Let us now praise famous men

Sex and death at work

Put me on a boat and cut the line
The fishing’s been much better but the weather’s fine
And all my friends are here to kill the time
And all the things I love are in rewind

~Port O’Brien, “Close the lid.”

Oyster Perpetual

I met Oyster working my very first gym-job. Oyster was classically good-looking, if a little short. He’s what would pop out of an AI-generated mold if tasked with casting an 8/10 white guy with dark hair. He had brilliant teeth, clear skin, and a normal BMI. Not shredded but within what would have been considered a normal, almost skinny weight-class. This was in New York City before America was so fat and, in any case, classic is classic and Oyster had it.

He stood about 5’8”, 160 lbs., the product of partying through an all-boys prep school in Connecticut, endowing him with a predilection for Adderall, alcohol, navy fleeces, armless puffer vests, brown loafers, casual distance running, rowing, and sport-fucking. We worked in a gym on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, surrounded by three hospitals that kept us stocked with an army of nurses replenished each July, in addition to many well-educated Jewish girls, who came from money and were well-inculcated in the upper middle class habits of bumping uglies. Many delighted in meeting a well-bred, good-looking guy they could never marry, letting him pay for a date he couldn’t afford and rearranging their guts for 29.9% APR. In his absolute very worst, most depressed months, he would limit himself to only one, gaining momentum in more gainful strips of calendar. By the time I met him he had already been through an easy fifty-something in the three years he worked there, on top of whatever others he’d left in yestersheets.

He bragged about his David Yurman, which was too expensive to be casual but what one of our bosses called “a starter watch.” At first Oyster seemed smart but, after a few weeks, I heard him reaching for words that didn’t quite fit. His insults also seemed to involve the adult version of calling me smarty pants, which is about the time I got a lock on his insecurities.

Girls could tell he wasn’t smart but they didn’t care because he was a good listener and great flirt. No matter how much money he needed, he could get thrown off by pussy 100 times out of 100.

One day I joked that I was going to impregnate a girl and refuse to acknowledge the kid. He told me not to let our boss hear it. For context, our boss was an extremely intimidating,  past middle-aged gay man who had very few prospects of executing such a task. Obviously, there was a secret, so I pushed, asking someone else for the goods. Turned out that one night a few years earlier Oyster had a one-night stand resulting in a positive pregnancy test. Some weeks passed when his liaison realized what was going on and told him he was on the hook for the next eighteen. Enterprising as he was, he received another phone call within a week or two, this one from a stripper he’d met the same weekend as the first caller. She informed him that yet another child was on the way, this one busy gestating inside of her. Just as Plan C follows Plan B, his children arrived the year after his most lucrative, which is conveniently the basis on which child support is assessed. 

One day he was sitting with his feet kicked up at my desk, talking to one of our bosses. I needed to run a payment and when I asked him to get up, he told me to chill out, that he was going to finish his story first. I stated my case again and he repeated himself so I swept the chair out from underneath him. He hit his head on the column behind him and fell to the floor. He looked at our boss and asked if he was going to do anything about it and he said, “You heard the man.” Within two months I was his boss.

Sagrados

Sagrados and I started work the very same day. We were both stocky bald guys and, even though I was about 10 years older than him, he was far more impressive. He was about 5’10” and almost 260 lbs, slightly fluffy. If you ask guys how they want to look or even speak to women, many will give a description that sounds closer to Oyster. But, if you put Oyster in a room with guys like Sagrados, it doesn’t always work out for Oyster.

Sagrados was a 23 year-old Cuban guy who always had a five-o’clock shadow by 8:00 am. He had played football at an uncompetitive school in the South and quit the team, having apparently encountered a fair amount of racism from guys a whole skin-tone lighter than him, questioning whether he was even American. He was tough and seemed like a winner so I took him at his word that it was as bad as he said. Plus, he just seemed like a good guy, the kind I would have been friends with in high school.

The first day, I was wearing a drab green baseball hat with an American flag patch on it. He asked if I had served in the military and I said, no, that I was just patriotic. This was in an upper class business and neighborhood filled with extremely wealthy people, some of whom are the wives of government officials nations like Venezuela. From the standpoint of our customer base, dropping five figures on plastic surgery or having an affair with your spouse’s friend is not so foreign to one’s social circle, that one can avoid it. Needless to say, when these people wear camo, no one confuses them for military.

It’s hard to describe another guy’s attributes without sounding gay but Sagrados was a specimen. I don’t remember his squat or deadlift but I do remember he could bench over 400 lbs and clean 300. One day we had to do a “team-building” exercise that amounted to diet Judo, shoving or throwing another person out of an arbitrarily drawn circle. While I have big bruiser paws, this guy threw me like a chihuahua. 

We started about a year and a half after the place had been shot up. The event made national news and there had been a commotion regarding safety in our industry that ultimately resulted in a lot of nothing security measures that were mostly up to college girls attractive enough to work up front. We could never figure out why the people who were nicest to us were all friends with the people who were shittiest. One day someone pulled me aside and told me it was trauma-bonding: Watching your bosses get smoked and then seeing a guy blow his brains out will do that to you.

As for us, we both quit after 6 months, realizing that the job wasn’t all that. Lots of headaches and condescension from less-impressive individuals with bigger egos. Sagrados quit a week before me, after a month or so of attempting to transfer to another location. Our boss had been unfairly targeting him but his numbers were not sufficiently impressive for her boss to take his request seriously, so he was denied.

After a few weeks in North Carolina, where he had just relocated for a new job and a new girl, who was absolutely beautiful, I opened Instagram and saw his post, clear as day. At this point Sagrados looked lean. If you go to his account, there’s a square on his profile grid where you can see a before-and-after split, one picture where he looks fat and depressed next to another, no smile but shredded, sweaty, six-pack, at only about 200 lbs.

The line below has three pictures. On the left, he sits on the edge of a boat with goggles on top of his head, huge smile beaming as he holds a lobster towards the camera so close to the lens, antennae so wide, the frame can’t contain them. On the right, a picture of his bike parked at the beach. And, in the middle, the last time we hung out. I caught him taking a 300 lbs tire and going for a walk with it, flipping it 30-something times and stopping seemingly out of boredom. To the left of his final post is an update from his brother with directions to his service. Top middle is his note.

Johnny BK

When I moved to New York, before I was working in gyms, I worked in hospitality. I had only been in the workforce for a few years but had now begun working jobs that gave me bonuses. One summer my gym had a special up: 16 one-hour sessions for $999. I was in. I asked a sales guy about it and he grabbed the first person he could and brought him downstairs.

The trainer looked at me and said, “What do you want to gain like 20 lbs?” I was only about 160 lbs at the time and I told him I just wanted to gain some muscle without getting fat. I also told him that I had just gotten into my first and only real, serious fight, after someone started spitting in people’s faces while waiting for the train. Jon put his hand on my shoulder and said, “When I’m done with you, you’re going to be the one spitting in people’s faces.”