The Hero's Body (8 page)

For two years I'd been reading in muscle magazines about gyms such as this, but those articles must have been too puritanical because they forgot to tell me about the humming sexuality, the pre-orgasmic splendor of the place, those about-to-give-birth attitudes. Nurse Whitman said it:
Urge and urge and urge, / Always the procreant urge of the world
. For an eighteen-year-old kid who'd misplaced God and didn't much mind, it was a festival of carnality and better than any heaven you could have conjured for me.

It's true that the Edge was the district primarily of the weightlifter and dogged bodybuilder—it was like being in a wilderness of erections: large, hard, vascular men planted everywhere around you—but for the sake of its survival, the gym also humored normal people, the loafered and the desk-glued who clicked keyboards at various firms in the vicinity, some of whom were hand-held through timid exercises by trainers who looked like surfers. The presence of these normal ones was welcome, as planets welcome their moons. It was they who gawked, who provided the stunned audience for our daily Mardi Gras of muscle. A gym such as the Edge was a gym only in the most literal, practical meaning. For those of us who would make it our home, who would come of age there, and become the ambassadors of its kingdom, its physical utility was only one part of its value.

I've heard certain tweeds describe a gym as a microcosm of society, complete with its own lexicon (
pumped, shredded, juiced
), its own cruel hierarchies (the largest men and fittest women, those Santas among elves, rule the upper stratum, while the pencil necks and chubbers are the unfortunate helots), and its own regulated behavior (don't you dare touch a machine or weight when a world-beater is using it). That might be accurate, gyms might have their own flesh-and-iron
ecosystem, but for me and the circle that would adopt me, the Edge was theater and church before it was anything else, the ancient triumvirate of ritual and drama and play. We relished the stage-like atmosphere of it all, this theater in the round, relished its most performative aspects, the music and the pageantry, the costumes and the exhibitionism. You should have seen the multicolored outfits I stretched over my frame. An elastane one-piece, striped in turquoise and white, was not the worst of it. A night at the gym often felt like a night of kabuki in a strip club.

Or else our body mass as Mass, because for the many failed Catholics among us, bodybuilding was both a form of homage to and revolt from the flesh-centered mythos of Catholicism. We said to the Church, in effect,
You want a fixation on the flesh of our battered Messiah? We'll make
ourselves
into messiahs, self-saviors. With this iron we'll torture ourselves into godliness
. The Satan of
Paradise Lost
, that unrivaled insurgent, describes himself and his legion of the fallen as
self-begot, self-rais'd / By our own quick'ning power
, and that's the kind of sublime, steroidal ego to which bodybuilders aspire.

We wanted to be totems, objects of veneration and warning, of the extraordinary and the occult. A tired psychologist will tell you that we wanted these things because we were internally minuscule people with the psyches of hurt birds, and I don't deny the trace of accuracy in that claim. But the more exciting assessment might be this: we wanted sexiness and seduction and exhilaration, some communion with the sacred in a culture that no longer acclaimed the sacred, and, above all, we wanted brotherhood. We wanted to belong.

I began
by training with those boyhood pals who'd joined the Edge before me. The way we trained, we couldn't train alone. We required partners, spotters to supervise the high poundage we lifted.
During a bench press the spotter helped raise the barbell from the rack, and then he was there either to prevent you from dropping the thing onto your esophagus, or to prod you through a round of forced reps. We used forced reps at the end of a set when the muscle was mostly spent. The spotter gripped the bar to help us complete two more, three more, four more, shouting us through the burn—it was like a delivery room:
push, push, push, push
—and that's partly how big guys get big, by shocking the deepest muscle tissue into expansion. Your muscles don't
want
to grow. They're perfectly content to remain as they are, which is why you need a shock campaign if your goal is size and strength.

My boyhood pals were frequently helpful but our schedules were never quite in sync. More important: they were muscular and strong but without the necessary violence of mind, the savagery of will I'd learned from my uncle. I don't mean they didn't care about training; I mean they were too well-mannered, their attitude toward the weights much too polite. I needed to pick fights with those barbells and dumbbells and plates, to kick and spit at them, grab them as if I had to throttle their heft in order to keep that heft from throttling me. After a hellacious, hollering set of straight-bar curls, I'd slam, clang the bar back into the rack, as if to tell it:
You lose
. My pals wanted a workout; I wanted warfare—against the weakling I'd been. They didn't mind eighty percent engagement; I considered that a waste and a shame when it wasn't a sin. What was the point of this enterprise if you weren't going to bring every particle of yourself to its execution?

Here was the Giraldi family machismo at last making itself known in me, the machismo I'd internalized now seeking vent. Maybe with that uncompromising attitude I stopped feeling, for a time, as if I was not really Pop's grandson, not really my father's son. I didn't carry that awareness with me through my days, wasn't unduly conscious of needing to impress either Pop or my father. They weren't privy to
my training methods at the Edge; they never went to see what my life was like there. Pop had once or twice visited Tony and me in the dungeon—he stood aside to comment and correct—but my father, entangled on multiple fronts, never did. That's not an accusation. What happens in the gym between a man and his partner and their muscles is not unlike what happens in the bedroom between a man and his partner and their genitalia, between the confessing and the confessor, and so uninitiated spectators can be a concentration-kill.

There's something to that. At the Edge, you made sure your awe stayed furtive. You didn't openly goggle those Atlasian others, but rather tried for glimpses in that funhouse—everywhere the mirrors gave the impression of rooms within rooms—because there was a contradictory sense that a workout was private. A public and publicized privacy, but privacy just the same. And yet in most cases the furtiveness wasn't necessary at all. Those who were rubberneck-worthy
wanted
your awe and ogling, wanted to see the lust and wonder on your face. That's part of why we'd made the Edge our home—it was what we lived for.

V

The Greek athletes at
the gymnasium shaved their pubic patches. Hairlessness as a symbol of youth's vitality. Porn stars barber their genitalia in a suggestion of pre-pubescence. Look how
smooth
, how godly, is that magnificent sculpture, the Farnese Hercules.

Our upstairs bathtub half-filled with tepid, milkish water, tinged with pink, my body afroth, throat to toes, with shaving foam. I was seated on the rim of the tub with a razor, rivulets of blood like raspberry sauce in whipped cream, wincing through the nicks. How was this done? The two blades of the razor kept getting crammed with hair. I'd slide it three inches and it was crammed.

So I had to knock it against the tub to loosen hair from the blades, but when I did that, the cartridge detached from the handle and disappeared into turbid water, and then I had to grope around for it, which is why my fingertip was bleeding now too. Plus the razor I used was meant for a tender male's face, and so the blades were dulling rapidly against my body's wool. I'd gone through three cartridges already.

I'm saying this took forever. Women did this
every week
? Perhaps it got simpler, more efficient, but I wasn't sure how, because, contorted though I was, I couldn't see where I was shaving. In addition to the body's collection of knobs, the ankles and elbows and wrists, those unseen corners and nooks were what was bleeding most earnestly.
Behind my knees, the under-pockets of my groin, beneath the ridges of my buttocks, also those raised moles, one in my left armpit a tragedy of crimson teardrops. It didn't at all seem imperative or comfortable, or
safe
, to shave my pubis and scrotum, too, but having gone that far, why not just deforest my genitalia of its personality? Everybody was doing it.

We shaved ourselves because you couldn't see the suffered-for striations and vascularity, the rutted divisions between muscles, if we were coated in hair. Your thigh, for example, is not a single lump of flesh; it's four elegant bands, hence its name, quadriceps. So hairlessness was required of both the competitive bodybuilder and the serious aspirant, and now that I was serious, too, now that I was training at the Edge, down the drain swirled my hair. Although it wasn't really swirling down the drain, I saw when I finished; it was stuck, splotched on the sides of the tub and clumped there at the grate, a whole inch of it.

My naked skin, dry now save for the runnels of blood, still felt wet, felt newly bloomed into a missing breeze, felt as if I could have used another bathtub full of aftershave lotion. There were eddies, shaving foam, sanguinary footprints on the floor, plus used Gillette cartridges like shell casings at a massacre. I was trying to mop this impressive mess when I heard it behind me: “Good God in the morning.”

I'd left the bathroom door ajar, and there stood my father, blistered and filthy from work. “Good God in the morning” was, for some reason, his way of saying,
What in God's name have you done?
He had much-used variants of that exacerbated expression, such as “Oh my aching back,” which meant
What trouble have you caused for me now?
Several years hence, when I'm “helping” him paint his friend's living room, I'll drop a newly opened gallon of china white onto the carpet, and we'll both just stand there looking in astonishment at this bungle, and he'll say it over and over: “Oh my aching back.”

I pressed the towel to my lap and we had this familiar two-line exchange: “Oh hey, Dad, what're you doing?”

“No, Bill—what are
you
doing?”

(My friends delighted in this exchange—they thought my father buddy-like, trenchantly comedic—and in the hallways of our high school they said to me, “No, Bill—what are
you
doing?”)

The paradox of bodybuilding, its mixed signifiers, the collision of the masculine and feminine. Tough guys
shave
? I said, “I'm shaving, Dad.”

And then he said it again with a wagging head, before shambling down the hall to his own bathroom: “Good God in the morning.”

It took
a month for me to be adopted by the prelates and priestesses of the Edge, to be welcomed into the sanctum of the gargantuan. Two things happened at once: a colossus named Victor approached me about training together, and the gym's manager asked me to work the morning shift from five to ten. The job put an Edge T-shirt on my back and its keys in my pocket: a vicar now, a cleric. I can recall that surging of honor in me, of pride at having trained harshly enough to be noticed, chosen. It's what all of us are working and waiting for in this world, to be chosen ones. I'd open the Edge at five, man the front counter, peddle memberships and merchandise, blend fruit shakes spiked with protein powder, offer training tips to newbies, stroll about the place feeling clued-in and authoritative, keys clanking at my side, then go home to nap and eat and read, and then return to the Edge at 5
P.M.
to meet Victor.

Short and broad, a foot and a half thick from front to back, Victor waddled around on diamonded quads and calves, with whopping arms and rashes of acne from anabolic drugs. His training partner had just been hit with a hernia during a set of bent barbell rows, and
so Victor was in pursuit of a dedicated replacement. His choosing me was an uplift, confirmation of my rigor, of muscularity that earns praise. It was like being asked to the prom just when you feared you might be too homely to go. We trained with the drive of vanquishers, with profanity and spittle, a return to the partnered intensity I'd had with my uncle.