Muscle

by Samuel Wilson Fussell

  No wonder I was feeling depressed, I told myself. The answer, I thought, might be “at home” clients, not the kind Nimrod penetrated and probed in his bedroom, but the kind who would pay me $50.00 per hour to oversee their training in their houses or garages. I wouldn’t have to pay a kickback to Raoul; I would make twice as much money as at the gym. I could use the gym only for my own workouts.

  With Nimrod’s referrals and a stack of my own references, I was in business. My first clients were Seymour Slatkin, the attorney, and his wife Sheila. I trained them in their Spanish hacienda off Orange Grove Boulevard in Pasadena every other morning. They had transformed the central courtyard with its climbing bougainvillaea and pocket arches into an open-air weight room.

  It was the forty-five-year-old Seymour, plump and hung over, who’d greet me first. As soon as we reached the courtyard and he grabbed a weight, he’d begin his dramatic monologue.

  “He felt the raw power surging through his body,” he’d start with a whisper, raising his voice as the reps continued. “He snapped the man’s neck like a breadstick and left him on the ground. Human detritus! Food for flies!”

  And while Seymour was off in his own world, his wife shuffled out of the breakfast room in her slippers, sweats, and hair curlers to join us for her abdominal exercises. Between sets, she whispered in my ear: “Yesterday afternoon, numbnuts over there unplugged the power on my computer while he was vacuuming the floor. Lost the whole file, the bastard.”

  We both looked over at Seymour. Communing with iron, he didn’t notice a thing. He couldn’t possibly hear her above his epic recital: “The Cajun common folk paddled from bayous beyond to catch a glimpse of Mister Man. He was big all right, but no bigger than a beer truck and with muscles to match. When he shook the beef of his bicep, it sounded like rolling thunder.”

  Exasperated, Sheila said, “I don’t know why he does this. He never does it when he’s not pumping iron, you know.”

  Seymour countered when he had me alone. He pointed at Sheila squatting in the corner. “At this stage, what can she do? She’s lost her looks, don’t you think? Hell, I’d rather screw my own mother-in-law. Hamburger instead of fish sticks—what’s the difference? It’s all fast food anyway. Sure you can’t come in and join us for a protein shake after the workout, Sam?”

  As a way of escape from all that—the gym clients, the home clients, the whole mess—I retreated to my own workouts. Full retreat meant training by myself. Much as I learned from Vinnie, his lifting was too much like a Vegas lounge act. He demanded an audience to pull him through, and I knew I spent too much time and energy helping him with his visualization principles, his ammonia, his walk, and his talk for my own good. To Vinnie, as to so many other bodybuilders, lifting was a team sport, so long as he was the team and his training partner provided the support.

  But I loved iron not for its offering of a community, but for its promise of solitude, for the chance to escape from everyone and everything. So, as gently as possible, I disengaged myself from Vinnie in the gym, and bought my own Walkman. And despite his mumbling “the student has overtaken the professor,” I knew that he was secretly relieved. For a solid year, my workouts had been driving him into the ground.

  Without a training partner, I found I could work that much harder. As long as I drove myself mercilessly through another sweating, bleeding, training session, I didn’t think about my clients, the other gym members, my roommates; better still, I never thought about myself. I blotted everything else out and, twice a day, met the demands of three on, one off training.

  Only occasionally did I stray from the endless cycle to wander the foreign land of Muscle Confusion. This was a technique I used to shock my muscles into growth by forcing them to encounter something new: dumbbell bench presses instead of barbell bench presses, say, or squats first on leg day instead of the warm-up of leg extensions.

  “Adapt, adapt,” I kept saying to myself, as my muscles ballooned in response to these variant exercises. As soon as I reached another plateau and found it difficult to get a pump, I tried something else: supersetting the bench with dips, leg extensions with squats. I kept my body guessing, but most of all, I kept pounding and I kept pressing.

  “Give it some time, you’re overtraining,” all of my iron friends said when they witnessed my mad workouts.

  I met their muscle clichés with my own: “There is no such thing as overtraining, only weak minds,” I said, stealing the line from The Barbarian Brothers (twin lifters regularly seen in the pages of the magazines). I knew the answer couldn’t be merely time, because my Shangri-La friends had all put in their ten years, like Mousie and Sweepea back in New York, yet they were still years away from competing against the best. Arnold had made himself into Mr. Universe in five years. I had already done four—time enough, I thought.

  The answer couldn’t be just steroids either, though they were part of it. Nor could everything be attributed to genetics, there were too many exceptions, too many bodybuilders like Franco Columbu who had succeeded despite enormous handicaps. A two-time Mr. Olympia, he had overcome bowlegs and the gnarled, stumpy frame of a garden gnome. No, the answer had to be simpler: never missing a workout, exercising with intensity, feeling every movement. Bodybuilders aren’t born, but made.

  As I pursued my quest, I found that even had I been willing, no one would have trained with me.

  “Doing legs today?” I’d occasionally ask Moses or Lamar or Nimrod.

  In return, I’d get a nervous look. “No man, chest,” was the wary reply.

  If it was chest day for me, it would be leg day for them. It wasn’t personal, it was simply survival. The only lifter capable of surviving my workouts was me. Just like back at the New York Y, no one else was so desperate to lose consciousness, if only for two hours. No one else was so saddened or disappointed or terrified by reality to need such an anodyne.

  In the gym, I out-Vinnied even Vinnie in muscle intensity, in muscle isolation, in muscle integrity. “OH JOY!” I screamed as soon as I felt the cold iron dumbbell in my hand. Safe once more. And it worked—the reps, the sets, the muscles kept everyone at bay. Not just the muggers and street thugs, but friends and family, even dates.

  Especially dates. Muscle isolation didn’t permit it. Nimrod, on a cash and carry basis, counted on his clients for occasional favors and Vinnie could always rely on his AA meetings for the nameless sexual encounters these occasions of sobriety provided, but I hadn’t had a date since I moved to California.

  The prospect of dating terrified me. It ran counter to my life’s work, bodybuilding. To date meant to admit frailty, to acknowledge the fact that I was less than complete. Nimrod, Bamm Bamm, Vinnie, Lamar, none of us had meaningful relationships with anything other than iron. Such was the case, anyway, until Nimrod told me of G-spot’s feelings.

  “She has a serious jones for you, Big Man,” he said.

  Thus ensued a parody of a date, complete with flowers, wine and muscle-wooing. At 1404 Delacey, I dimmed the lights, smoothed the sofa, and put an album on the stereo (Nimrod’s posing music, it so happened). My three roommates aided the cause by decamping to a Schwarzenegger movie.

  It wasn’t long before the burly G-spot parked her pickup on the lawn and presented me with photographs from her competition album. I hardly recognized her in these “before” shots, in which she chaired her high school debate team and played horseshoes with her family. The girl in these photographs was slender, attractive, a veritable gamine.

  But that was long ago; the woman in my arms was someone else. As G-spot put it with her winning smile and her foghorn voice, “I’ve fucking reversed the course of nature.”

  Menarche had halted with the introduction of steroids to her system. The coarse facial hair and acne started soon after. To counteract the sweat, she used spritz; to counteract the muscles, makeup. In fact, on the sofa, in my arms, G-spot looked like she’d strayed into mo
mmy’s makeup cabinet. She wore more rouge, lipstick, and powder than a Regent Street bawd.

  Between the two of us, there was close to five hundred pounds on that sofa, and when our grappling session began, you could practically hear the clink and groan of armor. There was barely room for our lips to meet above our swollen, pumped up chests. When, finally, I reached below her gold dumbbell pendant for her breast, I found it harder than my own.

  I couldn’t go through with it that night. Neither could she. Secretly, we were both content. Our moats and drawbridges had held after all.

  I was a bodybuilder, all right, inside and out. Now, thanks to the juice, I had in abundance the thickness and muscle maturity I had once lacked. No one delivered more muscle lines with more authority (if not conviction) than I did. No one had fewer dates. I had become my own bunker.

  By May of 1988, I weighed 257 pounds. My neck measured 19 inches. It was wider than my head. My arms measured 18 inches cold (without the added bloat of the pump), my calves 17½. I had a 52-inch chest, a 36-inch waist, and 29-inch thighs. God knows, I looked the part. The only thing remaining to complete the persona was competition.

  I viewed it as nothing more than what I’d been doing in an informal manner in the gym for so long. I was just increasing the level of competition, I reasoned to myself, seeking better opponents. But the truth was, I prayed that with a title I’d feel less constricted, less fraudulent, comfortable for more than my four hours of training every day. Everything else in the muscle world, I’d tried. Only a trophy remained to confirm my new identity.

  10. THE NINTH ANNUAL ROSE CITY

  BENCH-PRESS EXTRAVAGANZA

  IF SOMEONE MADE THE SLIGHTEST REMARK OR GAVE ME TROUBLE,

  I WOULD HIT THEM OVER THE HEAD.

  —ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER

  Thus it was that in June of 1988 I silently took Vinnie’s arm and led him toward the bulletin board on the gym wall. The cork surface was filled with notices and cards advertising discount massages, vitamin and supplement sales, rowing-machine deals, and at-home training sessions.

  Vinnie’s eyes skimmed over these to focus on three flyers. One heralded an upcoming strength event, the other two bodybuilding contests.

  “Boom, boom, boom,” I said.

  Vinnie looked back at me and smiled. “In the final arena, there will be no judges, Sam, only witnesses to your greatness!” he shouted, collaring me with one arm and flourishing an upraised fist with the other.

  I had six weeks until the Ninth Annual Rose City Bench-Press Extravaganza, then seven weeks more until Mr. San Gabriel Valley, after that, a week until Mr. Golden Valley. Scheduled for July thirtieth, the first show was a powerlifting contest, not a bodybuilding competition. There would be no posing or flexing, just pushing weight against gravity. As I had told my publishing friends two years earlier back in New York, in a “full power meet,” the athlete performs three attempts at each of the three different lifts: the squat, the bench press, and the deadlift over the course of one full day.

  But the Ninth Annual Rose City Bench-Press Extravaganza eschewed the squat and the deadlift in favor of the bench press—and for a reason. Among powerlifters, the bench press is the definable you, the real you. “What’s your bench?” is the classic greeting among powerlifters, as indicative of a man’s worth as “Where did you go to college?” among the flannel-trousered crowd or “What do you make per year?” where polyester rules.

  To the scorn of powerlifters, bodybuilders invariably give as their response the poundage they bounce. But since most lifters can bounce at least 50 more pounds than they can pause, it is not an appropriate answer. The pause is the moment, lasting as long as one full second when the bar meets your chest and simply rests there. Once the judge at the bench press sees that the bar has come to a full stop, he’ll clap, signaling the lifter to begin the push upwards.

  Twice a week, for the last four years, I had spent my bench sessions deliriously bouncing the steel bar off my chest, using my rib cage and gut as a primitive trampoline. My ego demanded the extra weight that poor form permitted. Now, finally, I had this powerlifting competition to tell me just who and what I was.

  One twenty-three, 352. Those were the vital statistics of Hero Isagawa, Japanese expatriate and world-class powerlifter who trained at Shangri-La. He competes in the 123-pound class, and holds the current world bench-press record, a whopping 352 pounds, which he set at the International Powerlifting Federation World Championships in Australia in 1988.

  With Hero as my guide, I learned to pause. But the bench press wasn’t as simple as pausing. There was also the explosion to master—the moment the bencher ends his pause and fuels all his energy for the upward burst of the bar. The next step was learning “the initial phase of lockout.” The first 10 inches off the chest, the explosion, are murder. But once you have pushed the bar past that point, you reach “the initial phase of lockout,” at which, comparatively, it’s smooth sailing. According to powerlifting physics, the last 12 inches of the movement, the simple locking out, is half as difficult as the first 12 for a man with the wingspan of an albatross, like me.

  But the real key to the bench, Hero said, lies in overcoming the fear of heavy poundages. I’d heard all about bench-press injuries as far back as Austin in the New York Y. Ripped pectorals, separated shoulders, missing teeth, anything could happen from wayward bars and awkward form, said some. But Hero scoffed at my iron anecdotes. He told me that if these sources were to be trusted, then Arnold’s constant companion wasn’t Maria Shriver, but a kidney dialysis machine; then professional bodybuilder Rich Gaspari collapsed once monthly from excessive steroid intake; then half the world was caught in the grip of a “’roid rage.” It was all just muscle malarkey, Hero said.

  Instead of fearing what could happen to me, why not concentrate on what I could make happen? he asked. Misty eyed, he told me of the men with “the attitudes fantastic,” the drooling and hysterical powerlifters, who once a year convened in Hawaii for the Budweiser World Record Breakers and hoisted weights previously thought untenable.

  At this Hawaiian strength-fest, Ted Arcidi had bench pressed 705 pounds; Fred Hatfield, also known as Dr. Squat, had been the first to officially squat over a thousand pounds. Here the super-heavyweights (those weighing over 275 pounds) were so huge, they had to use a meat scale instead of a Medco at the weigh-in. Here, superheavyweights (some of them weighing as much as four hundred pounds themselves) routinely broke the 2,000 total barrier (a powerlifters meet total equals his best squat, plus best bench, plus best deadlift of that day). For the superheavies, this routinely meant squatting over eight hundred pounds, benching around six hundred, and deadlifting a good eight hundred as well.

  Hero regaled me with these tales while I took a sabbatical from “Intensity or Insanity” training. I had to. Powerlifters and bodybuilders train in a most dissimilar fashion. Powerlifters do not profit from smooth, endless repetitions. The 12 to 15 reps per set with lighter weights that had worked so well for shaping were now a distinct disadvantage. Four to 5 reps of much higher weight and far fewer sets were the powerlifting norm. And in between these sets were the rest periods, not the 60 seconds that I practiced as a bodybuilder, but 10 to 15 minutes, simulating powerlifting competitions where a bevy of competitors have to lift in between your attempts. Out with “continuous tension,” in with full muscle recovery.

  To powerlifters, bodybuilders are a fraud, all muscles but no real strength. The bodybuilder’s endless reps are not recognized as a strength by powerlifters, anymore than a sprinter recognizes the merits of a marathoner. And bodybuilders reserve similar scorn for powerlifters, whose 1-rep strength they admire, but whose physiques, without veins or definition, they abjure.

  Which made it all the odder to my bodybuilding friends that I was entering a powerlifting meet. As the two sports have evolved, no one has ever combined expertise in both. The extremism of each training style necessitates cho
osing one or the other. But I couldn’t do just the bodybuilding shows. I had to prove to myself, if to no one else, that my muscles weren’t simply decorative.

  As the flyer noted, there were five different divisions in the bench-press competition: Masters (of which there were two divisions, ages 40–46 and 47–53); Open (male lifters who have competed in four or more meets); Novice (male lifters aged 20 and above who have competed in three meets or less); Women (all ages, all weight classes); and Teenage (male lifters ages 14–19).

  Hero advised me to enter the contest as a novice at 243 pounds, one pound up from the 242-pound-weight-class limit. This was perfect. Although I weighed 257, I had to diet anyway for my bodybuilding contests, and if I could get down to 243 by July thirtieth, it would make it easier to reach 230 and 6 percent body fat for the physique shows in late September.

  Hero’s counsel, though, had nothing to do with bodybuilding and everything to do with winning a bench-press trophy. As he pointed out, weighing 243 the day of the contest would put me in the 275-pound-weight class, where the competition in minor shows is notoriously weak.

  As proof, he brought out his back issues of Powerlifting USA. I flipped past the pages advertising “Deadlift Shoes,” “Super Chalk,” Ernie’s Workout Log Book, and special squat suits “guaranteed against crotch blow-out.” I headed for the final pages and the minuscule print of results from regional competitions over the past six months. Sure enough, Hero was right. The results were consistent: Whether it was the Biggest Bench on the Beach (Des Moines, IA), the 5th New London Open Bench Press (New London, CT), the 2nd Illinois Valley Bench Press (Peru, IL), the Bench-A-Mania (Stanardsville, VA), the 5th Annual Bayou Classic (Monroe, LA), the 275-pound-class lifters always benched less than those in the 181, 198, and 220 classes.

  Those lighter classes featured men like the five foot three inch, 181-pound Mike Bridges, with barrel chests and truncated arms—the perfect build for benching. At six foot four, I would be at a distinct disadvantage. But I wouldn’t have to compete against them. If everything went according to plan, I probably wouldn’t have to compete against anyone, because there was a paucity of competitors in the 275-pound class in the novice division around the country. If I could just make my opening lift, I’d probably win a trophy; the flyer announced first, second, and third place trophies for every weight class.