The Hero's Body

by William Giraldi

  Nothing except literature was more intrinsic to my adolescent identity, my half-formed conception of selfhood, than muscle strength and the Greco-Roman aesthetics of a champion. A champion of what, exactly, I could not have told you. Of vanity, I suppose, since, unless he’s working out at the gym or competing on stage, a bodybuilder doesn’t actually do anything with his beauteous bulk. He just ambles around with it, totes heavy objects for Gram, helps Pa with the furniture. Bodybuilding at the highest level, on the Mr. Olympia dais, is more spectacle than sport, an art form as elite as anything you see in the American Ballet Theater. If you think its everyday uselessness is a fault, recall Dr. Chekhov’s counsel: “Only what is useless is pleasurable.”

  I began aching for steroids after two years of training with Tony, after I turned eighteen and stopped making gains. That aching coincided with his departure from our weekday routine; his work was overdemanding again, his children too needy now, his wife slight with the lymphoma that would eventually erase her. Ever sensitive to abandonment, I did not perceive Tony’s leaving as such, and I took that as a hopeful sign, that maybe my bolstered exterior was beginning to bolster my interior. Steroid use had to coincide with Tony’s hiatus because he never would have consented to it, and it wouldn’t have been possible for me to conceal it from him. He knew what a steroidal physique looked like: the gibbous shoulders and biceps, the splashes of acne on the back, the weekly strength gains, the rising poundage, the blessed barbarity of the workouts. He’d passed me the skills and tricks I’d needed to forge on without him, and I had his go-ahead to keep training in his basement.

  I recruited my closest friend, Drew; we’d been pals since we were waist-high, living across the road from one another on the North 3rd Avenue in Manville. He had developed biceps, deltoids, pectorals, but his back was flat and lagging and he had spindles for legs. Tony’s favorite bit of ridicule for a guy with a weak lower body was “His legs don’t even touch,” meaning the adductor magnus muscles—the inner thighs—weren’t developed enough to meet in the middle. Like Pop, I had strong legs and shoulders, and a strong back, and forearms like bowling pins (pals were always feeling my forearms), but my pecs were pathetic (they felt concave to me) and this was a daily fount of embarrassment and anxiety. Drew was one year older and twenty pounds heavier than me, but our numbers in every exercise were equal. We made a compatible duo in my uncle’s dungeon, and I felt more than a little pride in being able to teach him the methods my uncle had taught me.

  Your body responds immediately when you first begin your bout with the iron, but your muscle tissue is so designed that the longer you train, the tougher it is to add mass. After several months or years, depending on your genes, you plateau. The dreaded plateau, an ogre whose name we dared not utter. It arrives unbidden and unexplained. Your body stalls. You’re eating just as much, training just as hard, but your muscle tissue has quit calling you back, is no longer stimulated by the iron. Never mind making gains in strength and mass: now you’re battling—eating and training like a loon—just to keep what you’ve got. It’s a spirit-sapping problem. Or, gratuitously worse than plateauing, you slip, slide back, your numbers start to drop—both your body weight and the weight on the bar—and this is a demoralization that feels epic, an annihilation on your ego.

  You could slave for weeks or months, glutting yourself just to gain five pounds of muscle, just to add ten-pound plates to your bench press or squat. And then something happens. The scallywag Phys. Ed. teacher makes you trot laps around the soccer field. (I was usually truant during gym class because I couldn’t afford to waste calories on such silliness as that. I needed those calories to grow.) Or you get a cold and miss a workout, and then, God help you, the cold graduates to influenza and you miss a week, ten days, twelve days, you miss scores of meals, scores of them, even the relief of sleep irked by sickness. And then those fought-for pounds, those incredibly precious five or six pounds for which you suffered for several weeks or months, have vanished from you. You could nearly whiff the smoke of their vanishing: poof. I was, like an anorexic in reverse, always standing on a scale.

  Drew knew an all-purpose drug dealer who ate every night at the pizzeria where he worked, a derelict who’d said that he was about to come into “a shipment” of steroids from some hardcore gym in New York. Here’s how brazen I was: after learning of this derelict’s rooftop address—he lived on a roof—I pedaled my twelve-speed bicycle there and knocked on a doorish thing unevenly hung. Imagine being in the paranoid profession of drug dealing and opening your rooftop “door” one day to find a stranger, some simpering teenage dolt with a handful of cash and the sentence: “I’d like some steroids, please.”

  Who was the derelict here? Disraeli: “Youth is a blunder.” Yes it is. How does anyone survive the wild tacking through youth? But here’s Disraeli again: “Life is too short to be small.” So there you have it. And so I blundered, trying to explain who I was, and then tried to hand him cash in exchange for the ampoules and needles I wanted. But this newly nervous young man—he must have been twenty-three years old, fit, tanned, tattooed, the frequently barbered sort, that Guido haircut Jersey made famous—said that “the shipment” hadn’t yet arrived but that it “definitely, definitely” would within a week. “Definitely, definitely,” he said again, and I remember thinking that a quintuple use of “definitely” didn’t sound very definite at all.

  “Hey,” he said, as I was leaving, “don’t show up here again.”

  We never heard back from that dealer, but near the end of my senior year of high school, about four months into my training partnership with Drew, a pal of ours was able to get us an oral androgenic steroid named Anadrol. We called it “Drol.” Made to treat osteoporosis and anemia, and eventually administered to those desperate souls eroded by AIDS, Anadrol was the brand name for the drug oxymetholone. A potent chemical concoction that increases size and strength as nothing else can, it performs its magic by bettering the body’s synthesis of protein. That protein synthesis is how all anabolic steroids work, by helping the body produce cells to strengthen the muscle fibers lovingly torn while weight training.

  Drol was so attractive to us not only because of its efficacy, but because it wasn’t an injectable. A lot of my pals had hang-ups about addiction and disease. They dreaded needles—in the early 1990s, “the war on drugs” was still used as a fearsome equivocation, HIV still a nightly news flash—and so weren’t capable of harpooning one into the white foam of their buttocks. The irony is that injectable steroids are much less harmful to your health; unlike pills, they get immediately assimilated by the body without having to pass through the liver and other important parts. Drol, on the other hand: it unleashed hellfire upon the liver. I frequently thought I could feel mine sizzling.

  But in only two weeks I inflated from 155 pounds to 165 pounds, and this for someone who could go many tormenting months without gaining a solitary pound. The new stony roundness of my deltoids and biceps, my lagging pectorals at last catching up, the added body mass I felt in each step, the sway of my quads under sweatpants, the spread of my lats (latissimus dorsi, those back muscles behind the armpits)—I can recall the inebriation of it still. It was as if I’d finally managed to get myself fully born. Never mind the high blood pressure that caused enfeebling headaches: I’d eat twelve ibuprofens per day, which tore up my stomach, which in turn caused me to eat twelve antacids per day. Never mind my puffed-up face: certain steroids cause water retention, so I had chipmunkish cheeks that were not cute. Never mind, too, the back acne and irritability: back acne was new to me, but irritability—I’d been thinking of it as a sensitive person’s anomie—had been a near-constant for years.

  Ever stolid, my father did not watch me as I sauntered through my days, did not notice the added mass on me, my complaints of headaches. Or if he did, he never said anything to me about it, and I have trouble explaining that. Wouldn’t a committed father have confronted his teenage boy about a body full of steroids? Tony noticed. At
a picnic, a family member asked me: “How are you doing?” and my uncle countered with “What are you doing?” He meant “What drugs are you doing?” But he never mentioned it to me again. Perhaps he thought it was my father’s task to fix the trouble I’d given myself, or perhaps he thought it wasn’t trouble at all. Like most families, mine often chose to cover its eyes and ears in an attempt to maintain peace. They pretended that problems weren’t problems because meddling caused other problems.

  A teenager is already a squall of hormones; that mortifying passage from boy to man shouldn’t be further disrupted by synthetic testosterone or something called oxymetholone. But don’t believe the after-school specials and alarmist brochures: steroids don’t make marauding goons, don’t turn placid males into Visigoths. On anabolic steroids, you are only more of what you were. The patient stay patient; the impetuous get impetuous and are glad for the excuse. Here’s what I know for sure: I raised the physical stakes for myself. I required this next step. To ignore the all-natural code of my family, to become the only Giraldi to flood myself with steroids, I must have been pantingly desperate for some semblance of power, for my place among men.

  I had no intention of shipping off for college, no spurring from my father to do so; my grades were painfully average, and despite my private life as a reader, I didn’t think that the university world was open to me. I wanted to linger in town because I was in love with a girl who was lingering too, and because I wanted to weightlift. By the time I was paroled from high school in ’92, a coven of boyhood friends had begun training at a gym in the next town called the Physical Edge. I’d known for several months that the dungeoned isolation of my uncle’s basement would no longer suffice. Every bodybuilder eventually requires an atmosphere of incitement and arousal, a dynamizing gym republic, full membership in the cult.

  I’d been all along too sapling, too uncertain of myself, not muscled enough to join the Edge or any of the less fervid gyms in the area. I remember fearing ridicule, the possibility of not belonging, of being jeered back through the door by freaky-looking beasts. But I was stronger and more muscular, more steroidal, than many of the pals who were already training there. It was the combination of Anadrol and graduating high school—the wideness of adulthood before me like the prelude to embrace—that gave me the necessary poise to walk into the Edge that first day.

  Set back in a spottily wooded industrial park, behind leaning plots of corn, the Edge was a crimson-and-silver sprawl of modern equipment and Olympic free weights, five thousand square feet of mirror and metal. An aerobics room of chants (and one and two and three), an alcove of stationary bikes, treadmills, and StairMasters. Manifold machines of transformation, pulley machines and Smith machines, squat racks, flat and incline and decline benches, a battalion of gray dumbbells, black barbells, red faces pinched and grunting under them. Framed photos of pro bodybuilders in muscular tableau. Everywhere the iron-to-iron slap of plates beneath speakers pealing Soundgarden, Nirvana, Metallica, such distortion-fueled bruit. Everywhere the scent of rubber, oil, and sweat.

  On my first day there, I tried to carry myself as if I were accustomed to such onsets of stimuli, but I’m not sure I succeeded. You’ve seen a six-year-old at a summer carnival, his eyes and limbs manic to take in, to test, all things, all at once? It was like that for me. When I tell you that the Edge was electrified by eroticism, I don’t mean covertly. I mean the eroticism was flagrant, women and men tending to their vanity and fending off their deaths, quarter-dressed and sweating, spandex shorts with priapic knolls or else split crotches blotted with damp, nipples in salute, the aromas of bodies in extremis, arms and legs aglint with their exertions, the unsubtle flirting between sets of lunges, sets of squats, workout moans and faces remarkably coital, part brunt, part bliss.

  For two years I’d been reading in muscle magazines about gyms such as this, but those articles must have been too puritanical because they forgot to tell me about the humming sexuality, the pre-orgasmic splendor of the place, those about-to-give-birth attitudes. Nurse Whitman said it: Urge and urge and urge, / Always the procreant urge of the world. For an eighteen-year-old kid who’d misplaced God and didn’t much mind, it was a festival of carnality and better than any heaven you could have conjured for me.

  It’s true that the Edge was the district primarily of the weightlifter and dogged bodybuilder—it was like being in a wilderness of erections: large, hard, vascular men planted everywhere around you—but for the sake of its survival, the gym also humored normal people, the loafered and the desk-glued who clicked keyboards at various firms in the vicinity, some of whom were hand-held through timid exercises by trainers who looked like surfers. The presence of these normal ones was welcome, as planets welcome their moons. It was they who gawked, who provided the stunned audience for our daily Mardi Gras of muscle. A gym such as the Edge was a gym only in the most literal, practical meaning. For those of us who would make it our home, who would come of age there, and become the ambassadors of its kingdom, its physical utility was only one part of its value.

  I’ve heard certain tweeds describe a gym as a microcosm of society, complete with its own lexicon (pumped, shredded, juiced), its own cruel hierarchies (the largest men and fittest women, those Santas among elves, rule the upper stratum, while the pencil necks and chubbers are the unfortunate helots), and its own regulated behavior (don’t you dare touch a machine or weight when a world-beater is using it). That might be accurate, gyms might have their own flesh-and-iron ecosystem, but for me and the circle that would adopt me, the Edge was theater and church before it was anything else, the ancient triumvirate of ritual and drama and play. We relished the stage-like atmosphere of it all, this theater in the round, relished its most performative aspects, the music and the pageantry, the costumes and the exhibitionism. You should have seen the multicolored outfits I stretched over my frame. An elastane one-piece, striped in turquoise and white, was not the worst of it. A night at the gym often felt like a night of kabuki in a strip club.

  Or else our body mass as Mass, because for the many failed Catholics among us, bodybuilding was both a form of homage to and revolt from the flesh-centered mythos of Catholicism. We said to the Church, in effect, You want a fixation on the flesh of our battered Messiah? We’ll make ourselves into messiahs, self-saviors. With this iron we’ll torture ourselves into godliness. The Satan of Paradise Lost, that unrivaled insurgent, describes himself and his legion of the fallen as self-begot, self-rais’d / By our own quick’ning power, and that’s the kind of sublime, steroidal ego to which bodybuilders aspire.

  We wanted to be totems, objects of veneration and warning, of the extraordinary and the occult. A tired psychologist will tell you that we wanted these things because we were internally minuscule people with the psyches of hurt birds, and I don’t deny the trace of accuracy in that claim. But the more exciting assessment might be this: we wanted sexiness and seduction and exhilaration, some communion with the sacred in a culture that no longer acclaimed the sacred, and, above all, we wanted brotherhood. We wanted to belong.

  I began by training with those boyhood pals who’d joined the Edge before me. The way we trained, we couldn’t train alone. We required partners, spotters to supervise the high poundage we lifted. During a bench press the spotter helped raise the barbell from the rack, and then he was there either to prevent you from dropping the thing onto your esophagus, or to prod you through a round of forced reps. We used forced reps at the end of a set when the muscle was mostly spent. The spotter gripped the bar to help us complete two more, three more, four more, shouting us through the burn—it was like a delivery room: push, push, push, push—and that’s partly how big guys get big, by shocking the deepest muscle tissue into expansion. Your muscles don’t want to grow. They’re perfectly content to remain as they are, which is why you need a shock campaign if your goal is size and strength.

  My boyhood pals were frequently helpful but our schedules were never quite in sync. More important: they were m
uscular and strong but without the necessary violence of mind, the savagery of will I’d learned from my uncle. I don’t mean they didn’t care about training; I mean they were too well-mannered, their attitude toward the weights much too polite. I needed to pick fights with those barbells and dumbbells and plates, to kick and spit at them, grab them as if I had to throttle their heft in order to keep that heft from throttling me. After a hellacious, hollering set of straight-bar curls, I’d slam, clang the bar back into the rack, as if to tell it: You lose. My pals wanted a workout; I wanted warfare—against the weakling I’d been. They didn’t mind eighty percent engagement; I considered that a waste and a shame when it wasn’t a sin. What was the point of this enterprise if you weren’t going to bring every particle of yourself to its execution?

  Here was the Giraldi family machismo at last making itself known in me, the machismo I’d internalized now seeking vent. Maybe with that uncompromising attitude I stopped feeling, for a time, as if I was not really Pop’s grandson, not really my father’s son. I didn’t carry that awareness with me through my days, wasn’t unduly conscious of needing to impress either Pop or my father. They weren’t privy to my training methods at the Edge; they never went to see what my life was like there. Pop had once or twice visited Tony and me in the dungeon—he stood aside to comment and correct—but my father, entangled on multiple fronts, never did. That’s not an accusation. What happens in the gym between a man and his partner and their muscles is not unlike what happens in the bedroom between a man and his partner and their genitalia, between the confessing and the confessor, and so uninitiated spectators can be a concentration-kill.