I have been going to the gym since I was fourteen years old. My father suggested it when my older brother, Ira, was getting into trouble. His grades began to slip at school, he was smoking, gaining weight and because Ira was arrested several years before, my father hoped weight lifting would help. My dad was also feeling a bit lonely. Our oldest brother, Darrell, who was in the Air Force, had been transferred to England from a base a few hours away from our house.
Two weeks after we began going to the gym, my father and brother quickly became uninterested in the notion that this was going to change anything about either one of them, especially their bodies, so they gave up. My father was reduced to being my chauffeur six days a week for the next two years until I got my driver’s license. My brother, who replaced the gym with a job as a customer service rep for Waccamaw Pottery, fell in love with a girl in layaway, who later dumped him for a red headed cashier.
Weight lifting, however, stuck with me. I wanted to look like Sly Stallone, like the chiseled down Rocky Balboa I was introduced to in Rocky III. I spent the summer of 1983, after watching Rocky defeat Mr. T, skipping rope, doing push-ups and pull-ups in our basement, running outside in a grey sweat shirt and matching sweat pants. All I got was heat stroke. I knew weights were the key to attaining the muscles I wanted and I was glad my father agreed.
Because I spent so much time at the gym, I mostly hung around men who were much older than me. Guys who worked on construction sites or in warehouses, guys who had mortgages and car payments, guys who had a girlfriend or loads of women to choose from. Things I hadn’t yet experienced but was eager to understand. When I got to the gym each day, I was mentally drained from a day at school. When they got there, they were physically tired from moving boxes all day or wind blown from a day on the job site slinging hammers. We spent our days differently, but the three hours we spent in the gym each night brought us together.
My ability to hang around with men sometimes twice my age, stemmed from my desire to be better. Better than the guys at school on the football team who wore their jerseys to school. The guys who had parties every Friday night after the football game (that I never attended) who drank beer and hard alcohol from their parents’ liquor cabinet and had sex on their parents’ bed.
Guys who played for Coach Ayers who asked me to join his team. When I declined he asked me, “Don’t you want to be a real athlete?” I was a real athlete. I wanted to be better than the guys who hung out with the popular girls like Paula Lindholm, who was nice to me in Junior High, when she would talk to me through the window of her second floor bedroom. She didn’t seem to care I was only in seventh grade and a little on the chubby side. I used to hear Jackson Browne sing “Somebody’s Baby” and gaze across the cornfield thinking Paula was on the other end looking back at me, wanting to be my baby that night.
Growing up, I wanted to fit into a crowd. I didn’t care which crowd it was, the preppies, the jocks, the stoners, I just wanted to fit in. I tried to assimilate myself in many of the groups, but just never felt completely comfortable. Either my clothes were too cheap or too outdated or I wasn’t into sports and sports statistics like many of the guys in my class were.
Most people just left me alone. Others mocked me, pointed me out, and harassed me. I was the guy who carried his lunch in a grocery bag, which was typically filled with a whole chicken or several cans of tuna fish, a loaf of bread, apples, pears, bananas; enough food to last me throughout the day. I was the guy who carried the gallon-sized jug of brown water (iced tea) with me and would drink from it in the hallway. I was the guy who shaved his hair short on the sides and back and died his hair bleach blond down the center.
Despite all of my differences, I was actually invited to a Saturday night party. It was my senior year. It was more like after my senior year because I had finished high school early. I had enough credits to graduate, so I was given the option to stay and take a light course load or leave. I wanted to make money for college, so I left. Instead of cherishing the final months high school had to offer, the moments I didn’t have for three and a half years, I deposited people’s checks, I wired money, I turned change into paper bills, I asked people to properly identify themselves before I cashed their paychecks. I became a bank teller.
I wasn’t sure why I was invited to the party. In retrospect, it may have been because finishing high school is like a license to let go. It’s an imaginary finish line. Everyone who crosses that line enters a parallel world, a world without social classes or clicks, a world where hair color or lunch bag mean very little. In their eyes, perhaps, I was worthy of an invitation to the party because I had crossed that line.
I just wanted to go to the party and see what the fuss was all about. There was a girl there I liked, Kim Hauser, and I wanted to see if she liked me back. I felt special. I felt cool. I felt wanted. If it wasn’t for the fact that I saw Kim kissing Aaron Kline, a second string member of the basketball team, while Cutting Crew sang “(I Just) Died in Your Arms,” my life at that very moment might have been different. When I saw the kiss, I knew all eyes were on me. My affection for Kim and I thought her fondness for me was not hidden. Throughout the night, we openly flirted with each other, hands touched, eyes gazed, attention remained fixed upon each other and no one else. So I thought. People were pointing, once again mocking a noble fool who walked out the front door to continue his appointed station in life.
The guys from the gym also had parties. There were bachelor parties, celebrations after a bodybuilding contest held in a Chi-Chi’s restaurant in Rockford, IL, birthday parties, surprise parties, 4th of July barbecues and the “You’re Going Away to College” party. They never gave it a moment’s notice to include me or throw a party for me. There was no mocking. There was no pointing. They enjoyed having me so they could pass along their knowledge and laugh with me. When any kissing occurred, I was a willing participant with women who wanted me as much as I wanted them. They were the guys I ran to tell the first time I had sex. They were the guys I cried with when my cousin died in a drunk-driving accident and then a year later, my uncle died just the same.
I’ve passed the age most of the guys from the gym were back then. I have a great group of friends I met in college. Guys who have jobs and wives and babies. Guys who have mortgages and car loans and credit card bills. They are the guys I will laugh with at a “get together” (the Friday night party of my past), cry with someday at a funeral, and celebrate with at their kids’ graduations.
I still exercise five-six days a week, but now I’m more interested in maintaining my shape than changing it. I sometimes struggle to fit in with a crowd. I can feel like low man, the court jester, the gopher, and the stooge. I’m okay with who I am and the man I have turned out to be. I have a wife that loves me, children that admire me, and I have creative goals for myself that the guys from high school or my old job may never understand. Someday, someone will want to be included in my group. I might shun people away while I grab the hand of some unsuspecting loner, ready to fit in, brimming with something better.
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