Muscle

by Samuel Wilson Fussell

  I only hoped to God that which made me stronger didn’t kill me. I yelped as Vinnie plunged the needle attached to a plastic, disposable syringe into me. It felt as thick as a finger. My gluteus muscles began to fibrillate helplessly in shock.

  I told myself that taking steroids was a Faustian bargain. I was selling my soul to the devil in exchange for transcending what was permitted to ordinary mortals. I was my own alchemist, I said, transmuting the base metal of myself, the dross, into gold. To the diseased, there is no pyrite.

  It was intensely personal, but I could deal with it only abstractly. To bodybuild without steroids was to read Russian literature in translation, I said, rubbing my hand over my swollen, twitching bottom. I even invoked the transitive property of equality: bodybuilding and muscular growth are synonymous; steroids and muscular growth are synonymous; therefore bodybuilding and steroids are synonymous.

  When faced with the syringe, even my own worst fears didn’t matter. I couldn’t stop. Seventeen-inch arms were not enough; I wanted 20. And when I got to 20, I was sure that I’d want 22. My retreat to the weight room was a retreat into the simple world of numbers. Numerical gradations were the only thing left in my life that made sense. Twenty was better than 17, but worse than 22. Bench pressing 315 was better than bench pressing 275, but worse than 365. I was reduced to a world where such thinking ruled, and it was only by embracing it that I could sleep at night.

  Besides, I was desperate. If who you are is what you do, and as a bodybuilder, what you do is what you look like, then in California I was distinctly in trouble, because I didn’t look like a bodybuilder. Not after two years of training. Not compared to Vinnie or Nimrod, much less Raoul, or even Lamar.

  And as long as I didn’t look like a builder, I wasn’t comfortable with myself. Delivering my muscle lines was not enough. Mr. World, Tom Platz, was quoted in USA Today as saying he first took steroids because in competitions, “you get tired of finishing second.” I was concerned far less with competition than with self-identity. I needed to complete my transformation. As long as the part I played was simply interior, I felt like a fraud. No, I needed the juice in the worst way, to make myself whole. I needed to complete the new persona, to make myself into a bodybuilder.

  When Vinnie reached into his footlocker to get some blue Dianabol pills and a syringe for himself, he confided to me of lean times back in New York, when he had fled from life with the help of cocaine and the bottle.

  “Yeah, Sam, after a few years with AA and other support groups, I got off the drugs and alcohol, and I ain’t never looked back,” he said. I watched as he plunged 3 ccs of Deca Durabolin into his own ass cheek. I was startled by the state of Vinnie’s bottom. It looked like an aerial shot of Ypres, circa 1917, with great craters here, trenches there, everywhere physical bombardment. Vinnie noticed my look of alarm and explained his condition.

  “It’s scar tissue, Sam, from the injections,” he said, chuckling at my reaction. “You know, sometimes I get little knots in my ass. And when I push the needle in, it hits a knot and bounces right on out. Hell, you play the game, you pay the price, but no problem, you can’t see the scars when I’m wearin­’ my posin’ trunks, so the judges can’t take off no points. Every few months, you know, in a periodical fashion, I go to a surgeon­, and he removes a knot or two.”

  As he spoke, I watched the blood seep out from my recent puncture wound to spread through the fabric of my underwear. Despite my resolve, I felt sick to my stomach.

  8. THE DIGS

  WHAT PEOPLE SAW WHEN HE APPEARED BEFORE THEM, THEN, WAS NOT REALLY HIM, BUT A PERSON HE HAD INVENTED, AN ARTIFICIAL CREATURE HE COULD MANIPULATE IN ORDER TO MANIPULATE OTHERS. HE HIMSELF REMAINED INVISIBLE, A PUPPETEER WORKING THE STRINGS OF HIS ALTER-EGO FROM A DARK, SOLITARY PLACE BEHIND THE CURTAIN.

  —PAUL AUSTER

  I had come to California knowing I would take steroids. But I hadn’t expected to be on them by my second day. From the very start, I relied on “the juice” to give me two things I sorely lacked after only two and a half years of lifting: thickness and “muscle maturity.” The thickness lessons I’d taken at the Y had been a start, but if it weren’t for steroids, I’d need at least three more years to really get thick. As for “muscle maturity,” that’s the polish, the sheen, the finish in the form of deep-muscle separation and definition that comes with a half-decade of training. A half-decade, that is, unless one resorts to the juice. And I, for one, couldn’t wait three or four or five more years to become myself. I was so uncomfortable not being “me” that I had to have it, now.

  I took that first injection in October of 1986 and within two months, I had gained 15 pounds on my first cycle. Much of it was water retention; my body shape remained the same, but I didn’t notice that. What I noticed was that the scale read 245 pounds. The plateau had finally been shattered. As long as I stuffed myself with my bodybuilding foods and swallowed my eight Anavar pills a day, and twice a week endured my testosterone and Deca injections, I could count on not losing a pound. At least, I hoped that was what I was taking. Because of the extraordinary demand, the market was flooded with bogus steroids. Retailers not uncommonly substituted pills of aspirin for Anavar, and replaced vials of legitimate steroids with vegetable and sesame seed oil. Builders call them blanks.

  But judging by my gains, both in strength and bodyweight, my source was pure. My bench press increased from a 1-rep best of 315 to 405 pounds in six months. I went from benching 275 for eight to 365 for eight. My squat increased from 405 to 545. Bent over rows from 225 to 315, dumbbell curls from 60 to 75.

  The heavier weight I lifted forced my body to respond. Pumping out 10 reps with 225 pounds on the incline bench is a strain, but 10 reps with 315 pounds is much more of a strain. Now that I was capable of the latter, my body had no choice but to grow.

  In six short weeks I was no longer the smallest resident of 1404 Delacey. Almost before my eyes, my arms gained half an inch, my thighs three-quarters of an inch, my neck a full inch. It wasn’t long before I surpassed Nimrod on all the major strength exercises in the gym. Soon after that, I overtook Vinnie himself.

  But while I looked better and better, I began to feel worse and worse. Headaches were a daily affair. And I worried. Among the many ’roid rumors, there were some unmistakable facts. In 1984, for instance, weight-lifting great Paul Anderson underwent a kidney transplant. In 1987, Mr. America, Dave Johns, a notorious juicer, died from what physicians termed “a mysterious fever.” Professional bodybuilder Dave Draper suffered a massive coronary, Tom Platz endured the ignominy of gallstones.

  If the health reports from the field were staggering, they could always be explained away—at least by my fellow gym rats. Studies have found that steroids lead to an increased risk of heart disease, I whispered nervously. Well, yes, but is it the steroids, or all that stuffing of food and sudden weight gain, they rebutted. There seems to be a link between steroids and that psychotic emotional condition known as “’roid rage,” I mentioned, as casually as possible. Well yes, my muscular friends replied, but is it the steroids, or the frame of mind a lifter has to have to lift inhuman quantities of weight?

  The more I researched the steroid results, the more I understood their answers. To date, it is all a gray, murky zone, untested and unproven. As Dr. James C. Puffer, head physician for the U.S. team in the 1988 Olympics Games, has admitted: “We don’t know as much as we pretend to know.” There are far more questions about the drug than answers, mainly because in the few experiments done in the past, doctors have had difficulty getting athletes to take just the prescribed doses. As we might imagine by now, the builders have had a tendency to do more. …

  And to bodybuilders—save for the renegade physicians who still prescribed steroids—the medical community as a whole was not to be trusted. After all, for over a decade the American College of Sports Medicine had officially maintained that steroids didn’t work, that they failed to increas
e muscle mass. The fact was that they did. Vinnie and Bamm Bamm and Nimrod could all attest to that. The question was: What else did they do? From October of 1986 to September of 1988, I found out for myself.

  The rectal bleeding, I passed off as just a consequence of my deep squatting technique. Vinnie always made fun of his own hemorrhoids, calling attention to what he called “flippers” that seemed to emerge, crawling and quivering with life, from the site of the discomfort. But rectal bleeding could always be hidden with Vinnie’s Huggies.

  It was the acne I couldn’t hide. As the months flew by and I trained and ate and injected, the acne invasion spread from my face to my neck, my chest, my upper back, even my scalp, until, finally, it found its way to my shins and toes. Wherever I had skin, I had pimples.

  But the biggest pain was in my ass. It ached constantly from my twice weekly injections. For weeks on end, a bad shot left a knot, a fist-sized tightening and swelling. The only proper way to receive the syringe was to relax the ass cheek and jab the needle in quickly, all the way to the base. But I had a tendency to tighten my gluteus muscles in fear. The result? A bruise the size of a pomegranate. Vinnie laughed at my problems, advising me not to wear tights. I learned to sit down very gingerly.

  I was grateful that, even though I had increased my dosage significantly, I hadn’t yet begun to grow bald like Nimrod or Bamm Bamm. And though I checked every so often during the course of the day, I could not detect the beginning of a bitch-tit lurking beneath either nipple. Soreness, yes. An actual bulb, no.

  The reaction wasn’t just physical. I found myself psychologically affected as well. Judging by my behavior, I had to admit that self-defense was no longer my muscle motive. Now, out on the sidewalk or in line at the movie theater, sitting­ in the park or standing at the bank, I needed to rule. Self-preservation­ had metamorphosed into something quite beyond self-publication. The T-shirts and tank tops and body language I’d used back in New York no longer sufficed.

  I was fueled by my own anger, which I seemed to draw from an inexhaustible source. I watched almost as a spectator as my body operated beyond my control. I wasn’t just aching for a fistfight, I was begging for it. I longed for the release. So I strutted through the city streets, a juggernaut in a do-rag, glaring and menacing anyone who dared meet my eye. On the road, I was no better than Vinnie. Any motorist ahead of me drove too slowly, and I tailgated them mercilessly to teach them a lesson. Anyone behind me drove too fast, and I cured them of tailgating by grinding Vinnie’s bastard barge to a complete halt, shaking in nervous excitement behind the wheel in anticipation of blows. The shouting matches invariably ended as soon as I discarded my shirt for battle. My opponents always fled.

  In calmer moments, my behavior baffled and frightened me, but Vinnie understood it at once. “Shit, Big Man, that’s just takin’ charge,” he explained. “Ain’t nothin’ wrong with that. Do you think the cowboys asked the Injuns for their land? You bet your ass they didn’t. They just shot ’em and took it, right?”

  To him, my “attitude” was perfect. To take charge, as he put it, whenever and wherever possible was the natural state of things. I was like a shark, he said. It made my motives sound almost pure.

  Little solace that would have been to the man I encountered in the supermarket on Fair Oaks Avenue. Toupee and all, he quibbled with the cashier over twenty cents on an item purchased. The argument lasted over three minutes while the rest of us in line waited silently behind him. Finally, I couldn’t wait another second.

  “GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!” I screamed at the man. “YOU’RE HOLDING US BACK!” I yelled, as if the issue concerned muscular growth. The man didn’t utter a sound. His face turned white, and holding his rug to his scalp, he fled.

  In the gym, I was even worse. I refused to let others work in with me while I did my exercises. Time was, a cheer and a nod from me would welcome them, but not now. Not when I spent the 45 seconds between my sets stalking and pacing nervously by the equipment. I resented even the passage of time for delaying my next set.

  From my first moment on the juice, nothing else mattered. Nothing but my workouts, my growth, my meals, my injections, and my friends, who were concerned with their workouts, their growth, their meals, their injections. Everything else was not just secondary—it was positively inconsequential.

  “ISOLATE!” Vinnie screamed at me in the gym as the months passed. “ISOLATE!”

  He was referring to the technique known as “Muscle Isolation,” maximizing growth by blocking out distractions and concentrating only on the muscle at hand. So I thought only of my biceps or my triceps or my deltoids or my calves during workouts. But we could have been anywhere at any time, because “Muscle Isolation” didn’t stop in the gym.

  Back at 1404 Delacey, we builders were nothing if not isolated, sequestered in willful disobedience against the rest of the world, and steroids were our agents of divorce. It was us against them, bodybuilders against mankind. Our home was like a sumo wrestler’s stable. In place of the mawashi (the ceremonial diaper), the geta (wooden sandals), and the formal kimona worn by the sumotori outside the stable, we wrapped ourselves in our layers of Gold’s Gym clothes. They defined who we were and what we did as clearly as our refusal to eat restaurant food (where meat might suffer the taint of salt or fish the sacrilege of butter). The sumotori stuffed themselves with their sacred chankonabe (boiled fish or meat, vegetables and seaweed), while we downed our chicken breasts, fish, yams, dry noodles, and defatted beef in the privacy of our refuge.

  But we shared more than vestments and diet and sequestration. In both sports, posture was half the performance. Measuring his opponent in the ring, the sumo wrestler goes through his ritual: the rice fling, the foot stomp, the stare, the restless shifting into position, the eventual contact. The mirror in the gym, the lifting belt, the ammonia, the slap, the scream, the lift—bodybuilding was not much different. For Vinnie, for Nimrod, for Bamm Bamm, for me, it was an existence so stylized it left room for little else. That was the point.

  “EAT BIG, SLEEP BIG, TRAIN BIG” was the iron edict obeyed by all of us. In our muscle stable, we averaged 5,000 calories a day. The stove was constantly burning, the oven baking, the refrigerator cooling, the cupboards storing. The preparation of food, the storing of food, the consumption of food, the elimination of food. “You can’t grow unless you eat” is a bodybuilding maxim that we at 1404 Delacey proved true. Nimrod injected himself on a daily basis with vitamin B12 in order to maintain his extraordinary appetite. Vinnie could be heard throwing up every afternoon from an excess of food even his body couldn’t take. Considering the frequency and volume with which Bamm Bamm ate, it was a wonder that he weighed only 290 pounds.

  To us, food represented fuel for the future. Every chicken breast and beef flank we ate was consumed in the hope that it would help make us into the giants we dreamed of being. A few chicken helpings more, and we were that much closer to turning our dreams into reality.

  The toll of all this food and two daily workouts with heavy, heavy weight was a chronic need for rest. Such, in fact, was the demand of the discipline that we were incapable of doing anything else. At Oxford, I’d gotten by on six hours of sleep at night. Here in Southern California, I found I needed twelve just to make it through the day, and my friends were no different.

  We saved most of our dreaming for our waking hours, the afternoon hours the three of us spent in the living room practicing our posing. Surfers dream of the perfect wave, builders of the perfect 90 seconds of posing. In bodybuilding competitions, the 90 seconds are called “the free posing round.”

  For just one minute and a half, the builder glides on the dais to the musical composition of his or her choice. Vinnie was still misty-eyed over his last performance at the Southwestern Connecticut State Bodybuilding Championship. As he reminisced (and not for the first time), “Let me just say one thing, guys, it was as good as an erection. There I was, on stage
in my posing oil and black trunks, and the crowd really loved me. I mean I moved ’em with my posing exhibition. It was just my fuckin’ time.”

  All of my roommates had competed, and with their help, I learned not only the standard poses, like the front double-biceps and the back-lat spread, but the accepted variations, like the Farnese Hercules and Michelangelo’s David. Bodybuilders have used the postures of classical and renaissance sculpture for effect since Sandow at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Farnese Hercules included one foot forward and one foot back, one arm in front of the body at hip level and one arm behind, a tightening of the torso and a pensive look downward. David involved a hip shift to the right with a corresponding move of bodyweight onto the right leg. From there, the right hand held at the right thigh, the left arm held up near the shoulder (as if holding the dreaded sling), and a look of nobility to the left. Every afternoon, we resembled a parodic tableau vivant, mechanically moving in and out of our poses.

  But while my three friends delighted in their posing, I couldn’t quite stomach it. It was no problem for me to make myself a living statue. It was a problem to believe in it. No matter how I figured it, the fundamental purpose of a posing routine seemed to be to encapsulate and reduce life to 90 ticking seconds. Somehow, it rankled me; it seemed wrong. As wrong, in its own way, as bullying people out on the street. As wrong as subscribing to that other act of life-reduction so favored by Xandra and Vinnie and Lamar: the motto. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t eradicate my skepticism.

  The magazines didn’t help. My roommates spent their few non-lifting, non-eating, non-sleeping hours reading them, pausing every so often to announce what they would do when they were discovered by “Joe.”