Leg Day

It’s leg day and I’m trying to focus, trying to bathe in the agony that is emanating up through my legs in waves.

I force my way through the rep, doing battle with the weight.

Stay with the pain. Don’t run from it. Accept it as it is.

I’m trying to reach some zen state that might sit somewhere above the agonies of my tortured flesh, some quiet place where tranquil waters run and sagely monks regard my efforts with a gentle amusement, but my relief and salvation is eluding me and all I feel is hate. Failure is around the bend, and my muscles have been defeated.

My teeth are grinding against each other and there is a terrible sense of unease creeping into my bones, an unease that can only come with knowing your very best isn’t good enough.

I rack the bar and stare into the mirror, meeting my own flushed angry face with a laser beam stare.

My shoulders are raw from the bar, the tanned flesh worn away and my tree trunk legs are shaking, but I know it’s still not enough. 

As I catch my breath, I start to clumsily pop some poses with the diminishing enthusiasm of a lost erection.

The pump is fading, and my gains are disappearing before my eyes.

I’m afraid to say it but I look small, almost puny.

I don’t understand it.

Maybe it’s time to up the dosage.

I have been smashing it for eight weeks and I can barely see any difference.

That cunt Tremble, flogging me hooky gear. I will be having a fucking word with that saggy prick, mark my words.

As I stare into the mirror at my very own self-made monument to weakness, barely able even to look at it, growing disgusted and appalled by it, I notice a bloke further down the gym with his headphones in, curling a pair of fifties like they are nothing.

My god his arms are perfect, and his back beneath his vest is a knotted nest of pythons.

And fuck a duck his legs.

Pillars sculpted from rock.

I feel dizzy, breathless, and as my eyes follow each and every perfect sweep of his physique, I start to see angry red spots and realise I will have a hypo if I’m not careful. I need calories.

The bloke must feel my eyes on him, because he stops what he’s doing and returns my gaze.

“Poof,” I snarl, and thunder to the changing room, flaring my lats.

I skip the showers, and I leave the gym feeling hollow, bitter and jealous.

The euphoria I used to feel after a session is nowhere to be found, replaced instead with a sickening realisation that I’ll never look as good as I used to and the harder I push the easier my ideals will elude me.

I nearly tear my car door off its hinges and squeeze my mass into the seat just as it starts to piss down.

The car stinks of old socks.

I stuff a protein recovery bar into my mouth, trying to wash away the glutinous paste with a lukewarm protein shake, my sixth of the day so far.

My overworked stomach grumbles in protest at the ritualistic force feeding but I ignore the nausea and force down more of the saccharin-sweet sludge.

I stifle my dry heaves.

I need this. I hoard the calories, envisioning myself as a dragon hoarding its treasure.

I close my eyes and will myself to grow larger. 

Raindrops tap dance on my car, and I start to calm. Sleep begins to pull me.

I’m tired.

I start to fall face first into a deep darkness.

I’m falling.

Something splashes my face and I jerk awake, thinking that somehow the motor has sprung a leak, that the rain is somehow pissing into the car.

I touch my face and see the tears shiny on my hand and start the car.

I get home and I don’t say a word to her. She doesn’t even look up from painting her nails.

I just pile into the shower and turn it up as hot as I can stand, imagining that the boiling jet of water can somehow wash away more than just sweat and dirt.

I imagine the torrent washing away the putrid stink of my failures, the rancid stain of my long dead dreams.

I imagine shedding the snakeskin of my old self, shrugging it off and watching it pirouette down the plug hole.

Fingers of steam rise.

It’s gorgeous, I’ve found a slice of peace again.

And then she bangs on the door.

“Len! Hurry up babe I need a wee wee!”

Wee wee? I cringe. She’s got the mind of a five-year-old, utterly thick as pig shit.

I purposefully take my sweet time in the hope that her mouse bladder will give way and she will be forced to piss herself.

But she bangs again. She ruins the ambience of the shower and suddenly the water isn’t quite so hot or invigorating.

I don’t feel reborn anymore. I feel like a stillbirth.

I wipe away the steam from the mirror and turn to reveal my back to it.

My acne is getting worse.

A swathe of custard filled white heads cakes my back and shoulders.

I nail one angry specimen with a pinch, and it ejaculates gunk across the mirror.

After I’m dried off, I go into the kitchen and prepare dinner; four plain chicken breasts, a pile of brown rice and some broccoli.

The chicken gives off a foetid odour and the grey meat oozing tendrils of whitish grease puts me in mind of something badly embalmed.

I shovel the tasteless fuel down.

I feel skinny, malnourished.

I squeeze my bicep and it’s a mere acorn.

I decide to go to the makeshift gym I have built in the garage and smash a few hard sets.

Squats till failure, just until I can feel the glorious pump, just until my greedy veins can gorge themselves on my thick angry blood.

I frisbee my soiled plate into the sink and waddle to the garage.

I smile as I think of my stash waiting for me down there amongst the steel and the cobwebs, waiting for me and me only. 

I have to pass her as she sits on the couch, glued to the telly, dumbly munching on a bag of crisps, the lights dancing on her slackened face, the electromagnetic rays beaming out images of unenlightened trash destroying whatever meagre braincells she has left.

I look at the screen.

Z list dating show. Feeble minded simpletons caked in fake tan gleefully humiliating themselves for popularity.

These ingrates are truly poo clingers on the arse beard of humanity.

I shake my head and she smiles up at me with the blank stare of a grazing farm animal.

I deserve more than this.

I lock the door behind me and I sit for a moment in the cold garage.

I think of the life I have built for myself and realise with stunning clarity that it is a prison of my own construction, and I have happily laid every brick.

I go to my stash.

I reach under my tool shelf, stretching my hand all the way to the back, past spiders and God knows what.

For a second my fingers can’t find it.

What if that bitch found them?

But then my fingers close around the plastic bag and the relief makes me moan.

I pull out my stash and brush away mummified earwigs and a weave of cobwebs from it, and then I open the bag and pull out the magazines.

I fan the magazines so I can see the titles.

Muscle Monsters, Muscle Insanity, Raw Power. Fuck Boys.

My pulse quickens.

My eyes greedily drink in the cannonball biceps and snaking veins and shredded abs.

I only keep the muscle mags for the diet and workout plans, and I keep the bender magazines for the sheer classical perfection of the physiques, but I know how this looks.

That’s why it must remain a secret.

The forms are somehow freer, and there is a happiness in their eyes and a cheekiness there and an attitude that just screams I am what I am no no no…

I put the stash back and then I hit the lat pull downs, ignoring my muscles pleas for mercy, inwardly scoffing at such wet ideas as overtraining and burnout.

I let the images of perfection swirl through my mind, and I envision myself morphing with them, tumbling through space and becoming one with them.

Each rep becomes savage with the knowledge that unity and inner peace are alien ideas to me, so unknown that I probably wouldn’t recognize them.

I can feel the pressure building.

My strength is surging.

I let the weight clank to rest and then a pain stabs into my chest and I drop to one knee.

A gorilla has wrapped its arms around me and is trying to explode my head, but I won’t give in.

Get your breath you quitter.

I clutch a pec as big as a tectonic plate.

Just lightheaded I tell myself.

The pain subsides.

Later in bed the dozy cow puts it on me.

She slides the clammy fish of her hand over across my thighs with all the grace and subtlety of a dump truck reversing over a troop of baboons and she even starts to laugh as she tugs at my shrivelling cock.

Part of me thinks she’s pretending to be coy, but it just sounds like she has Tourette’s. 

AHA AHA she goes, like that twat Alan Partridge.

I give her a seeing to eventually, and I close my eyes as I thrust, ignoring her theatrics. The neighbours would be forgiven for thinking that a pregnant cow mooing in abject distress had somehow found itself in our bedroom.

I close my eyes and think of my magazines and the faultless bodies in there, and how within those pages they will live forever. I think of pectorals and lats and traps and the epic curves of arses and oh god oh god…

Tremble’s discarded Halloween mask of a face is shrunken and tired, his eyes staring out from deep wells, the forehead lined, the lips rubbery.

He’s got some new gear he reckons.

His body is failing him but he’s clearly refusing to notice.

Despite his once award-winning body taking on the appearance of forgotten birthday balloons shrivelling in the sun, he’s wearing a Gold’s Gym vest and a pair of tiny shorts.

I doubt he could even tell me where Gold’s Gym is.

His skin has been so thoroughly irradiated from decades of sunbed abuse it looks like he’s painted himself with Ronseal shed protector and after I’ve shook his hand, I check my palm to make sure he hasn’t stained me.

He wheezes, and I notice a scar on his chest above his heart.

He notices me notice.

“Pacemaker,” he says with a resigned smile that creases his face into a wrinkled ball sack.

I shrug.

I look at the trophies collecting dust on his mantelpiece whilst he goes upstairs to fetch me the gear.

I look at some faded photos of various competitions, and Tremble coming in third, second and unbelievably first place.

I think of my own accolades and recall bitterly I don’t have any.

In one photo Tremble receives a trophy from a bemused looking Lou Ferrigno and in another he’s shaking hands with Arnie at some kind of expo.

The Arnie photo is too much, and I stuff it down my tracksuit just as Tremble wheezes his way back into the living room, handing me a paper bag rattling with glass ampules.

“Admiring my trophies, eh?”

I hand him over the dough.

“Something like that,” I say.

“Fancy a tea, Len? I could take you down memory lane?”

The desperate longing in his eyes tells me Tremble is lonely.

It’s less a friendly invite and more of a sad plea.

“No ta,” I quickly spit. I’d rather die than let this has been lord over me for an hour, telling me the way the wind blows.

“Take it easy with that stuff,” Tremble warns.

“It’s proper.”

I fuck Tremble’s picture frame into a bin on the way home and

I jab up as soon as I get in, jamming the used syringe into my buttocks.

I must admit the ampules look a bit ropey.

The labels are written in Chinese for a start, and the juice itself is a venomous looking stomach bile yellow. 

Beggars can’t be choosers though. I need to grow.

I hit my lat pulldown machine for a few furious reps, just to get the blood flowing, and take a quick look at my stash.

It’s leg day again, a week has passed, and I am massacring my legs, completely ethnically cleansing them.

I am like a man possessed.

Whatever Tremble has given me is working. My hair has been falling out in clumps, and I have had some pretty urgent nosebleeds, but you take the rough with the smooth.

I rack the bar and look down at the pool of sweat at my feet, and smile at my bloody hands.

A bloke with a man bun comes over, with a worried look on his boat.

It’s the same guy I clocked a few weeks ago, just with a sillier hair style.

“Are you ok dude?”

I ignore him, letting my body speak for itself.

As he walks away, I notice how nicely his lats sweep down, down toward his tight little no no no…

I growl and hit another set, to total failure and beyond, to a place full of bright flashing lights and crushing chest pains.

In the changing rooms I strip off and gulp at a premixed post workout mix. I spot the man bun guy getting changed.

I lumber over and poke him on the shoulder.

He turns around and I loom, forcing him into the corner with my naked bulk.

His eyes widen and he stares at my chest, presumably at the hideous boils that have erupted since I started on Tremble’s new gear, the walnut sized bastards that I must repeatedly lance with a safety pin.

“Rule number one. Never interrupt a bloke when he’s in the middle of a workout. Right?”

“Right,” he nods.

He seems to shrink as I swell.

It’s magnificent, this robbery of energy. I feel myself getting hard.

“Rule number two, especially if you’re just a casual, shut up and watch the pros, and you just might learn something. You’ve got potential.”

I let my eyes crawl all over his body, over his hard pecs and perfect skin.

He starts to turn a shade of red, and my tongue flickers out of my mouth in response.

I reach out and he recoils backward, flinching from my touch.

My hands have a mind of their own and they begin to spider down toward his oh my god his. . .

And then he hits me.

I see a flash and I’m sitting on the floor and my lip is pissing blood.

Man-bun is screaming at me in a frenzy, but I can’t hear anything because my ears are ringing.

Some uniformed staff help me to my feet, but I brush them off like the flies they are.

One of their hands brushes my knob.

By the time I get home my face is swollen, and it hurts to move my mouth. 

I can barely taste the shame through the blood.

I get in and am shocked to see that she’s finally gone, along with all her stuff.

The house has been ransacked.

It’s like a fleet of deranged monkeys have descended on it.

I go into the garage and my stash is scattered across the room, and some of my mags are torn into pieces.

I doubt that I left them out but the idea that Shelly would be smart enough to pull one over on me is too unbelievable, too far-fetched.

Still, rough with the smooth as I say. Rough with the smooth.

It’s leg day and the police have just left.

They politely informed me that I will be charged with harassment and that with my previous convictions, I better get myself a decent solicitor.

I am never to attend the Pump Factory gym in Addington again under pain of further prosecution.

The two bobbies look around at the detritus of my living room with disgust and pity, surveying the wreckage of baby food jars and half eaten kebabs as if I am some kind of tramp.

One of them sees a torn page from one of my skin mags and screws up his face. It’s stuck to the coffee table with jizz.

“Get yourself together Mr Walsh. This is unacceptable,” the other one says, staring at my face, at the expanse of raw, oozing flesh that has emerged since Tremble’s knock off gear started to take effect.

No matter what I put on it just makes it worse, antiseptic creams and lotions, the sore just eats them, as if I am feeding it.

My hair, it lays around on the floor in tumbleweed clumps.

They probably think I’ve got a dog.

When they finally leave, I decide to kill myself.

I go to the garage and consider wrapping the cord from my machine around my neck but decide it’s cowardly.

I change into my best gym gear and tighten my weightlifting belt around my bulging gut.

I blast a huge pre workout mix, twice as much as normal, and jab up a jumbo dose of Trembles experimental gear.

I chalk my hands and snort a line of the premium cocaine I picked up from Albanian Mick last week. 

I levitate over to my squat rack and load the bar up until I know it will start to bend and then I go under it and let its unstoppable mass come down on me.

And I do battle with it.

I push and push, tearing through reps, crushing the bar to a pulp, bending the metal to my will.

Time pulsates and fluctuates, becomes nothingness.

My nose gushes blood.

My tendons, I feel them snap. I feel something herniate out of my arsehole and hear something sloppy fall to the floor.

A pain begins to flower in my chest, but I push past it toward a startling white light.

My particles begin to boil, my vision, it starts to burn away like a cigarette placed against a polaroid and then I feel myself begin to disappear.