The Hero's Body (6 page)

Soon I was enthralled by ninjas—lithe but mighty ninjas—after I was somehow allowed to watch those staples of the 1980s ninja-movie craze,
Enter the Ninja
and
Revenge of the Ninja
, cyclones of
cinematic violence starring Sho Kosugi. Pop would point and mock when, donned in a ninja suit, I darted from tree to tree in what I thought was stealth mode. Of course the Asian man was too feminine, too hairless, for Pop's standards. When I tried to share with him a VHS tape of a Sho Kosugi film, he mocked him: “That guy's just a little shit. I'd knock him right over.”

My ninja posture then mutated into a fixation on Sly Stallone's
Rocky
and
Rambo
, the accidental kitsch of Schwarzenegger in
Conan the Barbarian
and
Commando
, and the ruckus of pro wrestling, all that shirt-ripping and American-hero jingoism of Hulk Hogan. My brother and I, with innumerable brothers across this land in the mid- '80s, nearly splintered our spinal columns imitating the maneuvers of pro wrestlers: flying dropkicks, atomic elbows, full nelsons, body slams, pile drivers into pillows.

The original Rambo film,
First Blood
, came to HBO in 1983, and this constituted an event in my family, an excitation beyond reason shared by my uncle Tony and my father. The scene that had stirred them, the scene they wanted me to see, showed Stallone sewing up an astounding gash in his upper arm, a gash sustained after he'd leapt from a cliff and plunged through a ceiling of treetops. In his guttural Stallone voice, my father delivered the most repeatable line in the movie, when John Rambo tells a pursuant policeman via walkie-talkie, “You want a war, I'll give you a war you won't believe.”

One autumn night after the house had gone to sleep, I watched
First Blood
alone in the dark, all through me that thrill small boys feel when they glimpse someone, some
thing
, they want to become. My father and uncle had insisted that I watch
First Blood
because they must have hoped that it would stir my desire to become someone like John Rambo. And it worked for a while; that night inaugurated a three-year preoccupation with Rambo and Stallone, one that had me dressing,
every day
, in an unsightly patchwork of camouflage, also carrying a survival knife, razored on one side, serrated
on the other. The hollow handle contained matchsticks, a compass, a needle and thread in case I had to sew up a gash in my arm.

For a significant stretch of my childhood, still clad in those unsightly camouflage fatigues, I was certain that I'd become a soldier of fortune. I began hoarding canteens, survival manuals, backpacks of nonperishables—the Cold War still had several years of chill left—and magazines that featured firearms, explosives, stories of mercenaries killing enemies of the United States in some Central American boscage.

Our father gave my brother and me a BB gun and compound hunting bow when we were still too short to see over the kitchen counter. With the BB gun I assassinated innocent crows after I'd read Native American stories that told me they were death incarnate, and my brother shot our babysitter, also innocent, square in the face. The BB got lodged in the bone of her chin and had to be surgically excised, and Mike was forced to make the lonesome walk down the street to apologize.

Why this near eye-losing episode did not shame or frighten our father into confiscating the gun from us is one of those mysteries I live with. I can't decide if he thought that violence and injury were the binding aftereffects of manliness—of masculinity realized and asserted—or if he was just too spent to do anything about it, too sapped from single-fathering, from those ten-hour days of contending with two-by-fours.

My father, like Pop, was a fan of Clint Eastwood's renegade cop Dirty Harry, and although I would not have tagged him a handgun enthusiast, I do remember those stickers and letters of thanks from the NRA. At some point, he and Tony bought identical .357 magnums for “target practice” and “home protection”: nonsense, since he only rarely went to the shooting range and since homes in Manville didn't need protecting. A dark hand-cannon, it slept in an unlocked padded case beneath his bed, and I fooled with it when my father
was at work. I'd cock the lever, aim through a window at passing cars, squeeze the trigger, listen to that satisfying
click
. And knowing now that this is how kids mistakenly fire bullets into their own heads or the heads of others, it feels wondrous that we dodged that particular disaster.

A purer mystery is the compound hunting bow; a BB gun can injure and blind, but an arrow through an organ meant the morgue for us or someone else. In the backyard my father had stacked blocks of hay we were supposed to use for target practice, but when friends were over we invariably entered a patch of woods looking to perforate living things. We never did—we had no training and couldn't steady the bow in our shaking arms—but one of us did manage to maim our house, just two inches above the sliding glass door, a permanent hole in the vinyl siding. How we or another child did not end up pierced to death is another of those mysteries I live with.

If all that tempts you into thinking less of my father's parental skills, it tempts me into thinking less of them too. And so does the fact that we neighborhood kids rampaged all over town on BMX bikes, up and down Main Street and residential roads, bunny-hopping and wheelie-popping, soaring from improvised ramps over barrels and one another—plus skateboarding, pogo-sticking, go-karting, anything that involved wheels or contempt for gravity—without once being told to strap a helmet to our skulls.

Domestic life in the 1980s was an overall less paranoid affair. It shouldn't have been. At eight years old, I spent the night in a hospital bed—bruised, amnesic, concussed—after my front tire got wedged in a sidewalk rut and thrust me over the handlebars, crown-first, into the plate-glass window of a liquor store, knocking me unconscious onto the concrete. When I came to I was blinking up into a silhouetted solar system of strangers' heads revolving around my own hurt skull. Those Manvillians didn't call for an ambulance and even helped me back onto my bike, never mind that I'd been knocked
out for half a minute and was bleeding from somewhere beneath my hair.

When I returned home I told my father what had happened, and he said, “Go play football across the street with your friends, it'll make you feel better.” I slipped on my pads and helmet and crossed the road to where neighborhood kids were clamoring in a backyard pile. The mother took one look at me and called my father to shriek at him, “He's white as a sheet, his eyes are dilated, he's bleeding, for God's sake, he needs a
hospital
.” Soon I was in the backseat of a car, headed to the emergency room, vomiting into a plastic salad bowl. And after all that, my father still did not think it smart to outfit me in a bike helmet. I suspect now that he considered it a tad girlie for his boy, like tassels on the handlebars, or a basket. Safety was not first. It wasn't even last.

I can't
recall any bodybuilding encouragement from my father and I also can't recall ever being bothered by that, not consciously bothered. You'd think he would have taken care not to become a cliché, a trope of masculinity, the reticent dispenser of what's always called “tough love,” although it never looked tough to me. The Great Santini seems like a spiritually hurt buffoon hiding homosexual impulses. My father was never the Great Santini, not even a little. His tomfoolery was a joy. When Tony was at his largest, my father would make blowing, nickering horse sounds at him, and this was funny without being insulting, since bodybuilders don't mind being compared to robust animals. But my father did subscribe, along with his two brothers and Pop, to a red-meated worldview, the tenderness-is-feminine slant, the encouragement-will-poison-them theory that has left many a son with a cleft at the center of him.

Aside from the BB gun and the hunting bow, there was no planned
campaign of masculinization in our household, no overt theater of virility, but I was aware of overtones of proper mannish ways. For one of his birthdays, I bought my father work gloves because he returned home from the job site each afternoon with his hands chafed and scraped, plum-colored blood blisters under his fingernails. A month or so later, when I spotted the gloves untouched in his truck, still bedded down in their packaging, I asked him why he wouldn't wear them.

“I can't have your uncles and Pop see me wearing
gloves
on the job.”

I knew I'd regret it, but I asked: “Why not?”

I've lost his verbatim reply, but the essence of it was this:
If you can't understand that on your own then you never will
.

Right. What carpenter with testicles would dare protect his hands from unnecessary chafing? But I never forgot that exchange, and when I was old enough to work summers on my family's construction sites—humping planks and blocks, shingles and bricks, wheelbarrowing dirt, hammering nails and smashing my thumb—I made sure not to wear gloves. Most nights I'd spend half an hour tweezing splinters from my palms, patching holes with Band-Aids, wrapping blisters with bandages.

My father and I warred all through my teenage years: verbally, physically, psychologically. The worst it ever got was a shoving contest in the upstairs hallway when I was sixteen. I lost. He pinned me against my bedroom door, his forearm in my throat, firm up beneath my chin, frothing a millimeter from my face, and it didn't stop until my sister, a Niagara of tears and screams, pounded our shoulders and heads with both her fists. The fault was mine. I was a canker in our home. Disobedient, disrespectful, dismissive. My father, under vigorous financial and emotional strain, still in his mid-thirties, felt unvalued, unloved by me. I wish I could have seen that. All adolescents can't be as swollen-headed as I was. Everyone knew that my
mother had left our family because she'd met someone else, a man with money, and yet during one of our verbal shoot-outs, I had the callousness right there at hand: “You know,” I said, “it's
your
fault she left us. It was you.” I don't know what I could have meant by that—he drove her away, wasn't man enough to keep her?—but I knew it would wound him, and that's what I wanted then.

“All I ever did was love your mother,” he said, and then he rose from the front porch and walked inside. I won that one, if you can call that winning. I'd give a considerable sum to be able to change my attitude that afternoon, revise those cutting words. Like many father/son relationships, ours improved immensely once I got the hell out of the house.

IV

It can seem inscrutable
when an arcane interest such as bodybuilding hops among friends like an infection. Several of my boyhood and high-school pals began bodybuilding when I did, or else I began when they did. We hadn't made a pact, hadn't conspired beforehand, weren't aware of each other's hankering for muscularity. But there must have been something in the water, I thought, because so many of us got sick with it.

Though perhaps it wasn't all that inscrutable. For working-class kids who came of age in the bigness and bluster of the Reagan '80s, who were soused on the action flicks of Schwarzenegger and Stallone, on the bombast of Hulk Hogan, muscled physiques were simply what you pined for. What happened to my pals and me in Manville in the early '90s was part of a grander cultural trend that had jumped to life a decade earlier when the American political mood took a hard-right turn. Cartoonish musclemen, typified by Schwarzenegger and Stallone, arrived to supplant the “girlie-men” of the '70s, to redeem us from the humiliating failures of Vietnam and the emasculating victories of feminism. If we wanted to win wars, actual and cultural and personal, we needed all the muscle we could get. In
Rambo: First Blood Part II
, when Rambo's former colonel springs him from prison so that the great warrior can return to Vietnam in search of POWs, Rambo asks, “Do we get to win this time?”

I and my pals spent a third of our time talking about weights, a third talking about food, and another third talking about steroids. Of course steroids. We weren't an overly principled lot, even if I had come from a family that was, nor can I pretend that we had a moral skirmish going on: to do or not to do drugs. There was no moral skirmish because we didn't think of steroids any differently from the way we thought of fuel for a motorcycle. Nor were we about to be hoodwinked by the culture-wide hypocrisy that declared cigarettes and alcohol—those convivial slaughterers of the untold—perfectly okay, while declaring steroids—the killer of few—perfectly contemptible.

You can hurl the accusation “cheater” in the bedroom and you can hurl it in the classroom, but you look silly hurling it among bodybuilders in the gym. For the kind of musculature and might we desired, drugs were as necessary as good genes, and yet were still no guarantee. You can't just inject a torpid stick figure with anabolic steroids and then sit back and watch him transmute into Hercules. All the hard work begins
after
the injection. Contrary to the popular disdain we often heard, drugs are not “a shortcut,” since the steroidian usually trains longer and harsher, and with more dedication, than his principled and drugless compatriots. This is what we would have said had you confronted us then:
If you have a problem with anabolic steroids, good for you, don't do them. But don't unload your own problem on us
.