Forget Something?

There was this guy at the gym earlier this week… Hold on… hold on… I’m gonna throw up again.

Oh man, that was a bad one.  I’m going to try to push through writing this but just know it is making me physically ill to recall this bit.

Ok.  So there I am in the packed gym halfway through my Zero to 5K routine on the treadmill listening to Warren Zevon ask for assistance to get out of some kind of jam he had gotten into in Central America when I see something in the mirror.

It was a dude.  A big, loud dude.  One of those guys that are “linebacker fit”.  Six-four, two-seventy-five-plus, 55% muscle, 45% fat.  You have seen and heard them in the gym before.

He was wearing shorts.  Well, I think they these could be called shorts because, technically, they had just enough material to qualify as “not quite underwear at least in the back”.  There was very little left to the imagination, especially since the material in the back had to do triple-duty constraining his pumpkin-sized cheeks from breaking free.  So the front part was sort of… sort of drawn up under his gut and… hold on… hold on… I’ll be right back.

Oh, God.  Dry heaves are the worst.

Did I mention the “shorts” were zebra-striped?  Yeah… they were zebra-striped.  Did I mention that he strutted?  Yeah… he strutted like a boss.

So, like I said, the place was packed with clients.  The trainers/managers were there.  Even with my headphones on and with the various machines running I could tell that the noise level in the room was deafening – packed to the rafters with the sound of everyone carefully saying absolutely nothing whatsoever.  Several dozen people participated in “synchronized looking anywhere but over there”… Unless you were one of the few unlucky souls trapped on a treadmill facing a mirror.  Then the game was “count the pieces of gym equipment that should probably be destroyed by fire immediately after he leaves”.

I have no idea how long he was at the gym before I got there but he left before I got off the treadmill.   He was wearing sweatpants and left with his plainly-dressed workout partner.  You read that right.  He had appropriate gym clothes with him and he was not by himself. 

I couldn’t hear what people were talking about one millisecond after the door shut behind him but eye-rolling, pointing, and snickering are pretty universal parts of human-to-human communication and are pretty easy to make out from across a room. 

I haven’t seen him there again since what will forever be etched into my mind as Skivvies Tuesday so I am wondering if management said something to him.  I’m doubting it, though.  Lawsuits, you dig?