Starf*cker: a Meme-oir (42 page)

“Nothing with my face,” I replied, starting strong.

“I agree; you have no wrinkles and I would have guessed you were ten to fifteen years younger than you are,” he offered. If he was looking for a quickie, he was moving in the right direction. But I soldiered on.

“I just wanna suck out all of this—” I grasped my mid-section—“and have it pumped into this”—I reached back and grabbed the part of my body where an ass should be. He didn’t tell me I was crazy, which was the first nail in the coffin of my surgical virginity.

At this point, the doctor poked his head in. A handsome guy in his forties, he looked kind of like Jeff Daniels if he lived in Palm Springs. One of the first things the extremely confident doc said to me was, “Come with me so you can watch a procedure.”

I followed him into his in-office facility, where a man in his late fifties or so was about to have under-eye injections of the popular filler Restylane. The only good thing about filler is that it wears off. Otherwise, I feel it’s usually overdone and makes people look unnaturally rounded, bloated even. It’s the opposite of what I wanted and needed. The silver-haired patient, his face covered in felt-tip marker notations where the injections would go, was on the make even as the good doctor began poking his eye bags. He flirted with me, asking if I thought he looked good and giving me elevator eyes, which is tough to do when you have a needle stuck in your face half an inch below them. He introduced himself to me then thought better of it. “You won’t use my name, will you?” I didn’t and wouldn’t. Assured of his privacy, he immediately launched into a story of his good buddy, an older gay man who’d just had a disastrous face lift. It was clear that plastic surgery, something most people want to keep secret, is too juicy a story not to tell.

The doctor told me there were four types of men who came to him: (1) The male model, who is already nearly perfect but needs to get his abs scraped out or his jaw made even firmer. I couldn’t help but think of the movie
Looker
, in which perfect girls are asked to have infinitesimally exact plastic surgery, only to be thrown over balconies in their panties; (2) The bodybuilder, who is basically like a bulkier version of the male model. He just needs his steroid tits reduced or the removal of love handles that no amount of weightlifting will reach; (3) The athletic dad, which is a guy in his thirties and up who isn’t a regular at the gym so needs some lipo and maybe an eye job; and (4) The CEO, who needs to keep up with the handsome young bucks around the office.

I didn’t hear “gay blogger” in there, but I didn’t object to being lumped in with the athletic dads. I never do.

I was then escorted into a room where I stripped nude (he does penile enhancements, too, but advises against) and donned a tiny, paper version of a G-string, which I’m sure would be quite hot in a role-play experience, but which left me feeling hopelessly exposed. The high cut of the disposable mockstrap did allow for maximum bulging, a technology Andrew Christian may want to investigate.

The assistant played amateur photographer, posing me against the wall for photos from the front, side and back. At this point, the doctor entered and looked me up and down. The first thing out of his mouth was, “You need pec implants and lipo.”

I didn’t feel he was being callous; I was more offended when a close friend had told me out of nowhere that I had no ass. But I was surprised he was focusing on my chest, and there was that word…
need
.

I told the doc I was more comfortable just doing weights when it came to my teats, but he said, “In forty-five minutes, I can give you what you’ve been working on for forty-five minutes every week for the past ten years.” In his estimation, pec implants are the “home run” of male plastic surgery.

I like my chest. It’s not that firm but it looks normal to me: a respectable chest for a guy my age. When he handed me the bendy chicken cutlet that would become the firm part of my pecs, I shuddered.

“When you pop those babies in, people immediately look at your chest and they’re like, ‘That guy’s hot.’”

I ruled them out. I have never seen a guy with pec implants who didn’t look like a guy with pec implants, there’s no way an implant in your body is not easily discoverable when someone touches you, and my nipples are as sensitive as twin clitorises—imagine if, while slicing me open to “pop those babies in” my sensitivity disappeared?

Once pec implants were off the table (and back into his desk), the doc felt up my buns and told me that because I had loose skin from my weight loss, and because I had so much (thank you) fat in my mid-section to work with, there would be plenty of material to harvest and plenty of space into which to relocate it—I was a prime candidate to get my booty jacked up.

He grinned. “I want you to look like the best version of you.”

I consulted with my nice-looking, formerly obese eye doctor, who’d had lipo and CoolSculpting (which freezes fat in your body so that it can be harmlessly reabsorbed), and he told me to avoid lipo. My general practitioner, a sexy gay with muscles everywhere who is one of the most opinionated and forceful people in my life, had told me I was crazy if I had lipo because it’s so inexact.

Both of them and every other expert I consulted told me, “The important thing is that you not have unrealistic expectations.”

But isn’t plastic surgery all about unrealistic expectations? Maybe life is, too.

A couple of months later, I arrived for surgery in the wee hours of the morning. I had to ring a special buzzer on his Midtown office building’s front door because only he and his staff were there at the crack of dawn.

Everything was in order. I was in a loose parka and sweats with no undies and had been taking the meds I was supposed to take in preparation (antibiotics, natural stuff to suppress inflammation, an anti-nausea pill), I had an escort—who was not an escort—coming to get me several hours later and I was out of work, so could easily recuperate for several weeks at home. Getting lipo is no picnic. Going on picnics is what comes first, then lipo, then you spend a month or so feeling and looking a lot worse than you did to begin with.

The doctor met with me and told me, “I
love
butt!” He is an ass man, too, which made me feel he would be a good judge of whether he was giving me what I wanted. He also meant he loves doing that surgery because the results for fat transplants are usually very good. (Butt implants are much less reliable, can slip, can become infected, can look weird.)

Under my flimsy robe, my heart beating a mile a minute (would I die on the table, as had Kanye’s mom Donda at fifty-eight, as had
The First Wives Club
author Olivia Goldsmith at fifty-four?) was whisked into the same room where I’d seen the man getting his eyes done.

The attendants were women. In keeping with the doctor’s joking tone, they were giddy and smiley. Trust me, there was nothing erotic about their eagerness to strip me naked and rub some rust-colored anti-biotic substance all over my cock, balls, belly, chest, and butt. I looked like the second lead in a German scat film.

The anesthesiologist was a reassuring man who told me he had a lot of experience. He and everyone else kept saying I was doing the right thing (I’d already paid, so I hoped so) and he began asking me questions as he hooked me up to an IV, which I knew meant I was about to pass out and get cut.

I woke up in a semi-seated position. It was the most frustrating feeling ever because I was in good spirits and mentally alert, but I couldn’t really make my hands do what I wanted and my mouth didn’t feel like it was moving even though I heard it talking. I was cracking jokes right away. I’ll be that old guy in hospice who makes inappropriately funny comments right up until he’s zipped into a body bag.

My escort was there. After what seemed like seconds, while I was still fucked up, they nudged me out of the office (I was magically wearing my clothes again) and I became aware of the dreaded, corset-like compression garment I knew I would be expected to wear for at least a week. It was white, or had been—now, it was soaked in a red liquid that I was told was a mix of my blood and the lipo fluid used by the doctor. Inside of it, I felt like I was stewing in my own juices; every time I moved, fluids gurgled around and squirted out of a few tubes that were taped to my body to stain the garment anew.

It was 2014, but this was total Frankenstein shit.

In the car on the ride home, I had to sit while kind of holding my new ass above the seat. The doctor had told me I would not be able to sit straight down on my butt for a couple of weeks, which is a lot harder than it may sound, especially when your midsection is in pain and leaking gross juices. I made it home and crashed, but soon discovered that it was almost impossible to be comfortable. Not only was the revolting garment going to stay on me for a full week (whore’s baths galore), it was so tight that it caused my legs to tingle all the time, making sleep a theory that could not be proven. I was miserable, extremely emotional (my damn dog hurt her neck and I was blubbering like we were putting her to sleep or something) and couldn’t stand to see the gross muffin top that hung out the bottom of the garment. Had it been fitted to me correctly?

“Why the fuck did I do this?” I asked myself in the mirror. My reflection offered no panacea. Then I took a picture of my ass, and I remembered why I’d done it.

My ass: bruised on one side more than the other, and featuring massive stitches under each cheek. But I had a nice, full, plump ass. And as a certified gay man, I’m an official authority on the callipygous. Oh, my God, that first belfie almost made me believe in God. I lived for that ass while struggling to get past the effects of the lipo.

When the garment came off, I found out I needed to wear a fresh one another couple of weeks, and then longer. I also had to avoid sitting down for several more weeks and couldn’t wear tight clothes. I do not understand how other people have lipo, let alone a butt job, and immediately go about their business, but I sure could not. Unemployed, I was in my house for a month save eventual unsteady trips to the grocery store, usually either lying on my side or flat on my stomach, since lying on my back might squish my new ass down too much.

Then it was all over. I was back to wearing normal clothing, I had my strength back, I could go for a run and it didn’t give me an alarming tingling feeling all over front and back, and I could sit down properly after a period of having to sit on my thighs.

Just like all those famous people, I was now a person who had had plastic surgery. I still am. It’s an abstract feeling, because my instinct is to make fun of me for it. The important question is: Was it good for me? Am I glad I spent the thousands of dollars?

Yes and no. My new ass turned out to have been very swollen when it had its first photo shoot, so it’s gone down a lot. I’m told I can expect to retain about 60% of the new volume after two years. I’m embarrassed to tell people I had surgery only because I am not exactly Rob Kardashian back there, but if I’m being honest, I have to admit that when the clothes come off, my new butt is definitely better than my old one. And it’s all me, just me rearranged, like a puzzle closer to being solved. I just wish it looked half as good in clothes.

My mid-section is another story. Moments before surgery, the doctor had warned that my weight loss meant I’d have some “extra skin.” It was too late for me to dwell on that, but once the compression garment came off, while I was pretty darn happy with my less bumpy back and my overall shrinkage, the lower part of my gut was still puffed out. It still is. It doesn’t look like loose skin so much as it looks like I’m smuggling two handfuls of marbles; the material inside is some kind of fat netting that isn’t going anywhere, unless I opt to return and let the doctor slice it off and sew me up, during a modified tummy tuck. More surgery, more recovery, more drainage, and—as with all tummy tucks—I’d have a scar from hip to hip. But I’d have no gut.

Since my surgery, I’ve gone back to exercising, but have also gone back to eating. You would think that much money and effort would motivate you to go vegan and take up yoga, but that isn’t always the case. I’m healthier than I was before, my body does photograph thinner in pictures, but I’m still not movie-star perfect. I’m better, just not the best. And I probably never will be.

Having plastic surgery helped make me more resolved than ever to have unrealistic expectations. You’ll never get anywhere suppressing your fantasies.