Fatty, by Jenny Bahn

This is what it’s like.

I meet him while outside of a booming club, the night after I fly into New York City on the private plane of a corporate magnate.  I am only nineteen – young enough that I allow rich old men to fly me across the country without questioning their motives.

You’d be amazed the things that will happen to you if you simply allow them to.

The man in question I will call Fatty.  Fatty is borderline obese.  In fact, he is so big that it is likely nothing else fits him save for the XXL blue polo shirt he is currently wearing – it’s the same kind I used to wear over khakis from the Gap as dictated by my Catholic school dress code.  The difference is that I had to wear them because of rules and regulations; he has to wear them because nothing short of a two-person tent will cover his robust folds adequately.  He is categorically repulsive.

Fatty hands me a card and tells me that he is a manager back in Los Angeles.  He drops some names that I do not know and follows each with what projects said names are working on.  I neither recognize the titles nor hear about them ever again.  I thank him.  And, contrary to my better judgment, I send him an email the next morning.

Make me rich.  Make me famous.

Fatty is in NY for another few days and he invites me to join some friends and him for lunch.  I agree.  I arrive at a nice restaurant on Union Square.  It’s the type of place that serves oysters and expensive fish with brushed butter and parsley flakes.  I am not as uncomfortable as I should be, but that is because I don’t know any better.  If you are smart enough, you grow out of situations like this.  And when that happens, you avoid them like the plague.

But the numbing combination of youthful naivete and a hunger for social climbing makes it okay to hang out with these people even though they sort of make my skin crawl.

There are three men at the table: Fatty, a flamboyant model booker, and a man we’ll call Credit Card.  Credit Card is another billionaire, similar in rank to the billionaire I hitched a ride across the country with.  The remaining bodies are female and exceptionally thin and beautiful.  Models.  The girls know each other, most likely because they eat around the same troughs often enough.  These are the gold diggers, the girls looking to supplement incomes that will inevitably wane.  But I don’t know this yet.  I am nineteen and think that modeling is the most amazing job in the world.  I look at these girls and assume they are all successful, all raking in the easy money.  Later I discover it’s precisely the opposite: these girls are here because they’re not making the cash.  The girls making the cash don’t have to subject themselves to this.

The food comes and goes.  Oysters, grilled salmon, sparkling water, flat water.  A bill arrives.  Credit Card pays.  He pays for the girls.  He pays for the less successful men.  Everyone mutters their appreciation, but he still owns us.  That fact is inescapable.

We get in a black stretch limo already waiting for us outside.  Credit Card sits deep in the back, looking like Stanley Tucci in Lovely Bones — khaki jacket and 1970s pedophile glasses, only fatter and older and with less hair.  Fatty manages to get through the limo door, although I am unsure of the actual mechanics of the undertaking.  The girls sit in between the wads of fat, more than they will ever have on their bodies combined.  They laugh and giggle and I try to remember if they were having Bellinis at lunch or not.  I would imagine they were.

Fatty tells me we are going shopping in SoHo.  I am still in college and working at a restaurant making $10 an hour.  As a rule, shopping isn’t that fun for me because what I want isn’t what I can afford.  But today, this will not end up being a problem.  In the company of this lonely billionaire and his gigantic sidekick, pretty girls don’t pay for things.

The limo drives down Broadway, dropping us off in front of Scoop, a store I wish would have supplied my entire high school wardrobe.  The girls creep in like vultures, diving towards the racks.  They know the drill.  I stay behind, not touching anything or approaching any item with marked interest.

Fatty pushes me from behind.  “Go pick something out,” he says, “Credit Card is going to treat you girls.”  This makes me uncomfortable; I don’t like taking advantage of people.  I am too young to realize that these men are already taking advantage of me, of my youth, of my beauty, of the possibility that I may one day break down and fuck one of them.  I lamely tell him that I will look for something, continuing to noncommittally cast a glazed look over the racks of pricey clothing.

The girls finish trying on their gifts and head to the check out counter where Credit Card is standing.  His wallet is out and he looks like an inattentive grandfather hoping to make up for his failings by buying his bevy of grandchildren material goods.  I’m sorry I’m a disgusting person.  I am sorry I am alone and cannot find real happiness.  Please let me buy you these things.  Please be my whores. There is still nothing in my hands when Fatty pushes me again.  “Find something,” he demands with a smile.

Not wanting to upset anyone, I frantically grab the first thing I can find – a gray cashmere V neck sweater with baby pink and baby blue argyle triangles on it.  I look at the price tag: $230.  Jesus Christ.  Fatty pushes again and the girl at the register rings up my purchase.  And I am thusly purchased, in turn.  I thank Credit Card awkwardly: it is one of the only times I have spoken to him the entire two hours that I have known him.  I never wear this sweater.  Not even once.

This is what it’s like.

The next day I get back on the corporate magnate’s private plane, headed west to LA.  Someone suggests I ride in front with the pilots during takeoff to see what it is like.  “Really?” I ask, like a kid who gets his first opportunity to sit on Santa’s lap at the local shopping mall.  The pilots laugh at me, me and my newness to the world of private planes and the lawlessness that comes with insane amounts of money.

I strap myself into the jump seat, just behind the two bucket seats holding two pilots and the confusing glow of the control panel.  Levers, red buttons, life and death.  Black sky stands in front of us like the face of a giant wave.  The plane moves, the plane accelerates, and we are off.  The nose of the plane moves and the sky goes nowhere.  The endlessness becomes greater the deeper we dive into it.  I giggle and shriek and again the pilots are humored by my innocence.  Just another nineteen-year-old.  Just another private plane.

This is what it’s like.

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