Some Keaton Backstory (part 1)

Joyce asks me every once in a while if Keaton is as big a homophobe as he sometimes comes off as being. I was calling things “gayass” long before I met Keaton, but he says things are gay way more often than me. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have anything against gay guys, although it’s not a secret that he likes it better when gay guys don’t act all…well…gayass. He’s not the only straight dude to think like that. And I know for a fact that he’s totally cool with the one gay guy we both know, the Parrots’ catcher, Adam.

What I am sure of is that if Keaton saw somebody giving a gay guy a hard time, he’d bust the jerkoff in the face. Even if he goes around saying that that things like looking in the mirror too much and frozen yogurt are gay. (Ok, he’s right about that: frozen yogurt is both lameass and gayass. I still don’t see his problem with looking in the mirror lol.)

At one point in his life, Keaton had a lot to do with a whole mess of gay guys. He was practically living in an all gay world. Y’all already know that one of his jobs was bodyguarding a gay Dutch billionaire. He finally gave me more of the story a couple weeks ago, when I was over at his place and we’d turned off the Dodger game in disgust. Keaton’s not usually the backstory type (backstory is gay lol), so I listened up when he started telling me about his time in Amsterdam.

Keaton’s from Granbury, TX, which is close to Fort Worth. After he finished high school, he got a job through one of his uncles working on the docks in Galveston. Good work, union card…and Keaton sure as hell ain’t the kind of dude who’d want to be cooped up in an office. Of course there were some pretty tough dudes working on the docks, and of course the new guy was gonna get picked on.

Dad taught me how to win a fight; Keaton’s ex-Golden Gloves dad taught him how to be sure the other dude doesn’t get up again. There’s a difference, and this one big dude who kept fucking with Keaton found that out the hard way. Eventually the big dude got Keaton into a fight…and he got his ass kicked. That’s probably not a surprise to any of y’all, but it surprised the fuck outta the guys working on the docks (especially the dude who got his ass kicked lol.)

So word gets around, and, a few days later, Keaton got approached by this sketchy dude who said he ran underground fights for rich people who like seeing longshoremen beat the fuck outta each other. He asked Keaton if he was interested. Since the last thing Keaton would ever do is back down from a fight, he said he’d try it. Besides, there was good money in it too, even if you lost.

Y’all can probably guess what the outcome was. He took on another dude the next week and won that one too.

And then his life took a completely unexpected turn.

One of the rich people watching that fight was the Dutch billionaire. He followed Keaton into the dressing room they had fixed up for the fighters and asked him to be his bodyguard and fly with him to Amsterdam the next day.

Keaton was 20 when this happened and down for any kind of adventure. Traveling around in private planes with a super rich dude sounded a lot more fun than working on the docks in Galveston, so he accepted the billionaire’s offer.

On one major condition. He could tell right off the bat that the dude was gay and that he didn’t offer Keaton the job just because he can hit hard. So Keaton made the dude promise to keep his hands off. The dude agreed, and, since he was older and clearly smart enough to run an billion dollar business, Keaton reckoned he could be trusted to keep his promise. (The dude passed the first test: getting outta the dressing room so Keaton could get changed.)

So the next day Keaton was off to Amsterdam in a private jet. In a couple days he was fitted out with a bunch of dark suits and a gun, and the billionaire had him a badass Texan bodyguard with piercing blue eyes and cowboy boots. Keaton must have looked intimidating as fuck, especially in a country where people think Texas is still like what they see in westerns.

Now the thing about Keaton’s new boss was that, except for Keaton, he surrounded himself exclusively with other gay dudes. Like everyone working in the company was gay, from the janitors up to the top executives. That made it easy for the boss to hire the best gay tech people available. It also got him a shitload of drama.

I reckon you gotta be a bastardass motherfucker if you’re gonna become a billionaire. Keaton’s boss certainly was one. He had a reason for having everyone working for him being gay: he knew how mean gay guys can get, so he pitted them against each other. Keaton said they were like cats trying to tear each other to pieces. The boss made it even more intense by making it known that the fastest way to getting promoted was getting into his (the boss’) bed. That made the competition even more vicious.

It was even more twisted: if you got into the boss’ bed and he didn’t like you, you got your ass fired rather than promoted. So even sleeping with the boss wasn’t a guarantee you’d get ahead. I reckon the boss’ plan was working, since the company was doing real well. And I bet everyone looked dang sharp when they came into work lol.

So there was Keaton, a 20 year old who’d never been out of Texas, in the middle of a bunch of totally backstabbing European gay guys all trying to fuck each other over.

That was only the beginning of the adventure.