Into the Ground
Pat Dixon
Time t’ get “Swingled” again, thought Larry Hoffman, letting out a long sigh.
He squared his shoulders, tightened his pecs, and glanced toward the far treadmill where old Howard Swingle had been steadily jogging for the past seven minutes.
Lorna Chalker, one of The Health Institute’s two nutritionists, caught his eye as he ambled toward Mr. Swingle to get his half hour of supervised exercise started. She wrinkled her nose and, grinning, mouthed the words of their mutual nickname for the elderly man: Gaseous Anomaly. Larry was quite certain that pretty Lorna hadn’t a foggy clue what the phrase meant literally, nor where it had originated, but she had laughed, and she had often repeated it after Larry first applied it four months ago.
During a lunch break, Lorna had mentioned that Mr. Swingle often wasted her time by reminiscing or chattering off on a dozen tangents whenever she was weighing him and checking his Body Fat Index—and almost always overstayed his time—and Larry had told her that the old guy also talked nearly the whole while he was doing his sets of twelve reps on the Institute’s various exercise machines.
“Nearly all the older guys run off at the mouth—like gas bags,” Larry had replied, “but this ol’ Swingle’s got ’em all beat by fifty miles. I’d say, as a rule, ol’ farts are what y’ might call ‘gaseous anomalies.’”
And Lorna had laughed to tears, apparently at the word “fart,” and apparently had assumed that farting was the point of the word “gaseous”—regardless of what an “anomaly” might or might not be. And thus Mr. Swingle’s nickname had been born.
“Hi, there, young man,” said Howard Swingle in his raspy voice.
“Hey, Mr. Swingle! How are you feeling today?” said Larry, glancing down at the printed green chart on his clipboard and penciling some numbers onto it.
“Oddly energized,” said the elderly man, stepping off the treadmill. “Not unlike old Nestor—in the Iliad. Now there’s a great story, if you’ve never read it. I was up by a quarter to seven this morning. I’ve already put in more work than most people do in a week: I fed our seven cats, scooped their pans, did a big load of wash, cooked five chicken breasts—did twenty push-ups, took a shower, did twenty more push-ups, had my breakfast, washed a dishpan full of dishes, wrote three letters on my computer—and then jogged over here—mailed the letters on the way—all while my wife was still asleep. And I just now had a nine-minute mile going on this running machine—until I started to run out o’ gas.”
“Well, we don’t want that t’ happen,” said Larry with a brief smirk.
“Running the seven blocks over here, I was thinking about how Charles Atlas—we used to call him Charles Fatless—how he must’ve finally had a day when he saw he was on the downhill slope as far as how his workouts were going—each one worse than the previous—though that’d be an average probably and not a straight-line-curve sort of thing—more like a tilted saw blade—but you probably never’ve even heard of Charles Atlas—a famous bodybuilder of the past. Anyhow, I don’t know why I’m so energized today,” said Mr. Swingle.
After a short pause, he continued, “I had a dream last night—actually I had four dreams I can still remember—but this one was about me running a five-mile race and feeling a bit tired during the last mile. Time was, I could do that sort of thing without even getting winded, but my legs just can’t handle it for too long anymore.”
“Lucky you didn’t wake up tired from it,” said Larry, leading him to the leg-lift machine.
“I don’t know if it’s like a sudden final flaring up of some embers just before a fire settles down and merely becomes a heap of cooling-off ashes—like one of my friends who had lung cancer last year. Just before the very end, he suddenly said he felt great—and he got out o’ bed and wanted to go outside and mow his lawn. And two days later he was dead.”
“Let’s hope that’s not what’s goin’ on with you, Mr. Swingle. Don’t forget to buckle on the seat belt today.”
“Like where am I going to go? How can I possibly fall off this thing? Now, with some of your Nautiluses—or Nautili—I do need the belt—like that back-strengthening machine, where my butt raises up if I’m not belted in, ’cause the weight I’m moving is more than that of the upper part of my body. And the same with your pectoral pull-down machine. But okay, I’ll buckle up today—just to please you, young man.”
Larry was silent and wrote something on the green chart he held.
“You know, Larry, I was not always as you see me now. Forty years ago I could do, oh, fifty to fifty-five push-ups at a time—several times a day.”
Larry said, “Five more reps.”
“I found I could do more push-ups after—after warming up my arms by doing, say, ten or so and then resting for a minute or two. Then my arms could do it. But, if I tried doing them ‘cold,’ so to speak, I had a hard time even doing forty. I mentioned this to the students in one of my classes once, and one of the kids—I forget his name now, but it’ll come to me later—a nice Mormon kid that was on the football team—very respectful—and smarter than most jocks—much harder working—he said he’d discovered the same thing about his own workouts. I guess I went up a couple notches in his mind that day—a teacher who knew something about exercising muscles.”
“Hmm. That’s all for this. Good job. We’ll work your biceps next, over in that machine. Uh, what did you teach, Mr. Swingle?”
“What did I teach? I thought I’d told you that two, three weeks ago. Well, your young life is full of all kinds of distractions, I’m sure. I taught physics—over at ol’ Witherspoon Academy. Was there for forty-seven years. They practically had to beat me over the head to get me out. And I was an unpaid volunteer assistant coach for the track team, too. We had a good record—while I was working there. Now they’re not doing so well, but then the new head of the Phys. Ed. Department’s a douche-bag.”
Larry silently adjusted the seat and weights for Mr. Swingle’s next machine.
“This one is my favorite machine—not because it’s easy, but because I think I need it the most. It helps me with my shoulder that was injured forty years ago. ‘Train for your weakness’ is my motto—and my advice to others.”
He paused a moment and then said, “Douche-bag? Did I say that out loud just now? You know, Larry, my wife, who probably knows me better than anybody else does, says I tend to run things into the ground sometimes—so that people just tune me out. She also says I’m a bit—well—crass—sometimes. I just tell her I’m ‘disinhibited.’ Great word, ‘disinhibited.’ You know that word, Larry?”
“Two more reps. No—that’s one I don’t know, Mr. Swingle.”
“It means that, as I’ve gotten older and’ve had some loss to my little gray cells up front—we all, including young people like you and—whatever her name is—the cute little nutritionist—we all have dozens of little mini-strokes every week if not every day. We don’t notice even a second’s lapse in most cases. Some little vessel in our brain just pops open for a couple of beats and then our platelets seal it back up—and probably only a couple of tiny memories are affected each time, but we have hundreds of back-up copies of ’em stored all over our brains, like computer disks almost, so it doesn’t matter much.”
“Good work. Pull-ups next. I’ll take away only a hundred pounds today, since you’re feeling so strong—just like Achilles.”
“Nestor—the oldest heroic warrior in the Iliad—a favorite of Homer’s. Actually, I’m not feeling quite so strong after coming off that bicep machine, Larry. Anyway, it’s the cumulative effect of thousands of mini-strokes that give some of us ‘Old-Timer’s Disease.’ Like that name for it? I first heard it about eleven years ago from my department head. So—we gradually get more and more forgetful as more and more back-up copies of our memories get killed off, and—here’s my point coming now—”
Here’s a ‘point’? There’s actually a point to this? Really? thought Larry with an innocent, friendly smile.
“—the frontal cortex of the brain is where we have our inhibitions stored. It’s the last part of the brain to develop—conscience and discretion—and in some people it never develops much. Anyway, as that part starts to deteriorate because of the minis, we lose our inhibitions about all sorts of things—like saying ‘shit’ out loud in a supermarket—or worse things. Some people even start getting all sentimental and weepy at the least little feelings they have about stuff. God—Almighty—this is hard work today.”
“Try and do just three more—two more—one more. There! Good work. Next we’ll do some crunches—using your obliques—twelve very slow ones for each side.”
“You’re the boss. I used to kid Mary Beth—my other trainer here—and say I was buffing up for my sixtieth high-school reunion so I could beat the living crap out of all the punks who’d been bullies back then. At least I hope I said ‘crap’ to her—and not ‘shit.’ So, anyway, I’m a little disinhibited, but not as much as a woman I heard yesterday in the supermarket. Never mind what she called a person who cut her off on the way to the fast checkout line! She shouted, ‘What the eff do you think you’re doing, you fat eff!’—except she didn’t—hoo—boy—she didn’t say ‘eff.’ Oh—boy—I’m going to have a—tough time getting back—on my feet—after these are—done. I used to—be able to do—about ninety o’ these with—no problem. And yet—I’m in better—condition than—when I—was sixty or—even fifty. There. Other side. Oh—boy!”
Mr. Swingle gritted his dentures and finished his remaining abdominal crunches in relative silence.
“Good work!” said Larry. “Now we’ll do a dozen dips—followed by the ab-crunch machine. Your abs will get a little rest during the dips.”
“‘Dips’ is a funny word,” said Mr. Swingle, snickering softly as he climbed up onto the machine and gripped its handrails. “Fifty years ago, if you called someone a ‘dip,’ you could expect an insult back—or a knuckle sandwich. We, my buddies and I, used to crack up if we even saw a traffic sign saying, ‘Dip in road ahead.’”
For the rest of that exercise, Mr. Swingle was unusually quiet. He seemed to be staring at the wall above the machine’s top, and Larry let him do three extra dips just to see whether he were counting them himself.
As Mr. Swingle sat on the seat of the abdominal-exercise machine, he said, “You were probably wondering whether I was having a senior moment or not—during those ‘dips.’ I was just recalling a road I ran on—oh—about twenty-seven years ago—which caused me to stop exercising for the next twenty-six years. My other trainer—Mary Beth—who went on maternity leave—used to tell me to shut up and focus on what my muscles are doing, but I’m sure in my heart that it doesn’t matter—and I usually find, if I talk, that I can get through my reps without noticing any particular pain—until an hour or so after I get home. So you keep good count, Larry—and I’ll tell you a little story—just one of many I could—tell you.”
He cleared his throat twice before beginning.
“Way back, when I was in high school—there were just football and—basketball and baseball—but not any track—or swimming for sports. My son’s high school—was different, and he—went out for race walking—and won all sorts of—medals doing it, but I—had to learn about the joys of track—when I got to college. I was pretty good at cross—country and not too bad—at dashes, and after college—I kept fit by running.”
“And stop there,” said Larry. “We’ll put you on one of the bikes for a good cardio workout for the final few minutes.”
“Okay, Boss. So the summer before my son’s junior year of high school we were all spending a week at a lake in Pennsylvania that my folks had retired to and built a house beside, and there was this up-and-down, hilly-dippy road—about three and three-tenths miles long—in a kind of roughly triangular shape—going around their little lake—and my kid says, “Let’s jog around it, Dad”—so we did. He was still fifteen at the time and probably wanted partly to show up his old man, and I was—oh—‘a perfect 36’—as it amused me to say back then.”
“Keep up your speed, Mr. Swingle,” said Larry. “Don’t let it drop just ’cause you’re talking.”
“I’m watching it, Boss. So we go about three miles, up and down the rolling hills, keeping together, and then Billy begins to pick up the pace as he sees the ‘finish’ ahead of us—Grandpa’s custom-built rustic redwood mail box. He pulls out, and I catch up, and he pulls out again, grinning his ass off, so to speak. So I decide it’s time to show the kid my infamous ‘Swingle Kick,’ and I shift into overdrive and catch up—and keep a-going—right past his smart ass—and I finish a good forty feet ahead of him—and he was one surprised young man, I can tell you. O’ course neither one of us told his mom or my folks what the outcome had been, but I’d like to think he learned something that day about his old man that was a good thing. Is this speed okay by you, Boss?”
“You’re doing just fine. Keep up the good work. Just three more minutes.”
“Think I may just barely have that much gas left in me. So, anyway, we didn’t go back there the next summer because my dad died of a sudden heart attack that fall—the very day after having a physical, of all things—and my mom sold that house and moved to Florida to be near some of her friends. Well, my point is coming up soon: when my son was twenty-seven and I was forty-eight, my wife and I were visiting him and his family in Lexington, Virginia, and one day, a Sunday morning, maybe just for the hell of it, he asked me for a rematch run—and of course, thinking I was in pretty good shape, I said, ‘Sure, Billy.’”
Howard Swingle paused and frowned, while the pedals of the stationary cycle still churned at a strong, steady rate.
“He’d measured a similar hilly-dippy course in his car and had run it a few times during the past year, I later found out. Well, he and I again stayed pretty close together for the first three miles, chatting about what a pretty day it was and about the hills and the autumn foliage and stuff—and then he made his move, and I made a move to keep up with my kid—and I did, for another tenth of a mile or so.”
Again Howard paused, this time biting his upper lip.
“And then—you had a heart attack?” prompted Larry.
“No. It was much, much worse than that. Much worse.”
“A stroke? Or a car ran you down?”
“Worse. I passed him pretty easily, being in good shape, and I didn’t even notice he wasn’t right behind me until I got to his driveway and looked for him—and he wasn’t there—but was lying back on the street. My boy—Billy’d had a heart attack. Twenty-seven years young, and he dropped dead on the street just fifty yards from his own house.”
“Sheesh. No kidding.”
“Picture trying to explain anything about our run to his mother—or his wife—or his little girl—let alone trying to come to grips with the idea you’d killed your own kid by running him into the ground. But—aren’t we about done with today’s workout, Boss?”
“Umm—we’ve gone an extra—minute and twenty-some seconds. You can quit now if you like.”
“Okay—thanks. Anyway, the autopsy showed he’d had a defect that had never shown up in dozens of physicals—sort of like that famous basketball player—Pistol Pete Somebody—somebody before your time—like Charles Atlas. Anyway, it took me more than a quarter of a century to realize that it was Billy’s decision to run that day, and so I finally decided it was time to lose forty-five ugly pounds and try to get myself back in shape. Call it free will or growing up or whatever. I’d always told my students not to avoid the things that are hard to do. ‘Train for your weakness,’ I’d tell them, meaning ‘Make your weak part strong by working and working and working to improve it’—whether it was a bad shoulder or certain type of calculus problem they had trouble with or some concept about fluid dynamics—or whatever. Well, thanks for coaching me today, Larry, and I’ll see you next Friday—and I’ll bend your ears with something else probably. Or—is it true Mary Beth is coming back to work?”
Larry was engrossed in writing numbers on the chart he held. A fiftyish woman in aqua tights gripped his left bicep with both hands and shook it.
“What? Yes, Mrs. Morgan—I’m finishing up. Be with you in a sec—we’ll start with—your—chin-ups. Umm—Mary Beth. Mary Beth—is going to be here on Friday—and you’ll probably be back with her, Mr. Swingle—and she—she said she’ll be twice as tough as before. Hey, Lorna! Catch you later—for lunch?”
