Sports Play (13 page)

Please, I know Arnie as if he were mine, as if he was me. I research him on the lovely poster that I've hung up in my grave. I study his features as to when I can really go after him. And I'm off! Downhill at great speed. My own hospital ward committee. I saved his extra-large garland especially, it oozes, earth, slowly into me until I quake right into my poor soul. That was not part of the original plan! Sadly I don't look much like Arnie, but that doesn't matter anymore. Who's looking at the face anyway? And here under the earth absolutely nobody's looking at me. I work hard and yet I always cut myself down to size too early before I can break through. Arnie, he wraps himself in his body, as if the body really was him and he even writes something on it! He writes to me every day, how many
leaps, seconds, minutes is he rushing ahead of me. I know all his letters by heart, even before he writes them. But he is not Jesus, who I met every day in our little kitchen. So I was able to compare. My God, the other one's my god, Arnie. Not God, the one you probably mean when you say angrily: my God! This mass of muscle does not grow of its own accord, even if that's what you were promised. God had purely nothing to do with your body. What he gave you is nothing. I get that now, now that I myself have become nothing. Although I can still watch Arnie on the screen in my head from which the bones grin, as if they'd seen my picture instead of Arnie's. From close by and in close-up. Tried both – no comparison! I want to be a child again so that I could at least once earn just so much recognition. Because I, at least once, will have done my homework on my body properly.

Too late. The teacher was there and has already gone away again.

Now I've quickly bought myself these new shoes that are ideal for running and jumping, for this walking of the great. But even these shoes that are touted round the whole world because a sportsman can't be everywhere at the same time, they won't transform me. At the most they'll simply represent me. What did I just say? Muscles always indicate effort, not nature? That's not quite right, because I don't simply owe my muscles to effort. I walked a few hundred steps beyond myself, then I returned back to myself, but I could no longer find the entrance. Something must have been dumped in front of it in the meantime.

I call up from below in my best public announcement voice: I'm me! I'm still dear Andi with the blonde curls so admired by relatives! Andi is called Arnie, when he's not Arnie. Me me me. Or, to put it another way, it's me. No. It was me. Listen! I always took care of my health, in particular my food, as a sportsman you always live healthily, but as a bodybuilder it's the other way round. Whatever you ingest damages you. You stand still and build everything up
yourself, and then you enter yourself and notice that you've already dismantled everything, any extensions you'd saved up for: mansards, balconies, pediments, stucco. I'd love to grant myself that final message from the Terminator, the donated wreath on my grave. Oh, if I only could go up one more time. But I have to wait until the garland trickles down into the earth behind me, into my collars of flesh, oh dear, surely they won't throw it away, my sire's garland!

Yes, my Arnie was allowed to lose weight so he could fit into his dinner jacket. And I'd not even got as far as being allowed to put clothes on at all. The unruly Doctor Publicity had not even said the magic words “You can get dressed now”. I always grew out of my clothes instead of into them.

I was and remain a poor farmer's lad. I bravely opposed affluence with my deprivation. Should anyone care. And yet this deprivation will gather momentum at some stage, just wait and see what might become of me once I've drowned completely in myself. That takes a while. And you can't train for it either. I always admire nature, well, now I've plenty of opportunity to. I'm looking at her so to speak from the inside, from her best side, the one she only shows to the dead. The maggots are getting the cutlery out. Today they're running rings round me. It used to be different. There was something of myself that was alive, even if it was a photo. Help! I'm holding great scraps of myself in my hand. You try with all your strength to get away until, just like a nest of young snakes, you've wriggled right out of yourself. Turned into a body of water. Liver dissolved, kidneys gone, the muscles still there, but underneath everything is liquid. Liquefied. Mama!

If the body's exterior no longer holds together, then it simply bursts its banks. Why didn't you give me another one, mama? Unfortunately I flooded! Instead of getting older, I just got bigger! Getting to this gigantic appearance is something I prided myself on.

I am Andreas from Pack, hello. Now that I'm dead, I feel a bit sorry for myself. I'd improved myself so strongly and so carefully, and now this! Look, it always embarrassed me somewhat that I had to reveal myself in front of so many people who looked up at me and then looked down on me. In some of them the reaction was affection. Which is not what I wanted either. My embarrassment in front of so many...it's as if you always had to hold yourself open as your own coat, ready to slip into it. But you never find the arm holes. How did I get to that point? You're suddenly in the position of a woman because you have to take your clothes off for your job. It can even prevent you from being a man. It sits in your stomach like a land mine that you've swallowed like a plate which you should have licked clean and handed to mama to wash up. I certainly swallowed enough stuff. All that Testoviron, Parabolan, Halotestin makes you childlike, docile. There is a secret room between father and the women, which is for the son. That's where I come into the game, an eternal son crying for his mother. But she was never there. She watched my career from afar, bitter in her sullenness, her hurt. She shouts at me from afar.

Arnie doesn't have to shout. He much prefers to speak, he always has something to say in his modish voice, emphasising the Styrian man. He surely means me and no other! He takes me up on the shovel and then he sweeps me back again, under the Loden cloth of the Austrian soil, under the felt of an Austrian hat. Arnie gave me this lovely building kit as a present and now I'm meant to do something with it! I was to be opened after my death, that's what it said in the instructions. Our little business back home never brought in enough to live on, but why did I throw my entire wellbeing at it? It was stupid of me.

Now I can no longer be changed. On the other hand for me health was a programme. As it is for every sportsperson. The main thing is not to eat anything bad or dirty. And so it happened that I, a huge child, wanted to stick Arnie in my pocket and only noticed right at the end that I didn't
have any pockets. I don't even have my last shirt. I am naked and dead! A secure castle, I stand all alone. Me, poor Andi, I martyred myself just so that I could have a measly wayside cross over my head. Normality did not satisfy me. I became massif only so that I could climb up myself. It never got so far that I, like my role model, was allowed to put on a really beautiful suit, not even once. I was my own suit, my only suit, my only coat, my shelter and my umbrella. I made my body myself and then, once it fitted finally, I put it on.

I'm trying – but am simply not succeeding – to describe myself like an article of clothing, from close up. I myself am so far away. The whole sense and purpose of myself existed in the fact that I cut off my own way back. One should only get out of hand if you can hand yourself back to yourself, back to mama. If I just think about it: this chemistry set that I supplied myself was meant to re-build me. Yet it did the opposite, the nutrition utterly de-constructed me. I must have done something wrong. No wonder, mama had always been responsible for the cooking and baking. She battered my poor bones. Too many puddings perhaps? For the eternal baby boy? I could never get enough of mama's nut cake. Rage grabbed hold of me like a storm. Drove me away. Me with my curly then shorn hair that never really got soft. The farmer boy's hair. My cheeks were summery-red, the cheeks of a child upon which a figure falls through the foliage of the trees. And the child took this figure to its heart as if it was from a real person. A man needs role models that don't come from his terrible parents but from him himself. Or from a phantom of him that took on human contours for so long that one began to fear it.

I just kept on staring at this ghost, this colossus, that rose up gingerly from within me, only to sit down again immediately afterwards, afraid of people. There was no way I could keep the World Championship date that I'd set for myself. Something always came in between, in fact two others came in between, namely first and second place. And so I prematurely ended myself. Me, son. Now they
think about me every day at home in Pack. Why does a musician play his instrument, he doesn't have to? That's how I had to play every day on my body. And then one I had to consume myself, because the packaging had been broken open. I squandered myself on myself, too stupid. I blew myself up like my own rubbish bag. Nothing but hot air! Although firm from the outside. A child who was successful too young to be able to grow up. The eyes always turned imploringly to the reporter who was to say something good about me. No one sees me now, here underneath the earth.

I was grateful and good, yes I can say that about myself. It's a pity that I died, don't you think? A quiet lad, a tree that did not quite make it to an oak, but my crown had a few nice spikes that in the end pricked only me. Like oats. Please, help yourselves! It's a well-cemented body mass. Now others are eating me in my grave. Once I made it together with my flesh, no, through my flesh, onto a front page. For me that was more valuable than a world championship gold medal would've been. Could've been. Get away from me! Go away. My picture exerts a strong pull. Brace yourselves! This country immediately occupies every available position that a sportsman has not kept occupied with himself. That's so greedy! First they put the sportsmen on a balcony and then they forget them there. Which is why so many people try to get away from Austria. So that there'll be more vacancies here. And yet they stay standing there, these sportsmen, I don't know, they just don't find a way out of this country. They stay, stiffly on sufferance, in order to stand opposite their own pictures that have long since belonged to their sponsors. Why are there always others apart from oneself on these pictures? We many wish we had wings and yet still remain docile. At home. I, firm and true, the lovely muscle mountain. I'm sat firm on the alpine saddle whose bags I packed in order to carry me away. The initial fun of the sport turned for me into a distorted passion to distort myself, and then built up my exterior like those enormous alpine window baskets set
in front of our award-winning jails. Give every sportsman his own little house and garden, in which he can recuperate from the exertion of solidly slept-through nights.

Arnie showed me how to do it by giving himself to me without letting go of himself. He must be half made of steel and yet he always trickled through my fingers when I wanted to grab hold of him. Personally I think they should not've been allowed to squander me so easily. I didn't leave, I always turned up until I just could not. I carefully saved the money for any urgent renovation work on my body. But isn't renovation supposed to mean that everything is new? Even the landscape changes completely a couple of times each year, but it still can't trade places. It stays there for us. I too stay here for you, under you. Yes, I stay amongst you but not in the way that you think. I will strike every glance in my direction dead. In my direction, me, the friendly farmer's son, I played tag with myself, chased myself to the bitter end. But you can't see that from outside. Just be glad! I remain the eternal hope for first place, beyond my death, promising, as they say. Perhaps I'll be resurrected! If Jesus can do that, then I can do it too! I just have to train even more. My appearance explodes the image of myself yet this explosion does not open up reality to me, it only opens up rooms where there are more pictures hanging. Rigid. In pose. I am the leader and the led in one. As long as I remain dead. I am made of my own stone, of my own human mass which went beyond all other human measure, stepped outside it and now I have stepped back in again. My own statue. A bodybuilder in the pose of a revue dancer and thus the feminine comes to an end.

A woman cannot allow a picture to speak to her advantage unless someone else apart from her is in the picture. Perhaps that is the case because this contender, and that one there, are not in fact the image of a woman, although they desperately try to resemble one. In despair they hold on to the tape measure, but someone rips it out of their hand. They don't need one. They are only ever measured
against others. Even now I'm dead, I wouldn't want to be one of them.

I, on the other hand, was measured against others, but I knew my own measure personally. It was called Arnie and I nearly reached it before I died. Nearly! Men's competition, Grade A. And now I have left all that behind me, even the grade itself, but I did have class. No one can say otherwise. From me, the human bank into which so much has been invested without paying interest, there's a great view of death, that is both my victory and my sting. Death, where are you? Ah, here you are. And now that I see your picture, I notice that it's me. Yoohooo! I am death, at least death looks remarkably similar to me, don't you think? And now I see: I've been waiting for myself the whole time. I can't pull this sting out of myself or else my whole body will follow. I clearly explained to the storm precisely where it should set itself down, for I'll no longer be there when it finally comes. But hopefully my body will represent me in a dignified fashion.

The light in the niche goes out and the Pieta disappears
.

The YOUNG WOMAN from earlier. She's now got her breasts on her back like a rucksack. A YOUNG SPORTSMAN who his fending off the woman
.

WOMAN:

You untamed man, may I greet you with a kiss? May I say that you belong to me? I wear my own burden heavily. Well, art I'm still permitted, and the wearing of clothes. But what is that. More gentle women than I master what I intend for you so much better. Their delicate appearance won't suffer because it's indestructible. Unlike mine. So here: a cheekily competitive exercise that people can watch by looking over my shoulder and see what I'm sketching in my notebook. No one's interested in it anyway. Well then, let me address you more formally.