The Boy And The Blob: Gay Sorcery and The Capture of The Ultimate Prize

Years ago, while I was living in Austin, I was working on a project that required some custom sewn fabrics. I knew nothing about the topic, so I set about finding local seamstresses and seamsters to educate me and help me decide on a direction for my plans.

After hitting a few dead ends, I found an off the beaten trail sort of place in Southeast Austin that was willing to spare some time to go over my project and give me a viability assessment.

I parked in a dingy mini mall lot with the vintage neon lights you only still find in Texas, flickering in that ominous way film noir movies pull off so well. It was after hours, and the only place still open was the fabrics place.

I entered the small, makeshift office, and beyond the rows of clothing and costumes, there was barely anything else to the interior other than a mirror, a second hand computer table, and an old-timey monitor glaring back at the proprietor in a glowy green counterpoint to the sickly orange neon without.

The middle aged man turned away from the machine and greeted me with a smile as I walked in. Despite myself, my eyes widened at the sight with what I now realize was uncontrollable horror.

To say that this man was blobular would be to overly flatter his physique. His rolls upon rolls were wedged into a swiveling office chair such that you’d think special machinery would be needed to extract him from it.

People that large don’t (or can’t) really exist outside of Texas. I think the vast expanse of land and air here demand the swelling of the inhabitants, whether in terms of size or just self-regard, the way dissolved particles expand to fill the liquid they inhabit. But even by Texas standards, this man was enormous, spilling almost everywhere the chair would allow.

And beyond the man’s size, it was his formlessness that was really striking. The manner in which the layers of lipids seeped into every nook and cranny of the container in which they found themselves and then hardened into a crust - such that they might describe a yet-to-be discovered Newtonian Solid formed of his plasmic flesh - almost defied belief.

And to cap it all off, he was ugly. Like really ugly. With a big, bulbous, bald head, unkempt speckle-grey stubble, and chins for miles, he was a human abomination, truly.

When he spoke, it was sinister, sly, and full of unnecessary innuendo. Clearly gay, his lisping was serpent like, as if he were trying to worm his way into your mind and tease out any sort of uncomfortable reaction he could, whether it be shock, disgust, or arousal. Being around him was eerily transportive, but not in any sort of way one should welcome.

His skin glistened in what appeared to be layers of sticky, syrupy sweat, most likely extruded, then frozen by the air conditioner, then reseeded again with the next round over the eternity that he sat there. The Big Gulp to epidermis pipeline seemed to be running efficiently and at full tilt.

He was melded into his seat and would likely need some sort of heavy machinery to extract him from his impressively stoic roller-throne, suffering silently under the load that it was clearly not designed to withstand.

How would he make trips to the restroom? The mind positively boggled. And since the man could obviously do no physical work nor move from his perch, in order for his fabric business to function, he needed help.

The help came in the form of an early 30s something buck. Though past his prime, to call this man an Adonis would still not be an overstatement. He was easily 6’4”, naturally muscular, athletic with flowing blond hair and a strong jaw that made him look like the jock we’re supposed to hate in all the nerdy revenge fantasy movies from the 80s. Unlike the blob, he was a specimen of human genetic perfection of which we might all be jealous.

But what was immediately striking about this young man was his extraordinary subservience. He scurried about the office like an enormous, well built rodent, fetching items from the back, obsessively checking on samples, and anxiously yet fecklessly essaying to tidy things along the way. He yes-sirred and no-sirred the blobular man with an appalling servility, and his overall bearing had the demeanor of a broken house boy, doing his master’s constant bidding. It was weird.

He occasionally looked up at me, head bowed, eyes furtive, making the most feeble attempts to appear butch (“Hey bro,” “Ok dude,” “Yeah man”) which betrayed that despite being unable to help it, he was supremely uncomfortable with his station in life and the power the blob seemed to wield over him.

After sizing up the boy, I looked back at the blob and his horrific disfigurement. In catching my gaze, he did not even try to conceal what was not a devilish, but rather a purely evil grin, which, along with a knowing head nod (discernible only by small indentations in the chin fat and likely his only exercise of the day), said unmistakably: “Yeah, I’m tapping that.”

While the boy was distracted, dutifully but awkwardly running this errand or that, the blob told stories of “we” and “us” and their adventures together going back for years. When the boy occasionally overheard, it visibly compounded his shame and self-loathing knowing that his vain attempts to convince me that he was not a kept man were being undermined at every turn by the insidious monster’s preening. When the blob disclosed that they were cohabitating in the little office, the final nail was driven in, and there was no escaping the fact that he was completely utterly, and unwillingly this man’s property.

I stood there for about a half an hour conducting business, asking questions about my project, and taking it all in as a kind of behind closed doors cultural vignette to which most people are not privy. No doubt there are all kinds of atrocities in the back rooms of casting studios, music studios, and other closed environments, many of which have been reported lately. But in none that I can think of is the victim so clearly *not* disempowered in the manner of a young starlet or violinist looking for a break.

Was the blob a physical match for the boy? Not in any conceivable way. Outrunning him wouldn’t take more than a brisk andante for the 1/8 of a mile it would take for the pursuing blob to fatigue and likely collapse. Was there some sort of star-level opportunity being lorded over the child’s head? Not based on the dismal studio office they were living out of. What then?

It is times like this - and if you were there, you would think the same thing - that one starts to believe in sorcery. The boy was completely incapable of freeing himself from a spell that the blob had cast over him.

There is no other reasonable explanation.

In the blob’s mien, you could see something dark, mysterious, and yes, even malicious at work. It is often the case that those with the least physical strength or stature, pursue the dark and magickal arts to find power in the invisible world where they lack it in the visible. But I have never seen it done as effectively as this. The capture of the young prize, mind, body, and soul by the most unlikely creature was simply stunning. That the boy visibly hated everything about the situation and yet stuck with it despite what could easily have been a life of luxury reserved for “the beautiful people” made it all the more impressive, and sad at the same time.

Now to be clear, there is a well known and time honored tradition of Butch/femme pairings in the lesbian world and Bear/twink pairings in the gay world. And it is not uncommon at all to see similar pairings in the “het” world of burly manly-men paired with delicate, miniature beauties.

In many of these instances, there is a massive (and occasionally nauseating) aesthetic disparity between the two. But the differential in these cases only serves to amplify the contrast between them, which magnifies the polarity, and with it, the attraction. And in general, this sort of arrangement works quite well for both parties.

But that is not this.

In such traditional cases, the “femme” in the arrangement delights in their positions (as it were). They are grateful for their role in the pairing and fulfill it with a true pride of purpose. And even if their outward appearance can tend towards the sheepish, they will occasionally flaunt their status as the prized “possession” of someone they love and admire.

But in the case of our not-quite protagonist, this boy took no such delight, displayed none of the competence in servility that “subs” traditionally exhibit, and was visibly distraught at all times. It was as if he were a closeted straight man, bumblingly and desperately trying to fit into the cage designed for him by the blob, yet at the same time chafing and fruitlessly yearning to break free.

It was a puzzle.

I’m not sure what the right commentary is here. Some would take heart that despite whatever limitations you may have in life, you really can get what you want. A young stud at your beck and call. Score one for the blobs! But others would be perturbed that the natural order of things is not being obeyed, and that, at least in the Shakespearean or Sophoclean sense, some sort of fearful divine reckoning would soon play out to restore balance in the universe. And better to not be around for that, lest the thunderbolt destroy your sewing machine. I’m not really sure where I come down on this, and in any case, the moral is probably in the eye of the beholder.

In the end, my business dealings with the blob ended after I politely ignored a blundering and unsubtle sexual advance over email, and he retreated back into his world forever. Perhaps he didn’t have as much game as I gave him credit for, but that is probably for the best. I occasionally wonder if the boy ever managed to free himself from the clutches of the oversized, amorphous golum, and how long it would take him to wrest back his dignity, self-respect, and mission in life after so many years of servitude.

In my travels, I often seek out the nooks and crannies that time has left behind and delight when anachronisms, holdovers, hermits, and recalcitrant misfits enter my world to remind me that, at least for now, not everyone will go willingly into that standardized technological goodnight utopia promised to us by modern day transhumanist redemption peddlers. Not everyone has seen all the TV shows that gave them pre-fab character choices to graft their souls onto, and not everyone has drunk the Kool Aid (though the blob almost certainly had a helping or two) of global homogenization.

Still though, some people fit in the cracks less comfortably than others, and it is hard to accept that holding out for your own ill-fitting micro world is always the moral better to being swept up into the prefab mainstream.

It’s hard to say.

Perhaps the boy found his way out of the whirlpool, or perhaps he was sucked all the way under. I would never find out. For me, The Boy and The Blob would live forever in their own private ever-looping conceit, shuffling and commanding, going nowhere forever like the Olympian Gods on high. And for my selfish imagination, that is exactly where I want them to stay.