Slave to the Machine

110 pounds.

I had to work out and gain weight. That was it. That was what I needed, what I needed in order to flush out all these images in my head. I told myself, the only reason those images were in my head, and the only reason I liked to look at the same images on the Internet, were that, being a skinny boy, I admired their bodies. Their pecs, their abs, their arms, their cocks, their cocks in other guys’ mouths, their cocks in other guys’ asses. Yes, if I worked out and got buff, I wouldn’t envy these men and their bodies anymore, and thus these images would never cross my mind again.

Just a few months ago before the start of eighth grade, my dad had bought me the Weider 8515, a home workout machine, and he told me that he didn’t want me to be skinny forever and that it was time to become a real man. I never thought anything serious of what he said until now.

Time to become a real man. I wanted to at least break 120 pounds.

I worked out pretty hard for a while. I followed the instruction manual’s workout plan for bulking up, doing each different exercise in three to five sets of eight to twelve reps each and taking two minute breaks in between each set. I used every part of the machine that was readily available: the lat bar for my lats, the butterfly bars and the imitation bench press for my chest, and the leg thingy for my legs.

At one point I thought it worked.

I went at least two months without jacking off and without looking at those images again.

Mission accomplished; it was time to celebrate by jacking off. To lesbian porno.

My earphones on and the volume of queefs on full blast, I sat back to squish around my limp dick for about fifteen minutes.

Ok, this was getting boring, so I tried to rationalize with myself: Today, I need to slowly ease myself into lesbian porno. I’ll start myself with five minutes of gay porno to get me hard and close, and just when I’m almost ready to shoot, I’ll switch back to the slutty girl on girl action.

I followed through with the plan. I watched two guys getting it on in an exotic rainforest and finished by watching ten seconds of a chick sit on another chick’s face. I figured, tomorrow, I’ll only look at gay porno until I’m halfway ready to shoot.

I ended up watching guys getting their faces sprayed with gallons of jizz for twenty straight minutes, from flaccid to climax. Shit.



153 pounds.

I officially peaked. The last four weeks of winter quarter 2010, I shot up from like 138 pounds to 150 pounds easily. Now, it was my sixth week into spring quarter, and I had been fluctuating from 150 to 155 pounds. 160, I need to fucking break 160.

I had been getting a lot of compliments, however. At the gym, I ran into my friend Ryan, a friend who I occasionally worked out with last year. “Damn Brian, your chest and your arms—you look so much bigger now!” He squeezed my bicep.

Alfonso and Khoa, upon seeing me in a tank, would say something like, “Oh shit, look at this buff man. You look so much bigger now.” “Now that’s the kind of chest I want,” Khoa would say.

This past week I ran into my dorm roommate Julian from last year, and he told me that I was looking hella “yoked” now. I wasn’t too sure what yoked meant, but I knew it didn’t mean “like a hella good dancer,” so I figured he thought I looked so much bigger now. The same day I also ran into a friend of Julian, who also grabbed at my pec a little and complimented it, saying, “You look so much bigger now. How do you get a chest like that?”

I felt like I had never gotten so many compliments about anything before.

I found myself at the gym again on Tuesday evening, lifting weights. Up, down, up, down, up, down. I was only going into my second set of bench presses when I realized, This is kinda boring. I finished off the set, and as I lied back down to get ready for my third, I thought to myself again, Why am I about spending one and a half hours at the gym again tonight? On my fourth set, This isn’t making me happy. On my fifth set, Didn’t I have other plans tonight? I realized that I had actually planned on taking a dance class at Boogiezone that night. For once I had extra money to spare, and since the beginning of the quarter I had only taken one other workshop class. That was extremely little compared to the twelve I took within the first two weeks of fall quarter. I really missed dancing.

Yet somehow, I found myself doing incline presses. Up, down, up, down, up, down, I pulled the barbell. And then it was too late to head over to Boogiezone. But wait! At 8:30, there was going to be hip hop class at the gym in one of the dance rooms, and I could’ve snuck in for free!

All I had to do was go upstairs.

But no. Dancing burned calories, calories that I couldn’t afford to burn because I needed to gain the seven pounds that I still needed. I decided that I would rather stay down here, to enslave myself to the rote, repetitive tasks of lifting—up down up down up down—and of pumping iron. Up, down, up, down.



112 pounds.

I studied myself in the mirror, shirtless. I tried to look at myself from different angles, bent my arms in different ways, tried to squeeze my pecs together. I realized I made no improvement. After two months I barely gained any muscle. I was still a stick, a fucking stick. How much weight did I gain? Like two pounds? I was weak.

It was time to get back to that damn Weider 8515.