The Hero's Body Page 7

  In this tsunami of August heat a quivering Ford pickup, rusted through the quarter panels and missing its tailgate, dinged the bell for gas. My pal and I were mawing pizza slices and gumballs in the office, and I walked out into a ninety-eight degrees that felt more liquid than gas. The guy in the pickup, a laborer with a granite paunch, week-old beard, engine grease to his elbows, said what you’d expect him to say: “Fill ’er up.”

  And so that’s what I did, filled ’er up. When she was full, he handed me the cash and the Ford grumbled away. And not ten minutes later, as I was feeding another thirsty tank, I saw this man sweating back into the gas station, from the direction in which he’d just departed. His thumb was jabbing over his shoulder. “What did you put in my truck?” he said.

  “Your truck?”

  “What did you just put in my truck?”

  “Gas?” I said.

  “Did you just put diesel in my truck?”

  I looked at the diesel pump, and there it was, looking back at me. Yes, I’d just put diesel fuel into his apparently gasoline-engine Ford. But he’d pulled up to that pump and told me to fill it. Of course the pumps were close enough to kiss. But I should have known what got diesel fuel and what did not. And of course now I was prodigiously frightened, the fear of imminent bodily harm.

  “Get X on the phone right now,” he said. X was the owner. I hurried back into the office to call him, but before I did, I called my father. “Dad, come to the gas station,” I said. “I’ve got a problem here.”

  My pal, a fresh gumball in his face, said, “You really did it now, fruit.”

  Soon my father was there, and the owner, too, and my father said: “We’ll have to siphon it out.” The owner was embarrassed by this, I saw, but he was missing the rage I’d expected. The guy I’d just dieseled had an icy attitude toward my father—he wouldn’t shake hands—as if he was to blame for my gas-station stupidity.

  From the garage the owner and the dieseled guy gathered tools, tubes, red cans, and didn’t include my father in whatever remedial plan they had. In the shade of the building—it was four o’clock now—my father leaned with one foot up against the white brick, no doubt wondering what he should do about this, waiting to be of some assistance. His look said to me both Good God in the morning and Oh my aching back.

  And it was then that I noticed, in his navy blue, hole-strewn sweatpants, the flaccid bulge in his lap. He must have scrambled from the house to come here. Perhaps he’d just stepped from the shower when the phone rang, and he must not have had time to hunt for underwear, and now he had this flaccid bulge at the center of his sweatpants. I was mortified by this; feeding diesel fuel into a gasoline engine seemed charming in comparison.

  The owner and dieseled guy left to undo what I’d done, and my father left too, although I’m not sure if he went with them. Later I would learn that he’d paid to fix the guy’s truck, handed over cash he did not have to reverse my mistake. I finished my shift at the station that day; I wasn’t fired. In fact, the owner was compassionate toward this blunder: the heat, my youth, my father’s willingness to pay, etc.

  No, I had to wait a few more weeks to get fired. It was another shift with my fruitcake-saying pal and we were knocking around in the mechanics’ bays, making the car lifts rise and fall, handling hydraulic tools, objects we should not have been touching. A grease gun hung from the steel beams so the mechanics could simply reach up for it when they were beneath the opened hoods of cars, and I leapt to grab this gun, dangled from it, the trigger engaged, salvos of grease unloading upon everything.

  I never thought to mop this mess—I hoped it wouldn’t be noticed?—and so I left these ejaculations of engine grease all over the garage bays. On the day I was fired, I pedaled home and spoke those words to my father: “I’m fired, Dad.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “that sounds about right.”

  VI

  A gym has several seasons a day, and the early season, during my shift from five to ten, was far less severe than the evening season. It was the mellower, coffee-scented spring of morning you’d expect. Most of the A.M. crowd consisted of those civilians who wouldn’t have meshed well with the evening behemoths. They were fit without being muscled, healthful without zealotry, professionals who entered in spandex and sports bras, sweatpants and sneakers, and exited in pantsuits and heels, dress shirts and ties.

  There were the silver-haired ones, as well, those who were up at five not because they’d pried their slumped frames from bed, but because sleep had betrayed them, deprived them of its gifts. When you have fewer days ahead than behind, dawn rushes upon you, mugs you awake, as if in reminder of your truncated time. I was very fond of them all and their normality; they talked to me about their jobs and their retirements, their kids and grandkids, and they seemed steady, easeful in their lives, in the lives I imagined they had when they finished at the Edge each morning.

  Normality has a soundtrack. Instead of the amygdala-arousal of Metallica or AC/DC required by the working-class night crowd—power chords that shook your spine—I’d play Pink Floyd or the Eagles, the tuck-in-your-shirt solace preferred by bourgeois white people everywhere. Sometimes I could get away with a smattering of Guns N’ Roses, with Axl Rose’s irreligious screech. (In ’88, not long after Appetite for Destruction came out, I bought my father the cassette so he could play it on his Kenwood stereo—the only costly item he ever gave himself during those gaunt years—and perhaps know what was seething inside my newly teenaged self. Whenever I heard Axl wailing “Welcome to the Jungle” from his bedroom, it sounded to me like hope, like I might have a chance in our household.)

  Sometimes the morning crowd let me get away with the lipsticked baying of the glam bands that in ’92 still held a cobweb of relevance: Cinderella and Ratt, Warrant and Faster Pussycat. In their dervishing falsettos you could almost smell the illogical mix of male pheromones and hairspray. Those glam rockers and their leotarded, yelping masculinity—men who’d morphed into women to croon about how much they loved women—had an uncomfortable amount in common with bodybuilders.

  The abusive cheese of ’90s Aerosmith was always welcome, and because we were in New Jersey, so was anything by Bon Jovi, and perhaps, on occasion, the Boss of Born to Run, though the Boss of Nebraska I could forget: too contemplative, too downtrodden for the spandexed. You have to understand how important, how primary, music is at a gym: riots erupt, coups are caused over the wrong kind. Let it not be too distortive or eardrum-slamming among the average ones, nor too sedate, too Paul Simon among the monsters. A revolution is always one song away.

  One duo never gave me any lip over the music I played: Hudson and Father Antonio, the about-to-be-married Catholic and his weightlifting priest. I’m not certain how they’d begun training together, and I remember thinking it incoherent that a priest should pump iron. (But in the Book of Job, Yahweh asks the stricken man, “Hast thou an arm like God?” Admit it: if you have a god, he’s no stick-figure wonk.) Thirty years old, humble, always hidden in a sweatshirt and sweatpants, sienna curls past his ears, Hudson was a man of great rarity, so magnanimous he accidentally made you feel bad that you weren’t a gentler person.

  On melancholy mornings I’d vent to him about a girlfriend at Rutgers who was in the process of jilting me; bodybuilding, it turned out, was no security against being jilted. Hudson would listen in a kind of nodding serenity, and then respond with the most non–New Jersey, quasi-Buddhist acceptance and sensitivity I’d ever heard from another male. Forget that bitch was the level of relationship wisdom I was accustomed to at the Edge, but Hudson was all nuance and subtlety and, without putting too bathetic a point on it, love. His strategy, wholly new to me, was to remind me of my value without demonizing the girlfriend. If he felt he didn’t offer enough comfort during a particular dialogue, he’d call me at the gym when he returned home to give me another twenty minutes of his time.

  The girlfriend at Rutgers—let’s call her Val—had been my girlfriend in high school, a senior-
year miming of commitment and love. That relationship, like most high-school relationships that attempt survival after graduation, was dying from loss of blood, from an impact of expectations. No suturing could have saved it, but I was in ironclad denial of this. She had a blond beauty that rewired my hypothalamus—oglers said she could have passed for Uma Thurman—and I was under the desperate misimpression that if only I could be beautiful enough, muscular enough, wise enough (I penned one of her college English papers, on Hemingway), then I could make her return the affection I felt. That strategy, as you know, never works.

  At Hudson’s wedding, officiated by Father Antonio, I read a verse from Corinthians—“If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal”—and years later, long after my life at the Edge had ended, long after Val had gone, I heard, I don’t know how, that his marriage hadn’t lasted. I spent several hours feeling unstrung by that news, and several more trying to find him after years of lost contact, but I could not.

  Father Antonio gave me my first invitation to speak to a classroom, to Catholic-school kids, but not about bodybuilding—about reading. He’d seen me one morning behind the front counter with a copy of Flannery O’Connor. Among the morning crowd I read openly, without dread of the question What the hell is that? In the evenings, doing cardio on the exercise bikes, I resorted to that well-known ruse, a reversal of the classic Playboy mag inside a textbook: into an issue of Flex or Muscle & Fitness, I slipped yanked-free pages from a battered Goethe or Keats paperback, or else I didn’t risk it at all and left literature home.

  One gets adept at keeping two sets of books, at managing a bisected life. Father Antonio’s curiosity about my holding a copy of Ms. O’Connor’s stories was unsullied by latent accusation, that small but suspicious rising in the voice that meant A muscle-head doesn’t read; who are you fooling? And never mind that I’d been wed to reading for a decade already before I picked up my first barbell.

  The only weightlifting priest I’d ever met or heard tell of, Father Antonio was rare in beholding no contradiction between a Homeric shell and a Christic soul. He was at home in modern paradox—which is probably why he beheld no contradiction in me either, why it was not jarring for him to see someone with my physique, someone so ensconced in the bodybuilding headspace, holding a copy of Flannery O’Connor. When I went to speak to the classroom of Catholic grade-school kids that autumn, I tried to promote the magnifying satisfactions of literature—I read from O’Connor’s story “Parker’s Back”—and they gave gracious nods, the courteous impression of agreement.

  But before I left, a boy asked about my biceps, about weightlifting: “How much do you bench?” and “How big are your arms?” Others asked if I would flex for them, if they could feel my arms. It might have been a mistake to wear an Edge T-shirt. Later, I’d interpret this as my failure to convince them of the personal relevance of O’Connor; they weren’t really listening to the sentences I’d read aloud, to my analysis of how the images and rhythms worked on the page, the codependence of style and matter. But maybe I was wrong about that. Why couldn’t they have both, the biceps and the books, just as I had both?

  I stretched my shirt sleeve up past the shoulder and stood at the blackboard flexing my right arm, and a gaggle of twelve-year-olds, all males, rushed to me there—those poor darlings who for the next several years would be stranded in a purgatory of inelegance, limboed between boys and men, with all the worst traits of both and none of the charms of either—and they took turns feeling my bicep and forearm, as if testing the firmness of fruit, the firmness of their futures.

  “Why do you want those muscles?” a girl asked from her desk, her hair a storm of black curls, her mouth a grid of metal. It was the most reasonable question I’d been asked all day, but I didn’t have a chance to answer because a crew-cut boy with buckteeth beat me to it. “For chicks,” he said.

  Let’s call her Daisy. Every morning she arrived with the sun, came to the Edge half-nude, half-clad in lavender—mere eight-inch strips of elastic across her chest and lap—came for sit-ups and the Stairmaster, for the aerobics classes and pulley-machines. Ten years older than me, silken yellow hair choked back into a ponytail, Daisy sat at the front counter after her workouts, sucking at a straw in the whey-protein shake I’d blended for her, sometimes interested in a fitness slick, sometimes in a novel, rarely in anything at all I had to offer. After ordering her shake, she seemed gravely committed to resisting all conversation, as if each dawn she’d made a pact with her temptation counselor not to chat up the eighteen-year-old at the Edge.

  That went on for more mornings than my ego cared to count. Even when it was only the two of us there, her face stayed locked on a magazine, a notepad, a book. Until that morning when the book was Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned. Our exchange sounded like this:

  “They’re pretty miserable, those two.”

  “Who?” she said.

  “Anthony and Gloria Patch,” I told her.

  “You read this?”

  “Yup.” Like every American high-schooler, I’d been given Gatsby in tenth grade, and when our class finished with it, I went in search of more Fitzgerald. The Beautiful and Damned seemed to me an unimprovable title.

  “You read books?” she asked.

  “Yup.”

  “These kinds of books?” and she showed me the cover, showed me the kind she meant, the serious kind, the kind serious, unmuscled readers read.

  “Those kind,” I said, and if I’d been more calculating, I’d have feigned a wounded bafflement.

  Mornings at the counter were different after that: her gradual glowing, an uncoiling. Since college she’d been nursing a medium-grade Fitzgerald fetish, and so, trying to catch up, intimated by her knowledge and the many sentences she’d memorized, I abruptly had a whole drift of Scribners paperbacks on my bedside stand.

  At some point phone numbers were exchanged, midnight talks shared, ostensibly about F. Scott but the subtext was all about our own antsy fluids. Val had not been returning my calls—she was just then in the process of banishing me to the marchlands of her heart, enthralled by college life at Rutgers, one of sororities and frats, a drunken rollick that could not include me—and so I didn’t for a minute consider this cheating.

  Soon I was at Daisy’s condo, an after-dark, unplanned stepping-out, in a town much swankier than Manville, BMWs and Benzes dreaming in driveways, lit shrubbery that looked imported from the Orient. She had a city of white boxes in her garage, boxes filled with baby oil, each with a picture of an overjoyed, over-soft infant on the side. A couple of times a week she’d empty several bottles into her bath water, marinate in it for an hour or more, and her skin, as I would experience that night, was like the satiny backside of the baby itself.

  When you’re the sprig I was then, and the woman grinding herself into your lap is not only a decade older than you but a decade ahead of you—degreed, salaried, mortgaged—what you first feel are inklings of the paradisal, an adrenalized confidence and joy, but then it’s something else. Then it’s much more substantive, a confirmation of your selfhood, a validating of your spirit; it’s a welcome to the altar of your contentment.

  It’s not quite accurate to say that Daisy seduced me that night; what happened in her bedroom was closer to consumption. I remember a robust gibbous moon cutting through blinds, the mirror atop her bureau alive with it, illuminating the underthings, the T-shirts, shorts, and socks that had been tossed hastily onto her carpet, her bookshelf boasting two feet of Fitzgerald. And I remember the scent too, always the perfumed, lotioned, laundered scent of a woman’s sheets.

  Her grip on my deltoids and biceps wasn’t merely bracing as she ground into me, nor was it merely a caress. Rather, it was part massage, part claw, talons attached to my arms as if she could keep them. She said my name and I did what you do: I said hers back. And that’s when she demanded, “Call me Daisy.” And I called her that until the moon showed me
her bun of lemon hair shaking free and she began to tremble toward release. Soon she’d switch jobs, switch gyms, and I wouldn’t see her again, although I’d remain intensely grateful for that single night she gave me, and for her leading me deeper into Fitzgerald than I might have otherwise gone.

  Parma had convinced my father that he needed what’s routinely called personal time, that his life couldn’t be a conveyor belt of kids, work, chores. I can hear her say it still: “How’s he ever gonna meet someone if he never goes out?” I was ten years old when she bought him a membership at a Jack LaLanne gym two towns away. For roughly four decades, from the early 1950s to the late 1980s, LaLanne was the preferred fitness czar for everyday Americans; his television program, The Jack LaLanne Show, which ran from 1953 to 1985, had a lot to do with that. But his gyms were of the sort that I and my set would, eight years later, regularly tease for their unembarrassed lack of masculine asperity and grit, their neutering sounds of Duran Duran and Phil Collins.

  But a lack of asperity and grit was exactly what my father needed then. He was only in his early thirties, although, said Parma, “he looks forty,” and so she paid for his gym membership with a mother’s gung-ho hope that it would both dilute his unhappiness and introduce him to a female. “He needs a woman in that house. It’s not natural for a man to cook and clean, and I can’t help forever.” My family was big on declarations about what was and was not natural.

  I’d recently overheard Parma and my father talking—adults often have an ignoramus’s inability to detect the antennae of children, when and how often those children can hear them, and how incredibly much those children care to comprehend—and my father said he was worried about bringing a woman into our house, worried about destabilizing us kids (my sister was eight, my brother six), worried about how threatened a new female might make us. If I felt guilty about this, I cannot now recall. It seems as if I should have felt at least a little guilty about the lonesome bachelorhood my psycho-emotional needs had helped to force upon our father.