Muscle

by Samuel Wilson Fussell

  The other men and women around us, the fashionably thin rather than the fashionably muscular, did their exercises in an expressionless trance. I asked Vinnie about this. Was it a new technique? A special visualization process? Not at all, said Vinnie, the more you scrunched up your face, the more lines you developed. These shop-window mannequins were trying to preserve their faces, to protect them from premature aging.

  To Vinnie the whole matter was simple. “Shit, buddy, you don’t get to be no air stewardess lookin’ like that!” he said, pointing at G-spot. She grimaced and sneered while she worked her back. According to Vinnie, though she was barely twenty-three, she would soon bear the wrinkles of a beldam.

  At the juice bar after the workout, Vinnie bought me a 2½-ounce jar of baby food. It was Gerber’s Junior Meat Beef. At first, I thought him joking, but when I turned to Lamar I saw that he, too, was savoring a tiny something in his huge hands. You could barely see it, but there it was. Peach Cobbler, of the Gerber Junior Dessert series. All builders swore by them; they were great protein and carbohydrate sources. I suppressed a smile as Vinnie handed me a jar of Junior Chicken Noodle and a baby spoon.

  It wasn’t enough for Vinnie to feed me. Like Macon and Lamar the previous night, he offered me shelter. It was settled, he told me. He had already discussed the matter with his roommates, Nimrod and Bamm Bamm. If I wanted, I could stay with them. It wouldn’t be an inconvenience—they had an extra room. Besides, as my behavior amply proved, I was family.

  So it was I found myself using the chrome stirrup bolted to the cab and clambering unsteadily into Vinnie’s customized, jacked-up, turbo-charged pickup. Vinnie had changed into his work clothes: tights and a loose Gold’s Gym sweatshirt, with a Gold’s Gym baseball cap he wore back-to-front on his balding crown. A small button was attached to his Gold’s Gym baseball cap. It read Gold’s Gym.

  In a sense, I had truly struck gold with Vinnie. He was a bodybuilder’s bodybuilder. When obstacles arose in his path, whether in the gym or on the street, he forcibly removed them. As he put it, blaring his horn, cutting off other motorists, pausing at stoplights to hector the cars beneath us, “Yeah, Sam, why jus’ drive when you can rule the road? That’s my motto, anyway.”

  On the mad dash to 1404 Delacey, Vinnie found time, between bouts of swearing at other drivers, to brief me on his two roommates, both bodybuilders. According to Vinnie, Nimrod had class, Bamm Bamm mass. I understood. Nimrod had cuts, or the chiseled look, Bamm Bamm size.

  Vinnie parked the car in the middle of the front lawn of my new home. I smiled and waved at Nimrod and Bamm Bamm, waiting at the door. Neither of them spoke a word of greeting. Nimrod, like Vinnie, about five ten, had long blond hair that cascaded in a multiple series of tiny braids to his spinal erectors. Below the hair was the body. He was a human anatomy chart. His skin was as transparent as rice paper and beneath that gauze I saw a trellis of capillaries, veins, and arteries. His body fat was so freakishly low that every muscle fiber beneath the skin visibly shook and swayed with every movement.

  Bamm Bamm was simply huge. So huge, in fact, that from a distance, his tiny head looked like a pea resting on a ruler. He was Lamar’s size, but, my intuition told me, not quite so gentle. His clenched fists indicated that.

  The place reminded me of The Growth Center back in New York. The floors were strewn with back issues of Muscle & Fitness, Ironman, Flex, as well as the lesser known Ironsport, Muscular Development, Modern Bodybuilding and National Physique Committee News. The living room was a messy tangle of chalk, stray lifting belts, wrist straps, knee wraps, spare ammonia capsules, used jocks, baby powder. The kitchen refrigerator was covered with dozens of cutout photographs of bodybuilding champions displaying their wares on the beach. Some beefy models posed outside tropical hotels, protein powder in one hand, a dazzling blonde in the other. Others were caught in the sweaty precincts of gyms, straining during a deadlift or a clean and press. One color shot showed a shirtless Lee Haney (the current Mr. Olympia, beloved by Macon and Lamar), spreading his lats, astride a smoking manhole cover clad only in blue jeans and black Reeboks. Another showed Anja Langer, an up-and-coming star from Germany, spreading her legs onstage, peeking seductively at the crowd from beneath a bronzed thigh.

  But something was amiss. Though the familiar environment was reassuring, there was an unspoken hostility in the air. I’d felt it as soon as I’d walked through the door. It was Bamm Bamm and Nimrod. They had circled their wagons, still not proffering a word in my direction. Not when I unpacked my things in my new room, not when I put up a poster of Arnold on my new wall, not even when I added my tins of protein powder and Carboplex to the communal collection in the kitchen. All the while, I endured their silent stares, which did not relent until we sat down for lunch.

  “So you’ve just joined Shangwi-La, huh?” Bamm Bamm finally asked, his chair groaning from his bulk. There was something about the way he said Shangri-La, that made me wonder. It wasn’t the lisp that was the giveaway. It was his tone of voice—it sounded like he hated it. And sure enough, he did. All three of them did.

  As I discovered from my new friends, Shangri-La had replaced Bill Pearl’s gym which had stood for years just a few blocks away. Pearl’s was as legendary as its owner. It offered heavy weights in abundance and large humans wanting to get larger. According to Nimrod and Bamm Bamm, its other advantages included a spyhole to the women’s locker room and the tanning bed.

  But Shangri-La was another kettle of fish altogether, calling itself not a gym but a fitness training center, offering not only weights, but an aerobics floor, motivational business seminars, dietary counseling and child care. The difference lay in the personality of the owners. Or, as Nimrod put it succinctly, “Bill Pearl is Bill Pearl, man, Raoul is Raoul.”

  From what I could gather from the bitter talk at the table, Bill Pearl was pro-building, Raoul pro-business. Pearl, the greatest bodybuilder in the world in his time, built because he had to. It was an essential part of his soul. He was simply diseased; his daily workouts, which began at four A.M., were a symptom. His gym catered to men and women similarly stricken, every workout offering the opportunity for a fistfight and the “Heightened Arousal Mode.”

  But as bodybuilding became conventional in the eighties, embraced and endorsed by Yuppies across the land, Raoul had latched onto it as a business opportunity and a vehicle for his ego. He sold motivational posters of himself, car shades, key rings, booklets bearing his image, and his own line of weight-lifting wear. He even stopped working out, believing it no longer “cost-effective.” Instead, he could be found glued to the personal computer in his back office, directing the flow of merchandise. To my new friends, Raoul was shameless, since his body—at its best not in the world’s top one hundred—wasn’t worth the merchandising. Bill Pearl, with so much more to offer, wasn’t interested in selling it. One was a profiteer, the other a purist. That explained Raoul’s braces. It also explained builders vs. the world, what I had witnessed at the gym. To hardcore bodybuilders like Vinnie, Nimrod, and Bamm Bamm, the gym was no longer a refuge. Since I was a muscle parvenu, my new friends had to know where I stood. This would be tough, but not impossible.

  “So, where do you come from?” Nimrod asked gruffly.

  “New York’s from New York,” Vinnie responded.

  Nimrod looked at Vinnie. “He can speak for himself, can’t he?”

  “Yes, he can,” I said, basso profundo.

  From the other side of the table, Bamm Bamm fired his salvo, “My dad’s in the tool and die business, what about yours?”

  In good bodybuilding tradition, I paused and thought before giving an appropriate response. I couldn’t very well pipe up and say, “Oh, he’s a literary and cultural critic, perhaps you’re familiar with his latest—it’s just out in paper, you know, The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism?” No, that wouldn’t do. I had to find something stronger, something nobler.

 
“He’s dead,” I said.

  “Was he a lifter?” Nimrod asked suspiciously, pausing with his fork at his mouth.

  I was in over my head, but I couldn’t stop now. “He certainly was,” I lied. “His name was Tug. He was so massive, they buried him in a piano case and lowered the casket into the grave by crane.” I assuaged my guilt by reminding myself that a bodybuilder’s fundamental task is reinvention.

  Vinnie came to my defense and settled the matter. “Hey, Big Man’s all right,” he said, annoyed, “you should have seen him throw up this morning after squats.”

  This was just what Bamm Bamm and Nimrod wanted to hear. All three of them retired to their rooms. A few minutes later, Bamm Bamm and Nimrod returned bearing disposable syringes and glass vials.

  “Dessert,” Bamm Bamm explained, dropping his trousers and underwear as Nimrod filled an upturned 3-cc syringe with yellow liquid he drew from a vial. It looked remarkably like urine.

  Nimrod withdrew the needle from the vial, slapped Bamm Bamm’s naked ass once, then plunged the syringe an inch and a half deep into Bamm Bamm’s flesh.

  “Grow, grow, grow,” Nimrod murmured, working the plunger.

  “Jesus, Nimwod, it feels like a fuckin’ garden hose. Are you sure that’s a new one?” Bamm Bamm asked querulously.

  I thought I was going to faint. Just then, Vinnie came into the living room, and said in concern: “What, Sam, this isn’t new, is it?”

  Nimrod looked over in my direction, his face visibly brightening. When he pulled the steel dart out of Bamm Bamm’s ass, the tiny hole spurted forth a stream of blood which landed with a splat on the plastic-covered sofa. “Nimrod, Bamm Bamm, one of you get the Windex, OK?” In deference to guests, Vinnie explained to me.

  That very day, Vinnie began my education as a bodybuilder and instructed me on the merits of performance-enhancing drugs. Drugs were an essential part of “the physique agenda,” as he called it, as integral to success for a truly committed builder as hard training and a good diet. And at 1404 Delacey, one could expect these “shooting parties” every afternoon. Didn’t I know? Vinnie asked. As far as drugs were concerned, all my bodybuilding heroes were on everything but roller skates.

  I knew nothing, but I’d heard everything. Both in his autobiography and on talk shows, Arnold admitted his steroid use with a mischievous chuckle. But Arnold could afford to laugh, he had retired. For the current crop of world-class bodybuilders, steroids were a nonsubject. But if the bodybuilding community clammed up on steroids, there was no shortage of juice yarns among lesser lifters. Rumors of “’roid rage” drifted through every gym. It was said to be a violent, psychotic condition linked to testosterone intake. I knew that in Maryland a thief had even won a jury’s sympathy by claiming “the steroid defense.” If it didn’t excuse his series of nocturnal neighborhood robberies and assaults, at least it explained it.

  From what the newspapers said, these drugs had been around since the early fifties for medical patients suffering adrenal insufficiency, certain types of anemia, and massive tissue loss. But in 1958, Dr. John Ziegler, a physician for the U.S. weight-lifting team, developed with the Ciba pharmaceutical company America’s first anabolic steroid specifically designed for strength athletes. They christened their wonder drug Dianabol (in the gym, it’s abbreviated as D-ball).

  In the sixties and early seventies steroids were the secret of strength athletes. It was the lifters and shotputters and discus throwers of the world who used the drugs. But word got around, and by the mid-seventies steroids had found their way to the training table of professional and college football players. By the late eighties steroid use had exploded. Studies showed that 6 percent of high school students and 15 to 20 percent of college athletes admitted taking steroids. Football, tennis, cross-country skiing, track and field, swimming, even fencing—no sport was immune. But it was in bodybuilding, the only sport that relies exclusively on muscle mass for judgment, the drugs worked best, and bodybuilders have been using them since the days of Dr. Ziegler.

  Vinnie took time out from what he called his “import/export business” to educate me personally in this matter. Being on the juice, or taking steroids, or, as some lifters call it, “taking shit,” simply meant that the builder was using either synthetic male hormone of an oral variety or an injectable one. Whether you swallow it or inject it, the drug eventually finds its way into the bloodstream where it spots muscle cells and attaches itself to receptor sites within each cell. The result? An increased level of protein synthesis within each cell, which, over time, means greater muscles and faster recuperation for the lifter.

  No, I couldn’t count on 30 or 40 pounds of muscle gain over a few months, as articles in Sports Illustrated suggested (the same articles that spoke so vividly of “’roid rage”). But if I trained like a wild man and ate voraciously, I could count on at least 10 and maybe 15 pounds of muscle gain (much of it in the form of water retention) over the same period of time.

  Vinnie led me into his own room to continue my education. The place looked like a Federal Express terminal, filled with plain brown envelopes and cardboard containers of all sizes. Vinnie’s business, he readily admitted, was steroids. At the foot of his bed was his “treasure chest,” as he called it, a footlocker holding scores of magical growth enhancers in bottle and vial form. I couldn’t believe the sheer variety of pharmaceutical options available to those involved in the pursuit of muscular accretion. A whole new world opened up to me filled with mystical names and properties.

  Names like Finajet, Dihydrotest, testosterone cypionate, Anadrol, Deca, Esclene, Lasix, Dianabol, Halotestin, Blastron. They sounded like city-states in a science fiction novel. Maxibol, Primoteston Depot 100, Proviron, Sostenon 250, Cytomel. There were drugs that increased your strength, drugs that decreased your body fat, drugs that ballooned the muscle for just a few hours, drugs that altered your mood.

  Vinnie saved the best for last. He lovingly cradled in his hands a large bottle that contained a liquid substance known as human growth hormone. It had been extracted from the pituitary glands of cadavers. It was sweet stuff, said Vinnie, used by all bodybuilding greats in the 8-week countdown before a contest. Excessive use, of course, promoted an unsightly enlargement of the jaw and forehead, the mysterious appearance of a gap between the two front teeth, the irreversible growth of the extremities (including the genitals), and, occasionally, sudden death. But it was just these possibilities, Vinnie added with a wild look, that made human growth hormone, or HGH, the ultimate test of a builder’s commitment.

  It wasn’t just HGH that could be followed by bad news, though—at least according to the white slip of paper that fell to the floor from one of Vinnie’s vials. In my hands, the sheet folded out like an accordion, and I read the fine print of the manufacturer’s warning detailing the negative effects from undergoing any form of what Vinnie grandly called “steroid therapy.”

  A condition called gynecomastia was one (what Tony, back at the Juice Bar, had called “gyno” that morning). It was more commonly known in the gym as “bitch tits,” in which the victim suffers a bulbous swelling under one or both nipples—the body’s estrogen reaction to counteract the flood of testosterone. Take a good look in the magazines at the best bodybuilders, the Mr. Olympia contenders, Vinnie suggested, and you’ll find quite a selection of big builders sporting the telltale tumor.

  But all was not lost, he assured me. A drug called Nolvadex could be taken to counteract the original drug that created the condition. The jury was still out on the possible side effects of Nolvadex.

  And there were other little problems from the drugs, the sheet said, problems like premature baldness, lowered sperm count, increased body hair, rectal bleeding, dizzy spells, thyroid and liver and kidney malfunction, gallstones, cancer, gastrointestinal upset, hepatitis, raised levels of aggression (“’roid rage” again), and, of course, acne. I noticed that Vinnie himself suffered from the
latter malady, and asked him if his skin condition was related to his steroid-supplementation program.

  “You know, Sam, I think muscles are worth a few zits, don’t you?” he asked.

  I watched as Vinnie delved into his treasure chest and emerged with a small box of one hundred white pills, a syringe, and two vials for me. Vinnie prescribed four Anavar pills after breakfast and four more after dinner. They should never be taken on an empty stomach, he warned, or I might get ulcers. Eight of these per day for the next eight weeks, along with two shots per week of injectables ought to break my plateau quite nicely.

  Each injection consisted of 2 ccs of Deca and 1 cc of testosterone cypionate. The testosterone and Deca (the bread-and-butter drug of bodybuilders) would work well for my strength and weight gain. The Anavar, combined with what Vinnie called “an intelligent diet,” would help me get cut (or defined).

  As I lowered my trousers and underwear, and bared my ass cheek, I tried to fight off my fear of needles by concentrating on the financial aspects of the operation. Vinnie charged me “wholesale prices” for the drugs: I bought four Anavar bottles (one hundred pills each) at $25.00 a bottle; sixteen 2-cc vials of Deca at $5.00 each; and two 10-cc vials of testosterone cypionate at $20.00 apiece. My first eight-week cycle cost $220.00 (prices vary according to how many hands touch the drugs before you do). But when Vinnie neared with the inch and a half syringe, my jaw dropped. Was I taking too much too soon?

  Not to worry, said Vinnie. True, I was “stacking” on my first “cycle,” that is, taking more than one drug at a time on my eight-to-ten-week program. But he had been “shotgunning” for years, inundating his body with all kinds of quantities in all kinds of combinations in the hope that his body hadn’t built an immunity to them all. Nimrod and Bamm Bamm did the same, and they were still standing, weren’t they? They were in fact, just then, watching and giggling a few feet away.

  “You’re a big man, Sam,” Vinnie said, silencing me with a look, “and big men take big cycles. That’s how they get real big.” I waited for the inevitable, and, sure enough, it came. “Besides, that which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”