Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [52]
“Don’t shlap it, Shtevie, punch it! Punch it!” Bill Connolly stood a few feet away. He was over forty and an inch shorter than I was, but he had a deep chest and thick upper arms, and we found out later that when he was younger he’d been a professional fighter up and down the East Coast. He was clean-shaven, and whenever he spoke he blinked a lot and all his s’s sounded like sh’s.
He shook our hands and showed us around. There were more weights and another bench, a couple of incline sit-up boards. He looked us up and down. “A middleweight and a welterweight. You boys gonna shign up?”
I had no desire to be a boxer. I was more interested in lifting the black iron weights I saw there, the same kind all the bodybuilders used in California. It was hard to get big if you were boxing, too. Sam may have been more interested than I was. His coach still had him off the weights, but he liked the idea of doing his push-ups and isometrics where other people were working out too.
“Yeah,” he said. “We are.”
The dues were cheap, and when we handed our dishwashing money over to Bill Connolly, he smiled and thanked us and took a pen and carefully wrote our names in a notebook. He blinked a lot and asked us twice about the spelling. I began to think this came from taking shots to the head, from getting punched over and over again in the brain.
WE STARTED working out there right away. Sam did his 666 push-ups, isometric curls and press-downs, pushing and pulling one hand slowly against the other, flexing his big biceps and horseshoe-shaped triceps. And I borrowed money from my mother she didn’t have and sent away to southern California for an advanced bodybuilding course from Franco Columbu, a Mr. Olympia who was also a powerlifting champion and at 185 pounds could bench-press over 500.
Columbu’s pamphlets were full of warnings that these were advanced routines for competitive bodybuilders, but I ignored those. Now, instead of one or two exercises for each body part, I was doing five, four or five sets each, and I moved my workouts from three times a week to six, and they were no longer one hour each but two and a half to three hours. Many times Bill Connolly would walk over and say, “Andre, you’re doing too much. You want power, come hit the heavy bag.”
But I didn’t want to hit the heavy bag. I wanted to be as big as Franco Columbu. I wanted his flaring back, his huge bulbous shoulders, his pecs he could crush a pencil between. For weeks I ignored how tired I was getting, how I was always sore and avoided looking in the mirror because there was never much to see, even less than a few months earlier.
One afternoon, Bobby Schwartz walked into the gym. He was over 200 pounds and six feet tall and wanted to lose some fat around his waist. He worked for his father, Saul, who owned a police supply business up on Washington Street, his shop across from Saldana’s bakery that’d been closed down because the owner hired only Puerto Ricans and Dominicans straight from their homelands and was accused of never paying them. Bobby was outgoing and good-looking, and he liked how long I worked out, how skinny I was. He asked if he could be my training partner and I said sure.
One Thursday, after a three-hour workout, we drove up to Bobby’s father’s store for Bobby’s weekly pay. It was a small, musty shop, blue uniform pants and shirts hanging from racks. Under a glass case were silver handcuffs and black regulation billy clubs. Bobby’s father was in the back office sitting at a desk cluttered with catalogues, a telephone, and Rolodex under a flickering fluorescent lamp.