The Fighter (10 page)

He was once a
professional bodybuilder, but three consecutive heart attacks had forced him
off the pro circuit. The cause of the attacks wasn't openly stated, but gym
scutdebutt had it that Stacey would pop anything that could be crammed into a
syringe, including powdered bull testicle. Once he'd loaded himself up on Lasix
before a show, leaching all the moisture from his body for that ultra-cut look;
unfortunately the racehorse diuretic left his organs so desiccated that his
kidneys tore like a tissue paper Valentine when he nailed a Double Crabbed
Biceps pose during a heated pose-off segment.

"Harris,
you pansy." Stacey wore a shirt with a snarling cartoon rottweiler over
the legend
don't growl if
you can't bite. "You
got a hollow
chest like a puffed-up paper bag. I seen ten-year-old girls with more
definition."

Stacey's shtick
was to stalk the gym belitding his customers' physiques:
You got driftwood arms; A butcher wouldn't take those
stringy legs as stewing beef; I could fry an egg on that flat ass of yours.
While
this initially struck Paul as an ideal way to alienate one's clientele, he'd
grossly underestimated the average gym member's tolerance for abasement. More
than a few appeared to crave Stacey's brutal assessment of their physiques, as
if he were a mirror that reflected the physical deficiencies they'd long ago
glimpsed in themselves. And though most of Stacey's assessments were of the
critical variety, he was infrequently known to deliver faint praise:
You're not looking quite as sickly as I recall
or
You're less skeletal; I guess I'll have to tell those body
farmers to look elsewhere.
Such backhanded
compliments were enough to lift Stacey's regulars to a state of mild euphoria.

When Stacey
wasn't berating his cowering clientele, he acted as spotter for some of the
more grotesque gym denizens. These juiced- up muscleheads could bench cart-oxen
weight, the bar bowed under a mass of steel plates as finger-thick veins stood
out on their corded necks. Einsteins of the Body, Paul dubbed them. Some were
so huge their heads looked comically small in relation. It amused him to
consider the possibility that they were, in fact, fantastically tiny men who
zippered into a hulking coat of meat and muscles each morning; at night they
unzipped and hung their muscles on a peg. Every few weeks they got their meat
coats dry-cleaned.

"Get your
ass under that bar," Stacey told Paul, adding a few extra ten-pound
plates. "It's go time." He slapped Paul's face, slapped his own.
"Do
this,
motherfucker."

Paul braced his
arms on the bar and jerked it off the pegs. His arms trembled; he entertained a
giddy vision of his forearms snapping and the bar crushing his windpipe. He
lowered the bar, felt it touch his chest, and pushed.

"You're in
it to
WIN
it, baby!"
Stacey jabbered. "Go hard or go
HOME
!
"

Muscles tore
across Paul's chest, fibers snapping like over-tuned piano wires. Stacey's
crotch hovered above Paul's face: stuffed into lime-green spandex shorts, his
package looked like a plantain and two walnuts jiggling in a grocery sack.

"Lift,
bitch! Be a
MAN
for once in your life!"

Paul's strength
ebbed as the bar locked inches above his chest. His muscles fluttered and bands
of white fire stretched across his eyes. The strain coursed down his arms into
his gut, knotting into an agonizing ball he expelled in the form of an oddly
toneless fart. Stacey guided the bar onto its pegs.

Paul heaved with
embarrassment. "I'm so sorry about that."

But Stacey was
pleased. "Only means you gave a hundred and ten percent to your lift.
You're not farting, you're not jerking enough iron. First time I squatted a
thousand, I crapped my pants."

Paul couldn't
tell what Stacey was more proud of: the fact that he'd squatted half a ton or
that he'd shit himself in the process.

He finished his
workout and hit the showers. He'd noticed how two distinct groups of men spent
far more time naked than was strictly necessary: those in terrific shape and
those too old to give a damn. A few struck show poses stark naked before the
change room's floor- length mirror. Paul found himself scoping out their
bodies: chests and arms and abs, the symmetry or lack of it, the freakish mass
of the Einsteins. Lately he'd taken to picturing how elements of other men's
bodies might look adorning his own: he'd take that guy's pecs, that guy's
delts, that guy's pipes, that guy's soup-can cock and cobble together an
idealized version of himself. Franken-Paul.

On his way out
he caught Stacey behind the front desk, bent over a plate piled with skinless
chicken breasts.

"Good work
today, fag."

"...Thanks."
Paul nodded to the shelves at Stacey's back: tubs of protein powder with names
like Whey Max and BioPure HyperPlex. Each tub featured a wraparound photo of a
tanned, overdeveloped, confidently smiling Einstein.

"Which do
you recommend?"

"These?"
Stacey jerked a thumb at the tubs. "All shit. Chalk dust and pigeon
crap." He shoveled chicken into his mouth. "No substitute for hard
work, Harris." He paused with his mouth open; rags of masticated chicken
swung from his teeth. "Well, that's not the literal truth."

He gave Paul a
look, its shrewdness suggesting that Paul's suitability and trustworthiness
were currently the subject of intense scrutiny. Later Paul would realize that
Stacey gave everyone this look; his customer criteria was no narrower than a
convenience store's.

Stacey rooted
through a drawer and set an ampule on the desk. "Testosterone ethanate.
We're talking the Rolls-Royce of performance enhancement."

The Einsteins
made no secret of their steroid abuse—why bother, when your body was a walking
billboard?—and Paul had overheard horror stories: hardened knots forming in
their asses from the deep- tissue injections, excess body hair and cysts the
size of corn kernels, penile atrophy. Stacey had himself developed a serious
infection in his right bicep; he'd performed meatball surgery on himself in the
men's bathroom, piercing the infected tissue with a heavy-gauge needle and
filling a Dixie cup with a broth of blood and pus.

Paul rolled the
vial between his fingers. A quarter-ounce of yellow fluid. Piss, was all it
looked like. A squirt of dirty yellow piss.

"Is it
safe?"

"Nothing's
one hundred percent safe. You walk outta here, get hit by a bus."

Paul had always
despised the well-trodden bus rationale. He asked what company manufactured the
stuff. Stacey told him that medical-grade steroids were for pussies; he said
Paul would be better off chugging the pigeon crap. None of this answered Paul's
question, however, leaving him to wonder if it had been brewed in Stacey's
bathtub.

"I hear it
shrinks your dick."

"That can
happen," Stacey admitted. "But here's the thing: every guy's got an
extra three inches of cock rolled up in his hip cavity."

"Oh, come
on with that."

"I shit you
not. Rolled up in there like a chameleon's tongue. There's this operation where
a surgeon makes a slit at the base of your cock and yanks out the extra bit. I
got it done; my dick's not bent or anything and I piss and fuck like a
champ."

Clearly Stacey
had tendered this pitch a few times. Not that his salesmanship was at all
necessary—despite any minor misgivings, Paul's mind had been set the moment
Stacey placed the vial on the countertop.

"How do I
get it into me?"

"Injection
to the tushie. I'll do it for you."

"Is that
the only w—?"

Stacey cut him
off. "Please don't be a pussy, Harris. I was just starting to dig
you."

And so it
transpired that five minutes later Paul found himself in a cramped stall in the
men's room at Jammer's gym, bent over the toilet with his pants wadded around
his knees and Stacey Jamison's hairy caveman hands clapped to his buttocks.

Stacey kneaded
roughly. "Spongier than a loaf a bread."

Paul braced his
hands on the stall wall. By now sickened at his impulsiveness—why couldn't he
just inject himself?—he was convinced it was too late to back out. Stacey gave
his ass a rough slap.

"Christ—jiggling
like Christmas pudding." He was genuinely revolted. "How can you cart
those lumpy sandbags around all day? It's just...
gross.
Look at it—
look!"

Paul craned his
neck, angling for a glimpse of his own ass. "It could do with some
work," he said helplessly.

Stacey's sigh
suggested that whipping a specimen as pitiful as Paul into shape would be a
mammoth chore, requiring the labor of thousands. "Don't move. If I jab
too deep you'll get a knot like a monkey fist."

A steel wire of
stark terror pierced Paul's heart. What if Stacey hit a vein and pumped this
junk directly into his bloodstream? What if he went into anaphylactic shock
and—
died
? He was
horrified by how Stacey might deal with the situation; he pictured Stacey
seating his dead body on the can, wrapping his dead hand around the syringe,
then calling the cops and saying one of his clients had perished while geezing
in the shitter. Paul pictured his body laid out on a morgue slab,
raisin-testicled with a twig for a penis.

Stacey pig-stuck
him and pushed the plunger. As testosterone shot through him, Paul felt...
nothing. It might as well be vegetable oil— hell, maybe it
was
vegetable oil.
He yanked his trousers up and out of sheer habit flushed the toilet—that, or he
wanted to convince anyone in the change room he'd merely been taking a piss.

"Work those
glutes!" Stacey hollered as Paul escaped through the
change room.
"Tone that saggy caboose of yours!"

Paul drove down
Highway 406 following the frozen river, took the mall exit, and turned left at
the lights. On Hartzell Road he passed pool halls and bars with neon signs, a
foreclosed Bavarian restaurant, a train yard where boxcars rusted in the nettles.

He yanked down
his pants at a red light and gave his ass a good clawing. An itchy red bump had
risen at the injection site. His heartbeat was all out of whack, weird yips and
baps. Reeking sweat poured from his body, soaking his shirt and running down
the crack of his ass. His fingers came away bloody but the bump still itched
like a bastard. He stuffed McDonald's napkins down his trousers to sop up the
blood.

At the end of
Hartzell a white-brick shopfront occupied the space between a knife shop and a
tattoo parlor. A sign above the door read
Jensen's paints
.
Below that sign a smaller one, reading, in clipped red letters,
impact boxing club.

Paul wrenched
the wheel and cut across the road, narrowly avoiding a T-bone collision with
an oncoming Buick. He skipped over the curb—some vital portion of the
undercarriage tore off with a shriek—into the paint store lot. The engine
rattled and conked out.

He sat with his
hands gripped to the wheel, wondering how he'd managed to pass these shops a
hundred times without ever noticing them. He heard that up north in the
provincial parks most of the trees had been clear-cut by logging companies;
what they left was called a "veneer": the pines went twenty or thirty
feet deep along the hiking paths and riversides, but beyond that only miles of
stumps. Paul thought that if someone clear-cut this city, gutted the office
buildings and homes and stores, he'd never know—so long as the veneer remained.