The Hero's Body Read online

Children are natural obsessives. For a month I’d been wearing Spider-Man pajamas throughout the day and making web-shot sounds, my wrists aimed at relatives. To reward this obsession, my family arranged for someone to costume himself as Spider-Man and come to our house. When from our front walkway I saw him approach me in an unwise amble I mistook for menace, I wept and howled and frantically climbed up my father. This must have been disappointing; I was no brave little boy.

  Later that year I was in an operating room about to be anesthetized, about to have tubes inserted into my ears. My canals weren’t draining; my family had thought I was disobedient but I was just deaf. The doctor asked me this asinine question: “Would you like a needle, or would you like to blow up a balloon?” and I answered as any child would. This duplicitous doctor then set a black mask over my face—I remember it descending like night—and four cool hands staked me to the table by my ankles and wrists. Just before the gas unleashed its sleep, I strained to snap free, and my thought was not of Spider-Man web-whirling through the heights of a metropolis, but of Pop, of that great green beast called Hulk.

  Pop and my father and two uncles admired weightlifters and footballers, wrestlers and boxers, lumberjacks, hunters, woodsmen. Celebrants of risk, they valued muscles, motorcycles, the dignified endurance of pain. Their Homeric standards of manhood divvied men into the heroic or the cowardly, with scant space for gradation. Heroes were immortalized in song, cowards promptly forgotten. This wouldn’t have been an issue growing up except that I wasn’t like them. I was made of other molecules, of what felt like lesser stuff. As the firstborn son, as the fourth William Giraldi, the pressures were always there, the sense of masculine expectation always acute. But I was the bearer of patrilineal traditions in name only, insufficiently macho and no doubt under suspicion as a potential pansy.

  In his “Calamus” sequence, Whitman is “resolv’d to sing no songs to-day but those of manly attachment.” This is a tale of men because my mother left us when I was ten years old, and so our upbringing fell solely to my father and his family. I realized what was happening between my parents about a year earlier. Lying on my bed one night, in the sudden dark of autumn, the deadened limbo of Sunday evening, I listened to my parents quarreling downstairs. Their voices floated up to me as if from a television set in a closed room; I could make out just the occasional word, sometimes a phrase or clause. But the individual words didn’t matter; their tone conveyed it all. Disturbances were coming.

  When the voices stopped after an hour, and when I heard the door to my parents’ bedroom click shut, I slid from bed, crept downstairs to see what clues I could find left over from their quarrel. There, in the dark of our kitchen, lit only by the weak bulb above the stove, my father sagged in a stool at the counter. At first I didn’t notice him there, but then he said my name, and I went to him, feeling caught at something, caught in something, but I couldn’t say what, couldn’t identify the new web in which he and I were now stuck.

  Unsure of how the separation would play out, this is what he said to me: “No matter what happens, I’ll always be your father.” The following year my mother would be gone, and without balking my father would fill both roles. There is a tale to tell about my mother, too, I know, and perhaps one day I will earn the mercy to tell it, but she is absent from these pages because she was largely absent from our lives, and that absence helped to place me in the hard clamp of the paternal.

  Tony brought me to my first bodybuilding show just after my parents’ divorce, when I was too young to assimilate the spectacle or understand why it mattered. Sitting in that auditorium, encircled by muscle, by a wall of aftershave, I felt the breath of panic on me, the prelude to a raid of anxiety. I told Tony I needed the bathroom, thinking that he’d let me go alone, that I could take several minutes to shake off whatever was attacking me. A ten-year-old, it seems, can be unmanned among the manly. Instead, I pulled him away from the best part of the show and stood uselessly at the urinal while he leaned against a sink, looking at his watch.

  This was when the men of my family still thought it possible that I might evolve into an athletic worthy, maybe a soldier, someone more daringly masculine than what I showed signs of becoming.

  There’s something else you should know at this point: all through my childhood and adolescence, I had a literary quest under way in hiding, a counterlife carried out quietly on my own, at libraries or at yard sales, whole grocery bags of paperbacks for a dollar. My family didn’t have any regard for literature, for the pursuits of language, and was never timid in letting that be known. When Pop once spotted me with a paperback of Poe’s poetry, he said, “I got a poem for ya: Bart Bart laid a fart,” and his chortle sucked all the air out of the kitchen. Physicality mattered; the rest was wasteful. So I cannot fully account for how my draw to literature was possible in a household that was not just unliterary but nonliterary, one in which poems and plays were considered ravingly femme.

  A maternal uncle seldom seen—contentedly unmasculine, a committed bachelor, everything about him contrary to the Giraldi male, his apartment an asylum of art books, journalism, Steve Martin records—sometimes brought me to the Manville library when I was a boy of seven or eight. He’d noticed my interest in the Greek god Pan; I’d been detecting it in the trees and weeds, its silhouette at the rear of our property, in the shrubs behind our garage, its flute, horns, and hooves. This uncle led me in researching the agglomerate of Greek gods and goddesses, and it was there at the Manville library, in its squat beige-brick structure at the center of town—I’ve never forgotten that air-conditioned scent of books, the brew of old leather and new paper—that I found The Iliad, a shortened version with ink drawings of those androgen-loaded heroes, their developed muscularity and pronounced thoracic arches.

  Later, on Monday and Wednesday nights in winter, the seventh and eighth graders met for basketball practice in our Catholic school’s gymnasium. Short and slight for a seventh grader, with no chance at all of succeeding at the sport, I was nevertheless stupefied by the acrobatics of Michael Jordan: he seemed a celestial vision, a beauty made, not born. Pop had erected a hoop above the garage to help me out, and even rigged a floodlight to a pole so my pals and I could practice after the early dark of December, the neighborhood night alive with the crisp thudding of the ball against concrete.

  My father never said as much, but he must have considered my basketballing aspirations a bit deranged. Uninterested in the overt masculinity of football or wrestling, trying to conceal an effeminate bookishness, I must have thought that basketball would let me pass as an athlete. I spent most of our team’s Saturday morning games where I belonged: on the bench, tying and retying the laces of my unscuffed sneakers.

  Once a year for a week, a book fair arrived at our school, wheeled stalls set up in a recessed part of the hallway. The nuns gave us several minutes each day at the stalls, but I never had the money for books, never felt my father could spare the ten bucks, and so I never asked him. From the way Parma fretted over my father’s debts, beggary seemed always about to descend on us. On the nights of basketball practice during the week of the book fair, while the taller players echoed and squeaked across the waxed maple of the gymnasium, I snuck down the darkened stairwell to the rolling steel gate that blocked me from the main section of the school. The book stalls were there, lit only by the scarlet glow of the exit signs—my red-light district—and if I yanked up the one damaged side of the gate, I could crawl beneath it and cat-burgle the books I wanted.

  Loading my duffel bag with illustrated, abbreviated versions of Poe and Verne, and glossy paperbacks of Greek myths and North American legends, didn’t feel at all like thievery to me. It felt like a private and mandatory search for self: private because I couldn’t share it with my family (and because the ardent interiority of reading is by definition a private endeavor), and mandatory because I’d somehow, against my social class and family ethos, begun to understand that within the dimensions and dynamism of language lay not just a b
alm for confusion or curiosity, but some form of deliverance for me. A religion more vibrant and sanative than what I was being sold by the Catholic clergy six days a week.

  The convent sat adjacent to our school, and the nuns would sometimes corral seventh- and eighth-grade boys to lug a bureau, or ascend into the attic to retrieve boxes, or brave the damp basement for a ceramic Nativity scene. They once chose me and another boy for such a task, and on the way out I saw, there in the sitting room, sun-dappled by the window, an elderly nun I’d never seen before, her face a road map of creases and clefts, her posture one of European eons, nun shoes like blocks of black wood. A visitor from Sicily, she sat reading the Gospels aloud to herself in a tongue of some other age, Greek or Latin, I didn’t know.

  I stayed to listen to this startling rhapsodist, to the opulent prosody of whatever she was saying. I could see that she owned the verses by memory because although the bible was splayed on her lap, her eyes remained shut for minutes at a stretch. She seemed held as if by some welcomed hex. What was that called, that inner billowing I felt just then at the sound of her verses? Why should I have registered such intimations of joy at what I could not comprehend? But I could comprehend it: as a braid of wisdom and beauty. A mystery, a religion that meant poetry, a poetry that meant hope. At eleven years old, I had hope for something, from something, I could not begin to articulate. But I understood that it had to do with the intricate rhythms of her language and what those rhythms meant, the spaces into which they were trying to reach. At the beginning of The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene writes, “There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.” This must have been a moment when the future was making itself known to me, the partial realization that language would become my life.

  By the time I reached high school, I’d figured out that my family was wrong about literature, that if books weren’t exactly happiness, they were—to employ Stendhal’s definition of beauty—the promise of happiness. Once in high school, I was lucky with my English teachers, discerning women who registered my interest and nudged me in the right direction: toward Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Flannery O’Connor and Vonnegut, Hamlet and Macbeth.

  In light of all that, my meningitis at fifteen was an embodiment of my role in the family, of the inner fragility they’d long spotted in me. Not that I was forever sickly, but that I was a weakling always with a book in my hand, an unmasculine and romantically vulnerable softie. The meningitis was a month during which I was at my feeblest, literally unable to stand beneath my own weight, but it was a month that in some ways exemplified my entire life to that point. And so when I wandered down into my uncle’s basement that May afternoon, I had a stack of troubles quivering within, including the humiliation of having no mother, a humiliation helped by my father’s own shame of not being able to hold onto his wife. I was not wholly conscious of those troubles, but this I knew for certain: I needed to make my own creation myth, to renovate my pathetic vessel into a hero’s body.

  II

  In conscious emulation of Pop when he was young, my uncle Tony got serious about weightlifting in his twenties. Like my father, he’d been a wrestler in high school, then earned a black belt in karate. I can recall the poster of Bruce Lee tacked up in his basement, behind the punching bag and speed bag, the bloody scowl of the great martial artist as he’s about to punt an enemy. Tony had always seen himself as too unmuscled (he hadn’t inherited Pop’s effortless bulk), and so, after wrestling and karate, weightlifting seemed the natural next step for him.

  In the 1980s, he trained with some hardcore Jersey bodybuilders—animals who squatted six hundred pounds, the barbells bending across their backs as if they were rubber—at elite bastions of brawn that were more dungeon than gym: cracked mirrors, leaky pipes, buckets for puking, heavy-metal music that rattled your bones. No place for the hausfrau or noodle-limbed executive. Realms of self-torture where the 150-pound dumbbells never needed dusting.

  When I joined Tony in his basement that first day, he’d just begun bodybuilding again after a four-year hiatus, one occasioned by the demands of children, but also by the burnout that came from years of harsh training. To train as he did Monday through Friday, and to do it without the accelerant of steroids, after nine-hour days of a carpenter’s toil, the hauling of lumber and pounding of nails, up and down a ladder with hundred-pound stacks of shingles at a noontime hot enough to make tar run, all while he was trying to preserve calories so that his muscles could repair, so that he had enough fuel for another racking session at the gym that day—seven years of that will wipe a man out.

  Once my uncle understood that I was committed to bodybuilding, once he realized that I wasn’t going to go away—it was summer now and I had little else to do—he accepted me as his partner. We trained together every weekday from three thirty to five o’clock, ninety iron-handed minutes, and he taught me the draconian habits he’d learned at those Jersey gyms in the ’80s. Uncles provide boys an avenue of freedom that fathers never can, a welcome into the saltier, slightly more pernicious arenas of adulthood.

  As the middle brother, Tony was quieter than my father, less antic, and compared to my uncle Nicky, he was not as daring. Nicky once rode his two-stroke Rickman dirt bike down the hallway of Manville High School—I’m told it sounded like the apocalypse. It often works out that way: while the oldest brother gets all the independence and the youngest brother gets all the attention, the middle brother, strained between the two, retreats inward. Not strafed by divorce and debt and three kids to manage alone, he was more available than my father.

  Five days a week he and I performed an enactment of that old initiation rite, everywhere in myth and fact, of the grown male escorting the adolescent into manhood by way of challenging tasks. This is what our routine looked like, a three-day cycle:

  Monday: Chest and triceps. (Four sets, heavy weight, low reps.)

  Tuesday: Back and biceps. (Four sets, heavy weight, low reps.)

  Wednesday: Shoulders and legs. (Four sets, heavy weight, low reps.)

  Thursday: Chest and triceps. (Three sets, lighter weight, higher reps.)

  Friday: Back and biceps. (Three sets, lighter weight, higher reps.)

  Monday: Shoulders and legs. (Four sets, heavy weight, low reps.)

  It took several weeks for me to learn the myriad exercises for each body part, how to train properly, heavy enough without getting hurt. My uncle was more patient than I’d thought possible. During straight-bar bicep curls: “You gotta widen your grip on the bar. Too narrow like that and all the pressure’s on your forearms. You gotta feel it in your bis: squeeze your bis at the top of the rep. Don’t swing the bar, either. Bend your knees half an inch, arch your back.”

  During squats: “Don’t go down so far or you won’t be able to get back up. You want your hamstrings about parallel with the floor, maybe just an inch deeper. Don’t lean forward, either, or you’ll fall over. Stay straight up and down. Keep your head up or you’ll fall forward. Keep the bar across your shoulders, not on the back of your neck.”

  During bench presses: “That grip is too wide. You see the grooves here in the bar? Line up your grip in those grooves. Too wide like that and you’re not working the center of your chest, you’re working your armpits. You want muscular armpits?”

  During dead lifts: “You heave the bar from the ground up. Never start with your back or you’ll wrench your spine out of place. Start the lift in your feet, your legs, and then unfold with your back, but always an arched back. Head up at the mirror, always head up. A smooth motion, never jerky.”

  Near the start of our training together, during a bout of seated dumbbell curls—“Twist your wrist inward at the top of the rep so the bi squeezes”—I performed the first set easily enough with twenty-five-pound weights. When it was time for my second set, I grabbed the twenty-five-pounders again, and Tony said, “What are you doing?”

  We looked at one another in the mirror; he was behind me with a bottle, half wat
er, half orange juice. I said, “My second set.”

  “You just did ten reps no problem with those puny things. You could’ve done twelve. You wanna grow or not? Get the thirty-pounders.”

  And I made the mistake of saying, “These twenty-five-pounders feel pretty good, though.”

  “They feel pretty good, huh? We ain’t down here to feel pretty good. We’re down here to feel pain. And if you can do ten to twelve reps in any exercise, then the weight ain’t high enough. And if the weight ain’t high enough, you ain’t ever gonna grow. The aim is six to eight reps. So grab the thirty-pound dumbbells, and if you can do ten reps with those, then grab the thirty-five-pounders. Quit pussyfootin’ around.”

  Each week mirrors reflected the wizardly transformation: the rounding of my deltoids and pectorals, the filling of my biceps, the pronounced horseshoe of my triceps, a thickening and broadening of my back, trapezius muscles bumping up from both sides at the base of my neck, quadriceps sweeping out from my waist in two directions, hamstrings and calf muscles beginning to protrude. Muscle pounds sticking, strength increasing within my very grip, the graduation from thirty-pound dumbbells to forty-pounders to fifty-pounders, sliding more plates (“wheels” was our name for the largest, the forty-five-pounders) onto the bench press, the shoulder press, squats, straight-bar and preacher-bar curls, spitting and moaning, grunting and goading one another with come on and three more and push it out. It was a partnership of inspiriting pain.

  Thursdays and Fridays were often slightly less intense because, if we’d trained heavy enough Monday through Wednesday, each body part would be too sore to be blitzed again. That soreness was the goal. It meant we’d been barbarian enough, meant the deep, slow-twitch muscle fibers had been properly damaged during exercise, a kind of controlled demolition by the expansion and contraction that happen while weightlifting. Soreness is a signal that you’re growing, because that’s how a muscle adds mass: during the reparation process, the amino-acid rebuilding of torn tissue. When I woke each morning and wasn’t in pain from the previous day’s workout, I berated myself until three thirty when it was time to try again, much more savagely this time, a cussing ninety minutes of severity that erased the backslash between pleasure and pain.