Working Out

In the past 15 years, by rough count, I have spent 6000 hours in gyms. Had I invested that time in the study of the slime mold, mankind, not to speak of the slime mold, might very well have been enriched by my observations. As it is, I have developed firm arms and am able to dash off suddenly and race after taxicabs in the rain, catching up with them a block away and thereby delighting dinner dates. I am winded after these exercises but appear to be less so than the next fellow.

I began to frequent (continued on page 164)Working Out(continued from page 139) gyms in the early Sixties, after recovering from an illness and being informed by a physician that my body had let me down. "Well, it's not going to let me down again," I said. I recall standing apart from my body, as if it were a naughty schnauzer, then taking it by the scruff of the neck to a gym and health club on the North Shore of Long Island.

"Why do you want to join?" asked the receptionist.

"Because my body has let me down," I said. Was I there in pursuit of bulk or cuts? an instructor wanted to know. That is, was I interested in going after sheer massiveness of no particular design or in shooting for a tidy frame with clearly defined sinews? Since I was frail and reed-like at the time, quite naturally I leaned in the direction of bulk. It seemed a sensible plan to bulk up quickly, as a first maneuver, and then proceed to cut up the bulk. Was this possible, I wanted to know, or, once having set your cap in the direction of bulk, were you committed to being a bloated fellow for all time? The instructor had heard of a case or two--in Japan--in which bulk had been cut up but felt it was a questionable procedure.

The gym appeared to be inhabited by nasty fellows, several of whom laughed openly at my arms. One, who had achieved both cuts and bulk, would perform sets of curls and then sneer back at the gym. Another unsmiling fellow made lunges across the gym on his belly, admitting that he was hardening his abdomen against the possibility of tavern insults.

Several fellows were there, quite frankly, to pump up for evening dates; that is, to set the blood coursing into their arms, giving them an extra half inch of width, which was quite fraudulent but tided them over until morning.

Highly admired was a bald accountant who was the king of the tiny sit-up, one that, paradoxically, was much more difficult to pull off than a full one, though it traveled only a quarter of the distance. He could do more of these than anyone in the Northeast United States and would arrive the instant the gym opened, get down on a board and tick them off until closing time; these labors had resulted in a great band of muscle below his rib cage, easily mistaken for fat by all except those who had actually grabbed at it and knew it to be hard as pig iron. Less respected was a fellow of unimposing physique who hid off by himself and claimed to be working on a muscle that was buried deep in the arms; once properly stimulated, it would cause all others to spring forth and flourish. If his plan caught fire, this routine-looking chap would appear, overnight, with the gym's finest body. He seemed anxious to get me in on it, but I doubted the existence of the muscle and decided not to fish around for it.

Much in vogue at the time, particularly for bulk people, was the squat, a desperately unattractive maneuver in which the shoulders were to be loaded up with as much weight as they could support; one was then to squat down in the manner of a Filipino woman relieving herself in the field, issue forth a great gust of wind, whisk it back in and struggle to an upright position. There was, presumably, no smoother road to bulk. Since this was my goal, I joined a group of hulking fellows that was cordoned off to one side in what was unofficially designated the Squatting Section. Several of them wolfed down Milky Ways between sessions. There I was cautioned that I had best continue squatting for the rest of my days, since a layoff would ensure that my bulk would turn to bloat. ("If you quit, you'll grow tits.") The building seemed to tremble as the gym's bulkiest fellow appeared, a great ballooning Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade exhibit of a fellow named Bob. He turned out to be a good-natured fellow and asked me to accompany him on a trip to 42nd Street for the purpose of ogling girls. Years later, I was to have a sad encounter with Bob; he had, indeed, let up on his exercises, and his once-proud pecs had turned into a bosom that much resembled that of Kathryn Grayson in her Middle Period.

In the months that followed, I attended the gym three times a week, where I would bulk up and then repair to the steam room.

Gathering confidence, I added super-squats to my regimen, an exercise in which one squats to exhaustion and then proceeds to squat some more, the tired squats presumably being vastly richer in effect than ones performed in a state of peppiness. In addition, I took on the highly touted behind-the-head pull-up, practiced by those who stand in contempt of chins. I would pursue this new interest into the streets, leaping up and grabbing Madison Avenue building awnings to get in an extra few. At home, I curled my son in the back yard.

My body seemed to be coming along nicely and I decided to unveil it at Haiti's Villa Creole hotel. It was there, at the patio, that my wife revealed to me that she had little use for either bulk or cuts, her preference being the willowy poetical body. Several Haitians at the hotel had these, and it was all I could do to fend them off. At poolside, the wife of a retired sea dog took me aside, said she admired my body and asked if I would deliver to her a lower-back massage. Although she had never gone to this length before, she was prepared to allow me to go "underpanty." I declined to do this, recommending a blind Santo Domingan for the assignment, but her interest buoyed my spirits and convinced me I was on the proper course.

I returned to the gym and found it under new management whose aim was to focus on professional people and, in the process, expel rowdies. At the helm was a retired police officer who would sign up periodontists and quickly involve them in parallel-bar dips; while they were thus engaged, he would slip outside to conduct affairs with their wives. I missed the scruffiness of the old gym and switched over to one on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan. It was lodged in the basement of a hotel and had more hair lotions than any other gym in the country. Homosexuality had not yet become relaxed and chic; as a result, a great blanket of sodomitical tension filled the exercise area. Contributing in no small part were Viennese fetishists with wounded eyes who haunted the steam room. One had to be on the alert for unemployed actors who would suddenly leap up onto your shoulders, offering to weigh you down while you did leg extensions. Stationed outside the steam room was the son of an esteemed Hollywood producer who offered Maseratis to anyone who would go up to his suite and soap his back.

For years, as a magazine editor, I had been eating cheese-casserole lunches with picture salesmen. I substituted my workouts for these and the effect was bracing. The magazines concerned themselves with men's adventure and I was not beyond flexing my arms as a means of facing down a testy free-lancer. My lunchtime visits to the gym were surreptitious; in the great tradition of weight-lifting people, I would not, upon pain of execution, admit to having ever set foot in a gym. If an associate editor admired my arms and asked how I had happened to come up with them, I would say that I had been raking leaves.

In order to see how you were coming along, it was customary in the gym to take secret sidelong glances at the mirror while others tactfully averted their eyes; it was during one of those moments that I discovered that I seemed to have developed two bodies, each a separate entity unto itself. One was a hulking affair that existed above the waist; the second, below the belt line, was that of a normal workaday fellow. Clothing had become something of a problem. A size-44 jacket fit snugly across the shoulders, but the pants that normally came with it were great tentlike affairs that required a squadron of tailors to trim down to size. My neck had gotten entirely out of hand, so much so that salesmen at my favorite men's shop began (concluded on page 226)Working Out(continued from page 164) to make faces at me. When my neck approached the 18 mark, I was shown to the door. To my great delight, I discovered a Lexington Avenue clothing store that "split up" suits, that is, fit you with a great hippolike jacket and then awarded you the pants from an entirely different suit that would normally have gone to a slender Arab teenager.

During this period, and while delivering a gerbil to my son at a camp in New Hampshire, I had occasion to suffer a hyperventilation attack. Gasping for air, I located a doctor who calmed me down, said I was in essentially good condition and gave me a supply of paper bags that I was to carry about at all times, fitting one over my head when I felt another attack coming on. This particular seizure seemed to tie in with an impending divorce and a fear that I would be made to eat turnips at the camp. They had made me ill as a child camper and, quite irrationally, as it turned out, I was convinced that a counselor would shove a plateful down my throat the second I drove through the gate. Tweaking at my arms, the doctor said that although I was safe for the moment, fellows of my body type were sure-fire candidates for coronaries the instant they entered their 50s.

"You mean bulky guys?" I asked.

"Exactly," said the doctor.

My early decision to achieve bulk, then, had been a poor one. Were I to continue in the same direction, I would unquestionably bulk my way into intensive care. I set about immediately to correct this situation by taking midnight runs through Central Park. This put an almost immediate dent in my bulk, though I developed, in its place, little flaps at the waist, inelegantly referred to by a Dayton-based stewardess as "love handles." I found, during my park runs, that muggers were no threat whatsoever; their assumption seems to be that runners are essentially hardy fellows who will lash back at them. Perhaps, too, they have an inbred fear of people who dash about in the dark. During trips to California, I continued my runs along the beach at Malibu, slowing up at Ryan O'Neal's house to see if he was up to any hanky-panky. Apart from trots along certain sections of the Canadian border, or unless Valéry Giscard d'Estaing is along, running is essentially a boring activity. On the positive side, starlets tend to be drawn to runners, particularly if they are stationed downwind of them. It was in such a manner that I met Jill St. John.

The late Sixties represented my farewell to bulk. I loped through much of this period, switching over at the start of the new decade to a balanced program of sloth and fits of gym activity. The martial arts had taken over and a good many of the fellows in gyms were hard at work learning to kick through people's rib cages. This represented a grim turn of events for my old bulk crowd. Though outwardly striving for physical fitness, it always seemed to me that they were there, at least in part, to get themselves ready to beat up people. No matter how imposing and finely turned out the lat or pec, there is simply no way to smack someone with it when he is sailing through your rib cage. On the two occasions on which I have had to deal with violence, I have used books to smash at my attackers, A Galsworthy Reader for an 86th Street offender and McNeill's Rise of the West for a Polish person in Queens.

I am quite pleased with my present gym. Are all gyms alike, in the fashion of Tolstoy's happy families? I would make a small emendation; all happy gyms smell alike. Each, on the other hand, has a characteristic stamp. My present one has a heavy concentration of UN Ecuadorians and Talmudic Jews, who are always getting trapped in the running machines and having to be pried out. At unannounced times, the barrier between the men's and women's gyms is swept away, enabling one to see Wilhelmina models doing calf raises. A sign in the swimming area that said, People with boils not allowed to jump in pool has been taken down; the fear that fellows with this type of affliction would seize the occasion to leap in freely has not been borne out. No longer is there much emphasis on gargantuan muscles; the strongest fellow I have seen in recent months is a mechanic who turned up to fix the air conditioner.

As to the present condition of my body, it is quite pleasant-looking and highly adequate, thank you. I have not, on the other hand, overheard any whispered conversations in which someone points to me and says, "I'll bet he's invested six thousand hours in getting it that way." I have had no luck in trimming down my love handles and expect I will gamely go forward with them flapping at my side. I show up at gyms exhausted and return home exhausted, but my fatigue has a certain vigor to it. My sleep may be troubled, but only in a muscular way. There is also the feeling of virtue that goes along with gym attendance; after a session at one, I feel totally justified in emptying vats of brandy that very night. The gym, too, has become something of a mom to me. Whenever my feelings are hurt, I run right off to one. Recently, a young lady at a singles bar referred to me as Pops. I lashed back at her by racing to the gym. Gyms continue to be useful to me. Until the bell tolls for that final set of curls, I suppose I shall continue to troop off to them.