And then the first day at the gym happened.
I’m walking on the treadmill at the 24 Hour Fitness on Arden Way and Hurley. It’s the smaller location and it’s farther away from my house. I like it because I don’t know anyone here. No one from high school will see me try to bench press on my own, lifting only the bar, maybe. No one I know will call me a girl, or laugh at the way I run on the treadmill.
Who am I kidding? Run? I have never run on a treadmill in my life. Today will not be the first time I do, that’s for sure. I didn’t put Talcum powder on my thighs to prevent a rash. Speed walking makes my groin red and burn. Running would act as kindling to a brush fire.
Turning a treadmill on is weird. You get on the damn thing, and it’s got an old strip of rubber that rolls over and over on itself. This is where you put your legs. 24 Hour Fitness treadmills are old, and especially at the Arden location. The belt is flimsy, and it reminds me of a fruit-roll up, a never ending, tire-flavored, revolving fruit roll up. If I fall down on this I will never get out of bed again. I will be too embarrassed to ever leave my house, and that could happen if I’m not careful.
I can picture it happening right now. I let go of the handles for less than a minute, because Judge Judy is the guest on Larry King Live, and I love her and it is showing in the back of the room, reflected on the mirror in front of me with closed captioning. I look down at myself in the mirror for a brief moment, not paying attention to my untied shoe, which gets caught in the fruit rollup and rolls over, and over again and again maybe--yanking my shins down, my head shoving down into the bar next to me, shoe flying off into the back wall. All of a sudden, people are ducking and trainers look up from their texting, asking their own clients if they heard a thud.
“This is why fat people shouldn’t go to a gym,” the thin, marginally sweaty girl in a green sports bra would think to herself next to me as she skis the elliptical into her forty-fourth minute of exercise. She’s probably going to be on this for ninety minutes, and then go meet her boyfriend and have sushi and talk about the status of her application for the civil engineering masters program at Sacramento State University. “This fat fuck fell off a treadmill,” she’d snarl in between swabs of wasabi on her Yellowfin tuna roll. “It was like, hilarious, Chad” she’d say to him while he ignored her and finished watching the basketball game behind the sushi bar.
This scenario reminds me to keep the incline at zero, or no hill. Flat land. My speed should be normal. I have big feet and a wide frame. I don’t need any funny business. I’ll walk two and a half miles an hour. I’ll decide what’s funny, thank you.
An almost middle-aged couple walks in wearing wedding rings and shares a wallet. They do not speak to each other. They seem bored, even pissed off by the task of swiping their membership cards to gain admittance. They walk toward the treadmills next to me. The wife sees me, maybe noticing my sweat beads around my neck, sensing how uncomfortable I am. Or maybe she thinks that because I’m a fat guy in a gym, I’m a pervert just waiting to leap off of this and hump her leg. “Let’s go the front.” She says to no one, but her husband knows he should hear it, and they take the treadmills in front of me. She’s at least twenty pounds overweight. He has a little belly, and a little bit of bald spot in the front of his head. They look miserable together. I decide that this is what couples do when they are ready to divorce. They go back to the gym. They’re here to renovate before going back on the market, and it’s a serious race against each other.
First they meet after years of exercise, hoping to ready their bodies for the perfect soul mate. They find each other so hot and so sexy and then about three months into the relationship they start eating out more, exercising less. They share desert, they fight over who gets to feed the other one the last piece. They charm each other, they indulge each other. They probably cuddle after morning sex for hours and then catch a cab to work because they’ve lost track of time, so there can be no walk to the light rail station. They email each other song lyrics all day. It’s Stevie Wonder in the morning, and it’s the Goo Goo Dolls in the afternoon.
They move in together. They put a TV in the bedroom.
They get chubbier, and it’s not immediate. It’s gradual over months, years even.
They get married. They feel bored because there’s nothing new about the relationship so they have a baby. She never loses the baby weight. He’s replaced sex with pizza. And they begin to fight over the last piece of cake. Now it’s about who gets to eat it themselves. Fights end when one says the other isn’t the same as in the beginning. They join a gym and it’s a race to fitness. Whoever loses fifty pounds first gets a lawyer. Whoever stays fat gets to keep the van.
I picture the wife, with her step-side haircut tossing a banana peel onto the treadmill, then laughing hysterically as her husband slips off and gashes his forehead open, just below where his hair is thinning. She pats him dry with her matching sweatbands and sarcastically calls him baby. I picture him adjusting her mp3 player to maximum volume before she gets on the stationary bike, blasting her ears out as she turns it on to listen to Celine Dion’s “That’s The Way it Is.” This deconstruction of these strangers’ partnership gets me through the first six minutes of my treadmill walk, and I’ve decided to stay on for ten minutes total. Yes, I will be on here for ten minutes. I will add a minute every day until I get to forty-five minutes.
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