Why MCA? - David Hutto

When I was in my 20s, I had fantastic pants. Lime green bell bottoms. Those, you are thinking, do sound like fantastic pants. With purple swirls, that I wore to see the Rolling Stones. Oh I wish, you are thinking, I had pants like that. I know. You can’t help it. I found my fantastic pants not long ago, at the bottom of a box, so far down the mice hadn’t reached them. I pulled out my pants and shook off the dust and, well, there were several things I had to shake off. Anyway, I put on my pants and they still looked just as good. But something wasn’t right. It’s not that I’m a little chubby now. I mean, actually  it is that I’m a little chubby now.

So I asked my sister Hester to repair my pants.

“Why don’t you lose some weight?” Hester asks me. Does that sound like sympathy to you? Ever since we were kids we’ve had a difficult relationship. Since she made me eat a bowl of dirt. She wasn’t home when I ate the dirt, but she told me it better be gone when she got back. When I asked her to let out my lime green pants Hester says, “You know that beer belly isn’t good for you.” And it isn’t all from beer, by the way. She pushed her thumb into my belly. “Maybe this is a good time to do something about it, Mr. Doughboy. You can join the YMCA.” You see what she calls me? Mr. Doughboy. With a thumb in my belly. And when I ate the bowl of dirt, I had our mother take a picture so Hester would believe it.

“Or you could let my pants out,” I say.

“I could,” my cruel sister says, “But what you need  is to lose thirty pounds. This is tough love.” Does that make sense to you? Love should come with hugs. And bigger pants.

I wasn’t going to let Hester tell me what to do. Good, you are saying, taking my side. Which is not biased on your part, it just shows your judgment. Good, you are saying, stand your ground, stick by your guns, be a man or at least not a very feminine woman. Yes, damn it. I was a slightly chubby man. So I joined the YMCA because I really wanted to.

They have trainers at the YMCA who will show you how to use the machines and tell you how close you should come to crying in public before you stop. “So you want to get rid of your spare tire?” the trainer asks.

“It’s not a spare,” I say. “It’s the only one I have.”

“But you want to slim it up, right?” she asks. “Lose some weight. Chub down. Catch a cab back to Manly Town.”

“I want to see the Rolling Stones again,” I say.

“Well,” she says, “I’m pretty sure they let fat people in, as far as that goes.”

The first day I went to the YMCA and followed the trainer around while she explained everything. She said you want to work up slow with exercise. The muscles need to adjust. Since I didn’t want to do too much that first day, I went home after she finished talking.

When I went in the next day I saw that the men with the most muscles were doing free weights. Those muscles, I thought, are what I want to have. Those men, I thought, must know what they’re doing. I went over to pick a weight up, but I figured it be a demonstration model, because it was permanently fastened to the floor. Then another man came over and picked it up. Grunting. Moaning. With a terrible bulging face. His suffering looked Biblical. Samson in the early stages of a heart attack. I realized that I could hurt myself with these weights. I wasn’t going to the gym because I wanted to get injured, so I figured I’d done enough for one day and I went home to eat a donut and take a nap.

Hester called to ask me how the gym was going. “Are you getting used to it?” she asks.

“Yeah, no sweat,” I say.

“You’re supposed to sweat,” she says. “You must not be doing it right.”

On my next trip to the gym I knew to stay away from the free weights. They’re only for trained specialists. The trainer had forgotten to tell me that. I looked at the treadmills, and there was an old woman on one, so I figured it must be suitable to the common person, who I’ve always tried to emulate. I got on the machine next to her and looked at the control panel. It had settings for speed and slope and heart rate and time and coefficient of lipid dispersal coordinates. I looked at the controls for a while and was about to get off when the old woman reached over and pushed the “Go” button on my machine.

I started off slow, but I decided to increase the speed to something worthy of my ability. I certainly wasn’t paying for a gym membership just to walk. No sir, people. I wanted my money’s worth. Running speed. For a minute I ran, a minute and a half, three quarters, maybe even two minutes. A long time. Fortunately, I remembered that when I joined I had gotten a special deal, so didn’t really pay all that much. I slowed the machine down again.

After such a workout I could feel the cab to Manly Town approaching. I could see its lights. I was getting ready to wave at the driver. I stepped with confidence to get in the cab. When I did I stepped down on a part of the treadmill that wasn’t moving. My other foot slipped backwards on the treadmill. I flipped to the left. Banged into the bars. Grabbed at the machine to hold myself up, hit the speed button, made it faster, stepped down again on the treadmill and went off the back. Onto the floor. The cab to Manly Town drove on by.

“Are you OK?” the old woman asked me. “Should I,” she asked me, “help you up?”

My evil sister called me the next day. “I was almost killed,” I say.

“You’ve always been dramatic,” Hester tells me. “You should be an actor.”

“I was an actor,” I say. “I couldn’t make a living at it,” I say. “And I was almost killed at the gym.”

“No wonder you didn’t make a living,” Hester says. “You’re not believable. I don’t think you were almost killed. You could,” she says, “have gotten a little sore from working out. Maybe,” she says, “But I doubt it.”

I took a few days off from going to the YMCA. To recover. I had emotional scarring. The next time I went I knew to stay away from the treadmills. They’re only for old people. I looked for something for people who think of themselves as young. When I was a kid I rode a bike, so I looked at the stationary bikes. They were exactly like the bike I rode as a kid. Except my bike went places. Like the time I went to Trixie Walladoon’s house, to throw a water balloon at her, but it broke in my lap just before she came outside with a group of girlfriends. I got on the stationary bike and began to pedal. I gripped the handlebars and pedaled faster. And faster. I was riding like the wind, like a lonesome freight train rolling down the line, like the Greek god Hermes on a bicycle. If Hermes had ridden a stationary bike when conveying messages from Zeus. While I was pedaling like a mighty human piston, I looked down. I realized this bike was higher off the ground than the one I rode as a kid. What if I was to fall off? What if there was an earthquake and the bike started to tip over and I had to fall all that way, and I wasn’t able to jump free in time… Of course who knows when the last earthquake was in central Pennsylvania. Which surely means we’re overdue. I got down from the bike and looked at the high seat where I had just been sitting. Risking my life.

I’m a determined person, as you obviously know by now. I’m sure that’s a quality you admire. And of course you know about the pants. So I went back to the gym and climbed on the elliptical machine. You can see my adventurous, exploratory spirit there. But within a minute the muscles in my legs started to ache so that I was ready to fall off the machine. What was this hellish device? Before I began to cry in public I stopped, climbed off, and fell into a chair.

Now my eyes were opened to the truth. Now the veil of slim muscular fantasies fell from my clouded vision. Everything at the YMCA holds a danger for the unwary chubby person. It’s exactly the sort of place where a savvy Mr. Doughboy would never go. So I stopped. Not that I’m a Doughboy. Since then I ran across a fashion magazine at the dentist’s office. There was not a single pair of lime green bell bottoms. My pants were out of fashion. When did that happen? Lucky, you are thinking, break, to discover that before I hurt myself in a high-risk place like the gym.

Eventually I had to go over to Hester’s house to take back the remote control for her TV. “You don’t look different,” she says.

“I’m very different,” I say. “I’ve found inner peace.”

“Piece of pie,” she says. You see how she treats me.