Floating

College.  It was like floating in air.  Everything was clean and easy and predictable.  I had grown up surrounded by random behavior, but that was the sort of thing that was trained out of you here.  There were patterns and predictabilities and what wasn't predictable was categorized, too.  You could count on these things.  Life inside the academic bubble seemed a safe haven.  

Everything was good and new, even the people I had known before. I was hanging around some boys I'd gone to high school with who were now growing out their hair and adopting a hippie lifestyle.  Some of them had been jocks and wanted to play intramural sports.  I began to run with them in the afternoons.  "We will enter the cross-country race as a team," they said, "and we will win.  We will look like a bunch of palm trees blowing in the wind, long hair flying, and we will run those others into the ground."  And every day after school, through woods and across trails, we would run, they toward something, I assumed, and me away.  I wanted to run fast and far and leave a lot behind.  

But we played volleyball instead.  I had met a very large fellow in one of my classes who was muscled up more than anyone I'd ever seen.  His name was Joe and he was from New Jersey.  He was older than I, in his early twenties, and had played basketball at a private junior college before it closed.  Now he was here, living in a little run-down place downtown by the bus station.  I would go over sometimes and hang out with him.  The place was a wreck, rat and roach infested, and he had to keep all his food in Tupperware containers to keep them from getting to it.  

"Here," he said to me the first time I went over, offering me a plastic container full of large, horse pills.  "You want some?"  

"What are they?" I asked. 

"These are protein pills.  These are vitamin C pills.  Try them.  They are good."  

I'd never seen anything like them before. I grabbed a couple and nibbled on them.  They were OK.  And after we had munched on them for awhile, he made some tuna sandwiches.  

He invited me to go to the gym with him one day.  I'd never been to a gym before other than to play basketball, but I said sure.  I had always been a good athlete and looked forward to doing whatever it was we were going to do.  

What we did was go into a small block room in the back of the YMCA where there were a bunch of iron plates and steel bars and medical looking equipment.  Joe put a bar on a bench and picked up the largest of the plates. 

"Put a forty-five on the other side, will you?"  

I picked up one of the large plates and did what he did.  Then he lay down on the bench and began to push the weight up and down.  It looked easy.  When he got up he looked at me.  

"Go ahead."  

I lay down on the bench and put my hands on the bar.  He helped me get it out of the rack and let it go.  I could scarcely hold it.  I lowered it to my chest too quickly and then struggled to get it up.  Jesus Christ, I thought, it felt like I'd broken something.  

"Haven't you ever done this before?" he asked. 

"No."  I saw a punching bag at the other end of the room.  "I think I'll do that instead."  I could feel the derision in Joe's smile.  

He kept at it, putting on more and more weight until he was lifting over three hundred pounds.  Man, I was fairly awed, but by now some other lifters had come in.  One of them was even thicker and more muscular than Joe, and he was cocky, too.  Joe asked me to spot him on a lift and said he probably wouldn't need any help, but in case he got stuck, I should help him put it back in the rack.  He didn't need my help though, and when he got up, I said, "Boy, you sure are strong."  This apparently pissed off the other lifter who said, "Bullshit. That's nothing.  Hell, he ought to be strong on the bench.  That's all he ever does.  Why don't you work your legs," he said to Joe.  I looked at Joe's legs.  They were normal size.  Joe didn't say anything.  

When we left the gym, he said, "That guy, Ken, he's an asshole.  He comes in and works out twice a day and thinks he owns the place."  Then he looked at me like a conspirator and said, "I don't work my legs because I don't want to hurt my back.  My brother used to squat heavy and he ended up crushing two discs.  I'm going to try out for the football team at Oregon State.  I've already contacted them.  I've sent them my bench press record and my time in the forty.  They want me to come out this summer so they can put me through some drills."  

I was appropriately impressed.  There was no doubt that the guy in the gym was an asshole.  But, I knew, he had rather saved me from embarrassment, too.  I felt bad that I couldn't work out with Joe, that I couldn't lift like he could, but all that was forgotten now.  Joe was thinking about Ken and he needed an ally.  

I asked Joe if he wanted to play on our volleyball team and he said sure.  We had decided to have a practice and I told the guys that I had a fried who wanted to play.  They said OK.  But when I showed up with Joe, their eyes bugged out.  He was as big as Steve Reeves in "The Sons of Hercules" and you could see the shock and fear in their eyes.  I introduced him.

"Man, you're big.  Do you lift weights?"  

"Yea, yea, a little," he said, looking away, not wanting to talk about it, it seemed, so everybody tried to act like he looked normal.  

We started knocking a volleyball around a little, but we weren't very good.  We looked like a bunch of hippies playing Frisbee to Joe, I thought.  It was all too laid back for him and he didn't take too much interest after the first couple of minutes.  

After that, he never came back.  

I guess the world was categorical, alright, and pretty much predicable, too.  And I was, it seemed, still filled with random behavior.