The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins Read Online Free PDF Page A

fitness and goals. Bodysculpt, a corporate glass and pine-floored yuppie chain, is more like a freakin daytime nightclub. They even have resident DJs, like the execrable Toby, thankfully absent today, playing “workout” music. It’s usually inspid ambient bullshit for lazy, Prozac-stunned, cocktail-guzzling beachballs who think they’re in some fucking
spa
. Most of the clients are women; the fat housewifes on my roster work uneasily alongside fashion-shoot, stick-thin models, and professionals who spend most of their time talking into their phones while doing low-speed elliptical shit. The few men in this gym all seem of the type who’d made fairly advanced plans to shoot up their high school, but chickened out late in the game. Decided studying and then practicing law was a better way of hurting their local community. And they were probably correct.
    Marge ends her set and I’m showing her how to do a deadlift on a heavier kettlebell. — As you come down, you brace the abdominals, I demonstrate, — and you’re squeezing in the glutes and pressing right through the centers of the heels.
    A gaping black hole and two shocked eyes stare back at me out of a sweating red furnace.
    — Go on!
    Marge gets to five and then she starts that white-flag bullshit. — Can I stop now . . .? the quitter begs.
    I draw in a deep breath, my hands on my hips. — Quitters quit! Doers do! Five more, Marge girl. C’mon, honey, you can do it!
    — I can’t . . .
    — Not acceptable! Gimme five more and we’ll call it quits, I demand, as she bends over, sucking in the air. — Find a way!
    The bitch looks at me as if I’ve just shanked her, but complies.
    — FOUR!
    Those fucking time-wasters don’t want change: they want affirmation. You need to shake them up. You have to slap their fat, stupid faces until they squeal.
    — THREE!
    To tell them you are gonna carve that suit of pudgy indolence from their bodies and make them
human
again. And yes, they are going to
hate
you for it.
    — TWO!
    And I don’t blow smoke up their gross asses; I lay it on the line. I tell them it
is
like being born again, but in slow motion, and where you remember every sweating, grunting, choking, bone-crushing, violent detail. But what you come out with is a body and a mind fit for the purpose of life in this world. Marge strains with the weight . . .
    — ONE! AAAANNND REST!
    The kettlebell weight spills out of her grip and smacks onto the rubber floor. She bends over, gasping for breath, hands on her knees. I don’t like people dropping weights, so I shout, — You’re rockin’ it, Marge! Gimme five, forcing her to reluctantly half rise to slap my palm, before fastening her hands back on her knees. She looks up, breathing heavily, like a wildebeest that’s escaped a lion’s clutches
this time
, but only at the expense of having a chunk of its ass ripped off.
You wish, fat bitch!
Yes, I’m detested now, but as the endorphin rush blitzes her she’ll start an all-day love affair with me. Then she’ll step out into the sun and see those tanned, lean South Beach bodies and think:
I must work harder
.
    Yes you fucking must.
    As our clients, Marge and Lester’s college prof, finish up and wander off to the showers, we take a break to wait for our next appointments. There is an office, but it’s primarily used for payroll, and managing the place, and we prefer to hang out by the juice bar, basking in the light spilling in through the slanted glass roof. The best trainers always want to be visible, even if you aren’t working out or training somebody.
    Lester is sipping a black coffee, while I’m on the green tea. I like Lester, now that he’s cooled it on the South Bronx ghetto tales which bored the living shit out of me. He had that New York arrogance when he first arrived, that tiresome assumption that only interesting, edgy, crazy stuff can happen there, but Florida has chilled him out. He’s also learned to use the ghetto talk selectively;