Sometimes imagination just can’t beat reality, in this case I am referring to the I-cannot-believe-he-is-for-real reality we encountered mid-workout at the Y. Sean and I are going to the gym now after a couple months of taking the girls out in the double stroller for runs while we earned a membership. Sean felt like we needed to demonstrate that we could commit.
Luckily our passing the committed enough line coincided perfectly with our holy fuck winter has arrived in the form of an ice storm covering everything with seriously impenetrable ice globules and inhaling air this cold might kill us realization.
So you’ll understand our glee as we hit the gym. The comfortably warm gym. We can taste for a moment what it was like to be able to just pick up the keys and run to the gym, no worries of clunking dumb bells into soft spots or having a push up interrupted by a poopie diaper. We get to be Sean and Amanda, maybe flirt with each other a bit, maybe just focus selfishly on how we look and how improving that makes us feel better. It’s good.
I think we were about 40 minutes into our workout when we heard a voice. A voice that belonged to the oddest looking man-thing I have ever seen.
Let me see if I can do this. He was 5’4″, maybe 5’5″. He had on long dark blue pants and a black shirt that had some sort of graphic on it. It wasn’t that the graphic was complex or something offensive, it was simply overshadowed by the sheer wrongness of his hair. Sean was mid-press when I blurted out,
“My god, it’s like, it’s like…wilted cilantro. That guy has a funky, shiny clump of wilted cilantro on his head.”
Sean lost it as he stole a peak, he set the weights down and we both tried to turn away. After a moment I took my turn on the bench. I was trying to keep the weights in front of my eyes so that I wouldn’t have to see the gym-slime thing when Sean said,
“But did you see the pants? Manda they’re velvet. They are blue velvet pants.”
I peeked and saw that while they were not actually velvet, they were a seriously plush velour, which, if you ask me, and I think I’m pretty open minded, is not the sort of thing a guy should wear to the gym. Or at all. But, considering the sins carried out by women holy panty lines and maybe-you-should-cover-those-up on every other machine, I won’t complain too loudly.
But back to the hair. It was shoulder length, curly, and I think if it had slightly less product in it, it might just have been blonde. Adding to the general foulness was the way he had it coming into his face. I think I saw it catching on his eye lashes and puffing out as he spoke, inasmuch as something that oily can puff. I couldn’t quite put my finger on who he reminded me of. Beneath his nasty hair was a fairly normal, all american type of face. Who? Who did he look like? Got it.
“Sean, do you remember Eight is Enough? Remember the curly haired kid, I think he drove the van?”
“I was too young for Eight is Enough.”
Damnit. For those of you not too young, travel back with me, back to Eight is Enough and sweet Tommy Bradshaw.
Did you see him? Now picture him with mucho product in his hair, blue velvety pants, oh and a bottle of raspberry water. That was him. And he was working it. But before I go on, do you know what Tommy aka Willie Aames is doing now? Well he’s not at the gym here in town, though by the look of the body armour they want us to believe he goes to the gym. He’s spreading the word.
Our creature at the Y was spreading a different kind of word. He stood, short legs spread wide, velvety crotch hanging low. He had been talking to a girl for some time, Sean was calling her the lilliputian escort, I was calling her nasty, short skank. I know, we are awful people. I suppose this goes against the whole open-minded line from earlier. We really do behave terribly. Thing of it is, we have fun. Quietly. The short woman moved onto another exercise and curly funk was left to his own devices. I literally did not see him do a single exercise while we were there.
“Hey. How was class? Your face is red.” He said to a non-descript late 20-something with writing on the ass of her black pants that I believe said: Combat. They may have been velour pants. I prepared to watch her diss him.
“Yeah, I get red. It’s awesome.”
“So, what’s the verdict? Is he out?”
“Umm, he’s just really off. So out, kind of.”
This guy was some sort of cut-rate, free weight Svengali deluding young women into thinking he was something more than a velour clad midget in need of a good scrub and hose down. I was hooked. It was like that really trashy dating show from about a decade ago where they ran the little thought bubbles down below which usually read something like this for the guys,
“Man, I cannot wait to get into that shirt. Now if she would just shut up.” And for the gals,
“Oh my god, is he balding up there? He’s really kind of ugly. Does this shirt make me look hot?”
“You know, if I could go into your future and change this so you didn’t have to go through it, I wouldn’t. Because then you wouldn’t learn, you wouldn’t experience the cycle, the rev-oh-lution of this.” And believe me when I tell you, he did a deep knee bend for effect as he said rev-oh-lution. I wanted to clap. He was amazing. Sean and I tried to continue our workout, but it was just more than we could stand. We decided to move to another station. We decided to call it a night when just as we got to the new spot a person raised to sitting from an ab work out.I had been looking at what I thought were very impressive man boobs, but were in fact just boobs. Female boobs. Sean stutter stepped and then shuddered. We promptly left.