The Hero's Body Read online

  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.

  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, something, 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 kitch
en 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 phy
siques 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.