“Do you really need that whole duffel bag of stuff?” Carmelo asked as Kristaps emerged from his apartment. “We’re just lifting weights. Not going to sleepaway camp.”
“I prepared for anything,” Kristaps answered nervously, dragging his bag to the waiting car. “Do you minding if I put on favorite jams on drive there? I need to pumping myself up.”
“If it’s more of that Latvian pop crap, I do mind,” Carmelo said, but this statement didn’t stop Kristaps from popping in a home-burned CD containing 128kbps YouTube rips of the favorite songs from his preteen years in Latvia. He sang along for the entire ten minute drive, trying to distract himself from the fluttery-sick feeling in his stomach. He felt like he didn’t know anything about lifting weights despite the Internet crash course he had given himself the night before.
They pulled up to the gym with Kristaps not feeling any less anxious than before. The comforting melodies of Latvian pop music were turned off and they walked into the gym to the gawking stares of the other patrons. “I was thinking bench press first, just to get an idea of your strength, you know, a baseline.”
Kristaps lugged his bag over to a nearby bench and sat down. “First I have to eating my protein.”
“Sort of unorthodox to focus on protein before the workout, but that’s cool,” Carmelo responded. “Is your bag full of protein bars or what?”
“Kinda,” Kristaps answered, unzipping the bag to reveal bags upon bags of whey protein.
Carmelo raised an eyebrow. “What you gonna mix it with, just water?”
“I usually just eating it plain,” Kristaps replied quickly. He hadn’t known that you were supposed to mix it with anything. He ripped open a bag wondering what he would find inside. To his surprise, whey protein turned out not to be a kind of gel or bar; it was just a light-brown powder. Unable to disclose his ignorance at this late stage, he boldly tipped the bag into his mouth. After pouring in half a mouthful, he grimaced at the foul taste and tried to swallow. However, he didn’t have enough saliva to make much progress, so he just chewed on it while trying not to gag.
“Man, that’s hardcore,” Carmelo said, watching the unfolding spectacle with a mixture of awe and bemusement. “You sure you’ve had this stuff before?”
“All the time,” Kristaps mumbled through his mouthful of chalky powder, causing some of it to burst from his nose in a cloud. Immediately he started to cough, and soon he had retched out the chunky, wet, brown substance. Passersby looked at the scene with amusement. Kristaps knew his face was red but he played it off. “Okay. Now I ready to bulking up.”
—
Kristaps and Carmelo stood next to the bench press. “Okay, you go first and I’ll spot you.”
Not knowing the first thing about bench pressing, Kristaps said, “I don’t know what means, ‘spot’.”
“It means I’ll stand behind you and make sure you don’t kill yourself with the bar,” Carmelo joked.
However, Kristaps started to panic. He hadn’t known that it was possible to kill yourself while lifting weights. Why would anybody even do it if it was so dangerous? His teammate clearly wasn’t too concerned about it, so Kristaps made an effort to push out of his mind his worry over the imminent danger he was facing. But he still didn’t know how to do the bench press.
“You gonna do it or not?” Carmelo asked impatiently.
“Quiet, Carmelo. I have to getting in zone before lifting,” Kristaps said. He tried to observe what other people were doing with the bench presses, but found that many of the people in the gym had recognized him and were staring at him just as much as he was staring at them. After pretending to get in the zone for another minute, he thought he had a decent idea of what he was supposed to do. He laid himself down on the bench and reached up to grip the bar with both hands.
“Don’t you want to put any weight on it?” Carmelo asked.
“Oh yeah, I forgetting. Put two hundred on. No, wait, two-fifty. I am in zone right now.”
Carmelo shrugged his shoulders and retrieved some weight plates. They looked very heavy to Kristaps, but there was no going back now. He had to show Carmelo and everybody else that he knew what he was doing. When the plates were all on the bar, he again grabbed it and prepared to lift it off the supports. With a small amount of help from Carmelo, he had the bar suspended above his chest, but it began to lower faster than Kristaps could control it. Soon, it was resting on his chest, and he couldn’t lift it back up.
“The protein isn’t works,” he gasped. Feeling suffocated, he allowed the bar to roll down his body, where it crushed his stomach instead. He squirmed, trying to get out from underneath it, but was pinned to the bench. Carmelo ran over and was able to push the bar to the side, where it fell off the bench at an angle and allowed Kristaps to escape.
“I thinking that I done for today,” he said, ignoring the many pairs of eyes that were on him. “Let’s go.”