Vinnie couldn’t persuade me. The months passed, and I didn’t return to the gym. In the first two weeks after the contest, I was too busy eating even to consider it. I put on 37 pounds in 14 days. If I was awake, I was eating. Then, suddenly, the novelty of unlicensed gourmandizing wore off. Over the following four months, I stopped eating and lost 50 pounds, much of it muscle. As hard as it had been to pack on, it was that easy to lose. At the end of it, I looked like I’d never lifted a weight in my life. And as odd as it once felt to be a bodybuilder, it now felt odd not being one. I moved awkwardly, like a singer who doesn’t know what to do with his hands. “The Walk” was an impossibility. There was nothing left to display. I watched the hair grow back on my chest and legs with bemusement.
I wasn’t the only one who was confused. A woman who had once greeted my muscle persona at a party with “This isn’t a turn-on, you know. I think it’s a really desperate maneuver on your part,” now reeled back at my pared-down version. “Wow, there’s nothing left!” she grieved. “What have you done?” If muscles are property, I’d regressed from a land baron to a serf.
The only ones who felt comfortable about all this were my parents. At the news that I’d abandoned bodybuilding but started a book on the subject, my father sent me a wire celebrating what he called my “iron étude.” “All is forgiven,” he said, “literature is bigger than people.” As an author, I’d resumed my rightful place among the patricians. My mother was simply relieved. She no longer had to roll her eyes when her Princeton friends asked if I were “still tilting at windmills.”
And the rest of my friends? Vinnie found Jesus and the “Bodybuilders for Christ Team.” He called me once, from Dallas and the mission there. He was ecstatic to report himself, for the first time in ten years, completely clean.
“It’s really great,” he bubbled over the phone. “We don’t do no ’roids or nothin’! We shoot amino acids directly into our system! Have you tried it?”
G-spot won the Junior Nationals and made the cover of Female Bodybuilding (“A Bodybuilder’s Boudoir: Hot Lingerie Looks”). Though no longer in competition, Nimrod is thriving in his personal training business in the San Gabriel Valley. As for Bamm Bamm, he finally realized his dream and left for Australia, a speech course, and the myriad bouncing opportunities in Sydney.
I bequeathed my knee wraps and wrist straps to Lamar and Macon at Shangri-La, home still to Leonard and his portrait of Bill Pearl, Raoul and his sodium-free rice cakes, Hector and his relaxation tapes, and to Tara and Xandra. Outside Shangri-La, the Mercedes and Luvs and Mavericks are still parked with their California vanity license plates reading RLNTLS and TFF STFF. There was a time when these inspired me—but no more. In the end, I had to leave. I was a lone and solitary skeptic in this realm of smiling and pumped Pollyannas.
THE IMAGE GALLERY
Author, age fourteen, in soccer uniform
Age twenty-two
Age twenty-four, celebrating the conclusion of Oxford examinations
The descent
The pause
The explosion
The explosion (continued)
The initial phase of lockout
The lockout
Author squatting 405 pounds
Squatting 500 pounds
Author with bodybuilding great Bill Pearl at
the San Gabriel Valley
Standing tall with Hero Isagawa, current bench-press world record holder for the 123-pound weight class
On stage at the Golden Valley
Author rubbing his chin (post “Heightened Arousal Mode”) at the Ninth Annual Rose City Bench-Press Extravaganza
Doing “Hair” at the San Gabriel Valley
The compulsory back double-biceps pose at the San Gabriel Valley
Abdominal pose at the Golden Valley
Holding water at the San Gabriel Valley
After “the Diet”—six days later, twelve pounds lighter at the Golden Valley
The lineup at the Golden Valley (author center)
Pose-down at the Golden Valley (author, second from right)
A bodybuilder at last. Author, 1988.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Samuel Wilson Fussell resides in Montana. Since 2004 he has lived as a subsistence hunter and worked as a rescue, recovery, and salvage scuba diver for the Flathead County Sheriff Dive Rescue Team. He is a graduate of the Lawrenceville School, Pomona College, and Oxford University. Since the initial publication of Muscle, his life story has been optioned for film, television, and the stage.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
Copyright © 1991 by Samuel Wilson Fussell
Cover design by Andy Ross
ISBN: 978-1-5040-0198-4
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
180 Maiden Lane
New York, NY 10038
www.openroadmedia.com
Find a full list of our authors and
titles at www.openroadmedia.com
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