I think we only worked-out together three or four times, and in that time I discovered that Ronan was literally just off the boat from a small Irish town, lived in a rooming house where he refused to share the refrigerator with the rest of the men who lived there, and finally was making ends meet by working as a stripper in the Gay Village.

At any rate, when I signed-up with Ronan I got a deal if I paid for 8 sessions up front, but due to some embarrassing reason, I only had 4 before we parted ways. That was about two year ago, and just recently I decided that I needed a personal trainer again to help get me in shape, and realizing I had a few sessions already paid for with Ronan, decided to give him a call.

Me: Is this Ronan?

Ronan: Who be asking?

Me: It’s me, Michael Murray, remember? You used to train me on Queen Street!

Ronan: No, I don’t remember you.

Me: I wore glasses, only have one lung and lived in a creepy apartment.

Ronan: (inaudible yelling in the background, thought I might have heard the word bumbaclot.)

Me: Ronan?

Ronan: Are you the guy who couldn’t lift any weights, but only the bar that was supposed to hold the weights, so you just did curls with that?

Me: Yes! That’s me!!

Ronan: Yeah, I remember you. That was a creepy apartment, man! Cobwebs and taxidermy everywhere, Mother of Mary it used to give me the shivers.

Me: Yeah, well great! We’ve moved, you know, and now live in nice place with windows and stuff. You’d like it! Anyway, the reason I’m calling is that I need to get back in shape and when I was working with you I think I paid for 8 sessions in advance, but only actually took 4, and I was wondering if we might work-out some arrangement where you could start training me again and I could get credit for those four sessions?

Ronan: That can’t be done.

Me: Why?

Ronan: You already paid for those sessions.

Me: But that’s my point.

Ronan: They were only good for a year.

Me: That’s not true. We never said that.

Ronan: It was implied in our agreement.

Me: So was my fitness. You failed me Ronan.

Ronan: You failed yourself, mate.

Me: You always smelled of Chunky Beef Soup.

Ronan: Your teeth disgusted me.

Me: I know you’re here illegally, mate.

Ronan: You don’t know shit, ya jammy rag.

And then he hung up on me.

She was the daughter of a British diplomat and she lived in a huge, failing stone mansion. I cannot tell you how much that impressed me. She had an accent so delicate that each word she spoke seemed to unfurl from her mouth like a flower, like a fragrance. Oh, how I was crazy for her, how I ached for her lips, but she preferred the bad boys. She liked them wicked and unpredictable. Boys who were born under punches, boys that didn’t ask questions and liked to fuck. I played tennis and coached T-ball.

I remember having my arm around her once when we were returning from a cottage. She was asleep, her head resting on my shoulder. It was autumn and the lake we were driving by was so beautiful, the leaves an astonishment reflecting off the water, like a choral reef turned into light.

And Louis Armstrong, the forever of Louis Armstrong, was playing in the car, as if narrating, and I had my arm around Rebecca Harris who was so wonderfully asleep and safe and nestled into me, and it was a perfect moment that I wanted to sustain for eternity. Yes. This was it. Yes. And then the car hit a bump and I bounced up and hit my head on the roof and Rebecca woke up, startled. For the rest of the drive home I kept my arm around her, but it was different now, all wrong. It was like my arm was pinned behind her back and neither one of us was comfortable, and the Louis Armstrong that was playing became the crappy, sanitized Louis Armstrong and the lake fell behind us as we entered into the junk land that ringed the city, passing hamburger joints and lonely, broken homes, places and things that weren’t quite where they wanted to be.