The Hero's Body

by William Giraldi

  You don’t get strong and big while bodybuilding; you get strong and big while resting from bodybuilding. The more you rest and eat, the more you grow. With a gutful of egg protein, I fell instantly asleep each night before eighty thirty, and my slumber was so consummate, so weighted, I’d wake in the exact position in which I’d blacked out. No pill, no bottle, no smoke or aerobic intercourse has ever allotted me the immovable slumber that occurred after a session of hellward training. I’ve been missing that subterranean sleep for twenty years.

  What happened to me in the fluorescent corner of that basement was a literal empowering, a structural overhaul. All that summer, those initial results, the evolution I witnessed, manifest in my every step, each time I moved, a solidifying, an engorging I could feel in bed with me as I slept, how the growth was noticed by others, complimented, admired: it all produced an elation I hadn’t suspected was available to me. I’d bumbled into being devirginized a year earlier and even that gift, the rapture of sex, could not compete with the fortified sense of self I gained in that basement.

  One evening after a workout, I walked two blocks, shirtless, to a convenience store for a quart of milk to drink, and in the tunnel beneath the rails I passed an older girl from our neighborhood, seventeen or eighteen now, someone I’d been looking at half my life. Her name began with a V, and because of her, V still seems to me the most erotic letter in our alphabet. She was forever walking across town trailing smoke and hairspray, walking with purpose, to keg parties and the apartments of leather-jacketed men, I imagined, hoop earrings like bracelets, her purse a satchel of secrets beneath the freckled whiteness of her lovely arm. What wonders that purse must have held: cigarettes and pager, lipstick and birth control pills, gum wrappers with phone numbers inked onto them.

  When we passed in the tunnel that day, she stopped and said, “Billy?” I said yes, and she said: “Giraldi?” And when I said yes again, all she said was “Whoa,” and she stood squinting at me through mascara-laden lashes and the smoke pouring from both nostrils. A week later she’d let me inside her bedroom, that pink and perfumed cave of happiness, Bon Jovi and his chest hair applauding from one wall, a crucifix chastising from another, I trying not to weep from the perfect joy of being invited there. A woman’s bedroom and body would always feel that way to me: an invitation inside a chapel for the privileged.

  In the 1977 docudrama Pumping Iron, Arnold Schwarzenegger, still and forever the doyen of bodybuilding, likened a workout pump to an orgasm. I suppose that’s right if he meant an orgasm in reverse: the eruption, the explosion, is inward. Just as an orgasm is an aim of sex, a pump is the aim of the workout. Without it, you feel you’ve been a radical disappointment to your body. But despite the near ecstasy of those pumps, I cared more for what was permanent, for what I could carry with me through my days, my frame armored against the world’s maleficent forces, all those things and people out to crush me. Only those with some sense of coming threat seek refuge in weightlifting.

  Buried somewhere in War and Peace is an image I’ve never forgotten: our body as a machine for living. What I sought then was a machine much better than the malfunctioning one I had, hoping that it would make life’s certain disturbances more endurable, much the way a luxury car makes highway clutter less irksome. And “machine” is the ideal term, because the grotesque men I studied in magazines and aspired to join looked like a mash-up of the mechanical and the human.

  Like my uncle, I was slight with a rapid metabolism, and so had lots of trouble adding that armor. The high-calorie force-feeding was harder than the bench presses and bicep curls. For breakfast: a dozen hard-boiled egg whites in a bowl of oatmeal. For lunch: two cans of tuna fish with four slices of wheat bread and a head of broccoli. For supper: a mound of pasta topped with a grilled chicken breast and flanked by a pile of spinach. Before bed: a quart of weight-gaining protein shake, chocolate or vanilla, chalky or viscous or both, some with the consistency of sawdust. And if I puked it all up, as I often did, I blended another and tried again.

  On the weekends: all of the above plus grilled sirloin and potatoes. (Tony once told me, “When you eat beef, you eat steroids,” and I liked the way that sounded.) And between those meals: muscle-making protein bars as appetizing as sand, added to expensive handfuls of multivitamins and amino acids and tart energy boosters. I was never not eating, never not bothered by having to eat. If you think it’s difficult to abstain from food, try glutting yourself when you aren’t even a little hungry, when you’ve already consumed more calories in one day than a regular person requires in three. From May to August I’d mushroomed from 125 pounds to 145 pounds, from angularity to rotundity, and because I’d been training so steadily, because I was so lean, my body fat percentage so low, those were pounds with a marbled, fluted density.

  My uncle’s basement was a ritual space now, our altar of iron at which we offered libations of sweat. From a poster on the wall, we were silently supervised by a deity: the bronzed and golden-locked bodybuilder Tom Platz, his legs so downright brontosaurian—shredded, ripped—he looked engineered by some sinister geneticist. That term, “ripped,” has infiltrated the common parlance and seems to mean anything from “muscular” to “strong,” but we mobilized it to mean only taut skin—skin like parchment, the diaphanous vellum of Bibles—that reveals vascularity and deep-edged muscle separation: no subcutaneous fat, so the muscle tonus shows, the lines and ruts of muscle fibers.

  The bodybuilder’s regalia helped lend the enterprise its pageantry. We wore T-shirts that looked painted on, sweatpants that bowed through the thighs and tapered at the ankles, wide leather lifting belts to protect the lower back, and weightlifting shoes made by Otomix, well padded and flat-soled. You wanted to be anchored during an exercise, your feet part of the floor so you wouldn’t wobble with two hundred pounds in your hands. We used wrist wraps for heavy weights, not just for dead lifts but for chin-ups too, for barbell shrugs, for bent-over barbell rows or T-bar rows, pull-downs and low-pulley rows. The wrist wraps made the metal part of your arms, and then you didn’t have to worry about the bar slipping from your damp grip. Your hands will fail before your back does.

  My uncle and I didn’t gab as we trained, or in those brief rests between sets. This was battle, not frolic. But if we gabbed before and after, we gabbed of professional bodybuilders, those gods and heroes, self-made monuments, aberrations, the Übermenschen among us, men superior to the unmuscled rabble of the world. Men with alien ways who puked and bled in search of Mount Olympus. Men who shunned the wimpy Christian ideal that puts a pretty soul above the perfection of physical form. Men who were magnificent Greeks, idolizing male beauty, believing that the bold exterior was an embodiment of the bold interior. Hercules, Achilles, Atlas: just look at them.

  Unholy monks of muscle, these men possess the brand of focus that has allowed ascetics to float free of their bodies, except that their focus necessitates a further filling of their bodies. Bodies forged into outrageous artwork, 3-D anatomical charts startling enough to spook Andreas Vesalius, the father of anatomy. Part athlete, part artist, they have the training habits of the hell-bent. Muscle tissue is their clay, their choreography. Triumphant Greco warriors whose no-pain-no-gain credo is Christic to its core: you must rove through hell to reach your heaven. Every professional bodybuilder becomes a nutritionist and chemist, a ritualist and rebel. Masters of nature, they achieve their own apotheosis. To exist in that world of extremity is to leave the rest of us behind almost completely.

  Remember how Ovid begins his Metamorphoses: “My purpose is to tell of bodies which have been transformed into shapes of a different kind.” Waiting in the checkout line at the supermarket, you’ve noticed them on magazine covers, Muscular Development and Flex. You’ve no doubt picked one from the rack and fanned through it while you waited, to mock, I know, but the curiosity tickles a space in you much deeper than the nothingness of scorn. The unexamined feeling is revulsion; you impulsively dislike the otherworldly aesthetics of them, t
heir suggestion of a hubristic tampering with nature. Their vascularity, earthworms wriggling over striated muscle, and their terra-cotta complexions, their scant workout garb, penile mounds in spandex, their stern faces orgasmically determined, the imponderable mass of them. Everything looks as if it’s about to erupt.

  Peer more closely at that curious spot in you, just below the mocking and scorn, and see if there isn’t a driblet of respect for the discipline, the religious training and dieting habits required to obtain that eurythmic muscle, the harmony of the whole neck-to-ankle machine. When you’re looking at the best pro bodybuilders in the world, you’re looking at a balance of form only a handful of human beings will ever achieve. Peek at the world champion, Phil Heath, and see how the linguistics of his body are closer to a poet’s than an athlete’s. No one, it’s true, is born with those aesthetics, and that’s why you must think it freakish and wrong. But art isn’t born either. Art is built. In his absurdist novel Body, the inimitable Harry Crews christens bodybuilders “the mysterious others,” and “the mad imaginings of a mad artist.” Start thinking of these men as part artist, part athlete, and not as drug-stuffed showboats, and you might start to feel a subduing of that scorn.

  I never possessed the freakish potential to look anything other than athletically normal. I was muscular and round and hard, yes, but not huge, the term of choice, the erroneous term, used to describe a commonly muscled man. The pros, the Phil Heaths and Kai Greenes of the world, are both muscular and huge, but muscular is otherwise not the equal of huge. I was always lean, unmassive, even when I was at my largest and strongest, which was not very large and not very strong, not by bodybuilding standards. In clothes I resembled most other males my age. Still, we trained with only that goal: strong and big. Why else would we have put ourselves through such arduousness as that?

  Each week contained at least one round of dead lifts and squats, exacting, injury-prone exercises that also, Tony often said, “separate the men from the boys.” That was important, as you might imagine: the separation of the men from the boys. He was also fond of saying, “Squats and deads will show you why you’re afraid of the dark”—a bit of machismo that meant These exercises are monsters most guys can’t handle. Pop once told me: “If you do dead lifts, you’ll never have back pains in your life,” and I never have. While most men strove for convex biceps and domed pectorals because they looked good bouncing down the boardwalk at Seaside Heights, Pop had always focused on his legs and back: “Your legs and back are what carry you around. You ain’t strong if your legs and back ain’t strong.”

  Squats and dead lifts were to be feared as much as any monster, but tame the monster, make it yours, and then upon you is bestowed great powers. We frequently spoke in those mythical tones. And we called dead lifts “deads” because, like all underground enterprisers, we relished the argot, but also because after a round of heavy dead lifts, we were virtually dead for the day. Nothing else would get done, and the morning after, our backs and legs would be so sore we’d have to squirm sideways out of bed.

  Legs are notoriously obstinate; they don’t want to grow. Mine always lagged: calves, hamstrings, quads. You train arms with arms, but you can’t train legs with just legs. They demand your gut, your back, and much of your soul. Deads and squats, because they work every major muscle group, prompt overall growth. You might feel the deads and squats primarily in your back and legs, but because back and legs are the largest muscle groups in your body, their stimulation promotes, in a kind of anabolic pollination, the growth of everything else. This is what Pop meant when he’d once told me that the serious weightlifters give most of their love to their backs and legs. They are, in other words, the Iliad and the Aeneid of body parts. As that summer started to wane, with a new school year just two weeks away and a photo of my ex-girlfriend still in my wallet, I squatted and deadlifted with a maniacal intensity that felt like a trance.

  The American high school: that four-year carnival of awkwardness and insecurity, the chancy program of taking human beings at their most psychically vulnerable, those undergoing hormonal monsoons, forced to endure the abounding fissures in their self-esteem, and putting them all on a lighted stage so that the outwardly mighty but inwardly weak can devour those who are weak in both places.

  When I returned to school that September, my junior year, people were confused by the twenty-five pounds of muscle I’d made; they poked at my shoulders and arms to see if they were real. No one had seen me since May; my ungodly mullet was gone, my facial acne seared away by sun. John Travolta’s iconic opening minutes in Saturday Night Fever, the Bee Gees squealing above his goombah strut? My first half hour back in the hallways felt just like that.

  Between classes I sat against a locker and force-fed myself tuna fish and wheat bread from plastic containers, making a show of my strangeness and dedication. Teachers and students passed me pinching their noses, and my ex-girlfriend eyed me with a fascination that I hoped flipped her insides. Halfway into the school year, I’d win her back for five romping months. And the footballer for whom she’d ditched me, the one who wanted to maltreat me in the parking lot the previous spring? When we passed in the hallway that first day back, he looked me over with tentative menace, as if he couldn’t quite decide how much provocation was called for in a spot such as this. The poor kid was in an unusual predicament: the half-pint he’d tried to pummel four months earlier was now bigger and stronger than he was. I saw his lips move but couldn’t discern the words. In an exhibition of bravado I hadn’t planned on, I let my bag fall with considerable drama, went across the hallway, and stepped into his face, close enough for him to smell the spearmint of my gum.

  “You got something to say to me?” I said.

  “If I have something to say, I’ll say it.” He was looking, I remember, at my arms, not my eyes.

  “You sure?” I said. “Because we can do this right now.”

  Another footballer steered him away then and neither looked back at me as they walked on. If he felt relieved to have avoided a fistfight, he didn’t feel nearly as relieved as I did, because the only fighting I’d ever done was with a joystick. Having muscles didn’t mean I knew how to use them, and yet they were useful all by themselves.

  In less than a year he’d become one of my closest pals when he asked if I’d help him gain strength and size. We’d meet in the weight room after last period and I’d teach him what my uncle had taught me, with the same pitiless attitude: “You need to use these heavier dumbbells or your arms will always be noodles: like this, watch me.” And: “If you don’t dead-lift once a week—look, like this, from the floor up—then you can forget about ever getting strong.” But he didn’t have the requisite ferocity of will, and he didn’t have the right genetics, either; he never gained any muscle. The satisfaction of that—of his humbling, of routing him in the weight room, of the closeness we fostered afterward, of the status I bestowed upon myself—was elevating to an almost spiritual degree.

  The awe of others that lets you feel worthy of being alive in a carnivorous world you fear is intent to consume you: that reaction is the top reason any kid desires the physical conversion I’d achieved, and never mind what he tells you about the health benefits. Milan Kundera has named youth “the lyrical age” because, like the lyric poet, the youth is “focused almost exclusively on himself, is unable to see, to comprehend, to judge clearly the world around him.” Give to that same youth the self-worship that bodybuilding fosters and what you get is a happy Atlas somewhat detached from the normality of others, and one who can begin to see himself as walking poetry.

  But I had a cloudless union with my new way in the world, with the obsessiveness and rigor of it, and could not imagine surrendering that surety of stance or understand how I’d gone so long without that heft in my step, the muscled swagger that, for the first time in my life, allowed me to feel myself in my body. Nor could I fathom ever again lapsing into a sadness intent on deleting me, all that inner unrest I perceived as a shame
ful lack of manliness.

  At the end of that first day back to school, as we said hello outside his classroom, my math teacher, the six-foot-three, full-bodied Mr. Roba, former marine and star athlete, blessed me with what remains the most enlarging compliment I’ve ever been given. He said, simply, “It looks good on you, kid.”

  III

  Around the time I was born, one of my father’s most cherished friends was a drug-free bodybuilder named Joe Gallo, a hairless and etiolated titan of a man who was, if stories and photographs are to be trusted, not only the gentle giant of fairy tale but an incurable jester to boot. My father talked of Gallo with a pointed esteem, and the key to that esteem had less to do with Gallo’s strength and size, both formidable, than it did with the fact that he’d achieved them without drugs. As a child, I couldn’t hear mention of that man’s name without the words “all natural” fastened to it like a rivet.

  Compact and solid and strong, my father was not what you’d call muscular. He’d lifted weights at various spots in his youth and young adulthood, but never very seriously, and never for the alterations I sought. It never took to him as it had to Pop or Tony or me. My sense now is that although he admired the muscle maker, in a kind of unconscious sedition against Pop, he admired him only so far. Many sons inhabit a contradictory space in relation to their fathers; they emulate in order to earn acceptance while rebelling in order to earn their own identities. I took up bodybuilding in part because I must have sensed that it was something at which I could outshine my father.