When I was 22 and living in a one-bedroom apartment on the side of town God doesn't list on his resume, I decided I had to have a Total Gym. I watched the infomercial late night after late night, the volume low so as not to inadvertently wake the chick who was sleeping free on my couch for the fifth month in a row, and I thought, yeah. I need that. I mean shit, I’m only a month behind on my power bill, I’ve got a free gym membership through the university I don’t use and I’ve got three hundred and eleven square feet just going to waste here. What I really need is a piece of gym equipment that weighs two tons, costs four grand and folds up neatly for easy compact storage. So I ordered one.
I’ll repeat that: I picked up the telephone, dialed an 800-number, and I said Yes, Please Send Me The Total Gym Risk Free For Thirty Days, and I gave them my credit card number. I know. This decision was actually the sole reason I didn’t get into Brain Surgery College.
So the Total Gym came, right, and I made sure the chick who was living on my couch, Darlene, was going to be awake that day so she could drag it in off the stoop while I was at work. When I got home my entire house was full of cardboard boxes. This was in addition to Darlene and all her crap, and her 140-pound
I immediately got busy ripping the boxes open and assembling this thing, and I guess in the back of my mind I had hoped that Darlene might jump in and help, but turns out she was really busy sitting at my kitchen table smoking pot and toiling over miniature oil paintings of various cocktails. As was so very often the case.
The first problem I encountered was a schematics issue; the only way the thing would fit in the apartment was if I set it up in the hallway between the bedroom and the living room, and that meant the bathroom would be inaccessible.
“Doesn’t matter to me,” Darlene piped in. Really, Smelly? Because that surprises me. What the hell—in for eleven thousand dollars, in for three thousand pounds. No bathroom it is. They were probably going to shut the water off pretty soon, anyway.
It took hours, this thing. At first I had it set up wrong and it was a helicopter. Then I set it up wrong again and it was a solar energy transference plant. Then, finally, it was a home gym. Kind of. Darlene immediately got on it and pulled on the lat cable, bringing two wobbly weight stacks crashing to the ground. I was really regretting a lot of things in that moment, not the least of which was helping Darlene pack her shit and scrounge her car keys out of the bottom of that dumpster where her boyfriend had thrown them in the first place. Not the least of which was also moving out of my parents’ house. There was definitely room for a Total Gym at my parents’ house.
Eventually (four days later) I admitted defeat. The Total Gym was useless; it was a warped piece of garbage with a weak pulley system that didn’t do crap, the only thing it folded up and fit underneath was the ceiling fan, and I really needed to take a shower. You know what's more taxing than assembling a Total Gym? Taking a Total Gym apart and repacking it into fourteen cardboard boxes.
I kept hoping Darlene might help but she was really busy smoking weed at my kitchen table and crafting ashtrays out of clay. UPS came and took my Total Gym away, and not long after that Darlene got knocked up by a married guy whose wife was seven months pregnant and she took her dog and went to live in someone’s guest house somewhere, I don’t know. I never heard from her again.
I only share this story because people often ask if I really bought a Total Gym, and they want to hear all about it because they’ve been watching the commercials late at night, they’ve been eying Christie Brinkley’s sixty-year-old abs, they’ve been considering. And I tell them what I just told you: the Total Gym is a complete waste of time. Now the Bowflex, I hear that’s where it’s at.
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