I'd been going the gym for one hell of a long time. I was only 26 but had been banging away at the heavy stuff, so to speak, for over 10 years. Not surprisingly I had developed some serious musculature. Looking at myself in the gym mirrors, my warm-up completed, I admired the swathes of thick, tanned flesh that clothed me from head to toe. Like armor, I thought, powerful, impenetrable and intimidating.
Machine-like, I started cranking out curls with 90-pound dumbbells, veins swelling through my skin like baby tentacles. As I let the weights crash to the floor after eight nasty reps, I noticed a chick and her boyfriend enter the gym. The guy was maybe 20 years old, a pasty-skinned dweeb whose sloppy physique could've qualified him as a Cabbage Patch Kid. What a loser. His woman was in her late teens, wearing a sky-blue t-shirt and dark-blue Adidas shorts, displaying what one might kindly have described as a robust figure. They both looked like they would have been right at home diggin' up taters in Ireland, ready to whack back a few pints of Guinness at the end of the day. The girl, at least, had the decided benefit of possessing an easy set of D-cups.
As they wandered over to my corner of the gym, looking around in the aimless fashion of tourists, I started into another set of curls. Only 7 reps this time, but the fact that the floor shook when I dumped the dumbbells seemed to impress them some. Especially the chick who, after whispering something in Fat-Boy's ear, kept staring at me as though I were some celebrity she'd accidentally run into with her shopping trolley.
