were you, I’d leave the country,” Overman replies, only half-joking. Overman explains that the window man is imbued with the tenacity of a pit bull, a quality he unleashes whenever he has an idea, no matter how small or how stupid.
“He thinks that if I cut open his eyes, he’ll be able to have sex with beautiful young women,” Gonzales says, bewildered. “It’s crazy.”
“The man is ill,” Overman avers. “My advice is not to take his calls and sit tight. Maybe he’ll have some sort of breakdown.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“I’m sorry for any trouble this has caused you.” Overman hangs up, wracked with guilt for what he has thrust upon the poor doctor. He wonders if he can use whatever is in his arsenal to tame Rosenfarb, but he knows in his heart that going toe to toe with Jake requires a lot more horsepower than he currently has under the hood.
When the alarm goes off at 6, Overman springs into action. He throws his car salesman gear into a small duffle bag and by 6:45 is walking through the door of the gym. He waves to Chuck, now the embodiment of shame for the beating he took on the annual membership fees, then proceeds to the locker room to store his work clothes. It is Overman’s first visit to a locker room since high school and he is quickly reminded why he never missed it. The smells were identical, that curious blend of soap and stench, and the sights had worsened considerably. This was Ira’s introduction to preening fifty year-olds with shaved pubes standing in front of a mirror, admiring their pecs and appraising their junk. Gay? Maybe half of them. Self-absorbed? Across the board. This was, after all, Southern California, where youth was not permitted to go gently into that good night, but hung onto with a ferociousness that turned its worshipers into wannabes. For the first time in his poor excuse for a life, Overman felt glad that he was different. Unlike the posing guy with the bald genitalia, scrounging for a kernel of existential validation, the new, improved Overman felt like he possessed something singular. It didn’t have to be stared at or paraded around, just sharpened and strengthened.
Overman brushes past Sir Baldy and makes his way out to the gym floor. He’s going to start with the tricep bar that pitiful Chuck showed him how to operate. He sets the weight at a light twenty pounds to start. Overman’s been told that at his age it’s about reps, not how heavy he can lift. He does ten pulls then takes a break, using the opportunity to drink in the Jungle Gym scene. Lots of plastic tits, old guys with dyed chest hair, young moms trying to get back to their pre-baby weight, a former professional wrestler, a middle aged female ex-bodybuilder named Carla who seems to know everybody and won’t shut up. After his second set of tricep pulls, she drops by to add him to her friendship circle. It turns out that after her bodybuilding career, Carla became a private detective. Upon leaving the gym, she will drive to City of Industry to spy on a beer distributor who’s banging his secretary. She feels super fat and she shouldn’t have had that onion bagel yesterday and she’s single, no surprise. As Carla flutters off to pester someone else, the wrestler known as Bo arrives to introduce himself to Overman. He welcomes Ira with a quick survey of the landscape, pointing out which of the plastic-titted gym junkies are porn stars, which are actual junkies.
Moving on to the next machine, Overman tries to make sense of this strange world that has apparently embraced him with open arms. While he’s able to finish his bicep sets without making any new acquaintances, it occurs to him that people seem to fancy their personal training in noisy, showy, social environs. While Overman knew he’d be working out amongst others, he pictured a parallel pursuit of individual goals rather than the yammering interaction before him. At the shoulder machine, he manages to clear his head. This was what he wanted: to concentrate on the business at hand and rid himself of the clutter that would fill up brain space as the day wore on.
The last time he exercised on a regular basis was when he joined the wrestling team as a freshman in high school. Wrestling was where they sent the slight and the puny, an apt description of fifteen year-old Overman, providing one was to add “pimply” to the mix. Clocking in at 5’3, 105 pounds, he couldn’t be taken seriously for football or basketball, but ostensibly had the potential to shine at a sport where the requirement was to bulk up, yet go down a weight class. In Overman’s case, it meant the 98-pound weight class. Getting there required rigorous workouts, dieting and staying after school for practice until it was dark outside. Since wrestling season fell smack in the middle of the frosty Long Island winter, by the time Overman had finished rolling on the sweaty mats and being humiliated in the group shower, he would find himself walking into the black night, wet hair hardening into icicles as he shivered his way home.
Conceding that listening to Carla, the private detective, yap about her onion bagel is preferable to the sweaty, frozen night walks of his past, he then spots, to the left of the barbells, a man who looks familiar and foreign at the same time. He’s sure he has seen this face many times before, but the body, the clothes, the hair — they just don’t add up. It is only after a fellow exerciser tells a lame dirty joke and the man laughs that Overman identifies him as Gary Sheslow, his ex-therapist. There is no mistaking the wheezy cackle of the legend whose most memorable line was, “We have to stop now.” This goniff, currently hoisting two-pound free weights and sporting a hideous dye job, had accrued thousands of Overman dollars during a span of nearly twenty years, only to conclude that his client was hopeless and toss him out on the street. In Sheslow’s defense, Overman had ignored or refused any piece of advice the therapist offered, precipitating a lengthy and expensive stalemate. The end had been unpleasant, to say the least. Sheslow denied Overman’s request to refund his money, instead recommending a psychiatrist and daring his former client to sue him.
What would the dipshit have to say now? Here was Overman, poised to climb his personal Everest while Sheslow the Clown was dipping his head in Kiwi shoe polish. He is tempted to go over and broadcast this salient point, but Sheslow has made an unforeseen exit to the locker room. Overman is not so tempted that he wants to follow his former shrink, confident that their day of reckoning will come further down the line. The therapist is not gone a minute when Overman notices a pleasant-looking brunette lying down to use the leg machine. She looks familiar as well. He knows they have not met yet she somehow conveys the essence of a brunette from his past. As the young woman pushes the platform with her feet and both calves extend, it triggers the rush of an earlier Overman memory, hands-down the saddest moment of an adolescence that had been defined by the Sad Moment.
Janie Sweeney is on her back in an alcoholic fog. The cacophony of the male chorus eggs Overman on as Marty Merkowitz shoves him on top of her. The others pin him down and he is forced to unzip his fly in order to make his inauspicious presence known. Janie emits a slight, but unmistakable cry at the moment of entry, a whimper not unlike that of a small wounded animal. The sequence of events had lodged itself within him and tortured Overman throughout his subsequent years. Why didn’t he get away? How come he didn’t report the incident? Moreover, if it had affected him this deeply, how badly had it damaged Janie Sweeney? Janie’s parents moved to New Jersey for the next school year and he never heard anything about her since. Not that he tried very hard to track her down.
As Overman picks up the five-pound free weights to do his lateral lifts, it dawns on him: on that fateful night when his good friend Rosenfarb abandoned him by the onion dip, he had been forced into penetrating another against his will. Since it was out of his control, didn’t that make him a victim as well? He had never thought about it in such terms, but technically, Ira Overman had been raped.
However one chose to interpret it, Overman’s first sexual experience with a woman was an act of violence and criminal behavior. Neither Spiderman nor Batman could boast that kind of dysfunction in their pasts. Overman wasn’t proud of it. The mere thought of that sperm-filled night rendered him pale and lifeless. But the resurfacing and ongoing crystallization of this memory also made him want to exercise harder and toughen up. Nobody would rape Ira Overman ever again, not even figuratively.
There is a pristine pleasure in being able to radiate confidence after
