“He’s paid his dues, sure enough,” Mousie added. As I was to learn, that was the greatest compliment one bodybuilder could pay another.
“He ain’t no barbody, tha’s for damn sure,” Sweepea murmured.
“What’s a barbody?” I asked, craning my neck for another look at the huge man. From a distance now, all I could see were the trademark signs of a builder: the simian, sloping shoulders, the V-shaped torso, the tiny waist.
“You know, all chest and arms, to impress the women up and down the bar. I seen loads of ’em at work. They just build those muscles you see in a Polo shirt. They don’t got legs, or calves or nuthin’,” Sweepea explained.
“Bet he’s on the juice,” Mousie whispered.
“Yeah? Well, I ain’t asking him,” Sweepea said fearfully.
“The juice?” I asked.
Sweepea smiled. “Yeah, man. You know, ’roids, shit, steroids.”
“That doesn’t seem very natural,” I said. I’d noticed that the magazines were decidedly silent on that subject.
Sweepea looked at me with a wry grin. “What’s natural?” he asked. “Looking at you, you think it’s natural to go someplace and read for hours at a time. See, the way people think, that’s OK ’cause you’re developing your mind. Well, I say, what’s wrong with developing your body? I mean, shit, who would you rather look like, Carl Sagan or Lou Ferrigno?”
I didn’t reply. I was too angry and ashamed. After all, I wasn’t the one walking up Second Avenue wearing a pirate’s cap atop a Prince Valiant haircut. As for the shame, I knew that Sweepea was right; even strapped in my weight-lifting belt, I looked much more like Professor Sagan than like a builder. I felt that the last six months had been a waste.
At the bar, people stopped drinking and stared as we hit the door. A fire hydrant, a human avalanche, and me. Mousie and Sweepea, acknowledging the crowd, milked it, striding up to the bar in muscular, freeze-frame fashion.
I perked up with my first sip. After all, I had started free-weights, a triumph in itself. And after all my reading, I finally faced the real McCoy: bodybuilders. According to bodybuilding great Franco Columbu in his autobiography Coming on Strong, there are only two kinds of bodybuilders: the smart and the very smart. The magazines and the canon concurred. The time they didn’t spend lifting, the iron press said, they spent writing violin concertos or poring over abstruse physics manuals, just for the fun of it.
I had to find out for myself. First off, how did these two support themselves? No trust fund babes, these.
“I’m a painter, man,” Mousie said with dignity.
I was impressed. The builder as polymath. So far, so good.
“Landscapes?” I asked. “Portraits?”
“No, banks mostly, some supermarkets.” He calmly sipped his beer. “Just give me a ladder and a brush, and I’ll give you a good coat.”
“I’m a crowd control engineer,” Sweepea cut in. I looked puzzled. “A bouncer,” he explained. “I work downtown, nights mostly. Sometimes solo, sometimes in a team.” A pause, then, predictably enough, it came.
“But my job don’t mean nuthin’, man. I live to lift…” Sweepea said. My two new friends clasped each other’s hands above the table in celebration of the delivery.
“Is that how you lost your tooth, on the job?” I asked Sweepea.
“Hell no, my father did that,” he said, “back when I was a kid.”
“I’m sorry,” I muttered, embarrassed. “Do you get along better now?”
Sweepea let loose with a great gap-toothed smile. “Yea, a lot better. See now, I’m the man. He don’t so much as say ‘boo’ without askin’ my permission. I give him an allowance, and he stays in his room. You should see him now,” he chuckled. “You think I’m missing teeth. …”
“My job’s cool, but it’s temporary, understan’,” Mousie spoke. “Jus’ give me five years, I be openin’ up my own boutique. You know, clothes and shit. So I gotta keep the flesh firm, man, that way, I be advertisin’ my goods just walkin’ to work each mornin’.”
As for Sweepea’s future, he told me, with a faraway look in his eye, before I could ask: “Sweepea’s Gym, man, right out there in Metro Park,” he said, waving his hand before him.
Mousie turned to me. “What about you, man? What’s the future hold for you?”
They watched while I drew the image of a body on my cocktail napkin. I gave no thought to genetics or racial stock. I set my imagination free. The enormous chest and back tapered into a wasp-sized waist. The legs flared out at the thigh. The calves looked like footballs. Benching four and squatting five would not be a problem. I spun the napkin around.
“You want to look like that?” Sweepea asked, incredulous.
Again, the pregnant pause. This time Mousie said it: “Then you best be prepared to make the necessary adjustments.”
“What adjustments are those?” I asked, nervously shifting in my seat.
“Whatever adjustments are necessary,” they intoned together, ominously.
First off, I would have to start eating five meals a day, plus special protein milk shakes. Then, I would have to adopt the double-split, three on, one off exercise program. It meant twelve workouts per week instead of three, thirty-five meals a week instead of twenty-one. It meant the purchase of a blender, a dietary scale, a caloric food encyclopedia. It meant a liberal supply of amino acids, vitamins, minerals. It meant purchasing wrist straps and knee wraps. But above all, they said, it meant “The Three D’s.”
“The Three D’s?” I asked.
“The Three D’s, bro’. You got to learn ’em, live ’em, lift wid ’em,” Sweepea said, taking a swig of his beer.
Mousie nodded sternly. “Dedication, Determination, Discipline. That’s bodybuilding,” he said.
Half puritanism, half P. T. Barnum—it certainly did sound like bodybuilding. The training list was endless and involved everything. Everything, that is, save women. But what about women? I saw them in the magazines, wearing conveniently torn leotards and tights while they trained, but never in our gym. How could they have a place in a world that revered only ultimate muscle size and power?
“Hey,” Mousie said, with a wicked leer. “You talkin’ ’bout women? Well, there be a time and a place for everything.”
“I had a girlfriend once,” Sweepea said wistfully. “But I had to let her go. She couldn’t even ‘spot’ me in the gym, so, you know, what’s the point?” Mousie shook his head in sympathy. For Sweepea I gathered.
I changed the subject. “What led you to the gym, Sweepea?” I asked.
“Flippers,” he said caustically, adjusting his pirate’s cap. “I was skinny for my age, see, and my fifteenth birthday, my dad gave me flippers. ‘What’s these?’ I says to him. It’s not like we got a big pool in our backyard there or nuthin’. ‘Them’s flippers,’ he says, ‘to keep your bony ass from disappearin’ down the drain when youse takes a shower.’ He said it there, right in front of mommy. I been trainin’ ever since.”
I too had started bodybuilding as a matter of survival, I said. I asked them if they’d heard the latest statistics. There were approximately 300,000 violent crimes a year in New York City, 12,000 on the subway alone, the papers reported. Study after study had shown that “fear of crime” was the primary concern of New Yorkers. I needed a helmet in this tough town, I said. Hence the gym.
Mousie and Sweepea were strangely silent. I decided to make one last toast.
I raised my glass. “To survival!” I cried.
They uttered not a word. At some point, I’d said something wrong.
Finally, Sweepea spoke. “We’re not talking about survival here. Hey, cockroaches survive. No, what we’re talkin’ ’bout is different.”
“Yeah, you see, now you one of us. That mean you got responsibilities,” Mousie explained.
I didn’t get it.
“See, Hoss, you don’t talk the talk, unless you walk the walk,” Sweepea said firmly.
I still didn’t get it.
It was apparent from his expression that Mousie had never before encountered anyone so dense.
“Look, you be a builder, you carry yo’self like a builder.”
Sweepea and Mousie exchanged a glance and abruptly rose from the table. After hastily paying for the drinks, I followed them out into the night. And there it was, out on Second Avenue between Fifty-second and Fifty-third, that Mousie and Sweepea taught me “the Walk,” that peculiar weight-lifters’ waddle.
I’m sure you know it. The huge man we spotted the previous hour had done it particularly well. It’s the not-so-secret signal among the iron cognoscenti of the presence of a dues-paying member of the bodybuilding guild.
I watched as first Sweepea, then Mousie strutted down the street. They swept their arms out to the side, as if the sheer massivity of their lat wings necessitated it. They burrowed their heads slightly into their shoulders to make their necks appear larger. They looked bowlegged, absurdly stiff, and infinitely menacing. At the corner light, they stopped and turned.
“Go on, now,” Mousie said, encouraging me.
Fledgling builder that I was, I followed. I too jutted my arms out from my sides, keeping my elbows on the same line as my shoulders. I too carefully walked with my legs spread far apart to prevent the horrors of inner-thigh chafing from the immense size of the quadriceps.
I utilized The Arnold Mental Visualization Principle and imagined myself an itinerant pillbox. Safe behind my muscle walls, nothing could touch me as I awkwardly perambulated forward.
“No, goddamnit, that ain’t it. You cowering!” Mousie shouted by the street light. “No wonder people mess wi’choo!”
“Like this, man, like this,” Sweepea said, strutting down the street with his chest and shoulders held high, a trace of disdain on his lips.
Mousie watched Sweepea’s swagger. “That’s right, homeboy, with dignity, dignity!” he yelled.
At last, I understood. The Walk wasn’t an upturned drawbridge and moat; it was a twenty-one gun salute, a full military cavalcade. I ran back down the street and tried again, this time curling my lip into a sneer. Once more, I used The Arnold Mental Visualization Principle, but this time I was Paul Bunyan, crushing Wisconsin hamlets with every giant step.
Deep in my reverie, I barely heard their shouts. “That’s it, man, a positive mental attitude! You got it, now! You fine!”
“That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger!” I eagerly cried.
It was an expression I’d picked up in the weight room and the magazines. I found myself frequently using it of late as a substitute for “Have a nice day.”
Sweepea and Mousie were delighted. From the corner of Fifty-second Street, the three of us parted that night after lengthy and elaborate soul shakes. Mousie headed due north for the South Bronx, Sweepea west to Metro Park. And I, I did “the Walk” all thirty blocks north by northeast back to my sublet.
4. THE METAMORPHOSIS
I’M JUST GOING TO KEEP RIGHT ON BUILDING.
YOU DO THE BEST YOU CAN TO STOP IT.
—ROBERT MOSES
It was my father, the Ivy League Professor, on the line. I could almost smell his pipe. He sounded concerned.
“Dad, you’re right. For a while there, I was genuinely fucked up. But everything’s all right now, I’m really getting into bodybuilding,” I crowed into the phone.
There was dead silence on his end of the line.
“Dad?”
I could hear him breathing slowly. Finally, he spoke. “September. The American Studies Program at Yale for your doctorate. You haven’t forgotten, have you?”
Silence, this time on my end of the line. The fact was I’d so immersed myself in iron of late that it was the summer already, and I hadn’t even completed the application.
My father’s voice broke through. “Son, have you given any thought as to who your peers will be in this seamy enterprise?”
For five full minutes I defended my action. I mentioned democracy and deadlifting, “urban dissonance,” and diarrhea. I spoke of falling air conditioners and of Jerry. I proudly described my new training partners, The Portuguese Rambo and Sweepea. I thought he would understand. He didn’t. He was even more disgusted than usual.
“Yes, I can see it now,” he said. “My son the bodybuilder, out on the streets of New York City with the rest of the poseurs of that particular metropolis.”
“No, Father, believe me, it’s not like that!” I blurted out. He didn’t believe me.
I could hear the effort it took to keep his voice calm and measured. “Look, go ahead, go join the lepers—they’re your limbs, after all. But do us all a favor, just don’t tell your mother. Spare her the heartache for once, all right?” Then he hung up.
But it was too late—my mother already knew. A family friend from Princeton had spotted me on Fifty-ninth Street the previous week doing “the Walk.” She had rushed to a nearby pay phone to give my mother a full report.
I armed myself with Sweepea’s tape of the movie Pumping Iron and brought it over to my mother’s apartment on my next “off day.”
“Well?” I asked at the end, flushed myself. I always found the movie so inspiring.
Her face was like stone. “It’s disgusting. These men have tits,” she said.
“That’s development, Mother. These men are engaged in the pure pursuit of physical development.”
“Yes, and meanwhile they’re functionally illiterate. One of them can’t even speak.”
“That’s Lou Ferrigno, Mother, and it’s not his fault. He’s deaf.”
“Well, you’re not deaf, so why do you want to do this to yourself? And the bully with the gap between his teeth? Who is this punk? He’s a moron.”
“That’s Arnold Schwarzenegger. He writes books.”
“Not without a ghostwriter, he doesn’t,” she said.
I gave my mother a brief synopsis of Arnold’s career. The fistfights, the bodybuilding titles, the marriage. The sheer chutzpah of the man. To live without apology, without complaint, without compliance. And to think, as he wrote in his autobiography, he owed it all to bodybuilding. I did a quick flex with my bicep to assist my argument.
At this, my mother sunk her head into her hands. She sighed. She searched for words. Finally, she reached out and took my hands in hers.
“Look, son, I know the divorce has been hard on all of us, but don’t you see? You’re internalizing. You’re punishing yourself. It’s not your fault, really it’s not. Look, I’ll talk to Professor Levy at CCNY. I know he can still get you that job teaching freshman comp, OK?”
But I didn’t hear her. My concentration was too great. She might have had my hands, but my calves were still mine, and I was flexing and unflexing them in time to the Mozart divertimento on her stereo. By the time she got to the NYU openings, I had quite a pump going.
When I left with Sweepea’s tape under my arm, my mother stopped me at the door. She spoke urgently. “Please promise me one thing. Just don’t tell your father. It would kill him.”
Others, too, were raising objections to my new passion. In fact, I felt buffeted from all sides. Childhood friends called me in consternation. Apparently, my folly was so spectacular, so profoundly perverse, that even they had gotten wind of it. It was worse, somehow, than enlisting in the Marines or buying finger cymbals and joining the Hare Krishnas.
Fowler, an old college friend, met me for lunch. He wore his Phi Beta Kappa key; I wore a skintight tank top. Frankly, he was baffled. A sudden mania for single sculls would have been acceptable, he said. That, at least, had the imprimatur of Yale and Harvard behind it. But not this dark, dingy work, not this lifting. It was beyond comprehension.
I spent an interminable hour as he bo
mbarded me with questions.
“Say, you weren’t in a fraternity in college, were you? It’s that, isn’t it, the gym—some kind of weird brotherhood. Like Skull and Bones, right?”
“Hasn’t it ever crossed your mind that this whole enterprise is rather vulgar? Is it your parents you want to hurt? Is that it? Is it your friends? Are you waiting for this to appear in the Alumni Notes? Goddamnit, why not do something with your life you can really be proud of?”
Fowler diagnosed my problem as a narcissistic personality disorder. He would have told me more, but he had to rush back to his job. He worked in public relations.
Only my gay friends were delighted. They thought they knew just where this would lead. A daily performance as studied and mannered as a bodybuilder’s could only mean one thing. I had to be gay. They were planning a “coming-out” party, they said. All I had to do was give them the word.
Iron made sense to no one. To no one, that is, but me. All I knew was that I had found a sanctuary in the gym, and the more I trained, the better I felt. Out on the streets of New York, I’d found nothing but impediments, red lights, and stop signs everywhere. Inside the gym, I saw only green.
At dawn the workouts began, and always I wondered if I could recapture the glow, the magic pump I’d felt the previous night. I’d start slowly, warming up, testing myself, and then it would happen. Release. From exercise to exercise I’d go, feeling as if I were driving a car on a dark, wet night in the city. Suddenly, the stoplight just ahead turns green, the next one green, and green again. You don’t need to brake for even one light. All you see is the road before you. You’re not quite sure why, but you’re going at the right speed at the right place and time. You take a quick look at the speedometer. Just to memorize the reading. But there’s no need. Just keep it going, another light, another block, another weight, another exercise. Green, green, green.
Two hours each morning, two hours each evening, “three on, one off, double-splits.” The gym was the one place I had control. I didn’t have to speak, I didn’t have to listen. I just had to push or pull. It was so much simpler, so much more satisfying than life outside. I regulated everything, from the number of exercises I performed each workout to the amount of weight I used for each exercise; from the number of reps per set to the number of sets per body part. It beat the street. It beat my girlfriend. It beat my family. I didn’t have to think. I didn’t have to care. I didn’t have to feel. I simply had to lift.
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