I am doomed to remember a fat boy with a wrecked asshole - not because of his asshole, or because he was the fattest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason that I believe in Gaining; I am a Surplus because of Aaron Cosby.

 

The seventh summer since my mother’s death was the first summer that I spent at camp. It was early August ‘23 and the facility had just received an inspector from the state government. This was an unannounced visit brought about by the sudden and untimely death of a fellow camper, and the negative publicity that had entailed. As a seventeen year old I was unaware of this at the time, (years later I looked up her report online), but the inspector's conclusions were nowhere near as damning as everyone involved in the camp feared that they would be. It was this fear of public damnation, of being forced to be outed as gainers, forced to become something that we weren’t, that drove the decision, to publicly at least, give the camp an air of normalcy. It was deemed to be required, in order to improve public perception, that we engage in ‘normal’ summer camp activities. No one had any intention of doing anything sports related or active. That was the reasoning behind the play.

 

Aaron Cosby didn’t mean to kill my mother. It was an accident. I forgave him at the time and I forgive him now. He never believed it to be his fault either, but he rejected with disdain my interpretation of events as being somehow accidental. He was convinced to the bottom of his belly that it was an act of God. My mother’s death was preordained and he was the selected instrument. Aaron was a heavy child and an even heavier teen. The son of working class mining folk he was fed a hard-working labourers portion from the moment he moved onto solids. He loved his food and I loved him. That summer at camp I was a tubby teen of seventeen, but had nothing on Aaron, who I swear if you swung on a rope could demolish the Hoover Dam. He was a wrecking ball of gluttony. I was just your average young New England glutton from an upper middle class family. Whom, whilst they didn’t control portion sizes, purchased far too many of their groceries from a Whole Foods for me to have the same opportunity to swell my belly to the size of my remarkable working class best friend. His belly was all burgers, whereas mine was too many dips and breadsticks, though my Grandma did make a mean Boston Cream Pie. It fills my heart with sorrow to think that I will never again be able to give Aaron Cosby any cream pie.

 

The play was Counsellor Jake's idea and he would direct it. As campers we were hardly overjoyed at the prospect of amateur dramatics but knew that it was the least worst option if we really had to spend two hours a day doing something other than eating. The discussion of what play to put on didn’t take long as there was only one play that any of us, campers and counsellors alike, had even the slightest knowledge of. At least we had mostly all seen, if not previously been involved in, a production of the nativity. It was the height of summer and over ninety degrees out but no one seemed to be perturbed by this. Everyone just wanted to take the path of least resistance in order to get back to the dining hall as soon as possible.

 

My mother died when I was ten, at a little league game. Neither myself or Aaron really liked baseball and we were both pretty terrible at it, particularly Aaron. That’s why neither of us played. It was my brother’s team that we were watching. Too fat for childhood sports we sat on the bleachers gobbling down, hotdogs, popcorn, and cola, kindly purchased for us by my mother. Aaron was very fond of my mother, not only because she was in the habit of funding both of our seemingly endless appetites for snacks of the highly fattening kind, but also because she never judged our desires. Aaron, as boys do, often used to joke about how beautiful and curvy my mother was, and she was a beautiful young woman, however, this never really offended me as I always had the impression, even from that early age, that Aaron had desires for curves of another kind.

 

My mother was late arriving at the game and me and Aaron were sitting and snacking and joking when Aaron asked me if I believed that he could swallow a foot long wiener whole. I told him that I didn’t believe that it was possible. He agreed that it sounded improbable but that something from deep within his stomach was telling him that he had to try. He didn’t know why but he felt that it was his destiny to at least attempt it. Five foot long dogs were purchased, two for me to eat the normal, sensible way, and three for him to remove from the bun in an effort to achieve the seemingly impossible feat. He tossed the first long weiner into the air just as my mother appeared at the side of the field. She was looking up into the bleachers scanning for us. As the weiner descended down towards his greedy wide gob he closed his mouth slightly too soon, mistiming his bite. His front teeth cut the weiner in half. He half choked and began to chew the part of the sausage that was in his mouth. The top half landed in his lap. Much to his chagrin I quickly snapped it up and ate it. “Oi!” he said, “That was mine, you’ve got your own!” I told him that six inches of wiener was useless to him. He required the full foot long and nothing less. “I still wanted it, even if it wasn’t as satisfactory as I would have liked!” “I like eating,” he added pointlessly.

 

The flying wiener must have grabbed my mother’s attention and she cheerfully waved at us and turned to make her way up the steps. Aaron was ready for his second attempt but it went forebodingly wrong. I burped aggressively, after too large a swig of cola, causing him to startle and he accidentally let the dog slip from his grasp just as he was accelerating his tubby hand skywards. One end of the meat tube hit his chin before it started to tumble down towards the floor. I reached out with my podgy right arm and managed to catch it as it descended just below his knees. I once more took his sausage up to my lips and took a large bite. He snatched the rest of it from me and yelled; “No fair! You put me off!” before munching down the remainder of it himself, whilst looking at me with deeply disapproving eyes.

 

We were both too focused on the all important third and final attempt to notice that my mother had started to make her way in towards us from the end of our row. I watched my bloated out best friend intently as he gracefully swung his fat right arm upwards, it glided smoothly through the air like a beautifully fat angel. With a deft flick of the wrist he launched the weiner high up towards the heavens where it seemed to hang and rotate like a thick juicy catherine wheel. I felt my tummy rumble. I so wanted to eat that wiener as well. At precisely the same time as Aaron had released the wiener of death one of the players hit a homerun. The man sitting next to Aaron jumped up in excited celebration. We discovered later that it was his only slightly chunky son who had hit the fatal homer. Through the joy that he felt through his offspring's success he barged my mother over. She fell forwards towards us, twisting in the air. She landed front up across Aaron’s lap. She looked him directly in the eyes, and appeared to telepathically tell him that it was alright, before turning her face towards the sky and opening her mouth in order to breathe out in relief at the cushioned landing that Aaron’s swollen bellow and porky thighs had supplied her with. The cheap offal sock fell vertically down into her throat, passing her gag reflex, and causing her face to immediately turn blue. I sat there watching in awed amazement as my mother lay in my obese best friend’s lap choking to death on his footlong weiner.

 

Seven years later and the day of the play was upon us. Being naturally fat and lazy we had barely practiced for two minutes let alone two hours a day. Not that this bothered any of us, the whole thing was a public relations exercise that we just weren’t mature enough to comprehend the importance of. Aaron had at first wanted to play the baby Jesus, “It’s the easiest part,” he told me, explaining his reasoning. “All babies do is lie down and drink milk. I still do that anyway!” His protestations that he was perfect for the part fell on deaf ears. The part had already been selected for Camp Leader Shawn. Aaron had to settle for being the angel. It was his job to descend from heaven and proclaim the birth of our lord and saviour. He was rather taken with the idea of dressing up as a scantily clad angel but took umbrage with the fact that he now had to learn a single line; “Do not be afraid. This very day in David’s town your saviour was born - Christ the Lord!” It was a line he was destined to fuck up.

 

Counsellor Jake appeased Aaron by telling him how wonderful he would look in angel wings and that he’d personally selected him because he was the most beautiful and angelic looking boy at camp. He was also one of the heaviest, this fact either seemed to pass Jake by or just not concern him. It should have done. The other notable characters were of course Mary and Joseph, played by a femboy called Danni (it was an all boys camp so he/she/they was as good as that was going to get) and a bro-boy whose name I can no longer recall. All I do remember of him was that he consistently aired concerns that Danni was no virgin. At the time, my youthful liberal attitudes caused me to dislike him for this, as I couldn’t understand why such a thing would matter, or how he would know? Slutshaming was not ok and more than that I believed it to be irrelevant. The whole point of acting is to pretend to be someone that you’re not. Or so I thought. The only other campers in the cast were two gay lovers, Stefan and Oliver, who comprised the front and back half of the donkey, and myself, who was a fat little turtle dove. I think Jake created the part for me at Aaron’s bequest. The three wise men were played by three counsellors, the twins - Steve and Henry, and Jake himself, who clearly had too big an ego not to cast himself in his own production. We were all in costume and completely unready as the crowd of other campers and a few select parents of local attendees took their seats in order to form our audience.

 

Our summer nativity started badly and quickly descended downhill like a runaway garbage truck on fire. The she-male Mary was the first to enter the stage riding on top of the aforementioned donkey accompanied by her ever suffering husband Joseph. It was three o'clock in the afternoon on the hottest day of the year and the stage had been set up in it’s usual lakeside position, where there was no tree cover to provide even the slightest slither of shade and respite from the baking sun that was still raising the air temperature to over a hundred degrees. The mostly obese audience of a hundred and seventy sweating balls of young blubber mopped their brows and sucked on their already melted supersized slushies in a desperate bid to stay cool and prevent any weight loss due to the energy they were expending just by being there.

 

Stefan and Oliver, the front and rear ends of the donkey, felt like a Thanksgiving Turkey roasting in an oven. The donkey costume, rented from a local fancy dress store, had proven to be too small for the oversized gays. Especially for the rear end, Oliver, whose globular planet sized belly had torn open the sides of the donkey’s abdomen the first time that he attempted to bend over in it. As a solution a brown woollen blanket had been badly sewn onto the donkey’s under belly, that was really Oliver’s belly. It hung so low that it almost dragged along the floor as he plodded slowly onto the stage.

 

The delicately chubby not so virgin Mary had designed his own costume. He wore a short tight mini-skirt with nothing underneath that clung to his succulent thighs and which rode too high at the back exposing the lower half of his thick buttocks. If this wasn’t bad enough he had decided to ‘tuck it back’ meaning that he appeared to be sitting on a small squashed purple mushroom. His top half bore only a crop top exposing both his beautifully round pot belly and ‘erotic’ arrow tattoo on his lower back that’s only purpose was to point all potential visitors to his entrance. There was no need to dress Danni up to look pregnant, had her gender not been in question then there would have been no doubt that he was carrying. She had long straight black hair tied like Wednesday Adams and matching black eyeliner and nail polish on her bare toes and fingers. He wore a crown on her head, which in her own words was to, “Represent that Mary was the real Queen.” By comparison the 280 lb fifteen year old Joseph looked relatively normal in his tight 3XL boardshorts and Vans ‘Off the Wall’ t-shirt that allowed only an inch of underbelly to hang out. He smiled and made a metal sign at his friends on the front row.

 

Poor Oliver’s back pain was crippling him. His inflexible physique and unnatural deportment, plus the 220 lb virgin whore riding him, caused him to scream out in pain. He dropped to his knees causing ‘Mary’ to fall off onto the stage floor with a thud. Her mini-skirt lifted up and she ‘untucked’. As her dick flopped out for all to see, the young crowd began to laugh. When the arse end of the donkey ripped open due to Oliver’s low position and hence extended rear appendage they bayed with laughter. Oliver’s massively wide eighteen year old naked pearly white ass reflected the sunlight like a magnifying glass, temporarily blinding a portion of the audience who just happened to be sitting at the perfect angle in order to receive the full effect. 

 

“What the fuck!?” The virgin Mary cried as she tucked her cock back in between her cheeks.

 

“It’s fucking boiling in here!” The ass responded. “I feel like a pot roast!”

 

“Fuck him! Give us a donkey show!” An immature voice in the crowd called out. The voice received plenty of peer support.

 

“Uh oh, no babes. Y'all know that’s not my scene!” Mary shook her hips and wagged her finger like an expert drag queen as she delivered her second improvised line.

 

“Then have the donkey fuck you! You’d love a huge donkey dick!” The same voice called out.

 

“And that’s why I’ll never have you chicken!” Mary received rapturous applause for her sassy put down.

 

Joseph, clearly feeling upstaged, decided that it was his turn to speak. “Why the fuck you got no pants on Oliver?”

 

“I’m not Oliver. I’m Stefan! Oliver can’t speak right now, his mouth’s attached to my ass. And It’s like a hundred and eighty degrees in this fucking thing. We’re both naked. We had no choice!”

 

“Is there anyone is this fucking play that doesn’t like eating ass?” A different voice from the crowd asked to much hilarity.

 

Jake seemed to take that as a hint to move the plot forwards. He fed me an improvised line and pushed me up onto the stage. If I was to describe my own appearance I would describe it as a perfectly average 300 lb eighteen year old high school graduate with short black hair and a 42 inch waist. I think that I looked like any other normal New England kid apart from the fact that I had three ostrich feathers attached to each arm, one of those old school feather dusters sticking out of my ass (I was forced to wear only a jockstrap and actually grip the household cleaning item with my butt cheeks, I still deny to this day that it entered the forbidden zone). The only other part to my costume was a yellow plastic beak. My bare overhanging belly had been painted gray and as directed by Jake I did a little dance across the stage and gingerly waved my ass at the audience before turning around grabbing hold of my belly and lifting it up whilst proclaiming, “I’m a fat hungry turtle dove. Please don’t eat me. I think the baby is on the way.” The last phrase I delivered with a wink to my fellow actors. They didn’t take the hint.

 

“What?” Fat bro-dude Josep asked me.

 

“Yeah, what the fuck?” The virgin Mary said for the second time in the opening scene. 

 

“You’re not supposed to talk. You tryin’ to upstage me you fat little straight bitch!”

 

“JUST HAVE THE FUCKING BABY ALREADY!!” I bawled back at him.

 

This sign of verbal authority seemed to have a submissive effect on Danni who did as he was instructed. He climbed on top of the massive makeshift wooden manger full of hay and squatted so low that his dong hung out again. She started to breathe heavily and moan, faking the pain of childbirth. The groans got louder and faster and started to sound suspicious. This was when I noticed that there was more than one voice moaning. Some of the very audible moans were coming from the front end of the donkey. The donkey was still squatting on its hind legs with its monstrously fat ass hanging out, only now its front legs had begun to tremble. It also appeared to be growing some sort of stick shaped tumorous growth just below its rather oddly spherically shaped neck. Mary, busy pretending to give birth, did her best to ignore it, although the audience was finding it very hard to do so.

 

With one final push the baby Jesus appeared from his hiding place below the hay. He slowly sat upright and cursed about the heat and lack of alcoholic liquids that he had apparently requested while in utero. The foul mouthed messiah was born wrapped in two plain white king size quilt covers and weighed a strapping 570 lbs. 

 

The funniest thing that I can recall about this was that Mary was just as fat after giving birth to the elephantine baby Jesus as she was before she did. After giving birth Danni immediately sat down on the edge of the manger and started eating a Twix that he must have hidden who knows where. Clearly the virgin Mary had decided that her part in the production was complete.

 

Now it was Aaron’s turn. He had been nervously waiting behind the stage munching down as many hot dogs as he possibly could. Nerves always made him hungry and he had this theory that swelling his stomach was the best way to kill the butterflies that may otherwise reside there in. He later admitted to me that he had consumed near on 12,000 calories before taking to the air that day.

 

Jake clamped the hook on the homemade winch to the elastic band on the back of his 4XL tighty wighties and started the motor. As the 380 lb angel slowly began to ascend, he was immediately caught in the world's worst wedgie, even before the ends of his fat toes left the ground. He screamed in pain. He screamed so loud that he even managed to attract everyone’s attention away from the still heavily panting donkey. The back of his Y-fronts dug so deep up into his asshole that it started to bleed. The first thing the audience and the cast on stage saw was his long blonde hair, followed by the excruciating look on his thick fat face. He wore, what was to be fair, a beautiful pair of huge white angel wings, also rented from the fancy dress store. These appeared to grow out of the side of his massively bloated huge and low hanging hugely swollen belly. In truth he looked fantastic. But angels are not supposed to have an anus, let alone one that’s been torn open and bleeding profusely. The blood dripped down from his backside between his fat legs, falling down onto the gainer Jesus below.

 

“Whose had their fun with him?” the virgin Mary enquired with a camp smirk. “They can do that to me!”

 

The angel Aaron writhed in agony. I’m not so sure if he forgot his line; “Do not be afraid. This very day in David’s town your saviour was born - Christ the Lord!” or if he just didn’t have time to deliver it properly before descending back to Earth, but either way he only kind of managed the last bit.

 

“JESUS FUCKING CHRIST!! He yelled just as the elastic in his underwear snapped and he plummeted naked, ass first onto the manger.

 

Jesus Fucking Christ, himself, yelled out in pain as the angelic young glutton crash landed on his saviour’s own massive belly. The messiah was badly winded but the human crash mattress had clearly saved the angel’s life. Aaron would never forget that fact. He believed and I also now believe that Shawn Stringer was brought to us to save Aaron. To save everyone like us.

 

The play came to a premature climax two seconds later when the front end of the donkey seemingly farted and orgasmed at the same time. The back half of the donkey tore itself away from the front, literally ripping its skin and fur wide open. The stark naked Oliver Twitch rolled out and onto the floor, crying and sweating profusely. The second miracle birth of the day had a raging hard-on which the gloriously fat infant tried but failed to reach due to his complete lack of energy and 100 inch circumference belly that lay in the way and rumbled loudly. No one in the cast had eaten for at least the last ten minutes. The three wise men never made it onto the stage but they weren’t at all bothered in the slightest as they had a hundred things they would rather eat than take part in some shitty play.

 

The audience rose to their feet in appreciation. They clapped and whooped wildly and the standing ovation went on for at least five minutes before everyone retired to the dining hall where Oliver Twitch told me, in the toilets, that it was the sweetest fart that he had ever tasted.

Despite having his life saved that day my life-long best friend Aaron, the fattest guy that I would ever know, still died prematurely. Neither of us ever met Shawn in person again after leaving camp that year. As you know he would go on to bigger and greater things, but Aaron knew that he was always destined to save him, in the way that he could never have saved my mother. He had been too young, too small, to cushion her fall. If only he had been older, fatter. That’s why he dedicated his life to gaining. It was his passion and his destiny. It’s also mine. Aaron Cosby died of a coronary arrest on the 15th of September 2047 aged 42. Even the messiah couldn’t save him from that misfortune.