Busy Monsters

by William Giraldi

  You should have seen Richie Lombardo in his front yard: a six-foot-two mass of hairless, striated muscle, three hundred pounds of rounded granite tanned bronze, one of the most famous bodybuilders in the Northeast, his physique in multiple magazines and on protein products and TV programs, gold and silver trophies adorning the rooms of his dwelling. When he shook my hand I feared he’d detach it from the wrist. And you thought cartoon characters were not real.

  He ambled like a being more robot than man, more metal than flesh, his oversized torso twisting on top of his waist because the wings beneath his arms confined him like someone in a body cast. When he greeted me on the walkway, his nearly naked frame blocked out the sun and cooled my face. I had never before beheld in person a thing so freaky and sculpted; Michelangelo no doubt would have shuddered in approbation. He was simply grotesque, a man misshapen into the mechanical, and yet he was stunning, an item of beauty if you were inclined to see him that way. I had thought there existed only six abdominal muscles, but this creature had eight, four on each side of his stomach, each of them a rectangular wedge of marble. In contrast, my midsection had become a bleached and hirsute mound of dough that maintained finger indentations for twenty seconds or more. His legs nearly defied description: quadriceps that met at his knees and had multiple chiseled parts, split hamstrings that bowed out half a foot, and calves roughly the size of genetically altered cantaloupes. In other words, the legs of a rhinoceros, mobilizing a body that humbled Hellenistic statue and Bowflex Man both.

  New Jersey: a state so Martian I half expected to look up and spot six-wheeled rovers parachuting down through a bloodshot troposphere.

  “Charlie, babe,” Lombardo said, “Friend informed me that we have some necessary work to do. When Friend calls, I answer. He saved my life once in Bosnia, back when I was Special Forces.”

  I had expected a voice gorge-deep, but his was normal and I daresay pleasant.

  “You’re the satyr who attacked unsuspecting Eurydice in that field.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Richard,” I said, “forgive my mouth ajar. I’ve never stood before another male undressed so. What are those little shorts made from? Nylon?”

  Nylon—stupid me. They were spandex.

  “It looks like you have a soda can in there. And forgive me for asking, but is it physiologically sound for one’s veins to be the size of electrical cords? I’ve never seen veins in a human being’s pectorals. Plus your nipples are the size of eggs.”

  He flexed his pecs. “Do you know how much discipline it requires to delete all the water from underneath the skin in order for these veins to wind around the muscle like this? One must be privy to the workings and interactions of potassium, glycogen, and H2O. Feel me, babe?”

  How did he get his grass so green?

  “Jesus, you shave your body? The whole thing? It must take days.”

  “You need to see the muscle definition. Why be shredded like stone if those shreds are covered by hair? You dig?”

  “Richard,” I said, “I’d rather not dig. I’m confused about why Friend sent me to you, and, to be perfectly honest, I’ve lately been spending my days in riot and roar, a hoodlum with no home.”

  “Have you been crying?” he asked.

  “Me? Crying? Do I look like a man who cries?”

  “You want me to answer that?”

  My silence said no for me.

  “It’s cool, babe. Friend advised me to read your memoirs in order to gather intelligence, diagnose the whole dilemma. You have tight narrative structure and a pretty strong sense of dramatic thrust. But if I could make one, not unimportant suggestion about your erratic prose style—”

  “Can you not, Rich? Thanks. I’m afraid of you and my penis has retreated up into my body so that now I am effectively a female.”

  “Chill, babe. Let’s go inside. The real females are waiting. I ordered us a pair of beauties from Madam Chung’s House of Superior Entertainment.”

  Females? Waiting? Madam Chung? To what brand of debauchery and Mother-Nature-fiddling godlessness had Friend sent me? And why was my horror now tinged with a splash of thrill? Dr. Frankenstein or Jekyll no doubt stood just behind the front door gripping a mallet, prepared to perform sacrilege on my own outmoded body. I still had time to turn around and sprint. Why wasn’t I?

  “Actually, Rich, listen, can we just talk outside in the pleasant sun or nearabouts? I need a relatively calm scene here. I spoke to my editor a few days ago and he said readers are emailing complaints, doubting my hijinks.”

  “I think you wrote in ‘Help Me Wanda’ that you needed more females in your stories, and I have two waiting right inside, babe.”

  “Somehow I have the feeling, Rich, that the women from Madam Chung’s House of Superior Entertainment are not the sort of women the average American female reader can bring herself to sympathize with. Plus I shouldn’t haul my scourge into your house. I taint all I touch.”

  “You can’t taint me, babe, it’s cool. Come on, now, stop the dumb excuses, let’s get learnéd.”

  As I followed Lombardo to the porch I couldn’t help but notice—honest: I couldn’t help it—that his buttocks were a perfectly level and square slab that did not jiggle as he moved. He was a pink anatomical chart, animated in three dimensions and smelling of tanning oil—you know the smell. This consummate lack of body fat did not appear to me in any way healthful; evolution chose body fat for a specific function, and whatever that function is—warmth, buoyancy, what have you—Richie Lombardo seemed not to need it. Physics took a detour at his form. The bodybuilders of America had gone from a barely registered curiosity one slakes with drugstore magazines to an imposing reality with sound and scent.

  It would take me several moments to notice that his walls were festooned with blown-up photographs of him posing onstage during various championship competitions, and this because the only two sights I took in at first were the naked Asian women massaging each other’s feet in a block of sunlight on the carpet. Lombardo introduced them as Mimi Squared—he meant, I guessed, that they were both named Mimi—and the two rose to greet me near the front door with tender hugs and kisses slightly French. I simply stood there aghast and impotent. Before me was the destruction we ill-fated all too often greet as stimulation.

  “Sorry,” I said, “I haven’t brushed my teeth,” but it didn’t bother them.

  They looked nearly identical and could have been twins except that one had itsy-bitsy breasts pointed upward and the other had itsy-bitsy breasts pointed outward. Pubic hair: pencil-line strips. Body fat: zero. Lips: pink pillows recently fluffed. Height: in the low five-foot range. Weight: light as air and love. Plus they smelled of some island fruit one longs to crack open and suck the flavorful sap from.

  “Mimi Squared,” Lombardo said to me. “Descendants of the Huns and other Mongoloid virtuosos. Schooled in submission and the art of orgasm. The yellow horde has insight we Caucasoids only dream of. They can walk across hot coals while playing violin.”

  I palm-knocked on my sideways head in order to clear whatever blockage was distorting his sentences.

  “Huh?” I said. “What?”

  “Chinamen, both of them, although Mimi to the left has some Japanese shogun in her distant past. You should see her wield a steak knife. Also meat eaters, as were all mongrels.”

  Palm-knocked the other way this time.

  “I don’t think I follow, Rich. Can you speak more slowly, perhaps pause a long time between each word?”

  “Carnivorous, I say, like our ancestors on the African savanna. Buddhist and Confucian, respectively. Fluent in four languages apiece, plus as many in the martial arts.”

  “I’m sorry, really, but I’m still stuck on that yellow horde comment. Did you say yellow horde?”

  “Sure did, babe. Asians are my bag, but what we’re about to teach you can be applied to any of the races, even Native Americans and the Inuit tribes, although they are much harder to bend.”

  I took a
step back here, toward the door.

  “Richard,” I said, “I am from New England, which, as I’m sure you know, means I’m a Democrat. We believe in equal rights and the liberation of women. They are not objects to be bent. What I see before me is sexual enslavement and a degradation most foul. Wait here, I’m calling the police. My morality, what little of it remains, is offended.”

  I think I had a hand raised in the air, finger pointed upward, at heaven.

  “No it isn’t,” he said.

  “But still, it’s the proper thing to say and the expected reaction at a time like this. I smell slavery and traces of sodomy.”

  “You should cut it out,” Mimi the First said. “Don’t judge us, wimp. Just cut it out.”

  And Mimi the Second said, “Right. Either you’ve arrived for illumination and good old-fashioned fun, as your friend Friend said you were in need of, or you have no desire to rid yourself of the shackles civilization has fastened to you. Which one will it be, Mr. Homar: the nature that begot you or the cell society has slammed you into?”

  I must have looked at Lombardo with an expression that indicated mystification and disgrace, because he said, “Mimi on the left graduated from Yale, and Mimi on the right published a study with the University of Chicago Press called Sexual Fantasia from Caesar to Sade. I have copies on my shelf. You’re free to take one. Both women were born and raised in Manhattan in the 1980s, by the way, which might account for much.”

  Hmm. Let me think here. What possibly could I have said just then? My options were not many and so, unhappily, this was what came out of my mouth: “Uhh, Sade was an ogre with no compassionate feeling for humanity.”

  One of the Mimis—I was already confusing them—the one with the outward-pointing teats—countered with, “That’s an egregious miscalculation, and a clichéd one at that. Sade was a comedian and fantasist forcing a hypocritical society to see that its own laws of morality are paper thin. Also let’s not forget Wilhem Reich and his theory of orgone: sexual adventure is the only guarantee of mental health.”

  “Yes,” I said, “and let’s not forget that Herr Reich landed in prison for fraudulent claims.”

  I had read that somewhere but wasn’t exactly sure it was true.

  “So,” she said, “you have something in common with Reich, then, you ex-con. Come down, Charlie. You look so silly up there.”

  Yes, your leading actor and chronicler actually glanced about to see where he had to climb down from; and then her meaning spanked me true and the real blushing began. I knew she was making superior sense just then, sure, but it struck me as a shade difficult to take her seriously with those candy-corn nipples vibrating on the ends of her little teats. Plus she had sat spread-eagled on the carpet and so her hairless packed mound of genitalia was aimed right at me.

  Is this the burlesque Friend had in mind for me? What good, people, could possibly come from this exchange? None, right? These gals made a gent remember maelstrom and mayday.

  “Really, Rich,” I said. “Did you have to give them my memoirs to read?”

  “They’ve been here all morning, Charlie. They were curious. Those memoirs are public property, babe.”

  “Okay,” I said, on the sofa now, “what’s the meaning here, Lombardo? What does Friend want you to do for me? I need to recline. It’s not every day I commune with a gargantuan superhero and his two Asiatic scholar-slaves.”

  “You want some water or something?” a Mimi asked. “You look faint.”

  Lombardo sat on the sofa opposite me, the slaves in the middle.

  “What are you thinking right this very second?” he asked.

  “I’m thinking: I can’t explain where I am or even begin to connect it with anything. I’m willing to acknowledge absurdity and randomness but I believe I prefer Bigfoot and UFOs to the likes of you three. And really, Rich, you know what the saying-makers say about situations that seem too good to be true.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean two gorgeous courtesans who just happen to be Ivy League scholars? Are you kidding? Who’s going to believe this?”

  “Why does anyone have to believe it? And nothing is too good to be true if you have the cash to pay for it. These girls are a thousand bucks an hour, babe.”

  One of the Mimis said, “But worth every nickel.”

  “Charlie,” Lombardo said, “if you’d come off your high horse and cut the crap for just one second, you’d see that Friend wants to help you. I’ve known Friend since way back and I’ve never seen him care for a buddy the way he does for you. He feels terrible for sending you to that dock with his gun and then you sitting in prison for three months.”

  “Richard,” I said, “if you’re trying to infuse my narrative with a shot of sentimentality, please refrain. My readers recoil from bathos. Plus I don’t know how to refute that. It makes me look bad.”

  “Friend thinks you need to sever the cable attached to this Gillian. I have to agree. Not a healthy union.”

  “Oh, and this is healthy?” I asked, gesturing, it seemed, to the house around us, but I didn’t mean his house was unhealthy. “You look like you’re about to burst from anabolic injectables, your skin is tanned a color that does not exist in nature, and you grease this grotto of sin with the paid-for lust juice of two Asian Eves. Plus you pray to false idols—look at all these photos of yourself.”

  “Affirmative,” he said, “and that’s what we want for you, babe, self-esteem included. Take out your pad and begin taking notes, because you’re not going back to Gillian. That way of life isn’t working out for you, in case you haven’t noticed. Look at yourself. I promised Friend I would fix you and that’s exactly what I intend to do. You’re gonna get muscles and eat raw meat with me.”

  “No can do, Rich. I promised a little girl I wouldn’t support the slaughter of animals and that’s exactly what I intend to do—or not to do, you know, not support it, I mean.”

  He squinted me a look that spoke first of troglodyte righteousness and second of the vegetarian sissy I was trying to be. Some pieces in me quaked; whether they were bones or tendons I could not tell. I imagined myself bleeding, perhaps planted in the backyard by his tremendous arms. Behind his head above the sofa was an obscenely large photograph of himself flexing so hard it looked as if his skin might unzip. The two Mimis kneaded each other on the carpet not six inches from my shoes, four eyes heating me with glances of confusion, perplexed by my elephantine idiocy. And yes, I’ll admit it: I didn’t gallop from the room because—come on, people—I had two vulvas and four breasts making promises and professing poetry. The mammal in us will have its say.

  “All right, then, Richard,” I continued, “say again that part about my becoming like you. I’m feeling some minor movement in me.”

  “Yeah, babe, that’s more like it. Follow us downstairs. Come, ladies, let’s get bacchic with Charlie Homar.”

  WE FOUR WENT through the kitchen—a gleaming off-white cleanliness for which his housekeeper deserves a green card or at least a raise—and descended the basement stairs into another gleaming, intensely lit expanse that contained his home gymnasium of professional weight-lifting equipment. The walls were ten-foot mirrors throwing around fluorescent light and nudity, the floor a blue rubber pad on which sat multiple machines for exercising one’s back, shoulders, quads, biceps. The space smelled of pristine perfection. A long row of dumbbells was lined up against one wall like metal soldiers, silver weights from twenty-pound lollipops to two-hundred-pound bombs. There in one corner sat a squat rack and bench-press station; there in another sat metal triangles that held his Olympic plates with the circumference of truck tires; and in yet another corner, that reliable contraption any gym fiend knows as a Smith machine, a barbell attached to the sides of the structure with oiled cylinders. And then there were places to perform chin-ups, sit-ups, T-bar rows; a pulley machine for triceps and the devil knows what else. Plus more framed photos of him posing onstage and creepy cartoon images of Asian banshees i
n coitus.

  “It’s so warm and dry down here,” I said. “My basement is like a rain forest.”

  “Climate control,” he said. “That’s pivotal for weight lifting and lovemaking.”

  One of the Mimis opened a door next to the bathroom and revealed a sun-strewn room with but a king-sized mattress on the carpet.

  “This is our launchpad,” she said.

  My face must have asked the relevant questions.

  “Launchpad,” she said. “Use your dreams. You wrote in one of your essays that every person wants to be a spaceman, and so this is how we do it. In fact, when you wrote that line you were referring to sex with Gillian. We aren’t that different after all, are we, Charlie?”

  “No, Mimi, my darling, I suppose not. Well, you know, in some ways. I still have remnants of a moral center.”

  The other Mimi—upward-pointing teats—said, “Every time I hear you mention morality it makes me want to puke. You attempted to kill several people. Plus Morris Hammerstein asked you specifically not to write about his family, and just today you ran that very story about his wife and kids. You called his wife a chocolate champion? Are you serious?”

  “He did! I didn’t! He did.”

  She said, “And you named their daughter Mocha, for crying out loud? You know how offensive that is?”

  “Wait, they named her that! They did. I just reported on it. People are entitled to their language.”

  The other Mimi said, “I doubt they named her Mocha. Her name is probably Mary or Marge.”

  “What’s wrong with Mocha?” I asked. “What? Ever have a mocha latte? It’s delicious!”

  She said, “And every last lesbian in the land is going to boycott you, I hope you know.”

  “But I didn’t tell Morris to fight that lesbian! Guys, I’m a victim here. Come on. Let’s be friends.”

  “Richie,” she continued, “I might suspend my Buddhist restraint and smack this dope. How do you think he’s going to characterize us for next week’s installment? As a couple of chinky, hypersexed, preverbal prostitutes.”