When I show up at the gym for my interview, a part of me wants to find Damion and repeatedly run him over with my pink beetle. The giant sign out front that reads Women Only makes me cringe. I take a deep breath and head inside regardless. I’m actually pretty blown away by the impressive atmosphere. Is this what women’s gyms look like?

The main entrance is enormous, and I can see that the place is two stories. Looking up, there is a track on the second floor that overlooks the main level. The wall on the far right of the gym is made of glass and looks in on a room full of tread meals and other similar forms of equipment. The main area of the gym is lifting equipment and a giant ass rock wall that makes up the majority of the room. Up ahead of me I see a smoothie bar and a hallway that probably leads down to various private rooms. Also in the main area of the gym, not far from the rock wall, is a boxing ring. I grin. Working here might not be so bad, I think, assuming that despite being male that as an employee I would have access to the equipment. At least there is a ring here. I watch the women up top running the track, their breasts bouncing up and down as they run despite the tight spots bras they’re wearing. No, working here would be just fine, I think to myself as I start to wander inside.

“Um, excuse me?” a woman taps me on the shoulder, and I spin around.

A tiny woman in a pants suit and big, red glasses smiles back at me. “Um, hello,” I say.

“You must be Jonathan Trial. We spoke on the phone. I’m Alex’s secretary, Becky Wallace,” she waves me forward, “come on, I’ll show you to her office. She’s expecting you.”

I follow her down the stretch of the hall until she invites me into a corner office. There is a woman sitting behind a large desk, typing away on her computer. Alex is a woman, of course, fuck you, Damion, for not giving me a heads up, I think as I wait patiently for the woman to look up. She’s got her hair pulled back in a ponytail, and she’s wearing a sports bra, a see-through tank, and tight yoga pants. “Thanks, Becky,” she says, not looking up from her computer, “Mr. Trial, come on in and sit down. I’ll be with you in just a second.”

Becky leaves, and I go and sit at one of the empty chairs in front of her desk. After typing away on her computer for a minute, the woman turns and looks at me. Now that I’m looking at her dead on, I can see that she’s a bit older than I had first thought. There is gray in her hair –a lot of it, and she’s got some serious wrinkles going on. My guess would be late fifties, but looks incredible for her age. Definitely an athlete. “So, you’re the famous Jonathan Trial that Damion has told me so much about,” she says, not looking at all impressed. She spins her computer monitor around; the video of me accidently socking Brandi in the face is playing on mute.

My face turns red. Well, this is off to a great start. I just look down and say under my breath, “it looks worse than it actually is.”

“Really?” Alex rolls her eyes. “Because according to the hospital records the media got a hold of, it sounds like Brandi walked away with stitches, a shattered elbow, and a black eye.”

“Shattered elbow?” I question; I hadn’t realized I had shattered her elbow. I wonder how her dancing is going? She’s probably still in rehab if that’s true.

“You see, here’s my problem, Mr. Trial,” she stands up and waves at me to follow. We head out the door as she speaks to me, “Damion is an old friend of mine, and he’s begging me to give you this job,” we head down the hall and she shows me a training room where some of the female boxer’s tend to hang out before heading to the ring. “So I’m torn between doing an old friend a favor, and this,” she points to the far wall where a big blow up of my face from my interview in which I smashed female boxing is plaster –and it’s full of darts.

“Awe, shit,” I say under my breath. The ladies have kindly drawn devil horns and boobs on me with erected tits, and from the looks of it, they use the oversized hand-made dart board quite often.

“Awe shit is right,” Alex says and takes a step away from me, turns towards me, and crosses her arms. “So you see my dilemma. Tell me, Mr. Trial, why the fuck I should bother hiring you?”

“I…. um….” What do I say to that? I just look at her with pleading eyes, and the older woman shakes her head.

“You see, I run a very professional, members-only style gym. Over half of my clientele are professional fighters. A good 25% are of some other athletic professional while the rest are just a bunch of uptight soccer moms who want to pay extra money for some of our perks. So with that many professional, female athletes here, how do you think they’ll feel if I hire you with the sort of anti-woman reputation you’ve gathered?”

“That’s not me, though,” I say, “I swear. That-” I point towards the giant poster from the women have made “-that’s not me. This weird screwed up version the media keeps trying to label as the real me; it’s not me. I don’t hate women. I don’t have a problem with female athletes –that comment I made got spun into a direction, I never meant for it to go. As for what happened to Brandi, I can’t make excuses for that. I love her, and I never meant to hurt her. I’ve screwed up. Bad. And right now, I’m trying to get my life back together. Boxing –sports –it’s what I’m good at. I can bring something to your team. Whatever you need me to do, I don’t care what it is –if you want me to scrub your damn toilets, I’ll do it. I just really need this job.”

I guess that’s all I have to say. I just stand there waiting for a response from her. She sucks her teeth and gives me this death glare; I can already tell she can’t stand me. She’ll probably run me through the ringer if she actually hires me –give me hell every day in search of a reason to fire me. But I got to try. Alex sighs. “You do know I wouldn’t hire you if it wasn’t for Damion, right?” I nod, and she sighs heavily again. “All right. I want you here six am on Monday –I want you to take the weekend to prepare a forty-five-minute beginners self-defense course to teach the soccer mom group that afternoon. Do not be late. Becky will get you your uniform. Go on, get out of my sight.”

I thank her profusely and then head out of the backroom to locate Becky. She finds me a simple t-shirt with the logo for Alexis’s Place on the chest as well as a pair of bright baby blue gym shorts. As I am heading into the main room of the gym, I see that a group of women has gathered around the ring. They spot me and stop what they are doing to glare at me on my way out. Well, this should be interesting.