No Gut, No Glory: My Adventure into the Underworld of Competitive Bodybuilding

by Todd Outcalt

     Picture a guy just turned forty years of age, a guy who’s been working out in the gym for two decades—straining under tons of black weight, force-feeding his body with creatine, vitamins, and massive containers of protein supplement—a guy who’s built a frame of muscle hidden under a thick layer of fat.  That’s me.  Or, more accurately, that was me.

     For years I’d been telling my wife that I was going to compete in a bodybuilding contest some day when I got “big enough.”  But every time I’d grow out of another pair of blue jeans or a five hundred dollar suit, I’d assure her that I’d soon settle down, get serious, and really work on getting into peak condition.  I used the line for years and it worked well . . . until I turned forty.

     And then my wife began insisting that I compete in something.  “Get this out of your system,” she told me.  “If you’re going to compete, do it!  You need to lose that gut.”  Having been a life-long, drug-free bodybuilder, I knew what I had to do.

     There were hundreds of bodybuilding competitions each year.  These ranged from the Mr. Olympia weekend—the pinnacle of the IFBB (International Federation of Body Building) professional bodybuilding competitions staged under Joe Weider’s moniker—to lesser-known amateur competitions sponsored by universities, regional and city athletic associations, or smaller federations devoted to a drug-free lifestyle.  Unlike some sports, where athletes work together as a team, bodybuilding is exclusively a solitary pursuit, with most athletes overseeing their own training, diet, and competition preparation (such as tanning, posing, and artistic presentation).  And while some of the top professional athletes might inject their fair share of steroids and growth hormones just to stay gigantic and hard, natural bodybuilders like myself, while not as muscular, had to focus on effective training and diet to get big and defined.

     Soon after Christmas (and my usual increased consumption of pecan pie and peanut butter fudge) I riffled through some of the natural bodybuilding magazines at the newsstand, located a contest, and sent in my registration fees.  There!  I was committed.  Now I had to get into shape.

     At six-one and two hundred forty pounds, I knew I was talking about a serious transformation in my physique.  I found myself training and dieting with a new intensity and dedication.  I started weaning my body on chicken breasts, egg whites, and fresh fruits and vegetables instead of eating spaghetti and meatballs.  I counted carbohydrate calories and lost ten pounds the first month.  That initial boost, coupled with diet aids, gave me a jumpstart toward getting into the best shape of my life.

     But the work got tougher.

     Unlike most mediums in which an artist or sculptor might work, I discovered that the human body—or more particularly, my body—resisted change.  I’d been lifting weights for years, putting on muscle, paying little attention to particulars such as definition, vascularity, and muscle separation and clarity—the real trademarks of a bodybuilder’s appearance.  But when I started trying to chisel these details into my forty-year-old body—well, I came up against one formidable foe.

     In particular, my gut was going to be a problem.  I’d never had washboard abs at any time in my life—not even as a skinny adolescent—and my wife was always kidding me about my waistline.  But I was determined to find a six-pack inside me somewhere!

     A couple of months before the contest, I upped the intensity of my abdominal training and took my diet to another level.  In a few weeks, I actually started seeing six distinct abdominal muscles stacked atop my waist.  I kept at it, and a month before the show, I had a firm six pack.

     By now I was down to 215 pounds.  But I still had a long way to go.  The last month, I knew, would be torturous.

     I started working out twice a day, increased my aerobic activity to burn 500-600 calories at a pop, and kept hoisting the weights.  But as I lost weight I was getting weaker.  Where I had been leg pressing 1000 pounds, I could now only do 700 pounds for reps, and my bench press had fallen from 300 to 235.  But I was feeling great.

     However, as my weight and strength faded even further, my emotions were on a trip wire.  I had all the symptoms of my wife’s PMS.  Without carbs, I felt mean all the time.  My children avoided me.  I kept to myself.  And if I’d had a dog, I’d have kicked it in the balls.

     Relief arrived three days before the contest, when I consumed my first carbohydrate meal in four days.

            The day before the contest I weighed in at 203 pounds.  I’d shed nearly 40 pounds of fat, kept most of my muscle mass, and lost my libido (a side-effect of competitive bodybuilding no man likes to talk about).  All in all it was a nice trade off.  I didn’t have to worry about performing in bed, and my wife loved the new slimed down version of my gut.  Now all I had to do was show up at the competition and pose in front of a live audience.  How difficult could that be?

 

 

     The day before the competition I found myself sitting in a cold dormitory room hooked up to a polygraph machine.  A police officer administered the test on behalf of the bodybuilding federation, and I was asked a series of questions regarding my use of banned substances.  Some initial questions were asked to establish a line of truth and determine my reactions to the procedure itself:  “Do people call you Todd?”  “Do you live in Indianapolis?”  “Do you realize how stupid you look hooked up to this machine?”

     Then the officer turned his attention to the list of banned substances:  anabolic steroids, growth hormones, anabolic enhancers (such as the popular androstenedione), diuretics, and a litany of other substances I wouldn’t attempt to pronounce, much less ingest into my body.  I answered “no” to all of the questions and given a “drug-free” thumbs-up.

     I gathered with the other competitors the next morning—thirty in all—inside the auditorium where we would soon be strutting our stuff.  The field of competitors was a study in humanity.  One guy showed up wearing nothing but a butcher’s smock.  There were fair-skinned teenagers competing in their division who were built more like bicyclists than bodybuilders.  One of the women competitors was a sixty-one year old grandmother who was so deeply tanned that her skin had taken on the texture of an alligator handbag.

     I had no idea how I was going to fare until all of the competitors were ushered backstage and we began stripping down and pumping up for the prejudging (the first and most crucial stage of a contest when the judges compare the competitors side-by-side by putting them through a series of “compulsory” poses).  Right away I could tell that I had missed the mark.  Compared to the other guys I did not have the quality the judges would be looking for.  I was humbled.

     In addition to competing in the “masters division”—reserved for those over forty years of age—I had chosen to also compete in the “open”—that is, for the overall title.  Although I was the youngest and the biggest of the masters competitors, I was clearly out of the running.  Even the old men I was competing against had rock-hard bodies. And as for the open competitors, I had twenty years on most of them, and their youthfulness and muscularity was clearly superior. 

     One guy, a fellow named Willie Joe, looked like the man to beat.  He was the only competitor taller or larger than me, and we found ourselves sitting next to each other in the locker room swapping insights.  “You look good,” he told me at one point.

     “The best shape of my life,” I told him proudly.  “But I’m not in your caliber.”

     He smiled and flexed his pecs while his personal trainer lathered his back with posing oil.  Nearby, two guys were coating each other with PAM cooking spray—an inexpensive way to prepare the muscles to reflect the glare of the stage lights and bring out maximum definition.  They were completely naked, and didn’t even flinch when a couple of wives and girlfriends walked into the men’s room to oil up their husbands and boyfriends.  Modestly, I slid behind a locker, not wanting the ladies to see me oiled up in my tiny bikini briefs.  But no one was interested in looking at an old guy like me anyway.

     “How many times have you competed?” I asked Willie Joe.

     Willie Joe’s trainer, a giant man who looked like a professional wrestler, answered, “Hell, we’ve been all over ain’t we?  We’ve done shows in California, Texas, Florida.  This is Willie’s fourth show this year.”

     “This is my first,” I said sheepishly.  “I lost forty pounds getting ready for this one.”

     “No shit?!”  Willie’s friend allowed his eyes to graze over the length and breadth of my body.  “I’d hate to see what you’d look like if you’d had a couple more weeks of dieting.  You got size, man.  Great symmetry.”

     I followed Willie Joe out of the men’s locker room into the pump room, where most of the competitors were busy sweating and lifting.

     In one corner, a couple of the women were getting ready to go on stage, flexing and staring at their reflections in the mirror, their bronzed bodies hard and cut.  A few of the men were pumping up early, and every ten minutes or so, one of the show’s organizers would poke his head into the pump room and call for the next batch of competitors.  Each announcement was followed by more furious pumping and flexing, and yet the atmosphere was very asexual, each competitor interested only in his or her own appearance.

     Finally the call came for the men’s masters division.  We entered stage left to a rousing round of applause and stood before the judges.  The seven judges—including two women—sat directly in front of us behind the lights, staring at each body as if inspecting a side of beef for marbling and any glaring irregularities that might relegate a grade-A prime cut to hamburger.  The head judge barked his commands and we obliged with our well-rehearsed poses.

     Although we were only on stage five to seven minutes, we were sweating bullets in no time.  Like a Miss America contestant, I wondered if I had chosen the wrong color posing trunks, or should have dyed some of the gray out of my temples.  Had I shaved my armpits well enough? What would it take to get the attention of the judges? I wondered.

     As we exited the stage I wondered why I had made such an insane commitment.

 

     The evening show was not a packed house, but close.  And the audience was one of the liveliest I’d ever heard.  For the show, each competitor was allowed to do a sixty-second posing routine set to music.  I’d practiced my routine only sparingly in the weeks leading up the competition, selecting The Steve Miller band’s Keep on Rockin’ Me Baby as my opus.

     When my turn came, I stepped onto the stage, managed to run through my dozen poses without falling down, and exited quickly.  Leave them wanting more, I thought.  When I looked up into the crowd, I noted that my wife was smiling at me as I walked off the stage.

     The rest of the show went as I’d expected.  Willie Joe finished on top of the men’s tall class, but was beaten by a smaller bodybuilder for the overall title.  The old men showed up ripped and ready in the master’s division.  And me?  Well, I took third place (out of four) in the masters and got dead last in the open.  But hey, I beat somebody!  Must have been my aftershave lotion.

     As soon as the show was over, however, I started anticipating my reward.  I hadn’t eaten dessert in months and I was craving something sweet.  I had to find some chocolate . . . and fast.

     But as my wife and I were walking across the parking lot after the show, one of the judges approached, pulled me aside, and complemented me on my physique.  “I think you were the biggest guy here,” he told me.  “Guys of your stature aren’t usually able to build enough mass to look symmetrical.  But you’ve got a nice build.  If only you’d come in a bit sharper, I think you’d have placed very high.”

     There was that word again:  sharper. 

     “You think I could do better?” I asked.

     “Oh yeah!” he shot back.  “Don’t give up.  You should compete again.”

     At that moment, of course, I wasn’t thinking about competing at anything except eating.  I’d had my heart set on a chocolate dessert for months.

     I thanked the judge for his comments and then my wife and I drove out to a local restaurant at eleven p.m. to celebrate my efforts and the beginning of a week-long vacation with the kids in Florida.  (A vacation where, lying sedentary on the beach and dining every evening on fried seafood and hot buttered rolls, I would gain back fifteen pounds in one week and lose my muscular definition in two days.

     At the restaurant, my wife ordered a glass of water.  I ordered a Brownie Double Fudge Delight and a glass of whole milk.

     “Don’t get sick,” my wife reminded me.  “You’ve not had any sugars or fats for months.”

     I consumed five or six bites anyway, and immediately felt a queasiness that had me teetering on the edge of vomiting.  Somehow I managed to keep it all down.

     “So . . . are you going to do this again?” my wife asked while I gulped my milk.

     I thought about the compliments I’d received, the improvements I could make, a better dieting plan.  Then I considered how many Brownie Double Fudge Delights and boxes of Krispy Kreme donuts I’d have to give up in order to get sharp.  “I don’t think so,” I said.  “Too much time, effort, and sacrifice.  I’ve got too many other goals in my life.”

     My wife smiled her alluring smile and stared at my two hundred pound frame of solid muscle and bone.  I could tell she wanted me.  I hadn’t seen that look in her eyes since our honeymoon.  “You should compete again,” she said seductively.

     “Why?”

     “You look good this way, all tanned and smooth and ripped,” she told me, winking.  “Really hot.”

     I gazed into my wife’s eyes, considered all of the things we could do together in bed, but hadn’t done in weeks because I had been consumed by training, dieting, and tanning.  I looked down at my big brownie smothered in fudge.

     “I might compete again,” I told her, lusting in my heart, eager to fulfill my wildest culinary desires.  “But not tonight . . . I have a headache.  And right now, I just want to finish my dessert.” 

 Todd, 3 Days Before Competition

Todd, 10 Days After Competition

Todd Outcalt is the author of twenty-five books in six languages including Before You Say "I Do", Candles in the Dark, and The Best Things in Life Are Free.  His short work (fiction and non) has graced the pages of publications such as American Fitness, Newsweek, The Christian Science Monitor, Cure, Brides, and For the Bride (where he also wrote a column for grooms).  Two of his articles on breast cancer have also won prizes.  In addition to writing Todd enjoys kayaking, hiking, and lifting weights--but he no longer competes in bodybuilding competitions!  He lives in Brownsburg, Indiana with his wife and is hard at work—always!—on his next book and essay.

 

Love like Saltwater

by LeeAnn Olivier

As I study my genealogy chart, I love to say the languid names of my Cajun ancestors, names like Jean Baptiste Olivier and Marie Magdelaine Monpierre, liquid names that curl in the mouth like minnows, then unfurl and swim off of the tongue. I come from a family of fishermen. My immigrant relatives made their living catching silver fins and tiger prawns in the murky coastal netherworld of Bayou Black, the swamp singing in their veins, as lush as mellifluous green rivers.

On a still, sweltering Sunday afternoon in August of 1856, before hurricanes had female names, a violent storm ravaged Terrebonne Parish where my ancestors lived on the Louisiana coast, killing over two hundred people. The hurricane destroyed the hotel and gambling houses at nearby Isle Derniere, the island left bereft, void of vegetation and split in half, the once bustling seaside resort transformed into a feral haven for brown pelicans and black-backed herons, royal terns and laughing gulls. Rains flooded the Mermentau River and destroyed crops along the bottom lands. Saltwater soaked rice fields in Bayou Black, stripping fruit from orange trees, smearing the air with fragrant swirls of tangy brine and sweet citrus. Survivors clung to bales of cotton and washed ashore as the storm subsided. My great-great grandmother Delphine, whose name is a French-Greek hybrid of “dolphin,” would have been fifteen when the hurricane hit.

I imagine Delphine. I imagine Saturday night before the great storm, Delphine—thin as an egret wading through a tangle of bible-black vines—crept to the lip of the pier, dipped her net, and waited for crawfish. I imagine on Sunday morning after dawn, the sun turned the moor to loam, and a violet sheen skimmed the gulf. I imagine Delphine sprawled on the front porch, watching the veined sky glower and sink and watching the vultures wheel and dive like black angels. I imagine that my great-great grandmother, like me, was a Catholic girl who harbored a secret pagan heart. On Sunday afternoon, the storm loomed. Delphine’s limbs aquiver, she whirled and danced like a dervish while the sea swelled. She was Hurricane Delphine, deciding whom to love when she saw what could crawl from the shambles unscathed, who could cling to a bale of cotton and sweep ashore, his swamp-green eyes singed with salt, his blue-black hair braided with seaweed—her own personal Poseidon. This is how she would choose her mate. I like to pretend this is how she met Pierre Zephirin Olivier, my great-great grandfather.

A century and a half later, their ghosts dance on my ribs, their maritime blood brewing inside me, imbuing me with a hunger for salt and brine and sun. Perhaps this is why I swam as soon as I could walk, staying under the water until my flesh puckered and my green eyes burned, flicking my imaginary fins, twirling like a drunken ballerina. A timid child too scared to climb trees or ride bicycles, I was always the first to dive, fetching pennies that glimmered like buried treasure at the bottom of the pool. Once I even swam with dolphins off the Mexican coast of Isla Mujeres, my hands gliding easily over their satin spines as they keened and twittered, their lithe, powerful bodies coiling around me, weaving human and dolphin skin into one skein. It felt like home.

Shortly after I learned to swim, in order to make myself useful to my father, I figured out how to mix his martinis—gin rather than vodka, shaken instead of stirred, laden with green olives and poured over ice. I remember the heady, acrid smell of the liquor, the clink of ice against the tumbler. I remember how he chilled the olives in champagne until they were smooth as emeralds bobbing in frothy bubbles. I used to dive for the olives submerged at the bottom of his rocks glass, and I would suck the juice out of them, rolling them around on my tongue, loving their briny, gin-and-champagne-soaked taste. They tasted like the ocean, like the swamp where my father’s people lived, like fishermen, like olive skin and sea-green eyes and ink-dark hair…like my father himself.

While most of the girls I knew received cars and college educations from their fathers, the Olivier genealogy chart is the only thing my father ever provided for me after I turned eighteen and he no longer had to pay child support. My father and I never knew each other very well, and all we shared was the same saltwater in our veins. A born seaman, he served as a lieutenant commander in the Navy and was often stationed overseas at exotic-sounding places like Guam, and Bahrain, and Okinawa. When I was in elementary school, he lived in Japan for two years, so I became obsessed with that seafaring country—their painted Kyoto dolls, their sushi rolls and squid salad, their modular beds as compact as cupboard drawers. When my father would return to my mother and me in Shreveport, he didn’t have much use for me outside of my bartending skills. He found me too fey, too fanciful, too peculiar. He called me a “bleeding heart liberal.” He called me “an egg about to crack.” Then he left us for good.

My father never really knew his father either—Alcide Olivier, nicknamed “Frenchie"—because he died when my father was a little boy. In the only photograph I have ever seen of my grandfather, he stands, haggard and swarthy, next to my elegant grandmother, his shock of sable hair mussed and oily, a hand-rolled cigarette dangling from his mouth. Working as a roughneck on a Gulf Coast oil rig, Frenchie traded in a life of fishing for a life of drilling. He swapped the salt air for sulphuric acid, and his blackened, sea-starved lungs couldn’t take it. So I suppose it isn’t my father’s fault that no one ever showed him how to be a dad.

In the French folktale, “Love Like Salt,” a king asks his daughter how much she loves him. She replies, “I love you as much as fresh meat loves salt.” The king is so perplexed by his daughter’s unusual answer that he disowns her and banishes her from the palace. Years later the banished daughter marries a prince from a neighboring kingdom and invites her father to the wedding. Still desperate to please her father, she requests that the food for the wedding feast be prepared without any salt. But the king spits the food from his mouth, declaring it “tasteless.” The king then embraces his daughter, admitting he was wrong to misinterpret her words. For the rest of the wedding banquet, the king relishes plump shrimp curled in crimson sauce, fat scallops soaked in butter, and brine-drenched oysters dipped in sea salt, affirming they are the best foods he has ever tasted.

Unlike the mythical French king, I doubt my estranged father will ever appreciate my odd way of looking at the world or will ever forgive me for being who I am. But I can try to forgive him. After all, his blood is the salt that flavors my food. He gave me more than a genealogy chart, more than a lilting list of French names printed in black font on twenty pages of white paper. He gave me a rich history from which I can weave stories, spinning them around in my mind like dolphins spiraling up from the bottom of the sea. He gave me sea gods washing ashore after great storms. He gave me Delphine fishing under the feverish flambeau of the bayou, luminous as a selkie drying her silken skin in the sun. He gave me the water.

LeeAnn Olivier is a poet and essayist whose     work has recently appeared in Stone Highway Review, damselfly press, Sojourn, SWAMP, Jelly Bucket, and Illya's Honey. A Ph.D. student at the University of Texas at Dallas, she is currently working on her creative dissertation—a collection of poems exploring myth, magic, and a Louisiana childhood. Olivier teaches English full-time at Tarrant County College and lives in Fort Worth with her partner John and their canine children: Eddie, Oscar, and Bijou.  “Love Like Saltwater” originally appeared in damselfly press.

She Leaves Me, She Leaves Me Not

by Samina Najmi

Yesterday we drove the three hours to San Francisco airport together.  Twenty-six hours later, you’ve called to tell me that you made it safely across North America, the Atlantic Ocean, Europe, and the Middle East—back to Karachi, our megapolis on Pakistan’s southern coast.  Sajeda, your housekeeper of fifteen years, has made you a cup of strong, black tea sweetened with honey.  Once again your day unfolds thirteen hours ahead of Pacific Standard Time.    

 I did not permit you any goodbyes in Fresno.  As we loaded your bags into the blue minivan, your bottle of water, your string cheese and banana for the journey, and as your face betrayed the weight of the parting, I told you gruffly that this was no time for self-indulgence, we had a plane to catch.  I snapped instructions—use the bathroom, put on your jackets—at my son and daughter, your eldest grandchildren, the ones who have learned from you the right-to-left Urdu alphabet, learned to share your taste for the sweet corn kernels, buttered and peppered, that you’d sauté for them when they came home from school, ravenous.  At the steering wheel, I saw without turning my head toward the passenger seat how you looked at the garage door closing down on our two months of togetherness, how, as we pulled out of the driveway, your gaze lingered on the bountiful oranges peeping out from the backyard, the tips of the tall cypress trees tickling our blue Fresno skies in early February.

Your son, my brother, met us at the International Terminal with a copy of your just-published book, your Urdu translation of a Harvard psychologist’s work on unwanted thoughts and our human attempts to suppress them.  My brother and his wife, your daughter-in-law, brought a chocolate cake and three candles so you could be part of your younger granddaughter’s birthday; their San Francisco home with its steep stairs a world beyond your reach.  When we sang happy birthday, two gray-haired women looked up from their sandwiches and joined in.  They were passengers like you, their eyes soft with recognition at your attempts to hold on to the flesh of your flesh even as the plane prepared to carry you eight thousand miles away.  The three children who began leaving you thirty years ago, for their undergraduate degrees, their master’s, their doctorates; for their careers in the academy, in the Silicon Valley, in clinical psychology; for their marriages to Americans, black, white, and Korean; for their children growing up without thoughts of Karachi.  And you have done your best to shrink space and time, to partake of the graduations, weddings, divorces, and births.  Except for the five years after 9/11 when the world came between us.  In those five years you buried your sister, my aunt, only a year older than you, and your brother-in-law, my uncle, friend of forty years.  In those five years, while shingles torched half your face (and burns you still), rheumatoid arthritis pounced on shoulder and wrist, gnarled your toes, and gnashed at your knees—the searing pain, the contorted limb—a mock rigor mortis, alive and afire.  You let go of your school, the one you began in our living room thirty-seven years ago for your four-year-old daughter, my younger sister.  You relinquished the love of four hundred children.  That daughter, my sister, sponsored your Green Card so you would never again be denied entry into our lives.  And you sliced your years down the middle, six months here and six months there, the wholeness of hearts bridging the fracture.

But this time Karachi kept you the whole year.  This time you arrived at San Francisco airport thinking, Let me see them in their American lives one last time.  This time you arrived in a wheelchair.  This time I was glad not to greet you at the airport.  I waited for my brother, your son, to bring you to me in Fresno, where you will stay, for the first time unable to visit your other children and your nephew and niece, my cousins.  So they will drive to Fresno, a familial Mecca, for hurricane visits from points north and south, including your toddler grandson, my nephew, from San Diego, who will tell you that his knee hurts too.  You will look in wonder at the lights on our five-foot Christmas tree, the one we’ve held on to year after year, though my children, your grandchildren, are catching up to it in height.  With your one good hand—the other shriveled up since your crawling days when you dipped it into steaming chai water—you will touch the ornaments they made in preschool, kindergarten, fourth grade, and marvel at them with your elementary schoolteacher’s eye.  Right before Christmas Eve we will whisk you away from landlocked Fresno for just one night because your son-in-law, my husband, will want you to see the Pacific Ocean again, from the wharf at Avila Beach when the horizon has turned the color of fresh peaches to the west, lavender ribbons flung east.

At four or five o’clock in the morning, while I press keys on my laptop in the family room, I will hear the hallway door creak open, the sound of your slippered feet scraping their labored way to the kitchen on our hard Mexican tiles.  You will not say, and I will not ask, what it took to position your feet on the guestroom floor this morning, how much courage, how much faith that your legs, warped into semi-circles like the necks of guitars left out in the humid Karachi sun, will carry you one more day.  When you pass through the family room, I will get up to kiss your cheek, and you will look into my face the way my grandmother, your mother, used to—wistful and wondering, as though I’m a pleasant surprise.  I will go back to my laptop and try to measure this morning’s pain by the time it takes you to reach for the milk in the refrigerator, unfold the wax paper in the cereal box, eat just enough so you can swallow the painkillers that your stomach will mutiny against all day.  When daylight spreads in our backyard, you will raise the shades of the family room, your left hand coaxing the reluctant right arm upward by the elbow, your eyes eager for the sight of our untamed sago palms and our pool shaped by the memory of a lake in Armenia, an exile’s imagining of home.  You’ll make your slow, seesawing way toward the pool’s blueness, wrapped in your bunny-pink robe, with cat food for Tub-Tub, the black and white stray who answers your Urdu call as brightly as your grandchildren do.  The pain will relent a little in the course of the day, and you will come with me in the blue minivan to see those two grandchildren, my children, on and off the yellow school bus, always vigilant with the remote control so you can relieve me of the task of closing the garage door behind us. 

Between the school bus hours, we will savor my sabbatical, have little meals of hardboiled eggs and steamed edamame together, and you will make me cardamom tea because you know it is a taste of Karachi I’m unable to replicate.  We will do our separate readings and writings until late afternoon when the winter sun shines half-heartedly through your window.  Then we’ll prop ourselves up in your bed, and you will read aloud from the two-volume memoir that your mother, my grandmother, left us so many years ago.  The memoir she wrote in her colloquial Urdu over the course of twenty years, which your journalist friend devoured all in one night—a vivid social history of Bihar!—she raved, of that patch of India my grandmother still yearned for five decades after Partition.  The memoir that was never published in her lifetime.  You will read to me for two hours at a time, and we will wonder how she could bear to remember so much, the details as fine as her grape-leaf embroidery on the placemats she made for my table one summer.  We will puzzle over the conventions of her time and place, laugh like unruly schoolgirls at her comic sketches.  We will read her heartbreaks between the lines.  Know ourselves a little better.

And when the day draws to an end, when your grandchildren and I have kissed you goodnight, my husband, your son-in-law, will pop his head through your accordion doors and ask if you’d like a new movie to watch.  You’ll insert the DVD into the player in your bedroom, and Victorian men and women in large hats and flowing garments will flit across the screen all night, a hum barely audible, but companionship enough as you lie on the guest-bed, adrift between waking and sleeping.  Then it’s five o’clock in the morning again, and you know I’m in the family room, on your way to the kitchen, pressing keys on my laptop.…

Already a memory—our two months together, living as though I never left Karachi, you never grew older, space and time just tricks of our idle imaginations.  You leave, as you have left so many times before, but this time you leave me a template for my tomorrows, of grace and tenderness, whatever the pain—Because if I live long enough, the remaining blessings will disappear, too—the mind curious, heart eager, eyes singing small beauties.  I muffle my goodbyes at San Francisco’s International Terminal, as your son, my brother, the one who chose business class to soften what your legs must suffer—Because when my time comes, how will I spend on my comfort if I never spent on hers?—as that son, that brother, waves to the wheelchair attendant, who checks your name off his list with one brusque stroke, and, before I can believe the sight of you in a wheelchair—my dancing mother!—he has whisked you off toward the gate beyond our reach, your grandson, my son the soccer player, running and running on strong, sturdy legs, determined to catch up with you, long after I have let you go. 

Samina Najmi teaches multiethnic U.S. literature at California State University, Fresno.  She has written scholarly articles on race, gender, and war in American literature and edited or coedited three books.  A late bloomer, she discovered the rewards of more personal kinds of writing in 2011 when she stumbled into a CSU Summer Arts course that taught her to see.  Samina was raised in Pakistan and England, and now lives with her husband and two children in the San Joaquin Valley, eight thousand miles away from her mother. 

Little Drops of Mutual Recognition

bioStories

sharing the extraordinary in ordinary lives

by Jono Walker

I read Gilead a number of years ago, which means I’ve forgotten most of it, but it is, nonetheless, a book that bubbles into my conscious thoughts from time to time.  It’s written as a letter from an old Methodist Minister to his very young son.  He lives in a forgotten little town in rural Kansas called Gilead, and he wants to write this letter because he realizes he won’t live long enough to see his son grow up.  I don’t contemplate my life in precisely the same terms as this minister does, but as I read the book I found myself treading with him on plenty of common ground. 

Mostly what I think about though when I think about Gilead is my Dad. From where I’m typing I can glance up and see its narrow spine wedged between some larger books, and what I see is Dad disappearing into the blueberry bushes along the fairway of the golf course in Maine searching for one of his errant drives. Another time when I look up I might catch a glimpse of him standing in the distance in front of a backstop on some muddy baseball field, tossing up a baseball and hitting me fly balls.

When Dad was alive we fought like crazy.  He talked too much, which irritated me, and I was often dismissive towards him, which no doubt caused him no end of grief.  The Vietnam years were especially stormy.  We got into some real knock-down drag-outs in those days—on one occasion quite literally so, with a black eye and damaged furniture to show for it.  We partook in no long conversations at any point in our lives. The only safe topics we could talk about tended to revolve around our mutual love of sports—how the Yankees were doing or if the Giants would ever get their act together again. I never remember him giving me fatherly advice.  Actually, that’s not true.  What I remember is him giving me advice about one thing or another while I sat blocking it out. 

Here’s a bit from Gilead that I underlined:

“A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.”

I like that quotation. Though I’d alter it by adding the word “recognition.”  I don’t think it’s contradictory for a father or a son to experience both mutual incomprehension and chances to share at least some occasional flashes of mutual recognition.  Maybe if the old man in Gilead had been lucky enough to see his son grow just a little older—or luckier still, see his son grow into a man and have a son of his own, maybe then he’d know what I am talking about.

One of the last memories I have of Dad is when he was elderly and walking with a cane.  He and Mom were down on a visit, and I walked the old centerfielder over the long stretch of uneven grass to a seat on the bleachers where he could watch my son, Ben, play baseball.  It was a blustery early April afternoon with a biting wind that made Dad’s eyes get oozy, but not oozy enough to dampen their sparkle as he sat there leaning on the handle of his cane taking in the action and hearing baseballs cracking into gloves.  At one of Ben’s at bats he hit a screaming line drive over the second baseman’s head that bounded out between the right and center fielders.  As Ben got midway to second base, he looked over his shoulder, and when he saw that the right fielder bobbled the ball, he made his commitment to try and stretch his hit into a triple.  We all knew that Ben was a fast runner, but when he put his head down and rounded second he notched it into a higher gear than I had ever seen before and was moving way faster than you would expect such an ungainly knobby-kneed 14 year old could run.  I saw Dad lift himself up just slightly from his seat and heard a little sound catch in his throat and I knew as Ben was streaking towards third, the wind rushing over Ben’s face was blowing across Dad’s face too, and that the crunchy feel of infield dirt being swallowed up by feathery baseball spikes was just then pressing up against the soles of his brittle old man’s feet.  Even though there wasn’t a close play at the base, Ben slid anyway, but too hard, and awkwardly, so that he rolled over the bag and had to reach back to it with his hand.

When I sat back down and the excited chatter from the smattering of parents in the stands had quieted, Dad and I sat there side by side with our eyes fixed on Ben as he dusted off his uniform. When Dad spoke, he didn’t offer any words of praise.  Nothing like that.  All he said was, and just loud enough so that only I could hear, “When are ya gonna teach that kid how to slide?”

Some people, especially daughters and moms might not understand this, but I’m telling you that these little drops of mutual recognition—which may only have materialized  from time to time—raised the river of my father’s and my mutual incomprehension just high enough to keep us from wrecking on the rocks. Moments like these kept us floating together in the sometimes swirling currents in what turned out to be—astoundingly enough—the same general direction.

Indeed, whenever I come up gulping and look around for a place of safe purchase, I can see Dad … just there, riding the currents with me still. 

 

Jono Walker is a writer and book review blogger who moonlights as an advertising executive and marketing consultant.  He lives in Pennsylvania with his wife Julia, their big weedy garden, a couple of poorly behaved dogs, and his trusty fly rod.  Visit his blog at www.jonosbookreviews.com

Fortune Cookies

by Rebecca Marks

I have never considered myself to be an overly sentimental person.  While I pin old Playbills from my favorite Broadway shows to my bulletin board, I have never been a scrapbook keeper or a superb memory preserver.  The movie ticket stub from my first date is nothing but a fond memory, and my camera generally lies untouched and forgotten in a desk drawer.  Of the half a dozen diary entries I actually committed to paper in my youth, the most exciting one reads, “Dear Diary, I felt sort of barfy (sic) today.  Mommy gave me some Saltines.  I hope tomorrow is fun.  Love, Rebecca Gayle Marks.”  My elaborate calligraphic signature takes up nearly as much space on the page as the scintillating entry itself.  I do, however, maintain one sentimental practice: the preservation of years’ worth of fortunes from fortune cookies.

        I have always loved fortune cookies.  In truth, I have yet to meet a cookie that I did not adore; complex carbohydrates and I share a deep, enduring bond of love and commitment.  Fortune cookies, however, have always been a favorite of mine.  From the rare opportunity to play with my food to the sweet, buttery taste melting on my tongue, these confections are truly excellent from start to finish. 

For someone who has always lived with major depressive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder, fortune cookies have taken on a particularly meaningful role.  These multifaceted desserts are my unscratched lottery tickets, magically holding the promise of wealth and prosperity.  When cracking open the cookie’s sugary shell to uncover the clairvoyant slip of paper within, I become the treasure hunter about to unearth an elusive chest overflowing with riches.  When your life is largely characterized by sadness, the fortune cookie’s ability to deliver the promise of a better tomorrow becomes an incomparable treasure.  Dozens of these small slips of paper float about my room, resting in the bottom of forgotten wallets and nestling in the deep recesses of unused drawers.  My favorites assume a place of honor, featured prominently above my desk where I can view them daily.  Of the hundreds of fortunes that I have encountered in my lifetime, three have played an especially prominent role.   

The first came to me while celebrating my younger sister’s ninth birthday at a local Chinese restaurant.  Due to my life-threatening peanut allergy, I must be hyper-vigilant at Chinese restaurants as several traditional dishes contain nuts.  I was dining on an innocuous bowl of chicken lo mein when the restaurant staff brought a tantalizing chocolate birthday cake to our table.  The glowing candles atop the sugary confection emphasized the rich frosting and chocolate chips sprinkled across the top.  Our waiter delivered the cake sans singing or general merriment, as my sister has been known to run from the table crying hysterically if anyone sings “Happy Birthday” to her.  All birthday photos of Shana up until the age of six display red-rimmed, swollen eyes and a tentative half-smile.  As my sister blew out her candles, my father inquired to our waiter whether the cake contained nuts. 

“Why, yes,” the waiter replied eagerly. “Our chocolate fudge black-out cake is filled with a hazelnut crème ganache.” 

While the waiter’s eyes twinkled, basking in the glow of this gourmet display, three other sets of eyes shifted nervously to me.  Their owners knew that I would now face the daunting task of watching my mother, father and sister dine on a scrumptious looking cake without being able to touch it.  Not a simple feat for an eleven-year-old lover of all things sweet.  I couldn’t very well demand that my nine-year-old sister send back her birthday cake (though I considered it), so I dejectedly poked at my leftover noodles with a splintered chopstick while my family enjoyed their mouthwatering dessert.  I was confident that if I didn’t complain and played my cards right, I’d be treated to fruit sorbet upon our arrival home.

        After the torturous treat was consumed, our waiter brought the check and a pile of fortune cookies to our table.  Finally, I thought to myself, a smile broadening across my face.  Here was a dessert in which I too could take part.  As I eagerly tore open the plastic wrapper and split the cookie in two, my fortune fluttered to the table. 

“What does your fortune say, Becca?” inquired my mother.

Unraveling the slip of paper reverently, I read aloud, dumbfounded, “You can have your cake and eat it, too.” 

After a few moments of silent uncertainty, my family and I burst into laughter.  The juxtaposition of an eleven-year-old having to watch other people eat a beautiful, undoubtedly delectable chocolate cake to which she was allergic and a fortune reading “You can have your cake and eat it, too” was utterly hilarious.  While it was my sister who was celebrating a birthday and enjoying rich deliciousness, I was the one who walked away with the true gift that night.  I learned first hand that laughter truly is the best medicine.  I didn’t know it then, but this prescription would prove invaluable later down the line. 

        Fast forward to my sophomore year of college.  My sorority was celebrating welcoming a new member class into our organization.  After an exhausting day of bubbly name games and bouncing on trampolines in matching, neon sweatshirts, we were all thrilled when dinner arrived.  The new member coordinator had ordered half a dozen varieties of noodles, several of which contained nuts.  The members of my sorority were all well aware of my nut allergy, so I was permitted to jump to the front of the line and serve myself first.  Avoiding a line of a hundred ravenous sorority girls and tearing into the macaroni and cheese first is definitely one of the few benefits of having allergies.  After heaping a generous portion of al dente pasta and creamy cheddar cheese onto my paper plate, I took my first warm, salty bite.  Immediately, my teeth bit down on something crunchily out of place and reminiscent of Asian cuisine.  I knew that the restaurant had sent us several orders of pad Thai as well, so I was immediately terrified that I had unknowingly ingested a cross-contaminated peanut.  My eyes wide and my face stricken with obvious panic, my friend Katie worriedly asked me what was wrong.  After violently spitting out the bite in question, I pointed to the chewed up food and shouted, “I think I just ate a peanut!”  Without blinking an eye, Katie plucked the regurgitated noodle from my napkin and popped it into her mouth.  Her brow furrowed in deep concentration, she eventually announced, “Not peanut, bean sprout.”  This impressive display of unconditional friendship would not mark the last time that Katie would swoop in as my knight in shining yoga pants.   

At the end of the school year, I reluctantly drove Katie to the airport so she could return home to Chicago for the summer.  After a tearful embrace at passenger drop-off, I returned home and settled down at my desk for some last minute studying for final exams.  Sitting on top of my computer was a pale yellow post-it note inscribed with the words “Love you - Miss you” in Katie’s neat handwriting.  Taped to the post-it note was a fortune with the word “bean sprout” typed in Arial 12 on the “Learn Chinese” side of the paper.  Laughing warmly to myself, I smiled and pinned the note to my bulletin board where it has remained ever since.  Whenever I look at it, I think of the friend who was miraculously brought into my life, just as serendipitously as she stumbled across a fortune cookie containing the word “bean sprout”.

                                                       

        The following year, my mental health took a dangerous turn for the worse.  I remember the day distinctly—February 6, 2012.  The impetus for my almost lethal overflow of emotions is essentially irrelevant; the combination of my chronic depression, overwhelming anxiety, a dash of obsessive-compulsive disorder and complete lack of medication meant that hitting rock bottom was completely and tragically inevitable. 

        As tears streamed down my face like turbulent floodwater spewing forth from a fractured dam, I fell deeper into the dark and dangerous depths of hopelessness.  I became increasingly certain that the situation would never improve and utterly positive that I would never truly know happiness.  Feeling wholly defeated and desperate, I did not think that I had the strength to continue living and fighting. 

I paced back and forth across my small room, feeling my nervous energy churning throughout my body with absolutely no outlet.  As I continued to wear lines in the dated carpet, my eyes settled on a bottle of pills.  The ordinarily harmless ibupofren that I often mindlessly swallowed to combat headaches and body cramps suddenly become a horrifyingly tempting deadly weapon.  While I had experienced thoughts of suicide regularly for the past several years, this situation was unprecedented.  For the first time, I felt there was a scarily real possibility that my life would end that night at my own hand.  In this damaged state, I decided that this was my destiny, so I may as well get it over with before accumulating more hurt and sadness.  As terrifying thoughts of overdose and impossible letters to friends and family menacingly swirled through my head, a life-saving deus ex machina in the form of my best friend intervened. 

Stopping by my room to see if I’d like to study together, Katie immediately took note of my condition and stepped in.  “I am not leaving your side.  Period.”  As Katie took control of the situation, I felt relief wash over my body.  The tiny white off-brand analgesic drugs instantly transformed from a lethal device back into harmless pain reliever.  I was immensely thankful that my life had been saved, but angry and confused that I had been the one about to destroy it. 

        Two hours and one emergency phone call later, Katie dropped me off at my home thirty minutes away into the open arms of my mother.  Armed only with a pillow and a haphazardly packed suitcase, I saw my world turn upside down. I had gone from the well-accomplished college student at the top of my class to a mental patient living at home.  In that moment, I felt that I was no longer the successful, independent woman of whom my family was so proud.  I was the daughter, the sister, the granddaughter, the cousin, the niece and the friend who had almost taken her own life.  I was the girl who was almost gone.  While I was still miserably unhappy, I was determined to get my illnesses in order and above all, continue living. 

One exhaustingly long month of waiting later, and I was admitted into a partial-hospitalization intensive therapy program.  Every Monday through Friday, I spent seven hours in a hospital to develop stress management and coping skills and an effective medication regimen. 

The first morning of the program felt completely surreal.  Who was this person bringing a sack lunch and emergency anti-anxiety pills to a mental hospital?  When I looked in the mirror of the hospital bathroom that didn’t even lock, I didn’t recognize my own reflection.   

After going far too long without cracking a smile or emitting so much as a giggle, I discovered that my therapist for the program sat on an enormous bouncy ball rather than a desk chair.  As I tearfully described what brought me to this low point in my life, Cindy nodded earnestly and continued to ricochet back and forth on her bright red alternative-seating device.  I quickly discovered that the words “suicide attempt” sound substantially less frightening when punctuated by constant squeaks.  Little by little, bouncy squeak by bouncy squeak, I felt the glorious soreness from smiling too widely return to my cheeks.  As I wiped tears of laughter from my eyes while recounting the nonsensical tale to my family, I realized that this moment of much needed humor constituted the best medicine I had ever received.  For the first time since that heartbreakingly dark sixth of February, I felt the tiniest beam of sunlight fight its way through the clouds and reach my skin. 

        Later that week, my mother and I were eating at a Chinese restaurant.  As I licked remnants of sweet and sour sauce from my lips, I split my fortune cookie in half to reveal the following prediction: “Your eyes will soon be opened to a world of beauty, charm and adventure.”  The only thing to which my eyes were open was the prickling of hot tears.  This slip of paper became a divine message telling me that my life was worth living, that my simple goal of happiness was not beyond reach.  I have never subscribed to the superstitious school of thought that ascribes cosmic significance to a moment, but I know that this fortune was ordained to be mine.  This moment and this tiny slip of paper was my sign that my world was turning around for the better.  

        A little over a month prior to the almost tragic sixth of February, I was at a friend’s apartment celebrating New Year’s Eve.  “Enjoy the last New Year’s ever!” shrieked exuberant party guests, referring to the Ancient Mayan belief that the world would be brought to a catastrophic end in the year 2012.  While cheery partygoers surrounded me toasting with cheap champagne and exchanging friendly kisses, I closed my eyes in silent prayer.   I prayed fiercely that 2012 would be my year—the year that I would be freed of the shackles of depression, finally able to embrace life and all it has to offer.  In the most unexpected way possible, my prayer was answered. 

On February 6, 2012, the Mayans’ prediction came true for me.  My world burned in a fiery conflagration of pain and sorrow.  When I almost took my own life but didn’t, my world changed.  On that night when my illness almost killed me, I miraculously regained control of my life.  The years of hurt and countless tears were destroyed, leaving behind the glowing embers of potential and determination.  I was left standing in the ashes, but the flames did not destroy me.  I was a phoenix, reborn amidst the blaze. 

Just as fortune cookies splinter into tiny shards of baked flour and sugar, I too fell apart when I almost committed suicide.  But rather than disintegrating into forgotten crumbs swept swiftly into a garbage can, I became the smooth slip of paper, filled with the promise of a better tomorrow.  I discovered a new, stronger person within.  A person who can and will laugh even when she can’t have her cake or eat it, too.  A person who can fully realize and appreciate her amazing friends and family.  A person whose eyes will indeed be open to a world full of beauty, charm and adventure. And above all, a person who has many, many years of fortune cookies ahead of her.

Rebecca Marks’ qualifications include a wicked under-bite that yielded a pronounced lisp, a laundry list of allergies that necessitated years of shots and an addiction to antihistamine, a Jewish heritage that provides a boisterous family and an overflow of neuroses and sarcasm, and most expensively, a nearly completed Bachelor’s degree in English.  Her work will be appearing in an upcoming issue of The Inconsequential and has been featured in The Portland Review.