I'm Not Gonna Lie by George Lopez Page B

The box hummed. I stood riveted, watching the sweat start to bead up on her forehead. She closed her eyes and patted her forehead with the towel. Then she opened her eyes and saw me staring at her.
    â€œWhat now? Don’t you have something to do? Don’t just stand there. Go play. I’m exercising.”
    I guess my grandmother didn’t lose any weight, because when I came home from school about a week later, the sweatbox was gone. But my grandmother didn’t give up. She was determined to lose weight. One day I found her rummaging through the kitchen cabinets.
    â€œI gotta lose weight,” she mumbled.
    â€œWhat happened to the hot box?”
    â€œI junked it. No-good piece-of-crap ripoff.”
    â€œWhat are you looking for?”
    â€œNot your problem. Ah. Here it is.” She pulled out a large black plastic bag, the kind you fill up with leaves when you rake the lawn. “I’m gonna put on a plastic bag, because I gotta lose some weight. This is gonna work.”
    She cut a hole at the top of the bag for her head and two holes on the sides for her arms. She wriggled the bag over her head, yanked it down over her body, and lashed the middle with a belt. “What now? What are you looking at?”
    â€œNothing,” I said. I couldn’t stop staring at her wearing the Hefty bag.
    â€œClose your mouth. This is not your problem. But if you don’t stop staring, it’ll be your problem.”
    I don’t remember how long she wore the plastic bag. Felt like a month or more. Every morning she’d slip the thing on while she did all her work around the house—housework, cooking, cleaning—wearing that plastic bag like it was a dress. Whenever she moved, you’d hear this annoying crinkling sound throughout the house—
vwwsh, vwwsh, vwwsh
. Finally, she gave up on the plastic-bag dress and started wearing Saran Wrap under her clothes, which is something personal trainers recommend today when you do crunches or sit-ups, to help you sweat off pounds and tighten your abs. When it came to Saran Wrap around your waist, my grandmother was ahead of her time. But I never saw her do crunches, and I don’t think she lost much weight.
    I’m not one for joining a gym or fitness center. To me, those places seem like meat markets—nightclubs with less clothes. When you’re over fifty, you really don’t fit in. You sit on the bench in the locker room. You start to get undressed. You peel off your T-shirt and suddenly you experience the dreaded “one-hair phenomenon.” You’ve got one hair coming out of your arm, one coming out of your wrist, one out of your shoulder, and, worst of all, one long hair popping out next to your nipple. You’re not in the best shape anyway, which is what got you there in the first place, so the one-hair phenomenon is about the last thing you need. And then you sneak a glance at the guy getting dressed next to you. He’s young, confident, and completely ripped, and you say to yourself, “Why am I here?”
    Which is why I started walking the stairs.
    I live in a three-level house in the Hollywood Hills—an upstairs with the bedrooms; a downstairs with the living room, dining room, and kitchen; and a lower level with a guesthouse. One day I went down to the guesthouse and I happened to look up at the flight of stairs that led from where I was, the bottom to the top—guesthouse to upstairs—and I estimated that I had at least fifty stairs inside my house. Suddenly I had an epiphany.
    I could get in shape right here, in my own house, on my own time, for free. I wouldn’t have to go to a gym that was really a meat market. I wouldn’t have to hire a trainer who would make me stick Saran Wrap under my shirt while he pinned my legs down as I did crunches. I wouldn’t have to stare at a bunch of hard bodies in some workout video engaged in soft porn, pretending they were