Muscle

by Samuel Wilson Fussell

  I checked my Gold’s Gym bag. Original Muscle-Up Professional Posing Oil? Check. Muscle Sheen? Check. Pro-Tan Instant Competition Color? Check. Sponge applicator tips? Check. Matte black competition briefs? Check. Mousse? Check. Sony Walkman? Check. A tape of my posing music? Check. A duplicate tape? Check.

  “Your food?”

  A Spartan mix of sodium-free rice cakes? Check. A half a cup of raisins? Check. A bottle of distilled water? Check. An anemic-looking boiled chicken breast? Check. A Tupperware cup of tasteless oatmeal? Check.

  I looked up from my bag at Vinnie. “There will be no judges,” I said. Vinnie beamed.

  “Oh yes!” he screamed on the way to the car, “ring the alarm bell, ring it loud!”

  Once inside the Luv, he stomped on the accelerator, before I could so much as fasten my do-rag over my moussed flattop. On that wild ride to the auditorium in El Monte we slowed down only once—for an elementary school child who had lost his jacks on the intersection in front of us. Vinnie veered toward the lad and, as I screamed, missed him by inches. He broke into an ear-splitting grin. The day was coming up roses for him already. I only hoped it would prove as wonderful for me.

  But the fact was I didn’t feel very wonderful. Though I hadn’t had a shot in a week, my bottom still ached from my steroid injections. Of late, the needle felt like it was grinding against the bone. I hadn’t taken a bath or a shower in a week in order to preserve my competition color. And my haircut, yes, there was my haircut. At the last moment, I had requested as close a crop as possible in the belief that the smaller my head looked, the bigger my body would appear.

  But the barber had botched the job, leaving my flattop more tilted than a skateboard ramp, and now I wondered just how the judges would react when I made my entrance. As every bodybuilder in Shangri-La had told me, judges were unpredictable. The one thing I knew was that they would be seated behind a long table located in the space before the front row in the auditorium. They would look for muscle size, muscle definition, pleasing bone structure, symmetry, and charisma. Not necessarily in that order—in fact, in no order at all. Bodybuilding judging, like the sport itself, is still in its infancy.

  When we parked outside the junior high school auditorium, I caught my first sight of my competitors. Most of them were clad in the same attire as my own: oversized terry-cloth tops and Gold’s Gym sweats. Inside, the theater was utterly empty. It is only iron addicts of the most extreme kind who attend the morning prejudging. Depending on the number of contestants, these preliminaries can extend for as long as six or seven hours.

  Beyond the heads of my entourage, I spotted a lone, tanned figure smiling to himself. A man in his sixties, he was seated in the front row, in the middle of the judges’ panel. He looked as fit and competition-colored as he had thirty-five years earlier when he won his first Mr. America title, as he looked, in fact, in Leonard’s imitation wood frame. It was Bill Pearl, whom no less a source than The Encyclopedia lists as “one of the greatest bodybuilders of all time.”

  Aside from the America, he had won the Mr. Universe title four times (spanning three different decades). If Arnold is bodybuilding’s favorite son, Bill Pearl is its patron saint.

  At the sound of the loudspeaker announcing the beginning of registration, I joined the line with my muscular kindred backstage. Most were teenage boys of every shape and size. My flattop haircut was the style of choice, in homage to Schwarzenegger and his latest cinematic epic, Commando. Others sported “rat tails” hanging down the back of the neck. One misguided fellow had instructed his barber to shave what looked like lightning bolts onto the hair covering each temple. Combined with the effect of his physique, which was both sagging and turgid, his haircut brought to mind shock therapy, rather than Mount Olympus.

  I stood a head taller than all of them, bronzed, the very picture of health. The audience wouldn’t know that my breathing was shallow, my heart rate abnormally high. The judges wouldn’t hear my panting and puffing. I hoped Nimrod was right, and that the eruptions of my riotous complexion would be invisible under the glare of the stage lights. If he was wrong, I was sunk.

  Immediately after registration, we filed off to a backstage room for the weigh-in. I stared over at the Medco in the corner. I hadn’t weighed myself in six weeks. Each competitor took his turn on it according to weight class and division. First the teenagers, then the novices, then the open men, which meant, at last, the heavyweights.

  As competitor after competitor stripped and mounted the scale, it was obvious that builders like to train the front of their bodies—the parts they face in the mirror. I saw good chests, quadriceps, and arms, but bad backs, hamstrings and calves—and I was no exception.

  At the call for heavyweights, I peeled off everything but my competition briefs and valiantly strode to the Medco. There were whispers when Spanky, the meet organizer, announced my weight: 232 pounds! Twenty pounds more than anyone else in the show! I felt, on substance alone, I’d already won. I put my sweats back on while the others took to the scale. There were just three entrants in my weight class, and unlike the bench-press extravaganza, now I felt cheated. Now I wanted the competition.

  The two other heavyweights were both black, but there the similarity ended. One was short and fat, the other tall and thin. Bursting with confidence, I walked out of the room with my lats spread as wide as I could flex them. I made sure that the other competitors noticed how difficult it was for me to squeeze through the door frame.

  Peeking from behind the stage’s red curtain, I saw Vinnie, seated with Macon, Lamar, Nimrod, and G-spot. I jauntily gave the thumbs-up sign to Nimrod, who elbowed Vinnie, who returned my gesture with an imploring one of his own. They needed to speak to me, it was obvious. What could it be? Something I’d taken? A toxic combination of steroids?

  No, they were worried about the tall black contestant, the heavyweight I had dismissed on the scale as not being in my league. According to Nimrod, who had seen him warming up, he was in many respects my superior and stood a good chance of winning the whole show.

  “Look, Big Man,” Vinnie explained breathlessly, his face inches from mine, “you got ’em on legs, but not on back and abs, so don’t get in no comparison shots on abs, he’s shredded.”

  “And remember,” Vinnie added, “you want your place in the bodybuildin’ pantheon? Well then, by golly, think smart and flex your legs next to his in the comparison rounds!”

  Nimrod nodded his head. “And the most-musculars, Vinnie, don’t forget the most-musculars.”

  “Right, right!” Vinnie cried. The teens were almost on stage. As the theater lights dimmed and Nimrod beat a hasty retreat to his seat, Vinnie dabbed a bit of Dye-O-Derm on my upper pecs and clapped me on the back.

  “Remember, Sam, you don’t get a second chance to make a good first impression!”

  With this in mind, I dashed off to the official pump-up room. It was actually an enormous, backstage men’s room, in which a crate of dumbbells and barbells had been placed in preparation for our exhibition. We had to put our dumbbells down on the white tiles carefully, so they wouldn’t roll down the sloping floor into the trough of the urinal by the far wall.

  Here, between the sink and the stalls, I stripped off the last of my layers and coated my body with Original Muscle-Up Professional Posing Oil. This would keep my muscles from looking flat under the glare of the lights. I pinned my number 9 to my black posing trunks. From a distance, it looked like a price tag. I dabbed the mousse I retrieved from my Gold’s Gym bag onto my hair. There were forty bodybuilders in the bathroom, about ten more than it could comfortably accommodate.

  I tried to ignore the grunting and groaning around me and grabbed the first weight that became available. Blocking everyone else out, I concentrated on performing repetition after repetition for my arms and shoulders, chest and calves. Everything but the thighs and the hamstrings, muscles which lose their definition when pum
ped.

  Every ten minutes, a group of competitors left for the stage, until finally the vast room housed only the male open heavyweight competitors. I warmed up furiously now, my skin ready to burst from the force of the muscles and veins seething just beneath the skin. I flexed my best shots in front of one of the available mirrors, spying on my competitors out of the corner of my eye. This time, my eyes did not deceive me. The shorter of the two black men was history. He was big all right, but bloated. Everything was swollen, not just his muscles, but his cheeks, his forehead, his knuckles. Whether it was testosterone or Twinkies, the sodium in his body left him looking like a float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

  But Nimrod and Vinnie were right. The taller builder flexing beside me, number 10, was good, there was no doubt about it. No dirigible, he. His abs were perfect, a regular washboard. His waist was half the size of mine, but my shoulder width was twice his. I was bigger everywhere, including some of the wrong places, like my obliques and hips. I had him on muscles; he had me on shape.

  I looked down at one of the brown-stained index cards in my hand. Vinnie had given me a set, “for motivation of the warrior,” he’d said. “RADIATE CONFIDENCE!” it read. I jutted my lats out a little further and practiced what I hoped would be taken for a spontaneous smile. Another index card: “THEY’VE COME TO BEAT YOU. YOU OWN THE CROWN.”

  “Open Heavyweights, you’re on,” a voice cried down the hall. Not a minute too soon. I made a last-minute check that my number was pinned to my trunks, and followed the others out the door. Dripping with oil and sweat, the three of us trailed the stage manager in silence to the curtain’s edge. We waited for the signal from the assistant across the stage, and at the lowering of his arm, we filed out in numerical order.

  Suddenly I remembered my last appearance on a stage. The blinding glare of the spotlights was the same, as was the air of expectation from the whispering crowd. Then, I wore a cardboard crown and pulled a stuffed camel on wheels. It was a Nativity scene, and I was in the second grade. Now, twenty years later, I stood before audience and judges in briefs, a number, and a tan.

  As the three of us did “the Walk” toward stage center, I could just make out Bill Pearl’s outline beyond the glare of the lights. At his direction, we stood in the line-up one arm’s length from each other. In this round the judges would be checking for symmetry (that “Apollonian Ideal”), size, and “flow,” the look the best builders have, of each body part flowing into the next, the look it takes years to develop, the look that none of us had.

  I couldn’t see Vinnie, but I heard him. “Spread ’em, Big Man!” he screamed from out there in the darkness. I cursed myself, still smiling pleasantly, and flexed everything I had, though we hadn’t yet begun the mandatories. We were still “standing relaxed,” but only a neophyte to the bodybuilding world would mistake the position for the dictionary definition.

  “Standing relaxed” is, in fact, a bald-faced lie. It should be called “continuous tension,” since it necessitates simultaneously squeezing the calves, the quads, the abs, the chest, the shoulders, the arms, and the lats, while maintaining the coolest of smiles. The weeks before the contest had seen my whole body convulse in reaction to the posture, but the practice had paid off. I could hold the position for 15 minutes, if necessary. I would not lose this round.

  “Gentlemen, a quarter turn to your left, please,” Mr. Pearl requested after just 3 minutes.

  We “stood relaxed” from the side, a quarter turn more, with our backs to the audience, a quarter turn more, from the other side, a quarter turn more, again the front.

  Finally, Mr. Pearl led us through the first of the eight mandatory poses. After all the afternoons spent in practice with Vinnie and Nimrod and Bamm Bamm, I couldn’t have been better prepared for these. I remembered to keep my heels together, my knees slightly bent, and my thighs flared outwards for the front-lat spread. For the side-chest I turned my side to the audience, extended my arms outward, joined my hands, then brought them toward my chest with a resounding squeeze of my whole upper torso. Arnold had recommended this method of getting into the mandatory side-chest position in The Encyclopedia. A judge might call you on it, he said, but they’ll love the drama. No one called me on it—the crowd was whooping and hollering.

  One by one, the rest of the eight mandatories flew by. With only three of us on stage, the judges had no need to arrange us for tandem comparison as they noted the difference in our muscle separation, definition, and shape. At Mr. Pearl’s order, two of us filed off to leave the stage to number 8, the shortest of all of us, for the silent, “free-posing” round.

  Number 8 tried, but his 60-second round was received with dead calm by the audience. He left the stage visibly shaken by the experience. He told number 10 that he felt as if he’d just attended his own funeral.

  I took the stage next and concentrated on looking both graceful and powerful, the latter easier to accomplish with my frame. For the “free-posing” round, I simply abbreviated the 90-second routine I planned to use that night, discarding poses that drew attention to my weak abs, inserting poses that highlighted my chest, shoulders, and quadriceps.

  It couldn’t have gone better. The applause started the moment I emerged from stage right with a confident grin, and didn’t stop until the audience saw my heel disappear behind the curtain. By the time I reached the wings, I was glowing inside and out. But my whole body deflated when number 10 took the stage. With his smaller frame, he moved much more gracefully than I did, his confident air made it clear that, like me, he thought himself the winner. At the conclusion of his posing, for which he, too, received strong applause, the morning show ended. The audience left hastily to fit in a work-out and a meal before the real fun began.

  Though most contests are actually decided in the morning, when the judges take the time needed to dissect minutely, then rank every competitor, the night show is the rowdy concession to the paying audience. Decorum is thrown out the window, and bodybuilders, heeding the pleas of the audience to “show us what you got!” are only too delighted to comply. After four years of labor, the ten minutes I stood on stage were it for the morning show. If I won my weight class that night, plus the overall trophy in the pose-down with the other weight-class winners that followed, I would be on stage for a maximum of 15 minutes more.

  Back in the car, Vinnie knew that it was between me and number 10 for the heavyweight title. He was tall, black, and cut. I was taller, white, and more muscular—but also fatter. It depended on what the judges wanted that day, Vinnie said, cuts or size, the classic bodybuilding debate. Ideally, the perfect specimen of a bodybuilder should present the audience with both, but even on the Mr. Olympia stage, it is rare to find the ideal. From time immemorial, physique fans have argued on the absurdity of the contest itself. How, they ask, can you judge between a lily and a rose, between size and cuts, between competitors number 9 and number 10?

  At Shangri-La that afternoon, the same argument raged around me as I bit my teeth into a quarter pound serving of orange roughy and drank two glasses of distilled water. At our power conference table by the juice bar, Macon prepared me for the possibility of defeat. He put an arm around Lamar, who had an arm around Cuddles.

  With a troubled look, Macon sighed. “You know, Sam, you’re like a second son to me, but, dagnabit, you never know which direction they’ll go in. Why, back at Mr. Inland Empire last year, even Troy took second, remember Lamar? And to a pencil-neck!”

  Lamar shook his head in disgust at the memory. I kept mum. I, too, knew it would be close that night.

  “See, Sam,” Macon explained, “it’s not like you’re not the biggest thing out there. Fact is, you are. Nimrod? Vinnie?” Vigorous nods from both. “It’s just that you never can tell with the judges, I mean, examine history.”

  “Lamar?” Macon sat back and swallowed a Chewable.

  Lamar, on cue, pressed forward from his seat. His
enormous shape dwarfed Cuddles in his lap.

  “Right, Dad,” he intoned grimly. “Nineteen sixty-eight. Miami Beach Auditorium. Arnold came to America and lost the Universe—to Frank Zane, a man 70 pounds lighter, a human swizzle stick.”

  While Macon and Lamar shook their heads sadly at the injustice of it all, Nimrod and Vinnie were lost in thoughts of iron precedence.

  Suddenly, Macon’s face lit up. “Now, I’ll tell you one thing Sam,” he said, “that Bill Pearl is a real size queen, sure as I’m standing here today. He’s an American builder, by golly, and I know as a fact you can count on his vote.”

  Everyone had advice for me that afternoon. I needed to concentrate on showing the muscle disparity between myself and number 10, and then to surprise the judges with some quality. I had good intercostals, considering my body weight, so Macon urged me to flex these when number 10 tried to hit his back shots.

  Nimrod advised me to keep my head. “Wemember, man,” Bamm Bamm chimed in, “no diwect back compawison shots. Keep to your stwengths, the arms and the wegs, then wet God sort out the fuckin’ wounded.”

  “Jesus fuckin’ Christ!” Vinnie screamed suddenly, rising from his seat. He could take no more. “What on earth is happening here? The time has come to get rid of pasty faces! Sam, at the warm-up tonight, you just show them who’s who, OK? Buddy, you want to pulverize that number 10 tonight? Then you grab ’im, Sam, and you shake ’im by his balls!”

  When we arrived back at the theater that night, every seat in the house was filled, mostly with Latino teens and their dates.

  Spanky, the stage manager, greeted me backstage at check-in. “Hey, man, good show this mornin’,” he said, clapping me on the back. He held his clipboard to him. “Look, Chief, we need a bio on you, you know, nickname, favorite gym, previous competitions, all the essentials.”

  In bodybuilding, everyone has a nickname. As Arnold is “The Austrian Oak,” Frank Zane is “The Chemist,” Rich Gaspari “The Dragonslayer,” Mike Christian “The Iron Warrior.”