Muscle

by Samuel Wilson Fussell

  Every few hours, no matter where I was, I found myself running through my muscle inventory, checking to make sure I was still there. From head to toe, I’d squeeze and flex every body part: traps? check; deltoids? check; pecs? check; lat wings? check; bi’s and tri’s? check; quads? check; calves? check. All present and accounted for.

  The rest of the day I spent preparing muscle food or resting my muscles on the bed, mentally gearing up for the next muscle-fest in the gym. If I wasn’t reading a muscle magazine, I was riffling through a new catalog from the neighborhood big man’s clothing store, wondering what tent-sized finery I might use to outfit my muscles. Muscles, muscles, muscles.

  An article I read haunted me. The piece had reported Schwarzenegger’s happiness in signing a new movie contract. In it, Arnold said, “Arnold is back where he belongs, on top.” I longed for that conviction, the ease and peace of mind that would come from the simplistic belief that there is a top and a bottom in this world. Top and bottom, black and white, good and evil, positive and negative, big and small, I retreated into the narrow world of dichotomy. I no longer had questions, only solutions, and they all pointed to the weight room.

  So long as I was trussed in my weight-lifting belt, life was as neat and tidy as a crossword puzzle. I stopped thinking of my friend Eric by not thinking at all. Spotting a would-be suicide jumping into the Hudson River off a pier, Eric watched the crowd congregate above the man sinking in the water. The drowning man had an audience, and not one soul offered a hand to help. But Eric, new to New York, couldn’t stand it another second. He dove off the pier, struggled through the murky water to reach the man and caught him. They went down together, the man’s hands wrapped around Eric’s neck. It took the police hours to find the bodies. As long as I lifted, I didn’t think about the life Eric might have led. I didn’t think about how my parents were no longer on speaking terms. I didn’t think about my own sterile preference for concepts and ideals rather than people. I didn’t recognize just how convenient it was for me to permit myself to love a woman who, because of her betrothal to another, couldn’t return my part-time affection. I was ripe for the disease, all right.

  I wasn’t the only one afflicted. Silently, steadily, the disease had reached epidemic proportions. Not just in health clubs, but out on the street, on the ferry, in cafés, bars, public parks, even libraries. Wherever there were people, there were builders. Of course, “the Walk” was a dead giveaway. But there were other signs, more subtle but equally telling. The shaved and tanned forearm of a subway strapholder. The shock of swollen gastrocnemius muscles below a father’s shorts in the grocery line. The bunched bulging traps of a bike messenger. All it took between us was a quick look, then a nod and a smile. We were not alone. Race, religion, nationality, they were inconsequential. First and foremost, we were bodybuilders—and we breathed easier because of it.

  To complete my identity, I shaved my whole body. It was the sole remaining impediment to the way. Body hair obscures muscle definition (the cuts chiseled between distinct muscle groups) and separation (the striations and visible muscle fiber making up the separate parts within the muscle itself). I thought of it as just a way of seeing who I was.

  As with steroids, the magazines avoided altogether the subject, since it included the disturbing matter of shaving the legs. But I gathered from Mousie and Sweepea that I would need a number of blades. So I bought my “Lady Bics,” ten of them, retreated to the bunker and ran the bathwater.

  I started with my upper body, lathering everything above the waist save for my head. Wrists first. Up my forearms, over my biceps, and around the hanging flesh of my triceps to my shoulders. Off it came, the hair from my chest, my abdomen, my underarms. As soon as one blade clogged with hair, I discarded it and swept up another. It seemed simple.

  It was—until I stood up and tried my legs. I would have been better off using a machete. As soon as I began to pick up speed, my ankles and knees acted as vicious speed bumps to the razor’s edge, sending the blade soaring over smooth plains only to halt and bite into one of my bony knobs. All in all, the whole thing took an hour and ruined ten good blades.

  And when I rose from the tub and looked down at my naked form, I was amazed. It wasn’t the body—it was the blood. I looked as if I’d run a full marathon through briars. I waited for the sharp shock of pain, but it didn’t come. I didn’t feel a thing. I was no longer connected to my own body. It had become simply an abstract concept, a shell to be polished and plucked with regularity.

  When I was dressed, the scrape of fabric on my skin constantly served to remind me of the state of this shell, a shell so foreign and cumbrous that I found myself bumping into door frames, lamp shades, easy chairs. My size had come so quickly that I hadn’t learned to accommodate it.

  But by September of 1986, two years after I had first embraced iron, something went wrong. I ignored it at first. After all, the Medco was frequently unreliable. I upped my food dosages and supplements, but without effect. The cruel fact was my body had stuttered, then stopped growing. My training diary recorded the problem, the tape measure confirmed it. I was stuck with 17-inch arms, a 17-inch neck, 16-inch calves, a 48-inch chest, and 26-inch thighs. Months passed without a gain of even 1/16 of an inch. In an agitated state, I confessed my problem to Sweepea.

  He looked at me sympathetically, then bit his lip. “Plateau,” he mumbled.

  It is the word bodybuilders fear most. Somehow, some way, I had to break through it.

  From what I could glean from the magazines, real builders, like Arnold, Bill Pearl, Lou Ferrigno—all of them had 20-inch necks, calves, and arms, 30-inch thighs, 60-inch chests. I was somewhere and nowhere at the same time. My muskets might have been the biggest in the Y, but they were nothing compared to the Gatling guns of bodybuilders from Southern California.

  The “before” and “after” pictures of these bodybuilders were astounding. As soon as they reached sunny Southern California, their bodies seemed to explode in growth. The place had something: truckloads of anabolic steroids, variant exercise techniques, special diets—something. Whatever it was, if it worked for others, it might work for me. To the diseased there is only one Mecca, and it is nowhere near the nation of Islam.

  My friends at the gym were delighted with my decision. They agreed: I was a bodybuilder, so I should move to Southern California. They were certain it would lead to layouts in the magazines. Only The Counter saved his words for himself, keeping up his recitation full-volume in the shower, as always.

  I summoned my mother to meet me at the bunker to discuss the logistics of the move. The visit was a first for her. I heard her frightened tap at the first storm door. “Sam?” she squeaked.

  She barely recognized me, but looked aghast at my uniform: military fatigues camouflaged to look like tree bark, spit-shined black combat boots, a T-shirt which read “Respect my spirit, for our spirits are one.”

  “Do we have bodybuilding to thank for this?” she asked bitterly.

  “It’s more than simply cosmetic, Mother,” I said with gravity, “it’s a whole way of life.”

  I swept my hand across the room. She took in the two ceiling-high refrigerators, the shelves of muscle magazines, the seated calf machine by my bed, and the smell of rotting food in the kitchenette. A cardboard cutout of Arnold with loincloth and sword as Conan the Barbarian stood against one wall. Sweepea had appropriated it from the marquee of a movie theater for me. Against another wall olive drab field utility boxes housed my protein powders, vitamins, and aminos. I could see from the look in her eyes that her worst fears were realized. All that was missing was a rifle and the President’s travel itinerary.

  She made her way to the bed and collapsed. “I’m sorry,” she said through her tears. “God, I’m so sorry.” She clutched the iron-callused pads of my paw.

  “That’s all right, Mother,” I heard myself saying, and, before I could stop myself, “no pain, n
o gain.”

  At this, the dam broke. She cried nonstop for a good ten minutes. And while I dabbed at her cheek with her handkerchief, I counted down the minutes until my next workout, and after that my westward flight.

  I had done my job well. My own mother was crying on my breast and I didn’t feel a thing. There wasn’t a chink in my armor.

  “A fresh start,” I lied. “California. Clean air, a stable environment. It will all be good for me.”

  She looked up at me in misery. “To pursue this … this … bodybuilding thing?”

  “Yes.”

  “But why?”

  I gave her the standard party line. “It’s an ambition to create something out of yourself that isn’t there to start with, Mother. Like a sculptor, you play with the form and stretch it. I just want to see how far I can go.”

  That sounded nice, almost sane, in fact, but that wasn’t what it was about at all, at least not for me. The fact was I’d found shelter in a body too large to feel and aimed to find even more in a body that was even bigger. It didn’t occur to me then that too big might not be big enough.

  “But where will this all end?” my mother asked.

  “Lifting is a lifelong pursuit,” I said with a smile, aping an article verbatim from the magazine open on my bed. “As long as I breathe, I lift. Without it …” again, the pause … “I shrivel up and die.” I held out my palm and slowly balled it into a fist to emphasize the point.

  More tears, but in the end she agreed to store my cartons of books beneath her desk in her apartment. Muscle Wars, The Education of a Bodybuilder, and The Encyclopedia of Bodybuilding, I took along with me. The clothes I gave to the Salvation Army. They no longer fit.

  6. THE MOVE

  WHATEVER IT IS YOU DO IN LIFE, YOU CAN NEVER GROW IN SELF-ESTEEM UNLESS YOU GET GOOD AND PUMPED FIRST AND STAY THAT WAY. ANY TIME YOU SPEND WITHOUT A PUMP IS TIME YOU CAN NEVER GET BACK AGAIN. I WOULDN’T LET ANY OPPORTUNITIES GET AWAY IF I WERE YOU.

  —FRANCO COLUMBU

  October, 1986. In one hand, I held a large suitcase, in the other a Gold’s Gym bag. The weight-lifting belt I wore around my waist, loosely buckled like a gunbelt. The amino Chewables, I popped into my mouth every few minutes. My pants were carefully cut off at each knee for maximum calf display. I had $12,000 in my pocket in traveler’s checks, all that remained of my inheritance from my grandfather.

  “Shangri-La Fitness Training Center,” the flag said in gold letters, flapping above the gym’s door in the breeze. The street was deserted, save for a beat-up 1971 Ford Maverick parked across from the gym. The black vinyl roof of the Maverick had blistered and peeled from the sun. The woven mat before the entrance didn’t say “Welcome.” It said, “Don’t talk about it, do it!” The words were framed within a pattern of little dumbbells.

  This was it. Southern California. Iron Mecca. Land of heavy artillery and for me, I hoped, opportunity. I took a deep breath and struggled with my bags through the door. The place was nearly empty. The DJ on the radio interrupted the rock music to announce “Your suntan turnover time is now three fifteen.” To the left was a long, spotless counter; to the right a juice bar for protein shakes and other liquid power blasters. I stepped forward and held on to the gleaming, chrome gate and turnstile that fenced off the reception room from the free-weight area.

  The weight room before me was huge—as large, in fact, as the Y’s was small. Once a munitions factory, now a gym occupying 100,000 feet, it had at least two of everything: squat racks, Smith machines, bench presses, incline presses, and row after row of black iron dumbbells. You can always tell a serious gym by its heaviest dumbbells. A good gym will have a matching set that weigh 125 pounds each. A great one houses two monsters at 180 pounds apiece. I examined the dumbbell rack in the distance, and found what I was looking for. The 180-pounders sagged on the stand—just a foot and a half long, but as heavy as a large human being.

  I couldn’t imagine anyone strong enough to actually hoist these, until I heard the screams by the squat rack. There lumbered a mountain of a man squatting with 585 pounds on the bar. He stood as close to seven feet as six, and had shaved his white skull bald except for a thin arrow of black hair that started at the base of his medulla oblongata and ended an inch above his eyebrows. He had huge lips and no forehead. He wore a sweat-stained gray XXXL sweatshirt with L. Clement stenciled in black on the back.

  “Like a human piston, Lamar! Like a human piston!” an older man with a white towel around his neck shouted behind him as Lamar performed his reps with harsh grunts and wild snorts. This rotund training partner wore an identical sweatshirt, stenciled with his own name, M. Clement. My own shirt was a parting gift from Sweepea and Mousie back at the Y. It depicted Fred Flintstone and Barnie Rubble “pumping granite” in a prehistoric weight room.

  But Lamar and his partner weren’t the only gym rats laboring on the floor. In every corner I saw them, “standing relaxed” like statues, and they were all at least twice my size. A man working on the dip bar was black and bald, like Mousie, but there the similarity ended. While Mousie had legs, and nothing else, he had everything. His arms alone had to measure over 20 inches, and they were covered with as many veins and bulges as a topographical roadmap.

  And over by the preacher bench I saw, at last, a woman bodybuilder. Her body was covered with muscles, her face with makeup, which was running from her sweat. In a voice deeper than Paul Robeson’s, she shouted “Fuckin’ A!” at every bicep rep. What appeared to be the beginning of a beard descended like Spanish moss from her upper lip down to her chin. Her back brought to mind a mohair sweater. She wasn’t quite a woman and she wasn’t quite a man, but she was, unmistakably, a builder.

  I heard a giggle, and a singsong voice from behind the counter.

  “Hi, it’s a great day at Shangri-La Fitness Training Center! My name is Tara? And how can I do you?” she smiled, revealing a perfect, gleaming set of teeth.

  She could not have been more than twenty, with bright green eyes and sun-streaked, teased blond hair which she wore in a ponytail. A shiny rubber tank top barely contained her sharply conical breasts. I marveled at the defiance of gravity and attributed it to progressive weight resistance training. I later learned it was surgery. With a quick wave of her hand, she motioned me over, as if she were going to tell me a secret.

  “Hi, guy!” she shouted. “We’d love to squeeze you in for a full year, so long as you, the client, find that to your, like, satisfaction, you know? But, hey, you know, we have, like, one day plans, one week plans, ten day plans, one month plans, three month plans, and more, uh …” she paused, looking confused. “And who do I have the pleasure of addressing?” She cocked her head to the side and played with her hair with a nervous hand.

  I did “the Walk” over to her slowly and deliberately. Keeping my lats flexed, I introduced myself. As soon as she shook my hand, she reeled back and shrieked.

  “My gawd! The calluses! Is your moon, like, in retrograde or what?” Mouth open, she examined my palm.

  “Really, guy, be straight with me. Are you, like, an immigrant laborer?” she asked.

  “No, I’m a builder,” I explained, nervously. Back in New York, I had been sure. But here, next to Lamar, the bald, black man, and the enormous she-beast, I wasn’t so sure.

  Tara kept hold of my hand, leaning forward over the counter, and said, so close I could smell her Bazooka bubble gum, “You know, Sam, like, I think your name is really rad! And you know what else? I have a feeling you’ll like it here, like, totally. And I mean, from your hand alone, I can see you’re a bodybuilder, and you know what they say about men with big hands, don’t you?”

  I looked at her warily.

  “Come on, silly! Men with big hands wear big gloves!” She tilted her head back and laughed. Then, abruptly, her expression changed and she began her sales pitch.

  “Now, I mean, did you know that all the big b
oys from the area come here? I mean, like, they all do. You’ve heard of Moses, right?” She pointed at the black behemoth I’d seen by the dip bar. “He won his weight class at the Fresno Classic last year, and placed second at Mr. Channel Islands. We have him. And, Vinnie, well,” Tara thought for a moment, “he got first, I think, at Mr. Northeastern Greenwich two years ago.”

  Keeping her hand on mine, Tara looked deep into my eyes and whispered, “He’s just so totally fine! I look at Vinnie and I think, like, anytime, buddy, just a-n-y-t-i-m-e! But that’s between you, me, and the fencepost, right, Sam?

  “And, oh, like, I almost forgot,” she continued, cupping her mouth with her hand. “There’s Raoul, the boss. He, like, runs the place, you know? He’s won the Teenage Cal, the Cal, the America, the Universe. Raoul’s done it all, and then some. See, Babe,” Tara said smiling, “you can’t help but get amped here just walking through the door! Now, I look at you, Sam, and what do I see? I see, like, a big guy who can go all the way. We provide the gym, you provide the sweat. I mean bods are definitely our business. Now, Sam, do you want to pay by cash, check, traveler’s check, MasterCard, AmEx, or auto debit?” She whipped out the metal credit-card appliance from behind the counter.

  Accompanied by the stereo sounds of Lamar screaming by the squat rack and Moses moaning by the dip bar, I swallowed hard, pulled out my traveler’s checks, and paid $400.00 for the full year.

  “Whoa! I mean, like, to the max! That shirt is just so totally rad. I mean, like, where’d you get it?” Another blond, teased thing, with a nose as curved as a ski jump, came up behind me. She wore a rubberized, glossy tube top like Tara’s, black tights, and a black lace G-string over them. She shuffled energetically to join Tara behind the counter, taking tiny geisha steps, since she hadn’t quite mastered her 6-inch, spiked heels.

  She stuck out a hand decorated with impossibly long, curved, pink nails but quickly withdrew it when I put my hand out to meet hers.