Muscle

by Samuel Wilson Fussell

  Except for my main rivals, numbers 61 and 63, the competitors were oiled up. I didn’t trust number 63. His easy smile, his huge chest and thighs might well mask the soul of a saboteur. I decided to trust no one, and do the job myself as best I could, when number 61 breathlessly sidled up to me.

  “Do your back?” he whispered, sounding like a child molester skirting the edge of a playground.

  He stared up into my eyes, and I coughed in reaction to the dose of lavender perfume that adorned his body. He sported a vertical haircut, the curls high on his head, the sides completely shaved well above the ears. His eyes were lost, seeming to see nothing beyond his long black lashes. He was in his own world, now, preparing for the contest. I oiled his back after he oiled mine, our weight class was called, and number 61 dove for the remains of a chocolate bar he had been ravenously chewing moments before. He tore a chunk off, then joined the rest of us in line. He trusted the sudden sugar rush to increase his vascularity. I hoped my niacin pills would do the same for me.

  Barefoot, we padded into the backstage darkness together. We paused by the curtain, still unseen by the audience, then, at the MC’s introduction, headed out in single file according to our numbers to the middle of the stage. There were ten of us that morning. By nightfall, nine of us would be singularly disappointed.

  The audience, about half full for the morning show, applauded loudly for the heavyweights, a weight class that can always be counted on to bring the most muscle to a contest. “Oh yes! Oh yes! Judgment Day!” I heard Vinnie scream rapturously from his seat. The ten of us on stage kept at arm’s length from one another and, at the judges’ direction, assumed the “standing relaxed” position.

  The judges, seven of them in number, made notes as we sweated under the glare of the lights. As a seasoned competitor, I immediately set about projecting the image of confidence, the air of charisma so evident in all true bodybuilding champions. Despite the pain that pierced my thighs, the dull ache numbing my shoulder joints, I smiled and swiveled at selected intervals.

  The voice on the humming PA system overhead commanded the five competitors who entered the stage last to retreat to the back of the stage, leaving the first five alone in the center. While I “stood relaxed” with the other four by the giant red curtain in back, the first five were rearranged in order by the judges.

  Heartbroken sighs were audible as the judges repositioned the bodybuilders. Competitors and crowd alike knew that if a contestant was placed away from a good bodybuilder and planted next to a bad one, he had already, within the first three minutes of his appearance, lost the show. The judges do not compare good bodybuilders with bad ones. They first sort the wheat from the chaff, then linger over the wheat.

  Our five by the curtain definitely represented the stronger group. The crowd had already picked their favorites, centering, as expected, on numbers 61, 63, and myself. As the inferior five went through the mandatory posing round, I stayed tight, still rigidly “standing relaxed.” I had to. Even though our group was not under direct scrutiny, one never knew when the judges might be watching.

  At the head judge’s direction, our group was next. We strode in line to the front of the stage, exchanging positions with the former group. As soon as we stood in the lineup, numbers 61, 63, and I were asked to rearrange ourselves for this comparison round. The excluded two bodybuilders visibly collapsed in spirit as we, the chosen, beamed. I looked to my right and left and saw my two rivals smiling, they knew the effect the Platzean image of American purity and pluck had on the judges. I quickly fixed my own face into a numbing grin and ignored the pain in my muscles and limbs, shuddering slightly from all the flexing.

  During the eight mandatory poses, I cockily preened and posed with abandon. It was a relief to actually move my body after the monotonous posture of “standing relaxed.” I hit every shot dramatically, as the primitive, bass beat of a jungle drum played in my mind. By the time we filed off to leave the stage for the next round, the 60 seconds of silent posing, I felt the saber was mine.

  I was the third-to-last contestant to go through the 60 second silent posing ritual. Pose for pose, I repeated my performance from the week before, but this time it went better. I remembered to keep my legs together. I remembered to move slowly, but dramatically. I hid my weakest points, my back and traps, and accentuated the positive, ending the exhibition with a series of vein-popping, tissue-shredding, most-muscular crabs that rocked the audience. The night show would be interesting. Vinnie caught up with me backstage as I wiped the oil off my body with a towel.

  “Oh, Sam,” he gurgled. “You looked like a human fucking penis! Veins were poppin’ every which way! You gotta love that niacin! You really moved the judges!”

  “What about my complexion?” I asked.

  “Like a fuckin’ tanned newborn,” Vinnie replied joyfully.

  I noticed in Vinnie’s wake a small, mustached man with an expensive collection of cameras dangling from his neck. The little man proffered his hand and regally announced, “I am Tomas. You are the winner, I am certain.” I shook his hand and listened as Vinnie told me of all the bodybuilding greats Tomas had shot in Venice.

  “I’ve finally made it,” I thought, as I did “the Walk” out into the blinding California sunshine. If only my friends back in New York could see me now: the men by the Universal, Austin, The Portuguese Rambo, Sweepea. How proud they would be! Nimrod and Vinnie stood behind Tomas as I ran through my poses for his camera.

  Tomas left me with his card and a wink. He strongly urged that I give him a call the next month for calendar work. He had a project in mind for me that might, in fact, take the whole weekend. He was willing to offer me $ 1,000, maybe more. …

  But the contest was far from over, and back at Shangri-La that afternoon, Nimrod ran over my role in the night show. I listened to his words as best I could, and tried to get down a rice cake and an apple. My stomach had shrunk to such an extent, I didn’t think it could accommodate both.

  “Remember,” Nimrod said, “forget the back. And, man, you forgot to do ‘Hair’ in prejudging. Do ‘Hair’ tonight, lots of leg shots too. And ab shots, your intercostals really came out this morning. Obliques too, and, man, you’ll look even better tonight, you’ll see. You’ve got number 61 and number 63 beat on cuts, not on size, so stay tight and show your torso, not your arms.”

  Nimrod was right. I had lost the audience in the silent posing round that morning as soon as I hit a front double-biceps pose. My body was too long for this kind of exposition. I had to keep my arms close to my side and flexed to make them appear larger than breadsticks. Any pose that drew attention to my back had to be expunged from my repertoire.

  But I didn’t spend that afternoon posing. I spent it as I had spent the week before, hallucinating rolling green fields covered in gigantic trees of broccoli, glistening in butter.

  We left that night at seven. Check-in was at eight, but as a heavyweight, I probably wouldn’t go on before ten. I checked my haircut one last time, spreading the mousse on the top, tilted layer. With the support of my friends, I walked gingerly to the car. We held our heads high on the way to Burbank, driving in the slow procession of winners. Vinnie, Bamm Bamm, G-spot, Nimrod, and I up front, Macon, Lamar, and Cuddles bringing up the rear. Behind us were friends and allies from Uptown Gym, from Bulldog, from Fanatics, from Gold’s.

  The auditorium, quiet that morning, was a madhouse. Three klieg lights revolved on a circular base by the steps leading to the entrance. Strong beams of white light rose a thousand feet upward. The spotlights were spectacularly dramatic, as the milling audience hoped the show would be. Most of the men were dressed to the nines, with silk tank tops and elevated shoes. Some wore jackets that listed their name, gym affiliation, and personal best on the bench press in script. Their dates wore patent-leather halters or tube tops with hair spritzed and teased to the rafters.

  In the packed theater, we foun
d seats in the back. Nimrod, Bamm Bamm, Vinnie, and I sat down, saving a place for G-spot, whom we had lost in the teeming throng. With the hood of my terry cloth jumper drawn over my face, I listened to my posing music on Vinnie’s Walkman and went through my routine again and again in my mind. What came after the side triceps shot? Was it down to one knee with back double-biceps, or was it a quarter turn to show back and flexed calves? I only hoped to God I didn’t forget any part of the posing sequence, because I’d memorized the whole thing sequentially. Like the alphabet, I knew what came next by what came just before. If I skipped a letter or a pose, I was lost.

  The theater had changed since the morning. The official black and gold NPC logo now hung above the posing dais. A red, carpeted platform dominated center stage. And there, stage left, gleamed the gold trophies on a wooden table, the silver saber among them. But I wasn’t the only one who’d spotted the spoils.

  From behind me, I heard the voice of Macon: “Look, son, over there. Tell me. What do you see?”

  “I see the silver saber, Dad.”

  “And the rest of the trophies, Lamar? What color are they, son?”

  Lamar hesitated for just a moment. “Gold, Dad. The color of kings.”

  “Yes, son, the color of kings,” Macon said, as if in a trance.

  The teen lightweights took to the stage as G-spot slumped down beside us, ashen-faced. She had gone to the women’s room and seen a particularly muscular blond woman donning a pair of canary-yellow posing trunks. “My God, the sight!” she whimpered, wrapping her arms around me. The blond contestant, she confided, sported a startlingly long appendage which emanated from her shaved vaginal lips. It was a result of her supplementation program. Her rosebud had grown to the size of a California redwood.

  G-spot was still shivering as competitor after smiling competitor took to the posing platform and offered the growing audience 90 seconds of a distillation of spirit and hope. There were muscular women, with great, wide shoulders and shocking pink nails. Men with huge chests and no legs, others with arms and nothing else. The audience, led by Vinnie, mercilessly decried the flaws of any found lacking.

  “Nice bitch tits!” he screamed at a male middleweight’s entrance. “You got a bra for that or what?”

  There were competitors who had tanned themselves while wearing, obviously, a larger suit for months before the show. Now with briefer trunks, the embarrassing white territory blanketing their midsection was exposed to all. Some had forgotten to shave, leaving a pad of pubic hair above the waist and crawling down each leg (“nice pubes, number 48!” this provoked from Vinnie). Others had overdone the posing oil and looked basted under the glare of the white lights.

  By the time my weight class was called, the audience was getting restless, and Vinnie was just one of many catcalling audience members, delighting in the competitors’ flaws after suffering them in good humor for the first hour. They had paid $15.00 a ticket ($20 VIP) and were now determined to get their money’s worth.

  A forty-five-year-old father of two, who, the MC announced, listed his hobbies as (1) bodybuilding and (2) bodybuilding, came out on stage only to be met with great guffaws and shrieks of laughter. “Sausage man!” Vinnie hooted. The sobriquet stuck, and increasing numbers of the audience joined in the chant: “Sausage man! Sausage man!”

  He carried 40 pounds more on his torso than he should have, all precariously balanced on a pair of toothpick legs. But none of this stopped him, as he furrowed his brow, bit the side of his mouth in concentration, and tried to quiet the crowd with his posing display. Sinatra’s “My Way” was not an ideal selection. The derisive chant became unbearable. He fled from the posing dais, both hands covering his watering eyes. I was just another obstacle he bumped into backstage on his mad dash to the men’s room.

  In the pump-up room, a small circle had formed around one bodybuilder. He was the Guest Poser of the show, professional bodybuilder Phil Williams. I joined the crowd and watched as he did set after endless set of seated calf raises. What was that look on his face? Once I would have mistaken that thousand yard stare for ruminative mysticism, now, it seemed more like doleful resignation.

  He was playing, and was condemned to play his muscle role until the kind release of death. In the end, he was a prisoner of bodybuilding, a victim, an iron casualty of the sorriest kind. He was better built, certainly, than the rest of the harelips, stutterers, and braggarts who paraded through the gym by day, but he was equally doomed. Sudden success in the iron game now necessitated following it up for the next thirty years with crash diets and iron comebacks. When he rose from the seated calf machine and quickly pumped out a series of bicep reps, he took up that dumbbell, as it were, for life.

  The consensus in the pump-up room was that the competition would fall to number 63 or myself. He had the most size, I the greatest cuts. One of us would lose, but it was still too early to tell. We pretended to ignore each other, grabbed the iron at our feet and set about flooding our muscles with blood. There were only a few minutes to spare and already, I noticed, our numbers had diminished. Two lesser competitors (from the first group of five that morning) had dropped out since the prejudging, realizing the saber was beyond their grasp this day.

  Following my warm-up routine, I visited the men’s room—minutes before we were to go on. As I walked into the room, I heard a stifled moan and the hasty closing of a stall door. Plainly visible from beneath the stall divider were two pairs of orange-hued feet on the tiles, the posing trunks of each bunched around their ankles. If their feet were any indication, one occupant stood, while the other, facing him, was seated. I was amazed they had the energy.

  “Heavyweight talent, you’re on,” a voice said by the door, and, in serpentine fashion, we all filed down the dimly lit backstage to the side of the red curtain. A man wearing a headset and a beard dashed from his offstage glass booth to make last-minute checks with us on our music selections.

  “Hey you, number 65!” the man called to me. “You want me to start your music as you go on, or when you hit the dais?”

  “Five seconds after I hit the dais,” I replied. Five seconds was time enough to fall to my knees for the beginning of “Giant in Repose.”

  He nodded his head frantically. “Right, 65, thanks. Good luck tonight, man, that audience is murder!”

  “Not for those of us who actually prepared, who strained and starved for the saber,” I said to myself. It was on the index card in my hands; the rest were back in my Gold’s Gym bag in the wings.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, men’s open heavyweight class!” the MC intoned.

  The crowd roared; they had been waiting for us for hours. Like suspects in a police lineup, we arranged ourselves in order on stage and faced the screaming multitude. I saw nothing, just the outline of the judges’ heads.

  “That’s right!” someone screamed above the buzz of the audience. The audience had selected their favorites, numbers 61, 63 and myself. This time it was Nimrod who yelled, “Legs!” I bit into the side of my cheek as a reminder to keep my quads tightened. I could lose the show on a mistake like that. Unflexed muscle looks remarkably like fat. One by one, we filed off as the crowd cheered for the competitors they favored.

  Shining with sweat and posing oil, we watched offstage as the first of us reemerged at the MC’s introduction to perform his posing. Some chose powerful instrumentals. “Theme from Rocky” and “Exodus” are perennial bodybuilding favorites, but this year’s choice was The Black Knight’s selection from the previous week: “Love Theme from St. Elmo’s Fire.” As I watched, I grew increasingly confident that I would win the posing round, if, that is, I could get through it without fainting. No one could match my music for pure drama. They were velvet; I’d be a hand grenade.

  The MC introduced me and listed my hobbies as bare-knuckle prizefighting and needlepoint (I felt the Goliath/David combination would attract the judges’ attention). But somethi
ng was amiss. As soon as I emerged from the wings and brushed that imaginary bead of sweat off my upper chest with one hand, my music started. The man in the glass booth had erred. I had expressly ordered the music to begin only when I reached the platform.

  According to bodybuilding convention, I had two choices: (1) To stand petulantly with arms folded on the dais and insist that the music start again, or (2) to press on, regardless. I chose the latter, and abandoned “the Walk” to scuttle to the dais. I bounded up the platform, immediately went into “Giant in Repose” and engaged in speed posing. I had no choice—I had to rush through “Garbo” just to catch up.

  “Legs!” I heard Nimrod shout. I flexed my quads just in time to accompany a climactic flourish of the music wailing in the theater. At the most dramatic moments of “Live and Let Die,” I spun around and crunched my body into the crablike contortions of the most-muscular pose. Blood coursed through my bulging veins, my muscles ballooned, my body turned purple. I smiled my whitest grin (the Pearl Drops Tooth Polish had been a wise choice backstage). I looked like Quasimodo with gleaming teeth.

  I remembered to avoid the front double-bicep. I kept my arms close to my body, trying to make myself look as thick as possible. I glided into the side chest position, languidly brought one arm up to flex my biceps, simultaneously passing the other hand through my hair and smiling. Yes, I did ‘Hair.’ The audience screamed, and I realized I had them. A few more wrenching most-musculars, my Tom Platz bow, and it was over.

  Offstage, the other competitors shook my hand. Most had me the winner. But the contest was not over. Number 63, the shorter, larger black man took the stage. The crowd loved him. He was massive; sporting what must have been a 54-inch chest and 30-inch thighs, and showing them to great advantage. He breakdanced through “Sexual Healing” by Marvin Gaye and received a rousing ovation.