FITNESS TEST(s)

A good day at the gym. Everybody loves Thursdays. You can look down to the street, see the rats and ankles below, and forget that they see you in the very same way.

It was a rainy, and slightly chilly spring day at Beefeater's Sports, Fitness Center (& Spa) (but no one ever used the spa, as most of these men were the sort, shall we say, who winced if hugged too hard, who clenched their eye sockets tighter if they could feel an emotion coming on, and prayed to the god that made them comfortable/rich or whatever level in between they were hard at, to make it subside – cease & desist, who tensed up their paranoid necks at you if you attempted to actually, Jesus H. Christ and his armies of marketing fiends, Touch them. They preferred the fitness part of the place. Where they could be alone with their thoughts. Like being on the toilet or at the urinal, but with their fellow employees around them, watching them huff and puff on that laced up machine of some kind, bringing them down to size one 20 minute increment at a time. Sweat collecting on their cell phones, which they keep close at hand, bleeding middle age into the complimentary towels which are always available for the taking. Truth be told, some of them took theirs already soiled back to the office, and kept it somewhere near and dear to them. Possibly to remind them of the way they smelled when they Actually let out some form of their bodily fluids during their normally cold and routine workday, and possibly to be intermingled with another of their bodily fluids, which they might find themselves releasing upon that late morning stretch. Some might see it as disgusting, but unless the cleaning lady found it in herself to want to explore places in which she would probably never ever think to desire to, their soiled selves would be safe in their office furniture, the ark which holds the tiniest and dirtiest and mostly unused pieces of them.

Here, at Beefeater's at high noon, it was hopping. The muscular guidos were out (their ethnicity didn’t matter much; they were neck less Johnny Gumbas of the New York variety, with eyes that gazed and surmised men and women in the same anteater fashion, sucking up the details as if their competitive life depended on it – they weren’t gay, mind you, all guys did that in college, and showers are a strange place….how can some dynamite not go off in the artillery store?), along with the skinny, ineffectual business dandys – all coiffed and color coordinated – and they never sweat! Why and how was it that they could run ten, fifteen miles on those hamster wheel devices and not sweat a single droplet! Tom thought this to himself, as he ran and sweat and wished he was running somewhere else. Not into the blank and slightly off white wall in front of him, windowless and covered only in the usual corporate gym framed photograph of the skinny girl on the beach doing yoga. He didn’t see any of those girls around Beefeater's – probably because they got tired of the desperate glances of men like him all gathered up on stationary bikes and Stairmasters (think of the word – the Word, after all, is the thing….there is no such thing as being a master of the stairs and if there was, would they really want to take up that challenge?) ogling the women in their downward facing dogs, causing more dog like mental activity to grow and germinate in the minds of those bored men on their rotating Catherine wheels of fitness and health. That, and the inner thigh machine that truly took the cake so far as all the Gumbas, the skinny odorless boys, the distraught businessmen unable to turn away from woman after woman spreading eagle repeatedly by their own choice but a stone’s throw away from the men and their trusty towels, neither improving their station very much from the place where they found themselves.

Hill and Angelo, worlds away from each other lifestyle wise, always had to conduct some sort of competitive match via the stationary bikes, which opposed each other directionally with nothing but mirrors all around. It was a slap-happy, all you can eat circle jerk off of physical fitness and tests of mettle and manhood, since they found it nowhere else in their lives – no woman had respected them for decades now, and all they had left was each other – Angelo was newly giddy, having lost over 60 pounds on his own (he practically sweated pink ponies he was that jazzed), but though they both considered the fight fair (Hill was almost 20 years older than Angelo and therefore never went beyond level 3 of 10 on his own stationary bike vehicle machine), it seemed odd visually, since Angelo was conducting the race from the seated and almost lounging position of one of those special stationary bikes – the ones wherein you sat back, far from the work your legs were doing, as if you were canoeing on a lazy boy, and that’s just what it looked like if you watched Angelo while he biked. The motion caused him to become a mouth breather, and his sweat was still that of a fat man’s – thick, heavy and sloppy, as it did nothing other than smear down the side of his face, back of his neck and presumably his still somewhat wide ass crack. They watched each other with all the glory their sodden work days could muster. They respected each other, even if their alienated wives did not.

Someone would always win, as far as miles biked, and all that, but usually, they wouldn’t seal the bet with any sort of prize to the winner – if a pretty girl walked by in the interim of biking to the showers (where Hill and Angelo always did their cleanup duties on opposing ends of the communal male shower – there was no need for small talk in some situations, after all) to the walk, slow and victorious, back to the office (wherein one or both of them would usually still be sweating – usually Angelo) , the winner of the contest would get to fuck her…..if one of them did, of course. The nameless, voiceless girl would march on, oblivious, but little did she know she was in for a sweaty, triumphant corporate fitness sponsored fuck, courtesy of Beefeater's and the rampant and momentarily vivid imaginations of those men who found some sense of victory in their silly, silly days. No matter if she didn’t look their way, or smiled. They knew the score. Their smiles said it all. They would huff and puff back upstairs, and know, in their heart of hearts, now pumping with good all-American fear and climax, that their special stolen towels would be there waiting for them, and would allow them every indiscretion until the close of work at 5pm.

M. Lucia