The Hero's Body (15 page)

“The upper back is killer. Sweet tie-ins with the bis and delts and traps. They pop in that shot. The fluidity is there.”

“Hams and calves, dude. Hams and calves, come on. Not just bis. Fuckin' focus here.”

“I'd do the right side for Side Triceps, not the left. Bring the left shoulder down half an inch. Look, see? You want the line from one shoulder to the other to be even. You wanna be level. Think about the
lines
your body is making.”

“You gotta get it into your head that just because this is a Side Triceps pose, you don't forget about the lines your body is making. Your
whole
damn body. So keep your right fist even with your right heel in that shot. Bring in your leg an inch. Think
symmetry
.”

“And the left pec in that shot too, bro. Squeeze the left pec by bringing the left shoulder around just a bit, half an inch.”

Then we'd break, I'd breathe for five minutes, mop my sweat, guzzle from the fountain before Sid or Rude would tell Victor to start the posing song on the boom box.

“Dude, when the song starts, right there at the guitar, you come alive immediately. You see dudes waiting too long to begin after the song starts. Don't do stupid shit like that.”

“Your solo time up there is yours, so let's focus on your arms and delts and quads, I'd say. Your routine, your motion has to favor your strong parts.”

“When the drums hit right here,
boom
, you hit a Front Double Bi, then, watch, you swing out of it right here and into the next drum hit, and then
boom
, right here, hit a Side Chest. See? Be steady as you do it. Be
fluid
. Not all jerky.”

“Yeah, you want fluidity of motion here. Don't be so damn stiff. Loosen just a bit between poses. Be loose until the drum lets you hit a shot, bro. Follow the drum, not the guitar and not the lyrics.”

“Should he mouth some of the lyrics? I see dudes mouthing lyrics all the time, you know, like they're really into it.”

“That's gay, mouthing lyrics. Plus, listen to this singer: he sounds like a dope addict. You can't even tell what the hell he's saying.”

“Follow the rhythm of the tune here. See, look: when the tempo of the song drops, right here, you drop, like this. Drop to one knee and hit a Double Bi, then
boom
, swing into a Side Triceps, like this.”

“Be sure to use the stage. Play to all sides of the audience. Do a Most Muscular pose to the left when the guitar picks up here—listen, right here—and then move to the right and hit another Most Muscular,
boom
, like that, but always on the drum hit. Don't flex fully into the pose
until the drum hits
.”

“And Billy Boy? No one wants to see a sourpuss up there on stage. Fuckin' smile—it ain't that hard.”

In a corner of the aerobics room rested a five-foot stack of blue floor mats, and on a few of those nights, after two hours of training and two more hours of posing, the gym about to close, I'd climb on top, my duffel bag for a pillow, a towel for a blanket, damp still through my clothes, and fall quickly asleep, somehow partially aware of the gym shutting down around me, lights clicking off, doors locking, leaving me to my womb of exhaustion.

Mid-August,
the contest was just twenty-eight hours away, and I was water-depleted. The goal at this crucial juncture was to keep my body as full and round as possible on the right carbs and protein while drying the remaining fluid from in between my skin and muscle tissue. Carbs require water to be assimilated, and because I wasn't drinking any, that required water was being pulled from beneath my skin, creating the dry, see-through aesthetic needed for the stage. The problem is that dehydration can feel like influenza, your bones somehow boards and jelly both. Also: try getting down your gullet an unseasoned, not-moist chicken breast and baked potato every two hours when your mouth's interior is a caul of Elmer's glue.

The guys at the Edge had instructed me to ban any stress from my week because stress creates a spike in cortisol, a steroidal hormone, and cortisol creates havoc with the body's processing of protein and glucose, which could cause a diminished muscle fullness, or the retention of water, which meant the blurring of muscle separation, a minimizing of the alps and ridges of my physique. The stress they meant was my girlfriend at Rutgers, Val; they sometimes overheard me quarreling with her on the phone at the Edge. Once, Victor caught me wet-eyed and defeated in the locker room, though he pretended not to notice.

But how was that supposed to happen, I wondered, the at-will banning of stress from one's week? What button did I press for that? Did they not understand that the triumph of stress stems from its unwillingness to be banned? I'd seen it with my father in the years after my mother left us. And wasn't being nearly naked on stage in front of thousands of discerning citizens
inherently
stressful? I'd been so zeroed-in on the training, the diet, and the posing that I'd
altogether forgotten to consider the coming anxiety: I'd never been on a stage before.

Our set at the Edge rented out half a motel in Point Pleasant—several others were competing in the upper divisions—and the day before the contest we caravanned down in vehicles stocked with coolers of chicken breasts, potatoes, and protein shakes, with duffel bags of bronzer and posing oil, drugs and needles. And if we'd been nabbed and searched by the police? We had Bob the Cop's business card. Everywhere on the boardwalks and beaches of Point Pleasant, on the sidewalks and in parking lots, waddled the women and men who'd arrived to attend and compete in the show: artificial tans, chiseled faces, chromatic muscle clothes, Oakley sunglasses.

In my and Victor's motel room, Rude and Sid ransacked a bed for a sheet, then flattened it on the clay-like carpet near the opened door. I peeled down to skin, cupped a handful in my lap—steroids are said to shrink testicles, but mine stayed stubbornly normal—raised the other arm, and the guys, having donned respirator masks, sprayed on a carob-hued coating, a mandatory glaze to darken my tan by about four shades, otherwise the stage lights would delete me. It fumed of chemical cinnamon, but sweeter, and went on cool. Victor held a clattering box fan to blow the toxicity out into the afternoon. What looked like blunt carob under the motel lamps and the day's remaining light would be a sheath of copper shine on stage. We'd settled on this carob-hued bronzer after Rude and Sid bickered for half an hour among the metropolis of bottles they'd erected on the bureau, each a different shade of brown.

“He needs this coffee-colored one, this one here.”

“Screw that, no way, that's gay. Let's use this mocha one.”

“Dude, that's too
dull
. The lights won't pick up that shit. Let's use this hickory. See, it's got this nice reddish tint.”

“What's he, an Injun? This pecan one looks sweet. This is the one.”

“Pecan is weak, dude. How about this caramel? This caramel will do the trick.”

“We don't need a trick, we need the right color. Let's use this umber. I used this umber once and it was sweet. The lights fuckin'
love
this umber.”

Dehydrated and craving cake, much too twiggy in the mirror, I saw every color as identical. I could not comprehend what they were carrying on about. When they began quibbling over what color trunks I should don, the red or the blue, Victor and I stepped into the bathroom so he could hit me with a needleful of Winny. I normally had no trouble injecting myself, but my grip was slick and shaky now, and since I'd sheared all the cushion from my body—my glutes were square slabs of stone—the needle felt twice as thick going in. That Winstrol burn I'd always savored? Not anymore.

Then we went outside and sat on the curb, dark gray cumulus hinting of thunder. And I remember wondering what time my family was going to show up the following day, my father, Pop, and Tony, if they'd arrive in time, leave Manville early enough to dodge the certain snarl of Jersey shore traffic. A black kid and his father pulled up to an adjacent room in their Oldsmobile—a kid my age, I thought, who was clearly there for the contest. They were dressed as we were dressed, lugging what we had lugged, the coolers and duffel bags. I could see the rounded mass beneath the clothes, the swaying quads in his step, and I said to Victor, “I hope that dude's not a teenager.”

He hesitated before his reply, waited for the kid and his father to disappear inside their room. “You could knock him out,” he said. The tender lies we friends tell one another: Are they told to preserve the other's delusion, or to preserve our own? I'd never knocked out anybody in my life.

My senior
year of high school and English class was under way, a lecture on Vonnegut's
The Sirens of Titan
. Then Alisyn, my sister, two grades behind me, appeared in the rectangular glass of the door, waving me out into the hallway, tears inking trails with her makeup. An ex-friend of mine, a weightlifter jacked on drugs, larger and stronger than me, had just accosted her, perhaps pushed her, threatened her, it wasn't clear—she was sobbing and I couldn't make out her sentences. Whatever had just happened had to do with me, I knew; my friendship with him had recently detonated from rivalry and rancor, a collection of jealousies, envies, perceived betrayals. The pettiness of seventeen-year-old boys. I calmed my sister, escorted her to her classroom, and then, on what felt like adrenal autopilot, stalked both floors of the high school searching for this kid.

I spotted him in his classroom, in the center of the front row. I banged open the door, rattling the glass in its frame, and in a swift stride, picked up the short wooden stool sitting empty there at the blackboard and stood before him at his desk with the stool cocked at my side. The teacher shrieked, fifteen kids gaped. The ex-friend didn't try to rise, just smirked up at me, his face a pufferfish, flushed and swollen from steroids. All I had to do was swing and his skull would break, his cheekbones crack, his teeth scatter onto the floor. He'd earned that.

The cliché is “heat of the moment,” but I didn't feel any heat now that I was there before him. What I felt was the cool awareness that I didn't want to hurt him that badly. I didn't want the consequences of that hurt. I lowered the stool with one hand and jabbed a finger at his face with the other: “You go near her again and I will end you.” And he did an unexpected thing then; he didn't protest or offer denials or reciprocal promises of destruction. Instead, he folded his
arms at his chest and pouted—a first grader's disappointed pout, but disappointed in what I couldn't say.

By this time the teacher was tugging at my sleeve, yanking me toward the door. I let the stool drop and I left, returned to class in time to learn something about Kurt Vonnegut, the clutch of his moral imagination. But I wasn't there long; the vice-principal was at the door now, saying, “Let's go, get your stuff, Giraldi,” and he led me from the building, suspended me for the rest of that week. And the conversation that night at the dinner table sounded just like this:

“You didn't knock him out?” Pop said.

“He attacked your sister and you didn't knock him out?” my father said.

“He didn't
attack
her,” I said. “He scared her, is all.”

Pop said: “He scares your sister and you don't knock him out?”

“I let him know what he needed to know,” I said. “He won't go near her again.”

“He goes near her again, you knock him out,” my father said. “What are those muscles for if you're not gonna knock him out?”

So that, then, was the chief value they saw in the physique I'd begun to build: how well it let me knock out another male. And if I had tried to tell them that I didn't comprehend my body in that way, as a hammer to inflict damage on other males? What good would that have done? I said nothing.

X

The morning of the
show, the prejudging portion, a muster of attendees mistaking gaudiness for godliness, not an overweight ice-cream lover among them, skin enough for a porn convention, outfits with an emphasis on both the “out” and the “fit.” The air inside the auditorium was charged and hard to breathe, crammed with bovine strut, men grazing from containers, ripping protein bars with their teeth. Female bodybuilders hulling through hallways like the genetic joke of some insane god, women who'd made themselves complete strangers to ovulation, their faces mannishly square from steroids, breasts abolished, voices baritone—Atlases in drag.