Dozer
By silicondog@earthlink.net

“How much does that rock weigh?”

I was standing in the middle of my exhibit at the Olympus expo, on the last 
night of the show in Las Vegas.  Our company had the biggest floor exhibit 
with our workout clothes, posing trunks, supplements, the works.  We 
attracted an audience by a strength challenge – stone lifting.  But there 
wasn’t much of an audience by that time of night; the evening Olympus 
show had just started and the expo was almost deserted.  I had the exhibit to 
myself.  

I turned and saw him.  First thoughts: freshman college kid, wrestler, 
powerlifter.  A few inches shorter than me, which makes him 6’2.  Lighter, 
but the thick, hard neck you get from a lot of weightlifting or wrestling  . . . 
or both.  When I played in the NFL, I had a strength coach who would call 
his build “long and strong.”  Jeans and sneakers, and red t-shirt.  Heavy 
fabric, but I could still see the veins of his biceps weave across his shoulders 
and down to his elbows.  For his build, huge forearms.  Spiky short brown 
hair on top, shorter on the side, and a weird looking Scooby Doo goatee.

“The stone.”  I blinked.  Jeez, stay cool.  

“The big stone is 300, my friend.”  I grinned.  “Wanna check it out?”

That challenge has a third row of teeth.  A lot of guys had learned that 300 
pounds is easy when it was iron plates on a barbell.  But on a round stone 
with no handgrips, those 300 pounds are damned slippery.  During the expo, 
after watching the challenger wriggling around with the thing, I strip my 
own shirt off, slide my arms over the cold rock, and powerlift the stone up 
and onto a platform.  Practice makes perfect, but I only do it when there’s an 
audience.

“Wait a sec” I reached over to the microphone stand for a legal disclaimer 
that everybody signs before they can try.  I found a pen, and turned around.

The kid was just standing there, calm, holding the big gray stone in his arms 
like it was a beach ball.  No grip, no leverage, just power holdling it to his 
broad chest.  The stone was too big for him to wrap his arms around entirely.  
Our eyes met – and he lifted it even higher, until it was over our head.  

“300 pounds?  Is that the heaviest thing you got?”  The big stone came 
down, first to his chest, then down to the platform.  He stood over the stone.  
No sweat broken.  Piece of cake.  

“Jimmy” he offered.

“Marko” I replied.

We shook hands – my knuckles almost cracked under those big fingers, the 
pressure built fast and then was gone. A second up and down look at the kid 
revealed broad, dense muscles across his torso, which swooped down into 
the beltless waist of his jeans.  Even relaxed, his defined abs slid up and 
down under the red cotton.  

“300 pounds isn’t enough for you, we got powerlifting over here.”  I led him 
over to the powerlifting stand, where someone had loaded the bar up with 
eight plates, each side.  By then the auditorium was almost deserted, and 
most of the other stands had closed for the night.   

“I wanted to get down here early, but I’ve been indoors all day” he offered.  
“Good to get a pump going.”  

No warmup, he just walked over to the big bar, grabbed the bar palms up, 
and stood.  He didn’t deadlift it, but then started to curl.  The bar bobbled 
and creaked a bit against the five plates on each end, but I watched –clean 
reps with more weight than I can deadlift.  I could see the separate heads of 
his biceps writhe and bunch against each other under his t-shirt, as he did 
another rep, and another.  Strict form, no swinging of his arms or arching his 
back, just pulling those hundreds of pounds against his biceps.  On the 
twentieth rep, he put it down with a thump I felt in my feet.  

“That felt better” he grinned, stretching his neck back and forth.  

“What’s your sport?” I asked.  With that kind of power, he could do damned 
near anything.  

He shrugged.  “I did wrestling when I was a kid, but the other guys started to 
dodge me.  Lifting’s great, ‘cuz I don’t have to worry about hurting 
someone.”  

“I tried football for a season, but it got boring, you know?”  He shook his 
head.  “I just get the ball and bulldoze through everybody else.  That’s where 
I got my nickname.”  

“Dozer” I guessed.  He wasn’t a “dozer” though, he moved too smooth to be 
a “dozer.”  

We had by then wandered across to the heavy-duty chinning bar we sell to 
gyms.  “I did gymnastics for a bit, but I got too heavy and too fast, you 
know?”  

With that, he stood underneath the bar, and grabbed the bar.  Up and down, 
two handed, twenty reps, no sweat.  I stood behind him and watched his 
shirt, muscles sliding back and forth under the fabric like fast, strong snakes.  
His jeans were skin-tight and, with both of us alone, I didn’t have to worry 
being caught watching his butt and wonder if there were any jockey shorts 
under that jeans.  

“Check this out” he turned and arched his head.  I walked over, to where I 
was standing in front of him.  He had been hanging by both hands, but he let 
go his right hand, and hung there with only his left arm.  Then he pulled 
himself up – one-armed, until he rubbed his chin against the bar.  Calm as 
ice.  When he dropped himself down to start another rep, our eyes met again 
– and he pulled up again.  As he rose, I could see his abs, where the t-shirt 
had lifted over his belly.  Two bricks of abs, dusted with black hair.  I was 
close enough to see where the hair darkened in the gully between the rows of 
abs, down to where it met a half-inch wide bright white waistband of his 
jockey shorts.  

After the tenth rep, he swung over and started pumping his right bicep.  No 
struggling or heaving, smooth reps.  

We never broke eye contact.

After the right arm, he swung his left arm until he hung on the chinning bar 
with both arms – and then grinned at me.  His legs swung out, and I tried to 
get out of the way.  I though he was getting ready to do leg lifts.  He was, all 
right!

He was fast – he lashed out his legs and clamped down against my lats, and 
then I felt my own feet lift off the floor!  He lifted me, up, up, and his feet 
clamped down against my lats to grip my torso in mid-air.  I could see down 
his jeaned legs, down over big thigh muscles, to a rapidly swelling basket.  
His legs lifted my 240 pounds up like a kitten, and I counted twenty reps 
until he lowered me down and dropped off the bar.  My sides ached where 
his feet had clamped down against my lats. 

“Want to go find some coffee?”  I asked.

We walked together through the expo doors, and crossed the parking lot.  At 
that time of night, it was almost deserted; it was also as muggy as only Las 
Vegas can get in October.  

“Now there’s a big rock to lift?” he said, and pointed across to a set of palm 
trees lit by floodlights.  The floodlights were hid from the street view by a 
chest-high boulder sitting in painted white gravel.

“If its real” I said.  

“One way to find out.”  He walked over to the boulder, and circled it twice, 
his eyes swinging back and forth over the surface and those thick fingers 
stretching.  He stopped, and squatted down at its base, slid those long arms 
along the side, wriggled his butt a bit, and grunted.  The T-shirt seams across 
the delts peeled open – and the boulder shifted.  A second grunt, and it lifted 
off the ground.  

“Shit, it’s real.”  His breath was deeper and only a little faster.  Another 
grunt, and he began to power the stone up, up, over his head, and finally 
balanced the whole mass over his head.  

He grinned at me.  “Let me carry it back inside for ya.”  

“What’s the number I have to paint on this one?

Big brown eyes focused on mine.  “4000.  Check it out.”  I paused.  “Come 
on, feel it.

I walked right under the big mass of stone he held over his head, and slid my 
fingers across it.  It was cold hard stone, slightly swaying inch by inch 
balanced under his power, and his arms were holding it over our heads like a 
beach ball.  Up close, I could smell the sweat off his armpits where the shirt 
had broke open under the swelling muscles.  His arms, dusted with fur, held 
the tons of rock over both our heads and our eyes locked again.

I remembered where the hell we were.  “Better put that rock down before 
someone calls the cops.”  I stood back, and looked around but we were still 
alone.  He braced his legs again, and let the mass of rock slide down his 
arms, and balanced it back over where he had lifted it.  Squatting down, the 
gravel crunched as it took the mass of the rock.  

He stood back, wiping those big hands across his butt, breathing only a little 
stronger.  The shirt was popped across his body, and the left sleeve had even 
broken apart from the shoulder and only the pressure of his bicep held it on 
his arm.  What fabric was still on his body was dark with sweat I could smell 
from where I stood.  

“Whoa” I pointed towards his jeans.  “More seams.”  I smiled.

He looked down.  Taking those tons of stone on his body had swelled his 
thighs until the leg seams had split open.  I could see his calves, and thick 
striated cables in his quads from his knees all the way up to –

“I gotta change.”  Calm.  Not the first time one of his pumps had wrecked 
clothing.

“I have some of our workout stuff in my van” I offered.  

As we walked over to my van he started to pick at what was left of his shirt, 
hooking his fingers into the burst seams and peeling it off his torso where it 
had split across his back, down his sides, and across his shoulders.  I pulled 
open the door and took out a bag of sample workout shirts and shorts, took a 
look at him, and chose extra large for the shirt and large for shorts.  

Wiping the sweat off his upper body with the scraps of his shirt, a dusting of 
hair matted across the hard planes of his pecs, inside the deep grooves of his 
abdomen down to the top of his beltless jeans.  

I chose one of our company’s sleeveless shirts, though when he tugged it 
over his pumped upper body, it looked more like a tank top.  The logo clung 
to his pecs like a fabric tattoo.  Under the cloth as his body stretched it, I 
could see his intercostals behind the shields of his pecs.  

After glancing around the deserted parking lot, he unzipped the fly and 
pulled down the strips of his wrecked jeans.  I got a quick view of dense, 
intricate cables up and down his quads, and his full, baggy jockey shorts, 
before he pulled on the knee-length shorts I had dug out for him.  The waist 
was a little loose.  Even relaxed, his thighs stretched the shorts.

“Whoa” he said, pointing to the posing trunks in the duffel bag.  I pulled one 
out for him, and he held it with the tips of his fingers.  And shook his head.  
“How does a guy fit his junk into these?”

“Dunno” I answered, “I couldn’t.”  I paused, and smiled.  “You couldn’t, 
either.”  

“You got a room up there?”  Tilting his head up at the expo hotel tower.  

“Yep” I replied.  A beat.

“Let’s see if I can fit into one”