Good Dance Music

by Christina Holzhauser

 

Patsy Cline’s songs came at me from all directions during my childhood, especially from the direction of my neighbor, a voluptuous woman with too-big glasses who was deemed “the best singer” in my town of 85. She sang Crazy at all karaoke nights at the one bar we had. She sang I Fall to Pieces, with only a tractor’s chug to accompany her, on those fall hayrides. She sang both of them out at Green Acres, the bar ten miles down the highway, while her rocking hips strained the seams of her denim mini-skirt against those thighs. I’m sure, though, that Patsy’s voice was on the radio up at Grandma and Grandpa’s house and on old, black and white episodes of television shows I watched on our satellite dish.

I knew Grandpa loved her. So, one day when I was about twelve, I told him of my interest in Patsy. Within days I had a whole album on a cassette tape that he had copied from his scratchy vinyl. Using the belt clip feature of my pink and red Walkman, I clipped it to the gear wires of my Wal-Mart ten speed and pedaled up and down the trail by the Missouri river until I'd listened to the entire tape, belting out those sultry tunes. I did this so often that I could flip the tape without stopping, without losing pace, without, even, having to look away from the canopy of trees over the trail or the bugs dancing through the air over undercurrents near the banks.

 

 

When I was seventeen, Ska bands went Swing and the alternative radio stations pumped out brass noise; a generation who had previously been head-nodders became sweaty, goofy-smiling dancers. Having grown up singing and dancing in musicals, the obnoxious melodrama of swing was an easy transition. As a gymnast and athlete, I learned the Lindy Hop in seconds. But instead of wearing a cute dress with Mary Janes, I wore black and white wing-tips and collared, button down shirts. Boys wanted to dance with me though; I was one of the only girls at the clubs who didn’t mind being thrown in and around the air, my strong arms allowing me to be upside down on male shoulders, my chain wallet clinking as I kicked my legs.

 I confessed my love of the music to Grandpa, a man who’d been around when the whole thing started. Soon after, he made me mix tapes and wrote, in his scratchy, boxy handwriting, "Good Dance Music." He put them in a tiny cedar box and handed them to me and said, "So you can remember me. I won't always be around."  I laughed and shook my head. The things older people say. I put one in my boom-box expecting to hear "In the Mood," or another old classic I’d learned recently. I pictured my grandpa throwing Grandma around in the air, her dress billowing, their feet bullets machine-gunning a 40’s dance floor. Instead, the first song sounded like country, like the whiny, twangy country I’d grown to associate with small towns and small-minded people. There were no trumpets or trombones, just fiddles and steel guitars. I was sad that grandpa didn't understand what swing music was.

        When he died a few weeks later, I took those tapes and shoved them in my cargo pockets and set out for the trail.  I was surprised to hear Marty Robins, someone Grandpa loved, someone whose song about El Paso I’d grown to love, too, even as the chain wallet became a permanent fixture of my wardrobe and my hair grew shorter and more colorful.  I listened to a song about a rose in Texas, something about sixteen tons, and again, I heard Patsy. I pumped my legs hard, leaned forward, tried to sing as tears dried cold on my face. With every song I turned up the volume until the world was a place only of ear-splitting fiddle solos and wobbly steel guitars. Until finally, I couldn’t hear myself.

 

Christina Holzhauser was raised in a town of 85 along the Missouri river. Since leaving home she’s worked as a ranch hand, a pee collector at a nuclear plant, a histology technician, an archaeologist, and an expert hiking boot fitter. While living in a cabin with no running water in Fairbanks, Alaska, she earned her MFA in nonfiction as well as the right to say she’s put on her coat to use the outhouse in the middle of the night, seen the northern lights, and watched the sun never set. Currently, she lives in Columbia, Missouri with her wife and son. She teaches Basic English and Creative Writing at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri.

Bearings

by Barbara Strauss

            “My eyeglasses,” Zayda said in broken English, tearing through the kitchen utensil drawer, but he’d never worn glasses. “My sheitel.” He patted his head, and Bubbeh translated “wig” for me as I took Zayda’s brittle elbow and led him aimlessly around the house. I was home on spring break. I meant to appease him, lifting couch cushions, opening the lid on a jewelry box on my mother’s vanity table that played the theme from Dr. Zhivago. “No sheitel in there,” I said, but Zayda had his own purple silver hair, never a toupee, he was ninety and nowhere even close to bald.

            “Don’t help him.” Bubbeh followed us as we returned downstairs, hunched and exhausted and shorter than the last time I saw her. “Shlemiel!” She slapped Zayda with a Yiddish newspaper whose subscription was re-routed from their Florida address. They were done with Florida. They needed my parents’ help now.

            My father, pouring shredded wheat in a bowl and spreading Circuit City ads over the table, told me if I didn’t give up, I might be touring my Zayda around all day.

             “What am I supposed to do? Let him roam?”

            “Yes,” my mother said. Zayda was only her stepfather. She paid bills at the counter. It was Saturday morning, the kitchen radio tuned to a crackly AM gardening show my father liked. My mother tried to lower the volume, and my father protested, slapping the table with his ads. Her response was to tune it even louder than he’d had it originally. All the women in my family were like that, pouting passive-aggressively, and I vowed never to lose my patience that way. “Zayda’s been totally out of sorts since they moved in,” my mother told me. She peered over her glasses. “We took him to three specialists. The decline is quick from here.”

            “I’ll shoot him,” Bubbeh said, moving through the kitchen in her floral robe. When she passed Zayda, he pinched her behind, and she slapped his hand crying, “Oy, gevalt!”

            “You’re like Kevorkian,” I said, leading Zayda out before I could catch my parents snickering at the drama. But it wasn’t drama to me. This trip home I’d brought him a string of painted wooden birds from my semester abroad in the Netherlands, and my first night here, he’d handled them one at a time, staring blankly at the little beaks and painted wings; he’d lost interest quickly and pushed them back in my direction. Next I’d taken puzzles down from my closet, which he loved—the easy ones, fifty pieces—and Zayda would have none of them. He just gazed sadly out the patio door.

            “He’s insulted,” I’d said, examining the picture of a kitten on the box. “It’s too easy.”

            Now he pulled from my grip to approach Bubbeh, who’d gone to rest in the living room. He mumbled at her in Yiddish, and next thing I knew, she was heaving a pillow, screaming that he gave her such shpilkes, and hobbling up to the guest room where the pullout sofa remained permanently open.

            The next morning, waking groggy and more stir-crazy than the day before, I found Zayda wandering through my bedroom in only a pajama top. I peeled my sweaty cheek from the pillow, let my eyes adjust to the light, and there before me hung a gray and shriveled penis, hairless and small as an infant’s.

            “My television?” he mumbled in English.

            I hid under the covers and cried for my mom.

The conversation turned to nursing homes. Reluctantly, I climbed into the back of the station wagon the next Saturday to search for places we might ditch him. There were plenty of things I could have been doing—writing a Walden paper for my class on the American Transcendentalists, or watching music videos in a blessedly quiet home, a bowl of cereal in my lap and my pajamas on. I hadn’t worn pajamas around the house all week, since Zayda had revealed himself.

            I came along though, because I couldn’t bear the thought of Zayda cowering in the background, jingling the change in his pockets while my parents and Bubbeh informed the nurses that sometimes he soiled his pants. As we bumped down side roads potholed still from snowplows, I reached over the seat and rested my hand on Zayda’s head, as though steadying him, his hair soft beneath my fingers. He turned and asked Bubbeh, “Voss is ehr numen?”

            “ ‘What is her name?’ he asks. Barbara,” she said, sucking her gums. “You remember nothing.”

            Evelyn Gardens: six floors of catatonics, televisions tuned loud for hearing impaired patients who slept before mid-morning talk shows. Social time, the nurse with a Haitian accent, who took us on a tour, called the meeting at the end of the hall. Wheelchair bound patients were lined against the wall, tongues out of mouths, the ladies lightly bearded, and nobody spoke to anyone else. An aide padded around, patting each patient on the shoulder.

            “And when we leave, she steals their money,” my father bent to whisper to my mom.

            “It smells like pish.” Bubbeh plugged her nose and held tightly to her vinyl purse.

            “Every nursing home smells,” my mother said. “The only decent place would be assisted living, and he’s too far gone for that.”

            “You could get a nurse to come to the house,” I suggested.

            My mother glared at me. “Who’s paying?”

            Our tour guide was paged and pointed us back to the lobby. She’d be down in just a moment to get us paperwork and an appointment with the intake facilitator.

            “I can’t put him here,” Bubbeh said. “It’s full of mishuganahs. A crazy house.”

            “Oh, he be fine.” The nurse clipped her beeper to her waistband. She gripped Zayda’s elbow, and he smiled up into her face. “He be fine on the fifth floor—we start ‘em there.” She excused herself and hurried to the elevator.

            After ten minutes on hard-backed lobby chairs, Zayda asking Bubbeh twelve times where we were, my mother said, “I’m sick of waiting. I’ll call for an appointment,” and took a brochure on the way out.

            “How ya doing?” I asked, taking Zayda’s hand in the car. He gazed at me, his lips curved over, hiding his teeth. I leaned up front and snatched the brochure from my mother. “We’re not settling on Evelyn Gardens,” I said, stuffing the pamphlet down the seat pocket. “There have to be a dozen better homes in the area."

            “We are not settling for anything,” my father corrected. He combed fingers through my mother’s perm until she pulled from him.

            “I can’t leave him in a place like that,” Bubbeh said.

            My mother grabbed a clump of her own hair and tugged. She told my father to drive home.

            “You’re going to make that shit hole our only stop?” I said.

            But my father looked for a place to turn, and we found ourselves in the driveway of my former elementary school. The word “diarea,” misspelled, was spray painted on one of the school’s brick walls, and because it was Saturday the lot was empty except for a man walking a golden retriever. The driveway formed a long loop, in the center of which stood a thicket of pines.

            “Zayda’s nothing like the patients in that nursing home,” I went on, in part to aggravate my mother. She was so impatient. She would pay. I cooed at Zayda, “You can walk and talk and feed yourself.”

He cupped my face and said, “Shayna maidelah.” Pretty girl.

As we rounded the area of the driveway where the forest spread widest, we came under cover of a lush canopy that blocked the sun except for the thinnest rays.

            Zayda reached over Bubbeh, rapping his knuckles on the glass. “Gaistu tsum der vasser?” he said.

             “Stop the car, Dad. Zayda made a sentence.”

            Bubbeh pushed him off her lap, but he climbed over her again. “Gaistu tsum der vasser tsu vashen mein hoisen? Vu is Frau Beniewicz?”

            “What does that mean, Ma?” my mother asked, twisting in her seat.

            “He thinks we are in Poland,” Bubbeh said. “He asks for the Beniewicz family—the ones who hid him in the war. Du bist nisht a kind!” she shouted into Zayda’s hairy ear. “You are not a child!” But he clung to her knee like a kid about to be spanked.

            “Malka?” he asked suddenly. He looked up at Bubbeh, his chin quivering.           

    My mother sighed.

            “What?” my father asked.

            “Malka was his sister.”

            Bubbeh whined. “Ich bin nisht Malka. I’m Pola. Your wife!”

            “Where is Malka?” Zayda asked. His English was strangely clear.

            “Auschwitz.” Bubbeh got in his face. “Malka died in Auschwitz!” she screamed.

            And then he punched her.

            It wasn’t a sock—his knuckles only grazed her cheek. Her skin turned purple, though. He’d broken blood vessels, and Bubbeh clutched her face, revealing the full circle of a bruise only when my mother ordered, “Show me” and reached over the console, wrenching Bubbeh’s hand away.

            “He doesn’t know what he’s doing,” I said. Zayda squinted at the splotch on Bubbeh’s cheek and made no move to help her. My father sped home to get ice.

            Her belt unbuckled, her body splayed over the console, my mother took Bubbeh by the chin, displayed her tear-stained face to me and said, “You think I’m a monster, sending him away. But do you see what happens when a person doesn’t know what he’s doing?”

And then I understood, really, how lost my Zayda was.

My mother, usually unsentimental, wanted to see a slideshow that night. Everyone had settled by now, Bubbeh iced and the swelling went down, and we’d already eaten dinner. My mother wanted slides from 1969, long before Zayda was around. She wanted slides of her wedding, photos of Benjamin, her real father, who died of a heart attack in ’76.

My father did as told and took the projector down from the attic. I blew dust off the machine and set the individual slides in the slots while he pulled the screen up and called everyone into the living room. My father shut the lights, and we viewed a tray of photos taken during my parents’ wedding, my actual grandfather, heftier and more serious looking than Zayda, walking my mother down the aisle. She and Bubbeh sniffled behind me on the sofa, and Zayda asked, “Who’s this?” waving at Benjamin, who held Bubbeh’s hand beneath the chuppah. Bubbeh wouldn’t answer, and we braced for a violent attack. So my father changed the tray.

They were ancient slides of my father’s parents, both of whom had died when I was in high school. In the photos my father was a kid, graduating from something, Hebrew school he thought. He stood far away on a lit stage. My grandma had him young, so when my grandpa turned the camera on her, seated beside him in the auditorium, the photo that came out was astonishing in its youth. My grandma was smirking, her mouth crooked as she’d always complained it was when someone told her to smile. She wasn’t wearing lipstick, where I was so accustomed to the heavy maroon she painted on in her later years. Her nose was long, like mine, almost touching her lip.

            “Barbara,” Zayda said. He tapped my knee and pointed at the screen. “Miss America,” he joked, his English poor but coherent.

            “That’s Molly,” Bubbeh corrected. She gestured at my father. “Max’s mother. Not Barbara.”

            Zayda stared at the screen with his mouth open.

            But he wasn’t far off. It was always said that I resembled my grandma more than anyone in the family. Encouraging Zayda, or to validate him, I jumped from my chair and turned on the light. I stood beside the photograph onscreen, which was hard to make out beneath the overhead bulbs, but Zayda continued to point between the two of us. I posed with my hands on my hips.

            “Miss America,” he said again. I laughed, and he laughed too.

            We ate sugar-free ice cream for dessert, and when it was time for Zayda to go to bed, I pushed back zealously from the table, scraping the chair legs over the tile. No one else moved to help him, and they didn’t want me to, either.

            “He’ll take ten years to get up there. Finish your ice cream before it melts,” my mother said.

            I slid the dish away but found myself just sitting there.

            I watched anxiously as Zayda paced, shuffling past the stairs to his room, forgetting where he wanted to go. My parents spoke with Bubbeh about money—bonds, stocks, and the fees for a nursing home, Evelyn Gardens or maybe another one they planned to visit later in the week. I watched Zayda, my slippers planted firmly on the ground, my hands flat on the table. He was wandering five minutes when I decided I’d had enough and started to get up to help.

            And then suddenly he turned into the foyer, where he needed to be. He tilted back his head. He surveyed the long staircase, and he started climbing.

Barbara Strauss lives and writes outside Boston. Her work has received Honorable Mention in the Glimmer Train Short Story Award for New Writers, and was published in the inaugural issue of technicolor Magazine. She also has a story forthcoming in The Mustard Seed Risk. She veered from fiction to write “Bearings,” about her actual grandparents. In addition to writing, she’s big into yoga.

 

 

Accordions

by Melissa Wiley

An accordion can all too easily take your breath away, and that, of course, is the danger. I was riding the New York subway the other weekend, where air is notoriously scarce, when a dark, stout man, balding though still young, sidled up beside me as I stood mid-car gripping a steel pole at its abdomen and began playing his accordion. At the moment, I was nursing one of those mild a-causal bout of melancholy that come on about a week before my menstrual period, and his music instantly altered my breathing, my own breath deepening with the accordion’s exaggerated and noisy inhalations of unaccountably fresh, ample sound waves. I couldn’t help staring, down as it happened, because he was about 3 inches shorter than me, at a large, glistening pimple insolently perched atop his left eyebrow. Soon a seat became available, and I sat down, at once perfectly gemütlich in this impromptu underground bier garden, directing my gaze upward now instead of down at the gentleman, though still a little distracted by the purulent mass raising and lowering with his eyebrows in time to the music as he ambled gaily down the car, followed closely by what I reasonably assumed were his wife and son at work collecting money in a brown newspaper cap.

The woman wore a tan sweater with a tight weave and bell sleeves and a long, flowing print skirt. She would have looked completely put together and somewhat lovely even, with her soft olive skin and light green eyes, had she not so conspicuously been not wearing a bra. The abrupt plunge of her small breasts as her nipples pointed askew like confused metal detectors within the taut tan sweater robbed it of its dignity, I couldn’t help but think a cheap cross-your-heart for her and some salicylic acid for him would have made all the difference—that and the absence of the shadow of worry on their faces, though I can’t imagine having been all open smiles myself were my own unfettered jubblies swaying quite so freely in the tunnel breeze, positioned at eye level with the seated passengers I was soliciting. But these thoughts were quickly silenced as a policeman curtly summoned them off the train at the next stop and escorted them out of the station to the muted jeers of the passengers, the ghost of the reverberating music still lingering like fraying spider silk among the metallic screeching of the train’s aging breaks.

Playing the accordion, I have always felt, is not something you can do on the sly, especially not on a crowded subway. It is, above all, an expansive, smiling instrument, a way of widening your chest and your lungs vicariously through its plodding rhythmic compressions. And whether you like its particular timbre doesn’t matter much; when it’s there, you know it, and you expand along with it to some degree. The fact that the most likely place you’ll happen upon one is at a German bier fest, two, three, or four sheets to the wind, only increases the odds of falling under its monochromatic spell. As I said, there’s no hiding from this one, and perhaps the man with the greasily climaxing mass of pus on his lower forehead should have known as much.

I had, as it happens, all too frequent encounters with a Burmese accordion during my most impressionable years. Our grammar school priest, a man we called Father John, a refugee of Myanmar, then Burma, would enter our classrooms at will, interrupting our tests in long division and American history to play songs like “Bless Me Jesus” and “This Little Light of Mine,” to which we could never sing loudly enough for his partially deafened tastes. While I was fighting against the clock for elusive traces of memory about Nathan Hale and Aaron Burr, Father John’s accordion would announce itself a mere two classrooms down, and our teacher, eyes yellowing, would whisper-scream to the class, “You are not retaking this test! If you haven’t finished it by the time Father John gets here, automatic fail.” Frantically extracting straws of surface knowledge from my hippocampus, the tempo of the encroaching song’s refrain accelerating with growing amplitude and the neighboring children’s voices metamorphosing into punctuated demonic shouts, the squeezebox-driven pressure was enough to make you throw down your number-two pencil, run screaming into the cafeteria, and drown yourself in Kool-Aid as the only legal precursor to your inevitable incipient career as a perpetually glassy-eyed patron at the local bier garden, where accordions knew their natural place. Just as Father John’s light, buoyant step crossed the classroom threshold, however, you’d scratch off the last answer, place your pencil inside its premolded slot at the top of your desk, and exhale, your face now a glowing infernal red from holding your breath to stave off the insidious influx of the chivying, caterpillar-like instrument. The accordion had nearly cost you a passing grade in history, not to mention a life of peaceable sobriety. But life, you were told by those who had lived more of it, was short, and you were prepared to be the bigger person, which even at nine years old I was easily on my way to being, Father John being the wee-est of wee Burmese men.

And in a moment, the accordion pressing its august air against the yellow cinderblocks and inflating the classroom a good 10 square feet beyond its previous test-taking proportions, you were at ease, if slightly deafened with the fresh force of the instrument’s arresting propinquity. Like all good sensory overload, however, it had the salutary effect of erasing your more distressing and entangled thoughts, thoughts of violence toward the most amiable of men, a servant of the Christian god and a refugee no less, from a place with much more textured, ethnically layered cuisine, and here he was stuck on a diet of dry cereal and corndogs in small-town Indiana. In any case, you were not supposed to mess with him, and you were glad that your hippocampus kicked in before you were driven to any irrevocable damage.

How they ever received an education in Burma, of course I didn’t know, what with their evident casual attitude toward the sanctity of the American Revolution, but I felt magnanimous in casting aside my previous frustration and shouting out “Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine!” with the preternatural vocal strength of a 10-year-old Mahalia Jackson. And it was the only appropriate response, even if I hadn’t finished the test and consequently initiated my decline into the life skills curriculum. Assailed by as big an oaf of an instrument as you’re ever likely to come across, I realized, you don’t send it and its player packing off the train—you let it dilate into its natural stentorian splendor and uplift the otherwise drab subterranean train ride. You don’t wear a bra and you let it shine.

But the authorities eventually caught up with Father John as well. In addition to the accordion, his other, dueling passion was King’s Island, a theme park in Ohio a tantalizing two hours away by freeway in his speeding orange-striped station wagon. He would invite up to six lucky children at a time to escape with him there every weekend with clement conditions, when he would forego the more immediate physical thrill of the water slides and roller coasters and even the gentler pleasures of the carousel for the shadier carnival games. For a singularly diminutive man, Father John had quite the arm and tossed brightly painted ping pong balls into goldfish jars as well as heavier dusty orbs into convulsively shifting hoops for six, seven, eight hours on end, crushing his enormous plunder of stiff-limbed stuffed animals into a storage container on top of his vehicle. His personal residence, the parish rectory, was an opulent three-story house with stippled flesh-colored paint. Anyone without a mania for acquiring life-size Styrofoam-filled panda bears and plush Smurfs with pert pug noses would have easily left at least five rooms hollow and uninhabited. But Father John had adorned them all with the cynosure, the fuzzy, cheap sunlight of every materialistic child’s eye. Piled to the ceiling in lampless room after room, labyrinthine catacombs of frozen plastic-eyed playfulness that would not decay for centuries, his seraglio of faux fur flesh formed an ever-smiling audience for his accordion practice. I took home dozens of toys at his insistence. One, a peach bear in a navy blue cheer leader costume with a matching bow, I only gave away to the Salvation Army this year, at the age of 33.

When I was in my early-twenties and living in Chicago, my mother told me over the phone one Sunday afternoon that Father John had been accused of stealing tens of thousands of dollars in funds from the parish. Nothing incriminating I believe was ever proved, but it also came to light that, presumably in the months when King’s Island closed its gates, he plied his dexterous right arm to the craps table at the local casino, temporarily leaving his accordion and his coterie of stuffed animals behind. His superiors swiftly relocated him to another parish, ostensibly without either a children’s theme park or another nearby means of testing his limits with Lady Luck. But may God give them adult acne for ever evermore if they took away his accordion.

So in my experience at least, playing the accordion and pressing your luck go very much hand in hand. There is a trenchant vulnerability, a mordant plea for gaiety in one who straps a squeeze box onto his chest and commences playing such an instrument, sending out obstreperous cornpone melodies into the ether in a New York subway or from a provincial church altar minutes before transubstantiating a host of bread into the body of Christ. There can be no false starts here with the accordion, however many there may be elsewhere, in the background of life. Whatever drove that man in the subway and his son and braless wife to seek money among strangers for a rousing few bars of “Roll out the Barrel” or whatever similar tune he played, he was not lying low with his volcanic pimple, gripping a steel pole at its abdomen, breathing shallowly in the cloistered, damp air, and keeping his eyes on the gum cemented into the floor grooves. He was making melodic, moronic waves that made me smile. For the few moments he was there, there was more air in the overcrowded train car as a result. And that's perhaps worth betting on.

Melissa Wiley is a freelance food and culture writer living in Chicago. When not minding her Ps and Qs, she seizes every opportunity to remove her shoes and walk barefoot with half-painted toenails through airport security in pursuit of global opportunities to dance, draw, laugh, and gape. She also volunteers as a literacy tutor and endangers children’s lives when flying her kite at full mast along the beach.

 

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.