SELF MADE MAN

BY

JAY WOELFEL

    I’m fat.  I’m a blubbery, fucking hog.  On the rare occasion when I can bear to look at my naked body in the mirror, I spare myself no abuse.  In some areas, the fat is just padding, but in others, it has completely changed the shape of my body.  Great globular folds of it literally overhang my stomach and knees, my elbows and my chest.  I have fat man breasts.

    I used to be quite hairy, even for a man, but I went out got a home wax kit and tried to remove all the hair I could.  It was painful stretching and ripping the hair from the blubber, but I felt better afterwards and I guess maybe that’s what gave me the confidence to go out and try to pick up a girl.  

    I’m at her apartment right now, naked in front of her mirror; she’s naked in her bed waiting for me.

    “I like big men,” she’d whispered drunkenly in my ear.       

   That was all I needed to know, so less than an hour later here we were, ready to do it.  I excused myself so I could take off my corset.  I just have to wait in here for a bit until the elastic marks ease up.  God, I hate looking in the mirror.  I usually shut the lights off in the bathroom when I get out of the shower and comb my hair in semi-darkness so I can have something like a good opinion of myself when I go off to work.  But here I am waiting and like an idiot I can’t resist looking at myself in the mirror. 

    The first thing I notice is my erection.  It sticks straight out, doesn’t look as big as it would if I was thinner, but it’s still there, ready.

    Then I start to check out the rest of my body, like I said I’d done the home wax thing and wanted to see my body without all that patchy fuzz.  Even though I’m used to my body, what I saw horrified me.  The white blubber, the rolls of colorless fat and the chunky cheesy areas under the arms and between my ass and legs�my arousal vanished.

    She was out there, wanting me, and I was in here wanting to die.

    “Hey lover, you alright in there?”

    “Sure, be right out.”  My voice cracked with embarrassment.

    I wanted it, I wanted her, I was freaking out for no reason, she liked big men, just calm down, keep the lights off, she’d probably like that anyway, do it and then get home and go on a diet tomorrow.   That’s what I told myself as I stood there trying to look at parts of my body that didn’t disgust me.  That’s when I turned around and saw it. 

    The final insult.  

    There was what looked like a pimple on my ass.  I sat up on the counter and twisted around to look at the offending thing.   I squeezed it tentatively.  It wasn’t a pimple.  It was some kind of a mole or something.   It didn’t seem to hurt when I pinched it; maybe I could just snip it off.   I rummaged around in her drawers and found a very sharp pair of scissors.  Leaning against the counter and watching my reflection in the mirror, I gingerly pressed the scissors together on each side of the fleshly bump.

     “Hey there, come out here and see me?”  She sounded excited, it gave me the courage to go on.

    “Be right there, hope you’re ready for me.”  I squeezed the scissors harder but still didn’t feel anything.  So I dug in.  Ah, there it is.  Cold steel slicing cleanly into my flesh then pain. 

    I twitched and let go of the scissors, but they clung to the wart, imbedded. I watched as a big bubble of blood formed, popped and streamed down my ass onto the counter.

    I had to finish what I had started.  I grabbed the scissors and with one violent motion, brought the handles together.   There was a loud crunching sound.  Then I passed out.

* * * *

            I guess she heard me fall to the floor.  She had white rugs and towels so I bet it was a big mess.  I don’t remember anything.  I woke up in the hospital.   I hate hospitals.  Don’t have insurance.  Don’t want any.  Couldn’t afford it, too overweight to get it.  So I just walked out when nobody was looking. 

I would have called her or gone to her place to apologize or something, but I couldn’t, and didn’t want to, remember her name, where she lived, or anything like that.

One day in the shower, the scab washed off.  I felt around back there and the offensive wart was gone.  Bizarre.  My home hack-job worked.  Sure it was a little pink circle for a few days after that and if you rubbed your finger over the spot you might feel a slight roughness to the skin, but I had actually made myself look better.   That was something I couldn’t ever remember doing.

            Diets never worked for me. They were too hard to stick to and I never saw results.  But I’d been obsessed with my weight since puberty.  I remember that a nutritionist had once told me that you never really lose fat cells.  Even when you diet, they just shrink down and lay dormant, waiting to be fed and built back up again.   That’s why radical fat removal like liposuction works.

            Those late night liposuction infomercials fascinated me.  I know some people find it gross, but I just marveled at the way the grayish white fat was siphoned out of your insides.  But I never really considered it as an option; no money, no insurance and I was afraid that I would be turned away because I was too fat.  They would laugh at me�

    But if I could do it myself�

    Maybe that’s what that awful incident in the bathroom had taught me.  Maybe I could improve myself all by myself.  

            When I’m not working, a computer job for an insurance company, I’m usually home watching TV and eating.   So I stayed up late, channel-surfed a little and sure enough, found a liposuction infomercial.  I taped it and watched it over and over.

            Then I went to a fancy kitchen store and bought a long handled fork-like scraper and a really sharp thin knife.  I heard somebody giggling because I was spending lots of money on stuff to make food.  I pretended I was too dumb to know they were laughing at me.  You see if you’re fat, people think you’re stupid.   Maybe for the first time I would have the last laugh.  If it worked�

            The fattest part of my body was my stomach so I figured I’d start there.  I’d seen on the infomercials that there wasn’t really all that much blood as long as you didn’t cut into any muscles or blood vessels.   My gut was so huge that I knew there wasn’t any danger of doing anything like that.

    I heated the instruments in a bowl of warm sterile water.   I swabbed the area I with alcohol and was ready to begin.

    I’ve cut myself shaving lots of times and only occasionally does it really hurt.  Thing with shaving is it happens fast and the blade is sharp.  That night in her bathroom, the scissors�I wasn’t fast and they weren’t sharp enough.

    So here goes.  I touched the sharp knife to my flab, took a deep breath and quickly pulled upwards an inch or so.    

    It hurt.  It bled.  But I didn’t pass out or anything and the pain wasn’t that bad once the blood started coming out.   I dabbed the blood away with some Kleenex so I could see my �incision.�   There wasn’t one.  Just a nasty scratch.  I hadn’t gone deep enough to penetrate the skin.

    I was frustrated.  Angrily, I took the same knife and this time shoved it into the surface scratch.  The pain was real bad.  But I was still determined so I left the knife in there.  I could tell the knife needed to go in farther, so I gave another push.

    I closed my eyes and let myself get used to the pain.   Tears ran out of my closed lids and I could see spots of light.  But it passed.  I looked down at my operation.

    The knife was in.   I held it down flat to my stomach and could see the submerged blade pushing up on the surface.   It was kind of mesmerizing in a way.  Surreal.  You don’t ever think you’d see such a thing.   It was awful in so many ways, but somehow it was beautiful at the same time.   I was practically drooling to scrape the fat from inside the wound.

    But I didn’t want to maim myself.  I needed to make the incision long enough that I wouldn’t tear the edges when I started scrapping the fat out from inside.   So, while holding the knife flat, I pulled with a sawing motion upward to make the incision longer.

    More blood came, but the knife was warm inside my body now so it wasn’t so bad.  A few moments later it was done.  I slid the knife out, held some more Kleenex to the opening for a few moments and was ready to keep going.

    I took the little scrapper thing, I guess it was supposed to be a fork thing for shrimp or something, and pushed it into the open wound.  I had to stop when the pain was too bad, but I realized that as long as the areas I worked on weren’t beyond the width of the initial cut it was manageable.   I worked the little fork in there and then pulled it back out, while pushing down on the handle so the little teeth would drag against the fat under the skin.

    At one point, I pressed too hard.  I must have been dragging against the backside of my skin.  I pulled hard and fast to get the thing out of my body.   I didn’t pass out completely, but I did fall over and I couldn’t see for what seemed like a couple seconds, but it could have been a minute or so before I got up again to see what good or damage I had done.  There was too much blood to really see.   I poured peroxide over the area and when the bubbling subsided, I saw a piece of baloney-like fat sticking up from the incision I had made.

    As disgusting as the outsides of a fat person look, the actual raw fat is far worse, more contemptible.  I had a very sharp pair of scissors nearby and I almost cut off the offensive thing, but I realized that would be stupid.  I needed to pull it and more of the fat attached to it out.  I didn’t really have a tool for pulling so I used my fingers.   Thumb and index�   As I pulled, the skin underneath kind of bulged up; a little more came out, and then, with a small tearing sound, the protruding bit was in my bloody fingers.  Revolting as it was, I couldn’t help admiring it, rolling it around in my hand.  I began kneading it, and closing my fist on it over and over, until the blob broke into smaller blobs and then into a kind of greasy wetness.  And that was all that was left of that piece of the enemy.

    I wanted more.  I tried squeezing the opening, foolishly treating it like you would a zit.  Then I took my little silver fork and began poking around inside (I’d seen how violent they were with the suction tubes on those liposuction commercials) with more vigor. There was very little pain really; I could feel the fork chopping up the lard inside me.  It felt a little like cubing up raw chicken.  I was such a giant blob, there was no danger of cutting into my stomach and the fat itself didn’t have nerve endings or blood vessels.  I was feeling pretty good.

    It did hurt, however, when I used the fork to drag the stuff out of me; I hadn’t really thought that part out very well.  So I’d prod and squeeze around the area where I’d been working and the chopped up stuff would kind of ooze up and dribble out of me.  It finally started to ache a bit and my neck was stiff from leaning over and with such intensity for so long.  I looked up at the clock.  It was four in the morning; I had to be to work at 9am.   I washed out the wound. 
There wasn’t much blood although some yellowish fluid seeped out.   I covered the incision, but didn’t stitch it up since I intended to use the same opening again.  I knew better than to take aspirin, since that would thin my blood and I didn’t want to risk bleeding, so I took some Tylenol and cleaned up the bathroom.  

    There on the counter was a pile of the hideous lard I’d extracted, must have been enough there to fill a softball.  I put it on the scales.  It weighed about three pounds.   I flushed it down the toilet like the shit that it was.

    I lay in bed gingerly feeling the area I had worked on.  It felt empty, a loose hollow feeling, rather than the heavy engorged flesh of the rest of my stomach.  It felt good.  I was happy.  It was the easiest three pounds I’d ever lost.

                                                * * * *

    I was kind of out of it at work the next day, but my job was such a no-brainer that I made it through.   The pain, I was learning, came afterward not during.  I ate the rest of the Tylenol and had to buy more on the way home.  Once I got home, I didn’t really feel like eating, so I went back to work on myself.

    It turned out to be a dumb idea to try to keep working on the same area I had the night before.  The seams of the wound had started to knit back together and I realized I’d have a nasty scar. I did have to drain last night’s area before I started fresh in another spot of my gut.  It went faster this time.  I had more than 6 pounds of fat to flush by 4 am.

    I was really sore and cranky the next day at work.  I was in too much pain to wear my corset so people actually asked if I had gained weight.

    But by the next month, one of the girls in the office was actually flirting with me.  It went on for several days before I even noticed, I was so used to being ignored.  She invited me to dinner at her place.  I had to turn her down.  Although I’d gotten very good at my weight loss program, the wound from the first night had gotten infected�nothing to worry about really, just kind of gross for the moment.  I’d have my chances with her again or someone better. I probably shouldn’t get involved with someone at work anyway. I was barely doing a passable job, because of the pain and late nights.    But after a month’s time, I had shed 25 pounds.   I had noticed after the first week that I was losing weight faster than I was flushing it down the can because I was so busy cutting I wasn’t eating.   A fringe benefit I hadn’t counted on.

    I’d just about done all I could do with my gut in about 8 weeks.   It wasn’t constant work, some nights my body hurt so bad I just went to sleep.  I had to sleep on my back which made me snore and that kept me up, but these were minor problems compared to the progress I was making. 

    I started working on my legs.  This was more difficult; I cut myself really badly one time and had to take a few days off of work.  When I could walk again, I took an extra day off to buy new clothes.   I’d dropped from a 42� waist to a 36��I was still kind of pear-shaped since I hadn’t made as much progress on my ass and legs as I would have liked.

    After 9 weeks or so I was really exhausted.  My whole body was a black and blue mess.   If you looked closely, you could see my body shape was sort of distorted.  Some zones were kind of uneven where I’d missed some fat.  But it was a skinny odd shape.  I was confident.  The scarring was hardly noticeable, especially when I let some of my hair grow back.   Of course it took another couple weeks for the skin to heal and contract so that the outer surface around the incision wasn’t so flabby.

    Although still in pain once in a while, I was happy, happier than I could ever remember being.  I could look at myself in the mirror now.  I was proud of the work I’d done and interested in the progress of the healing.   And more than that�  

    Well, no, I don’t want to say.   Well why not?  The whole thing was exciting.  Arousing.  I don’t mean that I got aroused by the gouging and scrapping, but by watching myself in the mirror, seeing myself thin down� yes I admit, watching the actual process was erotic in a way.   And yeah I did get aroused doing it one time, well a couple of times�

    I was actually becoming a good-looking man.   I think it was Michelangelo who was asked how he carved his famous naked figure of David from blocks of stone.   He said it’s easy.  I just carve away everything that doesn’t look like David.   That’s exactly what I was doing.  I was the stone that I was turning into a man.

    But goddamn genes!  My face was still fat.   Not as fat as it had been, but my weight tended to go to my cheeks and jowls just as much as it had my belly and thighs.  I’d need to be more careful with my face.  I got some razor blades, broke them up into tiny pieces and melted them into the handle of an old toothbrush to turn them into tiny scalpels.

    I boned up on plastic surgery techniques watching the tube and saw that they went in either under the jaw or back around the ears to hide the scars.  

    The whole thing was a mess from the start so I don’t really want to go into too much detail.  It was pretty disgusting and even though I was careful, I kind of fucked myself up.   My face got thinner though and I could hide the worst wounds with an �arty� goatee.  

    I promised myself I’d stop around that time.  Maybe I was getting a little obsessed with all this self-improvement stuff.  I was probably getting addicted to painkillers and was bound to get fired if I didn’t stop falling asleep at my desk all the time.  I told everyone I’d been in a car wreck to explain my face.    That gained me sympathy from that same girl at work.  We actually started fooling around one time, but when she started to stroke my crotch, through my pants, I had some flashes of pain�I’d had to scrape fat away from there too, it was still fairly fresh and raw at the time.

    I didn’t encourage her after that.  But I did start going out to bars and women began to notice me.   And why not?   I was actually eating less and eating better.  Not being fat and miserable about it all the time made it easy to eat less and my skin cleared up and I discovered that I was a strong guy�it takes muscle to haul around all that weight after all.  I did start smoking, just seemed like the right thing to do in a hip bar and it relaxed me.

    But I didn’t just hop into bed with every halfway good-looking chick that came up to me.  I’d worked hard to look this way and I became picky, too picky for my own good I suppose, because the ones I wanted still didn’t want me.

    Why?    

    Because although I was thin, I wasn’t when you got right down to it, all that good looking.  I promised myself I’d stop my program, but I never completely stopped.  There was always some bumpy area I felt I could improve on, or area to drain and disinfect.   So it wasn’t like starting all over again when I decided to see what I could do about my face.  Sure I’d screwed up my jaw line some, what do they call it, keloid scarring?  But I could learn from my mistakes.

    I cut along the eyebrow line; I stole some nova cane from my dentist’s office to inject the area first.   I peeled back the eye lip from the top down, cut out the fat and trimmed up the lid so that it would be less puffy before I stitched it back up to my eyebrow.  I did the other eye too; it bled a lot, some of it got into my eye while I was doing it.   But it made a difference.  My eyes looked bigger and I looked younger with my eyes wide open like that.

    I decided my nose was too skinny and kind of crooked.  I had to use both hands and some tapered rods to break and realign it at the same time.   The worst thing about that was the sound it made.  Blood ran down from it into the back of my throat.

    When the bruises and swelling went away, I was practically a new man.  Practically, why not go all the way?  I read about it on-line, went to a sight, saw the pictures.   Couple of thin incisions, then the insertion of a kind of ring like thing and I’d be enough man for any woman.   I don’t want to gross you out so I’ll just say afterwards it felt kind of weird, stretched and tight, but it was impressive to look at.  It worked just fine too.

     I suppose it was almost a year from that fateful night in front of the first girl’s mirror when I found myself in front of another girl’s mirror.  This girl was far hotter than that one had been.  I’d been interested in her friend at first, but her friend had had her boobs done�you can tell, you can always tell, so I went for this one instead.  That’s right now I was in the position of being able to choose one woman over another.  It’d been a long time coming, this moment, but I knew it would all be worth it. You get used to your own mirror, the way it’s lit, and the distance you are from it.   You look completely different in someone else’s mirror than you do in your own.  I should have realized that way back then, but I was a different person then.  This was a full-length mirror, I didn’t have one of those.   So how did I look?

    I squinted.  There I was, thin, muscular, Roman nose, large striking eyes, tight face.  My enlarged organ was erect and ready too.

    Then I stopped squinting and really saw myself.  Ugly scars and broken blood vessels covered my body.  My skin hung in loose folds in areas I had not trimmed up and sewn shut.  And worst off all was my broken looking, now flaccid penis.

    I actually broke out into tears.  She heard my wretched sobs even from the next room.

    �Are you all right in there, lover?� came the muffled voice.

    I turned on the water to cover the sounds of my misery and got the idea to blow a fuse and escape in the dark.  I splashed some of the water up into a light socket.  Blew the fuse right away.  I told her I’d go fix it; I just kept going and never came back.    

* * * *

    But this is a happy story.   It took me awhile to come to grips with that.  Sure I’m not actually having sex with anyone; maybe there’d be some kinky types into scarification who’d be into me, but they aren’t really for me.  And I wasn’t having sex when I was a fat fuck, so what am I missing?

    I’m not missing anything.   I’m in bars most every night, a drink in one hand and a stylish cigarillo in the other.   My pants are just a bit too tight, but only in the right places�  I can keep myself looking just right�don’t have to wait for scars to heal since I have no intention of anyone actually seeing me naked.   I’m the perfect image, from a safe distance, of what I want to be.   Of course looks aren’t everything, but I’ve practiced and polished my flirting skills to shine diamond bright.

    You’ve seen me; I’m that handsome enigma always on the same stool.  You hear I’m great in bed, but you’ve never met anyone who convincingly says they’ve actually slept with me.  I’m funny and intelligent, always on the make, but attractively shy�

    When it comes right down to it, I’ll admit I don’t know what any of you really think about me.   But I do know one thing.  

    You don’t know what you’re missing.

THE END

By Jay Woelfel

February 19, 2001

November 4, 2000