Muscle

by Samuel Wilson Fussell

  Number 61, whose burgundy trunks I now recognized from the men’s room floor, was the final heavyweight to perform his routine. Despite his last minute coupling in the men’s room, he bombed. Just as some people dance with ease and others as if they’re stomping a cat, number 61 simply could not pose. He tried to match the lyricism of his music with smooth, flowing poses, but his transition movements made him appear like nothing so much as a hopping praying mantis.

  As soon as number 61 finished, all of us filed back on stage and maintained the “standing relaxed” position once more while the judges prepared their results. The MC announced the order of merit, beginning with the least meritorious. Name after name was called, until, as expected, there were only three of us left, numbers 61, 63, and myself.

  Before rendering their verdict, the judges wanted a pose-down from the three of us. The pose-down might determine the winner, or, as in the previous week, one of us might be so far ahead, it might not. Only the judges knew.

  The audience howled, but not loud enough to drown out Vinnie’s words. “Like a fuckin’ tornado through a trailer park, Sam!” he screamed. Suddenly, Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” blared from the stereo. My two rivals ran after me as I strode to the forefront of the stage. Their chase was a good sign; they were acknowledging that I was the one to beat.

  Each of us matched the other pose for pose, and as the crowd grew louder, we drew up right alongside each other, desperately trying to indicate our opponents’ flaws. I flung my arm upwards, just grazing number 63’s chin, and flexed my bicep in front of his face. He responded with a muscle salvo of his own, bending forward in the crab and displaying his trapezius muscles. Number 61 squeezed next to me and compared his leg to mine. The audience saw rippling flex, cross-striations, bulging biceps, while we panted and flexed, gasped and smiled.

  The judge called an end to the round when it became clear that we were all on the verge of passing out. “The results are in,” he said, “and in third place …” it was number 61, the praying mantis. With a drooping head, he took his trophy.

  “And in second place …” I heard my name. I lifted my head to the ceiling, gave the victorious number 63 a bear hug, then delivered a fist salute of ironman solidarity to the crowd. Stiffer than a cigar store Indian, I took my trophy amid a scattering of boos and many cheers. As in every bodybuilding competition, every paying member of the audience had his or her own winner.

  All the heavyweights, save for number 63, exited the stage, leaving the arena clear for the winners of each individual weight class. But the quick pose-down that followed was a nonevent, the light-heavyweight winner, the middleweight, and the lightweight were no match for number 63. He hoisted the tin saber above his head, and contorted his body as if he were a black St. George slaying an imaginary dragon beside him. Photographers rushed the stage to get close-ups for the next edition of Modern Bodybuilding.

  Vinnie and Nimrod greeted me backstage. They weren’t sure what to expect—a vicious “’roid rage,” maybe, or a bitter denunciation of the judges. But I was capable of neither. I simply mustered a weak smile as they clapped me on the back. Number 61, the man with the burgundy trunks and the lavender perfume, sat on the metal stool by the master light control panel. He cupped his chin in his hands, and mumbled again and again to himself, “I must work harder, I must work harder.” For once, I wasn’t saying it myself. Vinnie went over to him and patted him on the back. “Do the right thing, buddy,” he said.

  I had to know.

  “Vinnie?” I asked, as I wrapped myself up in my Gold’s Gym sweats. “Was number 63 really that good?”

  Vinnie looked once at Nimrod, before looking back at me.

  “Sam, I kid you not, that number 63 is just the kind of guy you’d love to share a foxhole with.”

  I left the auditorium with Vinnie and Nimrod, and met my fellow gym rats at Round Table Pizza near Shangri-La for a celebratory-consolatory feast. Everyone was there, G-spot, Macon, Lamar, Cuddles, Moses, Nimrod, and Bamm Bamm.

  The pizza parlor featured stained glass and tapestries on the wall depicting knights prancing on chargers. The iron wheels serving as chandeliers housed candle-shaped light bulbs. Vinnie opened a menu for me, and I took in the “Specialties of the Castle.”

  In true bodybuilding tradition, the diet was over. I was now allowed anything I wanted, and as much of it as I could eat. IFBB bodybuilder Gary Leonard holds the unofficial record, putting on 54 pounds in 5 days after his Mr. America victory (23 pounds of that within the first 15 hours).

  Vinnie ordered for me “King Arthur’s Supreme,” a pizza with everything on it. Macon and Lamar settled on “The Camelot Calzone,” while the rest of the bunch ate “Guine­vere’s Garden Delight,” the sole vegetarian entry.

  There were smiles all around. I had completed the final rite. I had competed. I was a bodybuilder. The only one, in fact, who wasn’t smiling, was me.

  As I wiped the brown silt of competition color off my face with a napkin bearing the Round Table escutcheon, it was Moses who explained the verdict of the judges. “Sometime, man, it ain’t who got the most, but who knows how to show it. You’ll see, man, the more you do it. You’ll get ’em next time.”

  But there would be no next time. None of my friends at the table knew it, but it was over for me. There would be no more juice, no more three on, one off, split training sessions, no more competition color or amino chewables. In fact, after all the years, all the workouts, all the pain, and all the posing, there would be no more iron.

  15. THE AFTERMATH

  I WOULD GIVE MY LIFE FOR A MAN WHO IS LOOKING FOR THE TRUTH. BUT I WOULD GLADLY KILL A MAN WHO THINKS HE HAS FOUND THE TRUTH.

  —LUIS BUÑUEL

  I’d succeded, in a sense. After all, I had become that figure I once drew on the cocktail napkin back in New York in front of Sweepea and Mousie. I’d succeeded in gaining 80 pounds of muscle, in benching four and squatting five, in expanding my frame. In the parlance of the gym, I had swallowed the air hose. I had become a bodybuilder, but not, in fact, a very good one.

  In their account of the Golden Valley Physique Classic IX, Modern Bodybuilding reported: “The heavyweight division provided the most intense competition of the night. Gordon Kimbrough came out on top. He had ample mass and thickness. He was slightly smoother than second place finisher Sam Fussel [sic], but had superior overall development. Fussel was probably the hardest competitor in the contest with incredible serrati (pardon my Latin) and intercostals.”

  Why did I lose? Not because, as Moses charitably suggested, I didn’t really know how to show my wares, but because my body (come competition time) was like Bamm Bamm’s car. It too was a chop-shop special. A fender from a Plymouth, a trunk from a Chevy, it looked like someone had assembled me much too fast without adequate instructions or understanding (which was precisely the case). My impressive thighs merely brought attention to my paltry calves, my ice cube tray abs to my misshapen chest.

  Even after four years, I was raw and unfinished. It would take a good four more to achieve the kind of symmetry and sheen displayed by the professionals of the IFBB. Four more years of eating and supplementing and injecting and playing “catch-up” with those lagging body parts. But I couldn’t so much as swallow another Chewable, much less lift another weight. I knew it that night at Round Table Pizza, and I knew it the next day at Shangri-La when I resumed training my charges.

  “Is this good for you?” Moët asked, referring to the variant style of pull-ups she was just then doing.

  Forgetting for a moment who and where I was, I cast my eyes downward and muttered cryptically, “Is any of this good for you?”

  What I saw was the older lifters: the builders in their forties and fifties, long in tooth and sparse of hair. They were me in twenty years.

  Like them, I could keep on lifting. They spent feverish weeks pursuing size and shape, and then, succumbing to boredom,
took months off between workouts. They relied on the principle of “muscle memory” to carry them through their training. (If you read for 10 years, and then stop reading altogether for 10 more, when you finally pick up a book, you’ll read much better than a man who has never read before at all. The same principle applies with muscles.) Each and every iron veteran was engaged in a mythical comeback.

  Like them, I could keep on eating. As the years pass and the metabolism slows, older lifters get larger and larger, but less and less muscular. The concept of being “big” is hard to shake, so even bulk comprised of mostly fat is preferable to being a pencil-neck.

  And, like them, I could die prematurely. Heart attacks, strokes, liver and kidney problems, the ways are many. Eugene Sandow himself, back at the turn of the century, was said to have died of a brain aneurysm he incurred in single-handedly pulling his car out of a ditch.

  “It’s a quality-of-life issue,” Vinnie once told me. “You might be king for just a day, but, by God, you’re a fuckin’ king.”

  Once it had all been one to me, just point me in the direction of the gym and I had reason to breathe. But no longer. Now I wanted to feel and care. Now being alive made more sense to me than iron, and I wanted to be alive.

  I wanted to eat a meal for the simple pleasure of savoring the food, rather than worrying about its net protein utilization value. It wasn’t just doughnuts and chocolate éclairs. It was Brie cheese and wine, ham and French bread. I longed for salt and butter, those staples that actually give food taste.

  After all the histrionics and the grandstanding, I longed for a life unrehearsed. I could no longer reduce life to 90 seconds, to ten different poses based on a track of 360 degrees—not with a good conscience. No more than I could abbreviate and trivialize life to a series of sets and numbers, index cards and mottos. Everything I’d done for the last four years had been an effort to keep the world at bay, to find a place in which I wouldn’t have to react or think or feel. But having done that, having come 3,000 miles, having gained 80 pounds, I wanted out. I wanted out of that body, that mind, that regimentation. Because as big as I’d gotten and as impressive and imposing as I looked “standing relaxed,” I felt that if you could somehow find a chink in my armor and pry apart a muscular pauldron from a gorget, you’d find nothing within that vast white empty space but a tiny soul about the size of an acorn.

  It took the Golden Valley to bring me back to reality. The “thousand yard stare” I’d seen on the face of professional bodybuilder Phil Williams, the one I’d seen in the eyes of so many of my fellow iron casualties, I saw in my own eyes in the mirror the day of the show. We all looked like men who’d spent too much time in the trenches.

  “TIGHT! STAY TIGHT!” builders scream at one another as they perform their exercises. It’s a plea for good form. Close, tight form prevents injuries; it ensures the feeling of security a lifter craves. But “staying tight” also demands a singleness of purpose that obliterates everything but “the way.” Save for debate about reps, sets, protein utilization and glycogen retention, alternative opinions are not to be found in the lifting world. Among addicts, the only interest is the next fix.

  I should have known better, of course. I should have known better than to think that getting bigger and bigger was the answer to my problems. Sure, my size had succeeded in silencing Jerry, but it hadn’t cut me off from everyone. Two years earlier, back in New York, I was on my way to the gym. Thermos and gym bag in hand, I cleared my mind of everything but the upcoming leg routine. But rounding a corner to the Y, I saw an older man, wearing a Brooks Brothers suit, pushed to the ground. He landed hard on his side in the gutter. It knocked the wind out of him. His assailant, twenty years younger and similarly dressed, scooted away. The victim, his nose bloody, clutched my pants leg. Once his rasping struggle for breath faded, he used my arm to clamber back on his feet, inadvertently shattering my thermos on the cement sidewalk in the process.

  “Hit him!” the old man howled, pointing in the direction of the younger man. “It’s my son, the bastard. Hit him, mister,” he implored, “hit him now!”

  It was too late. The son sped round the corner. “Fuck you, scum!” his father screamed in his direction, wiping his nose.

  He looked at me as if I were at fault, and then suddenly set out after him. “You were a mistake!” I heard him cry when he rounded the corner.

  I felt sick to my stomach. It wasn’t the thermos, lying at my feet in pieces. It was me. I needed more insulation, more muscles. I would just have to get that much bigger. I rushed off to the gym more intent than ever to find some protection.

  But this shell that I created wasn’t meant just to keep people at bay. After all, a can of Mace could do that. No, this carapace was laboriously constructed to keep things inside too. The physical palisades and escarpments of my own body served as a rocky boundary that permitted no passage, no hint of a deeper self—a self I couldn’t bear. It wasn’t that I was worse than other people. It was that I was just as bad, just as frightened, just as mean, just as angry, and I hated myself for it. Every sin that had a name, I saw in me.

  But self-hatred is its own form of egotism. As long as I hated myself, I still believed that I mattered. My deepest fear was that I didn’t matter. All my life, I’d felt like I was treading water in a bottomless sea. I’d spent my days and nights flailing my limbs in terror just to keep my chin above water. With the sky stretching forever above me, and the water below me yawning to a fathomless deep, I needed whatever buoy or marker or myth I could find to keep me from feeling meaningless in the face of infinity.

  I called myself a realist. I reasoned that if, living the life of a bodybuilder, I was a monster of selfishness, I didn’t really differ so substantially from my friends who spent their days buying and selling used coins and soybeans and their nights bragging about it in bars. My posing and preening, my bluster and boasting seemed relatively honest, all things considered. But I was actually much more like them than I was willing to admit. Their money was my muscles. Both of us were stocking and hoarding our respective units of worth, and trumpeting ourselves for our skill in attaining it. We couldn’t live without the idea of a credit rating.

  I was actually an impossible idealist, who turned to bodybuilding as a way of purifying myself. Like The Counter back at the Y, I was Lady Macbeth in a lifting belt, forever trying to wash out my spot. And if I couldn’t eradicate my sins, then perhaps I could conceal them by fabricating an exterior so outlandish that no one would notice what was behind it. But behind that huge frame and those muscular sets, I felt shut up in a kind of claustrophobic panic. Not flexing but drowning. I felt like an actor victimized by his own success, condemned to play a role again and again and again. A role I spent four years seeking out and perfecting, but a role I was no longer willing to play.

  I became a bodybuilder as a means of becoming a caricature. The inflated cartoon I became relieved me from the responsibility of being human. But once I’d become that caricature, that inflated cartoon, I longed for something else. As painful and humiliating as it is to be human, being subhuman or superhuman is far worse.

  Back in the bunker in New York, my mother had known just this. She recognized in me a certain terror that reduced the rest of the world to a perpetual threat, dismissed and warded off with muscles and mantras. She understood that my monomania was driving me to the point of extinction. She saw that once again I was burrowing myself into a cocoon. Caught up in it myself, I had failed to see the symptoms of my own disease.

  I explained to myself and to her that it was in the gym that I was most alive. With 500 pounds on my back in the squat rack, only the moment mattered. But even that exercise was performed in a set-repeated groove, while I employed my belt, wraps, and ammonia for protection.

  In the end, I was like those chess players I saw in Washington Square Park. My lifting was life-denying rather than life-affirming. It didn’t have to be lifting or
muscles, of course. It could have been tax law or eighteenth-century English literature or arbitrage—anything where the obsession precluded all else. I was as twisted, warped, and stilted as a bonsai tree. Another of life’s miniatures.

  The irony was that I recognized the symptoms of the disease in Lamar and Macon, but not in myself. The one time I’d asked them both about the whereabouts of Lamar’s mother, the two eyed each other quickly, then riveted their eyes to the ground, simultaneously reciting: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” What was interesting to me wasn’t the fact that Macon’s wife had run off with a vitamin salesman, but that her husband and son were protecting themselves from the possibility of ever being hurt again.

  Like them, what I was really afraid of was risk: risking to be myself, risking to say what I actually felt, risking to feel something for someone else, risking to let someone else feel something for me. It was no accident that my love back in New York was someone else’s fiancé. It guaranteed a kind of distance on my part. The real connection between lovers was something I could never stomach. The rare times I tried, the pain was awful, the recompense of joy infrequent. Even Vinnie’s penchant for pornography was unsettlingly close to my own.

  Despite all I knew, leaving iron wasn’t that simple, of course. No iron veteran, after all, just walks away. Without the buttresses and corbels, the brackets and bolstering devices of muscles, bodybuilders feel they’d collapse quicker than a house of cards. It’s no wonder the rate of recidivism is astronomically high, and all my gym friends assumed I’d be no exception. I was suffering from post-competition trauma, they said among themselves. Give me a month, maybe three, and I’d be back with my wrist straps and knee wraps once more.

  Vinnie did his best to lure me back to the fold. He brought a newspaper to my room signaling the creation of a men’s cologne called IRON. It was just then sweeping the country, capitalizing on America’s bodybuilding fever. “PUMP IRON,” the ads proclaimed. But my eyes skimmed over this to the adjoining article. It was news of Alexei Stakhanov, the Russian hero. According to Trud, the labor newspaper, he had died lonely and miserable, a ruined alcoholic. So much for the human dynamo and the sanctity of labor.