When I was a Builder (edit 1, memoir, literary erotica)

I live my life in five buildings: the Gossamer house, The Promenade, Whitby Mental Health Center, Dalemount Public School, and Strictly Fitness Gym. I carry my gym bag. My muscles I wear. I don’t give a damn what clothes cover them, as long as the muscles shine through. My muscles take me through life, propping me upright, and standing in for me when words claw and catch in my throat.
Sometimes I get pissed off when I train: I’m getting ready for my two-hundred and twenty-five pound deads, and this little chick in pink and gray is gabbing to her friend—“and then he says—and I say—and like who does he think he is!” Things like that piss me off.
“Listen,” I say. “Could you do your talking somewhere else? This is a heavy weight if you haven’t noticed. And I’m not in the mood to injure myself.”
They sashay off, elbowing each other and giggling.

I’ve got my knee wraps tight, crisscrossed over the knee once, twice, three times and then tucked under, my favorite belt from my training days at Golds on Eglinton and Victoria Park pulled tight. I’m warmed up—a quarter each side for ten reps, stretch my quads and hams, maybe lower back, maybe not; one plate each side for six to eight; a plate and a quarter for four, unwrapping and stretching. Then I set up two plates a side, two-twenty five which isn’t bad. Fuck I’ve seen mediocre builders showing off with two plates. I like to train beside those guys. Sometimes I correct their form. “You’re rounding your back,” I say. “Your back’s too low, forty-five degrees is all.” “You’re leaning back at the finish. Don’t lean back.” I’ll even stop my own training to guide them through the form, start to finish. It’s just the way I am. Later I complain to Garth. “Did they ask you?” he says. “No,” I say. He makes me laugh.

Of course I’ve been injured—rotator cuff when I was just a rookie, showing off at Gold’s and smacking forty-fives on my bench; a pulled hamstring at Gold’s in Ajax when my peroxide blond sous-coach was teaching me to do the splits, standing me against the wall and lifting my first my right, then my left leg higher and higher until I could touch my toe to the wall—the sort of flexibility that came to me on Nina Street as I racked my legs over my head until my upper and lower body were sandwiched against each other so Garth could ram away the way he liked and which I appreciated in spirit, until the pounding became too prolonged and insistent. Still, I thought I was cool and once he told me as I lay cooing at his cock, “I have to tell you this is the greatest sex I’ve ever had. Ever.” I asked him how many females he’d had and it wasn’t much, but still I was flattered since he knew hookers from his bouncing days and women have always confided in him. And he had his porn business which didn’t make him the cash he’d hoped for and which he dropped before we moved to the Overbrooke house where he returned to his first love, stocks and bonds, options and futures.

Once Garth fouled up on a spot on my eighth rep of a barbell preacher curl and I pulled a bicep tendon which more than six months to heal and even after eighteen months still didn’t feel quite right. In our second year of training, I was about to do a one rep max of two sixty-five—I was standing in front of the squat cage beside the Smith machine after repping out on two-twenty-five around six o’clock when all the builders were out.
“I going heavier,” I grinned, throwing off my belt and unraveling my knee wraps.
“Sure,” Garth said. “How much?”
“A quarter each side?”
“Why not?” he said.
I slipped off the collar on both sides, snagged two quarters from the squat rack, and added one on one side of the bar while Garth did the other side. It’s like that. You work together.
“Getting a drink,” I said. I like to walk across the gym to the fountain before doing a tough set. The stride is purposeful and thoughtful, like a doctor before an operation. If I see a builder I know, I nod. I don’t chat and pass the time of day. Mostly I walk straight. My mind is clear. The walking does the work. Garth knows to be quiet.

First I wrap my knees. Then I tighten my old training belt still with me since John and our Gold days. Slinging the straps of my wrist wraps around the bar, I roll my wrists until the material cuts hard into my skin and force my thumbs around and over the straps. I set my feet shoulder width a part, and squat down, not in a squat though—my ass sticks out, back at a clean forty-five, shoulders over the bar, bar touching my shins as I stare ahead, checking myself out in the mirror. I breathe in. Three times I breathe in and out. Then I close my eyes. Garth waits. Beneath my lids I’m swearing "fuck what a weight, no angel cake this goddamn weight, two sixty-five is fucking concrete." but I’m holding on and with these glutes, hams, quads, back, all, I’m on my way, standing, standing, standing. And up.
“Wait,” I say, unraveling the wraps.
“C’mon Janice.”
“Hey I’m lifting, you’re not.”
He says it’s only two plates and a quarter each side. He does five. I tell him, “You weigh, what, four-twenty? And I’m weighing in at one-fifty-five these days. I wasn’t ready, that’s all.”
“Don’t freak yourself out. It’s not such a big deal. What you even wearing your belt for?”
I swing around. “What!”
“You heard me. I never wore a belt or wraps.”
“That’s you,” I say, because he’s like some comic book anti-hero, Spawn maybe or Venom, names I never came across until I met Garth my cold defender who loves me enough to assume I can lift two and a quarter on each side without a belt.
“Hey, you’re stronger than most of the guys here.”
“Yeah, squats and deads sure, and leg press,” I say, remembering the week before on the forty-five degree leg press, warming up and adding on —“lay on another plate, man”—until I was pressing eight plates a side and not those prissy reps in the shallow end either.
“Anyway, I’ve been wearing my belt and wraps since the beginning. No fucking way am I taking off this belt.”
“It’s your call,” he says and turns away. I hate when he does that. I don’t know who is watching. Building is like a small town; everyone knows everyone else’s business. Right now there’s one circle with only two builders in it, and Garth is about cut through its perimeter with his massive arm and walk away.
“I’m keeping my knee wraps on,” I say as I fling off my belt.
“I said it’s your call.”

I get back into position, plant my feet, and wrap the straps tight, tight, shoulders over, ass out, set my Tyroleans again, look straight ahead. Breathe. I’m alone in this world with the air hanging heavy and thick around me. I pull and nothing happens.
“Shit,” I say.
“You pulled. Just stand up.”
John used to say that—stand up bitch. Just fucking stand up.
I smile to myself. I can do that, stand up that is and fucking too, although not at the same time. And I do. My ass does what it was trained for, hams and quads following suit, legs straightening, two-third straight, three-quarters, abs and lower back signing on, while inside, a training belt surfaces, wrapping around my innards like a mighty clinging vine, and I’m thinking hey man, I’m a living belt. And even though the thick band stretches, circles, then like a viper constricts, I continue my upright climb.
“Good one!” Garth says when I’m finally upright. “Three-hundred and sixty-five pounds!”
“Yah,” I say. “Listen, could you clean this up for me?” I’m whispering. Not that I mean to, it’s just that’s how it is. There’s no pain, but I’m scared as a stunt man on the wing of a plane in a loop and going down. “I gotta get out of here.”
“Janice?” he says, standing in front of me and blocking my way.
“I’ll meet you in the car and would you hurry up?” I say, talking low and serious. “I’m outta here,” I say. And I am. I should have known. Like at the Indian house, the day when I walked out, the weather complying with its clear Payne’s gray—I should have known but I forgot because I wanted something too badly or I needed something, and he happened to be there. That’s how it was. He just happened to be there. I did the rest, without a belt, lifting and life, both.

But the thing is I love him. I mean I was sitting on the toilet in the Indian Road house bleeding out these words: “Please god, give me passion in my life.” And so I have my Garth. You know that old Nina Simone song—“say he ain’t much for the looking sake, he’s crazy and no count as he can be, he’s got the kind of love for me.” And now I’m lying in bed and the pills are wearing off and I’m crying, holding myself in a fetal position, first one side then the other, and on my stomach, crumpled over on the toilet with my head in my hands, rocking back and forth and becoming more god-fearing by the moment, whining out old blues songs, baby please come home, when the automatic garage door rumbles like an underground subway, and I snap into bed, reining in my breathing as I swing into my fetal roll.

He thinks he can move without sound, but I hear him climbing the stairs. I listen for his breathing and feel the thickness of his shadow as he stands, looking down over me. A low vibration swells through the tunnel of my throat and I fling it at him.
“I thought you’d be sleeping,” he says, “the pills are supposed to last four hours and I’m here with ten minutes to spare.”
“Not everything’s on schedule, you know.”
“You look old.”
“Thanks,” I say, hoping I look ancient for him. Because it had hurt like the extremes of all seasons—a winter blizzard, a rain torrent in summer, an autumn bullying wind, relentless spring rain causing the earth to expand and crack as it makes way for new roots in spring. Then he gave me these pills and went into his Queen Street night.
“Talon is sleeping and the pills will hold you for the next four hours,” he’d said and made off. It’s true I was curled up, the pills like a cross guarding me from the searing across my belly and back and battered ribs. I kept my breath above the waves. I was afraid of being dragged under. Gradually I allowed myself to unravel and the waves to coat my body, and I breathed into them. For the longest while I lay there with the waves lapping at me, until an undertow caught me unawares and I called out for Garth. But he was on his Queen Street route, surveying the presence and reduced number of Queen Street hookers and checking out the state of the world from his corner in Tim Horton’s.