For the Love of Money by Sam Polk Read Free Book Online Page A

I’m already hot , I thought plaintively, as I pulled on a pair of plastics over the sweats. Plastics are trash-bag suits with elastic at the wrists, neck, and ankles that cinch, trapping the heat inside. I looked like an astronaut. I put on a ski hat.
    I was an hour early to practice, so I jogged around the ­perimeter of the mat, the squeak of my ASICS my only company. Practice was brutal, two straight hours of intense drilling and hard wrestling. After, I lay exhausted on the mat. I hadn’t drunk any water during practice. I figured I had dropped six or seven pounds. My mouth was parched and I fantasized about a sip of water. But I knew this was only the beginning. I got up, walked out into the warm Los Angeles air, and started to run. I followed the trail the cross-country team trained on, each footfall bringing a brown puff of dirt. It was already difficult to swallow.
    After three miles I headed back to the locker room. I stripped, toweled off, and stepped on the scale: 153 pounds. Not even halfway. Ben was dropping a weight class, too, and had to cut almost as much as I did. Even though we weren’t really speaking, it felt comforting to be with him. We walked to the car in silence, our mouths dry and lips chapped.
    At the YMCA, we undressed, wrapped towels around our waists. We each held a credit card as we pulled open the wooden door, revealing the dark maw of the sauna. The air singed my face, and the scalding wood burned the back of mylegs. Soon I was sweating. Sweat is a cooling mechanism; as it evaporates from your skin, heat leaves your body.
    I started to scrape the sweat off with the credit card. The more I scraped off, the more my body produced, desperately trying to cool itself. First one arm, long swipes from shoulder to wrist, then the other. Then chest, stomach, sides, calves, thighs, face, and neck. Then again, in rhythm. Scrape, scrape, scrape, switch hands, scrape, scrape, scrape. Sweat pooled below me.
    I’d committed to ten full credit card circuits of my body. Halfway through, I started to panic. I wanted to run out, drink water, quit wrestling. But I didn’t. I wanted to go to state. I wanted to wrestle in college. And I kept thinking about what had happened with my dad the weekend before.
    The whole family was at Manhattan Beach, a forty-­minute drive from our house. Dad and I started wrestling. I thought we were just fooling around when suddenly my foot slipped in the sand and I went down. He ended up on top of me, his heavy belly covering my face. He let out a triumphant whoop, loud enough so heads snapped toward us. I lay grimacing underneath him, waiting for him to get off. But he didn’t get up.
    â€œBig wrestler guy,” he taunted, holding me down. “Still can’t beat your old man.”
    â€œGet off me!” I yelled, arching my back and pushing him off.
    He fell back but kept his arms high in the air, triumphant.
    â€œNever going to beat your old man,” he said.
    But I didn’t want to beat him. I just wanted him to be proud of me. That incident stayed with me all week. I’d remember the feeling of Dad on top of me, and my jaw would clench with resentment. In the sauna, I steeled myself for the excruciating pain I knew was still ahead of me. Sweat was still coming off me in buckets—it was when you stopped sweating that things became really hard. I watched proudly as my puddle grew.
    My mind was a single camera, orbiting around an ice-cold lemon-lime Gatorade. Droplets of water condensed on the bottle. One slid down like a tear.
    Eventually the panic and heat overwhelmed me, and I rushed out and lay on a bench, touching the metal lockers with my hand to feel their coolness. I savored that cool for five minutes and then, head hung like a prisoner, I reentered that dark oven.
    After three hours of fifteen minutes in, five minutes out, Ben and I went home to endure a long, sleepless night. In the morning I was still two pounds over.