For weeks I watched as girls trooped by in hopes of scoping Mark in low-rise briefs. Finally I knocked on his door. He listened to my spiel about being an asthmatic who’d grown up skinny and phobic, and allowed that he himself had been gangly until the summer before his senior year of high school. “What,” he asked, “do you want at the gym? D’ya want to get big or you want to get strong?”
My head in a sweat, I pondered the question like a man who’d just rubbed an old lamp. “What I really want is… I want to get laid.”
The next day I bought my first pair of Nikes and met Mark at the bottom of Stony Brook’s field house. Behind airshafts and pump rooms was a tiny space that constituted the campus weight room. It reeked of old mold and stagnant air, and the sum total of its apparatuses — two aged Universals — had oxidized a rusty ambergris. I followed Mark back to the rear machine, where, after a stern lecture about “respecting the room,” he had me lie on the bench.
[...]
I stood in a daze, savoring the burn in my chest and the wash of lactic acid down my arms. It was cold enough to see my exhaled breath, and the only sounds that intercut the noonday silence were Mark’s bellicose grunts while benching. But when I looked at myself in the unframed mirror mounted crookedly on the wall, I thought, This is the thing I’ve been searching for; I’ve found it, and I’m not leaving.
I’ve been paying for that fix, very nearly with my life, ever since.
Good read. I’m totally going to start my HGH regime now…
I’m kidding. This is terrifying. Don’t use steroids kids. Read the rest at Men’s Journal.
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