Neon Golgotha

by Michael Faun

  Only one week left before the NPC amateur bodybuilding contest...

  A tumorous cloud of self-loathing swelled inside her. She drove a fist into the mirror which shattered into large pieces, let out a fuming roar and collapsed amid the shards. Her tears mingled with the blood that poured from her gashed knuckle.

  She lay there staring at her face that gloated back at her through the fractured mirror mosaic for a good hour before her self-pity and anger retired. But she made up her mind not to give up this time. She would take the fight, eat up the competition and go home with that big-ass trophy.

  This wouldn't be New Dorp High School Beauty Pageant all over again.

  Barbara dragged herself up from the bloody mess and tended to her wounded hand. She popped a handful of Winstrol pills, then drove straight to her local gym.

  Planet Fitness sat on South Avenue right next to a Chuck E. Cheese's. Ironic, since that very establishment had built the obese monster of a body she now was hellbent on molding into perfection.

  The spring wind wafted the smell of grease into her nostrils as she exited her Mazda Protégé, and with resolute steps walked toward the gym's entrance. The fit receptionist offered a smile of recognition as Barbara zipped through the lobby and into the workout area, where generic fitness music droned.

  She saw Sean, the gym owner, immediately. Busy spotting a guy on a barbell bench press, he shown up as he noticed Barbara, and jogged over to her.

  “Barb! Long time no see,” he said and gave her biffy shoulder a friendly tug. “You've been missed around here, girl. What've you been up too lately? At least I see you haven't slacked off in your bulking. You seeing another gym?” he jested, feigning jealousy.

  “Not looking too shabby yourself,” Barbara returned with a smile and a raised brow. “See you've made some changes around here.” She nodded towards the new state-of-the-art training equipment. “Neat.”

  “Yeah... thought it was a good idea to upgrade the gym and, you know, invest in the business instead of spending it all on crap.”

  “You mean spending it all on white skinny girls, eh?” Barbara teased and poked his bulging pectoral. “Good for you. Good for you.”

  Sean chuckled. “So, how can I help you today? Wanna renew your membership? I can throw in a nice discount...”

  “Um, well...” Barbara hesitated for a moment, then lowered her voice, “look, I need some of your special stuff.”

  “Yeah?” Sean glanced around the gym. “Sure. I think we can work something out. Let's step into my office.”

  W hen Barbara returned home she was in high spirits. Filled with newborn hope, she whipped up a protein shake and took a gulp, then proceeded to open the plastic bag Sean had sold her and emptied it on the kitchen counter.

  There was a plethora of different kinds of steroids—orals, injectables, and syringes to go along. She glowed like a kid on Christmas as she inspected the drugs, eagerly skimming the leaflets just to find they were written in Russian or some other foreign language.

  She didn't care, though. Sean had assured her the steroids were perfectly harmless aside from the regular side effects, many of which she was already familiar with. Besides, none of that mattered. She was going home with that trophy, mustache or no mustache.

  Time to start shredding!

  Barbara drained her shake and cranked her favorite CD: M People's Bizarre Fruit, and began mixing the steroid cocktail to end all steroid cocktails.

  The song “Sugar Town” blasted through the speakers as she pulverized a handful of pills using a mortar and pestle. Her first 'brew' was a combined mixture of Methyl testosterone, Clomid, Equipoise, and Clenbuterol. After that bad boy, she planned to make a second blend of Deca Durabolin, Lasix, Halotestin, and Cytomel to serve as a kicker to boost up the former chemical mélange.

  She stared at the dark red powder in the mortar. This powder was her skeleton key to the doors of every future bodybuilding contest.

  So, with no further ado, she scooped up one gram of the super potent powder and stirred it with 0.3 oz. of the injectable Nandrolone-Phenylpropionate. It dissolved to a purplish semi-thick glob.

  Was it supposed to look that way? That thick? There were also tiny bubbles in the goo. Was that air? Was it dangerous?

  She had heard that medical professionals must always be cautious of air getting into their syringes, and had even watched an old movie once where a junkie killed another junkie by injecting a syringe full of air into his arm.

  Does the body have no defense against this?

  Second thoughts began to whirl in her head and she broke out in a pang of sweat. To this day, she had only taken her precious Winstrols, which she thought looked harmless, like little pink mouths. Shooting steroids, namely a homemade mixture, was a totally different ballpark!

  She stood pondering for a moment, then paced around the kitchen, made another protein shake and downed it to calm her jarred nerves. She dug deep in her memory, trying to recall the conversation she had overheard in the locker room at the gym.

  Yes. She was sure the women had said it was fine to inject crushed pills. She was sure they had mentioned the exact measurements she had just employed.

  One gram of powder to 0.3 oz. of distilled water to yield 0.3 oz. of liquid.

  Barbara plucked up courage. She sat down, picked up a syringe, and pulled the plunger until it had sucked up all the purple liquid. She took a deep breath, rolled down her spandex shorts, then slowly pushed the needle tip into her right buttock, depressing the plunger until all of it had entered her bloodstream. Then she pulled out the needle, swallowed, and said a prayer.

  The shot felt surprisingly mild. That was a good thing, of course. Barbara only hoped her ass cheek wouldn't swell up like a blowfish later. She dabbed a cotton ball on the puncture wound and decided it was time for a killer workout.

  She put on another favorite CD: Haddaway's The Album, and started with half an hour of squat thrusts. She could literally feel her muscles growing, almost as if a team of tiny construction workers bustled about inside her thighs. Another half hour was dedicated to her abs, a third to her chest, followed by a forty-five-minute rep of biceps.

  “Wooo!” Barbara felt like a super woman. Relentless, invincible, ready to crush any obstacle in her way with her bare fists. Wiping sweat off her chest with a small towel, she drank some water and crushed up the second batch of steroids. She dissolved it in Sustanon-250, and injected it all in her other butt cheek.

  Spurred on by her imagined superpowers, she moved briskly to her pull-up bar and did nineteen weighted pull-ups. Going for the twentieth, white pain rattled her brain and her muscles went into a deadlock. Her fingers turned to oily icicles and she lost her grip on the bar, falling head first to the hardwood floor with an ominous crack.

  Black pinpricks veiled her vision for a few moments. When her head cleared, she found herself staring into the ceiling, motionless and startled over the bad fall. At least she had survived, she reckoned. And her brain was apparently still working, so the crash couldn't be too serious.

  Or so she thought until several hours had passed without her being able to move anything but her eyeballs.

  By nightfall, she had to swallow the grim fact that her whole body was paralyzed.

  And so there she lay, just out of reach from her water bottle. After the first waken night of sleepless dread, she flinched as she heard the footsteps from the mailman outside. She tried to call for him but could not form a sound. Only a strand of drool came out of her mouth. And tears from her eyes.

  The second night passed and the mail started to pile up. She could hear the mailman whistle some cheesy tune, and that was when she decided to throw in the towel.

  On the third morning, after fifty-seven hours without food or water, Barbara's brain had begun to deteriorate. By now, her thoughts were nothing but babbling mush, and her senses flickered on and off like a low voltage light bulb.

  Later that afternoon, peculiar blue neon light flooded her house
. Barbara embraced it. Right there and then, she abandoned her dying body and threw herself over the escarpment of death, free-falling into the cold abyss.

  †

  B arbara was inducted to afterlife by the voices of the gym-owner Sean, and Megan, Barbara's arch rival. Fleeting snippets of their toxic dialogue echoed in her clouded head.

  “She's so fucking fat and it's about time she stopped trying.”

  “Ha-ha-ha!”

  “I'm serious, though.”

  “If she quit, my ass'd be on skid row. She's my cash cow.”

  “More like cash elephant.”

  “He-he, well, last session I told her, 'suffer if you want to be beautiful.'”

  “She probably bought it, too, stupid bitch. You think my ass and torso's improved?”

  “Did you do all the reps?”

  “Yeah, of course...”

  “I think you'd win the goddamn Nobel prize if there was a category for 'best ass'.”

  “Aww, thanks.”

  “Don't thank me. You did it all by yourself. I only gave you the tools. Any success you've had is your own doing...”

  “I think I'm done for today. Wanna fuck that piece of Nobel prize ass?”

  “Just lemme' me close up here and I'll meet you in the sauna.”

  Barbara blinked her eyes open. She found herself laying in front of a reeking dumpster in a dirty alleyway. Not two yards away, a one-eyed demon in piccolo garb stood leaning against a service entrance door, smoking a cigarette.

  “Ah, there you are, awake at last,” croaked the demon and flicked the cigarette to the ground. “Started to fear I was dealing with a late riser.”

  Where am I? Barbara thought, wrapping her spaghetti arms round her limp body.

  “Welcome to Hotel Neon Golgotha, Miss Haskell. High time to check in to your room.” Yanking open the grinding service door, the demon piccolo went inside and fetched a handcart and went about with hoisting Barbara onto it. “Off we go.”

  They passed through a bustling kitchen and soon entered a large service elevator. The grotesque piccolo pressed a button and the double doors closed, initiating a bumpy journey downwards.

  Barbara began to feel a sense of fulfillment with each descending floor. As if something familiar beckoned to her slumbering brain.

  The elevator finally ground to a halt and a dull PING sounded when the doors slowly opened. They zipped out into a smoky blue-painted corridor and soon stopped outside a slate gray door.

  “Here we are, Miss Haskell. Room 8488,” the piccolo announced and bumped open the door with Barbara's limp foot that stuck out from the bottom of the cart. “We sincerely hope the room is to your liking.”

  That said, Barbara was tilted over into the dark room, and as the door closed and locked behind her, a row of fluorescent strip lights switched on in the ceiling. Harsh blue light.

  And that's when everything fell into place...

  The locker room at Planet Fitness!

  Megan stood with one leg on the bench, wiping gluey semen off her inner thigh, humming “Be My Lover” by La Bouche. She crumpled the sticky towel into her gym bag, put her platinum blond hair in a bun and strutted into the hot shower.

  The paralyzed Barbara watched her living self—six months prior to her demise—enter the locker room gripping a 26 lbs. kettlebell, and with stealthy footsteps skulk after Megan into the showers.

  A nauseating cracking sound, much like a boot trampling over dry wood, echoed over the noisy water sprinkle, as Megan's head was smashed to a pink gray and dark red pulp.

  Blood mingled with sudsy shower water that flooded out over the white floor tiles of the locker room, soaking Barbara where she lay smiling.

  Then, as if by magic, the blood-mixed shower water disappeared and Barbara – once again – watched Megan stand with one leg on the bench, wiping semen off her inner thigh, humming “Be My Lover” by La Bouche...

  EPILOGUE

  It was way past midnight at the front desk when the demon night manager closed the massive ledger and killed the switch to the hotel's roof neon sign.

  Taking the elevator to the topmost floor, the 66th, it entered its dank quarters, poured a bourbon, and stared indifferently out over the monolithic skyline of the city of damnation; anticipating the next wave of deviants to check in.

  And to the deafening sound of tortured screams and mad laughter hailing from tonight's guests, it fell fast asleep, dreaming of the work that awaited tomorrow.

  And the day after that.

  Forever.

  END

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