The Hero's Body

by William Giraldi

  “Any fruit at all? He can get away with an apple or orange if he wants the taste.”

  “No goddamn fruit at all. No sugars at all. Those simple carbs are too quick. Show me any dude who’s ever built or maintained muscle with fruit.”

  “I’m just saying, he can afford an apple for the taste. I’m talking one a day, if he needs it.”

  “Fine, if he’s desperate, but it’s gotta be in the morning when his metabolic rate is highest, but otherwise, screw the fruit. Complex carbs will stay steady for him. The sugar is in and out. It’s a waste.”

  “It ain’t a waste on the tongue, that’s for damn sure. After seven meals of boiled potatoes, grilled chicken breast, and steamed broccoli, the dude’s gonna be hurting for a taste of sugar.”

  “Let him drink a Diet Coke then. He should be drinking six of those things a day anyway. Caffeine’s a diuretic.”

  “He can nuke the potatoes, easy enough, but the chicken and broccoli should both be lightly steamed. Heat’s too high on a grill, you can burn the protein right out of the chicken if you’re not careful.”

  “Don’t boil the shit, whatever you do. I see dudes boiling their chicken. Turns it to rubber.”

  “Make sure there’s no salt, not even a pinch, on the veggies and chicken. Maybe a dash of paprika, a dash of pepper. Throw the salt into the garbage when you get home.”

  “My advice: throw out everything in your kitchen you can’t eat. Just get a big-ass trash bag and load it right up.”

  “Empty your fridge when you get home, Billy Boy.”

  “Empty that thing right out, dude. Keep the chicken and beef and veggies, but ditch everything else.”

  The dialogue went on like that for another maddening half hour until everybody was in some form of agreement about what I was going to eat and when I was going to eat it. I’d have to drop eighty bucks for Tupperware and prepare each day’s seven meals the night before.

  Then it was time for them to inspect my physique, to scrutinize my body’s lingua franca, to assess which annotations awaited it. Victor twisted shut the blinds and I stripped down to my briefs and stood at the far wall, rotating when they told me to, while they leaned back in office chairs, their sneakers propped up on a vacant desk fit for an imaginary CEO.

  “His abs need work. His midsection is flat enough, but those abs need to pop more.”

  “The diet will make them pop.”

  “His calves need help.”

  “He’s gotta go easy on his delts and bis, they’re already jacked, and if he gets them even more jacked, he’ll be all out of proportion.”

  “Damn, his chest is weak.”

  “He’s got that little-ass waist, though. The round shoulders and little waist give him that sweet V. Plus his quads got a pretty nice sweep to them. It’s a good overall shape.”

  “Width-wise, he’s weak in the back, but he’s thick enough through the middle and lower back, I’d say. And what he lacks in back width he makes up for with those delts.”

  “All that crazy-ass deadlifting and bent-over rows, he better be.”

  “I’ll tell you what: deadlifting is done for him. No deads going into a contest unless you’re begging for an injury.”

  “Yeah, Victor, make sure. Stick to one-arm dumbbell rows, low pulley rows, maybe some dumbbell rows on the incline bench.”

  “T-bar rows are okay, I’d say. Pull-downs are okay too, wide and narrow both. I’d rotate wide and narrow.”

  “What about squats? He nixing squats?”

  “Depends. Light squats are okay, I think, nothing too crazy. Ten to twelve reps, three good sets.”

  “His weight can’t go too light or else he’ll lose mass.”

  “He’ll be fine with leg presses. He can go heavy with them and not get hurt. Squats are a goddamn gamble pre-contest, unless you’re doing ’em on the Smith machine.”

  “Stick to the Smith for squats, yeah, and stick to leg extensions and ham curls. Don’t screw around with too many barbells now or else you’re asking for injury.”

  “We can barbell curl, though.”

  “I ain’t talking about bis. His bis are golden.”

  “I’d say stick to as many machines as possible. Not now, but at about four weeks out, stick to machines. You’ll be depleted as hell four weeks out, and about eight pounds lighter, I’d guess, so you won’t wanna mess around with barbells then anyway.”

  “And remember, he’s getting smaller, not bigger, as he goes into the contest. That ain’t good news for his chest, I’ll tell you that.”

  “But those delts and arms and quads—he’ll be golden. He’s golden from the front.”

  “Not so much from the back, though.”

  “It’s the teenage division, for fuck’s sake. He ain’t going against Lee Haney. It’s his first show.”

  “These next eight weeks, all his focus needs to be on chest and legs and back or else we can forget about any symmetry.”

  “Yeah, Victor, you dudes really gotta go light on his arms and delts, dude. Forget about those behind-the-neck presses you like.”

  “I’m saying he can forget about barbells entirely. Anyone listening to me here?”

  “What about cardio? What are we recommending?”

  “Bike. Keep him on the bike.”

  “You feel like a gerbil on a stationary bike. Let him do the Stair-Master.”

  “So he can feel like a mountaineer? Screw that. Stick to the bike. He’ll be too beat for the StairMaster. Plus he can read those weirdo books of his on the bike, those little poems or whatever the hell they are.”

  “Nothing wrong with the treadmill, either. He should switch between the bike and treadmill. See how he feels. He can read his little poems on the treadmill too.”

  “Forty minutes for him? Fifty? Seven times a week? Less? More? What?”

  “Forty at least, maybe a full hour. Seven days for sure. Depends how much water he’s holding. Depends on if those abs are popping or not, what his striations look like. Let’s see what his fat percentage is about two weeks from now.”

  “Yeah, give the diet two weeks. He won’t need more than two weeks to see results. He’s lean already. He’s always lean.”

  “Shit, I was too at eighteen.”

  “Good to be eighteen.”

  “Fuckin’ great to be eighteen.”

  VIII

  There’s a fetishizing pleasure involved in the accumulation of steroids: the smooth, tiny ampules, no taller than a pinky, both clear and brownishly opaque; the white pill bottles, both square and cylindrical; the syringes of various gauges, packaged like toothbrushes; the bottles of injectable B12 for enhanced appetite, a scarlet liquid that caused a five-minute high, a giggling full-body warmth, as if a tonic lava loose in the blood. I lined them all up, tucked them into a velvet-padded, polished oak box with a flip top. I’d open the box, behold and hold them, scan the alien-lingo medical scripts printed on their labels, shake the vials, watch the oil or water breathe minor bubbles. Pot smokers, coke snorters, junk shooters share a similar hobbyist’s delight in ritualized minutiae: rolling the joints, cutting the lines, heating the spoons.

  I began accumulating caches of steroids, whatever I could buy, whenever a new shipment arrived. Better to have them and not need them than need them and not have them. Our connections weren’t the most dedicated lifters; you got the feeling they enjoyed the drug dealing better than the bodybuilding. Some of the drugs came from Mexico, where they are easily had without a prescription, and others came from hardcore gyms in New York State. I bought not only the drugs I’d already taken—the Drol and the Winny and the Suzie—but the drugs I wanted to take in the future: the Deca (Deca Durabolin), the D-bol (Dianabol), the Test (Testosterone Suspension). We uttered their sobriquets much the way I imagined top brass uttered launch codes for ballistic weaponry: with a sinister affection.

  Several boyhood pals from Manville were cycling with Suzie but were too skittish to inject themselves, so I’d do it for them in the loc
ker room at the Edge, or else at my house at night after my father was asleep. They’d often have to pace themselves into courage, wiping wet hands on the legs of sweatpants, gassy with nervousness, until finally they’d say, “Okay, hit me,” and I’d say, “Okay, on three,” but I always plunged on two, plunged into the upper-outer quadrant of the buttocks. Unless the needle was blunted from repeated use, it was never as painful as they’d been planning for.

  Word of one’s drug stash passed like bacillus through the raw oxygen of the Edge, as it does through any incestuous gym. I often had the best drugs because, between working and working out, I was at the Edge eight hours a day during the week, four hours a day on weekends. I knew who had what to sell and when. Pals began approaching me with “Billy Boy . . .” If they began that way, with the “Boy” and the ellipses towing the “Billy,” I knew what they needed, and I happily sold it to them for the same price I paid. Injecting drugs was okay; making money off your friends was not.

  Bob the Cop was a compatriot in the drugs-and-muscle milieu we’d built at the Edge, but he was understandably queasy about being perceived as such. One night in the locker room, he said, “Billy Boy . . .” and put a mammoth arm around me—I was eye-level with his jugular notch—and I said, “Sure, Bob, no sweat.” But he didn’t want the exchange to happen at the Edge, so he offered to come by my house, and this he did on a Saturday morning, in his uniform and police cruiser—he was on duty. He bought five hundred bucks’ worth of Dianabol and needles in my kitchen, and I was rendered giggly by the combination of his size, his officer’s uniform, and the discrepancy of what we were doing, a cop car humming out in the driveway.

  I blended us both MET-Rx shakes then—Crystal Light for me, orange juice for him—and at the kitchen counter we discussed the D-bol, how many milligrams he should inject and how often, what results he should expect and how soon. We discussed the Edge too, the training habits and dietary demands of our set. My father, I thought, was not due home until noon or later, but when we heard the front door creak open, I knew it was him. And before he turned the corner into the kitchen, as his bootsteps were coming our way, I knew what his face would say after seeing a cop car in our driveway: Oh my aching back.

  Bob the Cop usually had the immovable massiveness of a blond Kilimanjaro—he would not startle, would not stun—but as my father’s bootsteps came nearer, he got a slight squeak in his voice as he tried to appear normal, to continue talking about training and diet. (I’d wrapped his ampules and needles in paper towels and tinfoil so that the package resembled any workingman’s hoagie.) And then my father was there in a patch of sun, tanned gingerbread from summer middays, caulk in his wrist hair, mouth slightly ajar, eyebrows forcing his forehead up into a paragraph of wrinkles.

  After those initial seconds, after Bob the Cop introduced himself—“Mr. Giraldi, a pleasure to meet you, your Billy’s a good boy, just stopping by to talk bodybuilding, he knows his stuff”—and my father understood that this cop in our kitchen was not there to incarcerate me, it was difficult to decipher what he was most taken by: the police uniform or the mountain inside it. But he got that look I sometimes saw on him when in the presence of such masculine superiority, such sheer physical excellence: a look two parts awe, two parts longing, one part love—a look that said, Let’s be friends.

  Whatever exchange we had after Bob the Cop drove away has been lost to the many deletions of decades, to time’s bizarrely indiscriminate backspacing. What I do know is this: my father continued not to show excessive interest in, never mind enthusiasm for, my bodybuilding, and he didn’t even pretend to care about my obvious steroid use. And yet—how can I explain this?—I felt loved all the same.

  I understand if this will sound like rationalization to you, like a son’s bodyguarding of his hero-father’s memory, but here’s my step into hypothesis: he was allotting me the father-free territory in which I could measure the depths and angles of my selfhood. Perhaps he recalled his own emotions, his own coordinates of mind, at eighteen, his need to be liberated from Pop’s influence, interests, endorsement. I mean to suggest that my father left my bodybuilding alone not because he was resentful that I’d been shepherded into this portion of my life by his own younger brother—because he was hurt that he’d played no direct role in my most masculine endeavor—but because he somehow feared that his meddling, his overexpressed approval, would sully what I’d cultivated independent of him. Some teenagers will abandon a quest the second they suspect their parent shares it or appreciates it. Remember how dispirited you felt, how quickly you bailed, when the obscure band you worshipped was suddenly popular with the rabble.

  I can’t say now for certain if my father would have been right about that—I doubt it—but what matters is that he must have apprehended me as the seditious son who didn’t want his father’s interference, who somehow needed to evolve in its absence, and he’d have been right about that. Consciously, at least, I never pawed after my father’s attention during my bodybuilding years, and the pursuit was all the more crucial to me when I sensed that he really didn’t get it. When I knew that the pursuit was mine alone. At home at day’s end, we four in our house, I was content to be asked no questions, to offer no explanations, to prepare my meals and mix my shakes without being interviewed, without needing back pats and pep talks.

  Still—there’s no getting around this—my strength-and-size obsession makes emotional sense only when seen as an attempt to impress my father, to conform to the manful standards he’d inherited from Pop. That’s the thing about the developed body, and how it differs from the developed mind, from the life of ideas: there’s no explication necessary. Through its acquired aesthetics, the body is its own advertisement. What it means is how it looks. In that way, it also has its own semantics: the body as sentence, its demonstrable syntax and vocabulary, muscle as diction, the punctuation marks between muscles, the commas and semicolons of tendons, the style of striation. It is both the symbol of the things it communicates—grace, power, beauty, vitality—and the things themselves. In the classical conception of Western art, form soared over content, but for the bodybuilder, as for literature, form is wed to content. The style is the substance.

  Writing about Muhammad Ali, Norman Mailer offered this: “There are languages of the body.” I didn’t need to speak with my father about bodybuilding because my body spoke for itself. All I needed was to show him, and he knew. He didn’t have to respond, only look. The look was the response. This is the route many men take to express and assert themselves to one another. Deeds, not words. Recourse, not discourse. The physical over the emotional, or the emotional embodied in the physical—embodied in the body. Reticent in tongue, we men are garrulous in act.

  And he knew. Knew what, though? That I was at long last manful, worthy of our name? Or was my father not beguiled by my muscle-making because he suspected, as so many suspect, that the enterprise is femmy, faggy? Our shaved smoothness, nude brotherhood, walking erections, the spandex and banana sacks, the tanning booths and food fixation. At the gym, the spotter spooned in behind the lifter, his quads to the man’s hamstrings, pelvis to rear, his arms hooked under the lifter’s armpits, cupping the chest in an effort to keep the man squatting, keep him from yawing forward with such weight: an outsider looks at that and is perhaps helpless not to think of buggery. Of course he’d be committing a category error, a debauching of context; such a workout is actually the neutralizing of sexuality, just as one soldier carrying another across a minefield has no conceivable eroticism. No different from a brother’s embrace of brother, or when that cone-breasted great aunt excitedly stabs you in welcome. The erotic resides always in the crotch of the beholder.

  Be certain to experience the gamut of emotions when you’re young, said Gogol, because when you’re older, that gamut will not avail itself to you. Once you emerge from the trenches of adolescence, the one emotion you can frequently rely on will be regret. I can only grasp now in the dark for what my father really thought about my
bodybuilding, and regret that I never asked him, that I was too cocksure to care. By the time these questions became important to me, he was already gone.

  I must have been in the first or second grade, perspiring out in a baseball field at the edge of town, close enough to the river to smell its muddy wend, the summer now enormously ablaze, the sun all places, all at once. This was Little League practice, the coach the father of two boys who lived on our block. One son was the pitcher, a year older than me; the other son was my classmate, the star hitter.

  We didn’t have a baseball household, not even close. Baseball isn’t a motor or muscle sport, and so it wasn’t considered masculine enough. We didn’t give a damn about the Yankees, the team for whom everybody else in Manville hooted. And yet somehow there I was, squinting in that unbelievable barrage of sun, a shortstop in a white-and-marigold Manville Pizza uniform. Local businesses sponsored this Little League, provided the outfits, and the teams were called by their names: the pub or the pharmacy, the insurance company or the confectioner.

  On this day, my father came to practice to participate, humored by the coach, who knew he had no baseballing abililty. He came directly from a sun-charred day of roofing or framing. The coach, in contrast, was a foreman of some kind; he wandered around a plant with a clipboard and hardhat, made leisurely phone calls in a swivel chair, ate elongated lunches in an air-conditioned office. There they were, two snapshots of fatherhood, side by side at home plate: the rested and the ragged, one broad and tall with a greedy erectness, one much shorter, stouter, as if in perpetual duck of a right hand. One in pressed khakis, a laundered shirt, and smudgeless sneakers, ashen from the indoors, and the other in clothes that looked meat-ground, boots that were battle-worn and too heavy to walk in, his hands and limbs a pastiche of blood-sketched nicks and scratches.

  My father’s task was to stand at home plate, next to a basket of baseballs, and hit flies and grounders to us so that we might scamper after them. You know the trick: you’ve got to lob the ball in front of yourself with your left hand, then quickly regain your both-handed grip on the bat, then swing to send the ball soaring out among the waiting ones. Except my father couldn’t do this; he just couldn’t regain his grip on the bat quickly enough, and so the ball belly-flopped in the packed sand at his feet, or else he missed when he swung and so the ball again belly-flopped in the sand.