The Hero's Body (12 page)

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
ask
sis
, 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.”

“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.”