Notes. From the Upper West Side. A Novel by Dan Wrench. Chapter 65.
Terry. The next day I was back at the gym before meeting Fern long before, like at 3 in the afternoon, and I had Sammy with me. T-shirt girl at the sign encounter wasn't so friendly with me that day. She sighed noticeably when I signed by name in the little ledger next to the timestamp.
Before I could say, how's it going? She yelled out, TARRAY inducted into some back room. Oh yeah, it was clear. Terry told her I was this guy who liked getting blow jobs in the afternoon and bragging about it afterward with strangers.
Maybe he called me an asshole. Maybe he posted something about me on Facebook. Cockblocker. Terry came out of the back room and walked over to me and said, You're back.
Like he wasn't some loud mouth who talked shit about me to babes. You gotta change out of the streets though. He grinned. I know.
I said. I was giving him the stern look. I just got here. No camaraderie for you today.
Jack. I thought. Yeah. He said.
He stopped grinning like he could read my mind. You can take the boy down to Miss Jam and Wadd downstairs. Terry said. She'll show him where the little boy's room is.
Downstairs was the daycare suite for members. I was a member. I'm not a little boy. Said Sam.
Yeah. Said Terry. A few minutes later I had my sneakers and sweatshirt and cut off jeans out of the backpack and on my bod and Sam was in the fun room with Miss Jam and Wadd. Who was this sweaty porcine chick who wore a leotard and sucked on a straw sticking out of one of those water bottles with the Equiballon's logo on the side.
You know, like she needed to stay hydrated because she was working out all day. Except her gigantic ass said the closest she ever got to working out was planning a push up while ordering a slice. Terry was leading me to these big machines past roads of babes on treadmills when he said. Can you lift your own weight?
Um, yeah, probably not. I said. Hit that Bobby J. We gotta work on that upper body strength then.
Okay. I said. Hey, just not a curiosity. Why should I be able to lift my own body weight?
I mean, why not half my body weight or twice my body weight? Good question. He said he leaned against this upright machine with a bunch of padded levers on it and a black padded seat jutting out between two pieces of steel. Say you get in an accident or there's a fire and you break both your legs.
You gotta get away from the flings, right? Or the water that might be welling up around your head. So you gotta drag yourself by your arms. How you gonna do that if you can't lift your own weight?
I guess you're thinking I would be in an air shaft or someplace where there are things like grips I can use to pull myself out of harm's way. Yeah, right. Like an air shaft. Interesting.
I said. Good point. I pictured Terry at some Equiballon's orientation where his masters handed him a bunch of cards and on each of these cards was written a canned answer to some question a customer might ask. One of them was a little sentence that said if somebody asks you why they should be able to lift their own body weight you should tell them they might break both their legs one day and have to pull themselves through an air shaft.
I looked around at the guys doing pull ups and bench presses and lateral rows. I will bet you all of my money that not one of them was preparing for the air shaft eventuality. But I have to say in hindsight this Terry character helped me out a lot in spite of being some cock blocker who called me Bobby Jack and Bobby J because he couldn't be bothered to remember my real name. He kept me from overdoing.
See, in the front of my brain was the knowledge that I had less than three weeks to get into a shape and he was the voice of reason telling me there was no fucking way I was going to get ripped in 19 days. So day one at the gym was all about that's too much weight man you're going to get a hernia and you're going to wake up tomorrow morning and you won't be able to move and slow a few reps today a few more tomorrow don't eat the whole cow and so on. Dude I'm really interested in getting my abs in great shape. I said if I do nothing else I got to get great abs.
Okay well you can work the abs all you want but if you don't lose weight you're never going to see how ripped you get. Heck you might be ripped right now for all I know but I can't tell because you got two inches of flab on your belly maybe three shades of par. Well can I just concentrate on losing the weight on my abs? He laughed loud really loud like it was the funniest damn thing you ever heard.
Hey man you don't lose weight off of areas you lose it all over you don't lose it you ever see a big fat Bobby who's fat all over except in his waist or an obese lady with a little tight butt it don't happen you never see those people. Well I kind of told him I'd dilemma without being descriptive. I'm meeting a girl in 19 days and I have to be in great shape I said like I'd met some babe online from Florida or someplace and we were back to hook up in the real world for the first time. Hey that body it's always something like that.
If you're in here you're maybe a bodybuilder or maybe some guy who's really trying to change or else you're somebody who's got a point somebody else day after tomorrow and now you're trying to get a lifetime of training into 48 hours. So what do I do? Well you can start out on a healthy diet and just coming in to work out you'll feel a lot better you'll have more energy. Pick you might even lose five pounds before the big day or night.
And I had my kegels. I almost asked them about those but I decided to leave the kegels talk to my other coach, fat firm. So I had two coaches now. Three if you count par.
All helping me to bang a babe who wasn't my wife. I remember thinking what a bunch of assholes. What? You do what you have to.
Notes from the Upper West Side is a work of fiction. The people depicted in this work do not exist. Notes from the Upper West Side copyright 2013 to 2018 by Dan Wrench.