When I was in Uni I’d go to this makeshift gym at a place called Nsambya Sharing Youth Center in Kampala. It was a dark dungeon of sorts, a rectangular room with grills for windows and walls peeled of paint. The equipment was rudimentary, fashioned from the wreckage of cars, iron moulded, and welded to provide weights. Together with a friend, Charlo, we’d take a matatu after lectures at 4 pm, a 15-minute ride. Sometimes we’d go slightly earlier and play basketball as a warmup. Other times we’d just jump in without a preamble. Because it was below the floor level but not quite at what would amount to be a basement level, it would often get quite hot and stuffy in there. And most likely unhygienic. Imagine a dozen or so men in a darkish, basement-like enclosure, pumping iron, music blaring. We are talking lots of sweating; sweat on the benches, sweat on the bars, dead air. Luckily, we never caught anything – apart from machismo.
The men who attended that gym were built like gorillas. Massive Ugandan boys. Massive. They had wide backs and biceps the size of pineapples. Thick, cinder-block necks. When they turned, they turned in arcs, like trailers. They trained shirtless because that’s what you do when you are ripped and bigger than everybody else. They were a clutch of what seemed like bodybuilders or bouncers. They cackled at their jokes and trained on their own, grunting loudly, cussing, and generally making their presence felt. The animal farm. Then there was us. We were mostly windy, trying desperately to bulk up on staple meals of matoke, groundnut sauce, beans, and chapati.
There was a pecking order in the gym; you got out of the way for the big boys. If you found yourself unfortunate to be waiting for them to finish pushing 20,000 kilograms on the bench, you’d be advised to change and train another body part that day. The chest and arms were the most important body parts in the gym. They’d work their upper body until they’d look deformed, like extraterrestrials. They all had small legs. Hippo legs. If they walked in and found you working on a machine they intended to use, they’d not chase you away but just stand there watching you work out, speaking in Luganda, making you feel like an exercise in futility. The kinder ones would step in to correct your form because your form is always off when you are skinny. Of course, the rest of us were intimidated by them.
So you can imagine my surprise when I saw one of them in my gym the other day. You have to understand that it’s been something like 20 years or more. I remembered him because he liked to commandeer the music player. He loved Bebe Cool and that’s all he played. Another rule; the biggest guy in the room controlled the music. He wasn’t that big or the biggest in the room but he carried himself out like a big guy. Charlo and I called him Bebe Cool. And so there he was, seated, before his locker, towelling the areas between his toes.
In the gym I go to, people don’t generally converse with each other because it might pollute their gene pool. I have been in that gym for a year now and I don’t remember having one conversation with anyone in the changing room except for the usual hallos with the cleaning staff. The back of Bebe’s head was balding. He looked to be in his early 50s and had grown a bit soft in the middle like the rest of us, but he was still strong. His muscles still had memory. Because it’s improper to study another man for too long in the changing room, I stepped up (clothed) and said, “Hey, were you ever in Kampala in 2003?”
He looked at me with zero recognition at all. “Ye-ah…”
“I thought so,” I said. “I think I saw you there.”
“Yeah?” He was piqued. “Where, Bugolobi?
“No, Nsambya.”
He looked at the floor in a brief intense moment of thought. I could hear the gears of his brain changing, the whirring of its engine as it zapped back in time, searching for my face in Nsambya and finally, him looking back at me. “Nsambya…”
“Yeah, the gym. The youth center.”
“Sharing!” Light leaped in his eyes, “were you a member of the center?”
“I gymed there. I was a student. It cost 20-bob a month and it was dark and dangerous.”
“Oh my God!” He said laughing. It’s amazing how laughter completely transforms someone’s face. He suddenly looked different. “You gymed there? I didn’t see you there!”
“You wouldn’t have. You were the elite of the gym.”
He laughed hard. “Oh come on!”
“Yeah, pressing 5000kgs on the bench while the rest of us did 25kgs.”
He chuckled. “Now I’m doing 25kgs.” He extended his hand. “Ray is my name.”
“Biko.”
“I think I’ve seen you around. You don’t say much.”
So there are chaps like me; we don’t say much in the gym. Go in, press 30kgs on the bench, curl some dumbbells, shower, and leave.
Then there are the ones who:
Won’t stop talking. They talk more than they work out. He was always jabbering. Mostly embellished stories. One time I heard this ageing, wizened Indian fellow say loud enough for anyone who doesn’t care, “Ambani’s wedding cost 1 billion dollars. One billion dollars! Not Kenyan shillings, dollars. One billion dollars.” I was doing shoulder presses because shoulders say something about how you carry your world. I stared at him in the mirror and thought, “I don’t know about that wedding but no way that wedding was worth 1 billion dollars.” He went on and on about that wedding, about the groom’s watch, about Zuckerberg admiring his watch and asking him where he bought the damn watch. Who attended, and how much did the catering cost? He was speaking to the rapt audience of two gym instructors but we could all hear him in the damned gym. He’s always talking, that old man. I think he finds himself home alone in the house after everybody has gone off to work and he seeks solace in the gym.
The other person who won’t shut up is the person on the damn phone the whole time. They will join you standing at the dumbbell weight rack saying, “I don’t think it’s a good idea.” Thinking they are addressing you because you are thinking of trying out the 22kg weight for a change to do the dumbbell pullover, you turn to give them a death stare only to find out they are on Bluetooth earphones. “That’s what I told him ….yeah, it wasn’t going to work” Often they just sit talking and talking on the phone. Their workout takes over two hours, most of which involve touching weights and not lifting them because they are exercising their tongue muscle.
Then there are the cabal of savages who pile on all the weights in the gym. As if training for a raid, for war, to pilfer and plunder, and to kill men and boys and bring back the enemy’s women as sex slaves. They wear tight muscle shirts and walk like they have boils under their arms. Fine, we are all in the gym for some level of vanity, but these guys are there for more than their vanity, they are there for personal worship. Their bodies are their god. They stare at themselves in the mirrors with lust. They train in packs of threes or fours, a sorority of testosterone, grunting their encouragement. It’s all unabashedly gung-ho. The more weight they can carry the better the workout day.
But they are not annoying, the annoying guy is the guy who doesn’t replace his weights. Leaves everything lying about for someone to pick after him. You can tell this guy has never made a bed in his life. The kind who calls hired help, “the servants.” Just looking at his face you can tell he’s in his bubble and you want to throw a dumbbell at it. He’s trying to grow a beard because he believes that’s what being a man is about. But you can’t be a man if you can’t pull your weight.
Talking of faces. There is a girl who has lips that have lips on them. You see her lips before you see her; puffy things, like a bee bit her. I’m told they inject lips nowadays to look like the Kardashians. There is something unnatural about those lips, like they are painful. She’s an exhibitionist, this girl. She wears next to nothing; very tiny shorts and a strip of fabric across her ample bosoms. That’s it. Her derriere requires a whole blog post and I’m not sure if they are as real as her lips. She wears copious amounts of makeup; the dark eyeliners around her eyes make her look like someone who often engages in animal sacrifice. When she walks across the room to pick up a weight, it’s a spectacle. A production. All the men pretend they aren’t staring, except the wizened ageing man of the wedding. He just stares.
While all this is transpiring, a grown man moans in the corner. That’s the gym moaner. When he pushes weight he makes disturbing sounds like he’s pushing out a baby. Or something far more disturbing. It’s also distracting but not as much as the group of young Somali boys gathered around one piece of equipment. They don’t do much in the form of training, just socialising with weights. Getting to know their machines. Quality time with the bench. They banter in their language, jostle, laugh, and take turns lifting weights. The lifting weights part is an interlude. From what you can catch, they talk football a lot. Then they are gone, hardly breaking a sweat. And then you don’t see them and just when you start thinking, what happened to those boys, they show up after a month or so.
Talking of distraction. There are a couple I see in the gym. The girl is voluptuous, the man never wears shoes. Just socks and slides. Always together. They look married or living together. No babies, yet. You can tell people with babies. Babies take bits of your relationship and chisel the edges a little bit. The woman seems more dedicated to working out than the man. The man is always whispering things to her. God knows what; “Love how your face glistens when you squat. I want to have my whey with you.”
Speaking of Whey. What’s the rule for having liquid supplements while you are training? I see folks who carry colourful liquids in fancy water bottles. Won’t that shit give you a heart attack? Is it cheating if you are having sugar and things during a workout? These are things one wants to ask that guy who looks like he was sculpted from Kisii soapstone. His body dimension is unrealistically proportional. He has the right upper body definition and the right balance of lower body muscles. He doesn’t seem to do much, in fact, he seems to make it look so effortless. His female version has tattoos running on her back. These are people who were born already with the right muscles. They must eat only nuts and vegetables. And never struggle to drink their three litres of water. They are poster children of rude health.
A rude awakening is the girl who deadlifts hundreds of kilograms. Thick muscular thighs, strong arms, and a straight sturdy back. The kind of weights she deadlifts is enough to break my back into two. And she doesn’t moan like our friend in the corner. She is silent as a lamb while she lifts all that weight, the only strain showing is on her face. You can tell she has brawled before, that girl. That she has lifted someone and hurled them over tables. It took three bouncers to hold her back. She looks like the type that snores so loudly in her sleep that things dance and fall off her bedside table. When you see her at the elevators, showered and dressed, she looks different. She looks feminine, a little demure even but agile in her movement, strong bursts of movements. She can still lift you over her head and throw you over a table, you are sure.
The person she should be throwing over the balcony is the man who grooms in the gym bathroom. He comes with his vanity kit and he stands before a mirror and does his full routine. He brushes his teeth. He flosses. He gurgles mouthwash. He tweezes his eyebrows. He then foams his face and shaves the old-fashioned way, using one of those razors that Don Draper used in the TV series Mad Men. He takes his time because this is his moment and his world and you all just live in it. Besides, he has paid to use the gym, which you have never seen him use, so maybe he paid to use the bathroom. You leave him shaving when you step into the showers and when you are done and dressed and walking out, he’s still standing there in his towel, grooming. I admire that level of shamelessness.
Whatever you do today or tomorrow, work out your legs.
***
Registered for Masterclass? If not, do that HERE. Perhaps you’d like a book to read after the gym. Get that HERE.