Weight, In Rooms

Today I weighed myself. It was at a gym- my gym, the one that takes my money. Also the gym where I can never work out again, because I made such a colossal fool of myself in the weight room. There may have been some material damage.

The weight room sounds more lighthearted than it really is. The term brings up relatively gentle images of giant steroid-ballooned hulksters and women in eighties-era leotards with itty bitty hand weights and soft, undampened headbands. The worst that can happen there, besides causing yourself permanent damage to your spinal discs, is a flirtation that will lead to some mutual masturbation in the showers. My gym's actual is much, much, much more odious because it is full of- almost carpeted with- scales. Some of them are industrial scales, with giant dials and tissues mounted on the dial post for the crying. There are lots of scales, though most of them are of the standard bathroom-scale variety. The scale I initially stepped on was a doctor's scale.

This scale told me, in no uncertain terms, that I was four pounds heavier than I had been at some point in the past. I don't remember precisely when this lighter weight prevailed, or if there had been a recent stomach flu somewhere in that time frame, but by god there it was: four pounds. I had to jump from scale to scale, getting increasingly freaked out, until I climbed up (or shuffled onto, really- it had a ramp) on the industrial scale. The same: four pounds since...whenever. FOUR. POUNDS.  My adrenaline and cortisol levels were whooshing themselves to a spanking new height, so that freaking out became Freaking Out- I think I was uncontrollably flapping my hands about midway through the weight room- and that became a big, inappropriate, injurious FREAK OUT.

"FOUR POUNDS!" I screamed at the spin instructor, whose name is Candy. "Ha ha ha Candy- your name is clearly a part of the problem" I brayed, since I'd taken her spin class four times since my last trip to the weight room. Four pounds. "It says four pounds, Candy!"

"Maybe it's just that scale-" she started.

"NOO!! IT'S FOUR GODDAMN POUNDS, CANDY, and you should really change your name if it's going to make people hoist on the blubber-"

Candy looked shocked, but only partly so. "I cannot help what goes into my student's mouths after the class ends-

"YES YOU CAN, Candy! You can start by changing it to Celery, or Aqua, or Selenium, because NO ONE is going to scarf up any of those things in large quantities, are they?" I was trembling in the gym towel that I'd worn up to the weight room (you don't want to wear anything more than you have to, am I right?) when some other person saw fit to deny me my dodo self-perception.

"You really wear it well- " He started. I screamed: I screamed like a Velociraptor and bent over, which I wouldn't ever advise anyone to do who isn't wearing underwear- ever- and despite some gasps, I grabbed the undercarriage of two scales and flipped as hard as I could.

"FFFOOOOUUUUUUAAAWWWRRR POOOOUUWWWNNDSS!!!" I screamed. I don't remember this precisely, but the helpful people in the station showed me the sped-up version of what happened, and indeed, I'm saying that: fffoooouuuuuaaaawwwrrr pooooouuwwwnndss!! My eyes did look like the eyes of the deeply stoned, red capillaries blazing, pupils dilated. And my horrible dinosaur voice was unmistakable. The stand up scale next to the condemning industrial scale  went down, and took the row of scales next to it like a row of Hell's Angel's hogs in the classic comedy movie where that happens. The one on my left took a hit from the first one, which spiraled upward and then down on just the point that would make it explode, which spiraled and dove onto the same point on the next one, so that there was a room full of perfectly triggered exploding bathroom scales, making small bang noises one by one. It was entertaining to watch in the digital whilst with my enforcer friends. One would think, watching that tape, that they were hand-made scale-bombs, rigged with fertilizer and shame, and I the Jane Bond trying to both escape from the bad dudes and keep my hair perfectly tousled.

What did happen after all the little scale-bombs triggered was that I ran. I ran out of my gym and into the street, yelling "FOUR POUNDS! FOUR POUNDS, PEOPLE! That's going to be FOURTEEN THOUSAND CALORIES I have to burn on those FUCKING TREADMILLS!"  I got to the underpass of the highway and started to whip back and forth on the pigeon-poop covered sidewalk, clutching my towel to my chest and wishing I had remembered to put on my shower shoes. "FOURTEEN! THOUSAND! CALORIES, PEOPLE ! POUNDS! FOOOOUUR! POWOWOWNDSS!"

Someone who'd been sleeping under the embankment sat up unexpectedly. "couldyoukeepitdownsomeoneistryingtosleep" He or she said (I couldn't tell because of the angle,) but I just kept ranting. It was my turn. You see people ranting or muttering or screaming underneath these giant on/off ramps in any city or large town, but you never think: is it my turn yet? Do I have to go down there and sing or something- is it a civilian obligation of some sort? If so, how do I go about it? "FOUR POUNDS, SIR OR MA'AM! FOUR FUCKING ONES, FOUR! I'M SURE YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT!"

"Seriously, shut up! There are rules about that kind of thing!" she said (I decided to go with the female pronoun.)

I stopped pacing. "What are those rules? Because I think that I need to talk a whole lot more! I mean, LOOK AT THIS! I'M AN ABOMINATION!" and I held the towel at my side and turned my head so that I couldn't see her looking.

She looked for a long time. I turned my head to check if she was done, twice. My neck grew  a few knots from holding the position for too long. "Ok. When you're down here the first thing you have to do is check with everyone else to make sure you're not cutting in line. There's only one screamer at a time down here. At the 55/94 junction underpass they can have two at a time, but here's not a big enough platform."

"Uh...there's no comment about this mess?" I indicated my own self with a sorrowful gesture.

"Second, you have to check for sleepers, lady. I'm a person, and I was sleeping, and I deserve a little peace. The cars and trucks and so on are soothing-" I listened for the first time to the sounds from above, and they were at a hurtful volume. "But to have an unscheduled screamer down here is just not done."

I was getting excited, now. "Ok, manners, check. There's more?"

The beggar lady thought. After a while it seemed like she was in a fugue state, just staring and stuck. I personally was not at all stuck- not in the least, my brain was being unpleasantly licked with some flames of self-loathing, gathering into a ferocious amount of shouting- and as I was about to open my mouth and let more of the necessary words just spew, she spoke again.

"You'll want some cardboard."

"Why?" It wasn't cold, so I didn't need shelter. I was sweating around and beneath my gym towel.

Instead of answering, she ran upward on the cement embankment to her bedroll or whatever. She bent over and pulled a nonsensically large sheet of cardboard from underneath it. She brought it down and handed it to me.

"What is it for, though? You didn't answer my question before."  I held the cardboard up to take a look at it. It was hard to do, given the wake wind distributed by the speeding semi trucks just a few dozen feet above us. It was perfectly clean.

"You'll want to build a little shelter around yourself-"

I cut her off. "No, no, I don't want to stay, I just wanted to say my piece, and I was going to go back home." Something bothered me about what I'd just said, but I mentally waved it away- what else can one do? When you have four humongous, slobby pounds...

"You're naked, right? Where's the glass going to hit when it rains down here in shards? And you have to think about the grit. That stuff is hell to clean off, my friend- it'll take weeks to let go of intimate places."

She was right: I couldn't trust my gym's puny community towel to keep the grit out of my hoo-ha.
My new supervisor helped me make the cardboard into a barrel shape and prop it up around myself. "I just wish I had suspenders!" I said to her, and we shared a giggle, in that I laughed like a loon and she looked at me as if I were one.

"Maybe you should save the hysterics for something worth the vocal cords, you know?" And she may have been trying to say something fundamentally important, I think, but I wasn't sure.

"Do you have a marker?" I asked, and she did! So I was squatted down beneath the underpass on my somewhat bulging haunches, just finishing the legends IT IS NOT MY FAULT THAT MY LIFE HAS BEEN SO STRESS FILLED!! AND THE WORLD AT LARGE NEEDS TO ACCOUNT FOR MENSTRUAL WEIGHT FLUCTUATIONS!!! JESUS SAID EAT THIS BREAD IT IS MY BODY BUT IT WAS DURING DINNER AND EVERYONE, EVEN JESUS, SHOULD KNOW THAT YOU CAN'T EAT CARBS AFTER 4!!!!! when the cops came by and took my elbow and put me in the back of their squad car, holding my head so that I didn't give myself an owie. They were both very nice.

On the way, the passenger-side cop turned his head and said "I know what you mean," then turned back and stayed silent the rest of the ride.

I was so, so relieved.