Marge is playing at this! — Bend down at the knees, get that butt low! KEEP THOSE SHOULDERS BACK! DO NOT LET THEM PASS YOUR KNEES! Better! That’s it! Good!
When we were kids we moved from Southie to Weymouth. It was a nice big house with high ceilings and a huge yard out back, and Jocelyn and I had our own bedrooms. I always nurtured a sense that Mom and Dad weren’t happy though, and as I grew up, they only seemed to demonstrate togetherness through a shared rancor. He had his ongoing moans about the “Dorchester influx” into Weymouth (I got that he meant the blacks, whom he claimed he’d moved us down here to get away from, despite the fact that our last neighborhood was the whitest, most Irish in the city), while Mom would follow up with a trauma-filled nod of endorsement and a comment about “falling house prices.”
— That’s it, honey, I encourage Marge, — get that butt lower! All the way down!
But let’s go back to 33. It’s a dirty age for a single woman, and a filthy one for a personal trainer. It goes (mostly) unsaid, although the sneaky, squeaky Mona, eight years my junior, 5’9", blond, 36-24-36, and the next oldest female trainer at Bodysculpt, will occasionally, with cloying fake deference, describe me as the “most experienced.” Now there’s a bitch who takes acid in her saccharin.
— Okay, Marge, gimme an around-the-body pass, left to right. . good. . good, try to keep it at the same height, I tell her. This sucks bigtime for a cellulite-caked fatty. — Better. .
Now that Jon no longer appears, the only person I really get along with here is Lester. I much prefer working out of Miami Mixed Martial Arts, a proper joint on 5th, run by Emilio, an ex-boxer. The clients are serious about their fitness and goals. Bodysculpt, a corporate glass and pine-floored yuppie chain, is more like a freakin daytime nightclub. They even have resident DJs, like the execrable Toby, thankfully absent today, playing “workout” music. It’s usually inspid ambient bullshit for lazy, Prozac-stunned, cocktail-guzzling beachballs who think they’re in some fucking spa. Most of the clients are women; the fat housewifes on my roster work uneasily alongside fashion-shoot, stick-thin models, and professionals who spend most of their time talking into their phones while doing low-speed elliptical shit. The few men in this gym all seem of the type who’d made fairly advanced plans to shoot up their high school, but chickened out late in the game. Decided studying and then practicing law was a better way of hurting their local community. And they were probably correct.
Marge ends her set and I’m showing her how to do a deadlift on a heavier kettlebell. — As you come down, you brace the abdominals, I demonstrate, — and you’re squeezing in the glutes and pressing right through the centers of the heels.
A gaping black hole and two shocked eyes stare back at me out of a sweating red furnace.
— Go on!
Marge gets to five and then she starts that white-flag bullshit. — Can I stop now. .? the quitter begs.
I draw in a deep breath, my hands on my hips. — Quitters quit! Doers do! Five more, Marge girl. C’mon, honey, you can do it!
— I can’t. .
— Not acceptable! Gimme five more and we’ll call it quits, I demand, as she bends over, sucking in the air. — Find a way!
The bitch looks at me as if I’ve just shanked her, but complies.
— FOUR!
Those fucking time-wasters don’t want change: they want affirmation. You need to shake them up. You have to slap their fat, stupid faces until they squeal.
— THREE!
To tell them you are gonna carve that suit of pudgy indolence from their bodies and make them human again. And yes, they are going to hate you for it.
— TWO!
And I don’t blow smoke up their gross asses; I lay it on the line. I tell them it is like being born again, but in slow motion, and where you remember every sweating, grunting, choking, bone-crushing, violent detail. But what you come out with is a body and a mind fit for the purpose of life in this world. Marge strains with the weight. .
— ONE! AAAANNND REST!
The kettlebell weight spills out of her grip and smacks onto the rubber floor. She bends over, gasping for breath, hands on her knees. I don’t like people dropping weights, so I shout, — You’re rockin’ it, Marge! Gimme five, forcing her to reluctantly half rise to slap my palm, before fastening her hands back on her knees. She looks up, breathing heavily, like a wildebeest that’s escaped a lion’s clutches this time, but only at the expense of having a chunk of its ass ripped off. You wish, fat bitch! Yes, I’m detested now, but as the endorphin rush blitzes her she’ll start an all-day love affair with me. Then she’ll step out into the sun and see those tanned, lean South Beach bodies and think: I must work harder.
Yes you fucking must.
As our clients, Marge and Lester’s college prof, finish up and wander off to the showers, we take a break to wait for our next appointments. There is an office, but it’s primarily used for payroll, and managing the place, and we prefer to hang out by the juice bar, basking in the light spilling in through the slanted glass roof. The best trainers always want to be visible, even if you aren’t working out or training somebody.
Lester is sipping a black coffee, while I’m on the green tea. I like Lester, now that he’s cooled it on the South Bronx ghetto tales which bored the living shit out of me. He had that New York arrogance when he first arrived, that tiresome assumption that only interesting, edgy, crazy stuff can happen there, but Florida has chilled him out. He’s also learned to use the ghetto talk selectively; great for the boxing and self-defense classes, less so for the one-on-ones with the wealthier white clients. Mona comes in and joins us, laying down her William and Kate mag and going to the espresso machine. Lester is animated as Sarah Palin comes on the TV talking about the need for tighter immigration control. — Tighter immigration control? Damn, she need tighter ass control, he snickers.
— Enough sexism already, Les, but I can’t help but smile. I shouldn’t encourage him, but I do, as it offends Mona, who is back into her magazine. — Imagine living each day like it’s a dream, she gasps under her breath.
— Palin, bitch’s ass has gone south, Lester explains. — Compare it with ’08. Like shit Tina Fey gonna take her off now. She wish. That slovenly butt is what really cost her the 2012 GOP nomination. How far hellbound them handfuls gonna be by ’16? Les’s eyes bulge. — No good ol’ boy who can’t raise it to jerk off to her is gonna bother to trek his sorry ass down the polling booth to put his cross by her name. Gimme her booty for six months, man, I’d have it as hard and as smooth as two beach pebbles!
Lester always goes on about his list of fantasy clients, and what he could do for them. Bieber would be pumped with iron and steroids till he looked like Stallone. Roseanne Barr would be ruthlessly melted down till she resembled Lara Flynn Boyle. But his observations never impress Mona. — That is so misogynistic, Les, she whines, looking up from her magazine, her tone of voice indicating a disapproval that a face paralyzed from hairline to jaw by botulinum toxin simply cannot express. — I find her a really inspirational figure.
— I’m gonna go split-ticket against the sisterhood here, I cut in, — cause Les is right. Palin’s down to lose two million votes through letting her ass flop like that. I figure that for chick politicos each pound gained represents a net loss of a hundred thousand votes. Ten pounds one way or the other puts more than a few swing states into play, I conclude, picking up an apple from the basket and taking a crunch out of it.