This week I had the great pleasure to enjoy my second-ever “dinner with Dumont.” Before you ask, 1) no, there was no wrestling involved, 2) Lon wore baggy jeans and a fantastically tight, long-sleeve t-shirt stretched awesomely over his bulging pecs, and 3) this time I got a keepsake photo of the two of us that is instantly in my top 5 favorite possessions.  Back to the narrative, the long-time favorite homoerotic wrestler of mine was back in my neck of the woods and fulfilling fan fantasies by treating me to dinner. That’s right, stud puppy extraordinaire and perpetual infatuation of mine, Lon Dumont, picked up the tab for dinner!  Honestly, I believe that most people who I know well enough to treat me to dinner would describe me as clever, witty, and an engaging dinner date. But sitting across the table from a homoerotic wrestling infatuation like devastatingly hot Lon Dumont, I turn into a stammering fanboy.

It’s like seeing double-vision. There’s this engaging, cool guy in front of me, and I’m also seeing Lon Dumont, body beautiful wrestling heel flexing his champion biceps in some lucky opponent’s awed face.  Lon assured me that he has plans to be back through this way in a few months, raising for me the question of how many times would it take to have dinner with Dumont before I’m desensitized to the awe of it all and can be as engaging a dinner partner as I normally am (or like to think of myself as)?

It’s certainly happened to me before. On my pilgrimage to Pembroke, I got to meet and eat with some of the hottest wrestling heels to recur repeatedly in my fondest homoerotic wrestling fantasies on camera and in my imagination. I had questions prepared. I was planning on documenting the conversations to share, in my typical overdrawn and pedantic way, with all of you. And then there I was, talking to Kid Vicious, who was engaging, thoughtful, and downright philosophical in parsing apart the politics and polemics of homoerotic wrestling. In other words, he was talking my language! But there I was, stumbling over my tongue and finding myself with clinically diagnosable aggressively intrusive thoughts, in particular picturing KV stripped down to trunks and threatening to tear an opponent’s balls off.

Same lunch, same place, and Jonny Firestorm was the same way. Chatter, shop talk, the awkward revelation that Jonny doesn’t follow neverland closely enough to realize he was at one point my homoerotic wrestler of the month. So many opportunities to ask an insightful question, probe as the investigative blogger I imagine myself to be, and honestly, the only thing I could do was stare in awe at Jonny’s gargantuan forearms and picture him wringing the life out of hot piece of jobber meat.

Not surprisingly, the worst was meeting Kid Leopard. By “worst,” of course, I mean, the most paralytic for me, a completely awestruck, drooling fanboy. KL was a fantastic host, showing me around the grounds, letting me see where the magic is made in the ring, on the mats, in the gazebo, in the wrestle shack. He was generous and engaging, and I felt like I couldn’t string together more than 3 words at a time. Is English my first language? Why do I suddenly have a 3rd grade vocabulary!? Holy fuck, I just kept swallowing hard, completely at the mercy of the image of KL prying apart some fabulously hot hunk playing on repeat from my memory.

Hopefully, I’ll keep getting opportunities to meet these men of my wrestling fantasies, and hopefully, someday, I’ll be able to pull off more than just the thick-tongued stammering of a star struck fanboy.