Calvin's parents had been divorced ever since he was 16. His sister Janie had gone to live with his mother Claire. He had opted to stay with his dad, Justin. He really didn't have much of a reason other than he was worried his father would be lonely.
As it turned out, he couldn't imagine how his life would have turned out if he had chosen otherwise.
His father ended up buying a house in the Colorado Mountains from a friend in the brokerage firm he worked at. Evidently, after the divorce his father wanted a little seclusion and time to think things out. Not that the house was by any means a small cabin. It was three floors with underground parking for the vehicles. The lowest floor Calvin's father devoted to the only passion Calvin had known him to have other than money, working out.
While Calvin was interested in nothing but music, girls and trying to convince his father to buy him an expensive sports car, he found no interest in the sprawling workout area. Most people could almost envision it to be big enough to belong in any health club. It was around his 17th birthday, that that all changed.
Calvin's father, Justin, spent early mornings and early evenings nowhere else but the workout floor. He had a very strict diet that he followed religiously and rarely did anything that he considered potentially harmful to his body.
For the year that Calvin had been living with his father he actually rarely saw him. On the occasional day that he did get up relatively early, he would sometimes see his father returning from "The Pit" as they had come to call it. The only real time he could spend time with his father was on Sunday, the one day that his father took a break from everything. In that year, that had become Calvin's favorite day of the week. He loved the fact that his Dad would sometimes flop on the couch and watch TV with him, even munching on the junk food that Calvin always had at hand.
The first time that he had actually had an argument with his father was over junk food. It had been about a month after they had moved in, and Calvin could no longer take any more chicken, fish, steamed vegetables, and all the other tasteless low fat foods that were the only sustenance to be found in his fathers' house. He had finally had enough of it and traveled the 20 miles into town on his own to buy the food he had become accustomed to eating. Justin was adamant about the fact that such food would not be allowed into his house, and they ended up not speaking to each other for two days. It was during this time that a brief moment of clarity entered through the fog in Justin's mind and he realized that he had created a world in which he could count on things being exactly the way he wanted them, but maybe that wasn't exactly the way that Calvin wanted them.
He relented, saving as much face as he could, and told Calvin that whatever food he wanted he could have, provided he kept it in his room.
During this argument and subsequent "silent treatment", Calvin spent time wondering what the big deal was anyway. He felt his Dad was living life like some kind of monk. As best he could figure, his father's evening workout was from five to seven, that meant the few times he had seen his father emerging from "The Pit" at around eight in the morning, he'd been in there since six. The man never ate anything that had a fat gram content that was in the double digits, and craved everything that had a protein content that was in the double digits. There was a coffee maker in the kitchen that fixed only one single cup of coffee, as far as he could tell, that was all his father ever had in the morning. The rest of the time it was water.
It was after their argument that Justin started taking Sundays off. He would sit in the kitchen or the living room and have multiple cups of coffee while watching the world news on satellite. These were the things Calvin woke up to on Sundays, afterwards Justin allowed Calvin free reign to the television and he would sit and watch with him.
Calvin had begun to start noticing, after relentless hours spent in front of the television, that the male body was meant to look a certain way to women. A man was supposed to have broad shoulders, large arms, a "six pack", and that v-cut leading the eye to their groin where every man was supposed to have a half a foot to a foot of penis ready to satisfy any woman crossing their path. That was supposed to be a man.
Justin didn't work out in anything other than a pair of shorts. That might be a pair of nylon running shorts, a pair of cotton gym shorts, or even a pair of spandex compression shorts. He always kept "The Pit" at a temperature of at least 90 degrees or higher. This ensured that he would always sweat his ass off during his workouts, light or intense.
Soon Calvin's mind started to make the connection between the "ideal man" that the television was pressing on him and what he saw the few times he passed his father in the mornings and evenings coming from "The Pit". There was always a sheen to his father's body from the sweat; this just accentuated the extreme definition of his father's body. Justin had the six-pack, he had the defined chest, his arms were pure muscle, and most importantly he had the v-cut.
Calvin decided that's what he wanted to look like.
Over the next year Calvin started getting up early and joining his father in the pit and following him again in the evenings. He followed his father's diet, and even threw out all of the junk food in his room. They ended up compensating for the lack of junk food on Sundays by driving into town and enjoying the local fast food joints for dinner.
By the time Calvin's eighteenth birthday was only a few days away, he was unrecognizable from his former self. He shared his father's broad shoulders, defined chest, six pack, and bulging biceps. He had even acquired the difficult v-cut in his hips.
