Fat and happy

Padre Gold isn’t a fancy bar. The American Legion-owned watering hole and banquet room is a low-key neighborhood joint in Linda Vista with a nice-size parking lot, cheap drinks and a sweet wooden checkerboard dance floor. There’s nothing frilly or pretentious about the place, which makes it the perfect setting for Kathy Hernandez and her new Big Beautiful Women club night, Club Catalina.

“Five dollars to dance or free if you’re just here to drink,” says Kathy, roosted at her typical spot at a desk just inside the doorway beneath a huge American Legion logo painted on the yellowish-gold walls.

It’s just after 9 p.m. and the crowd is slowly starting to trickle in. Kathy’s carefully painting on a second coat of “Big Money Frost” green nail polish to complete her look for the night. It’s a week away from St. Patty’s Day, but next week she’s taking Club Catalina on a field trip to the Santee drive-in, and the week after that she’s got an Easter/spring-fling theme planned. Kathy’s red wig and bright-green, oversized plastic hat make her blue eyes even more piercing than usual tonight. Her smile, too, seems prettier. Maybe it’s the perfectly applied lipstick or her soft white skin, which, by the way, makes her look about half of her 41 years.

Kathy’s got a beautiful face. She’s been told that her entire life, especially by people who are meeting her for the first time. It’s a nice but unintentionally underhanded compliment that many bigger women get from family and perfect strangers alike.

“Your face is so pretty,” they say. Translated, that means: “If only you could lose some weight.”

Kathy twiddles her necklace, a gold chain with a pendant shaped like a baby with her son’s ruby-red birth stone in the middle. She never takes that necklace off—not even when she showers.

“Hey, how are you doin’?” Kathy asks as a few Navy boys pay the cover and walk on through. “Que paso, A.J.?” she says to the next guy.

Kathy’s fluent in Spanish. Her ex-husband is Mexican and, when explaining the whole Big Beautiful Women (BBW) club thing to outsiders who aren’t big, she often likes to cite her husband’s reasoning, “If he saw you, he’d say, ‘Eeeeew, fea flaquita’” (translation: Eeeew, ugly little skinny girl). Some guys feel like they’re hugging a bag of bones when they hug a skinny chick, she says.

Kathy’s bright-red phone rings. “No, you know what, he didn’t come,” she says in a serious tone. “He said he was gonna come and he didn’t come. Don’t make excuses for him…. OK, well, just get here when you get here and do not drive too fast, OK?”

Kathy has a strict policy of no-nonsense and self-respect when it comes to men. Men, it turns out, think they can get away with certain things when it comes to dating a fat chick. She says they try to pull the ol’ midnight booty call, the “Let’s just hang out at my house instead of going out in public” move, or they’ll follow a girl out to the parking lot after ignoring her at a club the whole night, and only after they’re out of their friends’ sight will they ask her out. But that crap doesn’t fly with Kathy and her crew—no way.

In an official-hostess role now, Kathy gets out of her seat and makes her way around the club. After three years’ experience promoting another BBW night in San Diego, Kathy knows her role. It’s her job to make everyone, especially newcomers, feel welcome. She’s got to herd people onto the dance floor if they aren’t dancing already. She has to take dozens of digital pictures to go up on the club’s website, and she has to monitor the one or two Padre Gold regulars who inevitably find their way into the banquet hall part of the bar without paying the $5 cover—usually she finds them grinding up against “her girls,” as she calls them, a big smile plastered across their faces.

The guys who come to Club Catalina every Saturday are a mishmash of military men, young black guys, old white guys, corn-fed Midwesterners and everything in between. Some guys treat it like any other club—it’s a meat market serving up bigger-than-average racks of lamb. For others, it’s a chance to take their longtime ongoing personal ad, “SM seeking fun-loving BBW,” off the Internet and into real life. Other guys, though, say they just go for the friendly atmosphere. They say everyone’s just out to have fun without pretension at Club Catalina, and they dig that.

The girls who come to the club are one big group of friends. They all know each other and treat each other with the kind of shit-talking yet funny swagger most save for bosom buddies. It’s not like other clubs, where clumps of females stand around in their closed-off, cliquey way—most of the girls are outgoing and won’t hesitate to invite you to their table for a drink or drag your ass on the dance floor.

The BBW community is tight and surprisingly small, considering the size of San Diego. If you’re checking out Club Catalina for the first time, both the girls and guys want you not only to come back, but to come back with all your friends. And if you’re one of those young BBWs who didn’t know this type of club existed, or didn’t know you yourself could be categorized as a BBW, they really, really want you.

“I’m 38, and I have not always had this same attitude my whole life,” says Kimberly Johnston, a single mother who 15 years ago was wearing clothing five sizes too big for her because she thought she could hide her fat. Now she alters her clothing by hand to make everything hug her voluptuous curves. “If I had this attitude when I was younger—not that I didn’t go out at all—but I always felt like a fish out of water. Had I had this attitude back then, man, I would have been a completely different person. I would have been going out all the time. I guess I would have evolved a lot quicker.”

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