Muscle

by Samuel Wilson Fussell

  But if iron hadn’t yet reached Oxford, it had reached every other pocket of the globe. The television in our living room showed bodybuilders in commercials, in sitcoms, even in game shows. Shows like “American Gladiators” and “Roller Games” presented contestants with bulging biceps and names like “Nasty Nancy” Wilkinson and “Deadly Debbie” Van Doren. NO GAIN, NO PAIN, proclaimed billboards advertising Weightwatchers, the diet group. “Start Wheatlifting,” our television commanded, displaying a muscular fist gripping a spoon freighted with shredded wheat. “Family Feud” pitted a gaggle of Gold’s Gym builders against a nuclear family. Every beer advertisement seemed to have one of the diseased pumping weights in the background. And in the magazines and newspapers, the models in their underwear no longer languorously lounged in contra posto. Now they “stood relaxed” with sharply defined abdominal muscles and blooming pectorals. It had gone as far as the White House, where President Reagan was photographed pumping out a few bicep reps on his chrome dumbbells before a briefing. Clearly, this whole muscle thing was no longer just my problem.

  With the obsession, came the demand. Vinnie started grossing $40,000 a year from his steroid sales. It wasn’t the bodybuilders who kept his answering machine working day and night, it was the Kips and Corkys, the lawyers and bank managers and salesmen of Southern California. From Santa Monica to Cucamonga, Alhambra to San Dimas, Vinnie visited gym after gym and sold 90 percent of his goods to yuppies in tights and tank tops. Blanks or not, there was no shortage of supply, and the daily bombardments from the media, in print, television, and radio form, ensured the frenzied demand. Most of Vinnie’s clients didn’t realize that the drugs only worked in conjunction with training.

  Vinnie wasn’t my only roommate making money off the body boom. In their own way, both Bamm Bamm and Nimrod profited from their physiques. Bamm Bamm’s calling was as collector for a loan shark. Overdue payments meant an appearance of Bamm Bamm at the door. And it was copious quantities of both the gym and “the juice” that kept him employed. Every few weeks, I woke at night and watched him pound past my room, his massive arms laden with spoil. Our living room became an appliance stockroom, filled with Frigidaires, microwaves, toasters, and Mr. Coffee machines. It wasn’t just appliances—Bamm Bamm added to his loot diamond rings and metal mugs, silver picture frames, even leather boots.

  Nimrod chose personal training. “At your home, at your office, at your gym, at your convenience!” read his embossed card. His answering machine closed with the line: “My specialty is results!” Actually, Vinnie’s specialty was older women, and two or three of them a day could be counted upon to visit him in his room, to emerge light-headed and refreshed an hour later. Nimrod called it “Rolfing” and “Deep Tissue Massage.” I called it something else; since then, I’ve known many a builder similarly equipped for aiding clients in need.

  None of my bodybuilding friends worked more than a few hours a day. Anything more would have interfered with their training, their sleeping, and their eating. But work in a fashion they did—even Macon and Lamar, who pounded their beat as mall cops.

  In fact, by the summer of 1987, I found myself in demand. A man hired me on sight to throw his brother into a swimming pool in front of three hundred guests on his fortieth birthday. I collected $250.00 for twenty minutes work. I did “the Walk” into photographers’ studios and posed for medical calendars. The television shows “Alien Nation” and “thirtysomething” called, and, do-rag and all, I strolled before the cameras for the obligatory gym scenes.

  The timing was perfect for me. After three years, I had to find a way of giving my lifting purpose and meaning. It had begun to dawn on me that the whole building thing might be merely a parody of labor, and I myself a well-muscled dilettante. What would Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism, think of bodybuilding? He had to be turning over in his grave. After all, the iron we lifted didn’t help build a bridge or a battleship or a skyscraper. It enlarged our biceps and spread the sweep of our thighs. The labor of farmers and factory workers and longshoremen had a kind of dignity and purpose that ours didn’t.

  A muscle vocation was the answer to my private panic, I was sure of it. If I could get a job related to my body, then I’d feel less self-indulgent; function and form would be in better balance. But the modeling jobs and the extra work came along too infrequently. I needed something more. Lucky for me, then, that by 1987 personal trainers like Nimrod were as much in demand as cellular car phones. And doubly lucky, the supply was so small and the demand so great that no credentials were needed other than a lifter’s physique.

  All I lacked, Nimrod said, to start my career at Shangri-La, was the assent of Raoul, since our gym did not allow independent instruction. With his approval, I could begin to train clients immediately, though I would be placed on probationary status. I would then be given a year to successfully complete a CPR course and a standardized test for personal trainers developed for IDEA (the International Dance and Exercise Association) by the Educational Testing Service (the same folks who brought us the SAT). The regulated wage at Shangri-La was $30.00 an hour, of which the gym received a $5.00 cut.

  Two years earlier, back in New York, Fowler had said to me: “Sam, do you have any idea how this will look on your resumé?”

  “What? How what will look on my resumé?”

  “This,” Fowler said, waving his hand over my T-shirted torso.

  But it was just this torso, now ’roided and juiced to the tune of 250 pounds, that I presented to Shangri-La to begin my life as a personal trainer.

  I found Raoul, sunken-cheeked and shriveled, in his back office. The dark room was bathed in the green, ghostly light of his computer screen. On the desk before him was a partially nibbled rice cake and a bottle of distilled water. The office was crammed with boxes containing his mail-order catalog goods: training manuals, car shades, personalized weight-lifting belts, signature protein powders, his own line of clothes, posters, place mats, key chains, 8 x 10 autographed glossies. Raoul had the goods, but for whatever reason, America wasn’t biting.

  “My products, they won’t move,” he moaned.

  His investors were irate. Raoul hadn’t trained in months, he was too preoccupied with his losses. And it showed—behind his desk, he looked tinier than a Tibetan Sherpa. He barely seemed to hear me when I asked his permission to train clients, but he gave me the nod.

  I left him with his head bowed before the unopened copies of Esquire, GQ, and Business Week arranged precisely on his desk. Still working on his overall presentation, I gathered. It all made sense somehow, Raoul and bodybuilding.

  The next morning, I penciled in my hours at the trainers’ log book at Tara’s front desk. Not long after, I heard her call my name on the gym’s PA system. “Attention Sam, your 10:30 is here.”

  So began my life as a personal trainer. I met my first client at the Trainer’s Table in the foyer and gave him the company line as I took a seat: “Good morning, it’s a great day at Shangri-La Fitness Training Center!” I heard myself roar. “My name is Sam, and how may I help you?”

  And help them I did. During “the initial consultation” I guided my new clients through the maze of personal information I needed in order to “design” their program. Before prescribing my training recommendations, I jotted down their exercise history, their medical history, and, as calmly as possible, any emergency phone numbers and next of kin.

  I took their blood pressure, I measured their pulse, I established their “target heart rate,” their “desired workload,” all the while explaining the logic and simplicity of the endeavor. To change your appearance, I said, merely reduce the quantity of fat in your diet while simultaneously increasing the fat-burning activity in your exercise. Fat-burning activity included the Lifecycle (a gussied up stationary bicycle), the treadmill, high-speed circuit training, or aerobics classes like Bodysculpt, Motion Explosion, Cardiotonic, and Power Aerobics, all Shangri
-La specialties.

  No consultation was complete without recourse to my metal calipers. The hydrostatic method is the most accurate means to estimate body fat, lowering clients like livestock into a pool of water and noting water displacement. But Shangri-La didn’t have a pool for the hydrostatic method, nor did we have electrical-stimulation equipment, so we used our metal calipers. Raoul handed me an oversized pair that looked like something out of a horror film, and these I plied in so-called “skinfold measurements,” as my manual said, “for field assessment of body composition.”

  As Raoul had done with me a year earlier, I tugged the flesh between thumb and forefinger at certain target sites. For men, the sites included (1) the chest (“halfway between the nipple and the shoulder crease”); (2) the axilla (“a line bisecting the armpit and hip at a level equal to the xiphoid process”); (3) the triceps; (4) the subscapula (“diagonal fold just under the bottom angle of the scapula, halfway between the spine and the side of the body”); (5) the suprailiac (“just above the iliac crest, slightly anterior to the middle of the side”); and (6) the thigh (“halfway between the greater trochanter and the patella”).

  For women, the chest was not to be pinched, though everything else was. The company manual had words of wisdom for testing female clients: “In some cases when measuring a member of the opposite sex, you may want to use a witness.”

  According to my company chart, the “ideal” body-fat percentage for men was 15, the Southern California average 22, the U.S. average 26. For women, the “ideal” was 22, the Southern California average 28–30, and the U.S. average 36.

  Florists, bouncers, barmen, hairstylists, I taught them all how to heave and hoist iron and how to alter their appearance. I stood vigil in my red company-issue polo shirt (with the word TRAINER emblazoned in yellow on the back) while they walked or ran on the treadmill or pedaled on the Lifecycle. Most of my clients I saw three times per week, one hour per session. Moët I saw six days a week.

  I met her husband first. “Oh, hi! My name’s Evan!” he said, interrupting my workout. “I’ve been done by Bruce—Bruce Weber.” He raised his eyebrows expectantly and, at my lack of response, rolled his eyes. “The photographer,” he moaned, exasperated.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “Do you need a trainer?”

  “God no! It’s not me!” Evan blurted out. “I’m a model. No, it’s my main squeeze, Moët.”

  The next day, Moët sat beside me for her consultation. I took down the relevant information.

  “Last name?” I asked.

  “Just Moët,” she chirped, “as in Sting or Cher.”

  Actually, it was Moët as in champagne. She’d read about Margaux Hemingway in People Magazine, thought the name classy, and spoke to her lawyer the same day. Goodbye Dulcie. Hello Moët.

  A chin cleft, a buttock and tummy tuck through liposuction, cheekbone implants, a nose job—Moët was a firm believer in modern science. But it was her boob job that was most noticeable. The doctor had left her with a pair so massive that she needed three bras at once for support. She seemed in danger of collapsing forward from the weight at any given moment.

  As much as the gym rats couldn’t avoid gawking at them, Moët couldn’t get them off of her mind. She had a mania concerning her breasts. All conversation, eventually, returned to them.

  As we trained, my standard query “Are you all right?” became, in her ears, “Are they all right?”

  “I think they’re better now, thanks. My doctor told me the skin would retract around them after the operation, and I’d feel corsetted, but I didn’t expect them to be this tight.”

  It wasn’t always her breasts: “I went in for lip augmentation last week, you know,” she said. “See, the doctor harvests fat from my thigh and injects it into my lips. Some people use bovine collagen, but it’s so much more natural to use your own fat, don’t you think?”

  “Oh yes!” I said, enthusiastically. “Try to keep ‘continuous tension’ on your triceps.”

  “Oh right … well, it’s made a world of difference, Sam. See, they’re much fuller now. I go twice a year, just for a touch-up. I really love this soft pout. I mean, it’s a really good look.”

  “Your breasts?” I asked, handing her a chrome dumbbell for her superset.

  “No, silly, my lips,” she responded, pumping out more reps.

  “How does your husband like it?” I asked.

  “Evan? Are you kidding? At cocktail parties, in movie lines, wherever we go, you should see the rubberneckers!

  “Oh, who is that?” Moët moaned, spotting what she called a “GLD” (or Good Looking Dude) by the squat machine. “Sam, I think I just stopped breathing! And look, my nipples are getting hard, and gosh, look how they’re sweating.”

  For six straight months, I trained her six days a week. Only once did she need to take time off, for the hospital as it happened. “Remember, Sam,” she told me. “I’m going in for surgery next week.”

  She paused on the conveyer belt of the treadmill. “I’m finally having those two ribs near the bottom removed. It will really make my waist look different. You know, you don’t live your dreams, you die.”

  “What is that, Nietzsche?” I asked, checking her target heart rate.

  “No, Flashdance,” she said, picking up her pace on the road to nowhere.

  I nodded wearily, adjusted the speed of the treadmill and murmured “make haste slowly.” At least, I think it was “make haste slowly.” Then again, it might have been, “you work hard, good things will happen,” or “be here now,” or “no guts, no glory,” or “she who dares, wins,” or “bigger’s better,” or a host of other muscle clichés.

  I retreated into the world of iron platitudes because the few times I fell out of character, the result was invariably an absurd misconnection, a dialogue of the deaf, which sent me scurrying back for cover.

  Such was the case with my 9:30, Brock. He spent his sixty minutes on the stationary bicycle, and paid me $30.00 an hour to talk to him. One day, he happened to ask me about my relatives. I started with my uncle. While Brock pedaled and puffed, I spoke.

  “More than anything,” I said, “he was a man of principle. During the 1950s, he taught at Berkeley, and refused to sign the document stating he was not a Communist. They fired him for it.”

  “Really? it takes a lot of integrity to do that,” Brock said, excited. “That is really admirable. I’ve got a client like that. His name is Jim Thurnbull, owns the biggest tire factory in the U.S., Thurnbull Tires, you’ve heard of it, right? Anyway, he’s trying to find the best bidder for his company. Well, the Nips, they’re offering him the most money, but you know what? He’d rather sell to an American. Men like Thurnbull and your uncle, they make America great!”

  There was no escape, no matter how I tried. When I fled my clients, things only got worse. Once, after the usual session with Moët (or was it Gino, or Melissa, or Steve, or Trixie?), I padded to the locker room, collapsed on a wooden stool, and held my head in my hands.

  “Don’t be such a sissy, son!” I heard someone shout over by the sink. “This is strength juice!”

  It was Macon, and as I walked onto the tiles, I saw him hovering over the kneeling Lamar. Together, they looked like Abraham and a muscle-bound Isaac. In one upraised hand, Macon sported a syringe. Lamar, his Mohawked head bowed, offered his enormous white ass to his father.

  “Just supplementing, Sam, just supplementing,” Macon whispered to me with a wink. “Time for Lamar’s feeding, if you know what I mean. …” He hugged his son with one arm before striking him with the syringe.

  Despite the jolt of the needle, Lamar looked up at his father in tenderness. Together, they formed a loving lifting diptych, but I’d barely survived that first treacly night back at the Maverick, and this was just too much.

  Between my clients and my own workouts, I was now spending twelve hours
a day in the gym. It wasn’t my four daily hours of workouts that bothered me. It was the eight hours of instruction or roaming the floor, clipboard and calipers in hand, eight hours of observing my clients and fellow gym members, eight hours in which I saw nothing but iron casualties. The place harbored multitudes of them—cleft palates, speech impediments, club feet, PWC’s (People With Causes: militant vegetarians, animal rights activists, Christers). Shangri-La, like the Y before it, was a breeding ground for the inept, the inane, and, when it came down to it, the homeless.

  And it was beginning to dawn on me that I was one of them. How different was the Arnold I kept in my mind from the tattered portrait of Bill Pearl painted on black velvet in an imitation wood frame that Leonard carted with him in the gym and out? Watching Leonard work out, accompanied by the portrait, was amusing. Watching him eat at a table for two, the portrait seated across from him, was more disturbing. How different was I from Hector (née Hortense), who played not rock music on his Walkman but “Crackling Fire,” from the “Sound of Nature Relaxation Tape Collection.” Both of us were desperate for reassurance. I used iron and the gym, he used the comforting sounds of the hearth. And the stutterers, how different was I from them? They kept silent because they had to; my aphasia was strictly voluntary. The gym was a haven for us all.