A Chance Encounter

I'll not write about my troubles today other than to say my mother made the transfer to a rehab facility yesterday.  I've already worn you out with the details, I know, so/but. . . updates to come.  

Let me begin with a chance encounter.  I went to the gym yesterday later than I had hoped.  I have gone but once in the past week and a half, and I went late in the afternoon in order not to see the usual posse.  I was going to go early yesterday but I waited for the cleaning lady to come to my mother's house for two hours.  As a result, I hit the posse at its peak.  I had to explain things time and again.  I didn't want to.  My troubles are my own and yours.  As I say, people cannot do anything to help really other than give words of kindness and thus it is frustrating.  They are nice people, but they will eventually learn to shun the sad sack with a wave and a smile.  

I got through my workout and was ready to leave, but first I needed the restroom.  When I walked in, I saw a seated man who looked much like an old gymroid I knew "back in the day."  I mean way back in the Arnold days.  Decent people didn't go to gyms back then, not so much, and so the old cement block warehouse building was full of policemen, bikers, and bouncers along with cabbies who sold drugs and guns.  It was a steroid gym and you could buy any sort--dianabol, deca-durabolin, winstrol, primabolin, and, of course testosterone cypionate, as well as equipoise, a steroid used in horses.  There were sometimes more exotic things around, too, like anadrol which killed one of my training partners and caused a stroke in another.  

"All to be bigger than dad," as they say.  

But Craig was different, if only slightly.  He had a Masters degree in Education and worked part time as a counselor at one of the local colleges.  His wife managed the apartment complex where they lived.  Craig's part-time job, though, was very part-time and seasonal, and like many others, he dabbled here in there in some underhanded capital enterprise.  

He was part of a group of locals who had gone to high school together, and there was some animosity between Craig and Lizard.  I can't remember what exactly the beef was, but Craig had besmirched Lizard's character somehow and turned him into an object of ridicule.  Craig was a fairly good looking guy, and Lizard. . . well, the nickname was appropriate.  

Lizard was a cross-country runner in high school, but these guys all joined the gym and began training at the same time.  The gym had just been sold by the famous German Strong Man Milo Steinborn, and was undergoing a bit of a transformation away from the training ground for professional wrestlers it had originally been.  In Steinborn's day, the gym manager was a fellow named Oop.  Oop was the father of some older fellows I went to school with.  They were tough guys and were wrestlers as was their father who became the state's first bodybuilding champion.  If you wanted to join the gym, Oop would invite you to come into the wrestling ring in order "to see what kind of shape you are in," after which he would recommend you start running and losing weight and getting into "road shape," before you came back in.  

Now the wrestling ring was gone as were a lot of the old-fashioned training equipment like rings and peg boards.  There were two types working out at the gym now--body builders and power lifters.  Lizard had decided he would train for an upcoming local bodybuilding contest, and Craig and Rocky and some others told him he should drink milk to prepare.  This was a joke.  You can't get cut drinking milk, so when Lizard took the stage, he was big but smooth as a baby's butt.  The boys thought it hilarious, but after that, Lizard became a power lifter and drank a gallon of milk every day.  By the time I came to the gym, he was the state's deadlift champion and rated in the top 50 powerlifters in the country.  

Craig was a bodybuilder who won several contests but never managed to win at the state level placing well several times but never winning it all.  

Lizard was a strange fellow who eventually got a Master's degree in History, but his obsession was with genealogy.  I might tell you a billion tales about Lizard sometime, but my intention today was to talk about Craig.  

Craig was odd, too, just not so very apparently.  His father was a doctor, and he said that his father had been trying to poison him for years.  He found powder on his car once, he said, and had it tested, and it was arsenic.  His father had been giving his wife drugs to put in his food for years.  He tried to sue his father and have him convicted.  Craig was a little cockeyed, and I could only guess that his father might have been giving Craig's wife something to give him to keep him calm, but that is just a guess.  

Like everyone else in the gym, Craig dealt in guns.  There were a lot of deals in the gym, and sometimes someone owed someone else money and there was bad blood.  One day, one of the gymroids was found dead in his living room.  He was sitting in a chair in front of the television, part of his head blown away.  There was a pistol, but everyone said it hadn't made sense.  It looked as if the fellow had been shot from behind.  And. . . everyone said he owed Craig money, and the rumor spread that Craig had shot him and tried to make it look like suicide.  

But I got along well with Craig as I did with almost everyone there, and Craig gave me training tips from time to time.  Though he was friendly enough with everyone, Craig always seemed aloof and living in his own head.  When you talked to him, he was always slow to respond as if he needed time to process what was said.  

After I went to the bathroom, I walked back through the locker room and looked again.  It sure looked like Craig some forty years later.  After I left the locker room, I decided to go back in.  

"Craig?"

He looked up slowly.  

"Yes," he said.  

"I used to work out with you at the old steroid gym."

He looked up at me, sort of, from his heavy brow.  

"Yes. . . I remember the gym."  

He was slower than before.  He told me he had hip replacement surgery and that this had been his first day of physical therapy.  

"They told me to lie on a table and lift my leg ten times.  I couldn't even do it once.  I couldn't lift my leg."

He chuckled.  He looked like an old body builder, heavy shoulders, thick arms, but he had grown a good sized belly that now rather complimented his overall look.  

"I'm going to the pool," he said.  It was obvious he had no memory of me, so I said goodbye and that     perhaps I'd see him again.  

It was a surprise seeing him, of course, as almost all the old steroid guys have died.  I really didn't know that any of that old crowd was still around.  Old Craig was a survivor.  

Hence the photo at the top of the page.  It's a funny one, really.  I asked A.I. to give me a prompt from one of my photos from which to make an image in the manner of a Michelangelo painting.  I didn't pay attention to the fact that the prompt didn't mention gender, so this is what I got.  I couldn't get A.I. to give him a bigger pecker, so this, too, is what we have.  

Oh. . . I revised the prompt to ask for the female version.  

I guess this is his sister.  They must train at the same gym.  

Hey. . . do you want to relive my night?  I may cancel all my t.v. subscriptions but YouTube.  They have become too expensive for what they are.  I end up watching YouTube most of the time.  Navigating it is much like dealing with A.I.  You really have to be specific when you put in search terms.  But if you are, there is a whole bunch of smart stuff.  

Last night, though, I just ended up watching these.  You will need to be a bit of a romantic, but if you are, you can, too.