Gym Story

It happened when the guy doing curls turned out to know the woman on the pulley machine.

I didn’t know the names of all the machines. I knew the rack with the barbells attached to the sliding poles was called a smith machine and the running machines were treadmills and the ellipticals and stuff but other than that I was completely ignorant. I was only there so I could look hot and get laid more often.

This guy was on the bench kitty-corner to mine. We were both using the freeweights. I’d seen him before but never spoken with him. I’d never spoken to any of the other regulars.

I was stuck in my head over something I can’t even remember now. Probably pissed off because I still didn’t look like I wanted to even though I’d been going there daily since the previous fall. I was also hangry — I didn’t eat until I’d had my workout. Also I was just unsatisfied with my life in general, which I know now is just part of being human.

I’d just finished my fifth rep of five and my biceps and other arm muscles had that wonderful tightening feeling. I’d worked myself up into a mental frenzy trying to get that final fifth rep. I was really fired up, and I happened to look up and see straight across the way to where the pulley machines were.

The woman on the pulley machine was probably forty, overweight with drab curly brown hair and flushed cheeks. She looked like she hadn’t kissed anyone in over a decade, except maybe her cats. She had these long, flabby arms that were flapping with every rep, like sloughs of wet bread dough.

“Disgusting,” I said. To this day I don’t know why I bothered saying it out loud. I was full of frustration and jealousy and adrenaline and some of it just got out.

“What’s disgusting?” said the guy next to me. He dropped both his weights. They hit the mat with a thud.

He didn’t look like a tough guy. He was dressed in a blue t-shirt with cutoff sleeves and had a boyish face and short brown hair and moon-eyes. He looked like an IT expert, Charlie Brown in his late thirties. His belly was round and his eyes were round and his face was round. His arms didn’t look like he used the freeweights very often.

The look in his eyes suggested my remark had pissed him off.

Now, normally I would have demurred. I’d have mumbled, “Nothing,” looked back at the floor, seething to myself over how weak I am, and that would’ve been it. But this time, for some reason, between the look of this guy and the mood I was in, everything lined up perfectly and I let the anger push me over.

I looked right back into his brown boy eyes and said, “That.”

I nodded at the woman with her arm flaps, wheezing as she pulled.

“That is my sister,” the guy said, and his eyes were looking right back into mine.

Somewhere in the back of my mind an alarm went off, but my puffed-up gym self couldn’t back down now. I had to escalate.

I dropped my weights and stood up. My heart was racing and the inside of my chest felt cold. The rage was coursing through me like a river through a burst dam. I can’t describe it except to say it was mixed with a desperate, lizard- brained fear.

I got right to the point.

“You wanna take this outside?”

I’d literally never said that out loud in my life before. I haven’t said it since. I was expecting the guy to back down. He didn’t look like he came here more than once a month, let alone someone who’d been in a fight before.

I hadn’t been in a fight, either, but it was too late for that.

He dropped his weights, stood up, stepped over the bench and got in my face. His breath smelled like bubblegum.

We held the position. He looked me in the eye for a minute. I looked right back, hoping he couldn’t see through me, how unsure I was, how my rational mind was repeating, “You’re fucking up, you’re fucking up!” over and over.

I didn’t know if anyone else had noticed us. I didn’t care. I was now having to recycle the rage through me. His proximity and unwillingness to submit was severely dampening my rage resources. Parts of my body were screaming at me to focus on self-preservation. This could get ugly. What if this guy turned out to be a black belt or something?

Again, too late. The only way out was forward.

Charlie Brown looked at me for a little longer, just enough for it to be uncomfortable. I held my gaze. If I looked down, that would be it.

“Yeah,” he said after what seemed like an hour. “Yeah, I think I do.”

Fuck, I said inside.

“All right, then,” I said. “Let’s go.”

As we walked across the gym to the front doors, I remembered we were dressed in gym clothes and there was a snowstorm yesterday and the temperature was in the 20s.

Neither of us spoke. I lead the way. We passed the treadmills. We passed the ellipiticals. My feet were moving. We passed the front desk. Headed into the vestibule where there was salt strewn everywhere on the floor from people tracking it in and the carpets were stained with salt.

A guy on his way in held the door open for us. Both of us were sweaty and still dressed in our gym shorts. When we stepped through the door, the cold hit me like a freight train. I struggled not to shiver, to make myself into a formidable and unwavering stone fortress. Hopefully I’d look intimidating enough for this guy to just give up and go back inside.

I contemplated what it must feel like to get hit in the face. What it felt like to hit someone else in the face. I didn’t hate this guy enough to hit him in the face.

I was thinking about all this as I turned and we made eye contact again. It was fucking freezing and my sweaty hair made me feel like my head was encased in ice.

“What’s your fucking problem?” the guy asked. He folded his arms.

And just like that, in that very moment, I wilted. I looked him in the eye, sincere and open and honest. I might as well be, I thought — in another minute, he’d be kicking my ass and knowing me in a way that no one else in my life had. My rage had completely fizzled out on the walk out here, a flash in a pan, nowhere to be found. The cold had killed it and left me weak and shaking.

I laid it out.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t think you’d actually do it. I’ve never been in a fight before. I said, ‘disgusting’ because I thought your sister’s arm flaps were—”

He cut me off.

“She’s got diabetes,” he said. “She’s here trying to better herself. I didn’t think you’d do anything after I called you on it, either. Now we’re both cold.”

I thought of how to never judge a book by its cover. This guy looked like a middle-aged Charlie Brown but he held himself like fucking James Bond.

A gym employee stuck his head out of the doors. He was a pretty boy, church-goer by the looks of it, very clean and with the body that I’d spent the last three months trying to get.

“Everything all right out here, guys?”

“Yeah,” said Charlie Brown. “Just needed some air.”

The employee went back inside.

“It’s fucking freezing,” said Charlie Brown, looking at me. Angry little me, who wilted at the first indication of real trouble. For a second I thought he was actually going to do something.

But then, he held out a fist and tapped me lightly on the cheek with his knuckles. Very gently. To my credit, I didn’t flinch.

“You gotta learn to control your temper, kid,” he said, and without another word turned and went back inside.

I stood there, not sure what to do next. My empowering spike of rage was gone, as if it was never there.

I went straight to the locker room, got my hoodie, and left. I never went to that gym again.