Free The Fighter by Craig Davidson

The strain coursed down his arms into
his gut, knotting into an agonizing ball he expelled in the form of an oddly
toneless fart. Stacey guided the bar onto its pegs.
    Paul heaved with
embarrassment. "I'm so sorry about that."
    But Stacey was
pleased. "Only means you gave a hundred and ten percent to your lift.
You're not farting, you're not jerking enough iron. First time I squatted a
thousand, I crapped my pants."
    Paul couldn't
tell what Stacey was more proud of: the fact that he'd squatted half a ton or
that he'd shit himself in the process.
    He finished his
workout and hit the showers. He'd noticed how two distinct groups of men spent
far more time naked than was strictly necessary: those in terrific shape and
those too old to give a damn. A few struck show poses stark naked before the
change room's floor- length mirror. Paul found himself scoping out their
bodies: chests and arms and abs, the symmetry or lack of it, the freakish mass
of the Einsteins. Lately he'd taken to picturing how elements of other men's
bodies might look adorning his own: he'd take that guy's pecs, that guy's
delts, that guy's pipes, that guy's soup-can cock and cobble together an
idealized version of himself. Franken-Paul.
    On his way out
he caught Stacey behind the front desk, bent over a plate piled with skinless
chicken breasts.
    "Good work
today, fag."
    "...Thanks."
Paul nodded to the shelves at Stacey's back: tubs of protein powder with names
like Whey Max and BioPure HyperPlex. Each tub featured a wraparound photo of a
tanned, overdeveloped, confidently smiling Einstein.
    "Which do
you recommend?"
    "These?"
Stacey jerked a thumb at the tubs. "All shit. Chalk dust and pigeon
crap." He shoveled chicken into his mouth. "No substitute for hard
work, Harris." He paused with his mouth open; rags of masticated chicken
swung from his teeth. "Well, that's not the literal truth."
    He gave Paul a
look, its shrewdness suggesting that Paul's suitability and trustworthiness
were currently the subject of intense scrutiny. Later Paul would realize that
Stacey gave everyone this look; his customer criteria was no narrower than a
convenience store's.
    Stacey rooted
through a drawer and set an ampule on the desk. "Testosterone ethanate.
We're talking the Rolls-Royce of performance enhancement."
    The Einsteins
made no secret of their steroid abuse—why bother, when your body was a walking
billboard?—and Paul had overheard horror stories: hardened knots forming in
their asses from the deep- tissue injections, excess body hair and cysts the
size of corn kernels, penile atrophy. Stacey had himself developed a serious
infection in his right bicep; he'd performed meatball surgery on himself in the
men's bathroom, piercing the infected tissue with a heavy-gauge needle and
filling a Dixie cup with a broth of blood and pus.
    Paul rolled the
vial between his fingers. A quarter-ounce of yellow fluid. Piss, was all it
looked like. A squirt of dirty yellow piss.
    "Is it
safe?"
    "Nothing's
one hundred percent safe. You walk outta here, get hit by a bus."
    Paul had always
despised the well-trodden bus rationale. He asked what company manufactured the
stuff. Stacey told him that medical-grade steroids were for pussies; he said
Paul would be better off chugging the pigeon crap. None of this answered Paul's
question, however, leaving him to wonder if it had been brewed in Stacey's
bathtub.
    "I hear it
shrinks your dick."
    "That can
happen," Stacey admitted. "But here's the thing: every guy's got an
extra three inches of cock rolled up in his hip cavity."
    "Oh, come
on with that."
    "I shit you
not. Rolled up in there like a chameleon's tongue. There's this operation where
a surgeon makes a slit at the base of your cock and yanks out the extra bit. I
got it done; my dick's not bent or anything and I piss and fuck like a
champ."
    Clearly Stacey
had tendered this pitch a few times. Not that his salesmanship was at all
necessary—despite any minor misgivings, Paul's mind had