Bright Lights, Big Ass: A Self-Indulgent, Surly, Ex-Sorority Girl's Guide to Why It Often Sucks in the City, or Who Are These Idiots and Why Do They All Live Next Door to Me? (34 page)

The pearls, naturally, stay on.

I grab a towel and hit the cardio area. I decide I’m not going to go full force because I don’t want to, you know,
die.
I select a treadmill with the best view of all four plasma TVs and I start to move, slowly, but gradually more surely. Ellen, CNN, and a couple of sports channels are my only companions in the cardio room. My heart thumps pretty hard, but it feels good.

My workout progresses nicely. I spend half an hour on the treadmill and do ten minutes on the elliptical machine. I get my heart rate into the fat-burning zone and break a decent sweat. Yay, me! I do a ten-minute cooldown on the bikes, deciding to skip the weight training for another day. Satisfied, I return to the locker room to change.

I’m congratulating myself for a job well done when the unthinkable happens.

I bend over to remove my sneakers and my pants explode.

Let’s milk it, shall we?

My.

Pants.

Explode.

Kaboom.

I struggle to remove what’s left of the dove-gray material and hold it up for examination. The back side appears to have been taken out by a Scud missile. Or possibly the aftereffects of inhaling six pounds of creamy, nutty, imported Gouda at Shayla’s pre–New Year’s Eve New Year’s bash. I shake my head and say to myself out loud,
“The camel’s back? Just broke.”

I throw on my street clothes and march up to the reception desk. I hate myself for what I’m about to request, but it has to be done. It is time.

“Jen! Happy New Year!” Mike, a friendly kid with massive shoulders, is now working the desk. “I didn’t see you come in. Hope you had a great holiday! So, how are you?” Not only does he know our names, but he knows all about us—like about Fletch’s job,
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our dogs, the new house, etc. He always asks how my writing’s going, but I have no time for his pleasantries today because
I Am Resolved.

“Resolved,”
I tell him.

He bends his head and holds a finger to his right ear while turning down the gym’s sound system. “I’m sorry, Jen. I didn’t quite catch what you said.”

Louder, I repeat, “I said I’m
Resolved
. It pains me to do this but I need to”—I grit my teeth and straighten my spine—“schedule ongoing sessions with one of your personal trainers.”

“That’s great!” He’s really enthusiastic about people getting fit and it would be adorable if it didn’t make me want to kill-self-comma-others. He cheers and attempts to give me a high five, but I’m having no part of it. I’ll suck it up and work out with a trainer, but damn it, I will
not
celebrate that fact. I hate that my lack of willpower over the buffet table has brought me to the point I need to pay someone to get me back on track. “Any specific goals you’d like to achieve?”

I hold up the spandex tatters. “Yes. I’d like to never explode out of my pants again.”

He pauses for a moment, looking thoughtful. “So…weight loss?”

“Obviously. And thank you for not laughing. Now I won’t have to gut you like a trout.”

“Lemme take down your info for Tim.” He writes my daytime phone number on a Post-it note for the owner. “Have you got a preference of who you want to work with?”

Without hesitation I tell him, “I want someone mean.”

“Come again?”

“Mean. M-E-A-N. As in the opposite of nice.”

“Okaaayy.”

“Mike, please write this down. Tell Tim I can’t train with someone who’s going to offer me cheery
‘You can do it!’
platitudes. I’m not motivated by positive reinforcement. I
need
mean. I require yelling. I want boot camp. Think drill sergeant. Better yet, think
Nazi
drill sergeant. And if he can holler at me about my deplorable eating habits, too? Even better.”

Mike looks thoroughly confused. “So—”

I interrupt because I’m on a roll and I’ve got to get this out before I lose my nerve. “In order for me to be successful, I must have someone breathing down my neck, screaming at me that I’m worthless and weak if I can’t give him
‘one more effing squat!’
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He needs to shout at me until the tendons stick out on his neck. Because if my trainer doesn’t do this, I won’t give one hundred percent. And I need to give one hundred percent or else I’ll be a fatty at my book events and that means Jessica Simpson wins.”

“Um—”

“Seriously, I wrote and sold my book not because of the people who told me I could. Rather, I wanted to show up everyone who told me I couldn’t. Make me mad enough and I’ll be unstoppable.”

“Wait—”

“Really? If I could hate my trainer? That would be ideal. I’d prefer to despise that person with the fire of ten thousand suns. So when I walk—nay, crawl—out of here at the end of my workouts, I want to lull myself to sleep by picturing my very talented and inspirational trainer getting hit by a bus. A bus that I am driving.” I pause to take a breath, having not done so in the past five minutes. “Hey, are you getting all this down?”

“Well—”

“Anyway, there’s a whole bunch of publicity already lined up for this spring and when
OK!
magazine writes up my book, I’d rather they not have the option to reference my gigantic ass. And thus, I need a trainer, because this getting thin business? Is obviously not happening on my own. So, can you guys set me up? Find me a trainer who fits my parameters so I can in turn fit my pants? Can you make it happen?” By the time I finish this diatribe, I’m in full-on, I-Am-Woman-Hear-Me-Roar mode, legs akimbo and hands on my hips. I defy this kid to tell me no.

Mike opens his mouth to speak a couple of times before sound actually comes out. “Um, well…yes. We can make this happen. That’s what we do.”

“Outstanding!”

“Except I don’t know how to say all of that on a Post-it note.”

“Oh.”

“How about I just write ‘Jen Lancaster—ass kick,’ and have Tim call you?”

I smile and nod. “That’ll work.”

When I reviewed the wall of framed trainer photographs yesterday, I assumed I’d be assigned to Steve, a former Mr. Arizona. He’s definitely the most buff trainer on staff—his neck alone is the size of a California redwood! Sure, I prefer my neck less of a tree trunk rather than more, but I imagine he’ll know how to do that and I’m confident he’d be the best guy to navigate the tricky waters of my quest for physical fitness.

I park right next to the door again and enter, swiping my membership card at the check-in desk. After stowing my bag and coat, I exit the locker room, expecting to find Steve, who’ll be eager to kick my soon-to-be-smaller ass, but there’s no sign of him. Where is he? I wonder. A slip of a girl in one of my gym’s logo sweatshirts is milling around the desk, so I decide to ask her.

“Hi, I’m looking—” But before I can finish my sentence, she holds out a tiny mitt and delicately shakes my hand.

“Hi! You must be Jen! I’m Polly and we’ll be training together today!” I take in Polly’s slender neck and bandy arms. She’s got an
itty bitty, would look like a sheet of paper if she turned sideways
torso and toothpick-variety legs. She’s built less like the brick shithouse I was expecting and more like a ten-year-old Olympic figure skater. I don’t fear her so much as I want to babysit her. I groan inwardly.
Oh, great
, I think,
I asked for the Marquis de Sade and instead I got an Olsen twin.

I follow Polly
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to the juice bar to go through a health assessment. After a quick discussion of my medical history
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she asks about my fitness goals. Naturally I answer, “To not look tubby in the national media.” We move on to discuss diet, and touch briefly on the Holiday Eating and Drinking Orgy. I watch her squirm when I mention the sheer caloric input, but even without her reaction I have a hard time taking her seriously. Shoot, this little gal probably hasn’t had anything but lemon water and air-popped corn in all of her fourteen years on this earth, so how can I expect her to appreciate the virtues of a buttercream cupcake?