Craig Davidson - The Fighter

Paul heaved with embarrassment. “I’m so sorry about that.”

But Stacey was pleased. “Only means you gave a hundred and ten percent to your lift.

You’re not farting, you’re not jerking enough iron. First time I squatted a thousand, I crapped my pants.”

Paul couldn’t tell what Stacey was more proud of: the fact that he’d squatted half a ton or that he’d shit himself in the process.

He finished his workout and hit the showers. He’d noticed how two distinct groups of men spent far more time naked than was strictly necessary: those in terrific shape and those too old to give a damn. A few struck show poses stark naked before the change room’s floor-length mirror. Paul found himself scoping out their bodies: chests and arms and abs, the symmetry or lack of it, the freakish mass of the Einsteins. Lately he’d taken to picturing how elements of other men’s bodies might look adorning his own: he’d take that guy’s pecs, that guy’s delts, that guy’s pipes, that guy’s soup-can cock and cobble together an idealized version of himself. Franken-Paul.

On his way out he caught Stacey behind the front desk, bent over a plate piled with skinless chicken breasts.

“Good work today, fag.”

“…Thanks.”

Paul nodded to the shelves at Stacey’s back: tubs of protein powder with names like Whey Max and BioPure HyperPlex. Each tub featured a wraparound photo of a tanned, overdeveloped, confidently smiling Einstein.

“Which do you recommend?”

“These?”

Stacey jerked a thumb at the tubs. “All shit. Chalk dust and pigeon crap.” He shoveled chicken into his mouth. “No substitute for hard work, Harris.” He paused with his mouth open; rags of masticated chicken swung from his teeth. “Well, that’s not the literal truth.”

He gave Paul a look, its shrewdness suggesting that Paul’s suitability and trustworthiness were currently the subject of intense scrutiny. Later Paul would realize that Stacey gave everyone this look; his customer criteria was no narrower than a convenience store’s.

Stacey rooted through a drawer and set an ampule on the desk. “Testosterone ethanate. We’re talking the Rolls-Royce of performance enhancement.”

The Einsteins made no secret of their steroid abuse — why bother, when your body was a walking billboard? — and Paul had overheard horror stories: hardened knots forming in their asses from the deep-tissue injections, excess body hair and cysts the size of corn kernels, penile atrophy. Stacey had himself developed a serious infection in his right bicep; he’d performed meatball surgery on himself in the men’s bathroom, piercing the infected tissue with a heavy-gauge needle and filling a Dixie cup with a broth of blood and pus.

Paul rolled the vial between his fingers. A quarter-ounce of yellow fluid. Piss, was all it looked like. A squirt of dirty yellow piss.

“Is it safe?”

“Nothing’s one hundred percent safe. You walk outta here, get hit by a bus.”

Paul had always despised the well-trodden bus rationale. He asked what company manufactured the stuff. Stacey told him that medical-grade steroids were for pussies; he said Paul would be better off chugging the pigeon crap. None of this answered Paul’s question, however, leaving him to wonder if it had been brewed in Stacey’s bathtub.

“I hear it shrinks your dick.”

“That can happen,” Stacey admitted. “But here’s the thing: every guy’s got an extra three inches of cock rolled up in his hip cavity.”

“Oh, come on with that.”

“I shit you not. Rolled up in there like a chameleon’s tongue. There’s this operation where a surgeon makes a slit at the base of your cock and yanks out the extra bit. I got it done; my dick’s not bent or anything and I piss and fuck like a champ.”

Clearly Stacey had tendered this pitch a few times. Not that his salesmanship was at all necessary — despite any minor misgivings, Paul’s mind had been set the moment Stacey placed the vial on the countertop.

“How do I get it into me?”

“Injection to the tushie. I’ll do it for you.”

“Is that the only w—?”

Stacey cut him off. “Please don’t be a pussy, Harris. I was just starting to dig you.”

And so it transpired that five minutes later Paul found himself in a cramped stall in the men’s room at Jammer’s gym, bent over the toilet with his pants wadded around his knees and Stacey Jamison’s hairy caveman hands clapped to his buttocks.

Stacey kneaded roughly. “Spongier than a loaf a bread.”

Paul braced his hands on the stall wall. By now sickened at his impulsiveness — why couldn’t he just inject himself? — he was convinced it was too late to back out. Stacey gave his ass a rough slap.

“Christ — jiggling like Christmas pudding.” He was genuinely revolted. “How can you cart those lumpy sandbags around all day? It’s just… gross. Look at it — look !”

Paul craned his neck, angling for a glimpse of his own ass. “It could do with some work,” he said helplessly.

Stacey’s sigh suggested that whipping a specimen as pitiful as Paul into shape would be a mammoth chore, requiring the labor of thousands.

“Don’t move. If I jab too deep you’ll get a knot like a monkey fist.”

A steel wire of stark terror pierced Paul’s heart. What if Stacey hit a vein and pumped this junk directly into his bloodstream? What if he went into anaphylactic shock and — died ? He was horrified by how Stacey might deal with the situation; he pictured Stacey seating his dead body on the can, wrapping his dead hand around the syringe, then calling the cops and saying one of his clients had perished while geezing in the shitter. Paul pictured his body laid out on a morgue slab, raisin-testicled with a twig for a penis.

Stacey pig-stuck him and pushed the plunger. As testosterone shot through him, Paul felt… nothing. It might as well be vegetable oil — hell, maybe it was vegetable oil.

He yanked his trousers up and out of sheer habit flushed the toilet — that, or he wanted to convince anyone in the change room he’d merely been taking a piss.

“Work those glutes!” Stacey hollered as Paul escaped through the change room.

“Tone that saggy caboose of yours!”

Paul drove down Highway 406 following the frozen river, took the mall exit, and turned left at the lights. On Hartzell Road he passed pool halls and bars with neon signs, a foreclosed Bavarian restaurant, a train yard where boxcars rusted in the nettles.

He yanked down his pants at a red light and gave his ass a good clawing. An itchy red bump had risen at the injection site. His heartbeat was all out of whack, weird yips and baps. Reeking sweat poured from his body, soaking his shirt and running down the crack of his ass. His fingers came away bloody but the bump still itched like a bastard. He stuffed McDonald’s napkins down his trousers to sop up the blood.

At the end of Hartzell a white-brick shopfront occupied the space between a knife shop and a tattoo parlor. A sign above the door read Jensen’s paints.

Below that sign a smaller one, reading, in clipped red letters, impact boxing club.

Paul wrenched the wheel and cut across the road, narrowly avoiding a T-bone collision with an oncoming Buick. He skipped over the curb — some vital portion of the undercarriage tore off with a shriek — into the paint store lot. The engine rattled and conked out.

He sat with his hands gripped to the wheel, wondering how he’d managed to pass these shops a hundred times without ever noticing them. He heard that up north in the provincial parks most of the trees had been clear-cut by logging companies; what they left was called a “veneer”: the pines went twenty or thirty feet deep along the hiking paths and riversides, but beyond that only miles of stumps. Paul thought that if someone clear-cut this city, gutted the office buildings and homes and stores, he’d never know — so long as the veneer remained.