Muscle

by Samuel Wilson Fussell

  With Mousie and Sweepea’s aid and Arnold’s canon as my guide, I worked out a program that emphasized the acquisition of “thickness.” I wanted pure, unadulterated bulk. The striated slopes and gouged declivities of sculpted muscle could come later. Size first.

  This meant eating, and lots of it. For breakfast, six poached eggs, six pieces of whole wheat toast, a whole grain cereal mix, a can of tuna. For my first lunch (around ten thirty), a pound of ground hamburger, a monstrous baked potato, a fistful of broccoli, a small salad. For my second lunch (two thirty), two whopping chicken breasts, spinach pasta, two slices of whole wheat bread. And dinner (eight thirty), dinner topped it all. Another pound of hamburger or steak, a super-size can of tuna, another potato, more bread.

  It also meant drinking. In my case, in addition to a gallon of nonfat milk a day, three mammoth protein shakes—each one consisting of three raw eggs, three tablespoons of BIG protein powder, three teaspoons of lecithin granules (to lower the cholesterol level), a pint of nonfat milk, and a dash of vanilla (recommended by Arnold for flavor). With my meals and the shakes I drank between them, I was eating the equivalent of five six-course meals per day. And, just to be sure, I supplemented my meals with BIG Chewables. Each bottle contained 405 tablets filled with vitamins, minerals, and amino acids. I sucked and savored 108 of these tablets a day, the recommended dosage.

  All the meals and the Chewables were ways to gain weight, and the way to make this weight stick was by working out in such a way that I actually lowered my metabolism. My “personalized program” emphasized the bench press, the deadlift, and the squat, the three major power movements in the gym. They also just happened to be the three most painful movements in the gym.

  Under Mousie and Sweepea’s care, I learned to wrap my knees, rise, and approach the squat rack “so angry you could spit tacks,” as Mousie put it. Then, attacking the weight, I burrowed the back of my neck below the bar and ripped it off the rack, resting the whole weight just beneath my shoulders. From there, just a few steps backwards, and the squat began. Up and down, with two, then three, then four hundred pounds. And all the while, at six thirty A.M., the voices of my friends.

  “BURY IT, MOTHERFUCKER!” they screamed. “BOTTOM OUT, YOU PATHETIC PIECE OF SHIT!”

  According to Mousie and Sweepea, a squat wasn’t a squat unless the squatter actually touched his calves to his hamstrings. Anything less, halfway down for instance, was labeled, disparagingly, “a football squat.”

  The squat was reserved for the dreaded “leg day,” the bench press or, simply, the bench, for “chest day.” But it was the deadlift, which I performed on “back day,” which was the apotheosis of pain. The wrist straps (purchased by mail from The Monster Factory in Connecticut) dangled from my wrists, until I bent down and wrapped them around the bar at my feet. At Mousie’s nod, I surged upwards with my legs and back, keeping my ass down, rising with the weight until my back straightened and the bar rested on my upper thigh. The pain was unavoidable, a piercing sensation deep within my lower spine. Blood trickled from my scraped shins. Rep after rep, I grimaced and wobbled, while my training partners, arms folded across their chests, nodded their heads in approval.

  The time I didn’t spend working out or stuffing my shakes and meats down my gullet, I spent at the office slowly making my way to the medical unit on the fourth floor to check my progress on the Medco weight scale there. I say slowly, because Mousie and Sweepea had told me that to gain weight and lower my metabolism, I needed to eat more and move less. In fact, they said, slow down all extraneous movement. I gathered that extraneous movement meant any activity that did not involve the gym.

  With all this food in my system, the transition from allegro to adagio was relatively easy. The hard part was keeping it all down. This was no easy chore considering my background. I had been raised in the “thin is in” neighborhood of Princeton, where madras-clad men starved themselves to impersonate Arrow shirt models. Too often, I found myself lunging for a streetlamp out on the street or lurching for the men’s room at the office, to rid my guts of the wretched surplus.

  But the bleeding and barfing I passed off as minor glitches in the overall program. After all, self-imposed pain seemed a significantly better alternative than the kind I witnessed out on the street, the kind issued by someone bigger, angrier, and meaner than his neighbor.

  And besides, before my own eyes, I was growing. And the more I grew, the more I felt protected, insulated from everything and everyone around me. By September of 1985, I hit the 200-pound mark. Six months later I reached 220. I celebrated by changing my march to the Medco from a weekly to a daily event and taking time out from my typing for impromptu posing sessions in the men’s room.

  The bathroom was the only place on the floor full of mirrors, mirrors I desperately needed to examine my form. The magazines constantly stressed the bad press mirrors and bodybuilding received, but it had nothing to do with vanity. Mirrors were simply a necessary tool for critical physique appraisal. Or so my books and magazines said.

  But whenever I locked the door behind me and quickly peeled off my shirt, I had to stifle a wolfish whistle. How my beanpole figure had changed in the last year! Before, I’d been what bodybuilders call “skinny fat,” which means a human boneyard covered in an opaque veneer of lard. But no longer—now as I flexed I saw veins larger than tug ropes spring up from nowhere to lace my biceps and triceps, now clearly delineated. My forearms, once celery stalks, were now bowling pins. Even my chest had changed. It was no longer completely concave.

  Listening for approaching footsteps, I’d spend a few minutes “standing relaxed.” Along with “the Walk,” it is the most common form of bodybuilding presentation. It starts with a slight bend at the knees to make sure the quads look fuller. Then, an ankle shift with toes pointed outward for calf display. A spread of the latissimus dorsi, a resulting outward sweep of the arms, a lift of the shoulders, and there you have it. The position is really just a standing version of “the Walk.” The trick is to flex and tighten all your muscles while maintaining an air of insouciance. Only the best builders can smile through the pose as their limbs begin to tremor and quake through minutes of rigid immobility.

  “The crab,” a far more dramatic pose, I saved for the cadenza. One of a number of “most-muscular” poses, the crab brings everything to the surface, making the crabber look like a human anatomy chart. I’d start with a deep breath, then, bending forward at the waist, fiercely thrust my arms before me like a crab’s pincers and watch. The inevitable result was veins shooting like lightning across the skin of my chest and shoulders, muscle fibers dancing just beneath my skin, my whole body shuddering. Bodybuilders call this veiny look “vascularity,” and it is prized as proof that a builder can be huge without being fat. Just a few minutes after entering the men’s room, I’d emerge purple from the exertion, not a bit sheepish, holding my chin higher than ever.

  Though no one ever caught me crabbing, at work my muscular behavior became a cause of concern on the floor. It was the general consensus that I had gone too far. Way too far. Some could understand the need to “fill out,” as I put it, and gain a few pounds. But two hour sessions in the morning and two more hours at night, five meals a day, vitamin supplements, and protein shakes?

  And if that wasn’t enough, well, there was the noise of my accouterments and the demands of my discipline. I installed an industrial-strength stainless steel blender in my cubicle for my shakes. I monopolized the floor’s sole refrigerator for my meats and milk and eggs, and continuously worked the microwave for a fresh feeding.

  My cubicle, which I renamed The Growth Center, became a depot for desiccated beef liver tablets, multivitamin packs, bag after bag of branch-chain amino acids, cartons of Carboplex (a carbohydrate concentrate), and protein powder. What with the magazines and the canon scattered across the floor, the whole place was a muscle minefield, but I didn’t see it that way, not then. Not when
I was caught in the full raging force of “the disease.”

  Oh, I knew I was afflicted all right. I studied who and what I was every day in my magazines and in the mirror. My research helped to explain to curious coworkers why, though I lifted weights, I didn’t look like the 350-pound Russian lifter Vasilly Alexeev. There are actually three distinct groups of weight lifters: Olympic lifters, of which Alexeev was one of the greatest; powerlifters; and bodybuilders. All of them worship iron, but each in their own way, and they get along about as well as Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland.

  Olympic lifters (the only one of the three weight-lifting activities recognized by the International Olympic Committee) compete in only two movements: the snatch, and the clean and jerk. They are simply two stylized means of propelling a weighted bar from the floor to overhead. Both require agility, speed, coordination, and strength.

  Powerlifters, whose sport came into being in the early 1960s as an offshoot of Olympic lifting, compete in three different exercises: the bench press, the deadlift, and the squat (the three I had incorporated into my size program). Pure power works for the aptly named powerlifters. Coordination and agility are not at a premium.

  The only thing Olympic lifters and powerlifters share in common is a judging system based wholly on the weights they lift. Bodybuilders are the sole group who are awarded points on such intangibles as charisma and tan (or competition color). Bodybuilders don’t perform specific exercises with weights on stage for competition. They use the weights simply to change the appearance of their bodies. They’re landscape architects, creating a mound here, a furrow there, as well as illusionists, positioning themselves in a certain manner on stage to their advantage. Bodybuilding requires some strength, a lot of endurance, and by far the most time spent in the gym.

  In the competitions, bodybuilders go through “mandatories”—a set of mandatory poses—in the morning, where the judges compare the body parts of the builders. And then, in the evening the competitors return to perform a choreographed routine incorporating set poses and moves, the ones I practiced in the men’s room.

  At the office, visits from my dwindling number of friends on the floor became increasingly infrequent. The few times fellow workers did venture to The Growth Center I found myself capable of discussing nothing but lifting. While my friends talked about upcoming books and their college reunions, I sternly lectured them on the importance of “the three D’s” and maximum protein utilization.

  The real problem at work, though, wasn’t my muscle homilies, my private posing, my pigsty of protein powder, my magazines, or my blender. No, the real problem was me. My physical metamorphosis had brought with it a completely different way of perceiving the world and my place in it.

  Attitude is what separates the best bodybuilders from the also-rans, I learned (look it up, the heading attitude is directly under arthritis, degenerative in bodybuilding manuals). If you think of yourself as a person of consequence, then you are halfway toward achieving that distinction. If you don’t think you can lift 400 pounds on a deadlift, then, believe me, you won’t. Every magazine article I read made that crystal clear.

  Mousie and Sweepea were right that first night. I had needed an attitude adjustment. And I don’t know exactly when the transformation happened—all I can say is that it did. Without being fully aware of it myself, I became the kind of man I had once feared and despised. I became, in fact, a bully.

  First, I changed my clothes. Out went the Oxford button-downs. They could no longer contain my bulk. From the back of the bodybuilding magazines, I sent off for XXL T-shirts specially cut for bodybuilders. Each day I’d wear a new one to work, only the emblems changed. One day, a lifter holding a sledgehammer, surrounded by inspirational bons mots like “Tough Times Don’t Last. Tough People Do.” Another day, a snarling Rottweiler, with the legend, “Don’t Growl If You Can’t Bite.” Just eighteen months before, these shirts would have billowed over my bony frame. Now, they stretched over my mountains of muscle like a taut second skin. Thanks to my swelling quadriceps, my pants were so snug, I had to spend company time in the men’s room applying baby powder to the skin of my inner thighs for cool relief.

  Then, my manner of speech. It had been too tame before, too timid. No wonder I never got my way in life. I went from answering the phone meekly to shrieking “SPEAK!” into the receiver on the first ring. I learned to pause professionally in dramatic bodybuilding fashion during the delivery of my lines as did Sweepea and Mousie. And I lowered the pitch and timbre of my voice to the point where I could make a laundry list sound like The Constitution.

  I perfected “the Walk” as well, roaming the aisles on forays from The Growth Center. By habit now, I made use of The Arnold Mental Visualization Principle, rolling through the deep as the great leviathan, watching the minnows scatter to their offices at my approach. From behind quickly closed doors, I could hear some gasp, and others murmur only “gross!”

  I was no longer me. Gone was the cautious, passive, tolerant student, the gentle soul who had urged departing friends to “take care” and actually meant it. The new me was a builder. A builder who had no time for anything that wouldn’t help him grow. Who, in place of the words “thank you,” barked “no kindness forgotten, no transgression forgiven.” As my behavior changed, the smiles of my fellow workers faded, their greetings tapering off to a nervous nod of the head. There was fear in the air.

  It was all wonderful—for me, that is. Others on the floor, like Benny Potemkin, came to feel differently. Benny was an earnest manuscript editor who could never be found without his copy of The Nation.

  “Be my guest,” he said one day, opening a door for me.

  As a builder, I accepted charity from no one. It was inconsistent with the concept of paying my dues.

  “Not in a million years, my friend,” I bellowed in my best builder’s bass.

  “I insist,” Benny said.

  A test of wills. I relished this. I just stood before the door and smiled. Wild horses couldn’t drag me through. It was a stalemate. Neither of us would budge. So I relied on what I’d learned in the weight room, suddenly wrapping both of my arms around Benny, lifting him clear off the floor and catapulting him through the door.

  He landed ingloriously on his ass and looked back in rage. “God damn you! You’re fucking insane!” he screeched.

  He rubbed his aching bottom, stood up and straightened his suit. Then he rushed off to the divisional president’s office to lodge a formal complaint against me.

  The writing was on the wall. For a moment, I panicked. But then I remembered Sweepea. “Dignity,” I heard his voice saying, “dignity!”

  I quit before they could fire me, strutting back to The Growth Center with chin and chest held high. I would not let this disturb my workout. Arms and shoulders, I believe, were on the agenda for the evening. I packed my things, the food, the blender, the meats, and left the office forever.

  And wouldn’t you know it, I ran into Jerry after work. Once again, he was haunting the subway platform, wearing his sandwich board. As soon as he saw me, he rushed over. First he ran his eyes over the blender and the bag of food in my hands. Then, he took in the rest of my body and stopped dead in his tracks. Faced with the new me—the muscles, the T-shirt, the glare—he balked. My heart soared.

  The whole thing worked. If even Jerry could detect the ocean of violence raging just beneath my taut T-shirt, I was saved. The makeover was complete. I’d lost my job, but I’d found my way of life. At this point, I was far beyond recall.

  5. THE BUNKER

  IF I ELIMINATE EVERYTHING, HOW WILL I EXIST? …

  WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU DROP ALL THE THINGS THAT MAKE YOU I?

  —GRAHAM GREENE

  I had always been told that to grow up meant to stop wanting those things you couldn’t have. But everything I’d learned from bodybuilding taught me to fight this notion. You can become the person
you dream of being, bodybuilders said. You can defy both nurture and nature and transform yourself. It’s the essential drama of the dream, though in the end it might take more than you’re willing to give.

  But not me, I vowed. If it meant feeling safe and protected, I was willing to give up everything. Along with my job, I gave up my friends—my non-bodybuilding friends, that is. “As they say, if you stick around cripples—mental or physical—long enough, pretty soon you’ll learn how to limp,” Arnold counsels in Posedown! I took him at his word. Fowler telephoned, wrote, even knocked, but I didn’t answer. Next, I surrendered my tony Upper East Side apartment. If I scrimped and moved to Queens, I wouldn’t even have to work again. I could simply become a gym rat, serving time until I could get paid for using my muscles in some fashion.

  Several years before, on my twenty-first birthday, I had inherited some money from my grandfather. At the time, my father had advised me to save it for something really important—a house, for instance, or eight years of graduate school. I now took him at his word and used it to finance my life as a bodybuilder. I called the move an investment in my future. My father (we were still talking then) called me psychotic.

  I found the perfect spot in Sunnyside, Queens, just a few subway clicks from my gym in midtown Manhattan. “Cozy bachelor pad,” the New York Times classified ads described it, but when the realtor, Mr. Tarantino, drove me to the house I got the feeling that I’d found much more than that. The only entrance was from the back, around a gate and through a storm door embedded in the ground. The basement steps led to another door, this one triple-locked and buried in the concrete foundation of the house.