The Hero's Body (5 page)

Legs are notoriously obstinate; they don't want to grow. Mine always lagged: calves, hamstrings, quads. You train arms with arms, but you can't train legs with just legs. They demand your gut, your back, and much of your soul. Deads and squats, because they work every major muscle group, prompt overall growth. You might feel the deads and squats primarily in your back and legs, but because back and legs are the largest muscle groups in your body, their stimulation promotes, in a kind of anabolic pollination, the growth of everything else. This is what Pop meant when he'd once told me that the serious weightlifters give most of their love to their backs and legs. They are, in other words, the
Iliad
and the
Aeneid
of body parts. As that summer started to wane, with a new school year just two weeks away and a photo of my ex-girlfriend still in my wallet, I squatted and deadlifted with a maniacal intensity that felt like a trance.

The American
high school: that four-year carnival of awkwardness and insecurity, the chancy program of taking human beings at their most psychically vulnerable, those undergoing hormonal monsoons, forced to endure the abounding fissures in their self-esteem, and putting them all on a lighted stage so that the outwardly mighty but inwardly weak can devour those who are weak in both places.

When I returned to school that September, my junior year, people were confused by the twenty-five pounds of muscle I'd made; they
poked at my shoulders and arms to see if they were real. No one had seen me since May; my ungodly mullet was gone, my facial acne seared away by sun. John Travolta's iconic opening minutes in
Saturday Night Fever
, the Bee Gees squealing above his goombah strut? My first half hour back in the hallways felt just like that.

Between classes I sat against a locker and force-fed myself tuna fish and wheat bread from plastic containers, making a show of my strangeness and dedication. Teachers and students passed me pinching their noses, and my ex-girlfriend eyed me with a fascination that I hoped flipped her insides. Halfway into the school year, I'd win her back for five romping months. And the footballer for whom she'd ditched me, the one who wanted to maltreat me in the parking lot the previous spring? When we passed in the hallway that first day back, he looked me over with tentative menace, as if he couldn't quite decide how much provocation was called for in a spot such as this. The poor kid was in an unusual predicament: the half-pint he'd tried to pummel four months earlier was now bigger and stronger than he was. I saw his lips move but couldn't discern the words. In an exhibition of bravado I hadn't planned on, I let my bag fall with considerable drama, went across the hallway, and stepped into his face, close enough for him to smell the spearmint of my gum.

“You got something to say to me?” I said.

“If I have something to say, I'll say it.” He was looking, I remember, at my arms, not my eyes.

“You sure?” I said. “Because we can do this right now.”

Another footballer steered him away then and neither looked back at me as they walked on. If he felt relieved to have avoided a fistfight, he didn't feel nearly as relieved as I did, because the only fighting I'd ever done was with a joystick. Having muscles didn't mean I knew how to use them, and yet they were useful all by themselves.

In less than a year he'd become one of my closest pals when he asked if I'd help him gain strength and size. We'd meet in the weight
room after last period and I'd teach him what my uncle had taught me, with the same pitiless attitude: “You need to use these heavier dumbbells or your arms will always be noodles: like this, watch me.” And: “If you don't dead-lift once a week—look, like this, from the floor up—then you can forget about ever getting strong.” But he didn't have the requisite ferocity of will, and he didn't have the right genetics, either; he never gained any muscle. The satisfaction of that—of his humbling, of routing him in the weight room, of the closeness we fostered afterward, of the status I bestowed upon myself—was elevating to an almost spiritual degree.

The awe of others that lets you feel worthy of being alive in a carnivorous world you fear is intent to consume you: that reaction is the top reason any kid desires the physical conversion I'd achieved, and never mind what he tells you about the health benefits. Milan Kundera has named youth “the lyrical age” because, like the lyric poet, the youth is “focused almost exclusively on himself, is unable to see, to comprehend, to judge clearly the world around him.” Give to that same youth the self-worship that bodybuilding fosters and what you get is a happy Atlas somewhat detached from the normality of others, and one who can begin to see himself as walking poetry.

But I had a cloudless union with my new way in the world, with the obsessiveness and rigor of it, and could not imagine surrendering that surety of stance or understand how I'd gone so long without that heft in my step, the muscled swagger that, for the first time in my life, allowed me to
feel myself
in my body. Nor could I fathom ever again lapsing into a sadness intent on deleting me, all that inner unrest I perceived as a shameful lack of manliness.

At the end of that first day back to school, as we said hello outside his classroom, my math teacher, the six-foot-three, full-bodied Mr. Roba, former marine and star athlete, blessed me with what remains the most enlarging compliment I've ever been given. He said, simply, “It looks good on you, kid.”

III

Around the time I
was born, one of my father's most cherished friends was a drug-free bodybuilder named Joe Gallo, a hairless and etiolated titan of a man who was, if stories and photographs are to be trusted, not only the gentle giant of fairy tale but an incurable jester to boot. My father talked of Gallo with a pointed esteem, and the key to that esteem had less to do with Gallo's strength and size, both formidable, than it did with the fact that he'd achieved them without drugs. As a child, I couldn't hear mention of that man's name without the words “all natural” fastened to it like a rivet.

Compact and solid and strong, my father was not what you'd call muscular. He'd lifted weights at various spots in his youth and young adulthood, but never very seriously, and never for the alterations I sought. It never took to him as it had to Pop or Tony or me. My sense now is that although he admired the muscle maker, in a kind of unconscious sedition against Pop, he admired him only so far. Many sons inhabit a contradictory space in relation to their fathers; they emulate in order to earn acceptance while rebelling in order to earn their own identities. I took up bodybuilding in part because I must have sensed that it was something at which I could outshine my father.

One night before dinner, at just about the time those first results began showing, after six or seven weeks of weights, I was swanking
through my grandparents' kitchen without a shirt and damp with sweat. We'd just finished one of those blood-gorged workouts that lets you feel half-enraptured. My father said of me, “Look at him, struttin' around like that, with his arms out like he's Hercules.”

Pop bit into him then: “You wouldn't know how that feels because you were never good at it.” In the psychological man-games of my family, that retort was a tremendous victory for me. I'd formed an alliance with the top patriarch. The grin I showed my father that night must have said
Take that
. He had never excelled at bodybuilding, and look what happened to him: abandoned and humiliated by a two-timing spouse, dropped into a pit of hardship and debt. Perhaps that's one more reason I'd become so driven with weights, because it seemed to me an assurance against being discarded, forgotten.

It's true that Pop was never more interested in me than when I was weight training. It was he who took the before-and-after photos of me that summer in 1990, a dozen shots at the start of May and another dozen at the close of August. But the impulsive reproach of my father that night did not necessarily mean adulation for me. The men of my family were slow to compliment one another, as if lauding another Giraldi male somehow meant a deficit in their own masculine abilities. There were, however, no objections to praising men outside the family:
that
somehow didn't punch a hole in their conceptions of their own machismo.

Pop, especially, was quick to deflate his sons and grandsons:
jackass, asshole, horse's ass
, always an ass of some ilk. They could rarely do anything well enough, and never anything better than Pop himself could do it. With a hammer or a saw, on a horse or a motorcycle, in a weight room or on a racquetball court, Pop would not concede that any of his brood had the potential to best him. When my uncle Nicky, the youngest brother, earned the New Jersey state record for the largest lake trout ever caught, and when many in Manville and beyond were cheering him for it, Pop's contribution was “That ain't
fishing”—because Nicky had caught it trolling in a boat instead of standing on a bank with a pole, which is how Pop had fished throughout his youth. The ghastly familial myths in the
Theogony
of Hesiod always seem a little like home to me: Uranus jailing his hated children in Tartarus, his son Cronus in turn castrating him, lobbing his testicles into the sea, deposing him. Cronus then eating his own children, of whom only Zeus survives, who later returns to punish his father. Above the desk in my college dorm hung a print of Goya's
Saturn Devouring His Son
.

For the Giraldis of Manville in the late decades of the twentieth century, the psychodynamics are not hard to untie: the vauntingly masculine and competitive are always trying to silence that inner whisper saying
You're not man enough
. It didn't occur to them, as it never occurred to my adolescent self, that a ranting masculinity is often the inverse of what it purports to be.

Rooting among
my father's papers after his death, I discovered a torn-out notebook page, ripped at the bottom. Printed in red pencil, all in caps, was this mantra or epigram, or what he probably thought of as a poem, despite his opinion, common in Manville, that poets were unemployable pansies:

WHEN YOU ARE NOT TRAINING

SOMEONE SOMEWHERE IS

WHEN YOU MEET

HE WILL DEFEAT YOU

That was the kind of bumper-sticker machismo my father went in for. By the logic of that motto, one would never not be training. A champion wrestler in high school, he must have scratched it down in
his early forties, just when he'd begun coaching wrestling at Manville High School, at about the time he was beginning to emerge from the cauldron of hurt into which my mother's flight had exiled him.

In a family, there's no distinction as pronounced as the one between those who fit and those who don't. Why did my father not press such machismo upon me? I asked him once, as a teen, before I began weightlifting, why he hadn't tried to mold me into a wrestler, and his reply was simple and perhaps truthful enough: “Because you never showed any interest.” The full truth no doubt would have been something closer to “Because I suspect you're one of those unemployable pansies, too faggish for the wrestling mat.” To which I could have replied, “What's faggier than two half-naked dudes groping one another on a mattress?” He did try to mold my brother into a wrestler, and I was pleased about that; it took the pressure off me if he had one son who was half-interested. They'd even gone together to a wrestling camp at Bucknell University one summer, but as an eighth grader, Mike was already too lanky, too stringy. Wrestlers excel when they have the physiques of fireplugs, low and broad, more
neanderthalensis
than
erectus
. And Mike was already adopting the attitudes of the pot-puffing absentee he'd perfect in high school.

My father might not have pressed machismo upon me, but he certainly nudged, hinted. He reared us on Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris movies:
Fists of Fury
and
Return of the Dragon, The Octagon
and
Lone Wolf McQuade
. He said to me one morning, Chuck Norris's autobiography in hand, “Bruce Lee was small, but Chuck Norris says he was pound for pound the strongest man he's ever known.” As a child, I too was small, and so I hear that line now as the subtle incitation it must have been, as my father's particular means of encouragement.