GOODBYE, BEAUTIFUL MUSCLES
By Max Lawton
The day before heading to Utah for a ski trip, I PR’ed on all of the lifts I’d been doing three times a week for the previous five months. Though I’d been a rower in high and school and college, I’d never taken lifting all that seriously, relying instead on my innate aerobic capacity, which allowed me to excel on the erg, even as the coaches and the other guys on the team considered me to be a “strong guy without much boat-feel on the water,” a characterization I didn’t entirely agree with then and am still ambivalent about now, one of the most frustrating aspects of rowing as a sport being that, when competing in larger sweep boats, “fours” or “eights,” it is impossible to know how you are contributing to the boat’s success or failure, impossible to know unless you’re a truly heinous rower, nicking your blade on the surface of the water, out of rhythm with the rest of the guys, and catching crabs.
On that fateful Thursday, I curled 60 pounds with each arm––four sets of ten––and dumbbell-benched 220 pounds––also four sets of ten. I didn’t bother to write down how much weight I was lifting for my overhead press or lat-pulls, safe in the assumption that these beautiful four-hour afternoons at the Hollywood Equinox on Vine––3- or 400 floors on the StairMaster reading Conrad or Dickens, the occasional guy coming up to me to demonstrate that he too had brought a book to read on the elliptical (“you inspired me, dude,” one of them said, flirtatiously showing me Yellowface and expecting more of a response than I gave him), then a smoothie from Earthbar, then the lift, then a twenty-minute session in the dangerously hot steam room, more of a steam sauna than a steam room, sitting on the upper shelf really felt like your skin was getting scalded––would never end, that there was no reason I needed to record these figures as a matter of future historical record, I’d remember them from day to day and there would be no issue . . .
I had been lazy about my diet and cutting, so I wasn’t exactly shredded, but my arms had grown quite a bit, a six-pack peeked out through the thin layer of fat on my midsection, and I imagined myself as having attained the intimidating physical stature of Tom Hardy playing Bane or Bronson. I’d become a guy who lifted heavy, a guy who looked with pity upon the beginners with scrawny arms being impotently encouraged by official Equinox trainers, but, not only that, I saw the huge guys in tank tops obviously taking human growth hormones as an attainable end goal for me (minus taking the HGH––I was (and am) frightened of such supplements).
When we arrived in Park City, it was snowing heavily, a blizzard, and this meant the mountain would be powdery in the morning––a perfect day for it. I’d grown up skiing on small hills in the Midwest because of my mother, an eternal braggart as regarded the quality of the skiing out west, where she’d grown up, and as regarded her father’s insane bravery on the mountain––allegedly, my gramps had forced her and her two brothers to cut their teeth on double black diamonds right when they were starting out because, he claimed, it was more dangerous to be on greens or blues with incompetent idiots who couldn’t ski blacks. Not wanting her sons to be unable to ski, she signed my brother and me up for a weekly ski program––Snowstar––an exhaust-filled yellow bus then taking us from the Park-n-Ride near our house in the suburbs of Milwaukee to a very small hill way out in the boonies west of Milwaukee, and, indeed, forty-five minutes of intense car sickness later and after having strapped on our rented gear, my brother and I also preferred the hill’s single black-diamond piste, a sheer wall of ice it took fifteen seconds to descend––either that or the hill with trick ramps, I would dare my brother to bomb the latter from the top and hit the big jump without slowing down at all, which he would dutifully do, his skis, poles, gloves, goggles, hat, helmet, and sometimes even snow pants erupting off of him the moment he hit the ramp, I’d catch up to him halfway down the hill and he’d be in tears, snot running down his face, then I’d collect the skis, poles, gloves, helmet, snow pants, get him back onto his skis, and get us down the hill, where we’d buy mozzarella sticks warmed by ominous red light and eat them at picnic tables outside the lodge, at which point my brother would be ready for more bombed hills and violent jumps.
All this is to say that I knew how to ski, but did not own any gear, so we rented everything the next morning in Park City, then skied for most of the day, the powder a soft cushion that would have made any fall painless, like drifting off to sleep or leaping into a feather bed––but I still prided myself on never falling. On the previous such trip we’d taken to Park City several years before, I’d had three perfect days of skiing, never once taking a tumble, and I bragged about this at the beginning of the 2024 trip, telling my wife of how certain I was that I wouldn’t fall during this trip either . . .
And, on the first day, I didn’t fall. We stuck to blues and a couple of blacks and I didn’t fall.
By 4 p.m., with the mountain about to close, we could feel a brutal cold front coming in, even before the sun had begun to slide behind the mountain.
It was negative ten degrees that night and, when we set out bright and early the next morning, the snow was hard and squeaky and the lift line was long. I suggested we go to the far, eastern side of the mountain, go up as high as we could, a long blue that would probably be fifteen minutes of easy skiing. It took three lifts to get to the top and, before beginning to ski down, I put in one earbud and turned on some French black metal (Diapsiquir), then we were off and it was hard not to go too fast, but my wife was snowboarding, easier to go slow, she was way behind me, I’d stop and look back up the mountain every minute or so, making sure she hadn’t fallen, then I came to an intersection, a black piste cutting off the blue we were on, I stopped briefly, looked up, saw my wife boarding evenly from one edge of the hill to the other, then I turned around and plunged into a steep stretch of snow, not bothering to brake much at all and the squeaking of the snow in my open ear was almost as loud as the black metal in the other. Then came an apparition, fast skiers coming down off of the black and cutting me off, they didn’t see me and our piste had the right of way, but, if I didn’t stop, I’d collide with them, so I swung a little bit to the side to dig my right ski into the snow and brake––how fast was I going, maybe 15mph?––at which point the edge of the ski caught more than I’d intended, the rented bindings too loose, and I flew straight out of my skis, the back of my right shoulder making contact with the ground when I came back down to earth, an immediate scream of agony escaping from between my lips.
It was clear I’d done something serious––I thought that I’d maybe dislocated my shoulder.
Screaming expletives, I got back up and clutched at my arm. The pain was unbelievable––a searing sphere of insulted matter within my body. My wife stopped and tugged her boots free from her board. She was confused at first, then panicked. Eventually, an experienced older man stopped to check on me and call the ski patrol.
“FUCK! It hurts so fuckin’ much!” I shouted, kicking the snow with my foot. “I feel like I’m gonna throw up!”
“Well, don’t throw up on me . . .” the older guy said as he made the call.
An ER doctor from NYC also stopped and offered to relocate the shoulder, but this was once the ski patrol had arrived and, fortunately, they prevented him from doing so. The displacement of the fractured scapula would have been made far worse by such a maneuver.
“What, there’s no Good Samaritan Law in Utah?” the doctor quipped to his buddy when the ski patrol told him not to do it.
“Unfortunately not,” one of the ski-patrol guys replied.
Then came the “meat wagon,” me strapped down into a sled and dragged behind a snowmobile, so high up the mountain that it took twenty minutes to get down, every little bump on the ground I passed over an additional jolt of agony, then the impossibility of standing up from the sled once we’d reached the clinic and four ski-patrol guys basically had to lift me up, I couldn’t do it on my own and I needed a pain pill, I knew that, I told them so as soon as I got inside, pacing around and begging for something, anything, so they gave me an oxy and I washed it down with water from a waxed-paper cup, the nurse also giving me a granola bar (“if you haven’t eaten anything all day, the pill’s gonna make you super nauseous”), then me apologizing to the nurse for swearing so much as she pulled off my sweatshirt before the X-ray, then the effects of the oxy came on and the throbbing began to register as nothing but heat––no pain, just blood collecting around the insult.
During the forty-five minutes I was in the clinic, four other people were brought in by the ski patrol. Their injuries were: a compound fracture in the leg, a broken arm, a torn ACL, and a broken hand. All that plus, as the doctor told me after he’d read the X-ray, my broken scapula. I wasn’t going that fast, just an unlucky angle, no bruising the next day, but the doctor said I’d have to get surgery for sure, a loose chip swimming around in the vicinity of the shoulder, mild displacement, they’d have to cut my back open and bind the bone together with screws, he was certain of it. When I got back to LA, I’d find a specialist and get more imagining done, then the surgery could be planned.
Numb with horror, but also high on opioids, all I could think as the doctor communicated this bad news to me was that my beautiful muscles were on their way out the door. I’d been planning to lift later in the day, but, instead, I’d never be able to lift again . . .
“Goodbye, beautiful muscles,” I whispered to myself as I walked out of the clinic with deliberate slowness, “goodbye . . .”
The muscles were on their way out the door, but, thankfully, the doctor at the bottom of the ski hill turned out to be an ignoramus and the specialist I found in Boyle Heights back in LA was unconcerned: “That’ll heal up just fine,” he said. “No need to screw in a plate over the fracture . . . displacement is minimal . . . the issue is that scapula is real thin up top, light comes through it if you put one up to a window . . . so, you’re a writer, huh?” Then he made a crack about my oversized Signet paperback of Bleak House: “Dickens has scared the crap out of me since high school . . . too wordy, too long…” he guffawed. “You’re a braver man than I am . . . ” He was of Japanese descent, the team doctor for the Angels, and I could tell he liked me. He warned me about the dangers of taking too many pain pills, I didn’t have any issues with that, but the injury got me hooked on melatonin again, I’d only just kicked the habit, so hard to sleep on my back, rolling over onto my side or belly not an option, even standing up to piss was an ordeal, as if I were bound to the bed by belts, a new version of Misery in which the imprisoned writer pens nothing, just focuses on the burning in his shoulder. The only way I could get any sleep at all was to use melatonin to knock out for four hours at a time, but I’d wake up as soon as the desire to shift positions grew to be too much, at which point I’d only be able to stare up into the darkness for so long before it was transmuted into a jeweled thing, earbuds in and prevaricating about the bush as regarded standing up from lying down, it hurt so much to do so, the abs having to be tightened as much as possible to absorb the force of the motion, to save the shoulder, so I’d listen to B-sides off of High Violet until the need to pee got too distracting, Matt Berninger continuing to sing to me as I moved through the apartment with the agility of a man many years my senior––“there’s a radiant darkness upon us / But I don’t want you to worry.”
After a month of total stasis––my muscles already practically vanished, right shoulder atrophied––the good doctor in Boyle Heights prescribed me with a rigorous regimen of physical therapy and I got set up with a clinic in Toluca Lake. Brad, my therapist, was a family man, he talked about going to church on the weekends with his children, also did strongman competitions very early on Saturday mornings. He told me I’d have to join his team once my shoulder had healed up. He played Christian rock as he massaged the tight muscles around the scapula and moved my arm through the air in strange circles. I made jokes about Biden to test his political affiliations, he loved those, then I made one about Trump and he bristled, the conversation screeched to a halt, and that was that, but he loved how I always asked to use the heaviest dumbbells on offer for the exercises he had me do, plus he was hopeful about my eventual return to heavy lifting.
“It might be a year or so, but you’ll get there . . . you’ll be back . . . ” he said soothingly as he drew figure eights on my upper back with his thumbs. “You’ll get there, Max, you’ll get there . . . In fact, y’know what . . . if you ever feel the desire, we’d love to have you on the team . . . have you do the strongman competitions . . . I’m the coach and the weights we use there are a lot bigger than the ones on offer here . . . boulders too, you ever lift those . . . ? I’ll train you up real nice . . . ”
“Yeah, man . . . ” I replied unconvincingly. “Let’s see what’s up.”
And the song in the background:
“There’s honey in the rock / Freedom where the Spirit is / Bounty in the wilderness / You will always satisfy.”
At my most recent appointment with the good doctor, his assistant was concerned that the fracture was still not entirely healed––a small gap left behind in the bone. He suggested I might need to get an electromagnetic device implanted beneath my skin to encourage bone growth. But the good doctor disagreed, I needed no such thing, it would heal up just fine, he said, repeating himself.
Then I went to get a breakfast burrito in Boyle Heights.
Eventually, the weights at Brad’s clinic became too light for me, so, these days, I do the exercises he taught me at Equinox, wary of the gazes of the strong men who might be disdainful of the amount of weight I’m allowed to lift. I do the exercises that Brad taught me without Brad, but I miss his massages and the way he’d wag and shake my arm through the air as we listened to Anberlin––our communion more holy than anything that ever happens at church.
He waits for me deep in the Valley, he’s throwing boulders onto busy roads, trying to prove himself to passersby. Don’t worry, Brad, I’m coming, I’ll join your strongman club––as soon as my beautiful muscles return, I’ll be there . . .