When I was twenty-one, I was a dedicated gym rat, and occasional fitness instructor. I went six days a week to a franchise of a certain chain gym, in a semi-industrial corner of San Francisco. I exclusively wore Lycra bicycle shorts. Friends making fun of me would stare at their asses in the mirror — apparently I did this horribly often. I was body-proud. I had been bodybuilding religiously ever since a very muscular boyfriend of mine told me that it was a sport that “required no talent.”
I had been taking a lot of dance classes around town and felt like I’d hit a wall. It was, I’d later discover, an ADHD thing: I was just terrible at memorizing combinations. I couldn’t think and move at the same time. So: I began lifting weights, and eating cod and medium chain triglycerides and handfuls of supplements that, the same boyfriend commented, “really increased the price of our urine.”
There was an interesting cast of characters who were regulars around the tall mirrors, weights and machines. There was a gigantic maniac of a man - let’s call him Dax. Dax was a serious bodybuilder in his late fifties, some kind of medical doctor, and a megalomaniac who advertised his medical practice on billboards all over town. When he wasn’t posing down in the pose-down room — an 360-degree mirrored section of the gym where bodybuilders could enjoy every possible angle of themselves, while posing — Dax could be found grunting against enormous stacks of steel plates with his comely girlfriend, “Sylvie,” an olive-skinned, black haired beauty not unlike an ethnic Patty Smith, with a lanky, St. Tropez kind of body — jutting hipbones and long legs. (No particular ass to speak of.) He put Sylvie on his billboards exchanging a flirty glance with a man in workout clothes and a towel around his neck, with the copy: “You Meet The Nicest People At (Dax’s medical facility),” giving the distinct impression that his medical center was was a Baby Boomer swinger scene.
Dax once responded to an electrical failure in the tanning bed by marching out into the middle of the gym in a g-string, in a frothing rage, and screaming like a Viking pillager, “WHERE IS MY SUN?”
I was good friends with an enormously muscled, extremely handsome Chinese actor. He was dating “Kayla,” one of the two “Jordan” sisters. Both were quite gorgeous, dedicated muscle-bunnies — electric blue-eyed girls with deep tanning bed tans, and they were extremely pneumatic. Their calves were sculpted into thick triangles, their biceps were ostrich eggs. (They had asses that looked like they were smuggling small bowling balls in their Lycras — you could almost rest your drink on them).
Kayla’s sister, “Kylie”, was more or less the de-facto queen bee of the gym. She had won something called the “Miss Natural Fitness” competition. I thought Kylie was a bit dim, in the few conversations I’d had with her, so I unkindly used to call her “Miss Natural Brain Damage” (but only to my boyfriend, who was also a bit dim.) She had a gargantuan, very handsome black boyfriend — together the two of them did “couples” bodybuilding competitions, and were, judging from the plaques that the gym proudly displayed, doing quite well at it. The boyfriend, “Marlon,” had a wolf-pack of enormous black guys always with him, and they seemed to do everything together - they were always pouring in and out of expensive sports cars in front of the gym, occasionally revving a superior engine for the sound.
Kylie was my aerobics instructor, and always in the gym when I was, it seemed. She was an indefatigable Energizer bunny. All the competitive bodybuilders were in the gym all day long. Rumor had it that Kylie and Marlon had been caught fucking more than once in the pose-down room. The gym was their native habitat — how were they to resist watching themselves rubbing washboard stomachs from every direction? They gym owners had to take the lock off.
About a year after I left that gym (and that boyfriend) to go to a different one, it was suddenly on the front page of the newspaper: Marlon had murdered Kylie. Kylie had tried to break up with him, and he wouldn’t let her. She was found naked and dead, during a bizarre standoff between Marlon and the police. Marlon held off the police for a while by holding a syringe full of steroids to his own neck, threatening to kill himself with it. Another gym member — a Buddhist cop — was called in to negotiate with Marlon. Finally Marlon jabbed himself in the neck and broke the needle off in it. The police closed in on him, and he was sent to jail. In the courtroom pictures of him, he wore enormous white bandages around his neck.
I called the Chinese actor. He was in tears; Kylie’s sister had broken up with him, since the family was so devastated. The gym ecosystem was shattered.
The murder ended up being at the center of a giant steroid ring bust — the maniac Dax was the apparent kingpin. I felt for all the gym rats that weren’t going to be getting their steroids anymore. Once the steroids left their systems, I had heard the men sometimes filled with estrogen and became emotional — in some cases, they grew breasts which had to be surgically corrected. In other cases, they proposed to girlfriends they never really cared about, because they felt excessively needy. “I could feel all the masculinity literally draining out of me,” one gay gym rat told me.
The women on steroids had other issues, I’d heard. Their voices became strange, low and dwarfish. Their clitorises grew to the size of walnuts; they got calcium deposits in their jaws and foreheads. It was a strange aesthetic they chased: brown striated muscle.
Before competition, I heard, the bodybuilders would drink soy sauce to dehydrate themselves and get that extra briskety look. It was far from feminine, unlike poor Kylie, who should at least be remembered for being a dedicated athlete and a real looker — her muscles were defined but not incredibly veiny. Still feminine.
One thing became certain: many of the men on steroids seemed to die quite young. Dax died soon after the bust. The last I spoke to the Chinese actor, he was bravely fighting cancer. I had heard that Marlon’s entourage of giants were understanding of the murder — even supportive of the decision Marlon had made to murder Kylie. It was, I guess, some Othello shit this crew carried deep in their psyches.
Marlon’s still in jail, as far as I know. I haven’t been to a gym in ages.
Rest in Power, Kylie. You were too pretty to let go of.
Mamas, don’t let your daughters date bodybuilders.
CintraW@gmail.com
Artwork: “Hanuman,” oil on linen, Cintra Wilson 2022.
Ok Cintra, why aren't you writing some cool throw-back pulpy style novel set in present time. Or even better, a screen play. Rip out the first draft in a fortnight, and wrangle to final over a month of bad diner food and coffee. We'll get Guy Rithie to direct.
Fantastic. I remember a gym in San Francisco where the showers were made of backlit frosted glass facing the open stairwell... one could never rinse properly, so I gave up fitness altogether.