From "THE DICK, CASILLAS," a story in New Testaments by Dagoberto Gilb

I like to stop and say hi to Ayisha when I check into the gym. She's usually there, though I'm there more. I come six days a week, either 11 or 1:30. I used to get there at 2 but there's a TV sports show I watch that comes on at 2, lasts an hour. If I want to watch that while I'm on a machine, I get another half hour of exercise without noticing it, almost cheating, if you see what I'm saying. Minimum I want is 60 minutes. I don't know how I or anyone used to do exercise before they had machines with cable TV. I'm not buying a 1000 songs or a 100 CDs. I can't take radio stations anymore, and music there, impossible to find any that aren't old and heard and heard and heard. I feel like a perv listening to the new top-40 station at my age. I go ahead and do that on the low alone in my car. In the gym, TV on the machines wins.

Once in a while Ayisha and I chit-chat. About nothing always. Usually I just take a pause in my step and hey hey, whadaya say?, tap the formica, and I pass on by. She and I have disability in common is why the connection, nothing much else, though that's also enough. I'm an old mother, used to it, but she's too young to not be happy all the time. I get more self-conscious when she's at the desk with Casillas. He's a little dick. So many tats all over his arms and legs and back and even up his chest and neck, his skin color is blue. He thinks he's badass. Accomplished somehow, skilled at whatever. I'm not that old. Can't happen. I don't for one second think he's someone I can't deal with. I don't like that he takes away from my big brotherly feelings for Ayisha. That's what he does though.

I can't do free weights now because I could hurt me or someone else, so I go to the weight machines. I actually prefer them. They're better than they were back in the day, when they began. I have a few I like—quads, calves, abs, deltoids, traps, biceps, triceps, pecs—but I can't always do them all. I'm old. Puts me down for the next day if I'm not careful. I tell people, I've decided not to do the next Olympics, so I go easy. I pick two to four. Unless it's being used, I like to lift. Since I was a baby, that's the one that makes my body feel strong in the ya no weakness that comes with the last lift. I set the pin anywhere from 60lb to 90lb, depending on whether I want to do more per three sets, my usual, or just burst my buttons doing fewer with more.

There are a lot of older folks here at the gym. Could be because of the time of day. Many older even than me by years, even a decade or two. They're all impressive for being here and in their routine. Women and men pretty close to equal numbers. There's this one older guy who, whenever he sees me, stares into my eyes like he knows me, expecting me to…I don't know. Say hi? If he knows me, I'm not sure why he don’t say so. It got so that I started thinking I knew him back. That he began to look familiar to me, too. He was, I saw at a distance as I was approached, on the machine I liked most and went to first. I didn't change my stride—my cane free limp, is better said. It happens, and I'd just move on to another first, and I'd get it tomorrow. But as I got closer, that man stopped. He got up before I could pass by and then stares at me like he does, and I think offered a smile, or close, or it was just kindness. Like to a friend. He didn't say anything but I did. I said hey, real nice, thank you, while he went off.

Not like he couldn't know me. Lots of older men know older sports. I had my days. I was good. Star linebacker, fullback, and I could even play safety until I either got too big or they got way faster by my senior high school year. I played baseball—third base or outfield, I could hit—and roundball, though much as I liked it, I wasn't tall enough or quick enough—I couldn't be a guard—and too hot-headed. High school champion at Dominguez High, which was always terrible back in those days. We just about lost to any team, even the all-whiteboy ones. Except me. I'd win somehow in every story told. And I was a Mexican, so that never happened. I made news everywhere. National. I might've been the first Mexican ever. Or it was that I was taking attention away from all the Compton stars. Which was news. I was recruited across the country. Football and baseball. Local LA schools like UCLA and USC (though not enough there), and Stanford and Cal. Arizona, Washington, Nebraska, Notre Dame, Oklahoma. The teams I liked, that had baseball and football. I wasn't the smartest about colleges. I didn’t know anyone who was. My parents didn't want me to leave town, even our neighborhood, because my dad was having health trouble and couldn’t work, and my mom could barely speak English. It was a tough decision. Really hard. I knew nothing but football, baseball, and eating. I loved my mom's pollo en mole. I loved sirloin con una papa. I loved double cheese burgers. I just took my high school coach's advice, the offer from Oklahoma. My mom, looking up at me because she was such a chaparra, was always about to cry, but my dad had come around. My brother and sister were proud. I'd be back. I'd make money. They thought I'd eventually drive back up in a porcha, which is a Porsche to non-Mexicans.

Make it quick: it wasn't even playing football, which I had just started doing there. Weeks. I was doing good, which is to say they liked me playing both sides of the ball still, and I liked it, and more newspapers were saying that too. National football news. I didn't get a lot of time reading much, but I saw and felt reporters, watching me mostly. I was in the hot gym, on the hot field, sweating, drinking and dousing water, eating a ton of anything that looked like food, and sleeping in what they told me was a dorm room but to me was just a bed. I had barely gone to classes, they were a blur, and I never did buy books. I didn't know what or where but, always hungry, of course I said hell yeah I wanted a giant steak, and the young assistant coach driving turned left in front of a pickup going maybe 50 on a sunny blue Oklahoma street and its front grill came through my door to where I was sitting with no seatbelt on. I didn't die but I was a long time in the first hospital and then came another and then another in a wheelchair and then the wheelchair in no hospital. Like that. Years. It took a while to have no wheelchair. I might not walk too good, but I walk.