Fatal Pose

by Barna William Donovan

  The other cardboard display was a lot more comely than the mountainous Arnold Tempelton but no less formidable. The second special guest was Jeanie O’Shaughnessy, a striking, blue-eyed brunette package of a seductive smile and a rippling physique of social-media-star muscle. The package on the picture was wrapped in a tight-fitting, strapless evening gown fitted with fluttering ruffles around its cups and a slit advertising the woman’s firm legs. As Gunnar—and all the fans of Muscle Quest, the most widely read circulation of the WBBF’s four fitness magazines—remembered from the legion of Jeanie O’Shaughnessy tributes and retrospectives, the woman was a not-quite-ready-for-mainstream experiment of the WBBF.

  Some years ago, the Federation had produced a fantasy action film with Jeanie, five-time champion of the Ms. Empire contest. The Mr. and Ms. Empire contests were the Super Bowl of professional bodybuilding. With the Federation’s otherwise obsessive quest to promote their female competitors, they thought they had a female Arnold Schwarzenegger on their hands when they realized what a charismatic camera presence Jeanie had. Indeed, she always gave fantastically animated, wryly funny, and self-deprecating interviews. Unfortunately for female muscle fans, mainstream America just wasn’t ready for a woman of Jeanie’s Herculean strength and proportions. Apparently, men and boys, while adoring fantasy action films, didn’t like Jeanie because she was intimidating. On the flip side, feminists weren’t buying her “strong woman defining her own standards of beauty” angle either. They said the bodybuilder’s unrealistic looks could put unfair body image pressures on young women thinking of emulating her. While movie stardom didn’t quite work out for Jeanie, for the last several years, she had still managed to capitalize on her muscles more than handsomely as a social-media fitness influencer. With just slightly under a million Instagram followers and YouTube subscribers, she turned a tidy profit selling her own line of workout clothing and charging three-thousand dollars per Instagram endorsement of everything from restaurants and juice bars to muscle-building supplements. And then, Gunnar knew, there was the seedier side of the women’s bodybuilding Jeanie had turned to as well. She made even more money in her muscle-worship side hustle, putting on private flexing sessions and engaging in erotic wrestling and pillow fights with “schmoes,” guys who enjoyed being dominated by pumped and ripped “muscle angels.”

  And now it looked like Jeanie O’Shaughnessy had come to the Sun State to hand out trophies with Arnold Tempelton.

  “They look quite important,” Kelly said at length after studying the photos.

  “They are to the WBBF,” Gunnar said.

  “I’m surprised they would come to a show hosted in a hotel that had a safety violation scandal last year.”

  “You’re so droll,” Gunnar replied. He had read that the event was originally supposed to run at a theater in Santa Barbara before the WBBF realized they couldn’t fill enough seats to pay the expense of the lavish venue. Thus, the premiere extravaganza was bumped down to the less than palatial Santa Monica Palace Hotel. At least this place had once possessed ambitions of a premiere convention site and had a small auditorium with a stage.

  Of course, the main reason for having to settle for this smaller venue was also the WBBF’s fault, Gunnar knew. Someone at the organization had decided to run only the Mr. and Ms. Sun State bodybuilding contests. These two contests included only the hardest of the hardcore of both male and female muscle athletes. Had the WBBF joined this event with one of their bikini, or fitness, or physique pageants, they could easily have attracted enough fans for Santa Barbara. Or they could have even added their male version of the fitness contests and their “classic physique” men’s division. Those were men’s muscle contests where the athletes didn’t weigh three hundred pounds.

  “I’m just teasing, big guy,” Kelly said and elbowed Gunnar. “And I appreciate the gesture. I know how valuable tickets to a Sun State competition must be. You did notice the construction still going on up on the top floor.”

  “If any ceilings collapse, you can sue.”

  “And I know you’re going to sweep me up in your big strong arms and rush me to safety.”

  “Hey! Big Guns!” a sharp exclamation traveled over the crowd a moment later.

  Kelly looked up as Gunnar tried to find the source of the call.

  “Gunnar ‘Big Guns’ Marino! Why I’ll be damned! I find you at last.” An elephantine bodybuilder in a blue and yellow jogging suit elbowed his way through the crowd, barreling straight at Gunnar and Kelly.

  “Franky Jankowsky!” Gunnar said. “My God, how ya been, man? Still living on that farm of yours in Fresno? And thanks for the tickets.”

  “The natural life, man! You gotta love it. So, Guns! Where’s the rest of you, man?” the giant uttered as he came to a stop two feet short of crashing into Gunnar. “All that beef! Where’d it go?” He looked Gunnar over with a painful, almost distraught glare.

  “Left it at the doctors’ offices,” Gunnar said, almost ashamed. “Held together by piano wire and a prayer these days.”

  “Doing the classic physique thing now.” the hulk’s spirits were automatically deflated a notch. “How ‘bout at Bayside General? Did you know Erika just finished her residency there?”

  Although Gunnar did know about Erika Lindstad working at Bayside General—the Venice gym scene grapevine filled him in quickly—the information blurting from Jankowsky’s big mouth, so matter of factly, touched a finger of discomfort to a nerve somewhere deep in the middle of his chest.

  But Frank Jankowsky paused all of a sudden and looked at Kelly. She raised her eyebrows.

  Frank looked uncomfortable as if getting caught in a sticky faux pas. “Uh, sorry, man. If it ain’t appropriate—”

  “Just friends,” Gunnar said. “But where are my manners? Frank Jankowsky, this is my associate, Kelly Vaughn. Frank’s competing in tonight’s show. And he’s the one that got us the tickets.”

  “How do you do?” Kelly replied and extended her hand.

  Coming toward her dainty fingers, Jankowsky’s hand resembled the shovel of a bulldozer.

  “Nice meeting you. Me and Guns here shared some wild times back in the Venice gyms. That’s what we called him then. Guns! Because of his biceps…. Big dog, you keeping the forces of evil at bay so the free world can rest safely?”

  “I’m just a private investigator, Frank, and I do my thing for the Marine Corps one weekend out of the month.”

  “Oh, yeah, the Corps. That’s how you met Brad, right?”

  “Seems like a lifetime ago,” Gunnar said, although he didn’t feel like elaborating to Kelly about the real source of the free tickets just yet. He had a sneaking feeling that Kelly wasn’t a fan of the Girls Caught in the Buff series Brad Holt produced.

  For some odd reason, Brad Holt wasn’t just looking to stage his big comeback tonight, but he had a need to reconnect with his roots. He invited several acquaintances from his early days of training. Gunnar couldn’t quite understand why he made it onto the list since he barely knew Holt from the time they trained together in the Corps. From what he’d heard, Frank had worked out with Brad a lot longer, as they were both pros. Gunnar and Holt certainly hadn’t been in touch since Holt turned professional and went on to his burgeoning career as a straight-to-DVD producer of “reality entertainment.” As a matter of fact, Gunnar would have been surprised if Holt even recognized him had they met on the street.

  “Kelly, you’re a regular fan of these contests?” Frank turned back to Kelly.

  “No, she’s not,” Gunnar said. “I had to con her into coming. Told her it was an avant-guard poetry reading.”

  “Shut up!” she chided. “I knew it was a bodybuilding contest. But actually, this is my first. It’s very…interesting, though.”

  “It’s war!” Jankowsky said. “We’ve got some of the biggest animals in the WBBF pro ranks backstage! Including, of course, Brad Holt, maki
ng his WBBF return. Too bad I’m going to kick his ass. Even if we did train together for all those years.”

  “Brad Holt?” Kelly said, and Gunnar noticed her eyebrows knitting together. “Why does that name sound so familiar to me?”

  Jankowsky chortled and said, “Well, he’s the guy—”

  But Gunnar cut him off. “Hey, Frank, time’s kinda flying, ain’t it? Didn’t you say you were going to show us around backstage?”

  “Yeah. You guys come to the pump-up area backstage for a minute,” Frank said. “That’s where half the battle is.”

  “Great,” Gunnar said, hoping his forced cheer didn’t sound suspicious to Kelly.

  “Is it open to the spectators?” she asked.

  “It’s open ‘til ten minutes before the contest,” Frank said. “It’s open for the guests and assistants of the competitors. Someone’s gotta help the guys carry their gym bags and equipment. You’ll be my guest for now.”

  “Carry the bags?” Kelly asked.

  “Yeah,” Frank replied with a glint in his eyes under angrily furrowing brows. “Judging standards have turned the backstage into a hospital emergency room. They’d like to see the contestants with skin like wet tissue paper. Dehydrated as hell. Or the guys at least.”

  Kelly winced at that imagery. “I did think you looked a bit—”

  “Death warmed over for three days? Don’t matter, though. I got two hundred and sixty-five pounds on me after dieting and a victory cigar in my pocket!” To demonstrate his positive attitude, his right hand reached into his warm-up jacket’s pocket and produced a pair of Dunhill cigars. “On me, man.” He handed one of them Gunnar’s way.

  “I brought one of my own for the occasion,” he replied and presented one from an inside pocket. “What’s a muscle contest without a good cigar?”

  After entering the main lobby, they turned left and headed for a door opening onto a corridor spanning between the auditorium on its left and the dining hall to the right. The corridor dead-ended at a pair of chained and bolted metal doors with a sign reading ENTRANCE TEMPORARILY CLOSED: STAFF ONLY. Off to the right and behind the dining room was a kitchen entryway. To the left of the corridor lay an open door to the backstage recesses of the auditorium.

  After climbing a four-step flight of stairs once rounding the entryway on the left, Gunnar and his friends were in the spot designated for the female competitors. Around a collection of stationary bicycles, treadmills, and very light free-weights relocated from the hotel’s fitness center, twenty well-muscled women were going through the last-moment preparations for the show. Everyone was occupied with one activity or another, with too many of the contestants varying in physiques along a wide spectrum. The striking differences in the way the athletes looked accounted for the schizophrenic state of women’s bodybuilding, without any set standard of appearance lasting for much more than a year.

  The women on the treadmills and the stationary bikes were adapting the men’s style of conditioning. They had dieted to a point where individual muscle strands could be seen running canyons along every muscle group underneath skin thinned through prolonged liquid deprivation. These competitors were trying to work off any last deposits of water under their cutaneous tissue with a final burst of intense aerobic activity.

  In contrast, there were quite a number of female bodybuilders who refused to go along with this extreme striated look. Rejecting the starvation and dehydration-induced approach that cost too much size in the final weeks of contest preparation, there were women packed with Herculean physiques of rippling, flexing bundles of quartzlike muscle. Trying to hold a competitive edge in muscle definition and refinement to the striated, emaciated athletes, though, these women were occupying themselves with the light barbells and dumbbells. A quick burst of high-repetition lifts with the lightweight equipment pumped blood to the muscles, making a zigzagging latticework of veins bulge to the surface of the muscle. Others munched on chocolate bars or ate fruit preserves, hoping a sudden sugar rush would further inflate their veins.

  Some of the competitors not going through last minute workouts practiced their posing routines or applied makeup. To some, in turn, the cosmetics and hair adjustment appeared paramount even to the posing and flexing.

  Upon entering the women’s preparation area, Gunnar and his companions noticed two camera crews covering the backstage action. They must have been an independent production company taping the contest for a future airing on their YouTube channel or streaming service. It had been over two decades since network television or even ESPN had anything to do with bodybuilding. One of the camera crews stood off to their right, with a cameraman and a stocky young male interviewer in a dark blue jacket and slacks talking to a wide shouldered, thick bodied woman bundled up in a blue, yellow, and purple warm-up suit. Further ahead backstage was the place the crowd from the lobby seemed to have migrated to, where people still crowded around the epicenter of another camera.

  “So, Christy, is this what the judges in the past have referred to as your contest glow? That special texture to your skin?” the man next to the camera on the right asked.

  “Well, Jack, I always believed in creating a look that’s more than just a layer of oil applied to your body. You know, that can leave you with a distracting metallic shine to your skin,” the woman, whom Gunnar recognized as WBBF newcomer Christy Gilmore, replied. She was also from the staunch hard-core faction of the sport, telling from the size of her warm-up suit, but she also had pleasantly attractive features, with a face that hadn’t been ravaged by a pre-contest starvation diet. “My approach,” she said, “is to apply two coats of skin coloring early in the morning before the contest to lay the foundation, then a skin lotion an hour later, and put on my warm-up suit. I’d go through some posing then to warm my body, start sweating a bit, then apply more lotion….”

  “And then?” Jack said.

  “Now, an hour before the show, I just put lotion on one more time, and I’m going to do some light lifts with my warm-up suit to open my pores and let all that oil out. And last, just before we’re called on stage, I’ll take the sweats off and rub the oil around my body.”

  “And this technique was also very successful for another bodybuilder back in the day, wasn’t it?” Jack asked.

  Christy smiled. “Well, this is the exact same technique Arnold Schwarzenegger used back in the day.”

  “Well, let’s hope you’re just as successful!”

  “Oh yeah, competition’s gonna be hot tonight!” Frank gushed with excitement.

  But he was also eager to impress Gunnar and Kelly with the back-stage energy of the men preparing for the first round of competition. It was on the way there that the troika got to see the second camera crew up close. The area where the female contestants were getting ready was off to the right side of the stage, and the literal backstage turned off to the left some forty feet behind. Where the men’s and the women’s zones of preparation met, a camera operator, an interviewer, a photographer, and a host of people in the dark blue WBBF officials’ jackets crowded around Jeanie O’Shaughnessy. She appeared to be reminiscing about her days of heated backstage preparations. “Everybody knows the Sun State Classic is the place to be,” Jankowsky said, leering at the striking Jeanie. “God, what a view!”

  Once the party rounded the corner to meet the men, they entered an area more garrulous than that of their female counterparts. There was the same hurried, piston-like lifting of light weights and posing going on, except here the athletes engaged each other in loud, taunting conversation. The scene was all as Gunnar had remembered bodybuilding contests being. Before the event, a lot of the athletes might have trained in their separate gyms, so at last, they had the chance to size each other up. The kind of noise going on around here was an omen of tough competition to come. Bodybuilders might either be very quiet backstage, with each man studying the competition with sullen, icy hostility or trying to
psyche each other out. This was a night for psyching out.

  “It’s called the pain barrier, ladies! The ones that can break it are fit to live. God, I missed this stuff,” a muscleman some five feet and eight inches tall yelled at the top of his lungs as he continued to knock out one hammer curl after another, while two others had fallen by the wayside. Had he not been marked by the starvation-etched look of the living dead, he might have been a fairly good-looking man with the high cheek-boned, square-jawed features of a screen idol.

  Taking a closer look, Gunnar recognized the source of their invitation. It was his former Marine Corps colleague, Brad Holt himself. Gunnar’s first impression was to glance at Kelly, though. Did she recognize him from one of his obnoxious late-night commercials for Girls Caught in the Buff?

  “Hey,” she said, at last, her tone signaling a revelation. “Isn’t that the guy from—?”

  “Yo, Marino!” Brad Holt exclaimed and let his weights hit the floor. Their startling crash tore through the warm-up area.

  Everyone else paused.

  Holt was about to start in Gunnar’s direction, except he seemed to freeze in mid-motion. The focus appeared to fade from his eyes. He tried kneeling on a lifting bench, then hunched over and collapsed to the floor.

  CHAPTER 4

  Had Laura Preston been able to control every single thing tonight, she knew she couldn’t have been able to set up the scenario any better. She watched in amazement as Brad Holt keeled over and hit the floor like a sack of trash. She had a crowd of witnesses who could attest to the fact that Holt was teetering on the edge of disaster, close to a complete breakdown because he pushed his body so hard during his pre-contest diet.

  Maybe the bastard will die, she hoped against all hope. That would let her scuttle the night’s carefully planned and coordinated series of moves she had yet to execute. This was incredible….

  Or was it? A second thought flittered through Laura’s mind as alarmed voices, shouts, trilled across the warm-up area. What if Holt doesn’t die but only becomes incapacitated? What if he’s rushed off to the hospital? He would be out of reach. He would become nearly impossible to get to. Naturally, once he was back on his feet, the blackmail and hostile takeover of her job would continue.