“Instead of going out to clubs, my friends and I play croquet,” the 19-year-old tells me. Her best friend Ethan dangles his croquet mallet lethargically, his back curved in the S of a tall boy just out of high school. A huge crucifix thumps on his chest every time he moves. In the glare of Southern sun, the silver Jesus burns like a hood ornament. On the pocket of his plaid shirt, a button proclaims “God Bless Our Priests.”
Cheryl and Ethan are riffing about the decorating of her new house. This evening, she will bid on a two-bedroom ranch on a suburban street, and if all goes well, they will move in together.
Because Ethan told me he favors a “swinging sixties” motif for the house, I had assumed the crucifix should be taken as an ironic gesture. It’s a commentary, perhaps, on the pedophilia scandal in the Catholic church, the kind of fashion statement that brainy kids make at that age.
Actually, no. Cheryl’s mother pulls me aside. She explains that under ordinary circumstances, she would worry about her teenaged daughter sharing a house with a boy. But honestly, Ethan? His career goal is to be Pope.
Ethan, in fact, plans to be a Catholic priest. But “there is a chance—it’s probably miniscule and really unlikely—that I will one day be the bishop of Rome,” he tells me. When I ask him how his decorating theme—hairy rugs, beads, Jetsons chairs—fits with papal ambitions, he dissolves into laughter. Cheryl answers for him. “Ethan is a bundle of contradictions.” And then, she shoots him a look, “And when you’re Pope, I won’t be kissing no rings.”
Cheryl, in any case, has her own grand ambitions, and they’re a little closer at hand. This year, she set a record at the international weightlifting championships, giving her bragging rights as the world’s strongest woman. But until she wins Olympic gold, no one will pay much attention. Cheryl took home a bronze medal in the 2000 Olympics. In 2004, if she is lucky, she will hunch in front of a barbell, throw it in the air and, perhaps, prove to television audiences and sponsors around the globe that she is really, truly the strongest woman.
She began with treehouses. Ten years old, she cut down pines and oaks and sliced them up. She dragged the logs into place and carried them up ladders. She reinforced the floors with T-shaped beams. When she’d finished one treehouse, she’d move onto the next. She tells me the story in a tumble, her two sisters chiming in, adding details about the wars they waged with neighbor kids. The Haworth girls know their way around this anecdote, as if they’ve told it many times, part of the way they explain themselves to outsiders. I picture the three of them as pint-sized frontierswomen, uprooting mighty redwoods, wrestling bears, bending railroad ties—their sense of themselves is so Paul Bunyan-esque that they seem to have emerged full-blown from a campfire tale.
Cheryl didn’t become a strongwoman, officially, until age thirteen. Her father, wanting to hone her upper body strength for softball, drove her over to the Paul Anderson-Howard Cowen gym. The family had been reading newspaper stories about the gym for years. Its Team Savannah members, male and female, had swept the weightlifting championships.
With typical Haworth gusto, Bob marched into the gym and proclaimed that his daughter might want to try out for Team Savannah, though she’d never once lifted a weight. “You might have the strongest girl in the world here,” he crowed. The women’s coach led Cheryl away to test her mettle. “Next thing we knew the coach was whooping and a-hollering. ‘This is the strongest girl I’ve ever seen.’ There were 120 pounds on the bar.”
Within weeks Cheryl began competing, cleaning up in the local meets. “I beat everybody in my first competition,” she says, matter-of-factly. Soon she was jetting to international competitions. In 2000, she competed in the first-ever Olympics to include women’s weightlifting as an official event. She, the newcomer, won the bronze medal. Reporters seemed less impressed with Cheryl’s feat than they were stunned by her size—over 300 pounds.
In front of banks of tape recorders, they hit her with a barrage of questions that would have driven most other teenage girls into hiding. Had she ever been on a date? What exactly did she eat? Didn’t she feel self-conscious about her body? Cheryl answered with aplomb. “I’m not trying to be small. I’m trying to be strong,” she reminded them.
Whether she wanted to or not, her very existence issued some kind of challenge to national assumptions about the good life. “There’s something in us that wonders if she can be truly happy,” a Boston Globe columnist declared.
According to her agent, George Wallach, Cheryl stands to make a lot of money if she can prove she’s happy. “She’s a big gal and for a lot of women who aren’t completely comfortable with themselves, she makes them feel better.” Wallach envisions numerous ways of cashing in on this—a plus-sized clothing line, motivational speaking tours, maybe even “an animated series, ‘Cheryl Haworth, Strongest Woman in the World, Saves the…whatever.’”
Cheryl cannot afford to think about her body as a symbol. She has to think about the Chinese. They own women’s weightlifting. She must stay big enough to take them on. “Cheryl can weigh whatever she wants to, provided that she’s got her speed and strength,” according to her coach, Michael Cohen.
What about the long-term health effects of all this bulking up? “Look at gymnastics,” he says. “You look at those girls and you think, ‘My god, that’s child abuse.’” He pauses for effect. “No, that’s not child abuse. That’s athletics.”
To compete in the Olympics you cannot be romantic about your body—you will need to starve it or muscle it up. You must endure being measured, analyzed, and poked. This becomes clear to me when Cheryl’s drug tester shows up. It’s evening. I’m slumped over the Haworth’s kitchen table, exhausted from a day of trying to match their pioneer spirit. A thirty-ish woman in a linen blouse lets herself in the door; a registered nurse, she makes surprise visits to the house once a month. From the moment she arrives until Cheryl produces enough urine for her to analyze—which is a lot, I gather—the nurse cannot let Cheryl out of her sight. She shadows Cheryl for three hours, jumping from her chair whenever the teenager pads into another room.
“She’s gotta watch,” Cheryl says, of the actual urine-collection process. “I have to put my shirt up to here and my pants around my ankles,” she adds and sighs. She takes another gulp of Coke, trying to fill her bladder, to get the ordeal over with.
Cheryl is cruising the highway with the AC up and Dave Matthews blasting on the stereo, working a toothpick in her mouth, lounging in the cushions of her Impala SS’s driver seat. The black, lowrider-ish car reminds me of a shark. She bought it with cash. When you’re inside it, surveying Savannah through the tinted windows, the trees pop out in surreal blues and greens. The clouds all have silver linings.
“It’s odd, because I’m a woman and I’m a weightlifter so I should be all about feminism,” she continues. Then she glances over at me, eyebrow arched in question. “Is that the word—feminism?” Recently, NOW honored her with one of its Women of Courage awards. “I didn’t do anything courageous,” Cheryl scoffs. “I lifted weights.”
I can see why feminism might seem unnecessary within the Haworth family. The eldest sister, Beth, “was always MVP in everything,” according to her father. Sixteen-year-old Katie has placed twice in national weightlifting championships, but says she won’t let athletics mess with her law career. “What do you want to be?” I ask her. “Supreme Court Justice,” she answers, without missing a beat. Cheryl manages to keep up her grades at the prestigious Savannah College of Art and Design while training for the next Olympics. She has shown me her drawings, photo-realistic portraits in black and white, the muscles of her subjects lovingly rendered, the eyes wet with life. The Haworth girls take it for granted that they will rule the world.
Bob Haworth tells me how he and his wife, Sheila, skimped on sleep to shuttle their daughters from swim practice to mock law trials to music lessons. He’s smaller than Cheryl, but I can see echoes of her in the way he walks, the side-to-side swagger of a guy who once wrestled
on a college team. His folksy voice would be perfect for narrating a Christmas special.
Sheila has the rolled-up-sleeves manner of a woman who has seen her share of split-open skulls. “We get the traumas, the gunshot wounds, kids riding their bikes with no helmets on, the adults riding the four-wheeler getting paralyzed from it flipping it over,” she says about her work as a nurse on a team that specializes in head, neck, and back injuries. “We see the results of a lot of stupidity,” she adds.
She regards sexism as just another brand of stupidity. “My dad was a brick mason,” she says. “I had a cousin Walter, who was the same age. Walter got to go work with his dad. My dad wouldn’t take me. I could do just as good a job as Walter. If my dad had taken me, I would have been a brick mason.”
“Is she talking about the bricks?” Cheryl says.
“It makes her so mad,” Katie says.
Sheila and I exchange a look. Her girls don’t get it, and she’s proud they don’t. The Haworth parents have taught their daughters to expect big sky, a wide-open future where they can ride like cowboys into any sunset they choose. The Haworths have a certain genius for optimism. But when I ask Cheryl how she became so confident, she does not immediately think of her family. She credits Savannah. “In the South, people don’t care. It’s different from California. I can wear the same shorts five days in a row. Being a woman and a weightlifter is more cool to people than odd.” Her fans—mostly middle-aged men—salute her everywhere we go. “Hey Champ,” they call. Or “strongest woman!” Or “Saw you in the paper!” In a restaurant, one beefy guy pulls her aside to consult about training tactics. An old man calls her over, and his wife says, “You’re even prettier in real life than in your pictures.”
I had expected chrome and flashy mirrors, a downtown location, maybe an underground parking garage with spaces reserved for the coaches. After all, the Anderson-Cohen gym sent more Olympic weightlifters to the 2000 games than did the official Olympic facility in Colorado. But the gym is unpretentious. It hunkers at the end of an access road that I had trouble finding on the map. The athletes park on the grass.
As soon as I swing open the door, the din hits me, the THUNK-thunk-thunk of barbells falling from six or seven feet in the air and then bouncing across the plywood platforms. Lifters sprawl on plastic chairs, waiting their turn—gawky kids training for basketball teams, tattooed guys, women who could pass for action figures, heavy kids who could pass for bookworms.
I find coach Cohen squatting under a barbell. When I get him in a chair, he’s still squatting, elbows balanced on knees, as if he’s ready to pounce, a man made entirely out of fast-twitch muscles.
Cheryl, he says, just returned from the Junior Championships, where she successfully defended her title as strongest under-20-year-old girl in the world. She needs rest. But in a few weeks, “we will bust her behind. She’ll be here all day.”
What about the Haworth family? I ask. How does he think the parents managed to raise three such confident young women?
Cohen doesn’t seem to be interested in that question. What interests him is that each of the Haworth girls fall into a different weight class. “You’ve got Beth who weighs 130, 125 pounds. You’ve got Katie who weighs 170 and you’ve got Cheryl who weighs over 300.”
Just then, two of the three Haworth weight classes appear—Cheryl and Katie. They announce their mission for the afternoon: ear-wax candles. Supposedly, you can stick one of these folk remedies into your ear, light it, and it will suck all the gunk out. They plan to find out if this is true.
But first, the girls take over the gym office. Katie swivels back and forth in the chair behind the desk, answering the Anderson-Cohen phone when it rings. I pull out my tape recorder, intending to interview her about her future, but it’s just too hot. Arrows of sun scorch the desk. Katie and I become absorbed in winding weightlifting tape around the office pens. Days later, when I have returned home, I will find one of these swaddled pens in my bag.
Cheryl’s cell phone bleeps. It’s Ethan. Hand it over, I tell her, because I realize that a certain question has been gnawing at me. “Ethan,” I say, “What are you going to do after you become Pope? What’s your plan for the church?”
He admits he doesn’t have one. Cheryl grabs the phone away. “You don’t have a plan? Ethan, you’ve got to have a plan!”
When we head over to the house she wants to buy, two real estate agents perch on a sofa. Cheryl sprawls on the floor. The sweet little two-bedroom ranch with a grill on the back porch requires a down-payment that’s a bit beyond her means. Now Cheryl pitches mortgage terms at the agents. They treat her with the deference due a celebrity who may be trading up to a four-bedroom-with-swimming-pool in a few years.
“I don’t think about it at all,” Cheryl told me earlier, about body size. However, if she follows her agent’s advice, she will have to. He wants her to cash in on her body’s power to explode assumptions about female strength, and the challenge she poses, willingly or not, to one-size-fits-all culture. It’s not the easiest route to fame, but it sounds like a plan.
UPDATE:
At the 2004 Athens Olympics, Cheryl Haworth tore a ligament in her elbow. Once the favorite for a Gold, she came in sixth. Two years later, she was arrested for drunk driving. After an argument with her coach Mike Cohen, she decided to leave his gym. She sold her house and moved to a dorm in the Olympic training center in Colorado. I have no idea what happened to Ethan.
Battery-Powered Brain
This spring, Stuart Gromley hunched over a desk in his bedroom, groping along the skin of his own forehead, trying to figure out where to glue the electrodes. The wires from those electrodes led to a Radio Shack Electronics Learning Lab, a toy covered with knobs, switches and meters. “For ages 10 and up,” the instructions on the box recommended. Gromley, a 39-year-old network administrator in San Francisco, had bought a kiddie lab because it had been decades since he’d last tinkered with electricity; he hoped its instruction sheets would help him cheat his way through the experiment he was about to set up. He couldn’t afford to make mistakes. He was about to send the current from a 9-volt battery into his own brain.
His homemade machine was modeled on the devices used in some of the top research centers around the world. Called transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), the technology works on the principle that even the weak electrical signals generated by a small battery can penetrate the skull and affect hot-button areas on the outer surface of the brain. In the past few years, research papers have touted tDCS as a non-invasive and safe way to rejigger our thoughts and feelings, and possibly to treat a variety of mental disorders. Most provocatively, researchers at the National Institutes of Health have shown that running a small jolt of electricity through the forehead can enhance the verbal abilities of healthy people. That is, tDCS might do more than just alleviate symptoms of disease. It might help make its users a little bit smarter.
Say “electricity” and “brain” in the same sentence, and most of us flash on certain scenes from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. But tDCS has little in common with shock therapy. The amount of current that a 9-volt battery can produce is tiny, and most of it gets blocked by the skull anyway; what little current does go into brain tissue tends to stay close to the electrodes. By placing these electrodes on the forehead or the side of the head, researchers can pinpoint specific regions of the brain that they’d like to amp up or damp down.
Some researchers believe that if tDCS continues to pan out, a consumer version of the machine might someday appear on the market. The final product might look like an iPod attached to a hat with electrodes in its brim—available with a prescription from a doctor. Still, it’s very simplicity might prove its undoing. How would a medical-supplies company make money off of a gizmo so rudimentary that it sounds like a 7th-grade science fair project? The cost of parts—electrodes, a battery, a resistor—could be as low as $10.
In fact, a small clique of hobbyists on the Web have already begun
to discuss how to make the machines at home and where to put the electrodes. Like ham radio operators of the brain, they share advice with their fellow tinkerers. “I accidentally found a way to make GREY FLASHES IN MY VISION using a 9v battery. Don’t you try it,” says one hacker in an online forum. “Here’s how not to do it,” he adds, and then provides instructions.
Gromley is one such hobbyist. He says that the first time he read about tDCS machines, he immediately decided, “I’m going to build one of these.” He’d been suffering from bouts of depression since he was a teenager; antidepressant medication only made him feel worse; now, he hankered to find out if tDCS might give some relief. And he was curious about a technology that might let him fiddle with the knobs of his own personality, to experience something that might alter his consciousness. “I’m always thinking, ‘What would it be like to be another person?’”
And so he set up the Radio Shack kit on a paint-splattered TV tray—the “art space” in his bedroom. He had bought sponge electrodes off of eBay, and he made an educated guess about how to position the electrodes—one on a temple area and one on the brow—based on the medical studies he’d pored over. When he flipped on a switch, current ran from the battery through a resistor and then into wires and into his prefrontal cortex. He leaned back in his chair with his eyes closed, wondering if he felt anything. That’s when he saw the flash—what he describes as a “horizontal lightning bolt”—that seemed to arc from one side of his forehead to the other.
“No, that didn’t happen,” he thought to himself, and tried to calm himself. Then, a few minutes later, he shifted in his seat, the wires jiggled, and he saw lightning again. Gromley yanked off the electrodes. He began searching on Google, using keywords like “tDCS” and “flash” until he found a study that reassured him: those spots of light were harmless.
The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex and Other True Stories Page 7