Fat Farm Counselor Ch. 01

Prologue

"You're serious?" I said, laughing, and taking another pull at my beer.

"Yes, David," he said, his voice familiar since our days as best friends in grade school, "I'm dead serious."

"I've got a good job," I said.

"Take a two-week vacation," he said, "it's not like coming to Colorado is a chore."

I laughed again.

"Okay, Greg, you win," I said, "give me a week to get things squared away here and I'll come out and visit your little corner of Nirvana."

"Hurry, man," he said, "I need the help."

I laughed again, said, "a week," and hung up.

The next morning I sat down with my boss and arranged my vacation schedule. I spent the rest of the week arranging to have meetings moved and making sure my latest report got into the boss's hands so he could review it while I was gone. I still had a couple of months before it was due.

On Saturday I set out on my trek across the continent. I was working in northern Kentucky at the time, never mind which agency, and so I had about a 1,200-mile drive ahead of me. I decided to give myself a break and take two days. I stopped overnight at some town in Kansas, well, at the I-70 interchange outside of some town in Kansas. From there I drove straight through to Denver, spent an hour taking a Magical Mystery Tour of nostalgia, visiting my grade school, middle school, high school, and the house where I grew up, before heading south on I-25.

At Pueblo I followed the little blue line on my GoogleMaps app, finding Colorado 96 west. I'm a native Coloradan, but this was new to me. I pulled out the sheet of written instructions he had sent me because Google Maps insisted I had reached my destination based on the fact that I was pulled over in front of a mailbox on a numbered road.

I followed the road another two miles and then turned off on the lane, well, turned off after coming back and finding it after missing it the first time, and followed it for the directed 4.7 miles. Right on cue, I turned into the small lane. A hundred yards in was a gate which I opened with the combination he had sent.

Another two miles, this time through a woods of mostly Aspen trees, and suddenly, like something out of a movie, the scene opened up before me.

And it was spectacular. Colorado is a pretty state, and growing up here, I had seen a lot of very pretty places. But this was absolutely spectacular. The word that sprung to mind was "meadow." The little valley was a mass of pastels of wildflowers in bloom, with a couple of brilliant red patches providing contrast. In the middle of the meadow, where the little lane terminated, was a group of buildings that I took to be The Farm.

I stopped and looked. God DAMN but this was a pretty place.

I pulled up to the little parking area in front of what I took to be the main building. It was the largest, but also located in the center of a sort of loose semicircle of buildings. I caught a glimpse of a pool between buildings. I was surprised there were no other vehicles in evidence but figured they'd be in one of the larger buildings. A couple of them looked big enough to be adequate parking lots.

As I got out of the car a woman came out of one of the smaller buildings, "cabin" I thought. She had on a pair of tennis shoes and not another stitch. She was short, I guessed about 5'4", and round, I guessed an easy 250 pounds. Her grey hair screamed "retired" and "Medicare card." She was cute in the round way of some older women and when she gave me a casual wave, fingers moving individually, and a happy smile, I returned both.

"You are most definitely NOT in Kansas anymore, Toto," I said to myself.

I walked to the main building, following her in, admiring the view as she walked down the hall.

"DAVEY!!!!!!!," I heard and turned in time to brace myself.

Greg had been my best friend since about third grade when his family moved into my neighborhood. He was still bigger than me, blonder than about anybody, and had that smile that required a smile back.

He wrapped me in a bear hug, squeezing hard enough I couldn't draw breath.

Oh, I could have escaped, but not without hurting him, and I didn't want to do that.

So I hugged him back and hollered, "put me down you fucking gorilla."

He laughed, but did put me down. Then he did the holding me at arm's length thing and looked me up and down.

"Shit man," he said, "you're pale. I have got to get you out of that office job."

As we stood, looking at each other, another woman came in the room, dressed like that first I had seen. This one was young, I guessed barely legal. She was tall and buxom and very pretty. She reminded me of one of those sweater girls from the 1950s, maybe Mamie Van Doren or Lana Turner, but made to about a 200 percent scale with boobs I guessed at an EE cup that had no sag, a soft belly with a very deep belly button, and hips to match her boobs. She was, when I thought of it, Betty Boop personified.

"Jeannie," Greg said, "come over here and meet the new counselor."

She came and she was sexual invitation incarnate. Her hips moved in that spineless way only a woman can achieve, and she invaded my personal space, standing close, her back arching, her breasts, and her ass on display in that posture. Her tongue was a damp pink entity with a life of its own as it slowly circled her lips, wetting them. Her eyes were half-lidded.

"Oh goody," she said, her voice breathy and full of desire.

"Jeannie, Dave, Dave, Jeannie," Greg said, in that formal way both of our mothers had taught us.

I extended my hand, almost by reflex, and she took it but didn't shake it. Rather, she turned it over and kissed my palm. "Pleased to meet you," she said in that breathy voice.

Yes, I took the job.

Chapter One

It's called The Farm and when Greg makes his pitch he usually adds in "fat," making it The Fat Farm. But it had never been a farm. It had started out as a cattle ranch a huge spread, something like 7,500 acres dating to an old Spanish land grant. Over time it had shrunk, pieces sold off for mining, there was silver first then a brief uranium boom along with some lead and a hint of gold that never paid off, and inheritance divisions breaking up the total into smaller parcels.

In the 1960s, caught up in the back-to-the-earth movement of the era, a rich kid had bought one section of 640 acres that contained a few buildings and a good well. Greg said he had been pretty successful, at least in terms of having a harem of a dozen hippy girls and plenty of pot grown in the one new-at-the-time building on the place. He had upgraded many of the facilities and hired in some sort of swami and run a "meditation camp" for a couple of years before family money ran out and with it his subsidy. He hung on for a couple of years but it really wasn't a paying operation and he abandoned it rather than drain the trust fund to keep it going.

Enter my friend, Greg.

We were sitting in his office over beer and he was making his pitch. It ran something like this -

Greg turned out to be smart when he put his mind to it. He had always been the jock in that big, blonde, corn-fed way of his. Third base on the baseball team in high school and college, adequate grades, and that killer grin that had him running through girls at the rate of one a month. But in college, he blossomed. He found his niche in Physical Therapy, something with which he was familiar after a shoulder and then a knee rebuild.

While I was doing my trick for my country in the Air Force, he was getting a Bachelor's Degree in Health Science and then his DPT (Doctor of Physical Therapy). He had always had a head for business and soon enough had his own shop and was doing well. Still unmarried, he indulged his pure joy in the opposite sex and in the business that gave him plenty of conversation material as he worked on clients, and he did continue to work on clients even if he did own the place.

And that's where the idea of The Farm was born.

"Dave," he said, leaning back and taking a big pull on the oversized bottle of Sapporo beer in his big hand, "remember what we talked about way back when about fucking fat girls?"

I laughed and held up my beer in an across-the-desk toast, "less competition," I said, laughing, but quickly added - "Women are SUPPOSED to be soft and round."

He returned my toast and took a pull on his beer.

"I tended to work with the older, well, the more mature, men in the shop," he said, calling his physical therapy business a "shop" in the same way the owner of a successful Chevy dealership might refer to "the store," "average probably 50ish, average income, a quarter of a million or better."

He paused so I said, "and?"

He grinned.

"Average weight of wife," he said and there was that GRIN, "somewhere a little north of 200."

This time I made him fill in the silence.

"I don't understand it," he said, "I think it might have something to do with the kind of personality that drives a man to climb that corporate ladder. My personal theory is that men with that kind of ambition have hard dicks like the rest of us but can also spot the phoniness of the pretty blonde head cheerleader and they find the girl with the clarinet in the marching band to be much more attractive. They may be good athletes, but their drive is focused somewhere else, on grades and a vision of owning a Fortune 500 company someday. So they are happy with the clarinet player. They don't see it as "settling" at all. They see themselves as being very lucky.

They want their wives to be happy. But they are too driven to marry their high school sweetheart. The clarinet player, though, remains the standard against which they measure women. They tend to marry women younger than they are, not cradle robbing but if you're 40 and have made it to Vice-President of Seven Boring Things and meet a 25-year-old blonde up-and-comer who finds you interesting, well, that's a powerful temptation."

"Okay," I said, waiting for the punch line.

"It's an odd dynamic, Dave," he said, smiling, "the man gets his trophy wife, the girl gets her sugar daddy, but then she starts worrying. Maybe he's looking. Maybe I let myself go. And now she's dieting and frowning."

"I'm still not following," I said.

He laughed.

"Here's the thing," he said, "a fat girl will always see herself as a fat girl. She may be the most beautiful girl in the room, hell, in the world, but when she looks in the mirror all she sees is the fat girl sitting home on Prom Night with a gallon of Rocky Road and a "Twilight Zone" marathon."

There was another pause, he always did have a flair for the dramatic.

"And?" I broke down and filled in the silence.

"And that is where this place comes in," he said.

I suppose I looked confused.

He laughed.

"You remember that Vice-President of Seven Boring Things I mentioned?" he asked.

"Yes," I said, sucking on the Sapporo again.

"He's real, Dave," he said, "and he's paying us $24,000 for a 12-week program to persuade Jeannie, who you met earlier, that she's beautiful and desirable even if she doesn't fit in a size 6 anymore."

His laugh at my blank look was a full belly laugh this time.

"Yes, Dave," he said, still laughing, the words coming out kind of bubbly, "we get paid handsomely to fuck fat girls."

It was infectious. I was laughing along with him, drinking my beer, gasping for breath in between drinks.

"You're serious?" I asked.

"Yes, my brother, I'm absolutely serious," he said, still laughing, "and I want you to come to help me keep these beautiful women happy while making a damn good living at it. You're starting salary will be whatever they are paying you times two. Your living expenses will be zero because you'll live here. Your clothing expenses will be zero because you will wear one of my shirts and shorts. I'll match you dollar-for-dollar anything you want to put into a 401(k) and we have a 457 deferred income plan as well. You can, basically, put your salary toward retirement, just holding out a few hundred dollars a month pocket money."

He stood and walked around the big desk, his hand outstretched. "Whattya say?" he asked.

"You're serious?" I asked again.

"Yep," he said, grinning.

"You're offering me a job fucking fat girls?" I asked, my head still swimming a little.

"NO," he said, "I'm offering you a job making fat girls feel loved and desirable, a very different thing than simply 'fucking.'"

"But there IS fucking?" I asked.

"Ohhhhhhhhhh yeah," he said.

So I stood and took his hand.

"I'm in," I said.

And there was another of those bear hugs.

"Okay, okay, okay," I said, slapping his back, "show me what I just signed up for.

So we left the office and I entered my new life.