Hard at Work by Adam McCabe

Author:Adam McCabe [Laurents, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-3-7325-2731-1
Publisher: Bastei Entertainment
Published: 2016-11-19T00:00:00+00:00

The Surrogate — by Jameson Currier

My first year in California I had come to believe my body separated me from other gay men, a body I could hardly understand or seldom seem to keep healthy, a body I could neither shape nor sculpt to the perfection many of my peers so easily achieved themselves. Much of this may have had to do with my self-consciousness and often low self-esteem when I walked into the gym on Santa Monica, though it may also have resulted from a lack of motivation and an absence of discipline in wanting to achieve what I also perceived as an often frivolous and irrational goal for my age. Whenever I went to the gym with Vince or Jeff, I was so vividly aware of how imperfect I physically had become: the lumpiness around my waist, the thighs that wobbled a bit too much, the skinny forearms that ended in large callused fingers. Around me, of course, the tanned, hairless West Hollywood boys stretched and pumped in their bright spandex shorts and tank tops, wiping the sweat carefully away with their short white towels, their biceps cresting into peaks with a casual but calculated flex of their arm. That was the year an aerobics boom had happened, the same year the sex bathhouses had become health food and juice bars or trendy clothing stores selling skimpy clothes for exorbitant prices, the same year that perfect bodies of young gay men seemed as easily manufactured as a skimpy clingy Calvin Klein T-shirt.

And that was the year, too, I first noticed my body beginning to pull away from me, the hint of its youth fading into a series of lines around the eyes and the steely string of muscles from my thighs to calves aching at the end of the day from a combination of weariness and supporting what I believed was too much weight for my frame. I suppose I wanted to mistrust my body — imagine that its heartburns and charley horses were the result of something more serious, something which could move me into that other category of gay men — those who struggled with infections and the onslaught of exotic diseases — the rumor had it, after all, that that year fifty percent of the population of gay men in West Hollywood were HIV-positive.

But the truth was, of course, I was undeniably healthy myself, increasingly so, rebounding steadily from the abuse of cigarettes and booze, having cast those addictions aside with my continental shift. When Nathan died I was at the apex of those addictions, yet at that point in my life I ironically looked and felt fitter than I had ever been before. Now, I could not stop eating nor retaining water, in spite of the fact that I sweated uncomfortably in the California heat. What energy I had once found from booze and cigarettes I had been unable to replace. In its wake a growing depression, lethargy and apathy had rooted itself.

Often at

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