strength Chris Changes His Mind

[tortolis]

Long time no post…this story continues a multi-part narrative with two main characters, Chris and Boot, who met as freshman dorm-mates at the University of Wisconsin. This section picks up the story when Chris, the less-worldly of the two, suddenly finds that it's the week before Thanksgiving break.

 

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Chris Changes His Mind

 

The Tuesday before Thanksgiving week, an odd thing happened in my favorite lecture. The class is "Physics for Engineers," so-called because it's taught by the same guy who teaches "Physics for Poets" — Shmuel Feinberg, more commonly known as Dr. Shmuelly. Everyone loves him and he's the go-to guy for local TV stations when they want someone to explain, say, a comet or global warming. He starts all of our lectures with a joke or riddle related to some aspect of physical mechanics, and you can come back to him weeks later with a clever solution and still get credit for it. This time he says "Question, class," as he generally does, and then "Let's say you happen to be walking along Fuhrmann Row very early one morning and you happen to see Chris Morgenfruh across the street holding the rear bumper of a late-model Mini Cooper with both hands and lifting it by moving only his lower arms by pivoting upward from the elbows." About half the heads in the big lecture hall swivel around and look at me, which surprises me, because I didn't think anyone knew who I was, since there are no other freshmen in the class. "It may help those of you who are gym rats to know that he is performing curls," he says. "What I want to know is this: If you know that the weight of the Mini Cooper is thirty-two hundred pounds, what else do you need to know in order to compute the effective weight that Mr. Morgenfruh is lifting, and how would you do it?"

 

Usually people jump all over these questions, but now the room was quiet. "How about you, Mr. Freeman?" said Dr. Shmuelly. "You're usually full of ideas."

 

"I'd have to know what hallucinogens I'd taken before I left the dorm," Freeman said. A few people laughed. "What about it, Mr. Morgenfruh?" said Dr. Shmuelly. "Can you think of anything?"

 

"First I'd want to know exactly where the car's center of gravity is located," I said.

 

"Good, and why would you want to know that?"

 

"Because if I'm lifting from the rear, the front wheels are acting as a fulcrum and I'd want to know how much weight is on each side of the fulcrum."

 

"A fulcrum? Really? When I said your forearms were pivoting from your elbows, that was a hint." A pivot, it turns out, is not necessarily a fulcrum. And if the center of gravity is forty percent of the way back, you're not lifting sixty percent of the weight — "why would it be linear, Mr. Morgenfruh? Why does it matter how far forward the front wheels are?" When I didn't answer, he asked "What about the angle of rotation, would you also want to know about that?"

 

"Yes," I said.

 

"Why?"

 

"Because if I didn't you wouldn't have asked me." Laughter.

 

"Why oh why am I so generous with hints. This isn't hard, people. Imagine instead of a car it's a tube or a bar of equivalent weight. It could be ten feet long, or fifty, and Mr. Morgenfruh is standing at one end. The actual weight is the same, the distance he moves his end is the same, but the angle of rotation is smaller if the bar is longer. Does that make a difference in the amount of force Mr. Morgenfruh must exert in order to do his curls?"

 

"Twenty-two pounds!" Freeman called out. "No, wait. That was his birth weight." Nervous laughter.

 

Eventually a number of teams — the lab section is divided into teams — a number of teams came up with answers that were quite close to each other's, but some methods were much more complicated than others. The guys who are good at calculus will take any excuse to use it, but it turned out to be optional in this case. At the end of the lecture we circled back to the Mini Cooper and Dr. Shmuelly buttonholed me as we were leaving. "Do you have time to walk with me to my office?" he asked.

 

This was a great thing. Only his favorite students take the walk, and his favorite students get A's. "Sure," I said.

 

"I wanted to apologize for the appetizer," he said. That's what he calls his quizzes — appetizers. "I'm sorry if it was embarrassing. In the middle of it I realized I shouldn't have used your name, but by then it was too late to turn back. Vietnam syndrome, I got in too deep."

 

Should I let him know that I didn't mind? "No problem," I said. His office was about the size of a bathroom with two chairs instead of one and, of course, books everywhere. Despite the digital revolution, scientists continue to churn out books.  "I like your desk," I told him, "what I can see of it." An old Steelcase desk, battleship grey, with grey linoleum inset in the top.

 

"I love this thing," he said. "I know you've got an eye. I do, too. You know that cliché about students getting younger every year? That really is how it seems." He's probably still in his 30s himself, young for a full professor. I suppose you could say his face looks like the map of Israel — big nose, curly brown hair — but I like him just like everybody else does. "One of the perks of this job is the people-watching. Big campuses like this one draw exotic creatures from all over the world. Students with every kind of good looks." He waved his hand to indicate a quote: "Rejoice, o young man, in thy youth; remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth." I couldn't tell where the conversation was going and asked him if he wanted the door closed. "Certainly not," he said. "You'll learn that faculty rarely close their office doors when conferring with students these days. Especially with attractive students." He's an odd mix of formality and informality. Keeps you on your toes.

 

"Attractive?" I said. "I'm not really attractive."

 

He chortled, but not in a derisive way. "I should know better than to talk to adolescents about their looks," he said. "Have you met Miss Spaeth?"

 

"Linda Spaeth, with the perfect eyebrows?" They're perfectly arched and razor-sharp, as if they'd been cut with a laser. I knew who she was but didn't know her.

 

"It's not just her eyebrows that are perfect," he said. "Dark eyes like burning coals, jet-black hair, olive skin, symmetrical features, bee-stung lips. If only a silent film director could have seen her. She looks like an Arabian princess, and maybe she is. I know her mother is Iraqi and her parents aren't here. I think you two are a couple of the most amazing-looking creatures I've ever seen. I envision you together in a medieval romance from the time of the Crusades. You're a knight…Percival, I'd say. Heroic but naive."

 

"Linda is what my mother would call Reubenesque," I said.

 

"Don't be limited by stereotyped thinking. Use your eyes."

 

"You sound just like her," I said.

 

"Who, Linda or your mother? I've never heard either of them. Anyway, that's neither here nor there. I've been watching you since the beginning of the semester. And when I say watching…I was really pissed off when I saw you in the first lecture, a freshman jock. It had to be a mistake."

 

"Stereotyped thinking?"

 

"Exactly. And then the gentlemen on Fuhrmann Row."

 

"Frat guys?"

 

"Yes, I heard them talking."

 

"They're full of it. They were probably drunk. I did some tricks at one of the frat houses on a bet. Indoors, not with a car."

 

"And how did you get such incredible development? Are you a football player?" I was sure that the next question would be about steroids, but perhaps because the door was open, he didn't ask it.

 

"I am pretty stringent about working out," I said, "but I'm as far from being a football player as you can get. Since my early teens I've been sort of experimenting on myself with exercise and diet and tracking the results to correlate with various metrics, very simple ones, but numerous, so the algorithm itself gets rather complex — work, rest, nutrition, BMI, trying to correlate everything to strength in every possible way. But I'm the only test subject and the experiment doesn't exactly meet laboratory standards. And no advanced biochemicals. Which is not to say…"

 

"I think I get it," he said. "With a computer you made yourself, no doubt. Still…in all my years teaching undergrads and grad students I've never come across a physique like yours. You know how spectacular it is, right? Percival was sort of blind to certain things about himself."

 

"With all due respect, Dr. Shmuelly, how do you know? I'm totally on the DL. I never wanted to be an object of display on campus, and I keep covered up, and this is a huge school, and I've got a rich roommate who knows all about dressing who helps me dress not to stand out."

 

"I would say, with all due respect, don't be fucking ridiculous. You can't hide what you are from anybody, let alone someone in the physical sciences. I would refer you to Faraday. You've read him?"

 

"Well, I know who he was."

 

"He wrote a seven-volume reference called 'Observations of a Burning Candle.' Or I would refer you to the wisdom of Yogi Berra, who said 'You can observe a lot just by watching.' Twice a week since September I've seen you standing, sitting, moving, sitting still. If I could draw, I could draw every detail of your body with utter confidence. Which is pretty far afield from the apology. I'm not done with that."

 

"Really? Why not? Unless you want to make it seven volumes."

 

He handed me a metal box, the kind that Band-Aids come in. "Don't open it," he said. "Just shake it. What would you say is inside?"

 

There was a fair amount of change in it; it was probably where he tossed loose coins from his pockets. "Coins," I said. "A couple of dollars' worth, maybe."

 

"How do you know?"

 

"Oh, I don't know. The weight, the sound. Not sure."

 

"You've observed a lot about coins and the sound they make in your eighteen years of life without realizing it. And now you're making an approximation based on a lot of variables without being fully aware of what they are. Do you know of these little correspondence groups that speculate on unexplained phenomena? They're like playing chess by mail, scientists who write to each other about things that seem impossible. Like proving what seemed to be a UFO was actually the result of atmospheric conditions. Sometimes we see an unexplained phenomenon and don't even take notice until later. It takes some analysis."

 

"I play Sudoku sometimes," I said, but I don't think he knew I was joking.

 

"I wrote to a couple of groups about the incident on Fuhrmann Row as if I had seen it. I didn't use your name. You were Mr. M."

 

"And? Anything interesting come out of it?"

 

"Not really. Not unless there was a baby trapped under the car. But after the appetizer this morning I feel I should have left you out of it entirely. Out of both."

 

"Nah, don't worry about it," I said. "Especially if it helps me in class."

 

He looked surprised. "You don't need help in class. You know you're acing my course, right?"

 

"Really?"

 

"What am I always saying, Morgenfruh? Be logical. You've done well on every test and every quiz except one. How could you not be doing well? And do you know how fortunate it is for me that you are doing well? I think you're a standup guy and a self-made guy, and that's fine, but students will do anything they can to turn something a professor does into a transgression, and then to use it as leverage. And in classes that are graded, the grades should be earned. Especially in the sciences, in which we strive to be objective about things and measure carefully. As scientists we can lose everything if we give in to the temptation to lie about measurements, so…"

 

"Not following, Dr. Shmuelly. And getting kind of dizzy."

 

"I'm just saying that I can't look like I'm raising your grade because you've got this incredible body. And I shouldn't have used your name in the appetizer, because that could appear to be out of line. About midway through I thought 'this could've bitten me in the ass if he weren't doing so well in class and somebody thought I was doing him favors.' So I'm thanking you for being a good student."

 

"Are you gay or something?"

 

"No, but still. I'm really curious. Not bi-curious," he laughed, "but scientifically curious. God, I am so glad I left the door open, you know? I'm normally quite articulate… So, anyway, is there a correlation between the size of a muscle and its strength?"

 

"Well, of course there is. A big guy is going to be stronger than a skinny guy."

 

"A direct correlation?"

 

"Not at all," I said. "A power lifter may be a lot stronger than a bodybuilder with bigger muscles, at least for the isolated, explosive movements that power lifters do. And then there's rock climbers."

 

"What about rock climbers?"

 

"They are incredibly strong and pretty thin. Strong for sustained work. And there's cyclists, though sometimes their legs…sometimes power lifters just look like fat guys. You'd never know how strong they are."

 

"Could you?  Could you tell by looking?"

 

"No," I said.

 

Dr. Shmuelly picked up the Band-Aid container and shook it. "You sure?" he asked.

 

"Definitely," I said.

 

"I don't know," he said…"You were pretty close on the change can." He paused with that look he gets when he's thinking up a quiz. "What's strength? What do you measure on yourself?"

 

"It's basically the ability to do work, right?" I said. "I index the weight of twenty repetitions of a movement to exhaustion." That's my current headache — the metrics have changed over the years, and now I'm just estimating until I find a new system. I felt that hot, prickly feeling and knew I was blushing. My face was in my hands. I didn't realize it until Dr. Shmuelly said "Mr. Morgenfruh, what's wrong," which made me even more embarrassed. "It's nothing bad," I said. "It's just that…to tell you the truth, the metrics…it was originally ten repetitions to exhaustion, but I'm limited by my equipment."

 

"You can't do all the movements you want to do?"

 

I shook my head. "Twenty reps is really too many, especially when doing multiple sets," I said. "But even adapting the exercises to make them more difficult, the maximum weights available to me aren't heavy enough anymore. They haven't been for a while now, so I'm increasing the reps and the duration of each one…it's really kind of a problem."

 

I had never seen Dr. Shmuelly with a faraway stare like that. "You're too strong for exercise machines," he said, not looking at me.

 

"Not for all of them. There's equipment that works electromagnetically, it's actually pretty fabulous, but I've never seen it in person. Some of it was adapted from cargo scales. Look, Ma, no weights."

 

He looked back at me as if coming out of a trance. "So how much could you lift with that curling motion that the guys on Fuhrmann Row saw you do? Twenty repetitions to exhaustion?"

 

"I'll take the fifth on that," I said. "Not telling."

 

"Fair enough. Let's measure the circumference of your bicep," he said. "Push your sleeve up. Have you tracked it over time?"

 

"First of all," I said, "you don't measure the circumference of the bicep. You measure the circumference of the arm at the point where the bicep peaks. Second of all, no."

 

"No what?"

 

"No to both. I haven't tracked it over time, and let's not measure it now."

 

"You could just tell me. I'll believe you."

 

"No I couldn't, because I don't know."

 

"Mr. Morgenfruh, you designed this experiment and you've shown great initiative with it, so far be it from me to — to criticize — but don't you think you've left out an important parameter?"

 

I felt the prickly feeling come back. Why was his interrogation bothering me? I don't tell anyone about how I run the strength project, not even Boot. But if I didn't find a way to increase the resistances, the whole thing might be at a dead end. "Not interested," I said. "Anyway, it's too late now."

 

"Not really," he said. "You could start now and after a few months I could take a look at the data and see if there's any way to extrapolate back a bit…for that matter, I could see if there's any of that fancy-dancy electromagnetic resistance equipment on campus. We have everything here, it's just a matter of finding out where. Would you be interested in that?" When I didn't respond, he said "You know, the more I talk, the more I seem to have to apologize to you. It's totally your baby, I didn't mean to pressure you in any way. This is what scientific curiosity does to us sometimes. What I should really have said…I don't know. I expected to be giving you advice. Did you know that students come to me for advice, sometimes years after they've taken my class? But advice seems like the last thing you need."

 

"I'm not surprised your students come back to you, or that you're popular. You're my all-time favorite teacher, at least so far," I told him truthfully. "And I can use all the advice that I can get."

 

"Well, my advice to you is to be a little less secretive. We live in a culture that loves super-heroes, and here you are hiding your light under a bushel. I think you should show off that incredible body a little, and have a lot more fun than I think you're having. But then, what do I know? Not as much as I thought in your case." He opened his laptop, cuing me to leave. "Though I may have inadvertently fueled some speculation about how much you can curl." That seemed doubtful, but whatever. It could be good for the job at Boston Charlie's.

 

I stood up. "Thanks, Dr. Shmuelly," I said with all the dignity I could muster. "Thanks for being a great professor. I've only been on campus for three months and I'm having a great time already. And for the record," I added, "you can't really do curls with a Mini Cooper's rear bumper. There's no place to get a grip. To do curls you need to get a good handhold. A Jeep is good, or an SUV." I smiled a sly grin, another thing my father hates, without actually looking at Dr. Shmuelly, but with his eye, he probably noticed.

 

If there were big electromagnetic machines on campus, Boot could probably find them as well as Dr. Shmuelly. Hell, he probably knew about them already. Something else was bugging me, and that was Dr. Shmuelly telling me I shouldn't be so secretive, that I should show off more. I like to think I'm honest with myself, but he and his sharp eye had noticed the contradiction about the strength project: I avoid knowing exactly how strong I am and I avoid looking at myself. I don't check myself out in the mirror, I don't even glance at my reflection in store windows when I pass by.  I tell myself it's not important, but it's really a matter of avoidance. And now, with my exercises on a self-imposed plateau, I didn't even have data on my usual strength indices, let alone…I went back to my dorm room, stripped down to my basic white briefs, determined to take a good look at myself in the mirror on my bedroom door. And when I did, my prick sprang to attention and got harder than a steel rod. No girl and no fantasy has ever done it for me like my own body. I think that's why I avoid looking at it; something about that seems wrong.

 

But that's not the only reason I don't look. The other is delayed gratification. When I actually do look at it, it's always beyond what I imagined — the width of my shoulders and the way my delts cap them off, the pecs, big and square-cut like Boot's lesbian photographer friend said, the exaggerated diagonal arcs connecting shoulders and waist, the abs perfectly lined up and deeply cut…everything so deeply cut and complex. Getting excited just looking at myself, I was exhilarated yet embarrassed. But showing off had Dr. Shmuelly's seal of approval, and besides, just what the fuck was anyone going to do about it? Say something to me? To tell you the truth, everything was going my way at U of W and everyone seemed to like me right off. Back in high school my guidance counselor, Dr. Veit — nice guy — said he admired how I had turned my life around, but that at a big, social campus like Wisconsin I'd find I wasn't the biggest guy around and not the smartest either, that college takes you down a peg or two. Well, guess what, Dr. Veit? Wrong! I went to the dresser and struck a relaxed pose with an elbow on the dresser-top and a hip jutting out, and except for the ridiculous tent in my briefs, I looked…very sexy. What did I have to worry about? It made sense for me to get off on my own body; it's better than anyone else's. I thought about every time I heard a guy refer to his arms as 'guns…' To call your arms guns, they should look like mine, with the separation between the shoulders and arms, the bi's and tri's so pronounced it looks like they're assembled from separate parts. I could walk around in my briefs all the time, all over campus, and who's going to say anything?

 

As if on cue, Boot walks into the suite. "Chris? Chris, you here?"

 

"In my room." I didn't move from my stance, leaning against the dresser. He opened my door and said "holy shit."

 

I said, "I am what is called huge. Right? That's the technical term for it. In case you hadn't noticed."

 

"Hadn't noticed? You are all ripped, all huge, all the time. And in case you hadn't noticed, I testified the first time I laid eyes on you."

 

"Yeah, well…I'm always bigger than I thought, if you know what I mean. You know what I'd like?"

 

"I'm afraid to ask. How about a car? A friend of mine is looking to practically give away a really nice Jaguar I wanted to tell you about. I think you should have a car, don't you? I am imagining you shirtless in a nice Jag. We could do a new calendar."

 

"Shut up. What I'd like is for you to hit me. Hit me as hard as you can."

 

"Dude, are you kidding me? The last thing in this world I am about to do is hit you. Not in this world and not in the next."

 

"Come on. I want you to. Hit me anywhere you like. Knock me down. Or try to, anyway.

 

"Dude —"

 

I'm not sure I'd ever heard him use the word 'dude' before, at least, not referring to me. "Hit me. Or do you want me to hit you and knock you down?"

 

"No way."

 

"Then hit me. I promise I won't hit you back. And you know me, I keep my promises."

 

"But why, for Christ's sake?"

 

"Because sometimes I think the guys at Boston Charlie's are plants and they're holding back. I want to see if it will hurt. Come on." There was a long silence, considering it was Boot — at least fifteen seconds. "Extra credit if you inflict pain or knock me down," I said.

 

"Kinky," he said. "So if you were me, what would you go for? What part of the body?"

 

"The gut, I think. If you go for my face — at Boston Charlie's, when they go for my face I've been catching their fists and breaking the bones. It's like a reflex. The surgery is expensive and it takes a long time to heal, or so I'm told."

 

"There's a size difference between us, if you hadn't noticed."

 

"Come on, you're a fit guy. If you do it, I'll go with you to your father's for Thanksgiving."

 

Another silence. "Okay, deal. Running start?" There wasn't that much space to run, just the ten feet or so from my door to the dresser. But instead of waiting for a reply, he suddenly ran at me with his fist cocked and plowed it into my stomach with a downward motion, as if he were trying to drive a lance into the ground. His momentum pushed me back into the dresser, but I didn't feel much, just something brushing between my abs. He winced dramatically and yelled, "shit! Shit! What did you do, implant a board in there? Damn." He was circling around the small room like a wounded animal, with his hands between his legs as he walked.

 

"You're exaggerating, right? It can't have hurt that much. You pushed me back and that took some of the impact."

 

He looked up at me with a sulky, accusing gaze. "Engineers are such assholes," he said. "You can't get out of the trip now, you know."

 

I probably would've wound up going in any case, but I wasn't telling him that. "Does it really hurt? Should we get you some medical attention?"

 

"You know that feeling when you stub your toe? I feel like I stubbed my hand. Maybe I'm being just a tad overly demonstrative, but…friends shouldn't do shit like this to each other, okay, dude?"

 

"Why am I suddenly a dude?"

 

He was still sulking. "I don't know. What about you? Did you even feel it in the slightest when I hit you with all my might?"

 

"Yes, I felt it."

 

"Good."

 

"It didn't hurt, but I did feel it."

 

"Mother of God," he said. I think at this point his annoyance was feigned. He raised his hand as if it were a gun, aimed it at me, and mimed firing it. "What do you suppose would happen?"

 

"I don't know. My skin can be punctured, I get paper cuts. But the muscle underneath…I don't know. Try poison gas, I think that would work better." Those troublemakers at Boston Charlie's, especially on weekends and Thursdays — their best efforts felt like Boot's abortive punch to the gut, and I was thinking that maybe I should I be more careful not to hurt them. My erection had subsided now, but as I raised my right arm into a bicep flex, it sprang right back. My arms are kind of magnificent.

 

"Holy shit," said Boot.

 

I raised the other one to form a pose known as a double-bi, and I felt like exulting in what I saw in the mirror. Now I wanted Boot to clear out of my room so I could jerk off, but what would it matter if I did it while he was still there? What did I have to feel embarrassed about? Who looks even remotely like me? "Dude," I said, "how big do you think these things are? Should we find out?"

[arpeejay]

S-P-R-O-I-N-G!

 

Thanks for continuing this great story! Where are the other parts?

[Kamaswami]

Agreed! I'd forgotten about Boots and Chris, but I certainly loved this installment. I await the next chapter with bated breath.

[ThePecman]

That is fucking great writing. I'd love to see the previous parts as well! Lotta potential here for a good story.

[mario2007]

Tortolis, I second all the previous comments.  I fucking LOVE this story.  Damn, just the thought of Chris letting his ALPHA BEAST out.  Woof!

[crushme99]

Excellent work.  I really enjoy your story-telling style.  Yes, where do we find the previous parts?

[cropsey23]

Great story concept, great writing. Yes, would love to see the earlier installments too.

[loveembig]

I love a shy muscle stud, but I also love a guy who gets off on his own size. Great story! Can't wait for more!

[tortolis]

Thank you for all the great feedback on this story, guys. It really does help. To those of you who have asked where to find the earlier stories about Chris and Boot, it's more than a year since they were originally posted in the Evolution Forum, and the response then was slightly less enthusiastic (I think because the writing is long on character development and description, and not everyone wants to wade through that stuff to get to the muscle). But maybe it can't hurt to re-post the earlier episodes? Let me know. In the meantime, I'll post another new entry as a separate topic, Boot Goes Home for Thanksgiving. That may help gauge interest in the project overall. There are half a dozen or so earlier episodes in my computer, and the ending is in my head, ready to be written. (Two or three more stories.)

[cropsey23]

Thank you for all the great feedback on this story, guys. It really does help. To those of you who have asked where to find the earlier stories about Chris and Boot, it's more than a year since they were originally posted in the Evolution Forum, and the response then was slightly less enthusiastic (I think because the writing is long on character development and description, and not everyone wants to wade through that stuff to get to the muscle). But maybe it can't hurt to re-post the earlier episodes? Let me know. In the meantime, I'll post another new entry as a separate topic, Boot Goes Home for Thanksgiving. That may help gauge interest in the project overall. There are half a dozen or so earlier episodes in my computer, and the ending is in my head, ready to be written. (Two or three more stories.)

Yes Tortolis, YES, please post all the earlier chapters. I love your character development and it's inspring me to finish my stories.