The media has never really influenced
me much. I could always watch what I wanted on television and suffer no
ill effects, like a man who can eat a large piece of apple pie a la
mode every night after dinner says it doesn't bother him because he
sleeps like a baby. But let a guy do that over a period of years and
it will eventually catch up with him. But mine was not the cumulative
effects of media consumption over time; I had a one-time episode
resulting from a movie that I know got the best of me: American Gigolo.
Richard
Gere played a . . . well, okay, a gigolo
in the movie who hung upside down shirtless in inversion boots and drank Fresca
out of the can. (This is all I really remember about the movie except
that Lauren Hutton was also in it, and I figure if she came of age now they
would have put braces on her to fix the gap between her front teeth.)
I believe it was around 1982 when I saw the movie, so you can guess
what happened next: I bought a pair of inversion boots and would hang
upside down and shirtless from a chin-upbar in my bedroom doorway. I lived with my grandparents and
mother, none of whom seemed impressed by this feat, a teenager
hanging red-faced, eyeballs bulging out of his head, feet in the air.
I
suppose the images--one of me doing chin-ups right side up followed
by me hanging from inversion boots upside down--aptly describes life
as a teenager for many of us. On the one hand, doing something
normal, and the other doing the opposite, the Jekyll and Hyde nature
of youth on display.
After
a good hang, I would grab a can of Fresca, which I recall had a
message about causing cancer in laboratory animals, and pour into my
body the greenish liquid that was about the same color as the water
in an outdoor pool at a cheap motel that didn't have a good
filtration system. But Fresca has a bit of a citrus taste and was so
much better than Tab, one of the main competitors in the early 1980s
diet soda genre that was what I imagine taking chemotherapy must be
like: a pure chemical cocktail. But it had only one calorie, so it
seemed worth it at the time.
As
time wore on, I kept doing chin ups right side up and eventually
stopped hanging upside down, probably because I had installed the
chin-up bar myself and wondered if it would give way some day and I
would fall on my head. Eventually, Diet Coke replaced Fresca as my
drink of choice, and An Officer and a Gentleman became the movie I associated with
Richard Gere rather than Gigolo.
Every now and then, I'll reach for a chin-up bar and think about
throwing my legs over it and hanging upside down because I know I
would feel eighteen again, at least for a moment. But then I think
better of it, grab the bar, and pull myself up, grateful I can still
chin myself after all these years.