Peers? Just because?
“How do you feel?” asked Janette in the parking lot.
“Like an asshole,” I said. “Seriously. I was annoyed by everyone. By nice, sad people. Did you ever read No Exit in school?”
“No.”
“Well, the short version is that three people are in a room and it turns out that they’re in Hell. One’s a lesbian postmaster or something, one guy is a war deserter and cheated on his wife, and I can’t remember what the other woman’s deal was. They’re in this room expecting to be tortured, but nobody comes, and they finally realize that they are one another’s punishments. If you’ve ever heard the quote ‘Hell is other people,’ it’s from that play.”
“Okay.”
“Well, tonight was like being trapped in No Exit, except that ‘Hell is other people’ was ‘Hell is other people who are probably very nice and are just here trying to be brave and reassure one another.’ They wouldn’t have chosen this. Nobody did anything wrong. I don’t know. Just the situation, maybe. I’m just annoyed that we have to be here at all.”
“I get it.”
“Do you care if I go to the gym? I know it’s late.”
“Go ahead. Take your time.”
The Iron never lies to you. You can walk outside and listen to all kinds of talk, get told that you’re a god or a total bastard. The Iron will always kick you the real deal. The Iron is the great reference point, the all-knowing perspective giver. Always there like a beacon in the pitch black. I have found the Iron to be my greatest friend. It never freaks out on me, never runs. Friends may come and go. But two hundred pounds is always two hundred pounds.
This was the final paragraph of Henry Rollins’s essay “The Iron.” Rollins had been the singer of the punk band Black Flag, an equally reviled and adored spoken-word performer, an author, an actor in several movies that required a man with a fierce scowl and a thigh-sized neck, and obviously, a man to whom lifting weights was a transcendent experience.
For the past year I’d gone to the gym, or trained in my home, nearly every day. It was 2006. When I wasn’t training, I was often thinking about it. When I wasn’t thinking about it, I was probably reading about it.
When I descended the steps at the gym in Sugar House, my hair stood on end. When I heard the clink of the weights, my skin warmed. Despite being in a basement, this gym was no dungeon. It made an extreme effort to be trendy and inviting.
I didn’t yell, grunt, or swagger. I didn’t slap backs. I didn’t give advice. I didn’t know enough.
Few people spoke to me, probably because I didn’t spend any time in front of the mirrors, grimacing as I searched for veins in my forearms and amplified my exertions to the point where nobody could ignore them. I didn’t have an exercise “outfit.” I wore a sweat suit with a hood. I walked down the stairs, put on my headphones, went to a corner, and tried anything I could think of to get stronger. I might be the only person whose first three-hundred-pound bench press was accompanied by the Recorded Books production of Don Quixote.
Henry Rollins said that half of life is fucking up. The other half is dealing with it. Like Rollins, I was no gym bunny socialite. I was there to smother the parasite inside of me. To deal with the other half of my life. I didn’t work out. I trained. I wasn’t a bodybuilder. I was building an obelisk that would commemorate the end of Misty’s dominion. I didn’t want muscles—at least, that wasn’t the priority. I wanted exertion. I wanted to pant and tremble with the strain because if I couldn’t breathe, then Misty couldn’t breathe. If she insisted on living inside me, I’d make her regret it. If, after a session of heavy squats, five minutes passed before my legs could climb the stairs, she had to wait with me. If I burned, it seared her.
Within months I was stronger than many of the regulars. Training was hard. Because of that—or at least that’s how it felt—everything else became easier, including school.
After attending many colleges over the previous decade I needed four more semesters at the University of Utah. I’d decided on an English degree. I was impatient in my classes. I didn’t want to sit around and theorize. The action and results-oriented mania of my gym life didn’t fit with the philosophical meanderings of academia.
I didn’t enjoy my studies but every class period behind me was a step toward a goal. Wanking around about Hegel and Louis Zukofsky’s “A” and seeing affable young men who looked like hobos nearly come to blows over the implications of a semicolon in George Oppen’s Discrete Series felt wasteful. It led nowhere. It produced nothing. I couldn’t measure my progress beyond my grades, which were always good.
I was in a class once where, after discussing, if I recall, a cyborg opera, a man with fingerless gloves (in July) somehow turned the conversation to George Romero’s zombie films.
“Because when you really think about it,” he said, stroking beard stubble that he seemed to wish he had, “zombies are essentially just vegetative nonlife commodities.”
Yes. When you really think about it…
Graduation crept closer.
One of the adoption classes was about foster care. This was essentially a crash course in “fast-track adoption.” In cases where a foster child’s biological parents have vanished or died or couldn’t get it together, the foster parents often receive first crack at the adoption. “This will be the hardest thing you’ll ever do,” said the leader after relating yet another case of a broken child who nearly broke his new home as well.
I couldn’t imagine nobler work than foster care. It also seemed too hard. We left feeling like hypocrites. We wanted a child “more than anything,” but not enough to invite a potentially damaged child into our home.
Shortly after that we had our joint interview with a twenty-three-year-old, giggly blond intern from Brigham Young University. “It is so awesome to meet you both!” she trilled.
There’s nothing wrong with being twenty-three, or blond, or giggly, but we were uncertain about her qualifications in representing us to prospective mothers. They’re so awesome you’ve totally got to give them your baby!
“So how would you describe your parenting style?” asked the intern.
“We don’t have kids,” said Janette.
“Kind and supportive,” I said.
“Right, right,” she said, making marks on her clipboard. “That is totally why I love doing this work. You’ve really got to see it to believe it.”
“See what?” I said.
“How would you describe your marriage?” She stared into my eyes.
“Good. Good?” I looked at Janette. “It’s good. It’s not always perfect. It’s—we’re trying, just like everyone else. Ha-ha. We.”
“It’s good,” said Janette, patting my leg. “It’s the smartest choice he ever made.”
“Janette, what is your dream job?” This felt like a trick, but Janette aced it.
“To be a stay-at-home mom,” she said. Luckily she could say this and mean it.
“Josh, what can you tell me about the Tourette’s?” As I stumbled through a lengthy answer, I could tell I was nervous: I made too many jokes about it. But even though the Tourette’s was horrible, I didn’t want to scare the intern away. Surely it was better to make light of it than to frighten off the mothers.
After each answer she’d nod as if she’d heard something of great significance. Scratch went the pencil. At the end of the “awesome” meeting we went out to eat.
“How do you think that went?” I asked.
“I liked her boots,” said Janette. “Other than that, I have no idea.”
An odd book crossed my desk at work: The Naked Warrior by Pavel Tsatsouline. Pavel, aka the “Evil Russian,” was allegedly a trainer for the Spetsnaz, a Russian special forces unit. The cover showed a contemplative, muscle-bound Greek warrior in bronze. The subtitle trumpeted, “Master the Secrets of the Super-Strong—Using Bodyweight Exercises Only.”
The Naked Warrior was about dominating your body and achieving maximum strength. I
t also contained an ad for kettlebells, and the challenge: “Try it if you think you’re so tough. You’ll wish you were dead.”
I was conditioned and strong, but my first session with the kettlebell—essentially a cannonball with a handle—drove me into the ground. Kettlebell marketing has some of the shrillest, shriekiest ad copy you’ll ever see, and much of it focuses on “gaining strength without size.” Meaning, use kettlebells and you’ll never get that grotesque bodybuilder look. Never mind that nobody is capable of That Bodybuilder Look without drugs—these ads were TYPED IN ALL CAPS! They were full of SOVIET STRENGTH-TRAINING SECRETS!! You could now LOSE FAT WITHOUT THE DISHONOR OF DIETING!!!
The kettlebell world is an incestuous realm of back-slapping and defensiveness, but it was free of the grunting, glaring, overly tanned bros filling most of the gyms I’d used. I aligned myself with fitness zealots who were every bit as dogmatic as the priests of any religion. We were the anti-bodybuilders. We were the hard-living comrades. Nobody cared, but so what? “Kettleballs? What are those?”
“Oh, well, all you really need to know is that they’re so much better than ____________________” and here you’d insert dumbbells, barbells, sandbags, Atlas Stones, and anything else not sold by the kettlebell companies. What was lost in this evangelizing was the fact that most people don’t care about exercise. You could argue with a bodybuilder about your superior method, but someone who just wanted to watch Mad Men and eat Cheetos wouldn’t care.
I trained obsessively with the kettlebell for the next five months. It didn’t help with my tics. Actually, it made them more frequent, louder, and the physical tics had greater force behind them. Kettlebell movements are big and fast, and often done for high numbers of repetitions. Performing three hundred snatches in a session was common. The snatch is a movement where you swing the kettlebell back through the legs, then propel it overhead by snapping your hips forward and guiding the bell to a locked-out position overhead. I’d never panted like this or trained this hard. When my breathing got erratic, my tics worsened and persisted with a duration determined by how hard I trained. I knew it made Misty miserable because it was killing me.
These workouts hurt worse than any Tourette’s symptoms and made me feel like a very sassy comrade. And I was proving to all those “wish you were dead” guys that I could WORK OUT IN ALL CAPS!!!
Also, kettlebells were portable. I let my gym membership expire and trained at home. When I needed advice, I’d buy another of Pavel’s books, watch someone on YouTube, or jump into Dragon Door’s online forum, where it felt like every single person who used kettlebells was. Many of the posts were either people telling one another, “Good job, comrade!” or mocking other training systems. There were lots of questions like:
“I’m doing Pavel’s Enter the Kettlebell program. Can I substitute…?” And then they’d ask whether they could do push-ups instead of kettlebell presses, or something like that. And then everyone in this crowd of user names would jump in and say, “Comrade! The party is always right!* Yes, you can substitute, but then it would no longer be the program!” Or some outlander would say, “Kettlebells are for pussies, lift some real weights.”
But even in this largely anonymous group of cyber-comrades, there were some standout personalities. I quickly got bored with most of them, but I read every post by a guy named “Unbreakable” Adam T. Glass. It seemed important to him to always have that T. in his name, because he never left it out when referring to himself.
Adam usually logged in to post videos of his latest strength feat, offer advice to anyone asking for it, and excoriate anyone who claimed magical levels of strength but never offered proof. He was, in his words, “brusque as fuck” with people whom he felt were wasting his time and asking questions just for attention.
I started following his blog, “Walk the Road Less Travelled,” despite the fact that he had spelled “Travelled” with two ls. I learned that he was a tech sergeant in the air force, stationed in Minot, North Dakota.
He said things like, “If a bully approaches you, do not rob him with words. Do not bow to the rude and insane. Reward him with the face he deserves.”
And, “No, I don’t hunt, but if I did, I’d hunt mountain lions with a pistol. I won’t hunt anything that can’t hunt me.”
And, “If you’re claiming to be a fat-loss expert, don’t point at me with a finger that’s dripping with cake batter.”
And, “If your boot camp didn’t involve combatives training, you might consider taking it off your gym’s promotional material. Exercise does not give you PTSD. Perhaps some respect is in order?”
And, “I’m a real fucking handful if you fuck with me. Ponder that before continuing this line of questions.”
He was into some weird strength stuff he referred to as “old-time strongman.” Think of the vaudeville guy in a leopard-skin suit, but substitute a massive guy in karate pants and a T-shirt with a shaved head and an eternal scowl. Adam bent wrenches with his hands. He bent railroad spikes. He pulled chains apart. He could lift four hundred pounds with one finger. He tore phone books in half. He could take a deck of playing cards and tear them into four pieces, sometimes without even opening the box first. He bent horseshoes into the shape of hearts. He could take kettlebells that most people couldn’t even press, turn them upside down, and press them like that. He had a heavy, stupid sledgehammer with spikes on the end that he called “Big Danger.” He would hold the hammer at arm’s length, then let the spikes drift back toward his face, supporting it with his wrist strength. He was also an expert in hand-to-hand combat and marksmanship.
The feats of strength were strange, but they looked fun, minus the spiked hammer. The problem was, seeing the finished feat of strength gave few clues about how to work up to it. If you see someone bench five hundred pounds, you know that he got there with a lot of benching. But if you see someone roll up a frying pan like a tortilla, all you can do is try to mimic the feat itself. When that didn’t work, I didn’t know how to start developing that kind of strength, because I had no idea what kind of strength it really was. Wrists? Hands? Fingers? Pain tolerance?
After I’d read all of Adam’s forum posts, I reached out, very, very tentatively with a private forum message that was the equivalent of “Gee, mister, you’re super cool, can I ask you some questions about how to get big and stwong like you?”
He replied by saying, “Yes, do this, this, and this, and don’t ask again until you can show me that you actually did what I said.”
And so I started doing this, this, and this, and working on my hand and wrist strength. It would be a while before we’d interact again.
“So today I’m just going to ask you some questions, kind of like the interview when you and Janette were both here, okay?” The intern looked serious.
“Okay,” I said.
Janette was right: The intern’s boots were impressive. Black, shiny, almost knee-length, with a heel of such slight diameter that it could have punctured concrete.
First, she asked me the identical questions that she had asked the two of us. Then it changed.
“How do you and Janette resolve arguments?”
“Well, we don’t argue a lot,” I said. “But sometimes I think that might be part of the problem.” I heard myself thinking aloud but couldn’t seize my attention. “What I mean is, I don’t love any sort of conflict, but Janette absolutely hates it. She’s more like my mom. She’d rather lose an argument than argue, if only to make it stop. So I wonder if sometimes I get my own way without realizing that we’ve actually been having an argument and she’s just shut it down early…but again, we don’t argue much. We’re at a good enough place that we can actually have discussions like this without hurting each other’s feelings. That’s taken some work and we’re proud of it.”
“Mmm-hmm.” She wrote something. “What do you guys do for fun?”
“I love to write. And read, of course. I’ve been working at the library for about a year now, so yeah, I lov
e to read. And I like to lift weights, but I don’t really work out. I train.”
If she cared about the difference, she didn’t ask for clarification. “What are you reading?”
Oh no! I tested various truths in my head. This was my favorite question, but it tended to prompt only one follow-up: What’s that book about?
I’m reading Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. It’s about this band of scalp hunters and there’s this giant hairless albino named the judge. He might be Satan. Or War. It’s hard to tell, but he and his gang just go out and slaughter everyone. And there’s this great scene where they make their own gunpowder out of bat guano and urine, and then they kill all of these Apaches who thought they didn’t have any ammunition, and—
Wait, can I start again? Actually, heh-heh, I’m reading The Day of the Locust. It’s about Hollywood, sort of. West wrote the bleakest stuff. He said, “Not only is there no one to root for in my work, there aren’t any rooters.” This girl writes this letter to an advice columnist about how everyone makes fun of her for not having a nose and it’s really funny, but—
Okay, I can do better. I’m rereading Choke by Chuck Palahniuk. It’s about this sex addict who goes to sex addiction support groups to meet women. By the end he has started to think he’s the second coming of Christ, but then his friend, a compulsive masturbator who has to keep stacking all these rocks up so that he can keep his mind off his—well, it turns out that he’s not actually Jesus, but—
There was only one way out: “Stephen King.”
“Oh? Which one?” Damnation! One hundred out of one hundred Mormon moms hate Stephen King.
“Cell.” I shut up. I waited.
“What’s it about?”
“Well, it’s kind of silly, not his best, but you’ve got to understand how long I’ve been reading his books. But if you read Stephen King looking for realism you’re probably just—well, it’s about this event called The Pulse, and when The Pulse happens, everyone who’s on a cell phone at that moment turns into a crazy zombie. There’s a great opening—maybe the most frantic forty pages King has done—and right up there with the opening of the final Dark Tower book for sheer craziness and pace. Or even It, which is the book about the clown that kills all the kids. So this guy in the city is just walking around and suddenly everyone around him starts attacking one another. This woman attacks a dog! And he starts hearing cars crashing and then a plane crashes somewhere else in the city. Then of course he has to meet up with a few other people and they get the group together, which is something King always does really well. And later there’s some bad guy called the Raggedy Man who might be killing people in a stadium but I’m not sure what to make of him yet. But the beginning, it’s just—” I stopped.
The World’s Strongest Librarian: A Memoir of Tourette’s, Faith, Strength, and the Power of Family Page 18
