Cooking as Fast as I Can (8 page)

But I had discovered in myself a penchant for hard work. I found comfort in exerting myself, in the discipline of doing something taxing day after day. Pumping iron and bodybuilding required the kind of dedication and sustained focus that lit me up. I was always good at naming a goal and working toward its completion. I excelled at finishing what I started.

I began working out at a shabby old gym across from campus. It was almost all dudes and a lesbian or two. Weight lifters traditionally work in pairs, and I had teamed up with Randy. He was what today we would call a nerd. He had a studious look, tall and lanky, with long knobby-kneed legs and a chest that could use some developing, even by non-pumped-up standards. We committed to training twice a day, two hours in the morning, two in the afternoon. I was five foot two, weighed 104, and could bench-press 130. Every day, we just killed it.

I entered some bodybuilding contests, where I would compete in the lightweight category. When I moved on to the regional level, my mom, dad, and grandmom traveled with me. We'd drive in the station wagon, and after the event celebrate with pizza and beer. Alma wouldn't miss an event. If it had to do with me, there was no question that she was there. I could have been in the circus and she would come to watch me juggle. They were determined to support me, and in their minds I'm sure they thought it would be like watching me play softball, or perform during halftime with the Genteels.

The contests were all-day affairs. One competitor after the next would walk onstage in her swimsuit, suntanned and shiny
with oil, and flex her muscles. My mom could hardly stand it. “Cathy! It's like watching paint dry,” she would exclaim on the way home. My brothers rolled their eyes, thinking I was just on another kick.

The women I competed against were enormous, with deltoid muscles the size of grapefruits and pecs like the armor suit of a superhero; every leg muscle was a massive steel cable that could haul a barge. And oh the bulging veins, prized in the profession, but appalling to my mom, who knew a symptom of anabolic steroid use when she saw it.

I had never used steroids, but then one day Randy showed up to train and said he was going to get some and would I like to give them a try. Given the controversies that have since come to light in professional sports regarding steroid use, this must sound pretty bad. But this was the late 1980s, and steroids, at least in the South, where bodybuilding was king, were viewed as supplements, no more scandalous than amino acids or protein powder. Steroids were everywhere, and readily available. People chattered about them at the gym without a care, as if they were talking about what movie they'd seen over the weekend. They'd do a set of bench presses, disappear into the bathroom to plunge a needle into their thigh, then come out and hit it again.

Randy and I injected each other in the bathroom in our glutes, the top of that big butt muscle. We shot up before every workout. The effects on my body were instantaneous. Within a week my delts popped up, and I was sporting a six-pack. My voice, normally an average girly timbre, had fallen into the Demi Moore range.

One day not long after I'd started steroids, my mom walked in on me in the bathroom as I was getting out of the shower.

“Oh my
gosh, what on earth are you doing?” she asked.

“What are you talking about?”

“You're taking steroids. I can tell. And you've got to stop.”

I told her I would stop, but kept it up until the day I looked in the mirror and spied some facial hair.

six

A
fter I quit bodybuilding, I found a new gym, an immaculate place that focused on overall fitness. There I met Blake, who was tall, blond, and bursting with energy. Everything I liked in a woman.

On our first date she brought along some freshly baked blueberry muffins. I found this to be incredibly sexy, a cute girl baking muffins just for me. I suspect I'm a little like a dude in that respect; the fastest way to my heart does indeed seem to be through my stomach.

We drove out to the Rez, the reservoir, sat on a picnic table, drank a few beers, and got to know each other. A big, bright moon shone down on the water, and we could easily watch the play of expressions on each other's faces. The night was warm and breezy and smelled of water and warm grass. We started to kiss, lightly at first, but soon we were splayed on top of the picnic table, dry-humping. We were forced to come up for air because a few trucks had pulled into the parking lot. That was the last thing we wanted—a truckload of rednecks gawking at us. So we did what any hot-and-bothered couple would do, ate another blueberry muffin.

Our romance went from zero to sixty in about three days. We were head-over-heels inseparable, a little crazy when forced to spend a single day apart.

Given what had happened with Jordan, I wasn't surprised when Blake confessed that she hadn't come out to her conservative family. Also, and equally unsurprising, before we fell in love she'd been dating a guy, a devout Christian named Edward. Mississippi is notably churchy; indeed, it's the most religious state in the nation, according to a number of reputable polls, and Edward was a Bible thumper of the first order.

Edward lived not far from my parents' house on Swan Lake Drive, and I'd run into him from time to time at the Jitney Jungle grocery. He was outgoing, salesmanlike, and perfectly cordial until the day Blake told him the truth, that she'd fallen in love with me. Edward began showing up at the gym when Blake and I worked out. We'd be side by side on the treadmills or at the weight machines and he would appear in his street clothes and lecture us. The music would be pounding, the machines whirring, and he'd yell, “Y'all are going straight to hell, you know that, right?”

We were polite. That's how both of us had been raised. At first Edward figured that as long as Blake hadn't “officially” come out, she was just being a willful and somewhat ridiculous sinner. He was her beard, a term with which I have no doubt Edward was unfamiliar.

Meanwhile, I'd enrolled at the University of Southern Mississippi at Hattiesburg, ninety miles south of Jackson, for the fall term. After two years at Hinds I still hadn't settled on a major, but I was closing in on twenty-one and knew it was time to dedicate myself more seriously to my education. My interest in food and nutrition, as well as sports and exercise, was a constant in my life, so I decided to major in exercise physiology.

One afternoon a few weeks before I was set to move to Hattiesburg, Blake met me at the gym at our usual time. I
could see she was rattled. Her eyes were pink-rimmed from crying. We'd talked a lot about her moving with me to Southern Miss. She was several years older than me and had already graduated from college. She could get a job anywhere, and we were determined to be together. I wanted a steady girlfriend, a partner to come home to. I thought Blake was it, and Blake thought I was it, and that morning she'd summoned all her courage and came out to her parents and told Edward that she was breaking up with him for good. I knew it took a lot for her to do this, because it had taken a lot for me to do it—and my parents had been accepting.

We found ourselves two open exercise bikes side by side and hopped on. Blake said her parents went ballistic. She said they lost their minds. She said they never wanted her to see me again, and that they blamed me for turning her gay. She pedaled faster and faster. Her eyes shone, her tan cheeks flushed a deep rose. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed the front door fling open, and someone stride inside furious with a sense of purpose.

It was Edward. From twenty paces I could see the rage in his eyes. He walked straight up to Blake and without pause pulled back his arm and punched her square in the face. She yowled, toppled off the bike and onto the rubber matting. I leapt off my bike and yelled, “What the hell!”

He stood over her and roared, “How dare you humiliate me!” His face was red. A vein on his forehead popped out. People came running, and someone appeared with a wad of wet paper towel, which Blake took and held against her swelling cheek. “You will not get away with humiliating me this way!” Then he turned and marched back out, his fists still in a ball.

After we ascertained that Blake was not grievously injured, Blake and I talked for hours. We were certain that holier-than-
thou Edward giving his ex-girlfriend a black eye in front of a bunch of office workers reading
People
magazine on the treadmill was the last of it, and for several days all was quiet. It was August, the deep southern heat and humidity stupefying, even for us natives. We rode around town with the top down, counting the days until it was time to go.

Earlier in the summer I'd landed a part-time job at another gym across town. It was one of those gyms that put on airs, insisting their employees refer to it as a fitness center. When I showed up for my shift after The Incident, my boss summoned me into his office.

The moment he closed the door I knew I was in trouble. I racked my brain imagining what I could have done. I clocked in early and worked late, was clean and courteous, and in all ways was an exemplary employee. When he told me to sit across from his cheap desk I knew I was losing my job.

“I'm just going to ask you straight out, Cathy. We're hearing rumors that you're gay and that there was an altercation.”

I told him what had happened, how Blake and I had been minding our own business working out at this other gym when Edward walked in and assaulted her. I used that word,
assault
, an actionable word by today's standards, but he swept it aside. “But are you with this woman?”

“Am I
with
this woman?”

“Women. Do you like women?”

I wish I could say that I spat out some sassy comeback or told him where he could shove it, but I just sat there and absorbed his disapproval. I knew how it was. In the eighties, in the South, people who associated with someone who was gay could be fired without cause. People who were gay—men or women—risked being beaten, even killed, with no police to protect you or lawyer to defend you. I kept my mouth shut,
quashed the urge to point out that none of this drama had happened here, at his fancy fitness center, and that it didn't concern him in the slightest.

He didn't straight-out fire me, but it was decided that the time had come for me to move on. I'd like to think I would have fought a little more had I not been on the verge of giving my notice anyway.

Blake and I moved into a small apartment in Hattiesburg close to campus, and we were happy for a while. We threw dinner parties and went out to eat with friends. New Orleans was a mere one hundred miles south, and we liked to go there on the weekends. Back then the legal drinking age in New Orleans was eighteen, and I'd had years of party experience. I knew all the good joints—jazz, drag, gay, straight, and strip. I even knew a couple of voodoo shops. I knew where to get the best oysters, pralines, beignets, po' boys, and muffuletta. I knew who served the best hangover brunch, the coldest beer, and the strongest drink. What sex shop had the best dildos at the most reasonable price, and where you could score some ecstasy. My own flirtation with X was mercifully short-lived. I took it twice, liked it too much, and decided it'd be best if I stuck to alcohol, which would prove to be more than enough vice for me to handle.

It seemed that no sooner had we gotten truly settled—flatware in the drawer, spoons and forks in the proper slots, posters on the walls, every box unpacked—than Blake started playing around. She was a great-looking blonde, tallish with nice legs. That turns out to be a lot of people's type. Including a she-devil named Julie, whom we'd met in New Orleans and had hit on me first, and when I turned her down, moved on to Blake.

I am nothing if not loyal. A devoted softball teammate,
drill squad member, student council member, sister, daughter, and granddaughter. Not too far in the future, I would become a loyal
commis
,
chef de partie
, sous-chef, and
chef de cuisine
. Even further down the road I would be a loyal and faithful wife. If I've said yes to you, if I've committed to you, I have your back no matter what. Despite the increase in our knock-down-drag-out arguments, I was loyal to Blake even when it was Blake out late with no real explanation; Blake trying out a new hairstyle; Blake buying new undergarments; Blake never there when I came home from class—from algebra, which I was flunking, because I was so consumed with the growing misery that was my relationship.