Chuck Palahniuk - Mister Elegant

Don’t ask how I know this, but the next time you think you’re fat, there’s a whole lot worse way you can look.

Something to picture, when you’re at the gym counting stomach crunches or hanging knee raises to flatten your ab muscles, just know that some people have a whole other person growing out of that spot on their body. That fleshy, jiggly area under the bottom of your rib cage, where to you is just a “love handle,” those other people have arms and legs, most of a whole other person hanging over their belt.

Doctors call this an “epigastric parasite.”

Some social workers, they call that extra person a “heteradelphian,” a fancy word for “different sibling.” It means somebody who should’ve been your brother or sister only got born with their head still inside your stomach. That extra person, he’s born with no brain. No heart. He’s just a parasite, and you’re the host.

You couldn’t make this stuff up.

And, please, listen. If I’m telling you this and you do have another person growing out from underneath your arm right now, please don’t get all bent out of shape.

The only reason I’m telling you is I kind of used to have one, too.

And trust me, what’s worlds worse than some jiggling subcutaneous fat is you popping out some heartless, brainless stranger. Sometimes that happens even years and years after you’re already born.

Don’t ask how I know this either, but after you’ve done a hundred million stomach crunches, when you apply to be one of those Chippendales-type sexy dancers — just to get hired as a buff, naked exotic dancer — they ask you: “… do you suffer from epileptic seizures?”

The question’s on the form they give you at the doctor’s office for the physical exam right after your audition. The nurse hands you a clipboard full of forms and a pen and a Dixie cup she wants filled with piss. And the dance company, it’s not even the real Chippendales, but you ask any has-been, washed-up male exotic dancer what troupe he was with, and just to shortcut a lot of explaining, he’ll tell you Chippendales.

We all recognize those copyrighted white paper cuffs and the black bow tie.

Really, my audition was for the Savage Knights. That’s “Knights” with a capital K. The Savage Knights are your Chippendales type of all-male, high-energy, feel-good touring exotic-dance company that caters to a ladies’ audience. Their home office ran this ad in the newspaper for auditions. In the sports section, across the top, their ad said: “Live Your Fantasy.”

In the banquet room of the airport Holiday Inn, on that Sunday afternoon, my smile on my face was a lie. My tan was a lie. So was my hair being blonde. On the job application, when I wrote 185 pounds, that was a lie. Under eye color, I wrote the color of my contact lenses. During the sit-down part of the interview, I said I wanted to be a Savage Knight because I really liked to travel to interesting places and meet new people.

The truth was, really I just wanted a career where every night, hundreds of drunk young virgins, they would stuff cash money into my underpants with their teeth.

For my age, I lied away three years and wrote down 24.

Every one of my capped teeth, it was a shiny white lie.

I buzzed off my brown pubic hair, and the agent for Savage Knights said they had an opening for another Mister Elegant. At any moment, she told me, 16 different companies of Savage Knights are crisscrossing the world, meeting the male stripper needs of global billions. Each troupe includes a fireman, a police officer, a soldier, a construction worker in a yellow hardhat. Like a roving high school Career Day. Plus Mister Elegant, who makes his entrance in a breakaway tuxedo and gives roses to all the women at the ringside tables. All smooth and cosmopolitan. A cool James Bond.

Troupe 11, their last Mister Elegant had turned gun-shy and bailed after some coked-up birthday girl in Fairbanks yanked him a torsioned testicle.

That’s when my own parasite started coming out.

In that Holiday Inn ballroom, I looked like nothing I’d ever seen in my bathroom mirror. Tanned and baby-oiled. Blond and smiling.

And the agent shook my oily hand, saying, “Good.” She said, “From now on, you’ll be Mister Elegant…”

The emergence of my new heartless, brainless different sibling.

Life is nothing if not a slippery slope.

What was true was, I figured if I made a relentless and ongoing effort I could pass for 24, forever.

For my dance part of my audition, the song “Bodyrock” by the artist Moby gives you your best 3:36 grabber. Call my taste a little retro, but you start with a song folks like and you’ve halfway won the game. Plus the dropout toward the end, when the track cuts to just lyrics, that gives you your perfect window to nail some stunt work. Inside that frame, I pegged a standing flip, dropped to splits, and recovered with a kip-up. After all my tanning and shaving and smiling, the agent for Savage Knights, she gave me a sheet of paper printed with directions to a clinic. The nurse gave me a cup for piss. And the forms asked:

“Do you have a history of epileptic seizures?”

So after all that bullshit, it was easy to check the little box marked NO.

I just made sure and took my Clonazepam.

If you’ve seen the video people uploaded on the Internet, of the naked muscleman flopping like a fish, surrounded by women holding Rum Hurricanes and Blue Hawaiis, his pink balls popped out one side of his black G-string and slapping in a puddle of his own piss, then you know what kind of mistake that last lie turned out to be.

Everybody in the world’s seen that video.

Little bastard teenage kids, now they even do a dance they call the Mister Elegant where they keel over in the middle of the dance floor and wiggle like hyperactive spastics being electrified. Little shitheads.

People imagine it’s so easy to be a Chippendales-type, high-energy exotic dancer. Male people, they imagine your worst problem is not sprouting a woodie.

Some other questions on that same medical examination form, they ask you: “Do you suffer from stress-related incontinence?”

And, “Have you ever had an episode of narcolepsy?”

Just from those questions, I should’ve seen where this was headed. Lawyers don’t just pull those questions out of a hat. Any big dance company from your Bolshoi Ballet to Chippendales, they’ve mapped out their doomsday scenario. Maybe smack in the middle of Swan Lake, some swan pitching a fit center stage, her eyes rolled up to only show the whites, drool gushering out from her long, yellow beak. Sweating. Pissing her lovely white feathers.

In the Savage Knights training brochure, they teach you to watch for anybody in the audience with a pad and pencil taking notes. Some deal called ASCAP — stands for American Society of Composers and Something-Something — if they catch you dancing to a song and not paying a royalty, they’ll sue you and Savage Knights. Besides them, every state sends liquor-commission spies to fine you for touching a patron inappropriately. Even just wearing white paper cuffs and a black bow tie, you risk a cease-and-desist letter from the real Chippendales for copyright infringement.

Don’t even ask me about managing body hair.

Really, the worst part of this job is paying to buy people a new Tequila Sunrise after you boogie off a pubic hair. Just a single good hip check can mean you buying the front two rows a fresh round of banana daiquiris.

Live Your Fantasy… Again, you couldn’t make this stuff up.

Getting a drunk anybody to put money in your pants with their teeth, it’s worlds harder than it sounds. So is staying 24 years old.

One minute you’re shaking your bag in the face of some bachelorette so shitfaced on Long Island Iced Teas you can smell your pube stubble curl from her lit cigarette. Her ugly bridesmaid is sticking a dollar bill up your ass with her tongue, and her mother’s shooting video. That’s how drunk virgins behave. Police officers or firemen — I mean real ones — they complain about job stress. They don’t know real stress. Dancers I worked with, they used to soak their bag in salt water, the way a boxer will pickle his face to tough it up before a big fight. Every bit of your free time, you spend pickling your balls and managing body hair.