Lowell Cole
Having given up my welding career and secured my GED (passed on the first try without studying!), I then worked for a year vacuuming office carpets at the brand new 52 story IDS Tower in downtown Minneapolis from 5:30 to 1:30 in the morning to save money to buy a car, while during the day I used the GI Bill to go to junior college.
It wasn't easy. Every day I took the bus to the community college, then took the bus downtown to vacuum carpets, then in the middle of the night at 2 AM, took the bus back to my apartment, even in the middle of the dreadful Minnesota winters. I hated taking the bus with a passion.
After one year, I had saved enough to buy a used Chevy Vega. I picked up my little yellow beauty on a Saturday, and being proud as hell of my hard work, determination, and persistence, I decided to celebrate and headed downtown that evening to Moby Dicks, a notoriously raucous and edgy bar that served a "whale of a drink."
After a few White Russians (an egregious concoction of vodka, coffee liqueur, and cream) I adjourned to the back of the establishment where, with a few of my new best friends that I had just met, and smoked a couple of joints. Now, fully loaded and ready to roll, I rolled off in my Vega down Hennepin Ave, a main street that cuts through Minneapolis.
The last memory I have is smoking the joints. All other data was gleaned from the police report. Shortly after leaving Moby Dicks, the police spotted me and a high-speed, 60-mile-an-hour chase ensued that ended with me slamming head-on into a cement pillar under a bridge overpass.
I woke up in the old Hennepin County hospital on a gurney parked right alongside the nurses' station with all four of my limbs tied with white gauze to the rails of the gurney. My belly hurt like hell, and I had to take a crap, really bad. I asked to be untied to go to the bathroom but, given my apparent obstreperous behavior on arrival, the nurse ignored my pleas and plopped a bedpan down, and left.
After filling the bedpan with contents that would have been denied entry to a nuclear waste facility, and fumbling with the mounds of toilet paper required to decontaminate the surroundings (with my wrists still tied to the bed), they stuck a needle into my belly and found blood. Turns out I was bleeding inside from my liver.
Within minutes I found myself in the operating room going to sleep and woke up later that day in a huge open ward lined with patients in their beds along each wall with another row of beds and poor souls right in the middle of the ward for everyone to stare at. For the next week I laid there next to an old man in the bed next to me, looking at him lying there in a coma with a gastrostomy tube, with the rest of my time spent focused, with the concentration of a Tibetan Monk, on the tube coming out of my nose filled with thick green mucous, praying and waiting for the moment they would pull the damn thing out.
This event was the last straw for me. I had been moving forward in fits and starts, two steps forward, then one step back. From now on it was only steps forward. I was living with my buddy Chuck from my teen years and moved out to my own place within two weeks. I quit smoking cigarettes, pot, and I have never been drunk like that again. And I decided to start working out.
Keep in mind this is around 1972 well, before there were any gyms or health clubs. The only game in town was the downtown YMCA, and it was, in those days, a very edgy place. It was in a very old tall building with 8 floors, 4 of which had hotel like single rooms for men to rent. Each floor had a small bathroom but no showers. The showers were in the basement and communal, just like at Glen Lake, and the men who rented the rooms shared the showers with other YMCA members who came there to workout.
I had, of course, from my time in the shower at Glen Lake, a pretty good case of severe communal shower PTSD. This, combined with the concerning nature of the men who lived in the rooms and who used the communal showers, meant that I briskly trotted my fully clothed but still quite hairless thin frame (though I was a reasonably attractive young man back then) through the bathroom and communal shower dungeon to and from the elevator to the 4th floor weight room while keeping my eyes laser pointed straight ahead without even so much as a glance at any of the many men loitering around the area with their waists wrapped in towels while lubricating themselves with various balms hoping for a close encounter.
The weight room on the 4th floor was about the size of a small gas station and was lined with closed windows that had all been painted pitch black, so there wasn't a single photon of light entering the room from the outside world. The equipment appeared to have been shipped over from an archaeological dig of an ancient Greek gymnasium and consisted only of two bench presses, a preacher curl bench, two squat racks, a pull-up bar, dumbbells, and free-weight plates.
Needless to say, the weight room was devoid of anything like the Lululemon decorations so prevalent in today's gyms. There were four regulars: Jim, a tall, lean, but very muscular ex Marine officer who never talked, the Bomber - a huge muscular young man with a sow's layer of fat draped over his huge muscles who loved to strut up if front of any of us out of the blue and throw a front biceps pose on us, Buddy Barge a shorter young black man with a perfectly chiseled ripped physique whose life seemed to revolve around pull ups and who had a back so wide that it looked like he was wearing a cape, and Lowell Cole, a 50 something man with jet black hair plastered into place with Brylcreem. He looked a lot like the guy in the ad below, but older.
Lowell had huge arms (he reminded us regularly of their 21 inch circumference), and like Buddy Barge and his pull ups, Lowell's life revolved around working his biceps by doing endless sets of seated dumbbell curls in front of the mirror, and in between sets periodically checking his looks and hair in the mirror, and then, if a mischievous strand or two of hair escaped the confines of their Brylcreem prison, using his hands to smooth them back into their Brylcreem lock down while simultaneously and carefully admiring his looks (he was good looking for someone with a lot of Brylcreem) and his biceps in the mirror.
Jim scared me. I forgot to salute a Marine officer one day as when I was in the Navy and he pulled me over and reamed my ass out. The Bomber was, as far as I was concerned, mentally unstable, and Buddy Barge seemed to be low-grade angry most of the time, whereas Lowell was the gym patriarch who loved to tease everyone and correct their uneducated ways of lifting weights.
I was, as mentioned, a thin young man with absolutely no idea about what to do in a weight room. Of course, given my many arrests and stints in reform school, and then the Navy, I was no stranger to strange places, so I latched on to the candidate most likely to lend me a hand: Lowell.
I asked Lowell if he would show me the ropes, and he did, with remarkable gentleness and kindness that blew me away, perhaps because he didn't have any children. Over time, Lowell became a friend, and I even spent time outside the gym with him and his wife, Betty, at their house. Lowell was another remarkable person who lent me a hand, and thanks to him showing me the ropes, I have continued to lift weights nearly every day since.
But more than that, he and his wife Betty saw something in me, and they lent me their friendship and kindness as I continued to take one step at a time into the civilized world,
