Boot, from Day One

[tortolis]

Here's "From Day One" told from Boot's point of view. I didn't know what to call it.

Gee, writing this kind of story is fast. Just climb into the character's head and think.

- Tortolis

Boot, From Day One - part 1B

Don’t get me wrong, I’m fine with the whole idea of college and I know that many families have to sacrifice for their kids to get there, but I’ve been investing for years now and if it didn’t make sense from a business standpoint I wouldn’t be here. I had one restaurant waiting for me in Madison and a stake in another by the time I arrived for freshman year.

Anyhow, that’s not the point. The point is that, have you ever been in the same room with a real bodybuilder? By that I mean someone who has worked in a sustained, concentrated manner to develop his physical strength, size and symmetry and who is physically gifted in the first place, though bodybuilder may not be the right word, if you see what some of those guys do to themselves. We’ve all seen them in magazines and of course the Governator in the movies. (And thank you, Arnold, for bringing the fullness of your talent to the world.)

But if I were a betting man, and I am, I’d bet that you haven’t been within arm’s reach of one of these guys. I’m not talking about the guys on your high school football team who used to make the girls squeal. Think about it: Every few years there might be one classical music nut like Schroeder in Peanuts who’s been playing an instrument since he was three and goes on to conservatory. A really focused, talented muscleguy is rarer than that. Maybe he was on an athletic team in high school, but probably not, because it’s a solitary thing, an obsession and probably the result of some psychic wound from childhood.

Then the classical music nuts go off to conservatory and find that actually there are hundreds like themselves and they go from being prodigies to being nothing special. And the same natural selection takes place at college and you see these muscle hunks from another planet filing in and out of big university gyms by the dozen. I saw them here and there on campus, or maybe they were just football players. But when I returned to my dorm suite on registration day, there was one sitting in the living room and sure enough he was my suite-mate, and the result of seeing him ten feet away was like nothing I could have imagined.

I wish I could describe the effect when I opened the door and saw him sitting quietly in an armchair. It was like lightning struck. He wasn’t exhibiting himself, anything but. Polite, quite, clean-cut…wearing a baggy green tee with the neck cut out and the sleeves cut open, slit to open up like bells, but they collected above his upper arms, which were unbelievably curvy and bulbous, incised and deeply shadowed in a way that looks different in person than in pictures. When he stood up, the shirt was close and smooth across his shoulders and chest, but hung loose below. It all happened in a couple of seconds but felt way longer. Meanwhile my heart is pounding and my voice, when I start to talk, is stuttering in spite of me. And I swear to you —

I never liked comics much as a kid, but I swear to you that I glanced around looking for a steel bar that would be propped right in the corner, so I could hand it to him. So he could bend it in half without taking his eyes off me.

And in that couple of seconds I also remember thinking how I’ve always believed in rationality and common sense, how I stopped saying my prayers when I was eleven years old and started telling everyone I was agnostic, and now, seeing this guy for the first time, it was like discovering there’s magic in the world after all.

And to tell you the truth, I felt this incredibly intense attraction that was immediately getting the better of me, like falling into a whirlpool. It didn’t seem sexual, since I couldn’t imagine shoving it into a guy, but there was something. What was it?

The guy, Chris, was calm as a cucumber. He’s like six-foot-five. I think he willed himself to be tall through mental imaging as part of his training. In couple of days I had his whole deal figured, not that he told me anything, just from observation: he was a computer sci major and treated his physical regimen like a gigantic multivariate computer model, feeding in data about his nutrition, his weights, his sleeping, his biometrics, his blood chemistry, analyzing the results, tweaking his program every day. A simple guy with simple needs, right? When you scratch the surface, nothing is easy.

But that’s getting ahead of the story. We’re still in the first two minutes when I realize that whatever else Chris’ body is, it’s a bankable asset, and if I can help him collect on it, he becomes obligated and I have a connection to him and to his muscles. They couldn’t be mine, but the connection could be mine. The question was: How do we collect on the asset? The answer: millions of ways. And about another minute one comes to me, and it came to me because my heart was still beating like a jackhammer and I was wondering why. So I thought: jackhammer — Hammerhack’s, the club in Baltimore — Boston Charlie’s, the club in Madison. And off we go to Boston Charlie’s. And I made a bet with myself that within twenty minutes his shirt would be off and that connection would be mine.

At Boston Charlie’s I knew about this guy named Abe who manages the front of the house, because I was thinking about taking a stake and the private equity owners told me about him, and sure enough there he is getting ready for the evening rush and the new semester. All I had to do was get Chris in front of him and let him figure his own deal — bouncer Chris, stripper Chris, eye-candy-in-a-cage Chris, bartender Chris, whatever. It wasn’t the ultimate solution, but it was a start. With two thousand occupancy and five thousand setups on a slow night — I said huge, right? — Chris could draw very big with the gals, the gays, the security-minded, whatever. About seventy-five percent of their market, easy.

Just like I thought, Abe’s eyes bugged out of his head when he got within range of Planet Chris. But to tell you the truth, my heart was still pounding and I was mainly interested in watching Chris take his shirt off. And as I had already learned, this is something that doesn’t happen unless he wants it to.

Now I learned a thing or two about bodybuilding right away after meeting Chris, and it’s actually kind of fucked up. The guys shave and oil their bodies and the drugs can affect your secondary sexual characteristics and cause your gut to protrude, which is not what we have in mind for him. At this point he’s still what you’d call natural, but he’s already huge in all the places it counts, which is unusual for someone who’s natural, and the effect is of overwhelming, supernatural power. Like I said: magic, right here on earth. So when he pulls his tee off, I’m on the verge of hyperventilating and Abe clearly wants to rip off what remains of his clothes.

Here’s the bodybuilder effect: the muscles are all defined, with boundaries that are like drawn on. Oiling accentuates the effect, and you can lose it in photography, but when you’re there in the room with it, there it is. Unbelievable. And in the late afternoon light at Boston Charlie’s in September, Chris was shadowed and his bulges loomed in a way that seemed really dangerous.

In bodybuilding, the twenty-inch arm is like a grail quest — that’s the flexed bicep, peaked like a piled-up scoop of ice cream — and when Chris flexed for Abe, his didn’t look smaller than any of the twenty-inchers I’ve seen in magazines since then. But that’s not even the point. He’s eighteen years old and he’s got something that these professionals don’t, standing there cool and offhand as could be. He’s got this aura of overwhelming power, like he could rip the club apart with his bare hands if he halfway happened to want to. Abe was creaming in his pants. Chris either didn’t know it or chose not to show it. As for me, I didn’t want to negotiate with Abe anymore. I wanted to get Chris back to the dorm.

When we got back there, he took his shirt off for me and I got to feel his muscles. I never wanted anything so much in my life, and I got it. Where it’s taking me, I don’t know. Gay? Post-gay? I decided in high school that the point of sex was pleasure and that bisexuality was the most efficient means to that end, but somehow the idea never appealed. But with Chris, I feel a kind of power I never knew existed before. It’s going to take me somewhere, that’s for sure. I just don’t know where yet.

[redroger11]

My computer lost power yesterday before I finished my comment to you. I am chuckling like I did yesterday and it's because I was right. I was going to say the best part of the writing was how Boot was so into his business thing that his drive really wasn't all that muscle. But you had the undertone of a guy in control being affected by something new and powerful.
OK, I know. A little late now that you put in the other point of view. But just to let you know, both POV are great. And for all his,I don't know about putting it in another guy, Boot still seems to be taken by Chris. Luckily it looks like Chris isn't ruling out the idea that something could happen.
Ya got a property here that could be a long term investment. But you already know that, right? Smart.
Keep Writing.

redroger11

[Geek2Jock]

Oh wow, that is tremendous! I feel like I know Chris better now AND I know a little better what motivates Boot by knowing what's going through his mind. His actions are not quite consistent with his intentions, so this glimpse inside his head sets a much broader stage for the story to unfold.

Thank you Tortolis

[tortolis]

Many thanks for the interesting feedback, Redroger11 and Geek2jock. This has been surprising and fun. The first story I posted was back in the second week of August, "Son of the Spider Woman", and it was full-length and took much more time than these two vignettes. I'd say these were experiments and now I've got to see where I'd like to take them.

In general, it's harder for me to invent and frame an incident I'd like to narrate than to build a character around it.

- tortolis

[Lucas88]

Okay...now I'm frightened...I've been INSIDE the yappy little terrier's head and found out he's really...bing bing BING!...Ricochet RABBIT!!! (Yeah, another step back into the time tunnel).

"Here?s the bodybuilder effect: the muscles are all defined, with boundaries that are like drawn on. Oiling accentuates the effect, and you can lose it in photography, but when you?re there in the room with it, there it is. Unbelievable. And in the late afternoon light at Boston Charlie?s in September, Chris was shadowed and his bulges loomed in a way that seemed really dangerous."

Now THIS is a description!

Can't wait to see where you take this, tortolis...or better yet, where this takes you!

Lucas

[Jaypat]

This is different, and fun and I'm really enjoying it. Forge onward!