I remember Import/Export, Inc., because it’s the first thing Seth Healey, owner and sole proprietor of Gym Rats since its opening in the summer of 2002, asks me about when we meet. “Did you go into Import/Export, Inc.?” he says, visibly excited to hear my answer.
I say that I didn’t, that I saw the sign for the gym and followed it. He looks disappointed.
“A lot of people try the Import/Export door first, by accident,” he says. “But there’s never anybody in there. Five years I been here, there’s never anybody there. No idea. I’m always waiting for somebody to solve the mystery.”
He holds the door for me; inside, there are a handful of men pumping iron, jumping rope, or working heavy bags. There’s no music playing; just the sounds of bodies breathing and weights clanking.
“Most of these places are loud as hell, right?” says Healey, leading me toward his office at the back of the barn-sized room. “Can’t even think. So when I built the place and they tried to tell me I had to spend a bunch of money on speakers, all I could say was: ‘For what?’ You know. ‘For what?’ Not me, that’s for sure. I knew I wanted my own kind of place.”
He smiles when he speaks, a smile that seems to come from a deeper place than the smiles you sometimes see when you’ve only just met someone. But it only takes a minute or two in the company of Seth Healey to see that he’s different, and to begin understanding how he’s managed to survive all these years, braving setbacks and roadblocks that would make many of us want to throw in the towel.
* * *
WHEN I VISITED Angela West in Virginia, she made it clear that the murders at Devil House were only part of her story. She spoke with me in the hopes that her story might help people closer to the beginnings of their own tragedy-adjacent timelines feel freer to put the past behind them, to shape their own lives along trajectories of their own choosing. Our conversations touched on her work, her teaching, her travels—I tried to follow where she led, and to only take what she was willing to offer. Even after two mornings and one afternoon in her company, I had to supply several conclusions myself; like many who’ve brushed the edge of the spotlight, she’d learned the value of the carefully chosen word.
Seth Healey is cut from different cloth. No subject is off-limits; his long monologues are wide-ranging, but never incoherent, though you can see how inattentive people might think so. He knows why I’m here, and, if it’s not fair to say he’s excited about it, it’s only because a state of excitement is his default setting. Nor is this my personal observation; as soon as we take our seats on facing weight benches, he points it out to me.
“I can be pretty intense,” is how he puts it. “It used to be a lot heavier, and they had me on medication for it for half my life, but that wasn’t the answer for me, which is something I figured out for myself after I got into exercise. I could tell the medication was holding me back, so I talked to a doctor about it and he leveled me down and I learned that if I just never stopped pushing myself, I’d never feel out of control. That’s the thing when you’re like me. You get bored, you lose control, you do something stupid. But, like I say, I fixed all that for myself, and that’s why I’m here. But it’s not why you’re here. You’re here to talk about the gruesome murders in the sleepy suburban town of Milpitas, right?”
I laugh; Seth is a funny guy.
“OK, right. So. There’s a lot of levels to the whole thing, and I’m not sure what you know or don’t know, because people have so many different stories about it, and none of them really get all of it and most of them miss pretty much all of it, which is partly because we planned it out that way. Although ‘planned’ is a little strong of a word to use there, you know, it’s more like ‘we got an idea and ran with it.’ But that still works out as ‘planned’ to me, that’s one thing I’ve learned about responsibility over my life, if you did something on purpose it doesn’t matter how committed you were to that purpose. I’m always telling the guys I train here. You need just enough dedication to get started and then you get a little momentum. Some of us work up the momentum in a hurry, and that’s me. And that’s what we did, that’s why you’ve heard about it. We’d read all the serial killer stories about guys like the Son of Sam or the Manson murders, what have you, wild crime scenes in all the pictures, and we said, let’s make this a crime scene, and then we got a plot together about seven chambers, right, because there were seven booths in the store, and … this is what you’re here for, right?” He looks a little nervous.