This was to have been a chapter in my (as yet unpublished) novel, Love $ick. But it became evident that the character Steve did not contribute to moving the story forward, so he ended up on the editing room floor. Since I won't be using the chapter, I thought that I would share it with you all.
Steve Works Out
"TGIF",
Steve thought, as he dressed to go to the gym.
Everybody
liked Steve. What was not to like? He had a good car, a good physique, a good
head of hair, a good job, and no major vices to speak of. And he had the gift of gab. It was the greatest weapon in his arsenal. Everybody liked it when Steve talked, everyone! Other lifters in the gym, colleagues at work,
random supermarket shoppers, postal clerks, waitresses, literally everyone.
It
was partly his deep, mellifluous voice, of course. But it was more than that. It was his easy facility with words, his
eagerness, and his general joviality. He
knew how to put his listeners at ease.
He knew how to tell a story, too.
Timing was everything, and he had a great sense of timing. He could also read a room better than anyone
else he'd known. He could work a
crowd. He'd even considered a career in
politics, where he could have put these talents to better use.
Today
was chest day for Steve. He had chest
day and arm day. They were really the
only two body parts he cared about. He
cared about arms and chest because he knew that chicks liked pecs and
biceps. There was no need to waste
precious physical resources training legs.
How many times did he go into a bar with shorts on? That's right, never. Who cared if his legs were a bit
spindly. He could set his jaw, puff out
his chest, and the cuties would come running.
It had always been this way, and he planned to keep it this way.
Steve
downed a quick protein shake, pulled a sweatshirt over his head, and palmed the
keys to the pride of his life: a dark
maroon Chevrolet Trailblazer SS. His
Trailblazer made him feel better than every other man in the gym. Hell, better than every other man on the
planet! It was going to be a great
day. And, then, tomorrow was Saturday.
"Live
for the weekend," was another motto of Steve's.
He
would begin his Saturday by detailing the SS.
But now he turned the key, brought it roaring to life, and backed out of
his driveway. Steve lived in a little
rental house, split into two units, each with its own driveway. He didn't have a lot of stuff, so he didn't
need much space.
"The
girls can't see my place from the bar, anyhow.
But they can see the Trailblazer in the parking lot!", Steve mused,
punching the throttle.
The
SUV scooted happily down the street toward Steve's gym, the Body Blast. He parked it in his regular space, all the
way in the far corner of the lot, so that it could never have a chance of
receiving a ding from the door of the vehicle of some mere mortal. It was well worth the extra hundred paces to
the door of the gym, to keep his baby pristine.
Steve
winked to Kristi, the morning desk girl at the Body Blast. Kristi really liked him, he knew. They had sometimes talked for more than two
hours. She never got tired of listening
to Steve talk and dispense fitness advice.
He would just chat with her a few minutes this morning, to keep her up
to date on his life and workout progress.
He
headed for the locker room. His ritual
here was very precise, and he allowed himself no deviation, no matter how
slight. He placed his lock in a certain
orientation on the bench, set his gym bag down just so. He unloaded it in a precise order. He gave himself three generous splashes of
Aramis cologne. It made him feel
powerful. He even imagined that he could
get a few extra reps with the cologne.
His next step, after stripping down to his boxers, was to admire his
physique in the full length mirror at the end of the row of lockers. This was an important passage in his liturgy,
and it occurred twice: once when changing into his workout gear, and a second
time just before showering.
Steve
looked himself up and down in the mirror.
"Handsome
devil," he thought.
He
noticed some belly fat, at the front and sagging around the sides of his
abdomen, but he gave it little attention.
"It's
not fat," he assured himself.
"I'm just holding a little water, that's all."
He
donned his workout gear, laced the left and then the right shoe (it didn't feel
right doing it in the opposite order), and fastened his leather lifting belt
around his waist. He tightened it two
notches tighter than snug, to hold in his waistline. He needed to present his best image,
especially in the gym. All the lifters
were always jealously checking each other out, even if they would never admit
it. Every male in the gym felt a rush of exhilaration when he spotted someone
punier than himself. And every man felt a
horrible, disabling despair when he spotted a gym member more muscular than
himself.
In
some men, this despair took on such severe physical manifestations that they
felt the blood draining away from their muscles, felt they would faint, and had
to cut short their planned workouts.
Others,
however, had developed coping mechanisms to deal with the possibility of
meeting superior male specimens in the gym.
Steve had this mechanism in place.
It had several layers of programming, and is best illustrated using the
following flow chart.
This
is, of course, a simplification of the Steve's mental process. In reality, there are more decision
points. For example, he can declare his
rival an inferior specimen if one body part can be seen to be clearly
undeveloped.
"That
guy has no traps whatsoever! What a
pencilneck!"
As
he got ready to step out of the men's locker room, Steve checked his posture,
puffed out his chest, and pulled his shoulders back. He held his clenched fists at his sides, about
a foot to either side of his hips, to make himself appear wider. He was ready.
He pushed the locker room door open with a firm blow to the stainless
steel plate on it, and nearly knocked over a scrawny man in his thirties. The man was startled, and cowered a bit until
Steve had marched past him. He looked
back over his shoulder at Steve, as he was entering the locker room.
"Loser!" Steve muttered to himself.
He proceeded to his home-away-from-home, the flat bench press station. It was one of two in this gym, not counting
the Smith machines, and they were in high demand. He hated it if he had to wait for
someone. Sometimes, he had even stormed
out of the gym and skipped a workout if both benches were taken. But both were available this morning.
He
slipped a 45-pound plate over each cylindrical end of end of the Olympic
bar. Forty-five pounds for the bar, plus
ninety pounds for the two plates, made 135 pounds, his warm-up weight. He positioned himself on the bench and looked
up at the weight. Even with a light
weight like this, Steve did a lot of preliminary huffing and puffing before
carefully grabbing the bar at the exact place on the knurling. He pounded out fifteen very rapid
repetitions, with nearly full range of motion.
He brought the bar down all the way to touch his chest on each rep, but
did not go all the way up at the top.
Close, but not quite full reps.
He
let the barbell clang down onto its resting posts, and jumped to his feet
victoriously. It was going to be a good
workout, he could tell. He loaded
another 45 on each side of the barbell, and then celebrated the good warmup set
by walking to the front desk to chat with Kristi.
"Miss
me?" he asked?
Kristi
smiled at him with what he took to be a very sweet smile, but said nothing. Steve knew it was his signal that she was
lonely and wanted to talk.
In
actuality, Kristi's tortured smile was a prayer for help, for deliverance from
this loudmouth and his gift of gab. He
tortured her every day this way, and if she had not feared losing her job,
she'd have long ago told him to take all his talk and shove it. But she couldn't do that. She had to be polite. A careful observer of the smile in question
would have looked not only at her mouth, but at her eyes, filled with fear,
pleading: "Please, please go away,
you wretched old man!"
But
this was not a message Steve was inclined to accept. Besides, he had some really good stories
about cars he had raced on the street with his Trailblazer. After those, he would tell her some more of
his old football stories. They were always
a hit with the desk girls. After that,
they could talk about country music for a while.
Kristi's
eyes glazed over. She thought about the
routine maintenance tasks she was supposed to be taking care of at this
moment: vacuuming the carpet, cleaning
the restrooms, and moving stray weight plates back to their proper positions on
the weight trees. This guy's constant
talk was really setting her back. At
this rate, she'd have to stay after her shift to get all her tasks checked off. Couldn't he see that she was not interested?
No,
he could not. One of Steve's other
weapons, along with the Gift of Gab, was a defensive one. It was the Inability to take a Hint. It served him well. It was only on extremely rare occasions that
anyone would say anything explicit to him, asking him to alter his
behavior. Almost always, they dropped
hints. But he did not have the ability
to pick up on hints. Or, rather, he had
a useful and powerful inability to take hints.
This was a beauty thing: it
allowed him to maintain his original course of action in nearly every
situation, unimpeded by the thoughts and feelings of others.
It
was 42 minutes before he returned to the bench press, his 225-pound Olympic
barbell still waiting for him. He lay on
the bench and performed another set.
This time it was ten slower, more controlled repetitions, still not
going all the way up at the top of each rep.
He racked the weight, stood up, and reached for his water bottle. He loosened his leather belt between sets, to
give him the ability to breathe a little more deeply. His eyes scanned the perimeter of the gym,
looking for the next person to talk to.
He saw Philip.
"Phil,
baby!" he called over to where
Philip was in the middle of a set of T-bar rows. "Lift big or stay home!"
He
chuckled loudly to signal to Philip that he was in a good mood and therefore,
Philip was also required to be in a good mood.
Philip
was a very knowledgeable nutrition expert in the field of fitness and
bodybuilding, but he had a quiet, understated personality. Though he knew fifty times as much as Steve,
it was always Steve who advise Philip on dietary matters. It was strictly a matter of Steve being a
completely confident blowhard, and Philip's time being too precious to him to
bother correcting Steve's every clueless statement. He saw the path of least resistance as being: feigning interest, nodding his head, and then
excusing himself to do the next set.
This
was not always completely efficacious, however. Steve often stood alongside Philip while
Philip performed his next set, still talking about his latest theories. Philip took it all graciously, as far as any
visible signs showed. But inside, he was
seething. Early on in their lopsided
relationship, this had ruined many sets of cable rows, squats, pulldowns, calf
raises, incline presses, laterals, and leg curls. But, then, he'd gone through a paradigm
shift. It happened during a set of wide
grip pulldowns. Philip was trying to
concentrate on his latissimus muscles, to feel them as he moved through the
full range of motion of the exercise. He
had a death grip on the iron bar that hung suspended from a cable. The cable ran over a pulley at the top of the
machine, and attached to a stack of weights.
The stack of weights could be anything from 10 pounds to 250 pounds,
depending upon where a pin was inserted between consecutive weight plates in
the stack. When the pin was set for a
lesser weight, there was a polished steel shaft with a pointed end that was
visible below the weight stack when you pulled down on the bar to lift the
stack. The end of the shaft was pointed
to help guide it back through the holes in the unused plates.
Philip
had been working out with 140 pounds when the new idea came to him. Steve had been chattering at him about
distilled water and positive nitrogen balance, and Philip's blood was boiling. He suddenly had a vision of Steve's fat head,
sitting on its side atop the unused weights.
Each time he lowered the 140-pound stack, he pictured in his mind the
pointed steel shaft plunging through Steve's head, sending blood everywhere,
and leaving Steve's mute tongue lolling out of the lower side of his mouth.
It
was a powerful vision, and Steve's incessant nutrition and workout lectures
only enhanced its power. Somehow, the
momentary imagination of Steve's head pierced by the one-inch shaft gave him a
superhuman strength for the next downward pull on the bar. The 140 pound stack fairly flew up to the top
of the apparatus. At the end of this
set, Philip bumped the weight up to 180 pounds, more than he had ever used to
that point. Steve kept up his monologue,
Philip kept visualizing Steve's head being impaled, and ten perfect, clean reps
were accomplished.
This
was the paradigm shift. Philip had
packed on five pounds of solid muscle since he had begun to impale Steve with
the weight stack shafts. Of course,
variations had to be devised for free weight exercises, but Philip's mind was
nimble, and he found plenteous ways to link his lifting performance to the
successful dismemberment and silencing of Mr. Gift of Gab.
He
still would have preferred never to have heard Steve's voice again, but this
new inspiration Steve gave him, and the muscle derived from it, was certainly
among the best silver linings he'd ever found behind any dark cloud.
Steve
was oblivious to all of this. He
reasoned that his pal Phil kept silence because it was simply the proper thing
to do in the presence of a superior. His
physique and knowledge, he felt, were far superior to Phil's. But he would help Phil catch up to him … a
little bit. Never all the way.
Soon,
it was time for his next set of bench presses.
He added a 25-pound plate to each end of the bar, bringing its total
weight to 275 pounds. The increased
weight required that he perform more gyrations on the bench, making sure that
his back was symmetrically located, and that his hands were not even one
millimeter off to either side of their appointed places on the knurling of the
Olympic bar. If he doubted his hand
placement, he took both hands off and started again. He wiggled his but to get it centered on the
bench. Finally, he was in position.
Steve
took eight deep, rapid breaths to fill his bloodstream with oxygen. He unracked the weight. At this weight, his form was different. He bounced the weight off his sternum at the
bottom, using his ribcage as a spring to reverse the momentum of the falling
bar. For the first three reps, he was
able to keep his butt on the bench and get the weight up. But beginning with the fourth rep, he arched
his back and lifted his butt off the bench, to bring his stronger lower
pectoral muscles into play. He managed
five reps in all. That was Steve's chest
workout.
He
headed over to the treadmill. He punched
in his desired speed and incline, along with his body weight. He added ten pounds to the body weight
number, because it made the automatic calorie counter go up faster, which made
him happy. He walked briskly for two
minutes, jogged at a quicker rate for one minute, and then did a two minute
cooldown walk.
He
paced to the men's locker room, making sure to hold his fists out from his side
to make himself look wide. He puffed up
his chest. He loved chest day. He showered and shaved at the gym, and put
his work clothes on. The world was his
oyster.
