I remember Jackie looking at me one day and was like, “You’re getting fat.” I looked in the mirror and, sure enough, I had a waist size that had grown past the 36” range, and I was tipping the scale at about 235 lbs. My diet consisted mostly of ice-cream, steak smothered in sauce, and anything smothered in melted cheese. So I decided to try to hit the gym using her trainer since I knew I didn’t have the immediate drive to stick with it.
My rules to the trainer were: 1) I don’t run, 2) I am not really interested in sweating, 3) I have 45 minutes tops, and 4) I expect results. Suffice to say that it was mildly successful, but as soon as I stopped seeing the trainer and got a gym membership was about as fast as any weight lost was regained and increased.
When Mom died, I lost a ton of weight… something like 35 pounds in about a month and a half. I looked in the mirror one day, and while I didn’t look healthy, I looked like I was in the weight class I was meant to be in. I looked at David and was like, “I’m gonna stick with this. I am going to make a really crappy situation and try to ween something good out of this, and you are going to be my trainer.”
So when we got back to NYC, I signed up for the gym he belonged to, and we embarked upon the most awful, painful thing I have ever done in my entire life. The little muscle man next to me was running four miles without really breaking much of a sweat. I, on the other hand, was getting leg cramps at 3.5 mph walking for more than .25 mile, and my heart rate was blasting to 165+ on a light jog over a minute.
We lifted weights, and I felt like the weakest guy in the room trying to do a concentrated curl and having trouble doing it with seven-pound weight. I would then go home and be sore for the next 48 hours for having lifted seven pounds a few times. It was a shot to my manhood—a sucker punch to the balls.
But slowly and surely, I made a little bit of progress, and I got to spend an hour and a half to two hours a day with my little brother in the morning before work a couple days every week. We would tell each other funny stories, or be running in silence with our ear buds in but still chilling next to each other.
His words of encouragement got me to the gym the days he couldn’t make it, and when I was really feeling down or hungover, I knew I could go there and push myself to the point of exhaustion that I wouldn’t be able to think about what was going on. I remember one time he said to me, “Wow dude, Mom would be really proud of you right now.” I was more interested in hearing the compliment from him (it was one of the nicest things he has ever said to me), and I think my mom would have been really proud of him for convincing my lazy ass to remain off the couch and start taking better care of myself.
But the best reward of them all was when he took me to Jamba Juice and bought me a Peanut Butter Moo’d. This little slice of heaven—this “Major Award”—was the tastiest, most delicious little bugger on the face of the planet. But if you didn’t work out, it was like a Big Mac Super-Sized to your system. So it came with a warning: You don’t workout hard enough? You don’t get Peanut Butter Moo’d. We drank a ton of these bad boys, and when we were on trips together, we would seek them out because even on vacation, he and I would go to the gym a few times that week.
I haven’t had a Peanut Butter Moo’d since he died. While I’ve been going to the gym a little here and there and trying to keep a good routine going, I haven’t earned it just yet. Sometimes when I am there, I can feel myself well up and have to push through so I’m not some cotton-headed ninny muggins crying to himself in the mirror. Other times, I harness a bit of the anger I have inside for what he did and will push myself just little farther. But I still haven’t earned that Peanut Butter Moo’d… YET. But I will.
I am sure it won’t be the same or as tasty as when I had them with him, but it will be a reminder to myself that I am keeping a promise I made to both him and my mom. And myself.
