Tales from the DepBE | Story #1: Francis Ocampo | Part 3 (Patreon)

PART 3

The first semester ended too soon. Ever since that night, Georg and I started hanging out together whenever our schedules allowed. Our light conversations finally filled the suffocating silence in the room. I also made it a habit to greet any of the boosters that I had met in Nasser’s apartment whenever I encountered them on campus. Sometimes, they would introduce me to other boosters who happened to accompany them. My social circle got bigger. Twice, Georg and I were invited to spend time with some of them, first by Benito and Nasser at a cat café, and second by Vittorio, Kenneth, and Harvey at the Cahoyan City Book Fair. Suddenly, college was warm and fun, more than enough to help me go through boring lectures and lab work in my nursing program.

When finals week came on the first week of December, almost half of my professors had already given their final exams or had set their deadlines a week prior. I had no reason to stay on campus any longer than I had to, and so, after I left my paper in my philosophy professor’s pigeon box, I packed my bags right away and went home for the holidays. I had saved enough money to be able to buy my family two wedges of Edam cheese, a Christmas staple if TV commercials were to be believed. Mom thanked me. It would be her first time to taste it.

A week had passed since then. I was dipping pandesal in my coffee when I checked my phone and saw that Georg had sent me a message the night before.

“I grew!” it said, followed by a flexed biceps emoji. I figured he had just received his grades.

“Happy for you!” I replied.

I quickly logged in to my university account to see mine. The A-pluses in all my courses made me smile. I then told my family the good news. I also told Mom that she did not need to slaughter another chicken, but she could make caramelized rice cakes if she really wanted to celebrate. One by one, people came into my house just to congratulate me: members of my extended family, guests who had just smelled the coconut milk being simmered in our outer kitchen, and neighbors who intended to loan money from us that day. They said I was a diligent boy. Dad was happy, and he told me I reminded him of Eugene. At that point, I felt secured with my choice of program.

But I could not get Georg’s message off my mind. Since I did not have social media, I had no way of knowing how much he had gained and how he looked right now. I considered asking him for a photo.

“Don’t spoil me until we meet again!” I typed instead. He replied with a thumbs-up emoji.

That night, I was lying on my bed, my eyes on my dusty wardrobe against the woven walls. I wondered how much I would have grown too, considering all the high grades I received. I imagined myself with 20 more pounds of muscle, deep crevices between them, and a tight six-pack. I imagined my shirts tight around my chest and arms, my legs forced apart by their sheer thickness. My dick got hard in an instant. I jacked it off, holding on to that image of my swollen self as greedily as I could. I looked at my hard dick and imagined it two inches longer. I came right away. I then cleaned up myself and dozed off.

__________

“Holy shit!” I exclaimed. It was the second week of January before the start of classes, and students were filling up the dorm again. I had just opened our room, and my eyes met Georg in his white briefs posing in front of our full-length mirror.

“Like it?” he said, flexing both his arms. Their thickness caught my attention. “I’m now five feet and eleven inches tall and 198 pounds of quality meat. Fuck yeah! It’s amazing what a C-plus average can do.”

If his physique simply looked athletic before, it leaned toward the heavier side now. He definitely exceeded the muscled version of myself in my imagination. The overhead lighting highlighted the smooth mounds that were all over his body. Not only were they bigger but also looked fuller and more defined, especially his six-pack abs.

“Congrats, man,” I said, opening my comparably smaller arms wide for an embrace. I felt his hard chest against mine. “Nice seeing you again.”

I closed the door behind me and unpacked my bag. Georg headed to our bathroom for a shower. A few minutes later, he got out with a towel around his waist, water still dripping from his upper body.

“Uhm, Georgie?”

“Yeah, bro?” He was blowing his hair with a dryer, his biceps bulging closer to his face.

“Uhm, can you teach me how to, uh, w-work out?”

 “I thought you’d never ask. We’ll be lifting buddies!”

“I just want to get toned.”

“Nonsense. I’ll make you bigger than Nas! Meet me at Balani at four.”

The gym he was referring to was located at the far end of the campus, past the woods and a small bridge over a creek. I guessed that the planners intended boosters to be isolated from the rest of the university. That afternoon, I got out of my biochemistry class and walked for ten minutes until I came to a set of three two-story buildings that made up the DepBE complex. It consisted of immense concrete and glass boxes stacked on top of each other, brutalist structures that evoked the department’s preoccupation with physical power. Balani Gymnasium stood right at the entrance. To the west was Uylamco Hall, the largest structure of the three, which housed the research and growth center, the department office, and a few classrooms. A walk bridge connected it southward to Juarez Residence Hall, which accommodated the faculty and the boosters who had grown too large for normal dormitories. Georg was waiting at the entrance when I arrived. He was wearing a stringer top that boasted his newly acquired physique. I had merely put on a regular t-shirt. I had always been too embarrassed to expose my stick arms in public.

“Let’s go,” he said.

“Are non-boosters allowed here?”

“Anyone can come here actually. It’s just that, one, many students don’t know that, and two, they don’t work out. Have you been to the other university gym? It’s empty. So, congratulations, bro.” He shook my hand. “You chose to set yourself apart from the commoners.”

He led me inside the gym. Unlike the exterior, it was spacious and cozily lit. The weird equipment that filled every floor space made me realize at that point that it was my first time in a gym and I did not know any of their names. The sound of grunts and heavy breathing resounded all throughout. About twelve boosters of various dimensions, most wearing only a pair of green and pink mini shorts, were scattered across the machines. I recognized some of them. The last time I saw Patrick Yamamoto, he weighed about 300 pounds. After receiving his grades last semester, he now carried 60 more pounds of muscle that looked so deliciously good on his six-foot-seven frame. He had just put the weights he was working on into some kind of rack before he noticed and fist-bumped both of us. Larsen only grew slightly but was now significantly leaner, while Harvey and Jefferneil Dizon, in their final semester before graduation, had just reached the seven-foot mark. We all nodded in acknowledgement of each other’s presence.

“Our class under Professor Jericho usually gives us a total of three hours of training here every week,” Georg explained. “That’s not enough, of course, so we have to make time to meet the required number of training hours. You saw my program in my corkboard, right? We’ll do something similar, but we’ll modify it to what you can do at this moment. We’re both doing chest today.”

He guided me to some stretches and warm-ups and guided me toward the little weights that lined up the mirror occupying the entirety of a wall. He then demonstrated how to do “dumbbell presses” with correct form. Meanwhile, I asked what “reps,” “sets,” and other gym terms he mentioned were, and Georg was patient enough to explain. The light weights he gave me made me feel insecure after seeing the heavier ones that others around me were lifting. After doing a few reps and sets, however, my chest and triceps turned so sore that I began to regret my decision. Georg simply chuckled.

“You do this every day?” I asked.

“It gets easier, I promise.”

“I’d rather study Chinese,” I was panting.

“See Jeff over there? He’s 540 pounds with six percent body fat and has studied Chinese and German. He’s currently taking Urdu. He’s been getting really good at it.”

I rolled my eyes as he patted my shoulder.

“It hurts now, and it will hurt for the next few weeks,” he said, “but at some point, you’ll be looking for this kind of pain yourself. Get back to work, bro.”

We pretty much repeated this routine all throughout the session as we moved from one exercise to another. He would show me how to do a workout safely, then have me repeat it using light weights. He would then do his own set using heavier weights while I rested. I felt nails being hammered into every inch of my body. I complained many times, and all the while he simply mentioned in response that Patrick was taking a minor in philosophy, Larsen was a Math Olympiad champion in grade school, and Harvey, who is Korean, can quote Francisco Balagtas in the original Tagalog.

“And don’t say you were top of the class,” he said. “Many of us were.”

“You have the DepBE program advantage.”

“Tsk, tsk, tsk. Excuses, excuses.”

After an hour or so, my chest and triceps were crying as we walked out of the gym toward the DepBE cafeteria. There, I was greeted with the high amount of nutrient-dense food displayed along several serving stations. Each dish was labeled with the number of calories and macronutrients it contained. One station served only grilled chicken breast in various seasonings. At the far end of the cafeteria stood three machines that poured out protein shakes in different flavors. The durian and soursop ones caught my interest.

I usually eat less than the average person. This time, however, I felt so ravenous that I basically devoured one of each of the dishes in the ground beef station.

“Eat,” Georg said, “for recovery.”

“I said I just want to get toned.”

“No such thing. What you did isn’t the worst part yet.” He chugged down a glass of milk. “But good job, bro. I’m proud of you.”

“Thanks for being a good coach,” I said. “I thought we were just going to have a chill session, to be honest.”

“You’re working out with a booster,” he smirked, his left finger pointing at his right bicep. “You’re not getting lite, you’re getting premium.”

Since then, Georg and I continued working out together every four o’clock in the afternoon on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Three times a week became four, and four became five. As the second semester went by, the workouts became more difficult and intense. Rest times became so short that I was panting non-stop. Every day, there was always a part of my body that was sore, and sleep sometimes became impossible.

After two months, Georg began teaching me how to track everything I put into my mouth, and it turned out that I was not eating enough. I needed to force feed myself until I was too bloated to be able to taste anything good. Since continuous eating also cost a lot of money, I started thinking how to explain to my family why I would not be able to bring home treats after the semester. I found out later that each booster is entitled to a “plus one” at the DepBe cafeteria. Thanks to Georg, I could eat there anytime. Come to think of it, the first time I was there, I was so famished that I must have forgotten whether I ever paid or not.

Eventually, the workout pains became more tolerable, if not enjoyable, even though I hated to admit it. I got so used to the routine that Greg needed less time to police my movements and more time to chat with the juniors. Other boosters would come to help me instead. When they were not giving tips, they would spot me or force me to do another rep, which, either way, would end in uplifting fist bumps.

Meanwhile, I was still helping Georg with another Filipino course. On some nights after our usual post-workout dinner at the cafeteria, we would go straight to the DepBE reading hall, order coffee from the counter, and study there until midnight. His class this semester focused more on literary critique instead of writing, so he needed more help from me than ever in unlocking the figurative nuances in non-English texts. Whenever he asked for the meaning of a word, I would translate it for him. Studying with me has definitely improved his vocabulary. He also started using expressions that I had been using with others, and he sounded natural doing so. A few times, we were even able to exchange sentences without a word in English.

“So, this epic hero, he simply does what he wants,” he said. “He’s pretty unlikeable, isn’t he?”

“From our modern lens, he may be. But pre-colonial societies had a different idea of what an ideal hero was. Remember that most of our current morality was only introduced by Spanish missionaries. I imagine how back then, taking a risk simply because you can might have been considered courageous.”

“Like when you started to work out.”

“What about it?”

“You seem to have lots of inhibitions, although I feel it’s starting to change now.”

I guess he was right. I was now chattier with the other boosters, and many times, I initiated the invites, whether to hang out at a café, watch a movie, or jog around the campus. I also started wearing tank tops at the gym. We were in the middle of the dry season, and I was forced to expose myself, but I found later how comfortable it was to do so. The best part of the semester, however, was the physical changes I was undergoing. My clothes felt tighter in the right places. After three months since I started lifting, I finally needed ones that were a size larger. At first, I simply cut the sleeves of my old shirts to save money. Georg, luckily, had a whole set of clothes that I could use. Pablo, who also got significantly hunkier since the holidays, also sent a box of his old shirts to our room. Georg helped me unload and try each of them. As I was taking my shirt off, I was able to catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror. My chest, shoulders, arms, and legs now looked bulkier and more defined. My lats appeared wider, forming the beginnings of a V-taper. My waist now sported a very faint six-pack. I could not believe myself. I never thought I had it in me to look attractive.

“Looking good, bro,” Georg hooted. “Flex your arms.”

I did an awkward double bi. He held both my arms, corrected my pose, and pointed at parts of my body that still needed improvement.

“You’re looking like an epic hero.”

“More like your comical sidekick.”

“Nah-uh. You know what’s cool? You’re now a bit heavier than I was when we first met. Good job, bro.” He patted me in the back. I ignored his compliment, but inside, I was smiling.

By the middle of April, I had gotten busier with coursework. I was forced to spend an extra hour studying, so I needed to reshuffle my daily routine. I pushed my gym sessions later at nine in the evening, which meant I started seeing Georg less. I had to adjust my interaction with a new batch of gym goers like Nasser and Benito, who were much quieter and more intimidating than I worked out with before. They were nearing the tail end of their prep at that time, and I figured that they were probably more exhausted than I was. The silence felt oppressive again. More often than not, the stress and lack of sleep made me dread walking toward the DepBE complex. I felt I was simply going through the motions, and I was looking for something novel to raise my dopamine levels a bit. One night, I caught a glimpse of Georg’s new training program. I had the crazy idea to copy it, albeit with less volume and intensity. My new fitness program turned out to be a real challenge. I started feeling really sore again, and I had a hard time sleeping comfortably. Still, Georg’s workout brought me pumps I have never experienced before. I flexed in the mirror, my eyes tracing the muscles that glimmered under the overhead lighting. I would have taken photos if not for the seniors at the gym making me feel smaller.

A week into my new program, I was doing dumbbell presses when I heard Benito chuckling behind me. Later, as I was about to begin another set, he walked toward me and held my weight-laden hands. He adjusted my grip to an unfamiliar angle and released them. I did my reps while he counted. Afterwards, he guided me through the rest of my workout, experimenting with various weights, rep counts, and rest times.

“Just discovered that,” he said in a weak voice. “Do that with everything, bro. Trust me.”

He then left toward the showers.

Ever since, I let the silence push me harder in the gym. I followed Benito’s advice with perfect form and increased the weight more frequently. Time went by like a blur. By the second week of May, my new clothes had gotten tighter as well. I checked myself out in the mirror one morning, and I saw a more muscular and defined version of my body. At 153 pounds, I looked like a college wrestler ready to take on anyone who messed up with me. The thought amused me. I took photos this time.

That same week, I realized that I had been working out alone in the DepBE gym. I guessed that the boosters might have reshuffled their workout schedules. They might have thought that they could grow more efficiently if they focused on their final exams rather than spent the last few weeks on junk training. I never got to hear about them except from Diego, who would sometimes walk along with me to my next class at Rosca Hall. I met him again that week. He told me the results of the seniors’ prep evaluation held the evening before. Benito, Nasser, and Jefferneil were included in the top three. Everyone was surprised how Benito was able to surpass Nasser this semester in everything except height. He walked home the champion and would be receiving a level four extra-climb on burst night. The other two would still undergo a level three transformation, and the rest of them, the remaining levels, depending on their performance. I was not sure what Diego was talking about, but I had heard of “burst night” before. I was about to ask him about it, but he already left rushing to his next exam.

I bumped into Georg that noon at the cafeteria while we were returning the trays. I asked him about “burst night,” and his eyes suddenly betrayed his excitement. And then, Anton called.