…fires full magazine of handgun rounds…
“I don’t know what the deal is with me right now. You think it’s just nerves?”
“Probably so, you haven’t shot in a while have you?”
“No, it’s been a while.”
“Well you did pretty good on the first magazine, all 8 patterned as tight as a half dollar, and 5 bulls eyes!”
“Yeah, the first two mags went down fine, but now my hands shaking like a leaf, I don’t get it. It must be my nerves are shot. I need to build back up to where I used to be. Let me try and lean up against this tree.”
…fires another magazine…
“That tree doesn’t seem to be helping much. Maybe you just need to rest a while. You know you can’t expect to jump right back into it and have nerves of steel right off of the bat. You’d have to be like Dirty Harry or something!”
“No, I know. It’s just frustrating. I need to shoot that way every time, I’m too inconsistent”
“It’s just temporary, you can’t rush it. Just work your way from 2 magazines a day to 5 a day to 10 a day over the course of a month or so, you’ll be fine.”
“Yeah, I guess. Let’s set up that larger rifle range so I can rest on the bag and shoot from prone. I’m not going to let my flaky nerves ruin our range day.”
“You got it, take a walk downfield and set up these new targets and I’ll go grab the spotting scope from inside.”
(265 words)
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Profile of a Person; Draft 1; "Grandma"
My grandma has a funny way of walking when she’s injured, kind of like my dog when he tries to hide the limp he’s gained from running through the briar patches. He’s learned by now that if I see him limping around, I’ll be less inclined to let him play, and he only lives to chase that stick. My grandma reminds me a lot of Joe Montana. She embodies one of his more famous sayings, being, “You gotta play injured.”
One time when I was younger, working with my friend Jack he demonstrated what his father, who is eighty years old, would look like if he didn’t limber up now and again by going out on his runs and rowing sessions in the lake. Jack’s father is eighty years old and spry as ever, but he still needs to warm up for an lengthy amount of time just like a mid seventies Buick needs to warm up for thirty minutes before it will turn over in a Detroit winter. When Jack performed the impression, he kind of stuck his arms out straight to the side, stiff like with his hands about a foot from his body, while he spread his feet about a foot apart with the same stiffness. He made himself look like he was wearing a long sleeve shirt and pants so tight that he couldn’t move at the elbows or knees. I imagined that his impression sort of looked like one of the characters in those white paper doll chains that kids make in grade school to hang up around the ceiling. Jack then added animation to the pose. He shuffled sideways with his stiff legs and arms while making movements similar to those you’d see when someone’s making a snow angel. Jack’s impression basically made his dad look like a crab with arthritis who somehow learned to walk upright. This is the most accurate way I can think of describing the disjointed walking movements of my grandmother. After she’s taken a tumble, she does her best to hide her injuries from my nosy aunts who will give her endless static. But my aunts already know full well that the only person who will ever slow down my grandma is death himself, and at least she won’t have to hear his mouth. While Jack would make the impression of his father, he and I both would have a good laugh at the expense of his old man. The comedy of it came from the unease we felt about our own mortality, we know full well we aren’t above the laws of nature and age. We decided to smile at our mortality while we could, laugh and be grateful, and rejoice in our youth while there was still time. I think my grandmother must smile at death every day the way she works herself at her age. And by her health I guess death has an affinity for simple people with a good sense of humor.
There are three types of people on this planet that can eat the same type of breakfast that my grandmother enjoys every morning without going immediately into glut tonic, lard induced catatonia. Eskimos, aboriginal whale fishers and true blooded, down south, farm and horse folks. Basically, to consume this breakfast, you need to be moving from about five in the morning until around ten at night and burn about five thousand calories per day. The smell of her cooking animal fat in the air at dawn is a better alarm clock than any Sony I’ve ever owned. Bacon has this miraculous way of making you forget about the daily grind. Bacon puts your mind on one track. Eat the bacon. It’s too bad, but most mornings I don’t have any bacon because I don’t burn even half of the calories that she does.
As I stumble into the kitchen every morning to make my delicious breakfast of egg whites and oatmeal, I always notice her still warm frying pan, which contains all of the necessary elements of a well balanced cardiac arrest. She enjoys things that I could hardly touch with a 2 foot grill skewer. Scrapple, thick cut bacon, pork shoulder, ham hock, I could make a list five feet long with other bits of the fattiest parts of creatures that she gets away with consuming like a fish does water. When she’s feeling healthy she’ll have some grits with butter, in a one to one ratio.
If you’ve ever worked a day where by the end you’re dripping in sweat, you’ll know the rigors of my grandmother’s lifestyle, except she lives it that way every day. Not every minute of physical work is enjoyable, but at the end of the day you’ve actually done something with your body that can’t be undone and connects you to the earth. It’s humbling. For me those days of sweating like a sieve, baking in the sun and freezing in the cold all ended after numerous summers and falls spent helping my uncle in concrete contracting and working on the family friend’s turkey farm. This honest work taught me that I am not cut out for a lifetime of that style of work. I guess that’s the nice way of me telling you that I don’t enjoy manual labor, because if you ask my grandma, she’ll you that I’m a wimp. I guess I can stomach her chastising. Being that it comes from a source that makes Rosie the riveter look like a bigger diva than Mariah Carrey.
It is a mystery to nearly everyone my grandmother meets as to what keeps her going. Some say she’s just doing what she can to keep herself busy and not concern herself too much with my granddad, who passed back in two thousand and four. I think everyone is addicted to one thing or another that keeps the embers in their souls bellowed, fueling them through this crazy life. I know that my grandmother is plain and simple addicted, in fact she’s your classic case of simplicity junkie. She’s constantly caught in that feeling you get after you’ve cleaned out the whole basement that you’ve been eyeballing for nine months. My grandma just gets things done. She’s humble and she’s guided by a moral compass more finely tuned than Swiss bearings. She has a genuine respect and regard for authority that I only wish I could poses. One time I was driving her and I came to a stop at a traffic light and let the front wheels roll a few feet past the white line. By the appalled look that my minor traffic offense left on her face you would think that my grandma just realized she was trapped riding shotgun with Billy the Kid.
"Instead of going to the gym all the time, you could do some more shoveling or something around here? That's a work out, huh?" I remind her that working out takes place in a controlled environment and the work she does is prone to injury. Just about once a week I hear a story about how she fell off a horse, or a tractor or a ladder. And she'll never mention that she’s taken a tumble, but I can always tell by the little extra hobbles in her steps that she’s gone down somewhere from some height. Those hobbles send phantom chills through my body, like her DNA is trying to communicate to mine that she's a madwoman and needs to settle down before she's paralyzed. But I know she’ll have it no other way.
“Any work is good work,” she says. I would strongly beg to differ, but I see where she’s coming from. A day you don’t do anything to her is a wasted day. For me it would be a day that you don’t learn anything. In my favorite Jet Li film he systematically defeats all of his enemies in the city and surrounding areas until one day his own family is murdered in cold blood, out of vengeance by a fallen rival school. Jet Li becomes disenchanted by his own selfish ways of blind lust and conquering. He roams the country side, finding a village built on terraced hills and simple customs. The village people teach him to cultivate rice and contribute to the community. He ends up living in the village for several years, enjoying the things he’d taken for granted, the changing of the seasons, building healthy relationships and working for an honest living.
Many of my modern day associates, myself included, have conditioned ourselves to believe that what frees us is attaining those things that are constructed, complex and often convoluted. My grandmother is an example of a timeless humility that is a testament to healthful benefits that are realized by abiding the humbler forces of nature. She knows the steward is wiser than the conqueror.
(1,492 words)
One time when I was younger, working with my friend Jack he demonstrated what his father, who is eighty years old, would look like if he didn’t limber up now and again by going out on his runs and rowing sessions in the lake. Jack’s father is eighty years old and spry as ever, but he still needs to warm up for an lengthy amount of time just like a mid seventies Buick needs to warm up for thirty minutes before it will turn over in a Detroit winter. When Jack performed the impression, he kind of stuck his arms out straight to the side, stiff like with his hands about a foot from his body, while he spread his feet about a foot apart with the same stiffness. He made himself look like he was wearing a long sleeve shirt and pants so tight that he couldn’t move at the elbows or knees. I imagined that his impression sort of looked like one of the characters in those white paper doll chains that kids make in grade school to hang up around the ceiling. Jack then added animation to the pose. He shuffled sideways with his stiff legs and arms while making movements similar to those you’d see when someone’s making a snow angel. Jack’s impression basically made his dad look like a crab with arthritis who somehow learned to walk upright. This is the most accurate way I can think of describing the disjointed walking movements of my grandmother. After she’s taken a tumble, she does her best to hide her injuries from my nosy aunts who will give her endless static. But my aunts already know full well that the only person who will ever slow down my grandma is death himself, and at least she won’t have to hear his mouth. While Jack would make the impression of his father, he and I both would have a good laugh at the expense of his old man. The comedy of it came from the unease we felt about our own mortality, we know full well we aren’t above the laws of nature and age. We decided to smile at our mortality while we could, laugh and be grateful, and rejoice in our youth while there was still time. I think my grandmother must smile at death every day the way she works herself at her age. And by her health I guess death has an affinity for simple people with a good sense of humor.
There are three types of people on this planet that can eat the same type of breakfast that my grandmother enjoys every morning without going immediately into glut tonic, lard induced catatonia. Eskimos, aboriginal whale fishers and true blooded, down south, farm and horse folks. Basically, to consume this breakfast, you need to be moving from about five in the morning until around ten at night and burn about five thousand calories per day. The smell of her cooking animal fat in the air at dawn is a better alarm clock than any Sony I’ve ever owned. Bacon has this miraculous way of making you forget about the daily grind. Bacon puts your mind on one track. Eat the bacon. It’s too bad, but most mornings I don’t have any bacon because I don’t burn even half of the calories that she does.
As I stumble into the kitchen every morning to make my delicious breakfast of egg whites and oatmeal, I always notice her still warm frying pan, which contains all of the necessary elements of a well balanced cardiac arrest. She enjoys things that I could hardly touch with a 2 foot grill skewer. Scrapple, thick cut bacon, pork shoulder, ham hock, I could make a list five feet long with other bits of the fattiest parts of creatures that she gets away with consuming like a fish does water. When she’s feeling healthy she’ll have some grits with butter, in a one to one ratio.
If you’ve ever worked a day where by the end you’re dripping in sweat, you’ll know the rigors of my grandmother’s lifestyle, except she lives it that way every day. Not every minute of physical work is enjoyable, but at the end of the day you’ve actually done something with your body that can’t be undone and connects you to the earth. It’s humbling. For me those days of sweating like a sieve, baking in the sun and freezing in the cold all ended after numerous summers and falls spent helping my uncle in concrete contracting and working on the family friend’s turkey farm. This honest work taught me that I am not cut out for a lifetime of that style of work. I guess that’s the nice way of me telling you that I don’t enjoy manual labor, because if you ask my grandma, she’ll you that I’m a wimp. I guess I can stomach her chastising. Being that it comes from a source that makes Rosie the riveter look like a bigger diva than Mariah Carrey.
It is a mystery to nearly everyone my grandmother meets as to what keeps her going. Some say she’s just doing what she can to keep herself busy and not concern herself too much with my granddad, who passed back in two thousand and four. I think everyone is addicted to one thing or another that keeps the embers in their souls bellowed, fueling them through this crazy life. I know that my grandmother is plain and simple addicted, in fact she’s your classic case of simplicity junkie. She’s constantly caught in that feeling you get after you’ve cleaned out the whole basement that you’ve been eyeballing for nine months. My grandma just gets things done. She’s humble and she’s guided by a moral compass more finely tuned than Swiss bearings. She has a genuine respect and regard for authority that I only wish I could poses. One time I was driving her and I came to a stop at a traffic light and let the front wheels roll a few feet past the white line. By the appalled look that my minor traffic offense left on her face you would think that my grandma just realized she was trapped riding shotgun with Billy the Kid.
"Instead of going to the gym all the time, you could do some more shoveling or something around here? That's a work out, huh?" I remind her that working out takes place in a controlled environment and the work she does is prone to injury. Just about once a week I hear a story about how she fell off a horse, or a tractor or a ladder. And she'll never mention that she’s taken a tumble, but I can always tell by the little extra hobbles in her steps that she’s gone down somewhere from some height. Those hobbles send phantom chills through my body, like her DNA is trying to communicate to mine that she's a madwoman and needs to settle down before she's paralyzed. But I know she’ll have it no other way.
“Any work is good work,” she says. I would strongly beg to differ, but I see where she’s coming from. A day you don’t do anything to her is a wasted day. For me it would be a day that you don’t learn anything. In my favorite Jet Li film he systematically defeats all of his enemies in the city and surrounding areas until one day his own family is murdered in cold blood, out of vengeance by a fallen rival school. Jet Li becomes disenchanted by his own selfish ways of blind lust and conquering. He roams the country side, finding a village built on terraced hills and simple customs. The village people teach him to cultivate rice and contribute to the community. He ends up living in the village for several years, enjoying the things he’d taken for granted, the changing of the seasons, building healthy relationships and working for an honest living.
Many of my modern day associates, myself included, have conditioned ourselves to believe that what frees us is attaining those things that are constructed, complex and often convoluted. My grandmother is an example of a timeless humility that is a testament to healthful benefits that are realized by abiding the humbler forces of nature. She knows the steward is wiser than the conqueror.
(1,492 words)
Nonfiction Story Draft 2 - "My Gym"
I’ve called it “my gym” on account of I’ve worked there two and a half years and I’m still the only one there who knows the difference between his ass and the hole in the middle of a 45 pound plate. As cliché as it sounds, It’s also like my little home away from home. Well, I guess it’s really more like a smellier, more dramatic version of a home away from home, but it’s been enough fun for me to hang around this long anyway.
Every day in my gym it’s the same thing. The place has a timeless quality, so much so I’m convinced if I moved half way around the world for decades and returned home I’d walk through the glass doors and hear the same thumping of feet and whirring of treadmill motors. The ventilation system would still be dumping piles of cool air onto the gym floor and the same bar bells would be clanking into their cradles while the smell of rubber flooring hung over the weight pit. Hundreds of hours I’ve spent in the gym, walking the floor during a workout, battling dust with the commercial vacuum cleaner, reclined in the leather office chair. The features of this place have been burned onto my conscious.
Contemporary design elements designed into the gyms décor create a non-threatening environment. This environment attracts what the fitness sales guys affectionately refer to as the “de-conditioned market”. Compiled into that tidy little demographic label are the house moms who have gained a little extra padding hustling junior to soccer practice, living on a diet delivered solely through a drive-through window. Ex-military men whose beer guts march horizontally, as their days of mandatory marching come to an end. Every other average Joe or Josephine with diabetes, heel spurs, arthritis and fifty to one-hundred and fifty extra pounds whose fitness resolutions begin ever year around December 31st and promptly end around January 5th.
Neutral colored green and purple pastel paint covers the walls. Ergonomic, friendly looking machines in powder coated silver stand in rows conceived to direct the human traffic through their routines. Mostly devoid of intimidating meat heads, you won’t hear too much slamming around of weights and frat house conversation in my gym. The weights are all rubberized, big red safety buttons on the wall and white lanyards with little green buttons can be pressed by the disabled or the panicked to alert 911 of emergencies. Members are typically cordial and clean up after themselves as top forty hits crank out low over the radio, pretty mundane stuff.
Leaning back against the reclining springs in the leather office chair I grab the days papers and begin to read them over as I crack open a bottle of water. Sipping off of the top of the bottle I lean back again and again, rocking, relaxing and thinking about how to tackle the day. One of our members, “Big John” as we call him, leans his head into my office, “Hey there old buddy. How’s the weather treating you old Brandt? We got dumped on pretty good uh?” John’s a great big ol’ Aussie and he carries his accent with him like a fifty pound trunk at the airport that he’s afraid to set down. John has wild red, sun bleached hair which makes him look like he’s just returned from spending years on safari in the Great Victoria Desert. John’s about as wide and stout as a compact car and my stereotyping mind pictures him playing rugby with a bunch of other Brits in his heyday, raising hell, chugging one liter cans of Fosters and shooting wallabies pinned in the headlights of chasing Land rovers . “Not too terrible I reply, how’s your car holding up in this awful stuff?” Since I’ve worked here John has single handedly help to raise my game in small talk, somewhat of a lost art in this day of twitter and skype. “Not too bad old boy, just had to dig myself out of an igloo this morning,” John chuckled as he replied. One time I confided in John that I hadn’t been accepted for a second round interview at a large firm which was pretty important to me. He knew I was going through a bummer and he said, “Those bloody human resources bastards are idiots. Worthless as tits on a bull they are, you need to knock down their door or they’ll have their way with you.” Eloquently put. The next day I put in just about a dozen calls and emails to the firms various departments. Two weeks later I had my interview. Crikey good show. John’s “Fosters Keg”, is what he refers to as his mid section, and it hasn’t shrunk an inch since he joined the gym. My friend and co-worker Brandon told me one day that for some people who come to the gym, the aspect of socializing and working out is the highlight of their day and when he first told me I couldn’t believe it. As time went on, I began to know many of these people. I do what I can to make their experience fun for them. Please god let the highlight of my life be retiring on a private beach in the Caribbean or South America, not sweating on some cold piece of steel in the middle of a strip mall.
“Hey, hey, man, how ya doin?” It’s “tall Tom”. He caws as he struts in the entrance, ducking to miss the commercial sized door jam. Literally, the guys like 7 feet even, when he runs on the treadmill he has to constantly crouch down and hit the keypad to change speeds, which makes him look like one of those pecking bird desk ornaments, eternally caught between cawing and pecking. Tall Tom sells his insurance, and I guess he’s pretty good at it too because I became his client after only a year of meeting him.
Jay’s the big man on campus around the gym, every time he walks though the doors he’s strutting like a rooster, making certain not to make eye contact with anyone while throwing sideways glances at the ladies. Jay’s a real estate developer with one hundred plus properties, some of which are in Barbados, so George, a struggling mortgage broker, is always right on Jay’s heels. They’re always batting it back and forth, reliving some old high school sports glories, arguing over ESPN highlights or whispering about some “young honey” that just joined up. My Gym is often the equivalent of one big office water cooler, working here has gotten me some sharp skills shooting the shit.
Next comes Alex the bank manager, then Jacob the loan officer then Julie the real estate broker and then a half dozen more like them that’ve offered me positions once I graduate. Note to self: re-open a gym after you’ve made it just for the networking opportunities. The usual flock of house wives rolls in. Most of them are well reserved, except for Jessica, a Brazilian lady who’s much more flirtatious than the rest. She floats from one man to the other in the gym like a butterfly choosing flowers, most of the men humor her but the novelty of her presence typically wears thin once her motives arise. Desperate housewives, one of the truly sad elements in my gym. She pops into the office, “We all want to know whether or not Bobby and Phil are offering free classes anymore and where we can sign up. Aren’t you here late Mr. Brandt, were you waiting just for me?” I laugh sarcastically, “Yeah I’m here just for you.” We small talk about working out and I listen to her same old story. She is eating bad again and put on weight. In two weeks she is going to a wedding or a reunion or a dinner with the in-laws, to be honest I don’t even keep track anymore. She needs to “look pretty quick.” I’m a gym rat. After these two years I could pass for a shrink.
Every person in my gym comes from a different walk of life, their motivations being vastly different. They have one thing in common, they all have bodies that have whispered to them, “time for change,” and we collect all of those insecurities. I used to think we only collected membership fees, but we collect more than that. We collect dashed and new romances, born again track stars, quitters of vice and winners of competitions. We collect new mothers, the silently determined, the outwardly apathetic and the willingly malleable. We also collect ones like me. And I’ve never been great at saying what my strengths and weaknesses are, so I’ll just tell you how I got here and you can judge for yourself.
“Can you bring me some more ketchup please? Sir! Sir!”
“Sure thing Sir,” I whistle from between clenched teeth and a forced smile. I’m picturing top sizing the plastic ramekin of ketchup upside down on his head so it looks like one of those little hats on the tambourine playing monkey in that Stephen King movie. It’s near the end of my double shift. I’m starting to go snow blind from novelty stained glass lamps and bar lights reflecting off of shellacked wooden dining tables. I hate this job, with passion. Little kids run free from their parents around my feet. They’re flailing forks and knifes like mini-swashbucklers as I try and balance thirty pound trays of double-decker cheese fries and clam chowder. By the end of the night I’m picturing booting these little kids like field goals up into the novelty fish netting hanging from the ceiling. I have no idea how I used to play football and soccer for six to eight hours and be as chipper as a jack rabbit afterwards and now I can’t even pull a double at this little greasy spoon house of horrors without turning into some grouchy old miser who hates people. I hate this job, with fervor. I can’t wait until I cash out, so I can unwind while sitting on my ass, reclined in my car, the summer night’s breeze blowing through my window, zeppelin pouring from the radio. Ten minutes of this treatment and I’m right back to normal.
Two weeks into my waiting career I reach a tipping point. I set down my little lined pad near the order terminal and walk back into the kitchen during another night of poor tips and times. I catch the manager looking at me with a serious expression, “Brandt can I talk to you for a minute?” I oblige and we retire to a spot by the dishwashing station, out of the way from the constant stampede of busboys and waitresses with arms and tubs full of greased up, generic white flatware. “Brandt, there’s an African American couple who complained that you’re not serving them as well as their neighboring table with white guests. Now I’m not trying to imply anything but what’s going on here?” Anger and humor boiled from my depths.
“You’ve got to be freaking kidding me,” I retort, letting out a chuckle of disbelief. “Those two are sitting next to each other in the booth and every time I walk up I’ve got to watch him with his hand up her skirt! You want me kneel down next to the table and take their order? I don’t care what race they are man but I’m not comfortable watching a skin flick while I’m trying to work!”
He looked shocked, “Alright Brandt, I believe you. I just wanted to make sure, you know what kind of area this is.”
“What kind of area this is?” I thought. “I’m the racist?”
I made my way to the bar, leaning on the far side for a time out, to reflect on my situation. For whatever reason I’ve always had an ability to keep jobs merely out of pride, sometimes holding out to the bitter end, even as the wheels fall off, because I don’t want to quit. “I’m getting older,” I thought to myself, “maybe knowing when to fold and quitting aren’t the same things.” I thought about the guys in the history books, the great business men and everyone else I’ve learned about and admired in formal and private studies. I decided no one who always plays it safe every time makes it anywhere in this world, they suffer slowly with tied hands, drowning in monotony. They choose hope over action, and while it is foolish to act on a whim, it’s equally as foolish to stay stagnant because of a lack of faith.
I walked back into the manager’s office and grabbed Steve, the owner. He was a younger, pretty hip guy who I got along with all right. I told him I put in my two weeks. Without batting an eye he thanked me for putting in my time and told me thanks for helping out while I could. The turnover in these places is ridiculous and I didn’t wonder why. I walked back out to the bar.
One of the younger busboys, Erik, was there fooling around with his bus tub pretending to work with a few of his Hispanic buddies. Some nights I’d played soccer with the Hispanic guys and their families out in the parking lot after work. I liked them. They were down to earth, hard working family people who focused on living daily life. It’s good to be around people who know how to enjoy the small things. They reminded me of the year and a half I lived with my first girlfriend, we worked simple jobs and our paramount joy was found in a walk or a plate of steaming wontons. Simple is good. Erik on the other hand, already had one foot in the slammer and he was only 17. Erik was making things complicated. He was talking to his buddies about hustling pot and partying.
“Man, so what if I have to sell a little weed here and there to get by?” he finished up his conversation with them as I entered the scene. “So Brandt, why are you quitting anyway?”
“Have I ever told you how they catch monkeys in the Congo?” I asked him.
“Nah man, what the hell are you talking about?”
“Trappers in the jungle hollow out a coconut and carve a little hole in it just big enough for the monkey to fit his hand in. They screw the coconut to a tree with the hole facing up and put a handful of peanuts in it. The monkey smells the peanuts, reaches into the coconut, grabs the whole handful of peanuts, and tries to pull his hand out, but he can’t because now he’s making a fist and the hole’s too small! Monkeys aren’t stupid, they’re one of the “smarter” animals in the jungle, but he’s mesmerized by the tasty nuts in his hand. For hours he tries to pull his fist out of the hole constantly, but he won’t let go of the nuts. The trapper sneaks up to the monkey, who’s crazy and senseless at this point, and the trapper shoots him. Easy as 1-2-3. The monkey did all of the trapper’s work for him. He made the trapper rich with his blood and sweat. In the end he had nothing to show except a hand that was only full as long as it trapping him.” I shuffled back from foot to foot in my slip resistant Sketchers, trying to aid the aching in my feet.
“Yo, you’re crazy man. So what in the hell does that mean?” the busboy asked after he’s grown impatient with the riddle.
“It means never be afraid to let go of the peanuts.”
My final shift ended in two weeks. As I drove to the gym I pondered the hardships I’d faced thus far in my education. I needed money, but I didn’t want to ask my mom, she had enough to worry about with my other brothers and sisters. Dad was decently well off, but in his first attempt at launching a consulting firm, the venture quickly became unmanageable for him and the IRS was taking him for a ride. There were no other ideas as to where I should go. It was too early in my academic career to have gained the experience to land a descent internship and too late to go taking steps backwards, applying at another burger joint to make ends meet.
I could feel my lungs getting ready to bellow as I laced up my sneakers. First I’d take a lap outdoors, around the shopping center in the night air, to loosen things up before I went inside to finish up on the treadmill. I was finishing my last stretch of the outdoor portion of my workout. Heading back to the main doors I noticed a small, beat up Isuzu Rodeo slowing down as it pulled away from me out of the parking lot. I realized it was John, the owner of the club. He was a multi-millionaire and he drove around that beat-up little SUV everywhere he went, I guess wealthy people stay wealthy for a reason.
He rolled down his window as I jogged up to meet him. He said, “Who’s that?”
“It’s me Brandt. How you doing man?”
“Oh Brandt, what’s up boyyyy.? What are you doing? Running out here?” John is over fifty years old, yet he talks and acts the age of someone half his senior. He’s got an easy way with people and It’s obvious for most to see that the years have been kind to him even though his youthful mannerisms can make him seem somewhat eccentric.
“Yeah man, just trying to get my mile time down,” I wheezed trying to catch my breath.
“What are you doing it in? Like 7:30?” he asked.
“Yeah, like 7:30. More like 6:45 if I didn’t stop to talk,” I ribbed at him a little bit.
“So what have you been up to? How’s school?” John shows a genuine concern for most people that he meets, maybe because he was a minister for about a decade before heading back into the fitness industry. He was a likeable enough guy, so the sales aspect of the job came to him naturally.
“Yeah school is good. Just trying to find a job right now you know.”
Just then he looked like a light bulb went off in his head, then like he was rolling something over in his mind. “I’ll tell you what. My sales girl, you know Emily, just quit to go over to the FAA for a full time thing with benefits and everything. Why don’t you call me tomorrow and we’ll see if we can work something out?”
“Yeah man. I definitely will, that would be great,” I was excited.
“Alright bro I’ll see you tomorrow,” John sped off in his little beater.
I decided to take another lap around the gym.
Every day in my gym it’s the same thing. The place has a timeless quality, so much so I’m convinced if I moved half way around the world for decades and returned home I’d walk through the glass doors and hear the same thumping of feet and whirring of treadmill motors. The ventilation system would still be dumping piles of cool air onto the gym floor and the same bar bells would be clanking into their cradles while the smell of rubber flooring hung over the weight pit. Hundreds of hours I’ve spent in the gym, walking the floor during a workout, battling dust with the commercial vacuum cleaner, reclined in the leather office chair. The features of this place have been burned onto my conscious.
Contemporary design elements designed into the gyms décor create a non-threatening environment. This environment attracts what the fitness sales guys affectionately refer to as the “de-conditioned market”. Compiled into that tidy little demographic label are the house moms who have gained a little extra padding hustling junior to soccer practice, living on a diet delivered solely through a drive-through window. Ex-military men whose beer guts march horizontally, as their days of mandatory marching come to an end. Every other average Joe or Josephine with diabetes, heel spurs, arthritis and fifty to one-hundred and fifty extra pounds whose fitness resolutions begin ever year around December 31st and promptly end around January 5th.
Neutral colored green and purple pastel paint covers the walls. Ergonomic, friendly looking machines in powder coated silver stand in rows conceived to direct the human traffic through their routines. Mostly devoid of intimidating meat heads, you won’t hear too much slamming around of weights and frat house conversation in my gym. The weights are all rubberized, big red safety buttons on the wall and white lanyards with little green buttons can be pressed by the disabled or the panicked to alert 911 of emergencies. Members are typically cordial and clean up after themselves as top forty hits crank out low over the radio, pretty mundane stuff.
Leaning back against the reclining springs in the leather office chair I grab the days papers and begin to read them over as I crack open a bottle of water. Sipping off of the top of the bottle I lean back again and again, rocking, relaxing and thinking about how to tackle the day. One of our members, “Big John” as we call him, leans his head into my office, “Hey there old buddy. How’s the weather treating you old Brandt? We got dumped on pretty good uh?” John’s a great big ol’ Aussie and he carries his accent with him like a fifty pound trunk at the airport that he’s afraid to set down. John has wild red, sun bleached hair which makes him look like he’s just returned from spending years on safari in the Great Victoria Desert. John’s about as wide and stout as a compact car and my stereotyping mind pictures him playing rugby with a bunch of other Brits in his heyday, raising hell, chugging one liter cans of Fosters and shooting wallabies pinned in the headlights of chasing Land rovers . “Not too terrible I reply, how’s your car holding up in this awful stuff?” Since I’ve worked here John has single handedly help to raise my game in small talk, somewhat of a lost art in this day of twitter and skype. “Not too bad old boy, just had to dig myself out of an igloo this morning,” John chuckled as he replied. One time I confided in John that I hadn’t been accepted for a second round interview at a large firm which was pretty important to me. He knew I was going through a bummer and he said, “Those bloody human resources bastards are idiots. Worthless as tits on a bull they are, you need to knock down their door or they’ll have their way with you.” Eloquently put. The next day I put in just about a dozen calls and emails to the firms various departments. Two weeks later I had my interview. Crikey good show. John’s “Fosters Keg”, is what he refers to as his mid section, and it hasn’t shrunk an inch since he joined the gym. My friend and co-worker Brandon told me one day that for some people who come to the gym, the aspect of socializing and working out is the highlight of their day and when he first told me I couldn’t believe it. As time went on, I began to know many of these people. I do what I can to make their experience fun for them. Please god let the highlight of my life be retiring on a private beach in the Caribbean or South America, not sweating on some cold piece of steel in the middle of a strip mall.
“Hey, hey, man, how ya doin?” It’s “tall Tom”. He caws as he struts in the entrance, ducking to miss the commercial sized door jam. Literally, the guys like 7 feet even, when he runs on the treadmill he has to constantly crouch down and hit the keypad to change speeds, which makes him look like one of those pecking bird desk ornaments, eternally caught between cawing and pecking. Tall Tom sells his insurance, and I guess he’s pretty good at it too because I became his client after only a year of meeting him.
Jay’s the big man on campus around the gym, every time he walks though the doors he’s strutting like a rooster, making certain not to make eye contact with anyone while throwing sideways glances at the ladies. Jay’s a real estate developer with one hundred plus properties, some of which are in Barbados, so George, a struggling mortgage broker, is always right on Jay’s heels. They’re always batting it back and forth, reliving some old high school sports glories, arguing over ESPN highlights or whispering about some “young honey” that just joined up. My Gym is often the equivalent of one big office water cooler, working here has gotten me some sharp skills shooting the shit.
Next comes Alex the bank manager, then Jacob the loan officer then Julie the real estate broker and then a half dozen more like them that’ve offered me positions once I graduate. Note to self: re-open a gym after you’ve made it just for the networking opportunities. The usual flock of house wives rolls in. Most of them are well reserved, except for Jessica, a Brazilian lady who’s much more flirtatious than the rest. She floats from one man to the other in the gym like a butterfly choosing flowers, most of the men humor her but the novelty of her presence typically wears thin once her motives arise. Desperate housewives, one of the truly sad elements in my gym. She pops into the office, “We all want to know whether or not Bobby and Phil are offering free classes anymore and where we can sign up. Aren’t you here late Mr. Brandt, were you waiting just for me?” I laugh sarcastically, “Yeah I’m here just for you.” We small talk about working out and I listen to her same old story. She is eating bad again and put on weight. In two weeks she is going to a wedding or a reunion or a dinner with the in-laws, to be honest I don’t even keep track anymore. She needs to “look pretty quick.” I’m a gym rat. After these two years I could pass for a shrink.
Every person in my gym comes from a different walk of life, their motivations being vastly different. They have one thing in common, they all have bodies that have whispered to them, “time for change,” and we collect all of those insecurities. I used to think we only collected membership fees, but we collect more than that. We collect dashed and new romances, born again track stars, quitters of vice and winners of competitions. We collect new mothers, the silently determined, the outwardly apathetic and the willingly malleable. We also collect ones like me. And I’ve never been great at saying what my strengths and weaknesses are, so I’ll just tell you how I got here and you can judge for yourself.
“Can you bring me some more ketchup please? Sir! Sir!”
“Sure thing Sir,” I whistle from between clenched teeth and a forced smile. I’m picturing top sizing the plastic ramekin of ketchup upside down on his head so it looks like one of those little hats on the tambourine playing monkey in that Stephen King movie. It’s near the end of my double shift. I’m starting to go snow blind from novelty stained glass lamps and bar lights reflecting off of shellacked wooden dining tables. I hate this job, with passion. Little kids run free from their parents around my feet. They’re flailing forks and knifes like mini-swashbucklers as I try and balance thirty pound trays of double-decker cheese fries and clam chowder. By the end of the night I’m picturing booting these little kids like field goals up into the novelty fish netting hanging from the ceiling. I have no idea how I used to play football and soccer for six to eight hours and be as chipper as a jack rabbit afterwards and now I can’t even pull a double at this little greasy spoon house of horrors without turning into some grouchy old miser who hates people. I hate this job, with fervor. I can’t wait until I cash out, so I can unwind while sitting on my ass, reclined in my car, the summer night’s breeze blowing through my window, zeppelin pouring from the radio. Ten minutes of this treatment and I’m right back to normal.
Two weeks into my waiting career I reach a tipping point. I set down my little lined pad near the order terminal and walk back into the kitchen during another night of poor tips and times. I catch the manager looking at me with a serious expression, “Brandt can I talk to you for a minute?” I oblige and we retire to a spot by the dishwashing station, out of the way from the constant stampede of busboys and waitresses with arms and tubs full of greased up, generic white flatware. “Brandt, there’s an African American couple who complained that you’re not serving them as well as their neighboring table with white guests. Now I’m not trying to imply anything but what’s going on here?” Anger and humor boiled from my depths.
“You’ve got to be freaking kidding me,” I retort, letting out a chuckle of disbelief. “Those two are sitting next to each other in the booth and every time I walk up I’ve got to watch him with his hand up her skirt! You want me kneel down next to the table and take their order? I don’t care what race they are man but I’m not comfortable watching a skin flick while I’m trying to work!”
He looked shocked, “Alright Brandt, I believe you. I just wanted to make sure, you know what kind of area this is.”
“What kind of area this is?” I thought. “I’m the racist?”
I made my way to the bar, leaning on the far side for a time out, to reflect on my situation. For whatever reason I’ve always had an ability to keep jobs merely out of pride, sometimes holding out to the bitter end, even as the wheels fall off, because I don’t want to quit. “I’m getting older,” I thought to myself, “maybe knowing when to fold and quitting aren’t the same things.” I thought about the guys in the history books, the great business men and everyone else I’ve learned about and admired in formal and private studies. I decided no one who always plays it safe every time makes it anywhere in this world, they suffer slowly with tied hands, drowning in monotony. They choose hope over action, and while it is foolish to act on a whim, it’s equally as foolish to stay stagnant because of a lack of faith.
I walked back into the manager’s office and grabbed Steve, the owner. He was a younger, pretty hip guy who I got along with all right. I told him I put in my two weeks. Without batting an eye he thanked me for putting in my time and told me thanks for helping out while I could. The turnover in these places is ridiculous and I didn’t wonder why. I walked back out to the bar.
One of the younger busboys, Erik, was there fooling around with his bus tub pretending to work with a few of his Hispanic buddies. Some nights I’d played soccer with the Hispanic guys and their families out in the parking lot after work. I liked them. They were down to earth, hard working family people who focused on living daily life. It’s good to be around people who know how to enjoy the small things. They reminded me of the year and a half I lived with my first girlfriend, we worked simple jobs and our paramount joy was found in a walk or a plate of steaming wontons. Simple is good. Erik on the other hand, already had one foot in the slammer and he was only 17. Erik was making things complicated. He was talking to his buddies about hustling pot and partying.
“Man, so what if I have to sell a little weed here and there to get by?” he finished up his conversation with them as I entered the scene. “So Brandt, why are you quitting anyway?”
“Have I ever told you how they catch monkeys in the Congo?” I asked him.
“Nah man, what the hell are you talking about?”
“Trappers in the jungle hollow out a coconut and carve a little hole in it just big enough for the monkey to fit his hand in. They screw the coconut to a tree with the hole facing up and put a handful of peanuts in it. The monkey smells the peanuts, reaches into the coconut, grabs the whole handful of peanuts, and tries to pull his hand out, but he can’t because now he’s making a fist and the hole’s too small! Monkeys aren’t stupid, they’re one of the “smarter” animals in the jungle, but he’s mesmerized by the tasty nuts in his hand. For hours he tries to pull his fist out of the hole constantly, but he won’t let go of the nuts. The trapper sneaks up to the monkey, who’s crazy and senseless at this point, and the trapper shoots him. Easy as 1-2-3. The monkey did all of the trapper’s work for him. He made the trapper rich with his blood and sweat. In the end he had nothing to show except a hand that was only full as long as it trapping him.” I shuffled back from foot to foot in my slip resistant Sketchers, trying to aid the aching in my feet.
“Yo, you’re crazy man. So what in the hell does that mean?” the busboy asked after he’s grown impatient with the riddle.
“It means never be afraid to let go of the peanuts.”
My final shift ended in two weeks. As I drove to the gym I pondered the hardships I’d faced thus far in my education. I needed money, but I didn’t want to ask my mom, she had enough to worry about with my other brothers and sisters. Dad was decently well off, but in his first attempt at launching a consulting firm, the venture quickly became unmanageable for him and the IRS was taking him for a ride. There were no other ideas as to where I should go. It was too early in my academic career to have gained the experience to land a descent internship and too late to go taking steps backwards, applying at another burger joint to make ends meet.
I could feel my lungs getting ready to bellow as I laced up my sneakers. First I’d take a lap outdoors, around the shopping center in the night air, to loosen things up before I went inside to finish up on the treadmill. I was finishing my last stretch of the outdoor portion of my workout. Heading back to the main doors I noticed a small, beat up Isuzu Rodeo slowing down as it pulled away from me out of the parking lot. I realized it was John, the owner of the club. He was a multi-millionaire and he drove around that beat-up little SUV everywhere he went, I guess wealthy people stay wealthy for a reason.
He rolled down his window as I jogged up to meet him. He said, “Who’s that?”
“It’s me Brandt. How you doing man?”
“Oh Brandt, what’s up boyyyy.? What are you doing? Running out here?” John is over fifty years old, yet he talks and acts the age of someone half his senior. He’s got an easy way with people and It’s obvious for most to see that the years have been kind to him even though his youthful mannerisms can make him seem somewhat eccentric.
“Yeah man, just trying to get my mile time down,” I wheezed trying to catch my breath.
“What are you doing it in? Like 7:30?” he asked.
“Yeah, like 7:30. More like 6:45 if I didn’t stop to talk,” I ribbed at him a little bit.
“So what have you been up to? How’s school?” John shows a genuine concern for most people that he meets, maybe because he was a minister for about a decade before heading back into the fitness industry. He was a likeable enough guy, so the sales aspect of the job came to him naturally.
“Yeah school is good. Just trying to find a job right now you know.”
Just then he looked like a light bulb went off in his head, then like he was rolling something over in his mind. “I’ll tell you what. My sales girl, you know Emily, just quit to go over to the FAA for a full time thing with benefits and everything. Why don’t you call me tomorrow and we’ll see if we can work something out?”
“Yeah man. I definitely will, that would be great,” I was excited.
“Alright bro I’ll see you tomorrow,” John sped off in his little beater.
I decided to take another lap around the gym.
Monday, March 15, 2010
Profile of a Person
I think I'll probably just stick with my ol' grand-nanny. I may choose to go with my uncle though, he's another very colorful character, tyypical country good ol' boy, kind of reminds me of David Sedaris's brother in the piece we read.
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Sketch of Someone Performing an Activity
Rolling over in bed and grumbling to myself as the daylight pours into my window I hear the dogs barking and the tractor starting. “Oh my god,” I think to myself, “how and why does she do this every freaking morning?” Before I even opened my eyes I smelled the bacon, scrapple and toast of which each is either slathered or cooked in full fat butter. Who would guess that a breakfast fully capable of turning Jack Lalanne into Michael Moore after just one sitting could effectively rocket my seventy year old grandmother from sunup to sundown enduring all the toils and labors of a full time stable manager.
Peeking from behind my curtains, I check my phone messages and there she goes as usual, hobbling down the driveway like rural clockwork. A bale of hay bare hugged in her arms she teeters like a marionette down the driveway to the watering trough.
What keeps her going? To say it’s in her nature would be too easy. Some say it’s probably a combination of the memory of my granddad and her faith but I think I know that beyond that she’s also just a hardcore simplicity junkie. She’s in a constant state of that wholesome, accomplished feeling you get when you spend an entire day just getting things done. “Any work is good work,” she’ll say.
"Instead of going to the gym all the time you could do some more shoveling or something around here? That's a work out too, huh?" she'll rib at me from time to time. I tell her that the gym is a controlled environment and the work she enjoys invites injuries. "You're such a wimp", she laughs. I guess I can stomach that, coming from someone who makes Rosie the riveter look like Kim Kardashian. She is literally a 70 year old stunt woman. Just about once a week I hear a story about how she fell off a horse, or a tractor or a ladder. She'll never mention when she’s taken a tumble, but I can always tell by the little extra hobbles in her steps that send phantom chills through my body, like her DNA is trying to communicate to mine that she's a madwoman and needs to settle down before she's paralyzed.
(379 words)
Peeking from behind my curtains, I check my phone messages and there she goes as usual, hobbling down the driveway like rural clockwork. A bale of hay bare hugged in her arms she teeters like a marionette down the driveway to the watering trough.
What keeps her going? To say it’s in her nature would be too easy. Some say it’s probably a combination of the memory of my granddad and her faith but I think I know that beyond that she’s also just a hardcore simplicity junkie. She’s in a constant state of that wholesome, accomplished feeling you get when you spend an entire day just getting things done. “Any work is good work,” she’ll say.
"Instead of going to the gym all the time you could do some more shoveling or something around here? That's a work out too, huh?" she'll rib at me from time to time. I tell her that the gym is a controlled environment and the work she enjoys invites injuries. "You're such a wimp", she laughs. I guess I can stomach that, coming from someone who makes Rosie the riveter look like Kim Kardashian. She is literally a 70 year old stunt woman. Just about once a week I hear a story about how she fell off a horse, or a tractor or a ladder. She'll never mention when she’s taken a tumble, but I can always tell by the little extra hobbles in her steps that send phantom chills through my body, like her DNA is trying to communicate to mine that she's a madwoman and needs to settle down before she's paralyzed.
(379 words)
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