The Hero's Body

by William Giraldi

  This happened for an excruciating three or four minutes, his sunburn dialed up a notch by embarrassment. With my mitt at my forehead to block the mugging rays, I said aloud, but not loudly, “Come on, Dad,” and I said it again, wriggling, each time he missed, each time I heard the sandy belly flop of the ball. When finally he made the bat connect, it connected with insufficient slap and the ball barely made the pitcher’s mound. The pitcher, the coach’s son, was glancing about and rolling his eyes—he made damn sure I saw him rolling his eyes—but if the other kids were impatient and disappointed too, they didn’t readily show it. The truth is, I was trying not to look. I was trying to keep my focus on the bat in my father’s hands, as if telepathy could send it the will it needed to succeed.

  He began hitting them after that, although not every one. I think he tried to send a ball my way, between second and third bases, but his aim was off. The ball would not obey the bat’s commands, whatever orders my father attempted to transmit from his body to the birch, and I didn’t have the chance to scoop a grounder, never mind snag a fly. The coach, clearly piqued by this—or was he secretly pleased by the physical failure of another man?—ended my father’s participation. And for the rest of the practice he stood exiled behind the fence, his fingers gripping the chain-link with the mild hope of a prisoner, too proud to go home though he looked hacked-at with fatigue.

  I’ve no other memory of that Little League season: not a practice, not a game, not a pizza party afterward. Nor, I am certain, did I ever join Little League again. Here’s the memory I do have: not long after this mortifying afternoon, we neighborhood kids were typhooning through someone’s front yard, a melee that was half football game, half wrestling match. At one point I saw the coach’s son—the brash pitcher, a soda can taller than me—kneeling there on the grass, smiling to the left of our pile. And here’s what I did: I rushed at him, and with the full momentum of my body weight, I thrust a knee into his ribcage. What came from him had no sound, a fish-mouthed fight for air, and he toppled to his side, his neck and face a palette of indigos. He couldn’t speak or breathe, but I knew he could hear, and so I stood above him as he struggled.

  “Let me see you roll your eyes now,” I said.

  He hobbled home then. Some parent from an adjacent home instructed me to go apologize. I had to cut through yards to get to the coach’s house, and when I arrived, the coach and his wife were with their two sons on their front porch, their brash pitcher no longer so brash, sobbing there in his mother’s lap.

  “Sorry,” I said, but I could feel myself smiling as I said it.

  “You get the hell outta here,” said the coach.

  So I did. I walked back home, down their driveway and through their yard. The pot of ferns they had sunning there on the bottom step of their rear porch? I kicked it over.

  IX

  Excommunicate all the sugar from your diet and watch your dreams go syrupy with visions of Willy Wonka, sticky collages of chocolate pudding and candy bars. Each week—each hour, it often seemed—I got leaner, harder, more striated, more vascular, skin more diaphanous. And weaker with weights, looser in clothes, a sucked-in face, more ravenous for cake. As my family scarfed down raviolis and stuffed shells, Parma’s buttered bread and lasagna, I sat secluded in the hallway with my Tupperware containers, trying to swallow a chicken breast drier than cardboard.

  It was a desolating assault on my psyche to be getting smaller and weaker when the sole mission of my training for the last two and a half years had been to get larger and stronger. Several times I attempted to tell Rude and Sid that I was not cut out for this, not muscular enough to perform onstage, that losing strength and size was my misery, but I could never get to the end of a sentence without hearing one of their stomping rejoinders: “Go change your tampon” or “Untwist your panties.” So you see what I was up against.

  Each evening after our workout, Victor and I pedaled nowhere on the exercise bikes for fifty minutes. He was doing cardio with me in a gesture of fellowship. I tried not to let anyone notice that I was holding Goethe’s novel of passion and self-destruction, The Sorrows of Young Werther: one self-involved romantic reading about another (although Auden saw Werther as an “egoist,” and perhaps that tag, too, applied to me, to all bodybuilders). Published in 1774, Young Werther sent a blast of suicides across Deutschland, and in its youthful assertions of self-consumptive doom, it helped define the European Romantic movement. Every dreamy stripling in the eighteenth century craved the book—“They should be ashamed of themselves, all these sober people!”—and there I was, trying to read it covertly on an exercise bike at the gym. Although, all the oomph slurped out of me by the vampiric demands of the diet, I cared much less about what my brethren thought of the books I read. The abolishing of sugar and fat, the curtailing of carbs: it saps your fighting spirit, demotes you to slow motion. In the tanning bed, I’d often fall asleep within the first minute.

  Near the end of the night, the guys opened the aerobics room and we practiced my poses and contest routine beneath a constellation of lights. The image in the glass sometimes startled me. That bronze sculpture had my eyes, though unnaturally lit against darkened skin, distended in a face angling toward the skeletal. There are eight mandatory poses on the bodybuilding stage: Front Lat Spread, Front Double Biceps, Side Chest, Back Lat Spread, Back Double Biceps, Side Triceps, Abdominal and Thigh, and Most Muscular. Each pose is designed to highlight not only the muscle group in its name, but also that muscle group’s relation to other muscle groups.

  Take the Front Lat Spread: the chief aim is to show the width of the back, the latissimus dorsi, by placing both pinched hands on the waist, sucking in to pronounce the thoracic arch, and swinging out the elbows to reveal the breadth of the lats beneath the arms. But the pose also reveals the density of the chest by packing together the pectorals. It reveals, too, the deltoid development, the roundness of the overall shoulders, but specifically the condition of the middle delts. What’s more, you can’t forget about your legs just because you’re flexing your back. You pose from the floor up, which means that a pose such as the Front Lat Spread begins with the flexing of the calves, then the quads, then the back, shoulders, and chest. That’s how you’re being scored: on the fluidity of the body as a whole, on how each muscle group merges with its neighbor.

  But one doesn’t only pose. A bodybuilding contest has two segments: prejudging in the morning—this is when the judges score you—and the night show, the spectacle for the crowd during which a pro athlete will often guest-pose, and during which each competitor performs a choreographed routine to music. We were given a minute and forty seconds to be ballerinos, to present our physiques in time to melody and rhythm and tempo. The bodybuilder competes against other bodies the same way a motorcycle racer competes against other racers, but the competition is also against the self: the rider’s against his own body on the bike, the bodybuilder’s against his own body on the stage. How fast you can push the bike or body without crashing.

  The competitive poses are normally performed with the other guys in your weight class, each man shoulder to shoulder so the judges can compare physiques. This was a problem for me because the teenage division was not divided by weight; rather, it was an open division for anyone nineteen and under, which meant I was going to be competing against guys who were much larger than me. So in order to do well, I needed superior conditioning: harder, leaner, more symmetrical. I had the V-shape, plus the tiny waist and joints that helped with the consummate illusion, but symmetry was going to be an issue because my chest and hamstrings were still delinquent, my calves still minuscule.

  An hour of posing, an hour of Sid, Rude, and Victor contorting me into the proper configurations, and then one more hour of practicing my routine to the song I chose—“Plush” by Stone Temple Pilots, because I thought it had the right drumbeats for posing—were themselves a workout. Those ludicrous two hours would sound something like this:

  “Dude, you gotta bring down your
left shoulder about two inches during that Side Chest pose. Look in the mirror: it’s too high, see? Make it even with your right shoulder.”

  “And you’re forgetting about your right ham, bro. Smash your legs together so the ham comes out. Push out your right ham with your left quad.”

  “Don’t forget that right calf too. Bend your left leg just a bit.”

  “His right bi is killer in that shot, though.”

  “And his chest looks not bad there actually.”

  “That’s about the only place it comes out. And thank God that shot doesn’t show abs, because there’s no abs to see.”

  “Not yet, but they’re coming out.”

  “Victor, seriously, dude, you guys gotta be killin’ abs more.”

  “Good quad separation in that Most Muscular pose. That’s his best shot, I’d say.”

  “The right quad isn’t as separated as the left. Dude, make your quads even. Flex them equally. Be sure to hit that pose from the floor up, bro. You want to unfold the flexing from the floor up, like this, watch me.”

  “Don’t just focus on the bis and quads in that shot, because the abs are part of it too. Think total body, forget about the name of the pose.”

  “In that Abs and Thighs shot you gotta blow it out more, blow it out so the abs pop, and then tilt just an inch to either side, pivot to show the obliques. You pivot at the waist.”

  “You can’t have that straining look on your mug, either. Can’t you relax your face more than that? You can’t faint onstage, dude.”

  “His glutes are gettin’ ripped. His Back Double Bi is not bad. See, his glutes are squaring there? That’s key to the Back Double Bi.”

  “Pull in your trunks, Billy Boy, we can’t see all of your glutes. You don’t want a goddamn G-string up there, but your glutes are gettin’ lined, dude, and the judges need to see that shit.”

  “Yeah, you sure as shit ain’t gonna win with size, so show what you got to win with.”

  “He’s gettin’ to be nails.”

  “His bis got a good peak in that Back Double Bi. I wish his lats were wider in that shot. He’s losing thickness in his lower back too.”

  “Straighten up in that Back Lat Spread, bro, you’re pitched too far forward. After you expand, come back up from the waist. Don’t let off the expanse of the back as you do it. Remember: pivot back up from the waist.”

  “The upper back is killer. Sweet tie-ins with the bis and delts and traps. They pop in that shot. The fluidity is there.”

  “Hams and calves, dude. Hams and calves, come on. Not just bis. Fuckin’ focus here.”

  “I’d do the right side for Side Triceps, not the left. Bring the left shoulder down half an inch. Look, see? You want the line from one shoulder to the other to be even. You wanna be level. Think about the lines your body is making.”

  “You gotta get it into your head that just because this is a Side Triceps pose, you don’t forget about the lines your body is making. Your whole damn body. So keep your right fist even with your right heel in that shot. Bring in your leg an inch. Think symmetry.”

  “And the left pec in that shot too, bro. Squeeze the left pec by bringing the left shoulder around just a bit, half an inch.”

  Then we’d break, I’d breathe for five minutes, mop my sweat, guzzle from the fountain before Sid or Rude would tell Victor to start the posing song on the boom box.

  “Dude, when the song starts, right there at the guitar, you come alive immediately. You see dudes waiting too long to begin after the song starts. Don’t do stupid shit like that.”

  “Your solo time up there is yours, so let’s focus on your arms and delts and quads, I’d say. Your routine, your motion has to favor your strong parts.”

  “When the drums hit right here, boom, you hit a Front Double Bi, then, watch, you swing out of it right here and into the next drum hit, and then boom, right here, hit a Side Chest. See? Be steady as you do it. Be fluid. Not all jerky.”

  “Yeah, you want fluidity of motion here. Don’t be so damn stiff. Loosen just a bit between poses. Be loose until the drum lets you hit a shot, bro. Follow the drum, not the guitar and not the lyrics.”

  “Should he mouth some of the lyrics? I see dudes mouthing lyrics all the time, you know, like they’re really into it.”

  “That’s gay, mouthing lyrics. Plus, listen to this singer: he sounds like a dope addict. You can’t even tell what the hell he’s saying.”

  “Follow the rhythm of the tune here. See, look: when the tempo of the song drops, right here, you drop, like this. Drop to one knee and hit a Double Bi, then boom, swing into a Side Triceps, like this.”

  “Be sure to use the stage. Play to all sides of the audience. Do a Most Muscular pose to the left when the guitar picks up here—listen, right here—and then move to the right and hit another Most Muscular, boom, like that, but always on the drum hit. Don’t flex fully into the pose until the drum hits.”

  “And Billy Boy? No one wants to see a sourpuss up there on stage. Fuckin’ smile—it ain’t that hard.”

  In a corner of the aerobics room rested a five-foot stack of blue floor mats, and on a few of those nights, after two hours of training and two more hours of posing, the gym about to close, I’d climb on top, my duffel bag for a pillow, a towel for a blanket, damp still through my clothes, and fall quickly asleep, somehow partially aware of the gym shutting down around me, lights clicking off, doors locking, leaving me to my womb of exhaustion.

  Mid-August, the contest was just twenty-eight hours away, and I was water-depleted. The goal at this crucial juncture was to keep my body as full and round as possible on the right carbs and protein while drying the remaining fluid from in between my skin and muscle tissue. Carbs require water to be assimilated, and because I wasn’t drinking any, that required water was being pulled from beneath my skin, creating the dry, see-through aesthetic needed for the stage. The problem is that dehydration can feel like influenza, your bones somehow boards and jelly both. Also: try getting down your gullet an unseasoned, not-moist chicken breast and baked potato every two hours when your mouth’s interior is a caul of Elmer’s glue.

  The guys at the Edge had instructed me to ban any stress from my week because stress creates a spike in cortisol, a steroidal hormone, and cortisol creates havoc with the body’s processing of protein and glucose, which could cause a diminished muscle fullness, or the retention of water, which meant the blurring of muscle separation, a minimizing of the alps and ridges of my physique. The stress they meant was my girlfriend at Rutgers, Val; they sometimes overheard me quarreling with her on the phone at the Edge. Once, Victor caught me wet-eyed and defeated in the locker room, though he pretended not to notice.

  But how was that supposed to happen, I wondered, the at-will banning of stress from one’s week? What button did I press for that? Did they not understand that the triumph of stress stems from its unwillingness to be banned? I’d seen it with my father in the years after my mother left us. And wasn’t being nearly naked on stage in front of thousands of discerning citizens inherently stressful? I’d been so zeroed-in on the training, the diet, and the posing that I’d altogether forgotten to consider the coming anxiety: I’d never been on a stage before.

  Our set at the Edge rented out half a motel in Point Pleasant—several others were competing in the upper divisions—and the day before the contest we caravanned down in vehicles stocked with coolers of chicken breasts, potatoes, and protein shakes, with duffel bags of bronzer and posing oil, drugs and needles. And if we’d been nabbed and searched by the police? We had Bob the Cop’s business card. Everywhere on the boardwalks and beaches of Point Pleasant, on the sidewalks and in parking lots, waddled the women and men who’d arrived to attend and compete in the show: artificial tans, chiseled faces, chromatic muscle clothes, Oakley sunglasses.

  In my and Victor’s motel room, Rude and Sid ransacked a bed for a sheet, then flattened it on the clay-like carpet near the opened door. I peeled down to skin, cupped a han
dful in my lap—steroids are said to shrink testicles, but mine stayed stubbornly normal—raised the other arm, and the guys, having donned respirator masks, sprayed on a carob-hued coating, a mandatory glaze to darken my tan by about four shades, otherwise the stage lights would delete me. It fumed of chemical cinnamon, but sweeter, and went on cool. Victor held a clattering box fan to blow the toxicity out into the afternoon. What looked like blunt carob under the motel lamps and the day’s remaining light would be a sheath of copper shine on stage. We’d settled on this carob-hued bronzer after Rude and Sid bickered for half an hour among the metropolis of bottles they’d erected on the bureau, each a different shade of brown.

  “He needs this coffee-colored one, this one here.”

  “Screw that, no way, that’s gay. Let’s use this mocha one.”

  “Dude, that’s too dull. The lights won’t pick up that shit. Let’s use this hickory. See, it’s got this nice reddish tint.”

  “What’s he, an Injun? This pecan one looks sweet. This is the one.”

  “Pecan is weak, dude. How about this caramel? This caramel will do the trick.”

  “We don’t need a trick, we need the right color. Let’s use this umber. I used this umber once and it was sweet. The lights fuckin’ love this umber.”

  Dehydrated and craving cake, much too twiggy in the mirror, I saw every color as identical. I could not comprehend what they were carrying on about. When they began quibbling over what color trunks I should don, the red or the blue, Victor and I stepped into the bathroom so he could hit me with a needleful of Winny. I normally had no trouble injecting myself, but my grip was slick and shaky now, and since I’d sheared all the cushion from my body—my glutes were square slabs of stone—the needle felt twice as thick going in. That Winstrol burn I’d always savored? Not anymore.