Hey guys! The photo of this guy really inspired me for some reason, so I just wrote my first original jock transformation story in ages. I’m sort of rushed this out, and I’m not the best writer or proofer, but hopefully you’ll enjoy it.
“Oh well,” Coach sighed dryly, “guess you’re still a voracious reader”.
Fortunately for Coach, Tyler’s favorite reads are now just comic books, nutrition facts, and the colorful pictures on the back of cereal boxes. Perhaps it’s not the more “intellectually stimulating” fair Coach found him holding open while asleep in an empty subway car at the end of the “A” line in Far Rockaway, Queens, but it’s all intellectual stimulation Tyler needs to be the amateur wrestler he now thinks he wants to be. Coach successfully neutralized the hipster in Tyler’s brain and body. He no longer poses a threat to blue-collar communities in his hunt for “authenticity” and ironic “cool”. Instead, Tyler is a seamless part of the community and Coach’s gym. From a square peg in a round hole, to a round peg in a round hole.
Tyler suddenly looked up from his favorite box of whey-infused cereal with a pained expression and turns to the once-complete stranger he now fully accepts as his Coach and sole authority. Furrowing his brow with simian confusion, he struggles, “Vora… vor-a… voratis…uh… wha?”
Coach pulled back and snapped on his stringer tank, “Don’t worry your pretty fucking meathead about it, son. It’s just a stupid fucking word.”
“Effing werdz,” Tyler laughed. “…so stupid”.
“Yes you are, now” Coach muttered proudly, and with no small amount of relief as they made their way out the door to Coach’s gym.
Truthfully though, when Coach first found Tyler, he actually was a voracious reader. Was. He was another one of those sensitive, pseudo-intellectual, ironically-inclined artistic-types who who abandoned suburban USA for the urban-cred of NYC. Hipsters. Over the last few years, Coach was running into more and more of them at the crack of dawn as he got on the train to open his gym for his small, but fiercely dedicated clientele of serious lifters. Every other day seemingly, he’d get on the train at the last stop, and there’d be yet another dirty, pale, scrawny hipster asleep in skinny jeans, hunched over asleep in a book. Always something by some New Yorker writer or This American Life contributor, like it were a billboard for one’s intelligence.
For a while, Coach would just wake the dumb sap up. The kid, clearly hungover after a night of full of abandon, wine, and pretension with other hipsters. Dummy thought he need a book to make the time pass, instead he just needed it for a pillow. Coach sees ‘em spalyed out on a seat, book open, marked with drool, nudging the sad sac awake. At first, they freak out at Coach’s behemoth silhouette, then they see the station name and make to run out.
“Last stop, kid!” He’d yell, and they’d turn around confused. These kids move here and still don’t understand the subway. “It’s going northbound now, you’re in Queens. Just stay on till your stop.” The kid would get be grateful and bashful and sit back down.
“Sheep”, Coach would mutter to himself, sit down, and he’d be on his way.
Now see, Coach enjoys a real nice setup, he lives in a fairly affordable, if slightly shabby and tired, beachview apartment. He’s lives just blocks from the Far Rockaway stop on the A train, and crucially, just a couple stops on the train from his own gym near the airport in Howard Beach. His community was an oasis of normal, hard-working, good natured, working-class people. He had full, and uninterrupted access to his own iron, nice views at home, and cheap beer and company down the street.
Developers, realtors, and hipsters have yet to really consider his community “cool”, which is always a precursor to new art studios, colorful gyms full of cardio equipment, overpriced coffee shops, farm-to-table restaurants, and artisanal bars with reclaimed wood interiors.
Then, six months ago, something snapped. Every morning now he was waking up hipsters on his way to his gym. He had trouble getting them all to listen as they exited thinking they had to switch trains. He feared they might wander out the station, discover his little oasis, and want to colonize it for their own. And then, one evening, at his local drinking hole, some a small pack of skinny, pale, bepladded hipsters walked and just gawked as the looked around the bar going “Cool, this place looks so blue-collar. Sweet!”, and “yeah, shit, it’s so real. It’s like time forgot this place.”
It was time for extreme measures, Coach reasoned. Fortunately, the next day, Coach had come up a more humane solution. Instead of waking up a hipster, he rode the train to Howard Beach, and carried the kid to his gym.
Coach remembered this dude he met on muscle-growth.org… you know, one of those sites for meatheads and aspiring bodybuilders? Coach felt like he hit a plateau with his gains a couple years ago, and this dude said he was a licensed hypnotherapist, and thought his professional experience could help him break though. And boy was he right! The hypno dude intensified Coach’s focus, his resolve to grow, and broke down his inhibitions and sense of morality. Thanks to the hypno dude, Coach became a huge, happy, neanderthalic HGH experiment.
So Coach tied up Tyer in the janitor’s closet and made a synergistic business deal the hypno dude couldn’t refuse. You see, the hypno dude has a side business in selling roids and HGH. His business plan is simple, and Coach an example of a happy customer. With his subtle gift of the gab, he persuades dudes they need roids, and then that they only want to buy from him. That way, he can mark up the product well above market price and make a handy profit.
Coach’s deal was simple: Hypno dude would bring his practice into the gym, Coach would pick up a sleeping hipster every morning, hypno dude would brainwash away their educations and personality, replacing them with the personalities and ambitions of hard-working, meatheaded, dumb jocks and athletes. After falling asleep on a subway train, they’d awake in a panic before the weight room’s mirrors, not because of where they were, but because the body before them didn’t look right. For Tyler, as with everyone since, everything he knew about his life didn’t fit the image before him.
“What the fuck? Where’s my stringer tank? Okay you fucks, real funny. Get this pansy ass shit off me? Oh shit, Coach! Coach! Aw Coach, look at me, I’m struggling to make any gains lately. Why’m I wearing these skimpy-ass jeans. Fuck you guys, who did this? Real funny.”
From there it was easy. Hypno dude rearranged their lives around Coach, he was the only man they thought knew how to build them into the men they thought they were and needed to be. He was to become their world, and loyal clients of hypno dude. So much so, they’d move to the neighborhood to work out with Coach everyday and have hypno dude help administer and manage their cycles – because obviously, they couldn’t handle that kind of organization anymore with their newly shitty math skills.
To make money to afford both the gym membership and the supplements, Coach had them work as trainers, operate paid strip cams online. The hypno dude even pushed Coach to operate a premium escort agency out of the gym. Coach wasn’t into it at first, but then the hypno dude removed Coach’s very last scruple, removed all of Coach’s vaunted hetrosexuality, and increased his horniess, dominance, and lust for power.
Six months later, Tyler McAvoy, a rising star in amateur wrestling at the community college, woke up in Coach’s bed overlooking the beach. Dawn had barely even broken, moonlight glistened over the incoming waves crashing upon the shore. Tyler crawled out of bed and into the kitchen to finish off his delicious box of whey-infused cereal before what was sure to be an amazing, but grueling, leg day at Coach’s gym.
Coach walked in from the shower, pulling on his workout kit for another day at his newly expanded gym. Tyler stood at the counter, engrossed in the funnies on the back of his cereal box, and didn’t even hear Coach enter. Coach just stared and took in the sight of his very buff, successful experiment in hipster neutralization. The first of hundreds now. If you’d never seen how Tyler looked before, you’d never known the kid hadn’t always been just another happy dumb jock coasting by on his looks and muscle.
Actually, as soon as Coach got Tyler obsessed with working out several hours every day and becoming a wrestler, it was clear he’d need to compete with a team. After years of giving out free memberships to staff and student athletes at the local community college, Coach was in real good with the athletic department. He was promised Tyler wouldn’t get any hassle about grades as long as he did well in matches. He just needed to find some documentation to enroll the kid. Took a while, but Coach finally found the kid’s old skinny jeans with his old wallet intact. Shockingly, this kid’s licence said he 32 years old!
He was grown man who looked like kid. Quite a testament to the anemic vegan lifestyles of the underdeveloped, emaciated pseudo-intellectual pretender he used to be. Luckily for Tyler, he was claimed by Coach and could finally stop pretending, stop hunting for authenticity and meaning, and just live the simple, physically taxing life real men need live happy lives. Being a voracious reader never did anything good for the kid. Now this former vegan nerd is voracious eater, 5-6 small paleolithic meals a day in between workouts and sham classes. If you can believe it, Tyler actually has a major in fine art and minored in science, as Coach discovered by Googling him. Tyler now thinks art is superhero comics and Michael Bay movies. And science, well, that’s now just the supplements that hypno dude give him that magically help him get shredded in the gym. He used to judge a person’s intelligence from their taste in books and vocabulary. Now he knows for fact that the bigger a dude’s muscles are, the smarter he must be about lifting. And as Coach has taught him, that’s the only real intelligence in this Darwinian world. The kid hasn’t forgotten everything about his past. His parents and old friends know where he is – they just think he’s gone insane and the feeling is mutual. He’s cut his ties – Coach is his guardian now, and his life is the gym and wrestling.
To Coach’s point of view, he rescued Tyler from a corrosive lifestyle, mindset, and personality that’s all about appropriating a community to his tastes and interests by instead applying the lifestyle and personality of a community onto Tyler. From a cynical liberal hipster, to an obedient, conservative, blue-collar athlete. And you know, a happy, slutty, himbro too.
As they walked from Coach’s apartment to the Far Rockaway stop, everyone was gawking jealously at Coach’s slutty, shredded, himbo protege proudly wearing little else other than his super tight and compression shorts and stringer. They walked onto the subway platform a train was making its terminus before going back the other way. The doors slid open in front of Coach and Tyler. As they walked in, like clock work, there was another pale, hungover hipster asleep in a novel – another lucky nerd about to be unwittingly rescued from a life he didn’t know he hated, welcomed into a fraternity of muscle.
