Peeled
Who is at fault when bodily perfection is everyone's goal? Max Szredni's short story shows the many pitfalls of pushing your body -- and others -- to physical extremes.
Jolly dies on the gym floor in front of you, ten weeks out from your first bodybuilding competition, dies with sweaty armpits and the worst BO, dies with a grey face and bile in his goatee, dies with a crowd of other trainers around him, who watch him die, die with sweaty armpits and the worst BO, except Axl, who has his eyes closed and takes Jolly’s pulse from the wrist, Axl, who says over and over, Jolly’s dead, Jolly’s dead; dies with your hands on his chest, over his heart, smooshing it to the beat of the gym’s techno music, AED thrown aside, kaput after the first shock—Paramedics say to keep compressing, says Taryn, who’s on the phone with dispatch. So you continue to smoosh; smoosh and smoosh.
When Jolly dies, you have fresh in your system 750 mg of Testosterone Enanthate (for gains), 50 mg of Winstrol (for gains), 30 mg of Dianabol (for gains), 350 mg of Trenbolone Acetate (for hardness, edge), 6 IU of Human Growth Hormone (for recovery/gains), 6 IU of insulin (for glucose absorption/the pump), 50 mg of Ephedrine (for fat loss/gusto), 0.5 mg of Arimidex (to prevent breast growth), 20 mg of Telmisartan (to manage blood pressure), and a multivitamin (for health). Also being metabolized are the three chicken breasts, four-and-a-half cups of rice, and half-litre of black coffee you’ve consumed that day, so far, as well as the yogurt-oat-protein powder-peanut butter smoothie you chugged right before Jolly’s session.
You are 272 lbs, 9% body fat, and your chest has begun to ache toward the end of your daily treadmill sessions—but not as bad as your left glute aches when you sit down after the cardio, its flesh the pincushion for your injections. Sometimes, at night, when you rub numbing cream into this glute, you hear applause, stadiums of fans who clap and cheer, and you need to tell yourself to focus, to not get ahead of yourself; Focus, champ, you tell yourself, and then you rub the numbing cream into your glute. Focus, champ, is what you now tell yourself, too, with your hands over Jolly’s heart. Focus, focus, focus; smoosh, smoosh, smoosh.
Over the phone, Jolly’s wife, assures you it wasn’t your fault, that Jolly was old, old and liked his cigars, liked his cigars, his gin, his Berliners, his Viagra—but she sues you anyway, Jolly’s wife does, the morning of his funeral, nine weeks out from your show; she sues you for one hundred times what you earn yearly as a trainer; sues you for more money than you’ve banked over the course of your entire life…so you don’t attend Jolly’s funeral, even though you liked Jolly, liked him a lot, liked him because he made you laugh, made everyone laugh, which was why they called him Jolly. No, you go to the gym and hit arms instead, hit arms harder than you’ve ever hit arms—thrash your biceps till they’re so engorged you can barely straighten your elbows; demolish your triceps till they’re so inflamed you can hardly straighten them either, so they now rest at obtuse angles at your sides, neither bent, nor straight, just gorgeous. When you flex your triceps in the mirror, they look like horseshoes, horns turned skyward for luck. You add an extra set to each exercise, in honour of Jolly, Jolly’s bile-coated goatee, Jolly’s grey face, Jolly, dear Jolly, dear Jolly who made you laugh.
At work, eight weeks out, when you tell Sgt. Tanner, your strongest client, about Jolly, he tells you his squad once broke through a suspect’s front door and found a trail of shit that went from the suspect’s bathroom to his bedroom, where they discovered the suspect dead, naked, and on all-fours, ass in the air, shit on his ass, his body blackened and hardened and covered in flies, so many flies, and then one of the cops poked the suspect with her shotgun and all the gases in his innards detonated, detonated so forcefully a chunk landed in Sgt. Tanner’s mouth—All of this to say, there’s worse ways to go, Sgt. Tanner assures you before showing you a picture of the exploded corpse.
When you tell Abigail, your most intelligent client, about Jolly, she says she once worked out so hard she got temporary amnesia—forgot where she was and who she was for nearly an hour (All of this to say, things happen, she says, especially as we get older). When you tell Elliot, your most elderly client, about Jolly, he blinks his rheumy eyes at the dumbbell in his hand and asks you if his knuckles look like elephant knees. Then you head home for the day, home sweet home, where in your mailbox you find a letter informing you your court date’s set for the day after your show.
Seven weeks out, your insurance company still can’t decide if what happened to Jolly was negligence or not, but confess CCTV footage is not kind to your cause—because your phone, your damn phone, your damn phone was in your hand when Jolly collapsed, with your damn face tilted toward the screen. But your damn phone was only in your hand because Jolly was on one of his notoriously long rest breaks, the long breaks he took whenever he did lunges, breaks that could last five minutes, five whole minutes, five minutes of panting and perspiring and yowzas and woowees, so you checked your phone for a second, just a second, because Jolly seemed fine, was breathing hard, yes, but seemed fine, so you took a few seconds to look at your phone while he panted and perspired and woowee’d on his workout bench…and because your eyes were on your phone, you didn’t immediately see his head slump, his body fold, his sweat rain down on the tiles—and you didn’t hear him spit up that bile either, gym radio too loud to hear him spit up that bile. So now the insurance company can’t decide if you’re liable, all because you took twenty seconds to look at your abs…or maybe it was a minute; maybe that’s how long it was.
Six weeks out, your insurance company determines you’re at fault and will therefore not cover you if you’re found guilty of negligence. You take a sick day and spend the afternoon in front of your computer, scrolling through photographs of yourself from the pre-steroid days, back when you were young, svelte, and human-looking. In your teens, you had been a runner, a world class runner, able to run marathons in less than two-and-a-half hours, half-marathons in less than sixty-five minutes, and 10Ks in less than thirty minutes…and then one day, you decided to run a hundred kilometres, just to see if you could do it, and you did it, in eight hours, you did it, you ran a hundred kilometres, ran the whole way, and after you ran that hundred kilometres, your dad called you champ, and your mom baked you a cake that said CHAMP on it, CHAMP scrawled in gold icing, and even though your mom and dad are gone now, just like Jolly, you still remember that cake, twenty years later, still remember how it had the word CHAMP on it, scrawled in gold icing; and you also remember the way your knee swelled after you ate that cake, because it turned out that hundred-kilometre run had ruptured your meniscus, ruptured it so bad that when it eventually healed, it healed wrong, all wrong, and you never could run again the same way afterward, even though your doctor said it was healed, as healed as it would ever be—so you lost your scholarship and your girlfriend, and your dad never called you champ again, and your mom never baked you another cake with the word CHAMP on it, even though you had run all that way.
Five weeks out and calories are now down to 3200 kcal/day, with daily macros set at 400 g of protein, 300 g of carbs, and 45 g of fat. Anabolics down too, replaced by diuretics—time to lean out and dry out and get your muscles grainy. But all this leanness and dryness has you hungrier and thirstier than you’ve ever been—so hungry and thirsty you need to take Propranolol and Lorazepam to keep calm at work, and then Zolpidem at night to fall asleep. But the Zolpidem doesn’t keep Jolly away, those dreams of Jolly; doesn’t keep away his grey face, his bile-coated goatee, his cigars, his Berliners, his Viagra.
You meet your lawyer at the coffee shop, four weeks out from the competition, and you can’t understand the words that whizz out of his mouth, too tired, hungry, thirsty, dizzy, and dumb to understand his whizzing words, so you ask him to simplify, to slow down and simplify; to make his words stupider for your slow and simple brain. He shuts his briefcase, rubs his eyes, says, We can’t fucking win. I’m sorry—we just can’t.
Three weeks out: you now lift in oversized sweatshirts to hide your pump, with the necks cut out so your traps pop through the top, hinting at what’s underneath, at this body that’s been under construction for twenty years, this body you’ve kept off stage, all to yourself; this body that up until six months ago seemed destined for obscurity, before you glanced at yourself in the bathroom mirror one morning and saw what you saw: that guy—that guy who since his divorce couldn’t keep a woman in his life for longer than a month; that guy whose daughter called another man Dad and hid behind her mom’s legs on the rare occasions you were allowed to visit her, until her mom could convince her you weren’t an ogre; that guy who couldn’t afford a car or brand-name foods—but had 23-inch biceps, forearms like Popeye, and just enough courage to wear a thong in front of a crowd.
During your last leg day, two weeks before the show, you start to see dots, a grid of black dots, and then the blood’s out of your head and you don’t exist for a moment—no more you, no more competition, no more legalese, no more Jolly—and then you open your eyes and Axl’s bent over you, his smelling salts under your nose, your barbell behind him, caught on the rack’s safety arms. Axl pats you on the shoulder and says, Take ‘er easy, champ—calls you champ Axl does, and that slows your heart a bit.
One week out, they move your hearing to the same day as your show, so you call Jolly’s wife to beg her to un-sue you—but the call goes to voicemail, so you beg her there instead, beg her to change her mind, you cry and you beg, you cry and you say sorry, you cry out the little water left in your body, and say sorry, sorry about Jolly, for what happened to Jolly, for getting distracted by your abs and not being able to smoosh him back to life; Sorry it all went wrong, you say. Then her voicemail beeps to let you know you’re out of time. And now a hammer’s in your hand and holes are in your wall and your bathroom mirror’s shattered and your computer’s smashed and your plates are splintered and your glassware’s busted and your cutlery’s on the floor, kitchen drawers lolling like tongues—and here come the sirens, here come the cops, another lawyer needed now, more legalese on its way. In your holding cell, you sleep, just lie there and sleep, and even though you’ve taken no pills, it’s the best sleep you’ve had in a long while.
On stage, illuminated by downlight, the other competitors stare at you in all your oiled/spray-tanned glory; stare at your jutting biceps, your striated triceps, your Clydesdale haunches, your Manta Ray back; stare at your vascular forearms, your bulbous calves, your bowling ball delts, your protruding pecs. They can’t look away; no one can.
Max Szredni is a Vancouver, British Columbia–based writer and small business owner working in the holistic health and wellness field. He graduated from the University of Victoria in 2019, where he studied psychology and fiction. Outside of writing, his passions include breathwork, hiking, athletics, and travel. You can find him @pacific_pulse_wellness
Terrific story, really good read.