By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, December 29, 1934.
“AAAAAAGHHH,” said Jimmie Frise.
“What is it?” I asked anxiously.
“Ughh,” groaned Jimmie, this Christmas-New Year’s week gets me down. Over eating. Over eating. I feel like a boa constrictor that has eaten three goats. One goat. Two goats. Three goats.”
“Yes,” I said, “I know that lumpy feeling.”
“I could just lie down somewhere and let those colossal gorgings digest,” said Jimmie. “I feel drowsy. Or is it just that I have eaten so much, my skin is tight all over me, and that is what is making my eyes half close?”
“What we need,” I declared, “is exercise.”
“I never felt less like exercise in all my life,” replied Jim, resting himself in another slouched position on his chair.
“Big meals,” I said, clearing my throat, “big meals, Jimmie, should be forbidden by the public health legislation of this country. They should be a crime. In ancient times, when nature was our only law, men, like any other animal, ate whenever they could, but lots of times they went for days and days without a bite to eat.”
“I wish I was starving to death, right now,” moaned Jimmie.
“Lots of times,” I went on, “when game was scarce, whole tribes of men were slowly starving to death. Then all of a sudden, a herd of prehistoric reindeer or a couple of mammoths came along…”
“Ughh,” protested Jimmie.
“A herd of mammoths came along,” I continued, “and the whole tribe rushed out of the caves and slew a couple of them. And what a feast there was then! Up leaped the fires, and great juicy steaks of mammoth went on the pointed sticks to be roasted…”
“Please, please,” begged Jimmie, rising. “If you don’t change the subject, I’ll have to leave.”
“Very well,” I said. “But you see the point. Mankind, in the long-drawn-out early history of us, used to feast only after long fasts. I should say that in the ancient days mankind ate, as a rule, very little, and only once in a long while did they get a square meal. In these days, when we all eat regular meals, we should never, never feast.”
“Agreed, agreed,” said Jim, yawning and groaning at the same time.
“Having all and more than we need to eat, as often as we like,” I said, “it is against the ancient law of nature for us to gorge ourselves. It should be a public crime to stuff.”
“I’m a criminal all right,” said Jim, closing his eyes heavily.
“I’m a criminal, too,” I assured him. “Christmas Day, I started with two fried eggs and bacon, toast, cherry jam, two mugs of coffee and a beaker of orange juice. Then, about two p.m., we sat down to a turkey. Such a turkey. I ate three full-size slices off the breast, cut with a sharp knife. A gobbin of dressing about the size of a grapefruit…”
“Erp,” said Jim, “pardon me.”
“Then mashed potatoes with dark bright brown gravy, and turnips and cranberry sauce with the skins left in, for sharpness….”
Planning a Cellar Gym
“You were saying,” said Jim, heaving himself to an upright posture in his chair, “something about exercise. Talk about exercise. Tell me about walking five miles in the crisp winter afternoon, amidst bright pine trees along the frosty roads.”
“Walking,” I said, “about 120 to the minute, short, strong-legged paces, swinging a cane, with a tartan muffler around your neck, a pipe in your mouth, and steam blowing from your nose.”
“Aaaahhhh,” sighed Jimmie, looking better already.
“And big stout boots on your feet,” I pictured, “and the ground frozen and lumpy underfoot, and chickadees and maybe a redpoll or two in the trees for you to pause and look at, and maybe a pheasant, all dark and burnished, running across the road ahead of you.”
“Get away from pheasants, raw or roasted,” warned Jim.
“In the olden days,” I stated, “when we used to alternate feasts with long periods of enforced fasting, we got plenty of exercise. Hunting the mammoths must have been an arduous sport. Through bogs and swamps and through terrible jungles, with your poor stomach flat against your backbone from emptiness.”
“Beautiful,” murmured Jim.
“And you weary from carrying an immense club studded with bronze nails to kill the mammoths with.”
“Keep the mammoths alive,” urged Jim. “A dead mammoth gags me somehow.”
“I tell you what,” I suggested, “let’s go for a good walk right now. Let’s lock the office and go. Let’s drive as far as the Jail Farm1 and then go for a big tramp about five miles west, along one of those lovely winter York county dirt roads.”
“I’d die,” said Jim. “I’d just sit down by a snake fence and die. I haven’t enough strength in my legs right now to stand up.”
“The only thing to cure you,” I informed him, “is exercise. A brisk, long walk. A swinging walk through country with cold wind in your face and pushing against your chest.”
“It’s lovely to hear about,” said Jim, “but I couldn’t do it. Just let us talk about exercise.”
“Can’t we do something about exercise?” I asked. “Instead of merely talking about?”
“I’ve often thought,” pursued Jim, “of making a sort of private gymnasium in my cellar. It’s a big cellar, with a nice high ceiling. I could erect a horizontal bar, and rings on ropes, you know?”
“And my wife,” I said, “has one of those rowing machines stored in the attic. I’d lend
it.”
“And a horse,” said Jim. “You know those leather horses for leaping over.”
“Why don’t we just join a gym?” I asked.
“It’s too public,” demurred Jim. “I couldn’t bear showing off my shape in front of a lot of beautiful young fellows built like gods.”
“You’re right,” I said. “Make it a cellar gym.”
“There,” said Jim, relaxing a little, “we two could meet of an early morning, fresh from sleep and before starting for the office. We could do a crisp half hour of swinging and whirling. We could shake all the stale blood out of our limbs.”
“And heads,” said I.
“We could start our pulses working,” went on Jim. “Evenings, we could do tricks, slowly reviving the lost talents of our muscles. Saturdays we could hold private and personal gymkhanas2, competing with each other to see who had the most strength, the most skill.”
“You have me interested,” I admitted.
So that when we broke off work early and went home in the bright afternoon, we called at my house and got the rowing machine out of the attic of my house, and I also contributed a length of big half-inch rope that once I bought for an anchor, not knowing how big half-inch rope really is. An old army saddle I also dug out of the attic, relic of my war days when I tried to ride horses.
“This,” I explained to Jimmie, “will do instead of a gymnasium horse. We can prop it up some way between two chairs or something.”
Jim had timber to make horizontal bars. Old curtain poles of the kind all houses used to have between the living room and the dining room, and all of which are now stored in the attics of the world, Jim produced and we made series of bars on which we could swing like Tarzan, from limb to limb, strengthening our arms and dilating our chests and lungs.
Jimmie’s stuffiness passed off as we got the material assembled in his cellar.
“I feel better already,” said Jim, removing his coat and vest and producing an old box full of hammers, saws, nails and dusty old brackets and things.
First we had to sit down to plan it. We sat down on boxes and planned, with gestures. Over in the corner would be the rowing machine. Along the back of the big cellar would be a series of parallel bars for swinging, grand circles, short arm balances and chinning.
“I haven’t,” said Jim, “chinned myself for so long, it will be a treat to do it again.”
“And rings,” I cried. “Jimmie, when I was at school, I could travel faster around the rings than any boy in the school. I love rings. To swing at arm’s length on rings, gaining momentum and speed. I wonder if we couldn’t get so expert, we could set up two sets of ropes and rings, and swing from one to the other, like trapeze artists?”
“Vaulting the horse,” said Jim. “Now there’s a thing that tests your mettle. You take a run at the horse, place one hand on the saddle, and vault cleanly over it. I would rather see a man vault the horse than see a whole team of military jumpers take the hurdles on horseback.”
So we planned. We would have the horse in the middle of the cellar. I got up and set boxes and things and rested a broom across, and balanced my old saddle on the broom to show Jimmie just how it would look. Then I sat down again.
“It isn’t big enough,” mused Jim, “for a running track down here. But we might get some whitewash like they use on tennis courts and mark off the floor in rings and squares, to make it look gymnasiumy. You know, half the inspiration of a gymnasium is the look of it. It must look appetizing.”
“I thought you were tired of appetite,” I said.
“Now, how about a chest expander,” said Jim, shifting on to the floor and resting his back against the box. “We could attach a couple of bricks to some strong sash cord, and run it up through pulleys. A first-rate chest expander.”
“Swell,” said I. “And how about a rubbing-down table? I could rub you down and then you could rub me down.”
For Fresh Inspiration
“Boy,” said Jimmie, “that rub-down makes me feel good. What would we use for a rub-down?”
“Liniment,” I decreed. “A good cool stinging liniment. With a pungent, turpentiney odor.”
“Ach,” said Jim, “the smell of it fairly catches my breath. I feel like a new man already, just thinking about it.”
He sat up and stretched. He stood up. He walked around the cellar and patted the saddle.
“Think,” he said, “of that grand fresh, feeling of doing twenty minutes fast work on these bars, those rings, that horse, then five minutes on the rowing machine, then a quick rub-down with liniment and so to work!”
“I tingle,” I assured him. “Try a few pulls on that rowing machine.”
Jim stood above the rowing machine, looking down at it.
“Sit on it,” I urged him. “Take a few pulls and see how strong and elastic those springs are.”
“In a few minutes,” said Jim. “I’ve got to run upstairs for a second.”
Left alone, I lay there visualizing the gymnasium. Seeing Jimmie and me in our underwear lithely whirling and twisting, swinging and bending and wheeling. Upstairs I heard Jim’s feet to and fro in the kitchen.
He came down, just as the light from the cellar windows was fading, with a large tray.
On the tray were onion sandwiches, and the tail end of the turkey. The onion sandwiches were Spanish onions sliced thin, as only Jimmie knows how to make them, with salt and pepper, a dash of vinegar laid on with a teaspoon to get it just right, a faint dash of wooster sauce, between well-buttered thin bread.
The turkey was on its last legs, but hidden about its colossal carcase were large gobbets of meat, some white, some dark. Inside were large hunks of dressing still adhering to the ribs.
Jim had also a pot of coffee and a jug of thick cream.
“Ah,” said I, sitting forward.
We just laid the tray on the gymnasium floor and sat to it on our boxes.
After we had finished, I locked my fingers behind my head and leaned back against the wall.
“Well,” I said, “how about the gymnasium? How about doing something for a start?”
“New Year’s dinner will be in a few days,” said Jim, picking a last thread of white meat off from along that big keel bone sticking up drily. “What do you say if we wait until after New Year’s before going on with the gym? It will be a sort of fresh inspiration for us?”
“O-kay,” I agreed.
So before going upstairs to listen to the radio from the chesterfield and the big fat chair to match it, we pushed the bars and ropes and boards and saddle and stuff into a corner where they would be handy.
Editor’s Notes: This story appeared both in So What? (1937), and Silver Linings (1978).
- The “Jail Farm” was the Langstaff Jail Farm. In today’s terminology, it was a minimum security facility for inebriates, first offenders, and petty criminals, an alternative to the dreaded Don Jail. ↩︎
- Gymkhana is a British Raj term which originally referred to a place of assembly. The meaning then altered to denote a place where skill-based contests were held. ↩︎
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