The Strongman
3
Idol Worship
I’LL PROBABLY get back to talking about the lockdown and how it affected school and all. The remote learning environment on the laptop made home schooling supplemental. I did okay, but with just half the course curriculum. With that load, I could keep up. I was spending around six hours a day working out. As predicted, I ended up taking two years to finish tenth grade as Mikey went zooming past me. But I actually got it. I wasn’t unable to learn. As Mom predicted, Mikey graduated with my class in 2023 and I officially became a member of the class of 2024. And a cheerleader.
Then, my senior year, I met the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. It wasn’t long after my one lone date with Dana that I arrived for cheerleader practice and saw Tara White with Coach Cook. I was instantly in love. I’d seen her in the Acrobatic Gymnastics World Championships in Geneva. You wouldn’t believe the obscure sports channel I had to subscribe to in order to watch that on my laptop. It was beautiful.
But Tara had been injured in the dynamic routine qualifying round and was carried off the floor on a stretcher. There’d been a flurry of stories about the extent of her injuries—unknown—over the next several days, and then the story dropped out of the news until it was reported that her partner, who had dropped her in the routine, had passed away.
The woman I saw talking to Coach Cook looked far more elegant, refined, and beautiful than the little girl I’d seen in the competition three years ago. She also sat regally in her wheelchair. I wanted to rush over and bow at her feet.
I restrained myself when Penny grabbed my arm with a grip hard enough to leave a bruise.
There was nothing between Penny and me except our cheer partnership. She had a boyfriend. She was still possessive. I have to tell you that Penny wasn’t the only flyer on the cheer squad. She was the smallest and did some of the most difficult tricks with me, but two other girls were often the ones who mounted my shoulders or stood on my hands. I was the all-round base for the team. If all three girls were flying, or standing on top, the other two were each supported by two more girls.
I didn’t cheer at ballgames or other sports events. From the first day I walked onto the gym floor with the cheer team, it was made clear I was there for their competitive routines where they did more acrobatics than when cheering at a game. I wasn’t the only one. There were sixteen of us on the competition team. Usually, only five cheered at a sporting event. They were the ones who bounced up and down with their boobs flying and slept with the football players. No thanks.
“Paul, come here, please. Penny, you, too. Flyers and bases,” Coach called to us.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said as we ran up to stand before her.
“I’d like to introduce you to our new acrobatics coach,” she said.
“Tara White,” I finally broke in. I was too excited to see the phenomenal acrobat in person. “I was so afraid you wouldn’t survive three years ago. I’m so happy to see you.”
“Well, you have a fan,” Coach Cook laughed. “For the rest of you, this is Tara White, one of the world’s top acrobatic gymnasts until a tragic accident at the World Championships three years ago. She has recently relocated to Minneapolis and has volunteered to help coach our cheer squad this year. She will work primarily with our five bases and three flyers, but will have choreography suggestions for the entire team.”
“Happy to meet you, Miss White,” Penny said politely.
I thought Tara’s smile was a little forced. She didn’t really look much older than any of us. When I did the calculations, I finally decided she wasn’t more than a year older than I was. Like all the tops in acrobatic gymnastics mixed pairs, she’d looked twelve when I saw her perform. I glanced at Penny. She would be eighteen soon and still looked twelve, as well. Tara looked much more mature.
We moved to a separate area where Tara rolled her chair to work with the acrobatic cheerleaders. We all did tumbling and flips, but only the eight of us did formations that involved two levels, lifts, and throws. We’d had some discussion as to whether we could do a three-tier pyramid formation, but hadn’t come up with an answer. We weren’t far into demonstrating our moves when one of the girls asked Tara if she’d teach us a pyramid. I saw her heave a big sigh and drop her head.
When she raised it, there was fire in her eyes.
“Paul, would you be kind enough to remove your shirt, please?”
I was really surprised. Our uniforms weren’t even form-fitting. There were cheerleading rules about what we could wear and high schools were instructed to de-emphasize form-fitting tops and ultra-short skirts. There were specific rules about what panties girls had to wear and instructed men to have full-length bottoms. We all had to wear specific shoes.
But I’d probably do anything for Tara White. I pulled my shirt off.
Since I didn’t dress with the girls, I couldn’t think of a time when any of them had seen me bare-chested. It was a little embarrassing—not that I have anything to be ashamed of in that department. There were a few gasps or catches of breath. I’d been training in gymnastics for six and a half years now. I was not the skinny runt I was in seventh grade. I had a six-pack and nice set of pecs and guns.
“Ladies, I detect that you have not seen this shape revealed before. I want you to notice the musculature and the core strength. Paul, please bring your partner to your shoulders so we can see the muscles at work,” Tara said.
Penny stepped up to me and did a stairstep mount to my shoulders. When she stood up, I held her ankles next to my ears.
“That move requires every muscle in the upper body, and several in the lower body I won’t ask Paul to show you,” she said. There were some giggles. “So, when any of you can show me comparable musculature and control, I’ll discuss building a pyramid with you. You can gain that strength, by the way, by working in your trios on artistic formations. Anyone care to show me now?”
“Hardly,” said one of the girls.
“You can come down now, Penny,” Tara said.
Penny gave a little bounce and jumped off my shoulders into my arms. I set her on the ground.
“I want you to know that this is what happens to a flyer when her base drops her.” Tara used her hands to lift one of her legs and then let it drop. It was completely limp. She maneuvered it back onto the footrest of her chair.
“Oh, shit. I mean… I’m sorry, Miss. I didn’t mean to be vulgar,” Penny said. She turned and looked me up and down.
“It’s something I say on a regular basis,” Tara said.
“What happened to your base?” one of the other girls asked.
“He killed himself rather than come to visit me,” Tara said. “I’m not telling you any of this to make you feel bad. It’s been three years since the accident and I’m more mobile than most paraplegics. I have strong arms and torso muscles, and even limited use of my legs. I want you to know, though, that I am deadly serious when I talk about the importance of your strength and support for each other. Now, let’s work on some other formations you can do with a top and a base—or two bases.”
During the COVID pandemic—I said I was going back to that—I didn’t have to go to school. I mean at school. We all thought everyone was going back in the fall, but the damned plague just kept on and on. It was fine with me. Mom and Dad had agreed to help me at home for my sophomore year, even if it took two years. And it did.
Dad and I finished converting the garage into a gym for me so I could work out when I couldn’t go to the gym. The gym was permitted to open in June, but on a limited basis. My time there was strictly for coaching, then I had to leave so they could get someone else in. I averaged only two hours a day. But I had a six-hour training regimen.
Dad borrowed a set of parallel bars, a pommel horse, and a set of rings that were being stored at the university. The rings were strictly for exercises, not for practicing a routine on. The rafters in the garage weren’t high enough to do a routine. I practiced rings, vault, high bar, and floor exercises at the gym. I also got a pegboard and we laid a wrestling mat he salvaged on the floor.
Dad and I installed a metal carport from Home Depot in front of the garage and he made it clear that I was responsible for seeing that snow was cleared between the door and the carport and out the driveway to the street. We had about eight inches of snow on the ground from November through February, but it started melting off then with only a few storms through April. I never stopped to think about what all this was costing my parents, or to make a special point of thanking them until much later.
Between being locked down inside and my time in the gym or garage, I didn’t have anything really to personally spend money on, so my allowance just got dropped in a dresser drawer. I had no idea how important that would become in the future. I was really lucky to have parents who were employed at a pretty high level and believed in providing for their kids. I’ve often mentioned that to them as I got older.
As soon as I had a space, I moved my laptop to the garage with me. When I took breaks from working out, I did my assignments for the day. I took classes on the school’s remote access, like Mikey did, and we studied some together. Mom and Dad both checked over my homework each evening to be sure I was doing the studies and not just ‘hanging from the rings.’
I couldn’t do routines on the rings in the garage. There just wasn’t enough height. I could do exercises on them, but… People don’t realize when they watch a competitor on the rings, his coach is giving him a boost up to the rings which are hung 8'2" off the floor and 20" apart. But the rings are hung from straps anchored 18' off the floor. If you figure the angles and relative force it would take to press your body into a cross with your arms straight out, you’d be pushing the rings roughly five or six feet apart. You’d be forcing the straps out at a much higher angle if they were only anchored three feet above your head. You’d practically have to be touching the anchor.
Mom made me figure this all out in a geometry lesson. She’s done that with a lot of the equipment. It was some of the stuff I understood best!
The rings in competition are called ‘still rings.’ That’s as opposed to swinging rings, I guess. Part of the artistry is that the gymnast is supposed to do his entire routine without having the rings swinging from that eighteen-foot-high anchor.
I tell you all this to explain why, three years later when I was a senior and told to take off my shirt, my chest and arms were something to look at.
But… Oh yeah. Back in 2020 when I was doing two-thirds or more of my exercises in the garage, I was just building upper body strength on the rings, not doing a routine.
The same was true with the pegboard. Think of approaching a climbing wall. You find a new handhold and pull yourself up with your foot pressure and the pull of your arms. Two differences between that and the pegboard. First, you don’t use your legs at all. Your feet are dangling. Second, there aren’t multiple handholds. There are multiple holes for the pegs. To move up or across the pegboard, you have to pull one peg out of the hole while you are dangling from the other, then put the peg into the next hole and pull yourself up on it.
There’s just enough height in our garage that I can do a limited routine on the parallel bars or the pommel horse, except I have to be careful with dismounts. Have to be careful regardless because I’m working without a spotter. I don’t have a death wish.
Dad took us all to the university to get vaccinated in September. We were back a month later for the second dose. It didn’t look like people were taking it seriously, though, and cases started increasing again. You guessed it, the gym was closed again. Coach Dawson met with me by video link every day for the rest of the year.
There was a big protest to demand businesses reopen just before Christmas. The gym didn’t. It wouldn’t have made a difference to me because Mom and Dad wouldn’t have let me go anyway. They took the whole warning system seriously. That didn’t prevent Dad from coming down with the damn plague right at Christmas. He was home, but Mom was the only one who ever saw him when she took him meals in his bedroom where he isolated. We all wore masks in the house—and everywhere else. I know the masks were to protect other people, but even with our precautions, it was always possible we’d be carrying the virus and inadvertently expose someone else.
Because he was vaccinated, Dad’s case was mild and in two weeks he tested negative and went back to work. Too bad for his end-of-year holiday break. Mikey didn’t return to school yet either, even though they were doing some kind of alternating days thing so only half the students were in class at a time. It actually looked like I might be keeping up with my class for a while. Except it was only in three subjects. I was considerably behind in everything else.
It wasn’t until May of 2021 that I returned to the gym. Coach Dawson was on me from day one. I’d maintained my body building and stretching, but was way behind on my routines. And there were competitions coming up in June. He really wanted me to test and see if I qualified for Senior Elite.
I didn’t. I would compete at the Junior Elite level for the summer and some of that was a stretch. I worked out nearly every day, doing my routines with a spotter. The gymnasts took turns doing their routines and spotting for each other. We worked hard and even though I didn’t yet qualify for Senior Elite, I spent my workouts with the high school team at the gym. It looked like there wouldn’t be a team the next year at that level. I was the only male gymnast working up to that level from our gym. The other guys I knew had graduated or didn’t stick with things through the shutdown.
Things were almost what I called normal by January of 2022. I was going to the gym every day for six or seven hours. Then I studied for four or five hours, doing the lessons Mom had left for me. She’d returned to work, but was the primary parent monitoring my studies. I think she was depending on Mikey to help keep track of things.
Regardless, I was told that I needed to return to school in the fall. I’d managed to get far enough that I was considered a junior with a lightened workload so I could continue to train. The trade-off was that I needed to join the cheerleaders.
“Hey! I know you have to put your hand there to support me, but you don’t need to squeeze,” Penny complained to me after a lift.
“I didn’t mean to,” I said. “Really. It was just kind of a reflex.”
“Boys! If I brushed a pacifier across your lips, you’d start to suck, wouldn’t you?”
I had to think about that. Well, maybe.
“I guess, I’m sorry.”
“Paul, you’re okay, but every girl on the team thinks you could force yourself on her. We know you’ve got muscles that are ten times what we have. Just try to make sure there’s no reason for any of us to be afraid of you,” Penny said.
“I wouldn’t hurt any of you! I’d never try to force myself on you. Jeez! What kind of asshole do you think I am?”
“I hate to be the one to tell you this, but you are a really strong and not very smart jock. At one point or another you have to touch nearly every girl on the squad. Some of us have to let you put your hand on our butts or inside our thighs or practically across our breasts. We just don’t need you to be squeezing when you do.”
“Oh, shit. I didn’t even realize it.”
“What? You don’t realize you have our butts or our breasts in your hands? Be real!”
“No! I mean… You three are like little girls. That’s the only reason I can lift you like that. What do you weigh? Eighty pounds? How would I even know I had my hand on your breast? How is it different than anyplace else on your ribs? Hell, I feel guilty if I even have a stray thought about one of you—like I’m a pedophile. I’m not interested in any of you like that.”
“Strangely, that makes me feel more insulted than comforted. I am not a little girl. So, I’m small. I’m seventeen years old. I’m a woman. Stop thinking of me as a little girl!”
“Wait! I don’t want to think of you like that! I don’t want to always be wondering if my hand is on your breast. I don’t want to think of your butt as more than what you sit on when I’m picking you up. Jeez! You want me to think of you sexually? No!”
“Oh, crap! That sure turned out backwards. I started out telling you not to think of me that way and then I complain that you aren’t. Okay. Just, for what it’s worth, no matter how you think of me, remember I’ve got a boyfriend and I’m just plain not available.”
“I…”
“Don’t say it! Even when it’s what we want, we don’t want to hear you actually say we aren’t desirable.”
“I will never in a million years understand girls,” I said.
Which brings me back to Tara White.
Believe me, when I saw her compete, I thought she looked like a twelve-year-old with too much makeup on. But when I saw her in the gym, I got a completely different impression. For one thing, I would never mistake exactly where her boobs were. They were right there. The rest of her frame was still slim, but I understood the signs of atrophy in her legs. She was strong and the top half was absolutely gorgeous. I think her face had matured, too, and she didn’t wear as much makeup. Of course, she wasn’t performing. No one wears that much makeup unless they’re performing.
Except Brenda Wilson in my civics class.
I remember when I first met her when we were freshmen, I thought she was kind of cute, but she had red hair like a burning bush and enough freckles to populate Manhattan. And I think she was really self-conscious about them. Guys weren’t always kind to girls who were a little different. I commented on it because I thought she was kind of cute and Dad told me that redheads got a freckle for every soul they ate, so to be careful. Well, I never got around to really talking to her after I asked Cathy to the ballgame and dance and found out we weren’t supposed to do that until we were sixteen.
Then when I came back to school as a junior, Brenda was a senior and had gone through as much of a transformation as I had. She was nearly eighteen, had an absolutely stellar figure, had colored her hair black, and found some kind of makeup that covered her freckles completely. She used a lot of makeup to get what girls called ‘the goth look.’ Pale skin and dark outlines around her eyes and lips.
Of course, at this point, I was a year behind her in school and she didn’t even know who I was anymore, if she ever had.
When Tara asked me to take my shirt off and pointed out my physique to the other cheerleaders, I got a real shiver of pleasure. I think even Penny was a little awed when she took my hand to mount up to my shoulders. And Tara was going to work with us to develop some new routines. This was going to be a great year!
At least that was one thing to look forward to.
I’d competed at the Senior Elite level the previous summer—2023—and did okay. I didn’t win any medals and I’d certainly not scored high enough to qualify for the upcoming Olympic trials. I’d asked Coach Dawson about entering some of the competitions after the first of the year that could qualify me, but he didn’t hold out much hope for me this year.
“You could compete at the Nationals in Fort Worth or at the Winter Cup in Louisville, but you’d need to place on the podium to get an invitation to the Olympic trials. Remember all the gymnasts who have been competing in college will declare themselves as pros before those competitions and will have an edge on you.”
I was disappointed, but more determined than ever to get there. I was doing well, but I wasn’t at that level of competition yet.
So, I was excited to have a real competitor at the World Games level work with Penny and me. It took me a while to get Penny on board.
“Well, like what, for example?” she asked when I’d suggested upping our routine a bit.
“You know how I hold you up in the air on one hand?” I said.
“Yeah. Thank you for having not squeezed my butt lately.”
“You’re welcome. It wouldn’t be an issue, though, if you were standing on my hand instead of sitting on it,” I said.
“If I was… You mean you could lift me, or support me while I was standing on your hands? Really?”
“For me, it would be about the same as you sitting there. It would all be about your balance, really. I mean, you weigh the same up there whether you’re sitting or standing.”
“I’d be up… I mean… My feet would be… um… around six and a half feet off the ground. That’s a long way down!” Penny said.
“I think that’s why Coach White was emphasizing the importance of not being dropped by your base. We could do all kinds of formations if we worked on it. And I know neither Coach Cook nor Coach White would ever allow us to attempt something like that without a spotter,” I said. “Preferably a couple of them.”
“That could be kind of cool. Okay. I’m up for it. Geez! Don’t ever drop me.”
“I promise I won’t.”
Tara White was a good coach and knew exactly where to start us. She had me lie down on the mat with my hands palm up on either side of my head. Then Penny stepped onto my hands supported by spotters on either side. It took us a few tries before we succeeded, but eventually, I was able to rotate my forearms to a vertical position with her standing on my palms. Can’t tell you how many times she started to lose her balance and bailed on me. Fortunately, she only jumped on me once.
Penny had been all concerned about me squeezing her butt when I held her up, which I’d managed to discipline myself not to do. But this was a completely different challenge. When I raised her up on my hands I was looking straight up between her legs. Well, that was a view I’d imagined a few times—with other girls—but I never actually saw the shape of that crease right above my face. Maybe three feet above my face. I actually saw what was known as a camel toe.
The first time I became truly aware of what I was seeing, my lower body started to respond. When she jumped off of me, I got up and made an excuse to leave the gym and use the bathroom. I stayed in there until Paul Junior managed to relax.
Of course, working with Penny wasn’t enough. Lana and Melina wanted to work with me, too. There was a bit of competition developing to see who would get to be the lead flyer. And the view of all three girls was inspiring. From this angle, I couldn’t see that they looked as young as they appeared from the top. I spent more time with my eyes closed while we were working on that move than I care to remember.
From having them stand on my hands with my elbows on the floor, we progressed to me pressing them up until my arms were fully extended. By that time, I was working hard enough not to notice what was in my hands. I was basically just bench-pressing a hundred pounds. In fact, Coach White had me raise and lower them several times.
All this took a couple of weeks before we really worked on any cheer formation that involved lifting the girls to a stand on my hands. I was wondering if we were ever going to progress to something we could really use.
And then one day, my world changed. I walked into the Hennepin Gym to start warming up and saw Tara working out on the mat. She motioned me over and I sat next to her to do stretches.
“I came to Minneapolis for just one reason, Paul,” she said. “To work with you.”
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
