My euphoria lasted all of 15 seconds, the time it took for Austin to find me back at my locker. He invited me to accompany him back to his place for a shower and a liver-and-whey shake. He had some slides he wanted me to see: some of the world’s most famous bodybuilders in a variety of interesting poses. It was all part of “the lifter life-style,” he assured me.
As politely as I could, I declined. Nothing more could happen, I thought, not on my first visit to the gym. After all, within the last two hours I’d suffered public humiliation, physical attack from a double amputee, and sexual harassment.
I breathed a sigh of relief and headed for the shower. That’s when I heard him. He was no ordinary shower warbler.
“ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR, FIVE, SIX, SEVEN!” the shout rang out, acoustically amplified by the shower tiles.
Bewildered, I looked at a man shaving at a nearby sink.
“Your first time, right?” he asked.
I nodded.
The man gestured with his head toward the shower. “They call him ‘The Counter.’ Some say it was ’Nam, others he lost heavy on Black Monday in Wall Street. Any case, the light’s on upstairs, but nobody’s home.”
I peeked in and saw him, alone, under the showerhead. He wore a showercap, but the water wasn’t on. It must have been on at some point, though, because he was lathered with soap, and rubbing what was left of the bar into his skin. Again, the voice boomed forth: “ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR, FIVE, SIX, SEVEN!”
Hearing my steps, he turned to face me. I looked down. No, he wasn’t visibly excited. That wasn’t it, then. I gazed at his face. Underneath the comedy of the shower cap, he looked utterly haunted.
He bit his lip for a second, examining me. I waited, uncertain yet for what. Tears, perhaps, or bitter, accusing words. Instead, his eyes turned inward and he took up his recitation again, this time louder than ever.
“ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR, FIVE, SIX, SEVEN!”
It had been a long day, but as I showered all I could think about was my next workout. Despite everything—the humiliation, the harassment, the methodical man beside me—I was hooked. Standing insensate under that showerhead, none of it seemed to matter very much. In the end, to my joy, I felt numb.
3. THE WALK
I INVENTED, MORE OR LESS, MYSELF.
—ION TIRIAC
From that first night of September 1984 to March of 1985 I labored three times per week in the weight room. Every bar I pushed, every cable I pulled, moved me that much closer to a body weight of 200 pounds, to safety out on the street, to isolation. My fellow gym members watched, astonished by the obvious and frightening fact that this lifting was of crucial importance to me. None of the men by the machines understood the depth of my desperation.
There was a beautiful simplicity about it. I pushed the iron, and my body grew. The harder I worked, the better I felt. My routine brought order amid chaos. I knew just where to shuffle and when: Deltoids followed pecs, hamstrings followed quads. Always 12 reps, always three circuits. I barely paused between exercises, moving from station to station, cable to bar. And if I wasn’t that strong, I could make up for it by continuing to exercise long after others had padded off to the showers. Set after set after set. Ninety minutes straight. Week after week. The training sessions passed in a blur. I put on 15 pounds in the first six months (bringing my weight up to 185) and regained my health. By March, my arms measured 15 inches, my neck 15½, my calves 15, my thighs 24, my chest 40, and my waist 34. I was on my way.
Still, one thing was bothering me. Despite my gains, things did not let up out on the street. Three-card monte sharps still took one look my way and rushed to set up shop beside me. My friend Jerry still lit up as I approached the subway escalator. And the general panic still followed me wherever I went. As much new armor as I had, I realized I would need a hell of a lot more.
Across the room lay the answer. Free-weights. The hugest men I’d seen, the men in the magazines, were always pictured with free-weights. They never seemed to trifle with the Universal. I couldn’t imagine them encountering the slightest difficulty out on the streets. I had to break the plane.
At the edge of the crowd on the far side of the weight room, I saw him again. His upper body wasn’t impressive, nor was his height. He stood as tall as my elbow. But his legs were enormous, the knees and ankles fairly drowning amidst the overhanging muscle. Noticing my stare, he put his dumbbells down and, rigid as a robot, walked over to me.
“I vomit the most. That’s why my legs are the best,” he said, in a high-pitched, girlish voice.
“The Portuguese Rambo,” he proclaimed, extending his shaved forearm in my direction. He was completely bald, black, and about forty years old. He wore a sweatband on his head tilted at a rakish angle. His weight-lifting belt said BAD in black block letters.
“Hell, man, you can’t build a house on a weak foundation,” he said, pointing to his legs with an index finger. The words were familiar. I struggled to place them.
He shook loose the muscles of his massive legs, and we both watched the flesh flap like a loose sail in the wind.
“This here’s the greatest sport; see, you work hard, you get rewarded.” Familiar words again—where had I heard them before?
I nodded. I had witnessed his temper that first night; I didn’t so much as utter a peep.
“See, we been watchin’ you at the machines. And you know, man, we don’t get it. Wha’choo want to work so hard for and waste it on them machines?” he asked, adjusting his groin with a public flourish. “Look, you want a chest bigger than Dolly Parton, right? Then follow me to the bench press.”
It was what I’d been waiting for. At last, the breach to the free-weight group. I kept my head down and tried to drift in as inconspicuously as possible. Unsettling snatches of conversation from strange new voices floated around me.
“It was so dry, man, I had to crowbar it in. Once I got going, like sandpaper. Man, it was music to my ears. She loved it too,” one man whispered, lasciviously, to his friend.
Another thundered beside me: “… so I nailed him, twice, with an uppercut. Should have seen his teeth there on the sidewalk. Like bloody Chiclets. You don’t mess with a lifter, man. …”
I hurried to the bench press where Mousie, The Portuguese Rambo, was loading up a solid steel bar with 45-pound black iron plates. Olympic Barbell Company, the weights said. The bar rested on a trestle attached to the bench. By the time Mousie slid three plates on each side of the bar, it sagged on either end.
“Three hundred fifteen pounds, man,” Mousie said, lying with his back flat on the bench. He did two repetitions, hoisting the bar off the rack to arm’s length, then bringing it down to touch his chest before pushing it back up.
Mousie removed a plate from either side and let me try. This wasn’t a machine, and I knew it instantly. It was twice as hard as what I had grown used to. I had no problem repping the 225-pound weight; I had a grave problem balancing it. The bar listed like a doomed ship in my hands.
“No problem, man, I’m here to spot you,” Mousie said from above my head.
With his fingers occasionally guiding the bar, I managed 10 repetitions. When I rose, unsteadily, to my feet I saw Bert eyeballing me. Mousie recognized my fear.
“Relax, man,” he said. “Bert’s seen how hard you work out. He really likes you. If he didn’t, you would have found a Kotex in yo’ locker long time back, believe me.” He prepared the bar again for his next set.
“Besides, homeboy,” Mousie added, rising from the bench when he finished, “you don’t come to the weight room to make friends, you come to make gains.” That too seemed familiar. Was it the magazines? The Schwarzenegger canon?
After seven sets of bench presses, Mousie puffed out his chest and walked with his shoulders held high to the incline bench. It was slanted at 45 degrees and, he said, would work our upper pectoral muscles.
I didn’t understand it. My normal route back at the machines was to follow the line to the shoulder machine. Why more chest?
Mousie laughed between reps. “’Cause we’re workin’ chest, man,” he answered. “I already done back this mornin’.”
“I thought you had to give your body a rest?” I asked, confused.
“You do, and the way you do it is to work a different body part every time, never repeatin’ the same part the next day. See, it’s called a ‘split routine,’ that is, workin’ different muscles on different days, splittin’ up yo’ body parts.”
As Mousie explained it to me, he was actually engaged in a “double-split” program, meaning twice-a-day workouts. He’d done back that morning, and would do chest that night. The next day, quads in the morning, hamstrings and calves that night. The day after that, shoulders in the morning, arms at night. The fourth day, or “off day,” was reserved for rest. The entire program was called “three on, one off, double-splits,” and, as I discovered, everyone in the free-weight section adhered to it.
“Why you think we don’t look like them sorry-ass motherfuckers?” he asked, pointing to the men by the machines.
Again, I used half Mousie’s weight. As I did my repetitions, I spied Sweepea lumbering through the door. He was the man I’d seen Mousie strangle six months earlier. They were the best of friends, I’d discovered, though Mousie frequently called him “The Missing Link” behind his back.
At five foot ten, Sweepea weighed 250 pounds. Of that bulk, an equal proportion was fat and muscle. He sported a Prince Valiant haircut, so shellacked with hair spray it looked like a helmet. Perched on the helmet was a black pirate’s cap with a Jolly Roger emblem. All this, plus a missing front tooth. Smiling, he looked cherubic. Scowling, like a very bad dream.
Catching sight of Mousie, he bustled over to join us. When he spotted me, though, he slowed down, walking with exaggerated muscle-bound difficulty, as if he were fighting a torrential gale.
“What day is it, Mousie?” he asked.
“Monday,” I interjected, trying to get at least something right.
Sweepea eyed me with disdain.
“No,” Mousie said, laughing. “Sam don’t understand yet. It’s chest and back today, Pea. Wha’s it for you?”
“Legs,” he groaned. This, I found, was the universal builder’s reaction to “leg day,” since the leg muscles were by far the most taxing to train.
“Look, you want to join us for chest?” Mousie asked, rolling his eyes at me. I gathered Sweepea would do anything to avoid a leg workout.
“Where are you?”
“Fourth set, second exercise,” Mousie said.
Without a warm-up, Sweepea snatched up the 80-pound dumbbells and erupted in a burst of violent reps. I watched him in alarm as he screamed “Fuck Arnold!” at the top of his lungs, snorting and cackling at every repetition. I looked around me. None of the other free-weight men, too busy bragging among themselves or brooding individually on benches, paid him the slightest attention.
Without missing a beat, Sweepea finished, handed me my dumbbells, and said, now calm as a country pond, “Your set, man.”
With my tongue between my teeth, I did the exercise, but timorously, spending as much energy balancing the weights as pushing them. At the eighth rep, I heard myself groaning and tried to stifle the sound.
Sweepea looked at me sadly and turned to Mousie. “He needs an attitude adjustment, man.”
Mousie, taking his turn with the dumbbells, agreed. “Bro, you need to attack the weights, conquer the motherfuckers.”
“That’s right,” Sweepea added. “You ain’t with the sheep no more,” he said, motioning to the men by the machines, “so stop bleating like one.”
Sweepea emphasized his point by walking with his dumbbells to a sign on the wall that said:
PLEASE REPLACE WEIGHTS
TO RACK AFTER USE.
Directly beneath this sign, looking back at me, he dropped them dramatically from his shoulders to the floor.
“Quigs will come, man,” Mousie said in warning. I gathered he meant Mr. Quigley.
Sweepea sucked in his gut and puffed out his chest. “Let him come, you see me quiverin’, bro’?” He turned his face slightly to the side and adjusted his pirate’s cap.
That’s when it hit me. Bad theater. Every word they uttered, every move they made seemed rehearsed—as rehearsed, in fact, as any performance I’d ever seen on stage. That explained the pregnant pauses before delivering the lines I knew so well from the magazines. Lines like “You gotta stay hungry,” or “You work hard, good things will happen.” Much of being a bodybuilder, I gathered, meant playing at being a bodybuilder.
Was this the essence of the sport? My reading seemed to confirm it. Since the first AAU Mr. America contest in 1939, bodybuilding involved premeditated reinvention. You chose who you wanted to be, and acted accordingly. So Angelo Siciliano picked up a dumbbell and became Charles Atlas. So Arnold Schwarzenegger became, for a time, Arnold Strong. If it was all a matter of role-playing, that explained Mousie’s vision of himself as The Portuguese Rambo and Sweepea’s pirate’s hat.
It also explained my presence in the gym. The threat wasn’t just from without, it also came from within. The fright I’d felt on the streets of New York I also felt deep within myself. Who was this man who cried not just at graduations and weddings but during beer and credit-card commercials? Who was this man terrified of his own rage, his own anger, his own greed, his own bitterness? Who was this man who never heard a compliment without hearing a subtextual insult, who never said “I love you” without resenting that other fact: “I need you.” I couldn’t deny it was me, or could I? There wasn’t enough pomade, mouthwash, deodorant and talc in this world to eradicate my sins, but what if I created a shell to suppress them? What if my armor not only kept the world out, but kept me in?
I was more than willing to play the role of a builder if it could save me from myself. Sweepea and Mousie had found a disciple in their midst.
“No more Jell-O, ma!” I brayed, attacking the weight, as my new training partners broke into grins. During my reps, I resorted to what Schwarzenegger likes to call “The Arnold Mental Visualization Principle,” more commonly known as the imagination, and saw my chest growing to such gargantuan proportions that no shirt on earth could contain it.
We went from incline presses to the decline bench, dumbbell presses to dumbbell flies, attacking our chests from every angle. Only two moves work for the chest, Mousie explained: a standard push movement from your nipples forward, and a standard fly movement, from arms outstretched at your sides to a position straight before you. Every chest movement is a variation of these two themes, and each theme involves the same principle: stretch (and by stretching, tear the muscle) and squeeze (flex it, contract it, during the whole movement).
At the end of the 90-minute workout, I had done so much stretching and squeezing, I could barely move. The free-weights had made all the difference. My chest spasmed and cramped back at my locker. It was caught in a state of shock. In circuit training, I was used to thirty sets per workout, but broken down into three sets per body part and ten different body parts. But tonight, we’d done thirty sets for just chest alone. The welcome onset of numbness was the only relief from the pain.
“God ain’t exactly helped you with genetics, bro’,” Mousie said, when I peeled off my tank top.
Sweepea pinched and prodded my aching body. He delivered his verdict with a sad shake of his head. “He’s an ecto, man. That’s tough.”
I felt thoroughly defeated. I recognized the term from the magazines. They were filled with geneticspeak, classifyi
ng every human being into three basic body types: endomorphs, the naturally obese; mesomorphs, those born stocky and muscular; and ectomorphs, the lanky and bony. According to bodybuilding lore, you can change the way you look through weights, and racial stock might be taken into consideration (with advantages to Italians, Germans and Blacks), but of the three basic body types, ectomorphs have the most problems gaining muscle mass. For sheer size, they have the most to overcome. It wasn’t what I wanted to hear.
“Arnold was an ectomorph,” I proffered hopefully.
“Hey, Arnold was a German,” Sweepea countered.
Again, my shoulders sagged. Mousie detected my misery. He asked if Sweepea and I would join him for a drink.
“Bodybuilders drink beer?” I asked.
“Milk is for babies. Arnold drinks beer!” they both shouted in what I took to be Austrian accents. Laughing uproariously, they revealed that they had seen the movie Pumping Iron again recently and were just quoting Arnold.
As we made our way to the bar on Fifty-second Street and Second Avenue, we ran into a man who looked as if he had sprung live right off the pages of my magazines.
He certainly didn’t resemble anyone from the Y, free-weight section or not. He had achieved the look gained only by the most advanced builders. While my body was a mess of straight edges and right angles, his, so preposterously muscled, was a mass of curves, fleshy ellipses and ovals. They made his joints look tiny, and, in contrast to the great gobs of muscle, almost dainty.
He swept by us without a glance, not even acknowledging Mousie and Pea as iron brethren.
“That dude’s got some serious muscle…” Sweepea said beneath his breath. “Bet he can bench four and squat five.”
That much gym slang I knew. Sweepea estimated that a body like that could bench press four hundred and squat five hundred pounds. No one in our gym could do it.
Muscle Page 3