Ronald the Fitness Pterodactyl

            It’s been a while since I’ve run into anyone strange enough that I needed to share the experience with the world. Gumbyman really set the bar pretty high. Last week, however, there was a chicken at the gym that I just can’t get out of my head. I’m going to go ahead and call this guy Ronald, because he had on bright, yellow shorts, the same color of Ronald McDonald’s clothing. He was also wearing fire engine red shoes, like Ronald’s hair.

            Even if you don’t work out, I’m sure you’re familiar with the type of person who needs to outdo everyone in his actions. It’s “The Smartest Person In the Room” in social practice. If you play an instrument and you’re playing something loud, he’s the wiener in the next room who has to play louder. If you’re putting up Christmas lights and keeping things tasteful, it’s the guy who steals your electricity to have his house visible from outer space. If you’re driving home from work, it’s the piece of garbage in the Eclipse who thinks he drives a race car, passes you on the right, cuts you off, zooms ahead of you so that he can beat you to the standstill traffic up ahead, and then revs his engine, even though he’s driving a car with an automatic transmission. Ronald is this guy – at the gym. There are a lot of Ronalds at the gym, and he’s someone most people come to expect – around the free weights and the muscles….

            On Wednesday mornings I go to a class some of you gym-goers may be familiar with. It’s called BODYPUMP™. It’s a choreographed weightlifting class. Some people are able to motivate themselves to exercise. They have that drive to just work out on their own. When I’m really angry, I can generally harness that emotion into some sort of serious work. It is not often that I am really angry on Wednesday mornings after I’ve had a cup of coffee, a chocolate chip muffin, and 9 hours of sleep. I find that having a super-fit badass yell at me and tell me to keep picking things up is much more effective at getting me to do shit. I’m clearly not alone because I see the same people in this class every Wednesday morning. I think I’m pretty strong – there are some tiny ladies in there who are even stronger than I am. Ronald was new last week.

            When I saw him standing in the back I felt sorry for him. I thought, “Wow, that poor little guy is going to feel completely emasculated by this room full of women lifting heavy shit for an hour.” It’s not an arrogant statement – it’s just that people underestimate the difficulty of the class and the strength it takes to repeat an action like a bench press continuously for 5 minutes without any breaks. Little did I know, Ronald was incapable of feeling little, despite his small stature.

            The form for doing these exercises is pretty simple. And there’s an instructor in the front telling you and showing you what to do. I would say it’s virtually idiot proof. It’s not like CrossFit where all kinds of crazy things are happening – I think if my clumsy butt tried that I’d become fast friends with my local ER doctors. Ronald was defiant. Ronald KNEW BETTER. Despite the fact that our instructor has taught thousands of these classes, Ronald was going to do his own version of these exercises.

            Thank the lord for mirrors in group-exercise rooms. And thank goodness, I know how to laugh silently. When Ronald squatted he looked like he was about to vomit into an imaginary toilet in front of him, rather than keeping his chest up and sitting into an imaginary chair. We do an exercise called a dead lift, which our fearless leader compares to “stripper pose.” Ronald would suck as a stripper. The concept of shaving the bar down as close to the body as possible was lost on him. He was dropping that bar through the porcelain goddess he visited in his squats. Bicep curls? He looked like he was trying to throw things behind his head – literally, as if you would through salt over your shoulder. My favorite though, was when he decided to do his pterodactyl impression. He was specifically told to keep his elbows and hands below his shoulders when raising the weights up in shoulder flies. I actually saw him shake his head “no,” which was followed by him throwing his arms WAY up in the air like he was trying to lift off out of the room. OH, and the best part of that was that he was doing it with 1 kg weights – the smallest ones available.

            I felt really bad for the woman who brought Ronald to the class. I felt bad that she knew this guy and had to talk to him. I’m sure he’s a real peach of a person. Who was he trying to impress? He was in a room full of women who were all secretly laughing at him and thinking he was a giant turd. I suppose it takes all kinds to make the world, but I wouldn’t mind running into less of his kind.

Gumbyman Returns!

There is no air conditioning in my house. We have those old fashioned window units in the bedrooms, but for the basic living spaces we are SOL. In these heat waves like we’ve been having in New England of late this translates to me relocating to coffee shops to work. My local coffee shop crowds pretty quickly on weekends, so I usually end up at the Barnes & Noble Starbucks just over the NH border. When I discovered Gumbyman’s existence last weekend, I really didn’t think I’d ever see him again. You can imagine my surprise on Sunday when he pulled up a chair at the table next to me and began a variation of what I have concluded is routine. Of course, we’re practically B&N café family now so I had no problem staring and taking notes.

            I don’t know why he only needed one table and one chair this week. Perhaps it was because he was not wearing his Gumby shirt. Without Gumby along for the ride, naturally he wouldn’t need as many chairs. His shirt was clean and pressed, a grey t-shirt with the sleeves cut off at the shoulders. No deviation from the forest green shorts. There was little rustling as he settled into his chair. No nerves. Just easy squatting and a plopping down of four books and a brown paper bag of a shape that would indicate it contained a sub like sandwich.  The literary choices were A Ship Without A Sail: The Life of Lorenz Hart in hardcover, The Three Stooges Scrapbook, The Color Companion to Walt Disneyworld, and a paperback of title that remained covered at all times. The only words I could see were “full of coupons.”

            Gumbyman got up not long after he sat down and walked to the condiment/straw station on the other side of the café. He grabbed a hefty portion of coffee stirrers (again), two packages of salt (again), a two-inch stack of cocktail napkins, and seven small plastic dixie cups clearly meant for other customers to use for water. He split the seven cups into three stacks. Snap and fizz, a can of Pepsi was poured into one of the cup stacks. Hgggckkkk spit, into a second stack of cups, followed by a crumpled napkin. (Gross, by the way).

The next activity disturbed me a bit. Gumbyman seemed to pull out of air two $5 scratch tickets. Of course, they were Three Stooges scratch tickets. The Three Stooges scratch tickets in Massachusetts are only $2. Why do I know this? Because I am a compulsive gambler. This is why I am disturbed. Gumbyman and I now have two things in common. That is two too many.

            Rub rub, scratch scratch, foil filings are droppings on top of the coffee stirrers, which would soon touch food, and the pile of napkins. Every so often Gumbyman’s top lip would pull back and curl up away from his teeth as if he were a billy goat chewing sod. He shook his head after he stopped scratching and stuck the ticket inside the dust jacket of A Ship Without A Sail. I gather he did not win. He then reached inside the paper bag and pulled out his snacks. Cheese Doodles, M&M’s, potato chips, and Fritos. Brand names must have been on sale at the gas station where he picked up his scratch tickets.

            Cheese doodles and book pages aren’t friends. My heart started to race a bit. Do not fear - Gumbyman had a plan. His right hand reached and grabbed three of the coffee stirrers as if someone else were racing to them, and he snapped them like a chicken’s neck. The splintered edges of the stirrers were violently used to rip a hole in the cheese doodle bag so that the bag could be opened into a flat plate. The stirrers were then used to stab the doodles as if they were cocktail wieners. He shoveled them in as quickly as he turned chunks of pages of Ship Without A Sail from right to left, unaware that it was in English not Arabic.

            New snack, new book. The M&M’s didn’t last very long. Gumbyman tore off the corner of the bag and poured them all into his mouth as I dreamed of pouring adult beverages down my throat to cope with what I was witnessing. The Three Stooges Scrapbook would have to make it through M&Ms and potato chips. I wondered if he would use the coffee stirrers to try and stiletto the potato chips. He didn’t. He did stiletto the bag though. I also hoped to see him pour the salt all over the table, but was disappointed that he didn’t use it at all. Perhaps brand name potato chips use more salt than the store brand he had the week before.

            For the final act he shoveled the Frito’s into the trap while paging through the book about Disneyland. He never made it to the fourth book with the coupons in it. Perhaps its purpose was just to act as a shelf for the other books. As soon as he finished the Fritos he finished his Pepsi, which he had been drinking from the plastic cup, not the can. He tried to empty more from the can, but it was dry. He forcefully smacked it down on the table in such a way that it leveraged his body up from the chair. Purposefully and with great speed, Gumbyman turned and, belonging-free, walked straight towards the public washroom, never to return to clean up his mess.