My
name is Scott and I live in a houseful of Scotts. I can’t remember how it
started, exactly, but one of us put a ROOMMATE WANTED ad up on our alumni list
serve, and before you knew it, I and the other Scotts responded to the initial
Scott’s post, or they all responded to me, saying, “Sure, we’ll live there,”
and, now, well, here we all are.
We live in a weirdly large-small
800-square-foot townhouse with four bedrooms on just three floors. The fact
that there are fewer floors than Scotts creates an imbalance I’ve yet to fully comprehend,
but this nagging asymmetry corrupts nearly everything we do. When we are home
together, things are bad. Every time one of us wants to cook food in the
kitchen or watch TV in the miniscule living room, there is a terrible fight. I
am perhaps the only Scott who sleeps here most nights, because I’m pretty
private for a Scott and also I am not dating anyone. Several of the other
Scotts or perhaps all of them are dating the same young woman: Teresa? I’m not
sure.
But we do talk occasionally and
share some ideas. One of the ideas that one of the other Scotts shared with me
was E(X)treme(fitz), or Xfitz for short. Xfitz is “a total body workout system
that mixes PSYCHOLOGICAL HYPER-EXTENSION THERAPY, weights, tights, running
around, and loud incomprehensible music.” It’s sweeping the nation and not long
ago it swept up one of the Scotts, who then swept me up in the craze as well.
Here’s how it happened.
(Dinner,
evening, misery).
One of the other Scotts (OotOS):
“Hey! Don’t use the microwave. It’s mine.”
Me: “It’s not yours. It came with
the place.”
(OotOS): “Don’t
use it. The food that you’re cooking smells bad. I will hit you if you press
any more BUTTONS!”
Me: “Oh, so it’s about the food then
and not the microwave, which you now admit, I am guessing, belongs to us all?”
(OotOS): (Sniffing loudly): “What
are you cooking? Eggs?”
Me: “Egggggggggg…” I pause,
ostentatiously, “ssssactly!”
(OotOS): “Oh, I see,” he says. “Protein?”
Me: “I guess?”
(OotOS): “Protein’s number one for
building muscles. All the Xfitz athletes are eating it now.”
Me: “Xfitz? What the heck is Xfitz?”
So OotOS spent the rest of the night explaining Xfitz to
me. “It’s more than a sport. It’s a body-mind aggravation paradigm that results
in total growth, total spiritual exacerbation. It was founded by this guy named
Bill…Bill Something. Everyone just calls him Bill. He made himself perfect
through Xfitz a few years ago and then disappeared into the Oregon woods. He’s
a billionaire.”
OotOS then went on to demo some of their exercises and
meditation techniques. They were violent and extraordinary. He made many scary
noises and broke most of our plates. At some point, he turned off all the
lights and hid. He said Hide and Seek was big in Xfitz and that he hoped to one
day become a master.
“Bet you can’t find me,” he taunted, but he made so
much noise crawling into a cupboard filled with broken plates that I found him
with ease.
“Whoa,” he said, blown away by my quick discovery when
I opened the door. “I’ve got to tell COACH about you. Come with me to Xfitz tomorrow.”
And I did.
E(X)treme(fitz)
TRAINING HALL: Coach Steve
At first, I saw him only faintly
through the dim lights of the decommissioned airplane hangar and the tangle of
equipment all around. He wore a kind of stepladder of a beard and an evidently
fashionable bodysuit that most of his charges wore as well: lyrca, littered
with dollar signs, assault rifle silhouettes, anarchy symbols, and ventilation
panels. About 30-to-60 students stood in even rows before him, holding hellish
barbells, glowing with fractious health.
“Alright, first, here we go. Today.
The exercise is, um: Snitches! The Snitch is an incredibly important
weight-body-lift that involves flinging the bar very high. VERY high, as you
all know, and then running away. How fast is important, yes. But HOW you run,
whether like a gazelle or an extinct raptor or a BEAR (loud synchronized
laughter from all the students) means everything.
“Now the question is, how? How, um, do I throw the bar…?” Then Steve
went through an exhausting series of cues, which his 30-to-60 students followed
exactly. They seemed to me like fairly well-off somewhat attractive people who
liked physical pain and following elaborate instructions. But in this moment,
they were angels in a choir.
Let me explain. One of the most beautiful moments of Xfitz
is when an instructor, like, for example, Steve, commands many or all of his
students to perform a great snitch lift during which the bars go haranguing
through the air. Below, all is tumult and madness. People dash off like
gazelles or baby raptors or, gruesomely, bears.
There is a great flurry and then, just as the snitch bars are about to land, a
pulsing, deep, devotional silence.
In this silence I heard a sort of
ethereal recitation begin inside me. It was as though some great gorgeous
monster was saying my name, Scott, in
such a way that it could never be confused with another’s, even another Scott,
and it was telling me to be watchful,
not just before the glorious spectacle at hand, but in every moment of my life
therefrom.
And then there was the crash of the
snitch bars. The Devil’s Silverware,
I heard one call it, sometime later. To me it sounded like the panic attack of
many ill bells in some phalanx of leapfrogging clock towers. It is not unusual
for the eyes of Xfitz athletes to change color during this moment and this
moment only.
“Great church of dementia!” I said
rapturously.
“They all say that,” said a knowing
voice just inches from my ear. I turned and suddenly I was enmeshed in a great
beard.
Steve.
He smelled like expensive coffee, sweat, bullets,
chalk, and rust. Steve took me aside to a cobwebby corner of the gym, where we
could be alone with his alluring odor. For many minutes, we just stood there,
breathing.
“So, Steve,” I said.
“Coach Steve!” he screamed.
“Right, Coach Steve! Can you um, teach me the—“
“Let’s start with the Hair of Demosthenes!” Steve
screamed, and as he screamed he pointed to an illegible tangle of ropes that
dangled above what seemed to be a ball pit. But when I looked more closely at
the pit, I saw that it was filled with crushed soup cans.
One of Steve’s more measured evangelists later told me
that Steve misremembered, with tragic enthusiasm, ancient history and mythology
and named many Xfitz activities after his delirious quasi-memories. As we
walked toward the ropes and pit, Steve “explained,” screaming all the while,
the name behind this dreaded exercise.
“Demosthenes was a demigod and politician who had
affairs with a Gorgon! In his youth, he had three brothers, who were all killed
during a hubristic voyage into the forbidden ocean by the sea god Mars!
Demosthenes begged the powerful Gorgon, who had eels for hair, to build him a
ladder to heaven, so he could visit his brothers, hang out for a while, and,
you know, catch up! By then, his brothers were the constellation Orion, also
known as the Three Goats!”
Before I knew it, Steve and I had waded into a
churning pool of metal. My legs were scratched and cut to bits by soup
cans.
“Alright, grab a rope and climb, if you want to live!”
Steve monkeyed up the rope in no time while I swung
back and forth like a helpless child.
“Help?” I said.
“No! Climb!”
“I cannot. I am too weak.”
“Close your eyes and listen to me! Listen to me as the
world dims! Imagine that you are a tiny steamship chuffing through the sewers.
Around you is filth! Alligators snap at your paddle wheel! All is murk and
feces! What do you do!?”
“I don’t know what I do!” I said.
“You climb, damn it! Climb!”
I felt a warm puff on the top of my head as each of
Steve’s hot exhortations reached me below. And, without knowing what my own
frail Scott-body was doing, I pulled myself out of the bleeding lake of cans
and began my ascent. In the end, I was not climbing rope, but Steve himself.
“Good! You have climbed into a new era, a new phase of
psychosocial evolution. You are no longer a Novice, but an Arbiter now!”
“An Arbiter! What does that mean?” I asked, as Steve
intoned into my eyes.
“You tell me! Tell me or I drop you to your DEATH!”
“It means, ah, that I alone judge my existence. It
means that the whole universe appears before the great court of myself!” I
said.
Steve squeezed me then with such force that I thought
perhaps he was trying void my bowels from without.
“Yes! You are a gifted student of Xfitz! Founder Bill
would be mildly sickened but also amused by you. You must not let the others
steal your mind-beauty!” He pointed below at a scrum of jealous gawkers who
leaned with viscous ease on their knobby barbells. “They will steal it and
become greater in the process. You must perfect the art of Hide and Seek! Now,
hide!” he said, as he held me, swaying, in the rafters.
The lights went off with a demonic clunk. Steve
slithered free of my grasp and left me alone on the rope. I could sense the
swarming Xfitzers hunting me in the dark.
When they come for me, I must kick them, I thought.
But even then, I would be found, and martial victories would count for nothing
against this greater disgrace. I stretched out a free hand and felt for an
adjacent rope.
Got it.
I swung to the neighboring rope and then repeated the
process until I was, I hoped, near the edge of the soup-can-pit. When I thought
this was so, I did a fireman slide down to the bottom, blistering my hands,
shins, and crotch badly in the process.
My feet landed on rubber matting. I could hear the
whooshing of Xfitzs people all around me, like large, swooping bats. I crouched
low and spider-crawled away from the frenzied masses. Occasionally two Xfitzers
would collide and gnaw at each other until they realized they were allies of a
sort. As I made my way into some kind of gymnastic cage, I heard several of
them talking about me.
“He looks weak and dull minded. I am sure he is
already dead.”
“Isn’t he Scott’s roommate? Scott says his roommates
are all dung people, dumb as buckets.”
“He did. There’s no way this new Scott still lives.”
Then the trio seemed to engage in some kind of surreptitious hand-slapping
game, damp and rhythmic, Clap, slip,
slorp, clapslipslorp, clapslipslorp, for
a minute or so before they skulked off in different directions.
How long must I hide, I wondered? Then, morbidly, I
thought, Weren’t the greatest of all hide-and-seekers the orphans, the
marooned? Those who tucked themselves away in nooks and drains and fridges and
air ducts so secret they were never found? Was that to be my fate? A starved
champion whose greatest victory would become nothing more than lore, a
magnificent reality that cheapened to rumor over time?
“Did you hear about the Scott that locked himself in
the walk-in-freezer? Died sucking on frozen peas?”
“Wait, I heard he hid beneath the hood of an old panel
van and couldn’t get out. Poisoned himself sucking anti-freeze from a punctured
hose…”
And so on.
No, I thought. The greatest hide-and-seekers always
revealed their tricks with flamboyant and dickish triumph. They transformed
their invisibility into an act of mystical revelation. They blinked into
existence from nowhere, like fresh subatomic particles blooming from the bowels of
some great flickering quantum nightmare of spacetime.
As these thoughts dropkicked my brain from some other
and superior plane, I began to see in the dark. Suddenly I beheld the Xfitzers groping
and pouncing at phantoms. And I laughed as I saw it.
Coach Steve was wearing a great big wilderness
backpack, filled with supplies: water, ropes, carabiners, rare pemican, and so
on. Evidently, he was prepared for a long hunt. I crept up behind him, unzipped
the bag, and quickly and quietly, replaced his gear with myself.
“Ugh,” said coach Steve to his bearded Xfitzs first mate,
Tyler. “I must have accumulated some CNS fatigue with all my recent snitch
workshops. This bag suddenly feels heavier than a kegerator.” Tyler offered
nonsensical congratulations and encouragement in return, before sprinting off
to climb and search the Vaseline wall.
Over the next few hours, the Xfitzers dropped like
flies. They need to eat every 80 minutes or so, or else they risk slipping into
temporary and harmless comas. Eventually, Steve, Tyler, and Kara-Bonnie were
the only ones left.
Kara-Bonnie, doing some muscle-ups to stay awake, said
to Steve in a perfectly even voice: “This rat is greatest Hide and Seeker I’ve
ever seen.”
Tyler nodded, “He must have evaporated. Perhaps only
his clothes remain.”
“No,” grumbled coach Steve in a semi-hysterical
yell-whisper, “Um, he’s still here. I can sense his arrogance. There is a smirk
somewhere in this darkness. I must stomp it out!!”
Just then I kicked coach Steve hard in the kidneys
through the bag.
“Agh,” he said, “That would hurt most men. Me, it
merely PERTURBS.”
Then I unzipped the bag and wriggled up to his
shoulders, piggybacking him like wayward nephew.
“Ta-dah?” I said. Somehow, the lights clunked back on,
and the remaining Xfitzers stared hard at me, their phantom, their Virgin Mary
on a slice of toast, their wives’ tale come to life.
“Surprise,” I said, doing a hammy, sitcom kid kind of
thing with my hands. But really, it was no surprise. It was an edict, a
pronouncement, a shuffling of kingdoms. The reign of coach Steve had come to an
end. The era of Scott had begun.
SCOTTFITZ
I renamed the club to reflect my new glory, though in
truth, I still had much to learn. I could not yet perform a snitch lift, and I
was weaker than most children, so I required constant assistance from my
underlings to complete the most basic of exercises. This would change in time,
I thought, but in the meantime, I would lead the club thanks to my credentials
as a visionary Hide and Seeker, and a first-rate survivalist.
Over time, Scottfitz became so popular that nearly all
of the Scotts in the metro area joined, as well as many of their useless
roommates, and their Teresa girlfriends. Many other typical Xfitzers migrated
to our club as well: they were former division II athletes and current office
park thrillsters who had a love of paraphernalia and structured play. They had
bogus special-forces beards and belly-button rings and loved to recite their
injuries which they alternately savored and ignored. They had, in short,
everything it took to become pretty good at something, but they sorely needed
my guidance when it came to accessing the fruits of psychological extremity.
Night after night, I appeared in front of them, my
first mate coach Steve repeating everything I said in a crazed bark:
“When they lights go out, that’s when voices will
speak to you,” I said.
“WHEN THE LIGHTS GO OUT, um, THAT IS WHEN THE VOICES
WILL SPEAK!” said Steve.
“To you,” I prompted.
“TO YOU!” he continued.
“They will tell you that the possible has not yet been defined. But that you are the Arbiters of
possibility. You are already perfect but will become more so with time. You are
the judges of the real. Physical reality will become your servant. Your souls
will glow—wait till I’m finished, Steve!—your souls will glow with becoming.
Your failures won’t matter anymore. Your dreaded condo fees will be nothing
more than the eraser dust you huff away from the pages of your immaculate
journals. You will revise the universe with your will. You will become a Scott,
and then a non-Scott, repeating this cycle until you have lived many lives,
remembered whole epochs of fantastical history from parallel dimensions. You
will no longer have arms but wings. You will be able to hide anywhere and then
reappear from behind the veil of your singular ingenuity. Your bosses will
admire your confidence. Your children will sigh less. You will see those
alimony checks for the trifles they truly are. You will be great people,
hyper-extended spirits, masters of the commute.
No one will be prouder, will feel better than you do when throwing
Frisbees to your bounding dogs. Believe me. Close your eyes and believe me.
Close your eyes and see. Steve? Steve!”
“SORRY! THEY WILL TELL YOU, um, THAT THE
POSSIBLE HAS NOT YET BEEN DEFINED…BUT, um, YOU ARE THE ARBITERS OF
POSSIBILITY…! YOU ARE ALREADY PERFECT, okay?, BUT WILL BECOME MORE SO WITH
TIME…”