Prince Charming or Porn Star?

What do you do when your Vespa scooter starts leaking coolant at 65 miles an hour along Highway 287 while driving home from Longmont? Most people would break down on the side of the road and call a tow truck. Not me. Luckily, I was riding along with my friend Rob, scooter mechanic god.

My friend Rob is every gay man’s wet dream.

First of all, he’s a UPS truck driver. He’s tall, dark and handsome. And his legs are killer in those brown shorts. He’s the stuff that gay porn films are made of. He’s friendly and I am sure charms all the receptionists along his route – both female and male – with his great smile. Imagine being married to Rob, coming home every night in his brown uniform, all pumped up and sweaty from tossing around 50-pound packages all day. You hand him a martini and massage his tired, yet muscular shoulders. It makes me moist just thinking about it.

Rob has no mortgage. He’s the only person I know who has completely paid off his entire house. A man with a steady job and no debt? More moistness.

Rob is a man’s man. He does not have a garage; he has the workshop of a mechanic. As I pulled my overheating scooter through his garage door, I found myself in power-tool paradise. I wouldn’t know how to work half of the equipment he owns, or even how to plug them in. Three other scooters also surrounded me, all in various stages of upgrades and repairs. And just like a mechanic shop, Rob has a pin-up calendar hanging from the wall. But since he is gay, all the bombshells are Colt porn stars.

Since my scooter needed to cool down before work could begin, we headed into the house, past the IKEA entertainment center, and poured ourselves a couple of stiff shots from his bar, which he built himself.  In fact, every room in the house has been remodeled and reconstructed by Rob at one time or another. Not only is he a bike and car mechanic, he also is a carpenter, electrician and engineer. It’s no longer moistness. It’s down right gushing.

Out in back is Rob’s latest project, a rebuild of his deck from the ground up. It will include sectional seating, an outdoor kitchen with grill, and a HDTV video projector for showing movies. This is the kind of stuff most gay men hire someone else to do. And lesbians do themselves. But not Rob. He is a man’s man with a love for DeWALT and Craftsmen, along with Lady Gaga.

Rob had my scooter taken apart and analyzed in no time flat. We located the source of the leak, uncovered the input for additional coolant and were bleeding out the system. (Don’t ask me what anything that I just typed even means). While he was not able to actually fix the leak, Rob managed to get the scooter operable so I could at least drive it home and worry about the problem later with the Vespa dealership.

So if you ever break down along the side of the road, keep your eyes open for a UPS truck. My friend Rob will be the knight in brown shorts you’ll want coming to your rescue.

While Rob far outweighs me in the butch department, I am the one who wears the handyman tool belt in the Waste household. My dad kept workshops in our basement and garage and though I spent far too much time sewing stuffed animals on my mom’s sewing machine, I did glean a thing or two about how to fix a chair leg or mow a lawn.

So when anything breaks or needs repairs, Mr. Waste assigns those projects to me. Lately, and luckily for me, toy triage is where I have been spending most of my repair time. Puppy Waste One and Two always manage to find a way to rip out the guts of any stuffed toys we give them. We have come home to scenes of dismembered horror, the white fluffy entrails of teddy bears strewn about our living room. I clean up the carnage and put those poor animals back together, many resembling the bride of Frankenstein rather than cute little bunnies. It’s not as manly as solving a coolant leak, but it does add some butch points to my scorecard.