The Strongman
11
On to Nationals
JENNIFER WAS EXPANDING our routine, based on the letter she’d received from the qualifying committee. They suggested that with the lack of jumps Tara could do, we emphasize more of the throws that look like she’s jumping. We worked on a new entry for our cannonball mount and tried going into a pike position double salto. The pike position worked well for this because as soon as I launched her, Tara could grasp her legs and hold them in the proper position. I caught her as she landed in front of me.
We got pretty good at the move, but we still had to figure out how to work it into our routine. Another thing the committee said in their letter to Jennifer was that even though our storytelling was good for a normal routine, we needed to up our artistry even more to compensate for the lack of elements that required Tara to land unsupported and to propel herself in a jump.
When I first started training, Coach Dawson had drilled me on building my strength with body weight. I did pushups, pull-ups, sit-ups, knee bends, and any other exercise that used my body weight. Most of the men’s events depended largely on upper body strength, so my chest and shoulders and core really developed well. Of course, that didn’t mean I ignored my lower body. The vault and floor exercises depended on lower body strength as much as the rings and high bar depended on upper body strength.
Tara had been in great physical condition at the time of her accident, but after that she went through a long and arduous process of regaining control over her lower body—a process that still continued. She didn’t slack off on her upper body work, though, and was almost as well-developed in the torso and shoulders as I was. Um… With the rather attractive addition of her breasts that she said grew during her time of enforced rest. Believe me, I’d never mistake whether I had hold of her boobs or not. I’d touched them a few times while we were making out and they were spectacular.
Oh. I wasn’t intending to get side-tracked there. I just… I’m a nearly-nineteen-year-old male. What else can I say?
I meant to talk about her upper body strength. There was a real difference between what she could do with her arms and shoulders and what Madison could do. Madison depended on her legs to get her in flight as much as she depended on me launching her. Tara helped in the mounts and throws with her arms. In our balance routine, she could slowly push herself up as I lifted her into a handstand, but in the dynamic routine, she could use a slight bounce on the sprung floor while I supported her to give her enough momentum to vault into position with her arms. It was pretty amazing. Her core strength was phenomenal!
I wasn’t clear on exactly the nature of her injury. Jennifer said the extent of her recovery was off the charts. She wasn’t expected to walk again at all. It was a sign of her determination and possibly stemmed from her upset at her partner’s suicide. I just knew that I loved her all the more for it.
Love. I didn’t think I’d ever actually said that out loud to her. Everything else in my life took a back seat to what I felt about her. But was that love? How were you supposed to know? I knew what lust was. I wanted her. I wanted to spend more time caressing her breasts while we kissed and then go further. I wanted to make love. That was my lust. I was willing to wait until she was ready. I guess that was my love.
I kept working with Tara every afternoon. I no longer had to take time out to go to cheer practice. I was through with them. I went to my classes in the morning, worked with Tara all afternoon, and studied all evening. My work with Tara also included massage instruction. Jennifer said that most certifications required 500 hours of practice. I was getting about an hour a day. And then things changed a little. I went into the massage room after knocking as usual and found another person on the table.
“It’s time you started working on more bodies than just your girlfriend’s,” Jennifer said. “We’ve posted a notice in the front of the gym asking for volunteers for a massage. You’d be amazed at how fast our schedule has filled up. Today, your first new client is Coach Anders. He’s used to giving you instruction on rings and high bar, so he’ll be providing feedback as you work on him. I will continue to be in the same room, monitoring your progress and giving instruction as needed.”
“Welcome, Coach,” I said, moving to the side of the table. “Ready to relax?”
“Bring it on,” he chuckled. “We’ve been talking about expanding the services here in the gym and are beginning to attract more adults.”
“That’s good. I wouldn’t want to be working on any children,” I said. “I’m sure they’d be fine, but I just see too much potential for miscommunication and problems. I’m glad to have a guy for my first new client.”
The massage went well, I did the same work on him as I usually did on Tara and discovered he could take more pressure than I used on her. A lot more pressure. His muscles were incredibly strong and it took some significant work to get them to relax. Like me, he was really strong through the torso, shoulders, and arms. Not that he had weak legs, but he specialized in aerial events and they really required upper body and core strength.
It also showed me more clearly that working on the body in massage was absolutely non-sexual. It was easy for me to drift off into a little fantasy when I was working on Tara. She often gave me a kiss after a massage. She was my girlfriend. There was no fantasy with Coach Anders. I didn’t think there would be any with any other clients, either.
After the massage, I went out to work on the mat with Tara and Jennifer. Rachel, our choreographer, was waiting to work with us. She had a tariff sheet with our moves on it and we talked for a long time about our story. She started working with us on some very specific poses and throws she wanted to work into a song about flight. That sounded pretty cool. We didn’t have an idea of the music yet, but she was working on sequence and transition before we got to rhythm and synchronization. She said she didn’t want us limited by the music before we’d had a chance to develop the moves.
Rachel gave the sequence and Jennifer worked on the execution of the pieces. Even working without the music, we could tell the piece was really emotional. Occasionally, we’d get into a throw or something when Tara was balanced up on top of me and Rachel would shout “Fly!” We got the message. This whole piece was about Tara flying. Our ending pose was going to be unusual. I was to lift and hold her in a flying pose as if she was truly taking off.
We worked hard and then headed back to the massage room. This time I worked on Tara’s very tired body. By the time I was done, I was exhausted. Tara was feeling more energized. We headed for the locker rooms and then met to go to dinner at her apartment. It was fun to be in her place instead of with my parents. Of course, Jennifer was also there, so it wasn’t like we were tempted to skip dinner and jump each other, but we were all feeling pretty wistful and dreamy after the session.
It was the new pattern for our workouts. School. Massage client. Mat work. Massage. Dinner. And on the weekends, I worked in a little time for Madison.
Saturday the sixteenth, I was surprised that after my class of toddler tumbling, and my two-hour session with Madison, and an hour of working on my own routines, I had no massage session and no working time with Tara. Instead, I was told to get showered and dressed. We were going out.
Maybe I was a little dense, but I’d completely forgotten it was my nineteenth birthday. Mom, Dad, Mikey, Jennifer, her boyfriend Bob, and Mikey’s date of the week Dean all joined Tara and me at Charlie’s for my birthday celebration. Wow! That was a fancy meal.
The original Charlie’s Café was long before my time. I guess it was pretty special, but closed last century sometime. This one is located in the Minneapolis Club, a kind of exclusive membership club frequented by a lot of politicians and company presidents. Dad’s boss at the university was a member and did a great job of promoting us to the club to get a seating for us on a Saturday night. Usually, non-members can only be seated during limited hours on Tuesday through Friday.
Dad’s boss had told the club that a national champion gymnast and her new partner were celebrating a birthday prior to the Olympic Trials in June. It would be a great opportunity for the club to do a little promotion of their support for Minneapolis athletes. I don’t think anyone there actually knew either Tara or me, but the sales job was sufficient to get us a Saturday evening reservation. The décor included the bar and frieze from the original Charlie’s and the furnishings were just plain elegant. The whole building was over a hundred years old and had an athletic club, library, guest rooms, and meeting rooms. Tara and I were photographed for a promotional poster the club planned.
Okay, so I was suitably impressed that my parents thought enough of me to take eight people out for an expensive dinner at this place. It made me even more determined to do well in our exhibition in three months.
I rode with Tara, of course, and that meant we had a pretty delicious make-out time before she dropped me off at home. It was getting harder for both of us to restrain ourselves from going someplace to book a room and not come out for a few days.
Nineteen or not, I was still in high school and I was making progress. Spring Break was the first week of April and I was determined to use the time to finish my English Literature assignment and to at least make sure I was completely caught up on my other coursework. Life didn’t agree.
First off, Jennifer was scheduling three massages a day for me to practice on. She kept a timesheet and at the end of each massage she had the client sign it and give an evaluation score. The client could comment on the service as well. I asked her about it, not understanding the significance.
“Certification, which is required in some areas of Minnesota and in most other states, has a recommendation of having completed 500 hours of practice and education. This is how we’re tracking your progress,” she said. “And we need to get you graduated so I can assign your anatomy coursework to you.”
“Are you an official teacher?” I asked.
“Yes, in fact, I am. Arizona requires 700 hours of schooling for licensing. It’s national board certification that only requires 500 hours. I taught at the Phoenix LMT Institute for a few years before taking the challenge of working with Tara,” Jennifer said. “I’ve served on the National Board for some time.”
“Okay. I’ll do whatever you say,” I said.
“You always do,” she chuckled.
That gave me some additional motivation to get finished with high school. I needed to start the coursework study for my massage work. Somehow, 500 hours seemed like a lot. I didn’t even know how many I had so far. It turned out Jennifer had been tracking my time from almost the moment we met.
I massaged an older woman—I mean lots older, like seventies—and after I was finished, she sat with Jennifer and me and assessed everything I did. I found out later that she was on the Board of Directors of the state massage therapy alliance and had pretty much written the state laws on requirements. I might have learned more from her in the hour after her massage than I ever learned in high school. She was cool.
She had a few good-natured jibes with Jennifer, including saying that the only people who truly benefited from licensing massage therapists were massage schools. They are the ones who make money from training the initial 500-1000 hours required by the state and the additional 20-50 hours required every two years to renew the license. While Minnesota did not require a license, she recognized the sense of my getting National Board Certification if I didn’t know where I would live in the future. Certification was a requirement in most states that had licenses.
Around the first of May, Mr. Fields had me set up an appointment to talk about American Gods. We’d had five or ten-minute chats all term, but this was an hour. I’d finished the book and really learned a lot. Reading was actually fun, thanks to the screen reading software.
He jumped right in when we met and asked me for a summary of the book. Then he asked questions I’d never heard in class before. How did that scene make me feel? What was the significance of the gold coin? Did the gods win or lose? They were questions that really made me think. Not only did I enjoy reading the book, but I enjoyed talking about it. I told Mr. Fields that when we finished and he nodded his head.
“Tell me about a passage that really spoke to you,” he said.
“There’s this place when Shadow is in Cairo at the mortuary, where he thinks back about his childhood and that he was a scrawny kid always being picked on. Then, all of a sudden, he grew. Bullies stopped bullying him and he was recruited for swimming and weightlifting teams.”
“He became popular? Had all the girls? Protected the weak?” Fields asked.
“No. I think that’s what got me. I marked the passage.”
He liked being big and strong. It gave him an identity. He’d been a shy, quiet, bookish kid, and that had been painful; now he was a big dumb guy, and nobody expected him to be able to do anything more than move a sofa into the next room on his own.
[Gaiman, Neil. American Gods: The Tenth Anniversary Edition: A Novel (p. 186). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.]
“I do like being strong. I’m not ‘big’ like Shadow. But people still treat me like I’m just a big dumb guy incapable of doing anything but move a sofa… or in my case, lift an acrobat over my head.”
“But Shadow is a lot more than that.”
“Yeah. He’s just so used to believing he’s still that scrawny little kid that he doesn’t know how to use his strength yet,” I said. “That really got me thinking about my life. I really don’t know where I fit.”
“Sometimes teachers forget that the most important thing about a class like this is to make you think. You scored an A for the class. Congratulations.”
And that was it. There were still three weeks of school, but I was through with English Literature.
Late Friday night, I was on my way home after dropping Tara off from our date. We’d gone to see Dune 2. I was more enthused than Tara was, but the love story hidden in the war story was nice. My cell phone buzzed just before I got home and I pulled over to look at the text.
“Help! I’m at a bad party and need to escape.”
I hadn’t been expecting a message from Mikey! I thought Tara was calling to wish me a good night. I scrolled to the next message which was the address where Mikey was in trouble. A couple of clicks and the GPS was routing me out south of town. I texted Mikey and said I was on my way.
It took me twenty minutes to get out to the rural area southeast of Minneapolis. I pulled into a farm that had lights on in the house. I shut mine off so I wouldn’t attract attention. Mikey’s message was that she was hiding in a toolshed behind the house. Things must have gotten pretty serious for her to run away from the party and hide in a toolshed. I left Mom’s Caravan and made a big circle around the house, so I wasn’t too close to anywhere people might see me.
“Not in the barn,” a voice said as I reached the back of the house. “The bitch must be in that shed.”
“How’d she get out?” another voice asked.
“Donovan is so blind drunk she probably walked right past him.”
“She’s not gonna go far naked. She wouldn’t dare even call 911. Not that there’s police out here.”
It seemed there were only two of them out looking for her and I was following along behind them, sticking to the shadows. If Mikey was naked and hiding in a toolshed, this would be tricky. I didn’t know any martial arts, but I was strong. I’d have to depend on that when I took her away from them.
They reached the door and pulled at it. It was either stuck or locked.
“Paul?” I heard my sister’s voice. “Is that you?”
“Yeah.” One of the guys yelled. He and his buddy laughed. I heard some movement inside and the door yielded to the guys’ pushing. “Got ya!”
“No!” Mikey screamed. “I’m not going with you!”
“Hey, this is the end of term celebration. You’ve fucked eight guys from our house and then refused to see them again. We all want another go. Now come on out with us.”
I heard some metal clang and one of the guys yelped. Good on you, Mikey. I got to the door right behind the guys.
“Bitch. Put the shovel down or you’re going to get hurt.”
“Get away from me!” Another strike of the shovel and then my sister yelped.
“Grab her feet and let’s get her back to the house.”
One of the guys backed up out of the shed holding Mikey’s kicking feet. This was it. I’d never really fought before, so I had no idea how to be most effective. As he backed out of the shed, I just kicked up between his legs as hard as I could. He dropped Mikey’s feet.
“Ow! Goddamn! How’d she kick me in the nuts? Fuck!”
He backed up another step, hunched over to protect his midsection. As soon as his head was clear of the door, I just punched as hard as I could at his face. Damn, that hurt. He staggered back and fell down.
“Danny! What the hell?” his buddy said. “You think I can hold this wildcat by myself?”
He emerged from the shed with Mikey held in front of him with his arms around her arms and chest. Mikey saw me and lowered her head as far as she could against her chest. I put everything I had into a punch and connected with his face. He let go of Mikey to protect himself, staggering back a step. His buddy was getting back to his feet.
“Car’s at the end of the drive. Go!” I barked at Mikey.
I couldn’t see what kind of condition she was in, but she stumbled off behind me. I couldn’t spare a glance for her ghostly white body. Both guys were after me now.
“Son of a bitch. I don’t know who you are, but you just walked into the wrong party,” the one I’d just hit said, lunging at me.
I caught a punch to the gut, but it takes a bit to get hurt past my abs. I swung wildly at him again and connected with his head just as his buddy threw a punch that hit me in the left arm. Somehow, I didn’t think these guys were completely sober. Their punches didn’t seem that powerful. It was my turn to attack and I grabbed Danny’s arm—the one that had just hit me—and twisted for all I was worth. He screamed out as I swung him into his partner.
Even if they were drunk, I knew I wouldn’t last against them if they kept coming at me. The second guy lunged. I didn’t let go of Danny’s arm in my left hand, but reached out with my right hand and grabbed his friend by the throat. He had reach on me, but I guess when faced with strangulation the first reaction is to try to protect your throat, not to hit your assailant.
It took all my strength, but I swung the two of them and cracked their heads together. They both went limp.
I needed to get out of there and get Mikey home, but my sister was in the car naked. One of the guys had a university sweatshirt on, so I just grabbed it and ripped it off of him. He started to struggle and I gave him a kick in the nuts to match his friend’s. He dropped back and I took off running for the car. I saw the back door of the farmhouse open and guys come staggering out. They were apparently all drunk.
“Danny! Dave! What’s going on? Where are you?” one yelled.
I just kept running and grabbed the door handle of the car. Of course, Mikey had locked it.
“Mikey! Let me in!”
I realized I had the key in my pocket and punched the unlock button. It popped open and I jerked the door open as I saw a bunch of guys streaming around the corner of the house.
“Mikey, are you in here?”
“In back,” came her weak voice.
I tossed the sweatshirt back to her and started the car, punching the lock button as I did. I spun on the gravel backing out of the drive. It didn’t look like any of the guys were sober enough to get a car door open and chase us.
I took Mikey straight home.
“I just beat up two guys,” I moaned as I drove Mikey home.
“You saved me,” Mikey said.
“How did you end up in that position?”
“Ugh. I didn’t want to get tied down to a guy, so I only dated them a couple of times. Then, after we’d had sex, I just cut them off. I didn’t know any of them were taking it that bad. They’d gotten what they wanted and I got what I wanted. These guys took rejection personally and decided to pay me back for it all in one weekend.”
“Mikey, you don’t have to keep living like that.”
“Says my virgin brother. Sorry, Paul. I’m just not cut from the same cloth as you.”
“It’ll end up this way again.”
“You’ll come and rescue me. It was impressive to see you take them down. You’re so strong!”
“That’s not the reason I got strong. It was supposed to be to stop kids from picking on me, not to beat others up. I’m no better than they are.”
“You came to my rescue. If that’s not the same as stopping kids from picking on you, it stopped them from picking on me,” Mikey spat.
“I never did anything to make them want to pick on me,” I whispered. “They picked on me just because I existed in their space.”
Mikey didn’t respond.
“Remember when the three boys wanted to take us girls and make out?” she asked. “We were in eighth grade. You stepped in front of them and refused to let them close to us.”
“They beat the shit out of me. Mom would still be in the principal’s office yelling at him if she hadn’t needed to take me to the hospital.”
“There wasn’t a ghost of a chance that you could stop those boys. Why did you try?” she asked.
“What else could I do? They were threatening you and your friends. I figured the security guy would get there before it got too bad.”
“When he got there, you were lying on the ground bleeding,” Mikey said. “I don’t think we ever said thank you. Thank you for that. And thank you for rescuing me tonight. I’ll try to make sure I never need rescuing again. I promise.”
“I worry about you, Mikey. What if I hadn’t been where I could respond? I’d only just dropped Tara off. Your lifestyle is… dangerous.”
“Yeah. I would have been gang-raped. And no one would believe me if I tried to press charges. I’d given it to each of them before,” she said. “I’m moving home next week. The semester is over on Wednesday and the dorms close next weekend. Anything I can do to help you to graduation? I’ll write your papers for you if you want.”
“I appreciate you helping me study, but you’ve never done my work for me. I finished my lit class. Mr. Fields said I passed.”
“That’s great. I know you’ve got a lot more, though.”
“Jennifer has me starting on anatomy. I’m studying to become a massage therapist.”
“You can practice on me.”
“I’m getting a lot of clients at the gym. Thanks anyway.”
“Hmmph,” she snarled.
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
