Xena the Body

He had both hands full of my titties in the dark of a posing room at two in the morning and I was nineteen years old.

That is the first thing anybody needs to know about me, so we can get it out of the way. Dorian Ruddick, October 2014, five days after my first show, with the weight floor dark behind us and the mirror lights on and my hoodie already on the rubber. His mouth on my neck. His hands going down over the caps of my shoulders and squeezing, which is the part nobody ever thinks to do, and my whole body going hot from the middle out because he was touching the thing I had built on purpose and making it mean something good.

“Jesus,” he said. “You are like a wall.”

“That is rude to say to a lady.”

“It was a compliment.”

“Say it better.”

He said it better. He got the sports bra up over my tits and put his mouth on them, one and then the other, and said filthy things into my skin about my thighs and my back and what he had been thinking about since August, and I stood there in a doorway with my hands hanging down and let a man talk dirty about a body the whole world had spent six years calling a problem.

I had eaten tilapia and asparagus out of a Tupperware for fourteen weeks. I had weighed every gram of everything that went in my mouth since June. I had not had a drink, a slice of cake, a late morning or one single thing I wanted, and here is what happens to a body like that when somebody finally puts a hand on it.

Everything I had been starving woke up at once.

And while he was doing it, in the middle of it, with my fingers in his hair, my head was where my head always is. On a concrete court behind building G in the Cuney Homes with my hands full of a twelve year old girl, and on her voice telling me I had been number two behind her my whole life, and on the promise I made her at her funeral with my mother’s dress pinned at the back.

Then his mouth went lower, and for nine seconds there was nothing in my head at all.

Nine seconds. That is what this whole book is about, and I chased it for twelve years and it cost me everything I am about to tell you.

Twelve years later, a bullet went past my ear close enough that I heard it work.

It is not a whistle. Nobody tells you the sound. It is a sound like somebody ripping a sheet in the next room. Then the concrete pillar behind my head opened up and sprayed grit down the back of my neck, into the robe, onto skin that still had competition tan on it and glitter in the crease of my shoulder. Twenty minutes earlier I had been standing under every light in the building with my arms up. Now I was barefoot in the back lot of the arena with a winner’s medal bouncing on my chest and a piece of a wall in my hair.

I did what I have done since I was twelve.

I ran.

Barefoot on the loading apron, June in my lungs and October on the calendar, the heat coming up off that Las Vegas blacktop even at midnight. My feet slapped and stuck. Somebody behind me was shouting in Spanish, not loud, which was the part that scared me. Men who yell want you to stop. Men who talk in a regular voice have already decided how this ends.

Two of them on foot. A black Escalade coming around the trailers with its lights off.

There were road cases stacked along the bay doors, the big black ones the riggers wheel the lights in on, chest high and heavy as a refrigerator. I got a hand under the lip of one and tipped it into the alley behind me. A man went down under it swearing. I laughed. I want to be honest about the laugh. My best friend was dead, my sister was somewhere in that building, there was a hole opening in my life the size of my whole life, and I laughed, because a two hundred pound case is nothing to me and it was everything to him.

I am the strongest woman most people will ever meet. So how does a woman built for carrying end up on her face on a garage floor with her own blood running under her hip? That is the question, and I am going to answer it in order. It is the only thing in my life I have never had to lie about, not once, not to anybody. It is also what it cost me, and the bill for it is still open.

The bay doors were shut. The service corridor was locked from the inside because the show was over and the crew was already loading out on the other end. That left the employee garage. The garage was up, and up is the wrong way to run. I took it anyway.

There was a chain link gate across the ramp with a bike rack chained to it, one of those steel loops bolted through a concrete block, and somebody had dropped it sideways so the gap was blocked. In the gym we call that a strongman implement. I call it a Tuesday. I squatted, got both hands under the block, stood it up out of my way, and my robe came open and the crystals on my suit threw little blue lights all over the garage wall. The gate rattled. The chain caught something at my throat and pulled.

Dorian’s chain. The thin gold one, the first piece of gold anybody ever gave me, twelve years on my neck, through two showers a day, and of all the nights in twelve years it broke on a chain link fence.

I felt it go. I saw it hanging there in the diamonds of the wire, swinging, catching the light.

I left it swinging.

The stairwell door was propped with a paint can. I put my shoulder into it and went up two at a time, and that is where the depletion got me. A woman looks a certain way the night of a show. I had been carb loading since Wednesday and water cut since Friday morning. I had drunk four ounces of water in twenty six hours. Every vein in my arms was a highway, and there was nothing in me to burn. By the second landing my quads were cramping, both of them, the way a charley horse grabs in the night and you have to stand up on it and swear. By the third I was seeing the little grey spots that mean sit down.

Level three. Kiana’s rental was twenty feet away, the white Altima, crooked in the space because my sister cannot park.

I made it nineteen of the twenty feet.

The second one did not miss.

It went in low on my left side, under the ribs, and it did not hurt the way you think. It was a punch. It was somebody swinging a bat into my side, then pouring something warm down my hip. My leg stopped working before my head understood why. The garage floor came up and hit the side of my face.

Fluorescent tube above me. One of those long ones with the dead moths in it, buzzing, a little green at one end.

I lay there under it with my blood going out onto the concrete, with a gold medal on my chest that said Ms. Titan on it and my name engraved wrong, and I asked the question you ask.

How did I get here.

I was thirty one years old. I had the title I had wanted since I was nineteen. I had a man I had actually started to love, which was newer than the title and scared me more. And I was lying in a parking garage bleeding on the thing I had traded fourteen years for, while a man in a black suit walked toward me at a normal speed because he knew I could not get up.

So let me answer the question. I have the time, and I am not sure how much.

Everybody in that arena says I slept my way to the top.

They are right. I will give you every name.

What none of them knew, what I did not know until about four hours ago, was that the last man I climbed into bed with owned the top, and I would have been safer at the bottom.

I am saying all of this from a bed at University Medical Center on West Charleston, at twelve minutes after midnight, with a tube taped into my hand and a monitor over my left shoulder that keeps making a sound I have started to hate. They took one bullet out of me at ten. They are taking me back in at six for the rest. The surgeon is a small woman with tired eyes who would not promise me anything, and I liked her for it, because everybody else in my life has been promising me things for years and look where it got us. Kiana is asleep in the chair with her mouth open. She drove twenty two hours to be in that chair and she does not know yet what she saved.

“Am I going to be all right?” I asked the surgeon.

“You are stable,” she said. “That is a different sentence.”

“Doctor.”

“There is a second one against the back of your hip and I am going in for it at six,” she said. “Ask me at eight.”

It cost me my best friend, the only father I ever picked, a man I had just started to love, and it may still cost me the rest.

So I am going to tell the whole thing. Every man, every room, every city, every gift. I have it all written down anyway. That is the joke that turned out not to be a joke.

So let me go back to that posing room and tell the whole night, from the key.

October 2014. I was nineteen years old, five days past my first show, and I still had tan in the creases of my elbows because that stuff does not come off. It wears off, and it ruins your pillowcases.

I had won. Heavyweight and the overall, in a ballroom on the Southwest Freeway with a carpet the color of a bruise and two hundred folding chairs. My mother cried. Kiana screamed so loud they heard her in the lobby. Pops stood at the back with his arms folded and his chin up and that is Pops crying, if you know him.

Then the show was over. I went home to an apartment with a bed in it and a cooler. I sat on the floor, ate a slice of somebody’s leftover birthday cake with my hands, and cried for twenty minutes for no reason I could name.

Fourteen weeks I had eaten what the scale said. Tilapia, rice, asparagus, water until my teeth floated. Seven meals a day off a phone alarm. No cake, no drink, no sleeping in, no going out, no nothing. They tell you the diet is the hard part. The diet is not the hard part. The hard part is that when you starve one hunger, every other hunger in you sits up.

Mine sat up that night and it has never laid back down.

Dorian Ruddick had given me a key to his gym in August. Ruddick Iron, on the edge of Midtown, all glass front and chrome and a smoothie bar, the kind of place Pops calls a showroom. He gave me the key so I could do cardio at two in the morning when the Houston heat was down and the place was empty. That is what he said. That is what I believed, and I want to say clearly that I believed it, because of what I know now about that key.

I let myself in at ten past two with my duffel and my hoodie over nothing much. The weight floor was dark. The lights in the posing room at the back were burning.

He was in there. Forty six inch chest, gym tan, a chain around his neck, sitting on the end of the bench with his elbows on his knees like a man who had been sitting there since midnight.

“You said two,” I said.

“You said maybe.”

“I say maybe to everybody.”

“I know,” he said. “I waited anyway.”

There is a mirror in that room that runs the whole wall. I could see both of us in the glass. Him sitting down, me in the doorway with the hood still up, six foot one in bare feet, two hundred and one pounds with all the water back in me and every one of them somewhere useful. I had spent my whole life being looked at like a problem. Girls in the lunch line, boys with their mouths open, a teacher who asked what my father fed me. I could read every one of those faces by the time I was twelve.

His face I could not read. He was not scared of me, and he was not making a joke to cover the fear. He was looking at me the way you look at something you are about to be allowed to touch.

“Take the hood off,” he said.

I took it off. My hair was blue then too, cheap blue, box dye and hell to keep. It came down past my shoulders and he made a sound in his chest.

“Come here.”

“You come here,” I said, and he laughed, and he came.

He put both hands flat on my shoulders first. Not my ass, not my chest. My shoulders, and then everything I opened this book with, which I am not going to make you read twice.

What I did not put at the top is what came after the talking.

He was slow. That is the thing I did not expect and the thing that ruined me for fast men for about a year afterward. He pulled the hoodie off over my head and dropped it on the floor. For a second he did not touch anything, just looked. I let him look. I was shaking a little.

“Say something,” I said.

“No.”

He pushed my sports bra up. My titties came out heavy, and he made that sound again. Then his mouth was on them, one and then the other, while his hands went around to my back and pulled me into him. I got my fingers in his hair. He bit, not hard, and I heard myself make a noise I did not know I had in me.

The room smelled like chalk, rubber, the lemon stuff they mop with, and under all of that, him. Some cologne that was too much. I have smelled it twice since, on other men, and left the room both times.

“Down,” I said.

“Bossy.”

“You are going to find that out.”

He went down. He got my leggings off me one leg at a time because they do not come off a body like mine easy and there is no dignified way to do it, and we both laughed about it, and that is the other thing I did not expect, that it could be funny. His hands went flat on my thighs and stopped there.

“Look at you,” he said.

“They are legs, Dorian.”

“They are not legs. Hold onto the bar.”

There was a bar across the mirror, the ballet kind, for posing practice. I held onto the bar. He put my right leg over his shoulder, got his mouth on my pussy, and the first thing I did was laugh out loud. Surprise. Relief. Fourteen weeks of eating out of a Tupperware. The second thing I did was stop laughing and hold that bar with both hands like a woman on a train.

Nobody had done that before. Nobody had done anything before. I was nineteen and I had spent every night of my life since I was fifteen in a gym or asleep, and the boys at school were afraid of me. I had told myself for years that I did not care.

I cared.

He knew what he was doing. He knew it, he took his time about it, and he kept his eyes on me the whole way through. When I came the first time my knee buckled. I nearly put him through the mirror, and he came up laughing with his chin wet.

“You almost killed me.”

“You would have died happy,” I said.

“Say that again.”

“Get up here.”

He got up. I got a handful of his shirt and put him against the mirror, and that was the moment I found out what I was going to be. Not that I wanted him. That I wanted to run the room. He was two hundred and ten pounds and I moved him like a plate and he let me. His eyes changed. I filed that away, I have used that ever since, every single year.

I got his shorts down. He was hard and I put my hand on his dick and he swore at the ceiling.

“Pick me up,” I said.

“I cannot pick you up.”

“Wrong answer.”

So I picked him up. Both hands under his thighs, off his feet, turned us around. I sat down on the bench with him on top of me still saying my name like a question. Then his dick was in me. It hurt for about four seconds, and after that it did not hurt at all.

I will not tell you it was beautiful. It was loud. It was greedy. I told him exactly what to do the whole time and he did every bit of it, and when he tried to slow down I locked my legs around his back and would not let him. My thighs have ended arguments. They ended that one. He got his hands under my ass. I used the bench. We went at each other like two people who had been waiting longer than either of us wanted to say. I came again with my heel dug into the small of his back and my mouth on his shoulder, and I bit him hard enough to leave a mark he had to explain for a week.

Afterward we were on the floor because the bench was not wide enough for the two of us. The mirror had both of us in it, sideways, sweat on the glass in the shape of his back. He was breathing like he had run stairs.

“You are going to be a problem,” he said.

“I have been a problem since sixth grade.”

“No.” He turned his head. “You are going to be a problem for everybody.”

I lay there on a rubber floor at four in the morning and I felt the thing I had been trying to feel since I was twelve years old, which was quiet. Nothing in my head. No court behind building G, no kitchen floor, no glass door, no ambulance, no numbers, no scale. Quiet.

That is my whole story, if you want it in one line. I found the one place the noise stops and then I went there for fourteen years.

In the morning he made coffee in the smoothie bar blender because he did not have a pot, which was disgusting, He stood behind me, put something cold around my neck and closed the clasp.

A chain. Thin, gold, nothing special, the kind of thing you get in a case at a mall.

“For the overall,” he said.

“You bought me jewelry.”

“I bought you a chain.”

“Men do not buy me things, Dorian.”

“They will,” he said. “Get used to the feeling.”

“Is that what this chain is?”

“This is a chain,” he said, and kissed my nape, and went to find the blender.

“You did not have to buy me anything.”

“I know.”

I looked at it in the glass of the trophy case. On my neck it looked like nothing. It looked like a gold line on brown skin. I wore it every day for twelve years and I had it on tonight in that garage and I lost it on a fence three hours ago. If I had understood one single thing about what that chain was, none of the rest of this would have happened.

Before I left he took a picture of me on the weight floor, under the Ruddick Iron sign, arms up.

It was on the sponsored athlete wall by the end of the week.

And a man named Cedric Boone, who promoted every show worth doing between Houston and Atlanta, walked past that wall nine days later, stopped. Asked Dorian for my name.

I used to tell that part like it was luck.