Bodywork In yet another desperate attempt to impress a woman, with whose image he is maddeningly in love, Michael takes up weightlifting. He shows up for his first appointment with the trainer at the gym. The guy is tanned, muscular, cheerful, and at ease. He asks, "What are your goals?". "Huh", Michael responds. This is a new concept. "Goals. You can loose weight, build stamina, gain strength, put on muscles. You're weight looks OK. Do you have injuries that need to be worked on?" "Uh". Michael has never thought of his body as anything other than a way to get from place to place. "Well, my shoulders and neck always hurt. My left knee sometimes pops out of joint. And I sprained my ankle really badly ten years ago, it sometimes goes out too." "Good, we want to be careful with your knees, strengthen your ankles, and loosen up your shoulders." He smiles like a Jehova's Witness who has just made a save and starts writing on a blank form. "OK, sure". Michael looks up at a row of machines that look like a cross between an old treadle sewing machine and the loading ramp at a steer ranch. Sort of a slaughterhouse entrance with pedals. "How old are you?" "Thirty-six". Each of the machines is occupied by a person in sweaty exercise clothing. Some stare into space or at the computerized display panels in front of them. Some have bulging muscles, which can be seen to flex and wane as they move. All have looks of intense pain. They are resolutely pounding up and down on the pedals of the machines. These machines have signs which indicate that they are called Stairmasters. Michael wonders what it would be like to put one in an elevator, so it could be used when getting to work or the dentist's office. "What kinds of exercise have you done up till now?" "Not much. I walk some." Beyond the Stairmasters are a series of diabolical looking mechanical devices facing a wall of mirrors. "OK, lets see." The trainer mumbles to himself. A heavily muscled man sits down on one of these machines and begins pushing on the two pads in front of him. A huge pile of iron blocks rises behind him, and then lowers. This happens five or six times, as his breathing becomes louder and louder. On the last repetition, the man's face contorts. He squeezes his eyes shut and exhales with a loud groan. The weights move violently upward as his arms extend. Gasping for air, he lets them down very slowly. The man looks blank for a moment then jumps up from the machine. He strikes a pose in the mirror and examines the results carefully. "Let's start you off with some stretching to warm up." The trainer leads Michael to a section of padded floor and begins to demonstrate various inhumane positions that can be achieved with his limbs and torso. Michael attempts to imitate him. "Good, you're pretty flexible." They are lying on their stomachs, pushing their upper bodies off the ground with their arms, bending backward. Michael's back hurts. His arms are beginning to shake. His stomach is streched too far. He is facing a double row of exercise bicycles. They have normal handlebars, seats, and pedals but are set in blocks of plastic and bolted to the floor. They are occupied by more serious looking sweaty people. All of them are desperately pedalling, trying to escape the tidal wave nipping at their heals. Nobody is getting anywhere. Michael gets an image of the Wicked Witch's monkey attack from the "Wizard of Oz". The monkeys are riding these clunky looking exercise machines. He hears Wagner's "Ride of the Valkeries" in the background. He laughs, over extends something in his gut, and collapses. "OK, now your legs, like this." Eventually the trainer puts Michael on one of the funny bikes, says "Start pedaling", and pushes some buttons on the control panel. Lights flash, numbers indicate, and patterns move slowly across the display. "Keep going at 80 rpm for 10 minutes, then we'll get to the weights. You should do at least 20 minutes every other day, but we'll keep it short today." Michael thinks, "Twenty minutes on this silly contraption, I hope the weights are more interesting." He pedals along trying to catch up with the woman in the leotard seated in front of him. After a couple of minutes he tires and lets her pull definitively ahead. Two people are using rowing machines on the other side of the gym. They slide back and forth, pulling on handles with a cables attached to wheels that whir in front of them like spinning wheels from the Sharper Image catalog. They are going at slightly different speeds and seem to be constantly pulling ahead of each other. Michael wonders if all of this activity could be harnesed, like the reverse of the old steam powered machine shop, and used for electrical cogeneration. He is too out of breath to communicate the idea when the trainer returns to rescue him from the bicycle. He is introduced to a standard sequence of exercises using various Nautilus machines. These are the diabolical looking devices which caused so much trouble for the big, strong guy a few minutes ago. Each of these machines has a stack of iron plates attached through gears, cams, and cables to some sort of harness or pressure pad in which the user entangles him/herself. A casual observer would mistake them for modern scientific recreations of implements found to be useful during the Inquisition. Many of them are. The machines are made to direct the torturee's effort into kinesthetically correct channels. One has merely to push or pull or whatever, and breath. You also have to count. "If you lose count", the trainer says, "you have to start over." He grins. Michael does his best to remember what to do, how many times, and why. This is complicated by his almost total lack of coordination. Long ago, in an introductory modern dance class, he found that he had no memory for body movements. If it involves more than two sequential changes of inertia he is lost. With two he can remember where he is at the moment and where he should be. Reach and grasp. Pretty easy. Adding a third motion causes him to forget where he should have been to start with. The fact that the dance class was populated with seriously nubile young females, the type that enter a room, set their stance, and point their chins slightly to one side while a bubble appears over their heads that says "I, am a Dancer", who were there just to warm up for the next, advanced, class, didn't help. He also has no sense of rhythm, so even two motions, when repeated, become problematic. Breathing, being a rhythmic behavior, is a complicated activity under these conditions. Some fear of lawsuits on the machine's designer's part has caused them to be constructed in such a manner that the occupant can escape major damage by letting go or collapsing under pressure. The side effect of this is usually a loud crash as the weights fall to their rest state. Michael finds that this never fails to get the momentarily undivided attention of everyone in the room. Forgetting for the moment that any results will be so far down the timeline as to be useless in the current clinch, Michael visits the gym with more than religious fervor. His friends begin to consider him demented on many counts. First, they know he has never done anything remotely exercise like since playing half-hearted tennis in high school. Second, they feel he is too old for this nonsense and should be ensconsed on a couch watching Charlie's Angels reruns, possibly with lovely wife and bouncing issue in attendance. Third, they think he's a wimp, the classic nerd who can't open a jar of peanut butter by himself. Fourth, he has a low boredom threshold and never does anything unless someone else is goading him on. Nevertheless, he persists. He learns to breath in rhythm to the motion of each exercise. He finds the right weight for his level on each machine. After a month he even remembers the sequence of machines and weights, and can eschew the cheat-sheet chart that all the beginners carry around. Some of the regulars nod at him, in vague recognition, when he passes. He wears a baggy sweat shirt and pants and refuses to look at himself in any of the myriad mirrors. He feels the muscles in his arms beginning to change from flab to tone. He likes the feeling. What's more, he likes the activity and ambiance. Here is a room full of people, some of them attractive, some of them in worse shape than him, inexplicably occupied by what appears to be a meaningless waste of energy. As a standard response to a new stimulus he buys books and magazines on weight training. He picks up the language. Strange abreviations for body parts. Lats. Abs. Traps. Pecs. Quads. Odd combinations of words and concepts. Do five sets of eight reps. Superset the bicep curl with the tricep pushdown for a real burn. Working my legs. Protein suppliments. Anabolic steroids. "At least they have drugs", he thinks. The magazines contain page after page of photographs of frightening looking men and women doing these things. Except for overall size, clothing and hairstyle, it's hard to tell the sexes apart. Breasts are about the same size. Suprisingly, crotches seem to contain the same bulge. They all have huge muscles with very defined demarcations. Veins swell in delicate traceries. No fat. No bones. No body hair. No skin, except for the tan color. Rows of straight white teeth bared in simulacra of smiles while posing. Its as if you can see directly into them, without X-rays. Michael wonders if he could get to look like that. Might as well be strong and ugly. He tells his parents about his new hobby. His father says, "We won't be able to recognize you. You'll end up looking like Arnold Schwartzeneger". His mother says, "Surely there's a more all around form of exercise than body building". He decides that it's the word 'body' that bothers her and ignores both comments. He pulls a muscle in his back while trying to 'max out' on a pulldown. He can't move his left arm above his head. He doesn't want to be seen wimpering and slinks off to the shower. Later, the gym masseuse berates him. "Man, you've got to listen to your body". In the past his body had always tried to interrupt the conversation. The proper response was, "Not now, I'm busy". While finishing a 'set', Michael sees an incredibly attractive woman sheathed in skin tight spandex walking towards him. He thinks, "She may notice me, maybe even smile". He gives the machine one last push. The weights don't budge. As she passes by, a tall, muscular man asks him, "Are you done here?" The man triples the weight and goes happily to work. The woman stops to talk to another regular about the finer points of her hamstrings. The callipygian unconscious. Michael thinks there is probably no hope, but something very ironic has occured. He actually likes pushing the weights around. They are made of iron. He has a mechanical bent and feels more comfortable with machines than people. He collects old tin cans because he likes the way the metal looks when rusted. On an even more mysterious level, he has a blood condition which causes his body to collect iron. Sort of the opposite of anemia. He's physically and genetically attracted to that position in the Periodic Table. He's always been pumping iron. He enjoys the immediate visceral experience of moving iron objects with his body. Bench presses, pushing the barbell off his chest with the ever present danger of failure. Cable rows, pulling a stack of weights off the ground using brute force and a pulley. Working each muscle until it won't do it anymore. The first few repetitions have a pleasant sensation of motion and accomplishment. Then, as his body begins to resist the strain, it becomes difficult. It hurts, but good. The last rep is pure agony. Finally, a way to relish the pain he has always felt within himself. He jokes, "Maybe I should move to El Cerrito and get into testosterone". Things change. Michael's body gains definition. His friends say, "Hey, you're looking buff". He suspects they are doing it to encourage him, but appreciates the gesture. He wears a tank top to the gym, and a sleeveless shirt to the cafe. He looks at himself in the mirrors as he's lifting, to maintain proper form, of course. Soon he'll be able to beat Matt at arm wrestling. He knows he should have started twenty years ago when the boy-hormones were in full flower. But still, he has connected with himself in a way he could never have expected. XXX (c) 1991 M. I. Smith