Saturday, June 21, 2008

Carnicería

Sometimes the most magical of places appear the most mundane. Sometimes instead of finding them in far away exotic places, you find them right under your nose.
So it was with the carnicería in the strip mall near Jonah’s gym. Jonah wouldn’t even have gone there if he hadn’t been hungry after a long butt-busting leg workout and hadn’t realized he had nothing in the refrigerator had home.
Jonah didn’t know what to expect inside the store. He didn’t speak Spanish, and he didn’t have the faintest idea what kind of meat an ethnic meat market sold.
Hearing the butcher greet him in unaccented English as he walked in the front door was his first surprise. The next one came has he looked up and across the counter at the biggest man he had ever seen in person in his whole life. Jonah had been working out three years, since his last year of college, at a serious bodybuilding gym, but no one he’d seen there, including some of the top rank amateurs who occasionally passed through town, came close to the size of the man behind the counter. Dressed in a white apron over an obscenely tight t-shirt, every mound, ripple and ridge of his shoulder, arm and chest muscles could be seen bouncing as he moved.
Jonah’s mouth dropped at the sight of him, and it took a few minutes before he snapped out of it. By then his cock was rock hard and tenting the front of his gym pants. The butcher was staring, but smiling. Jonah blushed.
“What can I get you?” the butcher asked.
“W-w-what’s fresh?” Jonah responded.
“Everything. We cut all our own meat here in the store. And it’s all the highest quality, tender, and with all the fat trimmed. You work out?”
Jonah was flattered a guy that big even noticed his muscles. He’d put on some size since he started lifting, but he was barely over two hundred pounds even though he was almost six feet tall. “Yes. Yes, I do.”
“How about a nice big, lean steak, then? How about if I wrap up several big cuts for you. There’s no better meat than what I sell here when you’re trying to pack on muscle. Chicken may be lower in fat, but this has more muscle building nutrients.” The butcher flexed an arm and up popped a biceps head almost as big as Jonah’s head, with a pair of pencil-sized veins snaking on either side of it. “I eat it two or three times a day, myself.”
Jonah didn’t make much money, and since it was towards the end of the month, he didn’t have much cash, but the way that mountain of muscle was flirting with him, Jonah just didn’t have the will to say no. As he watched passively, the butcher filled a big paper bag with several different cuts of meat, weighing each one, wrapping it in brown paper and marking it with a black magic marker.
The total was surprisingly low, considering everything he put in the bag, but it cleaned out Jonah’s wallet nonetheless. As he took Jonah’s money, the butcher held out a beefy paw and introduced himself. “Miguel,” he said with a broad smile that sent blood rushing to Jonah’s groin all over again.
As Jonah walked out he was sorry he’d bought so much, not just because he couldn’t afford it. He was sorry he wouldn’t have an excuse to come back again soon.
Jonah may have regretted spending money he didn’t have, but he didn’t let it stop him from enjoying the meat. Inspired by the butcher, he started eating meat three times a day – a breakfast steak, a lean hamburger for lunch and prime rib for dinner. It may have just been the placebo effect, but he started lifting heavier at the gym that week. By the following weekend, when he’d finished the last of his bag of meat, he’d added twenty pounds to his bench press and was ten pounds heavier.
It could have just been fat or water weight, but for the first time in months he was putting on size again. So that weekend he went back to the carnicería again after his workout and bought as much meat as he could afford. Miguel was just as friendly as the first time, and even claimed he could tell Jonah had put on size. As he packed up another paper bag, he winked at Jonah and told him he was slipping in a little extra for his new little friend. “You come back again next week,” he said. “You won’t find better meat, and you won’t find friendlier service, either.”
As the weeks went by, Jonah spent more money on food than he’d ever spent before in his whole life, but he couldn’t argue with the results. Every week he was stronger, heavier, and noticeably bigger. His old gym buddies thought he was shooting up and some of them stopped chatting him up between sets, but that was okay, because all of a sudden the bigger guys at the gym were getting friendly with him. Guys he’d lusted after from across the gym floor for years were coming up and shaking his hand, asking his name, and asking him when he’d joined. It was as though he’d been invisible to them the last few years, but now that he was their size, now that he was in their league, they finally saw him. Not that any of them came on to him. No, unfortunately they all seemed to be straight. Their sentences trailed off and their heads spin away the minute some busty fitness chick walked on the floor and Jonah was reminded that even though they treated him like a buddy, he’d never be able to date one of them.
It was all the more reason for Jonah to turn his attention to Miguel, who lavished ever more charm on him as he slid up the size ladder. By the time Jonah tipped the scale at two fifty, Miguel started getting into long conversations with him. There were never other customers in the store on Sunday morning when Jonah shopped, and sometimes Miguel sat Jonah down at one of the small tables near the window and made him an extra thick roast beef sandwich, extra rare, and poured them both a mug of coffee. He smiled and laughed and told Jonah how good it was to spend time with him and how much he looked forward to his visits.
And then one Sunday, as they sat in the sun streaming in the store front window, Miguel put his powerful paw on Jonah’s big, round shoulder. His smile faded. His eyes widened. His lower lip quivered and he leaned close to kiss him.
At that moment the bell attached to the front door rang. Miguel turned quickly away and welcomed the new customer. It took Jonah a moment longer to recover from what he had hoped might be his first intimate moment with the object of his weeks-old crush. When he turned to see who had interrupted them, he was in equal parts jealous and titillated. The gentleman who had entered was nearly the equal of Miguel in size and shape and smiled broadly, first at Miguel, upon whom he must have shared Jonah’s crush, and then at Jonah, whose body, beyond merely budding, had reached the size of a top professional bodybuilder.
Armando apologized for interrupting Miguel’s break from work, but Miguel greeted him as warmly as he greeted Jonah, clasping his meaty forearm and then his shoulder as he shook his hand and stared deeply into his eyes. It was plain that Miguel’s affection was exclusive.
It was also plain that Jonah was not the only man to have discovered the tremendous anabolic effects of the carnicería’s meat. As Jonah watched Miguel fill Armando’s order and stared at the gargantuan muscles that jumped and bunched over Armando’s body at his slightest movement, he wondered how many other men were beneficiaries of the carnicería’s wares. He fantasized about meeting them all, or better yet, spending a few hours in the company of them all at one time. Were they all as friendly toward other men as the two he had met?
That night Jonah’s fantasies of Miguel took a new twist as he imagined him with his other customers, and his customers with each other, tens of them, perhaps hundreds, and diving into a room full of them as the ingénue, the neophyte, but allowing them to initiate him into their companionship.
Jonah had never been particularly focused on his job. Though he had a college degree and a career in his chosen field, he’d had a difficult time transitioning from the relative freedom of college, with long stretches of leisure between lectures, and lots of days of sleeping late, to getting up at dawn every day and working eight to ten hours at a desk without interruption.
As his body grew larger and it became more difficult to keep up with buying bigger suits and shirts, he became more lackadaisical about his appearance. He blatantly violated the company dress code. At first his boss ignored his transgressions, but eventually it became too much for the company to overlook. Jonah’s enormous size, his slovenly dress, and his unwillingness to put in as much time on the job as his peers began to be seen as am unconscionable lack of commitment.
The week that Jonah topped the scales at 260, his boss took him aside and told him they were letting him go. He thanked him for two good years of work, but he told him it was obvious his interests lay outside of his job and urged him to pursue something he enjoyed more, like bodybuilding or training.
Although Jonah was glad to be shed of his boring job, he was also anxious about his finances. He had no savings, several thousand in credit card debt, car payments, a big student load, and his food bill alone was over a thousand a month. Without his pay check he’d never be able to continue eating the way he had. Without eating the carnicería’s unusual meat, he would stop growing, maybe even lose the size he’d gained in the last few weeks.
That weekend he cashed his final paycheck and went into the carnicería. Miguel could tell immediately that something was wrong with him.
“What is the matter my little friend?” he asked sympathetically.
Jonah smiled wanly. Miguel was one of the few men on earth who could still call him his “little friend”. “No great problem, Miguel. It’s just that this week I lost my job, and unfortunately my finances are not as robust as my body.”
Miguel fingered his chin as he looked his friend over. “Perhaps you could help me in the carnicería a few hours each week. I could not afford to pay you much, but I could pay you some of your wages in food.”
Jonah’s heart jumped inside his broad, beefy chest. Working with Miguel? He would have agreed if he’d had to work for free. “I’m afraid I don’t know anything about being a butcher,” Jonah said.
“What is there for you to know? You don’t need to cut the meat. I do that. You only have to weigh it, wrap it, and work the cash register.” Miguel extended his meaty hand. “What do you say?”
Jonah shook it and smiled so wide he thought he would never be able to get rid of his grin.
Miguel came around the counter. “Come here, my little friend.” Miguel wrapped his immense arms around Jonah and hugged him tightly, and as their bodies were pressed tightly against each other, Jonah thought he felt wood in Miguel’s loose pants, great thick and immensely long wood, equal to the man it sprouted from, and in response he grew hard and wet himself.

Where will the story go? Perhaps not where you think. Check back in a week for another chapter...

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