Stanley Elkin: Boswell

I had been coming to the gym for two years and was a regular myself (Oh, there are no buddies like locker room buddies. Each day we see each other’s behinds, groins, penises. I have worn Malley’s jock; he has worn mine. What is left but for us to like each other?) although I had no specialty. I did everything, developed everything (not like Flambeau, whose exercise led to a sort of delimiting or self-containment): chest, legs, back, arms, hands, neck, jaw, watching with a kind of pride my companions’ pride in the steady ballooning of my parts, growing, as Herlitz said, taller, but wider, too, expanding, blooming, becoming. I was big now, big, and to strangers watching, my great huge body might have seemed a threat (ah, but they couldn’t see my heart; that grew too — that love limb). I worked steadily, somewhat absently, without either sorrow or joy. In the locker room, for two years, I had been taking my towel from Baby Joe, who pushed it toward me sullenly from behind his wire cage. For two years I had weighed myself each night on the tall, free scale (each time, I mean it, pleased to be getting something for nothing), recording the steady accretion of pounds. For two years sitting naked and wet on the low, peeling bench by my locker, feeling beneath me in the vapory room something like a thin coil of excrement, hearing behind the iron double-deck lockers the rhythmed smack-thwump of Peterson, the handball player. (Peterson is very interested in the development of hands. He no longer wears a glove. I’ve felt the hard, smooth calluses of his upper palm; I’ve seen him hold a match against the unprotected skin.)

And if I had not yet sat at the captain’s table, I had at the coach’s, making with others the rude, brutal shop talk of athletes. The brutality is spurious. There is a real camaraderie here, the intense group feeling of amateurs. We are like crew members of a bomber. The camaraderie shines sportily down even from the walls in the gym’s corridors where hang the framed pictures of the teams: basketball players in trim, incredible shorts, in thick- numbered undershirts; football teams in their intricate, hyperbolic gear; baseball teams in puffy knickers, starchy hose, the players’ brows lost in the shadows of their caps so that they seem faceless. Somehow all seem faceless and — oddly, since these are athletes — bodiless too. Only their uniforms bulge clear. When the pictures are large enough to reveal their features, the men, for all their fellowship, seem sedate, serious, like men getting married.

Often I have come to the gym alone at night (I have a key, and though there is no heat the exercise soon warms me). Sometimes I have been startled to come upon Singleman, the gymnast. He comes alone too and sets up his bar and makes giant circles in the dim light of the caged ceiling bulb. (Everything in the gym is caged, barred, protected from our raw force. It is the architect’s detail, the mind’s contempt for the body.) It is something, to be there straining at the weights and hear Singleman whirling behind me, to hear the snap-whrr-snap as he soars, falls, soars in the dark. It isn’t all camaraderie. On a deeper level we are self-absorbed. Like the monks. It’s a question, finally, of our own soul, our own body. We dry ourselves with the intense absorption of men cleaning weapons. We rub each part with a selfish vigor, reach up inside our bodies with the towels. We toss them without seeing into the big canvas hamper.

There is a bulletin board near the mirror where we comb our hair. (Like any athletes we try to hide our bodies when we are in the streets. We hide them inside ordinary clothes, beneath carefully combed hair.) A poster admonishes us to drink more milk, to beware of sunburn. Tacked to the board is a clipping from the sports page which tells of the training habits of Bob Wormer, the Olympic decathlonist. “Every morning Big Bob runs up Mile High Mountain near Lago, Colorado, where he lives. ‘Believe me, I’m not starting from sea level either. They call it Mile High Mountain because it sticks up a mile higher than any of the mountains surrounding it. I figure I must be pretty near ten thousand feet up when I get to the top,’ Bob claims. He’s done it, when he’s felt he’s needed the additional challenge, with a knapsack filled with rocks on his back. “There’s no telling what the body can do if it’s pushed,’ Big Bob says. Well, that may be, but it is this reporter’s guess that there aren’t many men around who would be willing to push Big Bob’s body.” I read the clipping to cheer me up. I am feeling down. Believe me, I haven’t started from sea level either.

It had been occurring to me all day that nothing had happened, that everything was the same as it was when Herlitz had spoken to me. Only I am stronger, bigger. Tonight my uncle will challenge me again and I will be tempted to leave him. He will hold me to the smallest promises, remind me of things casually said. My uncle loves me. This is a new thing in my life. But he is only an uncle, and he is sick. I have been thinking lately that my life is off-center. In all this world I am closest to an uncle. I am father to a child I have seen only once. I am a kind of widower at twenty. Every few years I am freshly made an orphan. My friends are the men in this gym, off-center themselves.

Baby Joe watches us dress with his fevered, jealous eyes. Malley. Peterson. Levine. Singleman. Flambeau. Marty Penner. Lyman Necchi. Perry Lacey, the runner, sings a bawdy song in the shower, ever cheerful, ever big-lunged. I see him in the mirror as he steps out. He is smiling and I wonder if he has just jerked off. He likes to do it in the shower, he says, because then the water washes the scum down the drain. Perry is very neat. This is true. There is no scum on his shorts, no hair on his comb, no lint in his pockets. Perry is pristine. A pristine horse’s ass. He comes out of the shower and claps his hands and Baby Joe tosses him a towel. He pats himself all over his body with it as though he were applauding. He shakes his head like a dog and water spritzes onto Flambeau’s white duck trousers. (Only Flambeau dresses like an athlete. In street clothes, he looks as though he were on his way to the tennis courts.) Lacey shakes his head again; more water comes off his hair.

“Come on, Lacey, you’re doing that on purpose,” Flambeau says.

“Kiss mine,” Lacey answers neatly. He takes his towel by two corners and twirls it around rapidly. It is now a terry-cloth whip and Perry is Lonesome Lacey, the Nude Cowboy. Before I know what is happening he has come up behind me and flicked my ass murderously with his towel.

“Take that, and that, and that,” he says.

“Lacey, go run some laps.”

He squares himself off to face me, bouncing up and down alertly on his legs. The springs, he calls them. The springs. He hits me with the towel again. I try to move aside, but Lacey is a fast man.

“Lacey, I’m going to hit you with a bar bell.”

“Pals,” he says and extends his hand.

I take it and crush it a little, which makes Lacey sore. He flings his towel down and comes toward me, but Lyman Necchi hips him aside. “Lacey, go get dressed. Jimmy would kill you.”

Lacey is reasonable. He knows it’s true. “You guys make me sick,” he says. He says it cheerfully and I am convinced it is his big lungs. “I mean it. You make me absolutely sick. You think all a runner is is fast. You don’t think a runner’s strong.” When he goes to bars Lacey talks about good little men. “Well, a runner’s very strong. He’s got endurance as well as speed. Endurance counts. Persistence pays.”

I go back to my locker and start getting dressed.

“Big. Big. That’s all you know. It makes me sore. It really does. I mean, for Christ’s sake, they’ve got laws, official laws about a boxer’s hands. Did you know that? It’s actually illegal for a boxer to hit somebody with his hands. They’re ’lethal instruments’ in the eyes of the law. Weapons. It’s as if he took a gun and shot you.”