The Hero's Body

by William Giraldi

  Parma was capable of periodic gestures of hope, I know, but overall her disposition was unsinkably grim. That mood of hers, her dire sense of drama, set the tone in our family, and so there was habitual talk of how bad we three kids had it: “Those poor kids, without a mother, it’s so hard.” That’s the reason my father hadn’t brought a woman home; he believed, with Parma, that we kids were contents under pressure, canisters of ineffable internal suffering.

  My father worked out at Jack LaLanne on weeknights while my siblings and I were at my grandparents’ eating supper and scratching through homework. Not long after his gym life began, there was indeed a swelling of chatter about a woman. This appeared supernatural, if for no other reason than Parma, consistently wrong about human living, was right about Jack LaLanne.

  Whatever reservations my father had about bringing a woman into our house had been dashed, because this woman, Kim, was about to spend the night—on the sofa, but still, she was spending the night, because she lived an hour away. Our father and Kim had a date, my siblings and I had a babysitter, and because our father was sawing lumber until noon the following day, we were given warning and we were given injunction: “When you wake up, Kim will be here” and “Please, for the love of God, do not terrorize Kim.” Somehow the earnestness and gravity of that injunction did not reach me.

  I went to sleep that night positively giddy with the prospect of a woman being in the house upon my waking. My father was gone by six, I rose at eight, ahead of my siblings, and the first thing I did, before I even shook myself fully awake, was dress in my ninja regalia, mask and all—this was the apex of my Sho Kosugi period—including tabi boots and a utility belt into which I tucked my weapons, the nunchucks and shurikens I was too young and knuckleheaded to have, and yet I had them. I also owned a black grappling hook with a knotted rope I’d ordered from a catalog, and this was good news, because we had an open upstairs hallway, loftlike beneath a cathedral ceiling, a balcony that overlooked our living room. Lately I’d been practicing my crafty descent from the balcony onto the cushioned armchair below.

  I’d later be told that what I did next was unequivocally wacky behavior, even for a ten-year-old—“borderline mental illness,” my father said. But here it is: in my ninja suit I crept across the carpet to the spindles of the balcony, and I saw, down there asnooze on our sofa, the woman called Kim. Her hair—what was that color called? sangria? currant?—was cropped close, spiky like a man’s, and this sent tides of delight through me because all night I’d been expecting a commonplace do, an umber or mousy mane, permed just past her shoulders.

  I secured the grappling hook’s talon to the banister and rappelled, knot by knot, to the armchair, then ducked behind one of the two sofas, on my knees at the corner of it, spying on her erotic snores. Then, step by glacial, silent step, I approached those snores, my own breath clinched. I was close enough to smell her now, a fruity odor, part shampoo, part disinfectant. I’d punched nose-holes in my mask for ventilation, un-ninja of me, I know, but I couldn’t breathe in the thing otherwise.

  Her face was warmed by skylights: a creamy complexion, the dimmed galaxy of freckles across pronounced cheekbones, lips like azaleas. I was standing over her, bent at the waist, only two feet between us, my heart bobbing in my breast. And when her eyes flashed open—the sleeping mind sometimes knows when a delinquent is watching it—the sound she made was not so much a scream from the mouth as a moan from the throat, a clipped moan stuck somewhere between surprise and injury. Of course I rushed away, retreated back up to my bedroom, bolted the door, left Kim there on the sofa wondering if she’d been poked or probed. Even a visual trespass can feel filthy. I have no memory now of what followed, of what we five did that day after my father returned from work, but I know that evening she left and never came back.

  My decade-old self, the child as traitor: the unconscious saboteur of my father’s romantic hopes. Such maliciousness, such bristling, can hide in the heart of a child. He gets even for perceived wrongs, for whatever marring he feels has been unjustly done to him, and he gets even against those who deserve it least. Of what was my father guilty? Of driving away my mother? What hazard did Kim present to me? The splitting of my father’s affections? Of course my creepy ninja act was not to blame for her going away and never coming back, but neither was it darling boyishness: a ten-year-old is not a five-year-old. The latter can get away with all orders of mischief; the former is just two years shy of pubic hair.

  During those childhood years, there would be only one more appearance by a woman in our house, a fellow divorcee with two children of her own, a Manville girl, someone who’d known my mother before she’d disappeared, someone who could have been Carly Simon’s stunt double. Her relationship with my father, if you could call it that, was ill-fated from the word go. It couldn’t have lasted a month. He kept up his membership at the Jack LaLanne gym for a while longer, but he never met another woman there. He’d be single for seven more years, his only female love from the woman who bore him.

  VII

  Victor and I, along with some other pals from the Edge, had been traipsing around central Jersey some Saturdays to attend different amateur bodybuilding competitions. And at one of these shows, as we watched the teenage division, my pals became convinced that I could beat every guy up there, that I had the desirable aesthetics to excel on stage: “You could take those dudes, bro,” and “Dudes all got toothpick arms, bro,” and “Those dudes ain’t stacked like you, bro” (most of our sentences contained a dude and a bro). And it was true, mostly; one kid carried about as much muscle as a high-school swimmer.

  That Saturday morning, reclined in an auditorium somewhere in the intestines of our state, after what was really the most piddling instigation of friends, we decided: in two months, I’d represent the Edge in the teenage division at the Muscle Beach bodybuilding competition in Point Pleasant, New Jersey. This decision, it seems to me now, should have been paired with a feeling of momentousness. I’d never before done anything like it, was not a performer, naked or otherwise, at ease on stages. But I remember no momentousness. What I remember is the sense of inevitability, and a desperation not to disappoint the guys at the Edge who wanted me to do this.

  At only 175 pounds, I was in no way large, nothing close to what you see in magazines. If you put normal clothes on me I looked like any athletic kid, a lacrosse or football player perhaps. But my arms and shoulders were well built and round; those were always my kindest body parts. Unlike my lagging chest and calves that always needed extra doses of loving anguish, my arms and shoulders grew without too much coercion from me. And my waist was only twenty-eight inches, which allowed me that coveted V-shape. Bodybuilders can’t be fireplugs.

  Also, because I was naturally light and lean, with an over-rapid metabolism that made it an Augean effort for me to gain weight, I had the body-fat percentage of an Olympic runner, five to six percent, and for the bodybuilding stage, that’s a blessing you cannot inject. What’s more, in addition to having full muscle bellies, I had narrow joints, the joints of a fifth-grader. All of which meant that I appeared much more rotundly muscular, much more the bodybuilder, than I actually was. That appearance, or call it an illusion, is indispensible for the competitive bodybuilder. When he’s onstage, nobody cares about how much he can bench press. It’s not a strength contest; it’s an art contest.

  A weightlifter wants mass; a bodybuilder wants that too, but at a certain point, in preparation for a competition, he’s focused on conditioning, on diaphanous skin and vascularity, a symphony of form, the symmetry of his physique, how it all gels and melds: trapeziuses curving into deltoids curving into pectorals, biceps flowing into forearms, hamstrings into calves, quadriceps into kneecaps, lats into a tiny waist. And so the bodybuilder is a renegade aesthete, an underground artist whose medium is muscle tissue, whose implements of creation are food and iron.

  That stereotype with which bodybuilders are saddled—self-aggrandizers and simps, inauthentic athletes
, all show and no go—has always been an injustice put forth by those with no eye for harmony on the human body, or those too fearful to admit the animality in man, too fearful to catch our own reflection in fellow hominoids, in the mighty chimp from whom we’ve sprung. Tell some people they’re a primate and watch their faces become uncomprehending.

  Balance and proportion, rhythm and harmony: these are the terms of representational art. Indeed, bodybuilding can be viewed as a continuation of both the heroic and aesthetic traditions in Western art. If you believe that this heightened focus on the body is vain or narcissistic—Ovid: It is my self I love, my self I see; / The gay delusion is a part of me—ask yourself this: How different is it from a writer’s world-be-damned focus on his book, a painter’s on her canvas, or an actor’s obesity or emaciation for a role? Is bodybuilding really more egoistic than a ballet dancer’s brutal pursuit of perfection?

  Its proportions, mastery, vitalities, its self-containment and control, its suggestions of the ideal, reaching after Platonic form—don’t be so eager to dismiss the developed body as art. The person is not an object, I understand, but whether you like it or not, the body is an object, albeit one in a constant reciprocal waltz with the self. That doesn’t make bodybuilders self-demeaning objectifiers; it makes them sublime celebrants, Whitmanian crooners, singing the body electric.

  Much needed to happen in only two months. I had to make the technical transitions from weightlifter to bodybuilder, which began with weaning myself from the drug I was injecting each week, a miracle called Sustanon 250, a blend of four different synthetic testosterones (we called it “Suzie”). A mass-building, oil-based anabolic steroid, Suzie causes water retention, which blurs vascularity and muscle striation. She makes you strong as hell, yes, but also puffy, and puffy is not the aesthetic you’re after onstage. Puffy will be japed straight out of the auditorium. So no more Suzie for me.

  Instead, my set at the Edge scored me a steroid called Winstrol-V (drug name: stanozolol) from a crooked veterinarian who was also a weightlifter. We lovingly named it “Winny,” our true-blue mistress, a water-based injectable used during dieting because it helps promote the hard, dry aesthetic you want onstage, while letting you keep a bulbous muscle density, since dieting can flatten you right out. Whatever you do, don’t flatten out. You’ll find this drug not only in every hardcore gym across the land, but also at any given horse race. Winny makes the horses whinny. It also burned when I injected it. An oil-based steroid such as Sustanon felt not bad as it went in; a water-based one such as Winstrol felt like a lit match inside the muscle.

  I looked forward to the injected singeing caused by Winstrol, as if that burn was a signal, a promise, of its efficacy. If you pressed the plunger slowly you could mitigate the burn, but punch it down quickly with your thumb and the burn was twice as hot as it needed to be. I always punched it down hard, then sat to imagine it dispersing through my blood, bolstering amino acids, bonding cell to cell.

  What I’m speaking of here goes beyond the NO PAIN NO GAIN bumper stickers you would have seen on trucks and Jeeps in the parking lot of the Edge. I mean to suggest something about in-the-world asceticism—from the Greek asksis, which rather fittingly means “exercise”—about the degree to which this pursuit provided a brace for the soul, how the workouts and lifestyle were a quasi-spiritual undertaking, whether we realized it or not. What else did we have to believe in with equal intensity, what else worthy of our worship?

  It’s true that we didn’t subscribe to any ilk of mystical babble, and it’s true that I’ve always found emotional pain an unenlightening waste—Nabokov: “Human despair seldom leads to great truths”—but the bodily pain we fashioned for ourselves at the Edge was something else altogether: the exalting in, the election of, this particular anguish. We were contented self-crucifiers. You’d want to say that we ignored all delight for this anguish if it weren’t true that the delight was the anguish. It’s what Sadeans have been trying to show us all along, those sexual deviants and their assorted utensils of orgasmic torture.

  What I did not look forward to, not ever, was the contest diet. The nutritional demands are the most unforgiving element of this life. Only half of a bodybuilder’s physique is forged in the gym; the other half is forged in the kitchen. For the previous two and a half years I’d been eating cleanly: not a Big Mac, not a french fry or cupcake. But with those scant exceptions, I ate what I wanted because I had such a difficult time gaining mass, a metabolism in a hurry: lean burgers and occasional pizza, all-beef hot dogs and Parma’s ambrosial meatloaf, hummocks of pasta and mashed potatoes (no butter), sandwiches of all sorts, buckets of fruits and nuts, even the occasional Snickers, plus the vanilla MET-Rx protein shakes we blended with orange juice (they tasted like creamsicles).

  That diet, however, won’t mold a body into contest shape. The aim is to fine-tune the body, to get it sensitive to every gram of carbohydrate and protein, expectant of a uniform meal every two and a half hours—imagine that: eating a full meal every two and a half hours for eight weeks—so that it knows precisely when you switch from, say, chicken to steak, from red potato to white potato to sweet potato, from brown rice to white rice. When you’re already lean, already on the way to contest shape, carbs can actually alter your aesthetics. Muscles remain fuller, rounder on potatoes and pasta, leaner and less round on rice. Carbs are like coal into a steam engine: when they hit the system, they stir the metabolic rate, and you want to keep the metabolic rate high so your body doesn’t hold on to anything it doesn’t need. That’s exactly how we get to be jolly fatsoes, when our metabolism isn’t trained to burn what our bodies consume but instead holds onto it for future use. But since we’re jolly fatsoes, that future use never comes.

  The guys from the gym—Rude, Sid, Victor—sat me down at a large desk in an unused office at the Edge and debated the best possible diet for me, Victor scratching it all down on a pad as I stayed silent, scratching down my own notes. If someone unchurched in our ways had been among us that evening, here’s the onrush of obsessiveness and mystery he would have heard:

  “At his body weight, he needs forty grams of chicken protein per meal, and then I’d switch to turkey protein about four weeks out. He’s lean enough now for chicken.”

  “He’s too lean, and we need to keep the mass he’s got. I’d give him fifty, sixty grams of beef protein for at least three of his seven meals, maybe even four or five. Screw that turkey shit.”

  “He’ll put on too much fat with steak, dude, even a lean cut. I’d stick to chicken. And depending on how lean he gets close to contest time, we might have to switch him to fish, I’d say tilapia or halibut, seventy grams a piece, no more than eighty. We won’t know that till four, five weeks out.”

  “He ain’t gonna put on any fat, dude, look at him. He’s got veins everywhere and he ain’t even dieting yet. Diet him down too much and he’s gonna flatten the fuck out. He’s 175 now and he needs to be at least 165 onstage. So we’re talking ten pounds here.”

  “He ain’t got ten pounds of fat on him. Maybe five, you ask me. The rest is water. I’m recommending at least a gallon of water a day to flush the water he’s holding.”

  “A gallon? Try two gallons.”

  “He’ll be pissing every ten minutes, dude.”

  “That’s the point, dude. He’ll piss out whatever water he’s holding. Most guys lose a show, it’s because they’re holding water, not fat.”

  “That water will vanish a week after he stops the shit he’s on now, the Suzie, and starts up with the Winny. He’ll peel pretty easily on the Winny.”

  “What Winny we’d get him? Oral or injectable?”

  “Injectable.”

  “Winny ain’t no guarantee of losing water. I’m saying if he wants to get peeled, he drinks two gallons a day, end of discussion.”

  “What about his carbs? I’m thinking six-ounce baked potatoes all the way through. Why even screw around with rice, right?”

  “Depends on how full he stays.
If he’s full enough come contest time, we can switch to brown rice, sure. Or else drop the six-ounce potato to five, maybe five and a half. No less than five.”

  “That’s fine if he’s sick of potatoes, sure. If he’s sick of white potato, let him switch to red potato or sweet potato. I don’t like messin’ around with rice, white or brown. He can lose his roundness. It’s either pasta or potato, in my book. He’s lean enough.”

  “As long as he stays in the per-meal, fifty-to-seventy-gram range with the complex carbs, he’ll be fine whatever carb he wants. Let him switch between potatoes, sure, though sixty grams of pasta is good in the evenings to hold him through till morning. He’ll need that.”

  “He can’t be on rice for those last two or three meals or else he’ll wake up starving at 2 A.M. Let him have sixty grams of pasta and seventy grams of sirloin for those last two meals, and the rest of the day he can stick to forty-gram chicken breast and five-ounce potato.”

  “What’s he putting on the pasta for flavor, anything? Shot of hot sauce or something?”

  “No, nothing, nada, zilch. Plain pasta.”

  “What vegetable are we talking here?”

  “String beans will work. Never cauliflower, though. Let’s keep it green, whatever it is.”

  “If he’s feeling hungry at all, not full enough, he can switch to Brussels sprouts too. Those’ll keep him feeling fuller.”

  “That slimy shit at the bottom of the poultry package? Those are his nutrients right there. He’s gotta drink that shit if he wants nutrients.”