Tasteful Nudes: ...and Other Misguided Attempts at Personal Growth and Validation (20 page)

“Save yourself!” I wanted to yell back to my passenger as I struggled to keep my wheels turning.

Still, the desire to not look like some damn milquetoast was ultimately greater than my desire to not die, so somehow a force greater than any I had known before took over and guided me what felt like the remaining 85 miles or so to Columbus Circle.

“Thanks, pal,” the businessman said as he pressed a crisp bill into my palm.

It turned out I had just made twenty bucks and, apparently, a friend.

After the euphoria from having just earned twenty bucks while not having to be pulled onto a gurney in the middle of 57th Street subsided, I crashed hard. And I had to take a good look inside myself to figure out if I had what it took to pedal on. I also had to take a good look inside my wallet to make sure I had my health insurance card with me in case any other three-hundred-pound businessman thought a pedicab was a good way to get around town. After that, I began to slowly pedal east, doing my best to keep the bike moving and my lungs filling up with air. Then, I rolled shamefully back to Terry’s garage for the second day in a row. Once again, Terry wasn’t there, so I just parked my pedicab, gave the finger to the couple of other pedicab drivers in the garage while they weren’t looking, and packed it in for the night.

I woke up early the next morning feeling what I thought might be phantom leg pains, the kind people get after an amputation. But I was disappointed to find my legs still intact, making me still theoretically capable of going through with yet another pedicab shift. And with two shifts (sort of) already under my belt, it was time for my moment of truth, when both Terry and I would find out whether I was in the majority of those guys who never make it past a second shift or if I was one of the chosen after all.

Before I had a chance to decide which category I was in, my phone rang. The caller ID told me it was Terry on the other end. And I was just about to answer it, too, when I instead threw it on the bed and let it go to voice mail. Then I sat down in front my computer, pulled up my resume, cleared my throat, and slowly began to type.

“August 15, 2003–August 18, 2003—Pedicab Driver…”

Witness the Fitness

Note: If you’ve taken even a quick glance at my author photo in this book, I’m guessing it’s pretty obvious that I work out. A lot. Okay, fine, maybe it’s not that obvious or really even apparent at all when you get right down to it. And—who knows—since I’m writing this before the author photo has even been taken, I can’t guarantee that it’s the full body shot I was promised by the guy who swore to me he was the publisher of St. Martin’s Press in the bus station men’s room that day. My point, however, remains the same: I work out, maybe not a lot, but definitely more than I used to, which is great for me and—I’d like to think—a lot of other people, too.

I should be clear that I never planned on becoming the absolutely captivating physical specimen I am today; I was forced into it. I would also like to stress that I’m not one of those people who thinks that everyone has to work out around the clock and starve themselves to death just so they can look like the stars of Hollywood or those fair-skinned little waifs in all the fashion magazines. Unless, of course, you think it might lead to sex, in which case I say go for it. Anyway, this is the story of how I became one of the greatest fitness experts of all-time. I think you’ll find it very instructive, perhaps even inspirational.

I was driving back to my parents’ house during one of my visits to Cleveland a few years ago when I turned to my mother and said, “Mind if we stop at the grocery store on the way home? I wanna pick up some ice cream.”

“You don’t look like you need ice cream,” she replied, staring at the road ahead.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. It just seems like you might not need ice cream. That’s all.”

At the time I figured my mom was just being a jerk for some reason, maybe even for the fun of it, so I really didn’t give her words much thought beyond that. Shortly after the ice-cream incident, however, I began paying closer attention to the comments section of some videos I had posted on YouTube.

“Who is this fucking fatass?” one read.

“This guy is a fat fucking douchenozzle,” read another. “LOL!”

“Shut up, you stupid fat shit,” read a third. “Also, are you an asshole? Because you seem like you might totally be a major asshole. Oh, and one more thing: suck it.”

There wasn’t much I could do about the YouTube commenters’ opinions about my being an asshole aside from maybe showing up at their homes and doing something inexplicably nice for them, like mowing their lawn or presenting them with a Bundt cake, two things I both have no time for and also refuse to do. Still, I realized that when it comes to the truth, there is almost no one you should trust more than your own mother and a handful of totally anonymous Internet commenters, so I decided it was time to examine the situation a bit more closely.

I headed into the bathroom, stripped myself as bare as I could talk myself into, let the fluorescent light have its way with me for a moment, and then took a good hard look at myself in the mirror. As it turned out, my mother and all those Internet people were right. I seemed to have settled into what I like to think of as a “festive build,” the kind that comes not necessarily from eating fast food every single meal of the day or anything, but just from simply saying yes to life and also just about any food or drink that is set in front of you any time ever and never really getting around to working it off.

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d weighed myself, but stepping on the scale and seeing the little arrow race past 190 seemed like uncharted territory and significantly more than when I’d last done it. I remember my grandfather telling me when I was a kid that he weighed a rock-solid 190 pounds when he was in the Army. But as I stood in front of the mirror, my pale and freckled flab bathed in harsh light, the phrase “military build” didn’t come to mind. To be fair, “fat fucking douchenozzle” didn’t come to mind, either, but if I had to go with one of the two, I guess that would have been it.

Despite confirming both my mother’s and the YouTube commenters’ suggestion that I had officially become plus-size, the real wake-up call came when I put on one of my suits and found that it was much more formfitting than I remembered. As I stood there in what had somehow become a tiny little suit with buttons threatening to shoot across the room like bullets, blinding any and all in their path, it occurred to me that a lot of my other clothes seemed to be shrinking lately, too. I crunched the numbers and realized I simply couldn’t afford to update my wardrobe to accommodate my good-times-all-the-time lifestyle. It would be much cheaper to just lose a few pounds.

Despite the harsh realization that it was time to lose some weight, I also knew that quitting beer, ice cream, cookies, and other things I like to keep on the nightstand was out of the question. I’m not a goddamn crazy person. And some days I feel like that stuff is all I really have in life, so I decided I would instead just try to eat healthy when the sun was out, sort of a vampire diet, I suppose, only, instead of human blood, any food I happened upon after dark was fair game. It seemed like a solid plan.

“This is going to be right up there with the Atkins Diet once word gets around,” I thought proudly.

With my new, really strict diet in place, I began to address what I was told the other key ingredient to weight loss was—exercise, something I had done my best to avoid since the late ’80s. Since I knew I couldn’t count on myself to be disciplined enough on my own, I went all out and joined a gym. Not only would it make me commit to actually showing up somewhere and working out a couple of times a week, but it would also give other people the chance to see a man without limits in fucking action. It seemed selfish to keep that sort of thing to myself, and I couldn’t wait to inspire everyone around me with my awesome commitment to fitness. To gear up for things, I bought some of those athletic pants that make that swishy sound when you walk around in them. I wasn’t messing around. I looked pretty cool in them, too.

“Enjoy your workout,” the lady at the front desk told me at the gym after I checked in for the first time.

“No,
you
enjoy my workout,” I felt like telling her.

This shit was going to be epic. No muscle group would be left unattended. I figured I’d probably get asked to do my own instructional fitness video before long.

“Hi, I’m Dave Hill, and if you want to look as incredible in really tight pants as I do, then let’s get to work!” I imagined myself saying to the camera as a half dozen superfoxes in skimpy spandex stood behind me, bracing themselves for the killer yet sexy workout ahead.

As it turned out, however, the only thing I could really get myself to do with any frequency was use the elliptical machine. It’s a little on the dainty side as far as gym equipment goes, but it does promise a full-body workout right there on the machine and, perhaps more important, I once read that Jennifer Aniston uses it.

I made the elliptical machine my bitch a couple of times a week like clockwork for several months and largely credit it for helping me achieve the just slightly less doughy look I was totally going for. It’s a highly effective tool and if you don’t believe me you can ask Jennifer Aniston, a major Hollywood star who knows what it’s like to look great all the time, just like this guy.
1
The only thing I don’t like about it is at the end when it gives you a “workout summary.” Instead of giving me a bunch of numbers I don’t understand, I wish it would instead make me feel good about myself by telling me how bangable I am or something. Or maybe it could just be straight with me for a change. Just once when the workout summary comes up, I’d like to see it say, “Look, Dave, clearly you had a lot to drink last night. But don’t worry, no one is judging you. There’s only so many hours of the day you can sit around in your underwear before you start to feel like having eight or ten drinks and then maybe eating a pint of ice cream and staying up until 2:00
A.M.
looking at pictures of largely unattainable women on the Internet. In fact, if you factor in all of that stuff, the fact that you even showed up here today is pretty impressive. Now go hit the showers, you gorgeous and totally unpathetic man!” The technology to make that sort of thing possible is probably decades away, but I can still dream.

As fond as I was of the elliptical machine, however, it wasn’t long before I started to find going to the gym to be more annoying than going to the post office, then going to the DMV, and then having to go back to the post office because you forgot to mail a couple of things the first time. For starters, as best I can tell gyms are legally required to play the Black Eyed Peas at all times, which, despite the fact that I am sometimes genuinely looking to get a party of some sort started, is more than I can bear. Also, there’s too many damn rules at the gym: no cell phones, no cameras in the showers, no incorporating glitter into my workout.

“If they’re going to be dicks like that, why even show up?” I thought.

Lucky for me, I found a solution to my gym problem a couple of years ago when my friend Walter asked me to play guitar on a two-week tour of Europe with his band. Since I am even more incredible at playing the guitar than I am at the elliptical machine, I said yes. And while two weeks isn’t a particularly long time to be on the road rocking people in America, in Europe it can be a lot to handle, mostly because of the catering. As opposed to America, where you’re lucky if you get a six-pack and an already opened bag of pretzels, European clubs usually have a bounty of food worthy of ten Thanksgivings laid out for you as soon as you show up for sound check, and then a whole other spread of food, so big you’d think you were crashing a Russian wedding, served later for dinner. As if all that’s not enough, the dressing room is usually stocked with enough alcohol to satisfy Andre the Giant on a week-long bender. It’s as if they are actually happy to have the bands come play at their club or something. Seriously, it’s kind of weird.

After just a few days of eating, drinking, and rocking Europe into what I was pretty sure was total oblivion, I realized my bandmates would probably find my lifeless body one morning during the tour if I didn’t do something to counter the effects of all those cheese plates, mini chocolate bars, and other stuff us rockers tend to ingest in massive doses because we think we’re going to live forever. But with my gym having no branches in the area, I figured I was screwed (albeit screwed in that way that’s kind of a relief because you know you have an excuse to not work out at all). Then one day while in St. Gallen, Switzerland, Walter, a much thinner and handsomer man than I will ever be, even with the help of the medical community, got an idea.

“Hey, Dave,” he said. “You want to go for a run with me after sound check?”

Generally speaking, I had tried to avoid running most of my life unless I was being chased by Nazis or something, which—to be fair—has yet to happen. I’ve always found running to be hard, boring, and just really sucky in general—three things I am generally opposed to in life. Still, nothing sucks entirely when you’re doing it in Switzerland, one of the few places I’ve ever been that turned out to be just as adorable and idyllic as it looks on postcards and those little packets of hot chocolate mix. There are little gingerbread-looking houses everywhere, goats running around, little flower patches I can barely keep myself from diving right into—it pretty much has everything.

Since I had a pair of running shoes with me (mostly just for the look) and I’m incapable of turning down either physical challenges or shots of whiskey despite my utter disdain for both, I decided to meet Walter in front of the club for what I was told was going to be a “light jog.”

We began our “light jog” by making our way first through the cobblestone streets of St. Gallen and then up into the hills that surround the town. I was ready to stop after the first few hundred yards, but whatever pride I have wouldn’t let me, so I kept running alongside Walter while doing my best to not look like I might die at any second. By the time we had run about a mile, however, I was ready to drop. But I realized I could never find my way back to the club on my own, so I had no choice but to just keep running with Walter despite the fact that I was certain I’d be riding in the back of a Swiss ambulance if all of this went on much longer. Still, I figured if anything really bad happened, Walter would have to take care of it—I was quite simply too good at guitar for him to let me die in the hills of Switzerland.