Personal Narrative: A Short Story

For a long time, juicing was my elixir. It got me bigger. It got me stronger. It got me laid. But that was before it nearly ran my life.
It was the fall of 2004, and I was having such a rough go of it that even my depression was depressed. I had just totaled my brand new car, broke up with my much younger girlfriend and felt like I was spinning my wheels in a town I was scared I would never leave. I stood 5-foot-10, weighed 205 pounds. At the ripe age of 19, I had a new crush, on Michelle, a friend of a friend I had met my senior year of high school and basically organized my day around our 10 pm phone calls. I think we had always had something…. But each of us was always involved with someone else. As far as I was concerned, I had no chance

in hell to be with her, but she was kind enough to be a friend. I had plenty of time to talk to her, having quit my college baseball team and the fraternity that I had pledged. The only white kid in a seemingly all black or Latino group of guys who spent all of their time degrading pledges and force-feeding us a cocktail of booze and prescription pain pills.
The State University of New York at Cobleskill, billed itself as the "UMASS of the SUNY system," it was fairer, I think, to call it the "Harlem of the North," a school whose students were mostly riding on the government’s contributions to their education, very few of which would last more than a few semesters. To walk the length of my residence hall was to take a trip from the inner city, straight into Farmville. Cobleskill was an agricultural school who had created a brand new up and coming business/sports department. And I was there.
With the exception of mine, the one door on the hall kept closed belonged to a tall blond kid with big muscles. Actually, big doesn't begin to give a sense of the guy. The first time I saw Mark, he was leaving the shower, slash john, slash barber shop, slash vomit troth. He was wearing a towel so small it gaped at the hip and thigh. He had cannonball shoulders that looked as if they were carved from stone. The top of his arms seemed to flow into half-moon biceps and massive “J” shaped fish hooks for Triceps. His chest was a slab of T-squared boxes, beneath which knelt columns of raised abdominals that bunched and torqued as he moved. I turned around, slack-jawed, and watched him go; it took all my self-control not to applaud him. He clearly had put in the work.
For weeks, I watched as girls marched by in hopes of scoping Mark in low-rise briefs.

We had seen each other a few times in the gym, but it was more of a “bro nod”, never much talk. Finally I knocked on his door. He ripped it open; seemingly ready to confront someone with the door he nearly tore off its hinges. He listened to my spiel about being a Friday night hero who'd grown up thinking he had what it took it make it somewhere, and listened to my sales pitch about wanting to get big, followed by my admiration of him being so fit. He advised that he himself had been gangly until the summer before his senior year of high school. "What," he asked, "do you want at the gym? Do you want to get big or do you want to get strong?" To me, that was like asking if you wanted a beer or a

shot.
My head in a sweat, I pondered the question like a guy who'd just rubbed an old lamp. "What I really want is… I want to get big."
The next day I bought a new pair of shoes and met Mark at the bottom of Cobleskill’s field house. Behind airshafts and pump rooms was a tiny space that constituted the campus weight room. It reeked of old mold and stagnant air, and the sum total of its apparatuses – two aged Universals – both oxidized. I followed Mark back to the rear machine, where, after a stern lecture about "respecting the room," he had me lie on the bench.
Drawing a breath in, I whistled it out and hefted 135 pounds in the air.

They hung there a moment, eyeing the view, then came down much too fast. "Slowly!" Mark yelled at me. "You lift the weight; the weight isn't s'posed to lift you!" Chagrined, I shoved the bar up again and offered some push-back when it dropped. I did a third rep, and a fourth, when something strange happened. A radiant heat began filling my chest, as if someone had draped a compress across it. I did another rep and the feeling spread, inching past the collarbone toward my throat. I kept on going, losing track of reps, attuned to the muzzy, pins-and-needles buzz that was setting up in my ears. It was sharp and soft, then hot and cool. I forgot who I was and even what I was, imagining myself as a two-stroke engine and my arms as pistons firing. Dropping that last rep, I lay there, clinically stoned, wrists hanging limp at my sides, watching fireworks on the back of my

lids.
"Get Up!" Mark ordered. "No sleeping between sets."
I stood in a daze, savoring the burn in my chest and the wash of lactic acid down my arms. It was cold enough to see my exhaled breath, and the only sounds that intercut the noonday silence were Mark's bellicose grunts while benching. But when I looked at myself in the unframed mirror mounted crookedly on the wall, I thought, This is the thing I've been searching for; I've found it, and I'm not leaving.