To them and the rest of the bodybuilding community, “Joe” meant Joe Weider, the muscle publisher, impresario and self-proclaimed “Master Blaster,” the one-time grocery delivery boy and short-order cook who had parlayed his teenage lifting fanaticism into a publishing empire. With over 2,000 employees, his business grosses more than $250 million a year.
His magazines include Muscle & Fitness, Shape, Flex, Men’s Fitness, and, yes, Moxie. Joe Weider sponsored and created the greatest bodybuilding contest, the Mr. Olympia. He cofounded with his brother Ben the International Federation of Bodybuilders (the dominant professional league) with 136 member countries. He brought Arnold to America and kept a limited number of builders on salary.
But I knew even more about Joe. Unlike my friends, I had different sources, the daily newspapers and weekly newsmagazines, and I knew that this same Joe had recently shelled out $400,000 to the Federal Trade Commission for an out-of-court settlement involving his “Anabolic Mega-Pak” and his “Dynamic Life Essence” pills. According to the United States government, they were not the surefire muscle growers advertised in his magazines.
And there was more. While his magazine Muscle & Fitness belabors the point that bodybuilding really has nothing to do with vanity, Joe Weider’s name can be found well over two hundred times in every issue. It’s everywhere, from the front cover to the labels of the products advertised in its pages, from the trophies the builders hold in the photos to the glowing testimonials entitled “My Friend Joe Weider.”
Issue after issue of Muscle & Fitness presented my roommates with the same photograph of an awe-inspiring bust of Joe, their Joe. But I had read that Joe admitted that the bust was a sham. The muscular torso, the swollen arms, everything beneath the collarbone, in fact, belonged to IFBB competitor Robby Robinson. Only the face belonged to Joe, and by 1990 it was in sorry sagging shape.
My roommates ignored the Joe who, under attack, defended himself by saying Jesus and Moses had had their detractors too. It never seemed to occur to them that most of the articles in Joe’s magazines were simply advertising spiels for the protein products and arm blasters found in the pages that followed.
I didn’t draw it to their attention, but it was hard not to notice these facts myself. To my roommates, Ben Weider, brother of Joe, was a brilliant bodybuilding administrator. But I had read that Ben had a passion for Napoleonic memorabilia, including, in his private collection, a priceless lock of Bonaparte’s hair. If that isn’t a warning sign, what is?
The newspapers I read were also a valuable asset in shedding light on other heroes in the muscle magazines. In Muscle & Fitness, Sergio Oliva was one of the greatest Mr. Olympias the world has ever known. In the newspapers, he was dissuaded from beating his battered wife to a pulp only by a few well-aimed shots triggered by her from his own revolver. In the hagiography of the muscle magazines, Dennis Tinerino was Mr. Universe. In the black-and-white print of the newspapers, he was arrested and jailed for pandering.
I didn’t tell my roommates that my Joe and Ben and Sergio and Dennis were one and the same as theirs. I saw no reason to infect them with my knowledge. The fact that I knew it was awful enough, since once I perceived it, I couldn’t very well pretend that none of it mattered, any more than I could pretend that those “’roid rages” of mine on the road and in the grocery store were cowboy and Indian fun.
I felt I had to know more about my muscle crusade. It no longer seemed so noble or defensible a proposition as I’d once thought. In the gym, I was fine because it was the one place on earth I was safe from the perils of thought. But Lamar and Vinnie, Nimrod and Bamm Bamm, diapers and baby food, demands and rages? Was I, too, a case of arrested development, caught in a perpetual nightmare of adolescence? Or, despite everything, was I judging too hastily? What had led them to iron and why did they stick it out, burrowing ever deeper into the gym world? If a man is known by the company he keeps, what kind of company was I keeping? I felt that if I could learn a little more about them, I might learn a little more about myself.
Thus I found myself wandering back to the rooms of my roommates. “Nimrod,” I asked, “what led you to iron?”
“When I graduated from junior high,” Nimrod recalled fondly, “Dad gave me my first weights, a bench-press set and a squat rack.”
I remembered my own eighth grade graduation. My father had proudly presented me with a full reference library consisting of fifty bulky leather-bound volumes.
“Since then,” Nimrod said, “I ain’t never looked back. From 125 to 280.”
“280?” I asked. Nimmy was large, but because of his year-round ripped condition, not that large. Two hundred forty would have been stretching it.
“Two hundred eighty,” he said, leading me into his room.
As I crossed the threshold, the first thing that struck me was The Work. The only decoration in the room, it hung above the waterbed. All the other walls were bare. I tiptoed around the magazines carelessly strewn on the floor to examine a king-sized sheet nailed to the wall. On its white surface, Nimrod had painstakingly painted the number 280. This was the only mark on the sheet. An open bucket of wet black paint with a brush in it lay beneath The Work. The individual numbers were raised a full inch off the cotton surface, like welts, from so many repeated coatings.
“Two eighty, that’s my goal for January first, 280.”
I didn’t know what to say. I came out with “Don’t serve time, make time serve you.” I’d heard it in the gym. It seemed appropriate.
But Nimrod didn’t hear a thing. He only had eyes for his sheet, and before long he mechanically moved to the wall, stooped to pick up the brush, then set about repeating his applications. As he labored, he told me of his affiliation with the University of Florida. Nimrod hadn’t actually been a student there, but that hadn’t prevented him from living on campus. In the women’s dorms exclusively. In fact, Nimrod had spent four full years servicing the sororities of the University of Florida. As he said, “It beats dieting for a contest, eh?”
“You must have been a busy man,” I said wistfully. I hadn’t been that busy in well over a year. My New York girlfriend had jilted me for her fiancé. “What’s your secret?” I asked.
He closed the door. “Hydrogen peroxide, extensions, and contacts,” he whispered.
I looked at him, baffled.
“Once a week I take a teaspoon of hydrogen peroxide with my water. It clears up the skin,” he confessed.
As for his hair, those long gleaming blond locks were made of dyed nylon. “Extensions,” he called them. They were strands of hair actually anchored and woven into his own dark roots. At last I understood why Nimrod was the only builder I knew without that scraggly scattering of hair known as the “picket fence” look, so common among heavy steroid users.
Nimrod completed “the package,” as he called himself, with his contact lenses, which were colored to make his brown eyes blue.
“Aside from that, it’s the muscles. Jesus, do you know how many chicks I’ve pulled thanks to this?” he said, flexing, then staring in admiration at his engorged bicep.
“Big Man Muscles,” I said, parroting Vinnie.
“Hey, if you seen me pumped up in the gym, you don’t think I’m no man!” He spat out the word in disgust. “You’d think I was, like, a race horse, yeah, one of those gleaming thoroughbreds with my blond mane whistling in the wind. I don’t look like no guy. I don’t want to look like no guy.
“Look here,” he said, “how many inches you got?” I wasn’t sure how to interpret this and hemmed and hawed until Nimrod grabbed my upper arm.
“Oh, that … uh, 18,” I estimated.
“Hanging?” He meant with my arm simply lying limp, not flexed.
“About 17,” I admitted.
“See, I got 20 inches hanging and the way I train, these babies are here to stay. I want to look like something you’ve never seen before.”
I understood. The shock value is all. It’s saying, or rather screaming, “More than anything else in the world, whatever it takes, I don’t want to be like you. I don’t want to look like you, I don’t want to talk like you, I don’t want to be you.”
I forbore to suggest my own theory to Nimrod: that bodybuilding, decorating the body to such an extreme, was a principally feminine exercise (not to mention the extensions and contacts). He wouldn’t have heard me even if I had.
He’d wandered back with his brush to the sheet and was busy applying more coats. It didn’t matter to him what he looked like at 280 pounds. He just wanted to get there, stay there, then diet down from there for a contest. It was a very sad day for us all at 1404 Delacey when, months later, Nimrod tearfully painted over the upper portion of his 8 to alter it to a 6. He felt it was more realistic. We felt that someone had died in the family.
I hated to admit it even to myself, but there was something about what Nimrod had said about hating to be human that rang a bell inside me. It wasn’t that I wanted to be a dog or a cat or even a dolphin or, as in Nimrod’s case, a horse. Their lives seemed far worse than mine. It was just that I didn’t see much about being human that I liked either. Pre-iron, I’d spent my days convicting myself of avarice and envy and sloth. To become something else seemed the only alternative. As long as I covered myself with the equivalent of scaffolding and labeled myself a “work in progress,” I could escape the doubt and uncertainty that plagued my past and spend every second of my present concentrating on a pristine future. I hated the flawed, weak, vulnerable nature of being human as much as I hated the Adam’s apple which bobbed beneath my chin. The attempt at physical perfection grew from seeds of self-disgust.
In Bamm Bamm’s room, there was no telling sheet, but I did find him posing before his closet mirror.
Aside from his enormous muscles, Bamm Bamm’s stretch marks caught my eye. They were a series of parallel red rips in his skin that raked from his underarms to his pectoral muscles. As testifiable marks of growth, they were the envy of the gym.
“Jesus,” I muttered, repelled.
“Yeah, wooks wike an eagle’s talons, don’t it?” Bamm Bamm said, gloating.
Bamm Bamm had first started to lift weights for football. As an offensive lineman, he needed bulk and strength. But his career ended on the sidelines of Glendale Junior College, when, in front of the team, he had struck his head coach with “a forearm shiver” for reasons clear to Bamm Bamm and to no one else.
Since no college team dared have him, he’d lifted weights seriously for the next seven years. Just two years before I spoke to him, he competed in the nation’s best state show, the NPC Mr. California, but finished out of the running for the heavyweight title. Nimrod had told me that Bamm Bamm had failed to diet. Bamm Bamm explained the decision of the judges as “powitics.”
But Bamm Bamm didn’t want to talk about football or bodybuilding, he wanted to talk about war. “They’ve outwawed it, Sam,” he said, shaking his head in misery. “There are no more wars, no more Koweas or Vietnams. That’s why we have wifting, and this …” he said, opening his closet door.
Within I saw a helmet, and the rest of his armor. He had purchased it from Thornbird Arms in the San Fernando Valley. Once every few months, he left with Freewyn, a lifter from the nearby Fanatics Gym for a weekend war regulated by The Society for Creative Anachronism.
“I fight in a wogue spwinter gwoup, under a duke,” Bamm Bamm said, with a touch of defiance.
His last war was waged near Scottsdale, Arizona. Within spitting distance of the I-10 freeway, Bamm Bamm and a few hundred other knights from Ciad (the Southern California district) fought Adenvelt (the Arizona district) for their kingdom.
Bamm Bamm had forty “kills” that weekend, and a broken nose. Though the weapons are made of rattan, the armor is real. When a poleax struck his steel helmet, the nose guard came down and spliced his nose.
But Bamm Bamm wasn’t counting on fighting for Ciad much longer. In fact, as soon as he collected the money, he planned on emigrating to Australia.
“It’s a fwontier town, you know,” he said testily. “People know what’s wight there. They wespect a man for his size,” he sniffed.
Muscles as merit badges and armor. God, that too seemed familiar. I who could remember every test score I’d ever received back to the second grade, yet couldn’t remember half my teachers’ names. I who had cynically selected every academic institution I’d attended not for its offerings but for its reputation. I’d been far less interested in an education than in documented proof of scholarly success. Even Bamm Bamm’s search for war wasn’t too different from my own entry into the gym. As long as we created for ourselves a rite of passage, we could instill our lives with meaning. Knights errant both, we wore our weight-lifting belts over one shoulder like baldrics, packing our own form of heat in the event of Armageddon. How much easier it made life, whether the enemy was Adenvelt or my Adam’s apple or meat with more than 15 percent fat.
I wasn’t at all reassured by what I had heard from Nimrod and Bamm Bamm, just saddened—about them, about me. And when I found Vinnie in his room, my self-doubts only grew.
There among the boxes of Huggies and the baby food, the cartons of steroids and the vitamins, a photographic portrait caught my eye. I hadn’t seen it before. It showed a much younger and tinier Vinnie with his arms wrapped around his kid brother back in New York. It had been taken before Vinnie found his way to the gym, that much I knew, because in every photo since then he stood before the camera as straight and stiff and grim as a soldier.
“You like photos, Sam?” Vinnie asked.
“Sure,” I answered.
“Yuh don’t say?” Vinnie continued, visibly excited. “You know, I’ve been doin’ a lot of picture work, lately? Did you know that? Did you know I got acting talent?” Vinnie peered at me as if wondering whether I could be trusted. Deciding in my favor, he returned from his closet with a large professional black portfolio.
“See, I can go somewhere in this field here. Hey, you don’t have to just own a gym like Raoul, or sell shit,” Vinnie said, unzipping the great book and opening it.
There crouched Vinnie, fishing rod in hand, completely naked, a pastoral stage set behind him and a stream made from what looked like Saran Wrap before him. There he was in another photo, starkers once more, this time in a classroom setting, sporting an elongated dunce cap and an erection, as he serviced a bespectacled girl, who, I gathered, was the teacher in the scene. She, in turn, comforted the nether regions of a pimply faced female pupil who squatted before her.
“You know, Sam, bodybuilding presents a number of film and still opportunities,” Vinnie said as I flipped through the pages.
One photo in particular caught my eye. It was a mermaid. She looked so sad, so vulnerable, that my heart went out to her.
“That’s Mandy,” Vinnie shouted, ripping the photo out of my hands. “Shit, does that chick have bedpan eyes or what? Sam, I really felt somethin’ for her. I mean, she could suck a hubcap off a cab from twenty feet.”
He looked at me suddenly with concern: “Look, Sam, don’t tell Nimrod or Bamm Bamm ’bout none of this, OK? See, for now, it only pays the rent, but soon, I’ll make it to higher budget things.”
It didn’t come as a complete surprise. From my reading of the muscle books, I knew that bodybuilding and pornography had always been inextricably intertwined. Eugene Sandow at the turn of the century posed, for cold cash and public titillation, in a glass booth and a fig leaf. His follower, Bernarr Macfadden sold photographs of his hard physique in the buff. These sold well. Those of his wife in flesh tights sold better. And, in recent history, Serge Nubret, Arnold’s rival in the early seventies, had done hard-core film work in France.
As I sat beside Vinnie and drank my protein shake down to the lees (a sprinkling of lecithin granules, the yolky remains
of a raw egg), I worried about my own possible future in the still and film world. I feared that complete exposure might reveal a lagging body part to the judges.
9. THE VOCATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES
“WHO IS HE?” TENDS TO ACCOMPANY “WHAT IS HE?” AND SOMETIMES TO PRECEDE IT, AND THE CONSEQUENCES IN LIFE AS IN ART ARE COMIC OR TRAGIC OR IN THE GREAT GREY WASTES BETWEEN.
—PETER STANSKY AND WILLIAM ABRAHAMS
My mother tried. God, how she tried. Through the mail came a ceramic toothbrush rack in the shape of a muscular torso, a porcelain toilet roll holder made of bulging biceps. I was on her mind, that much was clear.
To her friends, she called me “a substance in search of a form.” I wasn’t really a bodybuilder, she explained, I was Baudelaire. In place of dyed green hair and revolutionary poesy, I, iron iconoclast, simply substituted “the Walk” and the shock of drug-fed muscles. Like the long line of artists who had preceded me, I spent my days throwing bricks through stained-glass windows in my own manner.
That was her public stance, at least. In private, she fretted that I had chosen for myself a long and arduous form of suicide. My father was less charitable. He didn’t give me the benefit of an aesthetic creed, however wayward. “I can feel your contempt, Son,” he had written in a recent letter. “Since you first emerged crying from your mother’s womb, you’ve always begrudged the world for its failure to measure up.”
To him, I wasn’t an agent provocateur or even a grotesquerie, but a derelict, plain and simple. “I understand the urge to spit,” he wrote to his son, the muscle stooge, “but does it have to be facing the wind?” He had sent me but one communication since then, enclosing the heavily underlined Frost poem, “The Road Not Taken,” and the University of Pennsylvania Law School application.
But if to my parents my life in bodybuilding represented the perils of free will, to my friends at Oxford the whole thing sounded Falstaffian, as if I were reveling in Southern California as some kind of anarchic Lord of Misrule. They thought the whole thing sounded sort of fun, until, that is, the photographs of my juiced-up body circulated. Then, with these bloated, billowing muscle shots in hand, they thought the whole thing kind of sick. The suggestive “Samuel is looking rather butch” progressed to the dismissive “obviously he’s gone queer.” Even my most loyal friend couldn’t conceal his apprehension: “You have really worked a transformation of your outer self, Samuel, and I would be fascinated to know how you motivated yourself to lift weights with such diligence and faithfulness. I am curious because when, years ago, I seriously considered trying to become a concert pianist, I was unable to make myself persevere through the tedium of practice, and I tend to imagine that biceps curls and bench presses must be the finger exercises of bodybuilding.”
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