Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

Sure enough, once he reached the balcony, he was in the realm of the thick, the dense, the swell, the diesels. From throughout the balcony came the strangled basso profundo of gonnabe buff boys pumping iron, lying on their backs on padded benches within the bench-press frames, bent legs atremble in the squat frames, bellying into strange, padded inclined planes for biceps curls and vertical lifts for the latissimi dorsi.

“Hey, dude, spot me, wouldja!”

“That’s it! That’s it! One more! Don’t be a pussy! One more!”—accompanied by ostentatious groans.

“…did five hundred.”

Groaning out of a strangled throat, “Bullshit—you—did—five—hundred—you—couldn’t—fucking—budge—five hundred,” followed by a desperate interjection halfway between a groan and a cry—“Oonaggh!”—and a dense young mesomorph emerges from the squat frame wearing a wrestler’s low-cut strap-style shirt (in order to display the pecs as well as the bi’s, tri’s, delts, and traps), inflating and deflating with deep breaths, holding his arms slightly curved and away from his body, as if the muscles through his chest, back, bi’s, and tri’s are too big for his arms ever to hang down straight again, and walking about with a curious, apelike straddle gait.

Adam involuntarily tugged on the arms of his T-shirt to bring them down below his elbows to make sure none of the brutes got a look at those sad little pipes of his. He imagined that every eye on the balcony was pinned on him…the featherweight weakling who had dared ascend to the balcony of the jacked…not realizing that every bodybuilder thinks the entire gym is watching him…to check out how much weight he’s lifting, how many reps he’s doing…and whether or not he’s going to try to sneak a look in the mirror afterward to see how much bigger his traps, delts, pecs, bi’s, tri’s, lats, quads, and obliques look, now that the exercise has gorged them with blood…

Adam loaded up the shoulder-shrug machine with weights—had to make it look respectably heavy—tried it…couldn’t budge it…had to take a lot of weights off…mortified at the thought of the brutes’ no doubt mounting scorn…finally reduced the weight enough to do three sets…ten, eight, and a final puny five repetitions. Between sets he took deep breaths, looked down at the floor with his face set in a terribly manly grimace, rolled his shoulders, and walked with a straddle in the accepted apelike fashion.

After an hour of lifting, Adam felt gratifyingly pumped up, and he headed downstairs, stealing glimpses of his traps where they were visible at the extra-big neck of his T-shirt as he passed mirrors, and wondering if they really did look a bit bigger or if it was just his imagination. No…they did look bigger.

He was enjoying that temporary high the male feels when his muscles, no matter what size they may be, are gorged with blood. He feels…more of a man.

The Farquhar Fitness Center had elevators, but it also had a wide, well-lit stairway, and Adam, high on muscle building, chose the scenic route. On each floor’s stairway landing you could look through a pair of big plate-glass doors and see what was going on within. One floor down, the sign above the double doors said CARDIOVASCULAR, which struck Adam as a pathetically medical term connoting the sickly, not the manly…but the sight of students, many of them girls, running in an odd fashion on a machine caught his eye, and he went inside…The machine, called a StairMaster, allowed you to run—if you could really call it running—without taking your feet off a pair of huge pedals. It was a bit like standing up and “pumping” on a bicycle. There were many girls…Some wore plain, sexless gym clothes, T-shirts, sweatshirts, roomy shorts, and sneakers. More, however, came dressed as…girls. Super-low-cut sweatpants they had! And short T-shirts! And lots of nubile young flesh and belly buttons in between! From the back…was he seeing a little buttocks décolletage, a little cleavage…Right in front of Adam, a girl with long blond hair pumped away on the StairMaster in low-waisted lavender nylon running shorts and an abbreviated royal blue basketball jersey. She didn’t have large breasts, but with each rotation her nipples pressed out against the thin nylon of the halter, and her belly button winked this way and that in the long expanse of bare flesh. Four machines down the row, a girl wore black tights, which gripped every curve and crevice of her loins like a second skin, and a flesh-colored athletic bra. The tops of her breasts bobbed up and down like flan. You had to look twice to make sure she had on any bra at all. The sight aroused Adam. His own loins were on the qui vive, as if something were about to…happen in this so-called fitness center…The push of a button, the flick of a switch…and they would stop pretending anymore and plunge into a full-blown rout, an out-and-out orgy, and rutrutrutrutrut…

Just beyond the StairMasters were rows and rows of treadmills, an extraordinary number of treadmills…wide black keyboards…green and orange diode lights. The noise was almost deafening. Row after row of boys and girls were running on the treadmills, some of them at quite a clip, adding the thuds of a hundred, perhaps two hundred feet pounding the treadmill belts, whose motors ground away in a bass register. Adam could see scores of breathless young buttocks…

He started to turn back to the StairMasters when a mane of long brown hair caught his eye. The girl was running, really running, on a treadmill next to a mirrored wall. He could see her from behind at a three-quarter angle. She was wearing ordinary sweatpants, not low-cut, but they fit tight on her buttocks—and that line! That line! A dark line of sweat had formed in the crevice between the two buttocks. It clove the declivity and reached down under into the very mystery of her loamy loins. He couldn’t keep his eyes off it—the dark, wet rivulet that led to…Oh, loamy, loamy loins! He caught sight of her profile in the mirror. He stared—he stared—and he was sure of it! It was that girl, that freshman, the one he had run into that night in the library when he had to do an all-nighter writing a paper for Jojo. All he had gotten out of her was her name, Charlotte. Other than that, she had frozen him out. She had cut him to shreds with her eyes. He had longed to run into her again—and, oh God, that line!

How to approach her, though. She was flying on that treadmill—looked as if she were running a four-minute mile…eyes fixed straight ahead. The treadmill next to hers was vacant. No more than eight inches between machines. He drew closer, walking slowly down an aisle between rows of treadmills. What a racket! It was her, all right. Such untouched, innocent beauty—with a temper! Well—if he worked up his nerve and got on the vacant treadmill, what would he do then? How could he even operate the damned keyboard? And could he run? Not the way she was running…maybe not at all…When was the last time he had done any kind of running? And how could he make himself heard if he got up on the thing? But—this was his chance.

Adam got up on the treadmill and looked at the girl, hoping she would notice him before he had to do any running at all. But her eyes remained pinned on some abstract vanishing point straight ahead. It took him a full minute—seemed like ten—to figure out how to start the thing. There were buttons for every damned thing in the world, including his own weight—weight?—the incline of the treadmill—incline? The racket was so loud he felt as if he were in the innards of a machine, a printing press. He finally punched the speed button until the treadmill belt beneath his feet reached 2 miles an hour, now 2.5, now 3…There was nothing to it, he could keep up with it by walking…then 3.5…By the time he got to 4 miles per hour, however, he had to walk so fast it became an effort…Maybe it would be easier to jog it, and she might show an interest in a runner rather than a walker…He started jogging, but the machine was actually going too slow for jogging, so he punched it up to 4.5. He kept jogging, but still she took no notice of him. Barely thirty seconds had gone by when he realized that his lungs weren’t up to this. So he leaned forward with his forearms resting on the big keyboard console, frantically trying to make his feet keep up with the belt while he reached beneath his chest to slow the machine down—damn!—hit the speedup button instead, and—whoa!—his legs went out from under him. He pushed against the console to try to straighten himself up…and in a helpless slow motion…he knew precisely what was happening but couldn’t do anything about it…he did a belly flop on the treadmill belt, which transported him and his whole body and dumped them on the floor. He was still lying there, thoroughly dazed, when the girl leaped acrobatically onto the frame of her own treadmill—which was really speeding—leaned over, hit a button that stopped his belt, then stopped her own, leapt like a goat, and—just like that—was on one knee by his side.