The Hero's Body Read online

  THE

  HERO’S

  BODY

  * * *

  William Giraldi

  To the memory of my father,

  William Giraldi (1952–2000),

  and to my sons, Ethan, Aiden, and Caleb,

  so that they may know him.

  THE HERO’S BODY

  Prologue

  The illness began with a week of all-around lethargy, how you feel when an influenza first gets into you. Soon the headaches commenced—not the forehead pain you have with dehydration, or a behind-the-eyes throb from reading in muted light, but a panging all along the anterior of my skull. Over the span of several days, the panging migrated into the base of my neck. Then the waves came, whole days of dizziness, followed by a stiffening, a gradual inability to turn my head right or left. A body-wide infection now, something toxic thriving in my blood. About twelve days into this, I blacked out in one of my high school’s hallways, slumped against someone’s locker. I was fifteen years old that autumn, a sophomore. Friends lifted me from the floor and I woke in the nurse’s office, my vision tipped and tinting the world into grays.

  Then I was on a bed at my grandparents’ house, in a darkened room, unsure how I’d got there or how long it had taken, no longer well enough for fear. A minute or an hour later my father was dashing me across town to a doctor who’d recently opened a private practice. We hadn’t had a steady family doctor in years; since my mother had left our family when I was ten, my father, a carpenter, couldn’t afford medical coverage. When he carried me into the office that afternoon, a boneless waif over his shoulder, this doctor knew right away what was killing me.

  “Meningitis” sounded terminal. The doctor instructed my father to take me directly to the hospital, and it was his italicized directly that convinced me of my coming doom. He himself would hurry there to perform the spinal tap. I’d once seen a horror movie that had a character infected with meningitis, a wretched young woman, her spine stuck to the outside of her skin—she looked fossilized. So I’d soon be dying of a slow and grisly living decomposition, rabid unto death. Supine and panting in the backseat en route to the hospital, I asked my father, “What’s a spinal tap?” He said, “I think they just tap on your spine with a little rubber mallet,” and I didn’t realize that he was trying to be funny. Soon I was unconscious again, yet somehow still aware of being suspended in a capsule of fever and hurt.

  A spinal tap: a too-large syringe inserted between lumbar vertebrae and into the spinal cord in order to extract the colorless liquid, called cerebrospinal fluid. Meningitis is an infection of that fluid, which causes an inflammation of the membranes, the meninges, that bodyguard the brain and spine. The most common causes are imperial germs called Coxsackie viruses and echoviruses, although herpes and mumps can also bring on the malady. Some of the germs that lead to meningitis can also stir up such infamous problems as tuberculosis and syphilis. Most meningitis targets are children in their first five years of life, but I was fifteen—I could not comprehend what was happening. If you’re among the lucky unlucky, you have the viral sort and it will be caught before it causes too much destruction. But if you’re among the unlucky unlucky, like the girl in the horror film I remembered, then you have the bacterial sort that isn’t caught soon enough and you end up dead.

  Here’s how a spinal tap happens when your doctor knows what he’s doing: You fetal yourself on the table, knees tight up into your chest. The doctor canvasses your lumbar vertebrae for the best place to harpoon you. He then harpoons you and pulls the plunger to extract the fluid. That’s not what happened to me. My doctor-for-a-day pricked and pierced this essential part of me but couldn’t extract the fluid. He hadn’t told us he was a spinal-tapping virgin, but that’s exactly what he was.

  I remember looking over at my father, leaned against the heating unit beneath the window, his balding head aslant, his face a mask of stoical consternation, bulky, hirsute arms crossed at his chest in what seemed defiance of this new fact upon me. I imagine he was thinking two things. The second thing was That looks like it hurts (and he’d have been right about that), but the first thing was How am I going to pay for this mess? It was a good question.

  My doctor shot a few more holes into my spine, and that’s when my father asked him, “Why won’t it work?”

  “I . . . don’t . . . know,” he said, with those odious pauses between terms.

  “You don’t know?”

  “I just . . . don’t . . . know.”

  And my father said, “You want me to try it?”

  I managed to say no, please, no. He would have handled that needle as if it were a nail, he the hammer, I the lumber. Because he was a master at building things, he sometimes believed he could do anything that took two hands and the right will. His own threshold for suffering was not my own. He had rare use for doctors, hospitals, aspirin. His stomach did, however, keep Rolaids in business in the years after my mother’s abandonment: he’d buy the economy bucket of three hundred wafers and finish it in a month.

  My doctor at last surrendered and then talked with some hospital personalities about getting an expert to perform the spinal tap. Benumbed and dim-witted, not fully conscious, I remained on the table with the feeling in my teeth of having just chewed tinfoil. And then—in one hour or two, I couldn’t make sense of the clock—in glided the expert. She was a neurologist with the dauntless manner of someone who knows she’s an alloy of brilliance and beauty. Dressed in a plaid skirt, white blouse, and heeled shoes, cocoa hair wrapped up in a fist at the rear of her crown, her complexion like typing paper: just seeing her was enough to let me know that I was about to be resurrected.

  My father and my failed doctor stood nearby as this neurologist, with the skill of a master who’s long been spinal tapping, drew out the fluid everyone needed to see. The feeling that rippled through me when this life juice left my body? An authentic euphoria: my headache fled, my arthritic neck unloosened, my muddy vision cleared. And I thought three short words: She fixed me. It felt like love, like an overdue embrace by the maternal revenant.

  I sat up then, as out-and-out amazed as I’d ever been in fifteen years, and I inched off the table, feet timidly finding the floor. I grinned at my father because I thought we’d be returning home now, resuming our lives now. I took a solitary step, and, with that dope’s grin still stuck to my mouth, I promptly blacked out in a hump at my father’s mud-stippled boots. I’d spend the next two weeks in a hospital bed, everyone vexed as to why my vertigo and murderous head pain would not relent.

  I had the viral stamp of meningitis instead of the bacterial, and the doctors insisted this was good news—good news that would sentence me to bed as I got more and more waifish, all angles and knots. Each day a retinue of doctors and attendants filed into my room to examine charts and shake their beards and ponytails at me. They took so much of my blood I suspected they were selling it. They wheeled me up and down those antiseptic hallways for PET scans and CAT scans and other scans that showed them nothing, and there was even talk of another spinal tap until I sobbed them out of that plan.

  Some pals came to visit, others did not. The news in my high school said that what I had was deadly and contagious both. When I was released two weeks later—uncured, an enigma still—my father left his construction site at lunch time to pick me up. I was 110 pounds. My spinal column still ached in the places I’d been punctured, and my father, specks of sawdust in his forearm hair, said, “You don’t look better even a little.” I wasn’t. Another two-week bed sentence awaited me when I got home, and by the time I could stand up without blacking out, it had been more than a month. My grandmother, Parma, was certain that I’d been crippled for life.

  After seeing another physician, we were no wise
r. Perhaps the persistent vertigo and head pain had been caused by an imbalance of spinal fluid, possibly because my body had been sluggish in producing more after the extraction. Perhaps it was temporary nerve damage from all the freewheeling needlework. Parma felt livid enough to suggest that we sue the doctor, but the suggestion meant little: she knew that my father wasn’t the suing kind. When the hospital bills began their monthly assault on our mailbox, they were the new topic of Parma’s anxiety. At my grandparents’ house, the nightly dinner conversation was usually freighted with dread of one ilk or another. Parma lived in a constant smog of worry that either my siblings or I would be hit with a disease, my father wouldn’t be able to pay the bills, the hospital would seize our house, and we’d be living on the corner in a cardboard box with the local hobo. Somewhere in her bustling imagination, Parma believed that there were agents for the hospital who would raid our house and heave us out onto the lawn.

  After my meningitis, my father arranged to send the hospital a hundred dollars a month until the hulking sum was paid off—it took seven years. He kept a list of his payments in a black-and-white composition notebook, and, a decade later, after his violent death in a motorcycle crash, I found the notebook in a blue bin and wept with it there on my lap.

  BOOK I

  Youth ends when we perceive that no one wants our gay abandon. And the end may come in two ways: the realization that other people dislike it, or that we ourselves cannot continue with it. Weak men grow older in the first way, strong men in the second.

  —Cesare Pavese

  I

  Eight months after meningitis, in the late spring of 1990, recently heart-thrashed by my first girlfriend, scrapped for a football star, weighing barely a buck and a quarter, spattered with acne, both earlobes aglitter with silver studs and my hairdo a mullet like a lemur’s tail, and here is what happened to me:

  In the deadening heat of a May afternoon, stultified by sadness and boredom, I wandered over to my uncle Tony’s house and found him weightlifting in the pro-grade gym he’d installed in one half of his cobwebbed basement, AC/DC yawping from a set of speakers. The song? “Problem Child.” Tony lived across the street from my grandparents, where my father, siblings, and I ate dinner each weeknight, and so I’d known about his gym—he’d built and welded most of it himself—but never had a reason to care about it. Earnestly unjockish, I’d long considered myself the artistic sort. I kept a notebook full of dismal poems, song lyrics, quotes from writers I wanted to remember. My hero was the reptilian rock god Axl Rose. Filthy and skinny, he looked hepatitic and I thought I should too.

  But there in my uncle’s basement, my sallow non-physique mocking me from a wall of cracked mirrors, I clutched onto one of the smaller barbells and strained through a round of bicep curls, aping my uncle, who for whatever reason did not laugh or chase me away. And with that barbell in my grip, with blood surging through my slender arms, entire precincts inside me popped to life. Engorged veins pressed against the skin of my tiny biceps, and I rolled up the sleeves of my T-shirt to see them better, to watch their pulsing in the mirror.

  Wordlessly I did what my uncle did, trailed him from the barbells to the dumbbells to the pulley machine, trying to keep up, mouthing along to the boisterous lyrics. And in the thirty minutes I spent down there that first day, I had sensations of baptism or birth. Those were thirty minutes during which I’d forgotten to feel even a shard of pity for myself. I didn’t know if I was lifting weights the right way, but I knew that I had just been claimed by something holy. I’d return to his basement the following day, and the day after that. I’d return every weekday for two years.

  I see it clearly now: I was prompted by more than a need to stave off my melancholy, prompted by forces I couldn’t have anticipated or explained. There was the obvious motive, a desperation to alter my twiggy physique, transform it into a monument worthy of my ex-girlfriend’s lust, a kind of revenge so important to shafted teenage boys. The footballer for whom she’d ditched me? Just two weeks before I wandered down into my uncle’s basement, he’d rammed me against a classroom door, said for me to meet him outside, “so I can teach you a lesson,” and I was too shaken to ask him what lesson that might be, since he was the thieving scoundrel between us. Of course I didn’t meet him outside; he’d have ruined me in a fistfight. He and his pals called me exactly what you’d expect them to call me: pussy, sissy, faggot.

  There was also the chronic memory of that month-long meningitis, the successful shame of my body’s failing, the need to fortress myself with muscle in order to spare my father the high cost of my weakness, to preempt whatever disease might choose me next. But the mightiest motive, the one not entirely apparent to me? To obtain the acceptance of my father and uncles and the imperious grandfather we called “Pop”—to forge a spot for myself in this family of unapologetic, unforgiving masculinity.

  Before we return to that basement and those weights, there are certain essential details you need to know about where and how I was raised, details that will help explain how bodybuilding was for me both impossible and inevitable, and how it developed into an obsession that included brutalizing workouts, anabolic steroids, competitions, an absolute revamping of the self.

  My hometown’s name, Manville, lets you know precisely what you’re getting: pure Jersey. A town of plumbers and masons, pickup trucks and motorcycles, bars, liquor stores, and football fields, diners, churches, and auto repair shops, and a notorious, all-nude strip club once called Frank’s Chicken House. Go to central Jersey, ask any working-class guy over thirty about Frank’s Chicken House, and he’ll point the way: the town of Manville, right off Route 206, fifteen minutes from the sylvan spread of Princeton, a town straight from the blue notes of a Springsteen song.

  Manville was no Princeton. A meager two and a half square miles of low-lying land, the town is bordered by the Raritan River at the north and east. Roughly once a decade, it gets swallowed by an end-times flood. It was named for the Johns-Manville Corporation, which produced asbestos building materials that ravaged the lungs of its many workers. The manufacturing plant, defunct by the time I was a child, sat on Main Street, blocks-long behind rusted fences, vacant but for the spirits of the dead flitting through those empty spaces in search of better air to breathe.

  It was one thing to grow up in this blue-collar zip code, and quite another to be raised by men for whom masculinity was not just a way of being but a sacral creed. I’ve seen photographs of Pop from 1945, sepia shots made more flaxen by time, thick cloth-like rectangles of paper, curled under at the edges. Pop is sixteen years old in these shots, on a jagged rock wall by the bridge, high above the water. He’s with his closest pal, Ed Stowe, both in swimming trunks, both heavy with muscle. They are weightlifters, bodybuilders, backyard boxers, and they’ve come to this rock wall by the river to peacock the results of their training, to flex their suntanned brawn for posterity. Stowe is Thorish, tall, broad, and blond, while Pop has a powerlifter’s density. He resembles the era’s ideal of muscular, masculine beauty, Steve Reeves, he of the Hercules films, one of the first famed American bodybuilders.

  Pop and Stowe do indeed look like men in those photos I remember, not teenage boys. Such confidence and well-honed bulk, square faces shaded with stubble, no magenta sprays of acne. Among his assorted boasts, Pop often recalled shaving in the sixth grade, when the other boys were still tickled by cartoons and waiting for pubic hair. As a teen, Pop had muscle and body hair that let him pass for twice his age, and later they earned him the moniker “Magilla Gorilla” from one of my crueler boyhood friends.

  Pop always spoke of Stowe in a reverential tenor lifted by swells of sorrow. He believed Stowe was part genius, “ahead of his time” when it came to the particulars of weight training and exercise, nutrition and health. One of Stowe’s maverick ideas was that the human body has the ability to cure itself of any illness. It needs neither medicine nor food to recover from whatever malady has attacked it. Sips of water, perhaps a wedge of g
rapefruit, but otherwise you did not burn the body’s energy sources on digestion and you did not further pollute it with laboratory concoctions. You left the wise body alone and waited while it purged the pathogens. Ed Stowe died of starvation in the Arizona desert where he’d gone to consult some turbanned guru of wellness. “Ahead of his time” is morosely exact: he leapt forty years into the future, straight into the hole of his grave.

  When Pop first told me about Stowe, I was twelve years old, with my best pal at the time, and when we biked off into the Manville gloaming, after Pop finished with his stories of Stowe, my pal asked me, “Did you see your grandfather got tears in his eyes when he was telling us about that guy?”

  “Bullshit,” I said. “No way.”

  “There was a tear,” he said. “I saw it.”

  And I said, “Pop doesn’t have tears.”

  One of my earliest memories of Pop, circa 1978, when I was three: he cable-tied a one-foot rubber doll of the Incredible Hulk to the grille of his pickup truck. He’d drive around Manville with this green doll scouting the way, and whenever he stopped at our house to visit, he’d exit his truck with the Hulk’s dramatic growl and upper-body flexing.

  But it was Spider-Man for me. Not Superman and not the Incredible Hulk, those mesomorphic wall-punchers leaving messes of people and property. There was a finesse to Spider-Man, such sleekness and stealth. That liberating mask was the clincher; you could see the faces of Superman and the Hulk, and I thought that a woeful disadvantage. The Spider-Man of the late ’70s barely had a bulge anywhere under his fitted suit, even where he couldn’t have helped but to have one. Unmuscled, he immobilized foes without harming them, and that seemed to me, at three years old, a noble thing.