The Barking Scarecrow And Other Oddities–Freaky By-Products Of The Biden Administration

The gym brings out the the freakish among us, a side show of dwarves, bearded ladies, and two-headed babies.  Metaphorically speaking of course, but if you factor in where the gym is located – in this case in an upscale professional neighborhood of Washington – then it indeed had the tony equivalent of the side show of a travelling circus.

Take ‘Death’ for example, a grey, skeletal woman, who did not just run on the treadmill, but was outrunning something awful.  Her face became more drawn and ashen the more and the faster she ran.  She never sweated because her body had no sweat to give, no excess of anything, all husbanded for one last ride.  She was as frightening as the Headless Horseman, frantic on the rubber carpet, desperation in the hollows of her face, in the strands of thin hair which trailed down her back.  No one had ever seen her get on the treadmill or get off.  She was always there, pounding away, eyes in some unknown distance, on some fearful thing waiting for her.

There was The Creep, a giant of a man and in his way as frightening as Death but in an intimidating, threatening way.  He was always dressed in black sweats and a black hoodie, said nothing, did nothing except pump the ellipticals, but implied nastiness, hurt, and chaos.  He had no friends, no easy camaraderie.  People got out of his way.  

He must be on parole, some said, or just released.  The gym had to take him as part of their tax abatement with the District – his private half-way house for a few hours a day before he took the bus back to Anacostia.  There was something about the way he strutted back and forth in front of the exercycles, bound up in rubber tubing to add tension to his walk, barbells on his shoulders, grunting like a feral hog, and eyes rabid and focused.

Jabba The Hut, a mammoth 400 lb. fat man with elephantine legs and a huge bariatric scar from abdomen to gullet, a reminder of his failed operation to tie off his intestines.  He spent hours in the whirlpool, the only place that gave him some comfort, relieving as it did the gravitational pull on his immense body.  Rolls of fat shook from his neck to his feet every time he took a step, water poured over the sides of the whirlpool as he slid in.  As he sank down to the very bottom, only his surprisingly very small head showed above the water line.  With all the foam, spume, and roiled waters of the pool, no one could tell who was in it; but when he got out, no one could look away.  He shook his body like a St. Bernard and water splashed into the locker room, back into the whirlpool, and onto the low ceiling.

And then there was The Barking Scarecrow, the main attraction, the center of attention, and as batty as any inmate of St. Elizabeth’s.  She was tall, gangly, and neurasthenic.    “Not an ounce of fat”, she barked, but she was stringy, dried out, and bony.  Angular where there should have been no angles, protrusions instead of rounded flesh, scaly, corrugated shins and ankles.  She ran miles every day, then biked tens more, came to the gym to work out, and then rode and ran home.  Halfway through her workout, she sat on one of the machines to eat her lunch of carrots, radishes, raw lima beans, and water.  And between bites she banged on about her job at the elephant house at the zoo, her work with wounded raptors, and her engagement in liberal politics.

During the Trump years she was worse than any Union Square zealot, hammering away at anyone who would listen about the President’s villainy, his hatred, his anti-American misogyny, sexism, racism, and unbridled predatory capitalism.  Once she warmed to her subject, she was unstoppable, loud, shrill, and awful.  She had a voice that carried for hundreds of feet, and no one could escape her harangues.  What would she do if Biden won, patrons wondered?

The old, seasoned political pro was certainly quieter, more temperate, and certainly far more sane than his predecessor; and once Trump hatred had been expunged and whirlpools and locker rooms sanitized there was little political talk; except for The Barking Scarecrow who turned out to be a political chameleon as well as a zany prophet; but more than anything, she was a freak.  

To most people’s surprise, she did not shut up once Trump was out of office, but amped up her show.  She hammered the old man for his geriatric non sequiturs, his bondage to the radical Left, his reflexive progressivism, and his deer-in-the-headlights gaze when anything unsuspected came up – a question from the press corps that had not been screened, a demand from an odd ball from the Idaho who cadged his way in, a few rumbles from the subway underneath Pennsylvania Avenue.

“He’s a faker”, she yelled, “a parvenu, a political hack out of his depth, beholden to internationalist, socialist forces he barely can pronounce”.  His Cabinet was a potpourri of grab bag toys, none of them worth the gauze and wrapping paper they came in. His Vice President was a latter day Rasputin, the woman behind the scenes, the puppeteer of this hopelessly wandering, senile alte kocker.

“Look around you”, she said, sweeping her hand over the likes of Death who ran from the Grim Reaper; the Gerbil, a little bowlegged man with a pointy nose, pointy mouth, and sharp protruding teeth who literally spun the treadmill like a wheel in a cage; Jabba the Hut swaying, lurching his way to the men’s locker room and the whirlpool, “these are the retards, demented, misfits that Biden and his progressive claques prefer.  This is his ‘diversity’, this collection of rejects, hopeless moral derelicts, and social miscreants.  This, my friends is the face of liberal, progressive, idealism, the wacko groupies that love Biden.”

She paused for effect and said, “Get me out of here”.

Of course she was just as demented as any of those on the treadmills; but she had a point.  This particular gym was indeed, despite its location, the locus of imbalance.  A few blocks downtown, closer to K Street and the White House, the athletic clubs were as one might expect – nary a creep, mortal runner, or hamster.  Only breeding, education, and money.  Supreme Court clerks, White House fellows, Congressional aides.  This was the permanent Washington corps whose attitude, affections, and loyalties were as transient as the occupants of the Oval Office.  They were the elite Washington corps of well-to-do attorneys and lobbyists.  They were Republican by birth, conservative by persuasion, but deliberately uncommitted.  They were not Trump’s ilk –too Ivy League and Eastern – and certainly not Biden’s. 

His handlers had been very careful to draw up A lists and No Fly Zones; and above all, more than anything, and until the usual international crises plunged him like all presidents before him into an America first, internationalism be damned posture, he was to show his multicultural, diverse inclusiveness at every turn.  

he Downtown ‘Y’, for decades the place to see and be seen was off limits; but the Upper Northwest gym was an ideal photo op opportunity.  His kind of people sweated good, proper sweat there.  He had had enough of the usual, cake and cookies ‘diversity’ – gay men, transgendered women, black feminists, former Chicano strawberry pickers, and a Samoan.  The NW gym offered a new kind of diversity – those on the very edge of normal society.  Those on the psychotic edge.  The obsessive, the illogically driven, and the imbalanced.  

Here, without design or deliberate planning was an assortment of the freakiest ‘normal’ Americans anyone could find.  Yes, there were blacks, Latinos, and gays, but they were not mainstream.  There was something about this gym that said, ‘we take all comers’.

Biden did not make a visit; but the rumor persisted for a good while.  Meanwhile The Barking Scarecrow kept up her harangues.  No administrators stopped her or even wanted to, for she was as batty as any of the other members.  She fit in.  Little did they know it, but their little corner of Washington had repute.