiculously hot. Here was this average to decent looking girl, covered in makeup, wearing some fucked up Dom DeLuise thing on her head, preening and checking over her shoulder like the Queen of Sheba.

Of course it doesn’t take a PhD in anthropology to explain this. She was Queen in this environment, just like the least loser-ish of the meth guys was the King. I can only imagine what it must be like to be one of those guys… they would have all given their left nut to sleep with that girl. A girl that I wouldn’t even notice on the train in Manhattan let alone at a fancy party. Hell, I wouldn’t even notice that girl in a small town in fucking Peru. Big cities always have more hotties (duh), but even small towns in poor places have their gems, because the girls aren’t all fat walruses.

There’s almost nothing sadder than a 22-year old with a cute face encased in a layer of ever-growing blubber. Thank god I’m headed back to the city where nailing pussy doesn’t involve spelunking through folds of fat with a headlamp strapped to your forehead; then on to points south where everything’s just sweeter, girls included.

Maybe someday I will go back to that little town in New England as an old man — young wife and young mistress in tow — and build a house. In the summer I’ll ride motorcycles on the winding roads, and in the winter I’ll read Yukio Mishima by the fire, and I’ll die at 80, in flagrante delecta, of course.