A second or two after panting in the bed sheets I wondered how much of the previous night might have been a dream. I was in Ignacio's room so there was no mistaking that some of it might have happened. But the rest (the outrageous muscle and strength that he grew right before me that climaxed the evening) might not have really happened. It was all too wishfullfilling and contrived like stories that have dream sequences (not to mention that horrible old chesnut of the character awaking and then wondering if it all could have been a dream). All such speculation was quickly dispelled when Ignacio made his way as best he could through the door and then elcipsed most of the room with his epic form. There had been other nocticible changes from the night before as it would happen.

"You've grown... everywhere now!" I blurted out by way of good morning. Inpoliteness aside I was only stating emperical fact. He was no longer the compact, pocket Hercules of the nigt before. His form now easily embraced six feet and nine inches at the least. The effect was, to say the least, magnificent. He was gorgeous before as a diminutive paragon of strength and beauty. When his muscles had their latest and most pronounced growth they did offset his proportionality and did make him look a bit comical. But now his frame had caught up with his physique. His muscles, though still bigger and stronger than anyone elses on the planet, now had more room to breathe. No more did he seem ungainly in mass but as majestic a portrait of a young god as you could hope to have a sticky dream to. Ignacio's reaction to my outburst was in his typical vein of teasing good humor, "Yes," he said bringing his right arm up for a slight gesture of a flex, "It looks like all I need now is a few more barrels of that stuff for you to take me seriously." He laughed as he flexed his bicep up and down. Ture to form it grew larger with every flex and he stopped when it finally flew up and hit his fist away. He then switched to the left arm and repeated the process. "Symmetry?" I asked archly. "Symmetry," he replied.

When he had finnished we just looked at each other. It had already occured to us, right back when Ignacio had taken his brother's formulae, that things were going to be different now. Well, in point of fact it would be Ignacio's difference and not mine. Aside from having the sexual experience of a thousand lifetimes I could have left that house and its superhuman teenager inside and gone on with my own silly life. But I did make an oath to Ignacio that I would not leave him and, truth be known, I did not want to. So what was the both of us to do. Ignacio was standing in front of me naked. Nothing would be suited to cover him. Even his clothes from just yesterday when he was just the largest teenager in the world (as apposed to the largest human being in the world today) would be insufficient. But even if something makeshift could be done with bed sheets (which is what we had to do later) what then? Professional bodybuilding? He and I entertained this idea and all its perks of world-wide stardom until it occured to both of us at the same time that the officals would probably take one look at him and ask for a urine sample. We both doubted that his brother ever intended to make his stuff undetectable. Perhaps we both thought of the circus but neither of us mentioned it.

We were both mulling over possibilities when the telephone rang. Ignacio went over to the bedside table and reached over for it. Before he brought up the reciever to his ear the thing snapped in half. You should have seen the look of horror and embarrassment on his very youthful face as he just stood there with part of the phone still in his hand. I knew from the night before that he could control his strength masterfully so I understood that something must trully have been bothering him. "What's wrong?" I asked. He turned to me with a pleading look on his face. "Well," he began and then said haltingly, "you remember how I said that my brother sends me the growth stuff... well... he kind of... told me... not to use that stuff I took last night."

The great animator of the golden age, Tex Avery, would have drawn my jaw hitting the floor with that bit of news. Then, after I had used a crank in my ear to bring my jaw back into place, I repeated, dumbfounded, "Not... to use... that stuff." "Yeah." "And why not? Is it dangerous?" "He said that the company had foud out I was using it and was going to cut his funding if he didn't send it all back." "Then why?" "Why'd I use it?" "Yeah!" "I guess love makes you do stupid things." Now that I'm looking back on this I'm really touched by what he had said. I realize now that he must have been very genuine in his heart. But at that moment I was scared and not a little cynical. "Sure," I said spitefully, "it was love. You couldn't get enough of the stuff could you? You had all the fucking strength in the world but you had to have more!" "Eli, don't say that!" The look on his face was just too pitiful. I looked at him wholly. From his perfectly muscled legs to his slender, iron plated stomach, to his red-wood size arms and his almost two yards wide chest, and then up to his scared face with his sad eyes, his open, unsure mouth, and his long, back and unrully hair. For all his size, strength and beauty, I realized, he was a terrified kid who now had the wrath of an elder brother and a mysterious corporation to deal with. I decided to take a better route. "Ok," I began, "I'm sorry I said that. We've got to keep our heads here. I'm no lover of cliches but there's no way around it: what's done is done." "What are we going to do then?" "Well, we could call your..." I stopped and looked startled at Ignacio's hand. The reciever still had the cord attached. There was no way to know now who was on the other end listening to everything that we've said. "Ignacio, don't do anything. Where is another phone?" "There's one in the room next door; my brother's bedroom. What's going on?" "Just don't touch the phone. I'll be right back. Stay... calm..." I did a old time stage bit of carefully leaving the room and then rushed to the brother's bedroom phone. I picked up the reciever and said, nonchalantly, "Yes?" A high and very annoyed voice responded with, "Who is this?" "I might be interested as to who you are." "Is this Ignacio Alvarez?" "That depends." "You're not him, you're voice is different." "Different from who?" "Different from Ignacio's! I heard him say he drank all the stuff! Are you his lover?" "That's a personal matter I don't discuss with strangers." The man on the other end brought the reciver away from his mouth and said to someone else with him (I could just barely hear him), "Boss, he's stalling." Then another voice came on. A very rich voice with much athourity and bearing. "I'm not going to beat around the bush here," he began as if this phone call was interrupting his rigging of the prices of rice all over Asia, "Ignacio or whoever you are... you've destroyed a very valuable bit of company property. I'd say it's not only in yours but also in Mr. Peter Alvarez's best interests that you recover the costs." "How much would that be?" I said, "Three million dollars. I shall expect the sum at my attorney's office by the end of next week. If a single penny is unaccounted for... well... I'll assume you've enough imagination for the rest. Good day." The dail tone then dronned on in my ear for a whole minute as I took it all in.

I went back to Ignacio's room and found him sitting on the bed look anxiously up at me. The situation was dire but I couldn't help but smile faintly at his hulking body on the bed's edge, bringing the frame down to the breaking point, and the receiver still in his massive hand. He must have noticed my smile and thought things would be ok for his face brightend up. That was stupid of me, I thought, and I shook my head as a way of giving him the nature of the situation. "Well, what is it?" "That apparently was the company. You can hang up now." He did and the effect was to flatten the entire phone into a thin plate of plastic. "Fuck!" he exclaimed and burried his face in his hands. "Ok! Ok! Calm down," I said and sat beside him. That was the last staw for the bed frame and it collapsed under us. This upset him even more. "Look at me! Look at what I've done! I've made myself a freak and now my brother is going to pay for it!" "Ok! It'll be ok! We can fix it! They said they just want to money back." "How much?" "Three million." "Oh jesus fucking christ!" He got up and ran out of the room. He didn't ease himself through the door and so his shoulder's took huge chunks out of the sides of the wall. I got up to follow him. As I moved my way through the unfamiliar house I could hear other things breaking. Wood snapping, glass crashing, and other tell-tale signs that someone had set a herd of bulls loose in a small suburban home. I went past where the door to the garrage used to be (it had been, as it would seem, walked through with out anyone bothering to open it) and I found Ignacio wrecking havoc on anything around him. He punched through the garrage door, he pulled down the garrage door opener and pulled it apart, he took a three hundred pound barbell and twisted it into some mangled bit of modern art, and he wound up on the ground punching huge holes into the concrete floor. After three minutes of relentless pounding on the ground he subsisted and fell back sobbing. I went over to him and tried to lift him up to my lap but he was too heavy. I tried and tried but his tosro alone must hav weighed hundreds of pounds of muscle. I tried so hard to get a reach around him that he stopped crying and watched me struggle with him. "What are you trying to do?" he asked. I answered through various, exhaustive grunts, "Isn't it obvious? I trying to bring you up a bit so I can hold you in a classic embrace of concern and comfort in your moment of distress." "You seem to be having some trouble doing so." "Yeah, could you help the process out a bit." He sat up a little (I could help but notice his unholy abs bunching up as he did so, old satyr that I was at eightteen) and I put my arms around him. His attack upon the garrage and my pathetic attempts to comfort a mountain had calmed him down a bit. There was a note of resolve and determination in his voice when he asked, "What are we going to do?" "Good question." "Four million dollars!" "No, just three million." "Ah yeah, so we're already a fourth of the way there, huh?" "That's right. So how are we going to get the rest?" "When do they want it?" "By the end of next week." "My God! Where could we get three million dollars in two weeks?" Call it something inherently anitsocial in my nature but the answer to that question hit me with the immediacy of a slap in the face. If I may call upon the services of the late Mr. Avery again; two dollar signs in my eyes and a "Kah-ching!"ing sound, if you please. I looked around at the destruction about me. I had seen very similar stuff in what Henry Darger would call, "The realms of the unreal." To wit, hero-comic books. True to form, Igancio must have gotten wind that something had just occured to me. "What are you thinking about, Eli?" "Let me put a few things before you, Ignacio. What do you think of the capitalist system?" "well, it beats a lot of alternatives." "True ture, but don't you think that it's appalling that some people should have so much and other's so little?" "Of course I do. I see those folks in there thousand acre palaces and get sick!" "There's a good fellow! Now, just keep that anger in mind and give me a little bicep flex." "What? This is not the time for muscle whorship!" "I agree. This is to illustrate a point. Now flex!" He was, of course, right that this was no time for muscle whorship but I must admit that I was lost in admiration a bit when he brought his arm up. That mass of power was so humongous it was otherworldly. I ran my hand over the top of it a bit and felt the diamond like density of all the chords of pure muscle force underneath that thin covering of light brown skin. I regained my composure and said, "Now, look at this muscle," then I gestured to the destruction of the garage with a sweep of my hand ending up in the huge hole that Ignacio had pounded into the concrete floor. "That muscle, my friend, did all that." "Yeah," ignacio began with a look of immense sastisfaction. He put his hand on his bicep and tried to squeeze it, "Even I can't put a dent in this. I wonder how far I can go with them." "Trust me, we can go as far as we want with them. Now, put two and two together. You're muscles and your feeling for the rich." Ignacio's eyes widened to the size of saucers... beautiful saucers at that! "Crime!" he exclaimed. "Yep! Imagine it, Ignacio. Walls are no match for you. Metal stuff is your bitch. We need three million dollars. There are plenty of banks that have that and more." "But I don't want to hurt anyone... except those bastards that have my brother! What if I just went after them?" "Too dangerous. By the time you would have smashed your way to them they would have killed him several times over." "Ok, banks. But no one gets hurt. I mean, no skull crushing... and how about the people's money?" "Insurance to the rescue!" This was going over faster than I had expected. But that wasn't so unsual any more. My life was moving with increasing swiftness. I anticipated an end that would have the feel of light terminating into utter entropic darkness. But now was the time to embrace all the goings on and its mad, suicidal speed. Yesterday I was just another high-school graduate... tommorow... I, with my hot as all get out muscle-god lover, would be one of the most wanted bandits in American history. Beat that, Horatio Alger! •