Gideon Gemstone Memes: impressing a cute boy, a hung Keefe, and Skyler's first clothed scene in five years

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Carlin James: The third thug, a gay three-way, a queer romance, and Pretty Dudes.

In Episode 4.5 of Better Call Saul, the Breaking Bad spin-off starring Bob Odenkirk as a sleazy lawyer, a flashback to 2003 shows the young Saul/Jimmy McGill working in a cell phone store.  He starts a side-business selling stolen burner phones (popular with drug dealers, gang members, cheating husbands, and so on). 

While scoping out customers at the Dog House, a sleazoid-favored hot dog stand, he approaches teen thugs Peewee, Skipper, and Scooter. They don't need any phones, but they'll wait until he's done for the evening and beat him up for his profits. Jimmy kicks himself for not being able to foresee that the interaction would go bad.

In the next episode, Jimmy approaches the guys at their laudromat-hangout and offers to give them a cut if they let him sell without harassment: a more reliable dividend stream than robbing him just once.  They decide that they prefer robbery, and chase him -- into a trap!

Jimmy's allies, Huell Babineaux and Man Mountain, tie them up, gag them, and hang them upside down in a piñata warehouse.  They begin smashing the piñatas with baseball bats.  Jimmy asks the teen thugs if they prefer to be smashed to death quickly or slowly.  

The thugs are so terrified that they promise not to bother Jimmy anymore, and to tell all the other thugs to leave him alone.  He calls off the smashing, but his goons pretend not to hear him until the bat comes withn inches of Peewee's face.  "You get one warning," Jimmy tells him as he whimpers.  "And that was it." 

Other than the gay-subtext potential of the three guys hanging out without chatting up girls, I was interested in this scene because I have profiles of two of the actors: Tommy Nelson, left, and Cory Chapman, center.  

Both would go on to roles in The Righteous Gemstones, but in different seasons, and both have a substantial amount of gay and gay-subtext work.  

So what about the third thug, Scooter?  

He's played by Carlin James, a Filipino-American actor from Long Beach.  His on-screen career begins in 2009-11, playing college students in dramatic shorts and guys who get killed in thrillers.

His first mainstream role was in a 2016 episode of  How to Get Away with Murder: he plays Martin, one of the guys that main character Connor, played by Jack Falahee, invites home for a three-way.

More Carlin after the break

Adam Stevenson: Vampire's boyfriend, sailor's husband, ghillie dancer, possible bondage bottom, true Scotsman

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Pain and Glory: An aging director recalls his first crush and his first boyfriend, with nostalgia and nudity

For forty years, Pedro Almodóvar has been giving us raucous, irreverent, sometimes funny glimpses into the sexual and social freedom of post-Franco Spain: Bad Education; Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!; A Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown; What Have I Done to Deserve This? He's not exactly a proponent of essentialist gay identity: his gay men are usually there to have affairs with the female focus character, when she's not busy seducing her stepson.  Or maybe she'll seduce her stepson and his boyfriend, or join her sister in having the affair with the gay man.  There will be male nudity, urination, pop culture references, and kitsch. And these aren't comedies. 

Pedro went through similar machinations in his private life, being closeted, then stating that he was bisexual, and finally coming out as gay.  He's been with his partner, Fernando Iglesias, since 2002.

Dolor y gloria, Pain and Glory, is the 74-year old director's swan song, a summary and perhaps a justification of his work, touching on all of his major themes:  "sentimientos, costumbrismo, reencuentros, homosexualidad, sensibilidad, pasión, familia, drogas… "

Almodóvar stand-in Salvador, played by regular star Antonio Banderas, is an aging director, in physical and mental decline.  His chronic pain has kept him from new projects for several years.

Left: A misty memory of Banderas, fully nude in his first film appearance in 1982.

Asked to speak at the restoration of one of his old films, Flavor, he decides to look up the star, Alberto (Asier Etxeandia, left), whom he hasn't seen since the filming.  They had a falling out over Alberto's use of heroin on the set.

While reconciling, and trying heroin himself to ease his chronic pain, he tells the story of his first boyfriend.  

His First Boyfriend:  Director Salvador was in a relationship with Federico, played by Leonardo Sbaraglia, in the 1980s, but ended it due to his heroin use.  

Federico turned out to be one of Almodovar's temporary gay men: he left the "lifestyle" behind, moved to Argentina, married a woman, and had children.

Flavor star Alberto turns this story into a play that draws the attention of the real life Federico.  He returns to Madrid and wants to start the relationship again, but Director Salvador wants to keep the past in the past. 

More after the break