“So,” Frank said.
“What can we do for you?”
“I’m not sure. I’ve never done this before.”
“Well, why don’t we start with your name.”
“I’m Frank Snake Church.”
“Damn, that’s impressive. A man with a name like that is destined for greatness.”
“If my name was John Smith, you’d tell me I was destined for greatness, right?”
“Well, I’m supposed to help you be great. That’s my job. Stronger body, stronger mind, stronger spirit. That’s our motto.”
Frank stared at Russell. Silently studied him. A confident man, Russell was comfortable with the silence.
“Are you a serious man?” Frank asked him.
“I’m not sure I understand your question.”
Frank stood and walked around the desk. He knelt beside Russell and spoke to him from inches away. Russell didn’t mind this closeness.
“Listen,” Frank said, “I know this is your job, and I know you need to make money. And I know a large part of what you do here is sales. You’re a salesman. And that’s okay. You need to make a living. We all need to make a living. And hey, this job you have is a great way to make money, right? You get to wear T-shirts and shorts all year long. And you’ve probably helped a lot of people get healthy, right?”
Russell could feel Frank’s desperation and sense of purpose, the religious fervor that needed to be directed. Russell had met a thousand desperate people, all looking to rescue or be rescued, but this Indian man was especially radiant with need.
“I keep a scrapbook of the clients who’ve meant the most to me,” Russell said. He’d never told anybody about that scrapbook and how he studied it. If exercise was his religion, then the scrapbook was his bible, and every one of his clients was a prophet. Russell never spoke aloud of how proud he was of the woman who lost five hundred pounds and kept it off, of the man who recovered from a triple bypass and now ran marathons, of the teenager paralyzed in a car wreck who now played professional wheelchair basketball. Russell fixed broken people, and sometimes the repairs lasted a lifetime. But he could not say these things aloud. In order to be taken seriously, Russell knew he had to pretend to be less than serious about his job, his calling. He could not tell his clients that he thought his gym was a church. He’d sound like a crazy fundamentalist, an idiot parody of a personal trainer. He couldn’t express sentiment or commitment; he was forced to be ironic and cynical. He couldn’t tell people he cried whenever clients failed or quit or trained too inconsistently for the work to make a difference. So he simply repeated the tired and misleading mantra whenever asked about his work: It’s better than having a real job. But now, after all these years, Russell somehow understood that he could tell the truth to this sad and desperate stranger.
“I remember everybody I’ve worked with,” Russell said. “I remember their names, their weights, their goals. I remember the exact day when the quitters quit. I keep a running count of the total weight my clients have lost.”
“What is it?”
“I can’t tell you that. It’s just for me. It’s a sacred number.”
“Okay,” Frank said. “I think it’s good to remember things that way. Very good. I admire that. So, with my admiration clearly expressed, I want you to answer my question. Are you a serious man?”
“If I said this aloud to most of the world, they’d laugh at me,” said Russell. “But I think I have one of the most important jobs in the world. That’s how serious I am about what I do. So yes, in answer to your question, when it comes to this work, I am a very serious man.”
Frank stood and looked out the window at the Seattle skyline. With his back to Russell, he spoke. It was the only way he could say what he needed to say.
“My father died a week ago,” Frank said.
Russell had often heard these grief stories before. He knew five people who’d come directly to the gym from funerals and immediately signed up for full memberships.
“What about your mother?” Russell asked.
“She died when I was eighteen.”
“My mother died of sickle cell last year,” Russell said. “My father was killed when I was twelve. He was a taxi driver. Guy held him up and shot him in the head.”
Frank honored that story — those tragic deaths — with his silence.
“How did your father die?” Russell asked.
“Heart attack.”
Frank and Russell were priests and confessors.
“Listen to me,” Frank said. “I used to be a basketball player, a really good basketball player, the best in the city and maybe the best in the state, and maybe I could have become one of the best in the country. But I haven’t played in a long, long time.”
“What do you need from me?” Russell asked.
Frank turned from the window. “I want to be good again,” he said.
Russell studied the man and his body, visually estimated his fitness levels, and emotionally guessed at his self-discipline and dedication.
“Give me a year,” Russell said.
For the next twelve months, Frank trained five days a week. He lifted free weights, ran miles on the treadmill, climbed hundreds of stories on the stair stepper, jumped boxes until he vomited from the lactic-acid buildup, and climbed ropes until his hands bled. He quit smoking. He measured his food, kept track of all of the calories and the fat, protein, and carbohydrate grams. He drank twelve glasses of water a day. Mr. Death, Frank thought, I am going to drown you before you drown me. Frank’s body-fat percentage, heart rate, and blood pressure all lowered. Every three months, he bought new clothes to fit his new body.
During the course of the year, Frank also cleaned his house. He removed the art from the walls and sold it through want ads and garage sales. Without ceremony, he piled up all of the old blankets and quilts, a few of them over eighty years old, and gave them one by one to the neighbors. He gathered financial records, wills, tax returns, old magazines, photograph albums, and scrapbooks, and stored them in a large safe-deposit box at the bank. After that, he scooped all of the various knickknacks and sentimental souvenirs into cardboard boxes and left them on the corner for others to cart away. One day after the movers carried away all of the old-fashioned and overstuffed furniture, other movers brought in the new, sleek, and simple pieces, so there was only one bed, one dresser, one coffee table, one dining table, one wardrobe, one stove, one refrigerator freezer, and four chairs in the entire house. He pulled up the rugs, hired a local teenager to haul them to the dump, and sanded the hardwood until the floors glowed golden and sepia. Near the end of the year, he found enough courage to give away his father’s clothes and the boxes of his mother’s clothes his father had saved. Frank gave away most of his clothes as well, until he owned only black T-shirts, blue jeans, black socks, black boxers, and black basketball shoes.
Frank kept all of the books, three thousand novels, histories, biographies, and essays, and neatly organized them on bookshelves he built into the walls. He read one book a day. After he disconnected the telephone and permanently stopped the mail, his family and friends worried about him and came to see him, but he turned away all visitors, treating loved ones, strangers, salespeople, religious crusaders, and political activists as if they were all the same.
Frank knew his behavior was obsessive and compulsive, and perhaps he was seriously disturbed, in need of medical care and strong prescriptions, but he didn’t want to stop. He needed to perform this ceremony, to disappear into the ritual, to methodically change into something new and better, into someone stronger.
“Make me hurt,” he said to Russell before every training session.