PUMPED
DAVID McKENNA
Sal is saying that squats have been his passion since Susan said he had quads like steel cables, could she touch ‘em just once. This was months ago, he explains, when she accepted Jesus as her personal savior and Sal as her personal fitness instructor. Her request froze his heart and forced a little cough, like the methedrine he used to buy from his Warlock friend Jack Crockett before it got stepped on by mutants in South Philly. He felt the same excitement in subsequent encounters, he says, although Susan is stoop-shouldered and well over thirty and not likely to evolve into a jiggle-free gym bunny, if that’s what I’m worried about.
He stoops to load more weight onto both ends of a steel bar, and I say, “Why are you telling me this? Just get the key.”
“I’m going through some heavy changes,” Sal says, without being ironic. “Susan knows what it’s like.”
Mirrored walls make the gym look big as a football field. Reflected images of a dozen weightlifters gesture at me as I try to focus on Sal. I’m locked out and just want to go home, but can’t resist popping the question.
“Are you having an affair?”
My demure little query is barely audible above the grunts of lifters and the clang of iron. The mirrors are everywhere. I look cool in denim and suede, but feel like a toy poodle in a room full of pit bulls.
“I figured you’d think that,“ Sal says.
He flips back his waist-length ponytail, then hoists the weighted bar over his head and onto his broad shoulders. The muscles in his short, thick legs stiffen and bulge as he rises to his full five feet, six inches and dips back into a squat.
“You didn’t answer my question,” I say, not sure I really want him to.
He repeats the squatting motion nine times before heaving the weight off his back and lowering it soundlessly to the floor. It’s like I’m not even there.
“Or maybe you just let her touch you once in a while,” I say, sarcastic but kind of lame.
That Sal, he says the darnedest things. He’s lifting 20-pound dumbbells from thigh- to chest-level and down again, like a wind-up toy, when he blurts out, “It’s not really about quads. Susan likes me for my mind.”
“That’s funny, but I’m not laughing,” I say.
I count forty, fifty curls and vaguely recall him voicing a preference for free weights over circuit machines. That was last year, when his bodybuilding passion turned into a religion.
“Fact is,” Sal says, “a quad is just a quad, but a good idea is money in the bank.”
His voice complements the rhythm of his arms. Yakety-yak. A hundred curls, no sign of fatigue. Sweat streams down his face and shoulders and soaks through his tanktop, front and back.
“I’ve got an idea for a business, a good one,” he explains.
“You were never at a loss for ideas,” I concede, recalling the casino bus service, the X-rated phone line, the day care center for dogs and other schemes I financed.
“And Susan’s a businesswoman,“ he continued. “She made me a proposition.”
”Interesting choice of words.”
I can’t even get mad in this place. Bodymold is blood-red carpets, sweat and Ben-Gay. It’s grimacing muscleboys straddling seated calf machines and kneeling at preacher attachments, which are cushion-y little devices that help lifters endure more pain.
“If I guarantee a good location, Susan will supply the product.”
“You better not mean what I think you mean,” I say.
“Not dope,” he says through clenched teeth.
She searches her reflection for signs of life. Her sullen beauty is fading. Ornery gray hairs are OK, but not the subtle pull of gravity on her jawline and under her calm blue eyes. And what machine in Bodymold could restore her skin tone?
A bow-legged man in the background lifts a quarter-ton of barbells to chest-level, then over his head. When he drops them, the muffled crash of metal on carpet shakes the gym. His beefy companion congratulates him with a slap across the face and both roar triumphantly.
“You’ve got a one-track mind, Christine.”
“Whose fault is that?”
”That’s why I get pissed. You can’t let it go.”
Sal is breathing like a lover at climax. He rises to his toes for a final, excruciating curl, then replaces the weights in a wall rack before admiring himself from all sides in the mirrors. The ponytail and hyper-developed frame suggest a comic book hero: Conan the Barbarian, but shorter. Four inches shorter than Christine, but almost half as wide as she is tall. And 10 years younger. Her ex-friend Andi used to say “Lift dumbbells, don’t go out with them.“
“I’m pumped,” he digresses, admiring the reflection of his wildly inflated physique. “Lifting is better than drugs, it doesn’t kill my appetite.”
“I noticed.”
Last week, on a rare day home with Sal, she tried to tally his food intake. A half dozen raw eggs in a blender with orange juice and powdered nutrients. Two pounds of hamburger. Fistfuls of megavitamins and other pills containing God knows what, washed down with a half-gallon of milk. She ran from the apartment at 2 p.m., when he began frying a bloody heap of liver and onions for his third meal of the day.
“Susan’s motto is ‘Stay hungry,‘” Sal says, mopping his brow and eyeing her reflection. He hasn’t looked at her directly, not once. “It’s the only way to succeed.”
“If that were true, you’d be a millionaire.”
His shoulder muscles swell to grapefruit size when he reaches over a dip station for a towel. He was a good model for her nude sketches before he became a walking cartoon.
“Now that I have the right partner, I can get started.”
He wipes his face and studies his profile again. The mirrored walls remind her of his mother’s home in South Philly.
“Not so fast,” she says. “First get me the key.”
He hits her in the chest with the balled-up towel, then sashays past the crunch machines toward the dressing room. Tonight she’ll draw him as an old man with a melting potato body on thin, crooked legs.
Susan is a sales rep for Mighty Slim, which is sold by the box in foil-wrapped pellets that look like bricks of hashish and taste like chocolate laxatives. Christine reads the literature when cases of the stuff start turning up in the apartment after her surprise appearance at Bodymold. Mighty Slim purportedly does it all: curbs appetite, stimulates muscle development, helps metabolize fat more efficiently.
Each new shipment is gone by the time Christine gets home from her graphic arts job at the casino. Sal works 4 to 12. She’s usually asleep before he arrives, but on Friday she waits up to confront him. Yes, he tells her, his latest career shift involves weight reduction counseling and, yes, he is going into business with Susan. He’s already selling Mighty Slim to gym members who want to cut down on workouts without gaining weight. It’s a growth market: women too old for vigorous aerobics but too vain “to walk around with big butts and flabby thighs.”
“Big butts are back in style,” Christine says defensively. She bikes and swims but worries that her hips are too broad, just as Sal worries that his thighs and upper arms lack definition, except after workouts.
“Flab is never in style,” he scoffs. “Not now, not in the future.”
“What about our future? What about this woman?”
He shrugs her off while stuffing a half-pound of turkey onto a foot-long Italian roll.
“Our relationship is platonic,” he says before tearing into the sandwich.
“Odd word from an ex-pimp.”
Andi compared Sal to the man-eating plant in Little Shop of Horrors. Drugs, weights, women — all fodder for the greedy beast that squats where his soul should be. The three of them met at Alcoholics Anonymous, in a church basement where anxious yuppies routinely shared secrets with young hoods and old stumblebums. Christine was never sure if she had a drinking problem or was using AA as a safe place to socialize. Andi said Christine was “codependent,“ not alcoholic. She broke ties with Christine after the wedding. The very traits that repelled her — Sal’s coarseness and physical menace — attracted Christine, who embraced the idea of channeling his energy into something useful.
“We might have to rethink our future,” he continues through a mouthful of meat. “I need someone who responds to my needs.”
“Ha! A well-stocked refrigerator and a woman with good credit.”
“Low blow, Christine.”
Anger makes her serene. As a child, she liked going away, without packing or leaving home. She’d sit motionless on a blanket, staring. Then she took up drawing and her quarrelsome parents stopped worrying.
“I don’t need your money,” Sal says, recovering. “I need a woman who says ‘Go for it, I’ll back you.’ ”
“Your friend Susan.”
His thick lips are parted childishly. There’s a smidge of mayonnaise on his chin. It’s hard to believe he once beat a biker half to death with a pool cue.
“She pumps me up, you tear me down.”
Christine wonders what’s worse, driving around lost or hitting a dead end.
Two weeks later, Sal is fired for selling Mighty Slim to gym members. Leaving Bodymold for the last time, he phones Christine when his rusty Ford won’t start. She arrives in her Honda to find him next to a dozen cases of Mighty Slim, shouting at a roly-poly woman sporting a dark pageboy and faded green spandex. Christine knows instantly that this is Susan, though she didn’t believe Sal’s description and pictured her rival as a 21-year-old swimsuit model. Susan sees Christine and wobbles toward the parking lot like a stale lima bean.
“Give me the keys,” Sal says quietly, loading the Mighty Slim into her car. After a few careful questions, Christine deduces that Susan refused to take back Sal’s product and insisted he sell it from home, now that he can’t use the gym.
Sal drives. Christine places a reassuring hand on one of his inconceivably hard quadricep muscles. She’s silent until he pulls in front of a speeding 18-wheeler. The truck brakes with an agonizing screech, right before its air horn emits a 30-second blast like Judgment Day dawning. She peeks between cases of Mighty Slim at the chrome-faced cab looming inches from the car’s bumper. The horn drowns out her scream. Sal slows instead of accelerating, and the truck groans like a wounded dinosaur. Its driver leans on his horn again. Sal stops the car, forcing the truck to do the same. Christine tries to restrain him, but he shakes her off and walks toward the truck as cars whiz by in the other lane.
She jumps out and considers shouting a warning, but Sal is pumped. The trucker climbs down from his shiny red cab. He’s six inches taller and a hundred pounds heavier than Sal. She can see the anger in his puffy red face. This one will be like the others, she can tell.
He calls Sal a punk and throws a roundhouse right. Sal ducks it easily and moves inside with a flurry. The trucker sags as Sal pummels his flabby gut. He straightens when the uppercut connects and freezes for a second before collapsing, as if unable to believe he’s been clobbered by a ponytailed midget.
On the road again, Sal shouts, “The fatter they are, the faster they fall.”
“You’ll get us both arrested,” she says, looking out the window for flashing cherrytops. Her blood is pumping, her skin tingling. She can’t sit still.
Back home, she helps him stack Mighty Slim in the living room. He lays a big hand on her shoulder and says, “Don’t hate me, baby.”
They make love amid the Mighty Slim, and it’s their best time in months. He brings her to climax almost as quickly as he KO’d the trucker. She runs her hands along the rippled muscles of his back and stops at his shoulders, which are calloused from squats and remind her of Susan and almost spoil the moment. He’s cheated on her before, but never with a religious nut shaped like a lima bean.
Sal goes out in the morning to have his car repaired and disappears for three days. She finds him in the kitchen Monday, eating what looks like steak tartare from a plastic bowl. Bodymold was a bust, but his biceps are bigger than ever and his entrepreneurial spirit undiminished. He’ll find another gym and an 800 number, and he knows a guy at a radio station who might help him buy air time for a call-in show. He is, after all, a certified fitness trainer and Mighty Slim is FDA-sanctioned. He’s not one to sit around moping, especially with Susan counting on him to meet his quota.
Fear courses through her like venom. “I thought you’d quit that unfortunate looking creature.”
“Susan knows what I need. Thanks to her, I’m back with my Higher Power.”
“I beg your pardon?”
He was distraught about being tossed out of Bodymold. Susan, it turns out, talked him out of buying drugs from his former cronies in Atlantic City. She steered him to a two-day spiritual seminar where Mighty Slim reps were drilled in sales techniques based on principles borrowed from AA.
“I turned it over, put the whole thing in God’s hands. Now I’m starting my own fellowship to spread the Word.”
Christine sits across from him. “What word?”
“Susan joined. You can too, if you accept Jesus as your personal savior.”
He lifts a forkful of raw meat to his mouth and gobbles. She does some mental doodling — blobs and puddles, quads pressing flabby bean flesh — then jerks the table upward with both hands. Sal’s bowl plops onto his lap, staining his white sweats.
“Tell it to your blobby friend,” she shouts. “Selfish lowlife brute.”
He’s on her in a second. “I’m flawed but getting better.”
“I want you out of here.”
He relaxes his grip when she stops writhing, then pulls off his blood-spattered shirt.
“You should think it over, don’t you think?” he says, flipping his ponytail back in place. “Take it one day at a time.”
“I want you out, out!” She’s pumped, but knows it won’t last.
Sal picks the meat off the floor, replaces it in the bowl, runs tap water over the mess and drains it. Then he sits and resumes eating.
“I’ll say a prayer for you,” he says, perhaps wondering how long before she calms down and accepts the Good News. “I’ll phone Susan and ask her to say one too.”
