The Hero's Body Read online

  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.

  The camaraderie at the Edge happened the way rewarding camaraderie normally does, with ease and unspoken understanding. We dubbed one pal “Sid,” after the pro wrestler Sid Vicious—six and a half feet and 250 pounds of blond beef—and we dubbed another “Rude,” after the mustachioed and curly-locked wrestler Rick Rude, ripped through the midsection, world-class abs and obliques. Pedro was wee, only five feet, two inches, a trainer with an office at the gym, with beautifully rounded muscle bellies and a gargoyle inked into his bicep; he lay naked in the tanning beds and once came out saying, “I think I burned my rooster.” (The shorter you are, by the way, the easier it is to stick muscle to your skeleton, especially the legs. Tall guys are forever in lament over their lagging quads, hams, and calves.)

  Bob the Cop was always “Bob the Cop” to distinguish him from the other Bob who wasn’t a cop, but both had height and bulk and pectorals like halved volleyballs. It was useful to know Bob the Cop because if ever another cop pulled you over in town, all you had to do was mention him, present his business card—“Bob’s a friend of mine; we train together at the Edge”—and the cop who’d just interrupted your day would instantly know what that meant. The bodybuilding compatriots of Bob the Cop don’t get tickets in this town.

  The other Bob—thirty-five years old, owner of a car dealership—sometimes trained in the morning or afternoon. He was constantly having to stagger his schedule, circumvent his fiancée, train when she’d least suspect it, because she’d outright forbidden him from bodybuilding, from every aspect of gym life, its drugs and its fanatical kinship, such nuptial-wrecking zeal. She was smart, in other words: an emergency room nurse, privy to how some men cannot weight-train casually, with the calmness of only fifty percent investment—privy to how they get squeezed by the obsessiveness of the sport, and to the health trouble that can be sparked by the drugs we used.

  If Bob wanted to do some bicep curls at home with her tiny purple dumbbells, if he wanted to go for a bit of a jog, or jump some rope, do some sit-ups, all that was okay. But God have mercy on his soul if ever he stepped foot in a gym again. Bob gave us, his pals and coconspirators, wallet-size photos of h
is fiancée—all lips, cleavage, yellow locks from Rite Aid—with instructions to warn him should we ever see her coming, warn him so he could escape out the back door. He parked his Trans Am in the rear of the building. If ever I answered the phone to find a woman asking for him, I was to reply, “Who? Nope. No one here by that name.”

  The nighttime priestesses of the Edge were Pedro’s girlfriend, Rude’s fiancée, Sid’s wife, and a Titaness called Christine, her outfit usually a prototype for the porn version of Barbarella, a woman so unjustly beautiful she seemed to have stepped from the pages of Petrarch. She rearranged all your body’s chemicals as you looked at her; you could feel your endocrine glands going haywire, the stuttering of your pituitary. And she was so mighty with weights you dared not cross her. Victor and I were often just getting our asses out of her way.

  A beautiful woman in the room will make some men try harder at whatever they do, whether deadlifting or dentistry. The callousness of sexual selection at work: your double helix needs to impress her even when your backward self has no hope of ever smelling her sheets. The women in our sect were like mists of cocaine in the ventilation system; they could wake you right up, turn a middling workout into a memorable one.

  We had a hard time remembering how ordinary women and men traversed this world without muscle, without our shields to fortify themselves against all the missiles aimed at them. And for me, in certain exalted moments, that was especially true. I tried not to remember it, because those memories were appended to feelings of sickness and vulnerability, fourteen years old in a hospital bed with meningitis, then dumped by my first love for a footballer.

  If you want to know about the essence of eroticism in the bodybuilding underground, I suppose you’ll have to tack a homo onto that term. Imagine us there in the locker room of the Edge, a tribe of hairless, naked men bayoneting one another’s buttocks with needles, massaging the cramps from one another’s deltoids and quads, positioning one another into poses before adoring mirrors, bestowing compliments on muscle shape and density, in post-workout exhaustion sprawled on benches like the Barberini Faun, in unknowing imitation of the fifth-century Athenian gymnasium at which beauteous, post-pubescent boys exercised fully nude (gymnos is Greek for stripped, naked). And the original Olympic games, in legend founded by Hercules himself, were spectacles of masculine nudity.

  In the West, our entire mode of thinking about the male body and male beauty has been handed to us by those fifth-century Greeks. The prominent social place they allowed for sculptures of that beauty is unmatched in antiquity; just look at how they conceived of the human being, what godliness they glimpsed in us. For those Greeks, one’s carapace of muscle was not only a signal of athletic dexterity or a warrior’s prowess, but also indicative of inner, non-physical energies. It meant fortitude and fearlessness.

  You see it everywhere in Greek myth and drama, the importance of self-mastery, the glorification of the individual through physical battle, through a struggle not with your own spiritual state, but with a corporeal world always attempting to clobber you. This is why the Greeks believed that the individual, the self and its selfhood, was inextricable from the condition of the body: the cultivation of one compelled, required, the cultivation of the other.

  It’s no surprise to know that the Academy and the Lyceum (those two vital gymnasiums, arenas of physical aptitude and beauty) lent their names to Plato’s and Aristotle’s programs of philosophical inquiry. The great thinkers did their cognitive exercises within sight, scent, and sound of young, naked, athletically perfect men, as if the mere proximity to their muscle and might would stroke the brain cells. It seems to have worked. In a conversation with a fatso named Epigenes, Socrates declares that the youth has both a civic and ethical obligation to develop his body to its peak potential or else he’ll live a wasted and ridiculed existence.

  So the inner and outer were indistinguishable, and they mostly stayed that way until St. Paul debuted his new hero, the Nazarene. Flip through the medieval Christian thinkers, peek inside Augustine and Aquinas, and you’ll spot the odium generis humani, the anti-idealizing of the physical form, the severing of flesh from soul, a belief in the inherent imperfection of the flesh, and a marked preference for the health of the spirit. In his hymn “Pange Lingua Gloriosi,” when Aquinas writes: Now, my tongue, the mystery telling / Of the glorious Body sing, you know whose body he’s talking about.

  Christianity cares about the fallen, filthy body only insofar as it will be resurrected after Christ’s second coming. Even the Renaissance resurgence of Greek ideals in art, so effective at wedding the Hellenic with the Christian, didn’t put a damper on Christianity’s disdain for flesh. That makes sense, doesn’t it, if you consider Nietzsche’s contention that Christianity is for literal losers, for the many weaklings of the world. When you’re a limping asthenic being bashed by imperial muscle, of course you’ll say that muscle doesn’t matter. Of course you’ll elevate the incorporeal, the soul, to the highest ranking. The secretly envious usually pretend that what they envy isn’t all that enviable. It’s impossible to imagine Atlas offering his aggressor the other cheek to slap, or Hesiod or Homer uttering Christ’s third Beatitude in the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.”

  But Christianity is meant for, designed for, the meek. It’s the perfect fit for the gimped and depressed, for those who feel beneath one boot heel or another. Don’t worry about your physical, worldly deficiencies and flaws because glory will be yours in life after death. Bodybuilders would rather not wait that long for glory, and they aren’t about to be despotized by anybody, or concede that there’s something hallowed about meekness. They are exceptionally plugged in to the palpable, the carnal, the world as it is and not the world to come.

  You’re probably wondering: Didn’t bodybuilding strike any of us as extremely gay? It did not. If a mocking sexologist had shown up to point out how gay we were, we would have said that he didn’t get it. The manly code, the manly discipline, the manly sport and art: “You try it,” we would have told him, right before smacking his glasses off. We would have insisted that our arcane passion resulted from wanting to astonish women. We were all of us suspiciously vocal about wanting lots of women.

  But let’s be honest: despite the skirt-chasing, the real aim of our arcane passion, entirely hidden from us then, was to astonish one another, to gain the attention and affection of other elite men, the grandees of the Edge. And we, the ultra-masculine, had transformed into stereotypical females in order to do it. We repined for the approval of dominant males, shaved and tanned ourselves, wore tiny clothes, were food-obsessed, weight-obsessed, always standing on scales, secretly worried about our brittle images and self-worth, our always tremulous control. With one another at the Edge we made a show of whoops and high-fives, not unlike those syndicates of teenage girls who embrace one another at the mall with shrieking brio. Except for me the show wasn’t merely theatrical. I’d found my tribe among them, a substitute family, the Edge a home more meaningful than what my father provided.

  Many of us also had gynecomastia, what we called “bitch tits”—I still have mine in the left pectoral—nodes of fatty tissue beneath the nipples caused by an excess of synthetic testosterone. Your body is looking for the right testosterone-estrogen ratio, so when you deluge your blood with synthetic testosterone, the body cooks up more estrogen in its quest for homeostasis, and more estrogen means, among other things, the physical traits of a female. It means breasts. They could be moderately painful, to boot, but it wasn’t the pain that bugged us. Pain we did not mind. Tits we did. Some among our number went under the scalpel to undo the humiliation.

  The acne harvested by steroids, the high blood pressure, the bitch tits and frequent headaches: tolerable consequences of trying to meet the Western standard of male beauty, much the way anorexic women become famished, hirsute, hideous in their quest to be loved. The male bodybuilder and the female anorexic are equal though opposite manifestations
of steady social arm-twisting. Women will be thin, men will be muscular, or both will be nobody. The equivalence of genders is nowhere more apparent than in a gym.

  I was twelve, twelve and a half years old, pumping gas at a station in the next town. The owner, we’d heard, was a notorious “fruitcake,” his wife an elaborate blind. But this confused me, because with a sashay like that, I was certain there was no blind big enough. Certain queer-scorning pals warned me not to pump gas there because the owner would trick me into the bathroom and try to wedge himself into my jeans. But I didn’t believe he’d do this—he’d never been anything but kind to me—and I was proven right. He didn’t.

  But I did this to him: it was one of those August middays when the asphalt was about to melt, the heat coming as much from below as above. I was working a shift with one of my best pals, who was also not made nervous by the owner’s sashay, although this pal was a part-time gay-hater who amputated fruitcake to fruit, and rather enjoyed saying it, enjoyed saying it so much he greeted me with it: “Hey, fruit” and “What’s up, fruit?” and sometimes just plain “Fruit,” in the lilt you use when you say someone’s name upon seeing him after a longish spell.

  (This aside is not quite poetic justice but it falls within a nearby taxonomy. The same pal with fruitcake always on his lips was one of three brothers, two of them extroverted, all sons of a brash fireman. The first son was a heavy-metal head and car mechanic; the second, my pal, a titanic football fiend; and the third, the youngest, was—always had been—inward, awkward, skulkingly cautious, too effete in the macho oxygen of his household. Over the next decade he centimetered himself from the closet, to the no-doubt-thunderous disquiet of his family. Before I left Manville for good at nineteen, I placed a copy of Housman’s A Shropshire Lad discreetly on the youngest brother’s desk: a token of fraternity from one misfit to another. So my pal who called everyone fruitcake when we were twelve years old would be, before long, confronting that slur in a fashion he couldn’t then fathom.)