The Hero's Body

by William Giraldi

  Then we went outside and sat on the curb, dark gray cumulus hinting of thunder. And I remember wondering what time my family was going to show up the following day, my father, Pop, and Tony, if they’d arrive in time, leave Manville early enough to dodge the certain snarl of Jersey shore traffic. A black kid and his father pulled up to an adjacent room in their Oldsmobile—a kid my age, I thought, who was clearly there for the contest. They were dressed as we were dressed, lugging what we had lugged, the coolers and duffel bags. I could see the rounded mass beneath the clothes, the swaying quads in his step, and I said to Victor, “I hope that dude’s not a teenager.”

  He hesitated before his reply, waited for the kid and his father to disappear inside their room. “You could knock him out,” he said. The tender lies we friends tell one another: Are they told to preserve the other’s delusion, or to preserve our own? I’d never knocked out anybody in my life.

  My senior year of high school and English class was under way, a lecture on Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan. Then Alisyn, my sister, two grades behind me, appeared in the rectangular glass of the door, waving me out into the hallway, tears inking trails with her makeup. An ex-friend of mine, a weightlifter jacked on drugs, larger and stronger than me, had just accosted her, perhaps pushed her, threatened her, it wasn’t clear—she was sobbing and I couldn’t make out her sentences. Whatever had just happened had to do with me, I knew; my friendship with him had recently detonated from rivalry and rancor, a collection of jealousies, envies, perceived betrayals. The pettiness of seventeen-year-old boys. I calmed my sister, escorted her to her classroom, and then, on what felt like adrenal autopilot, stalked both floors of the high school searching for this kid.

  I spotted him in his classroom, in the center of the front row. I banged open the door, rattling the glass in its frame, and in a swift stride, picked up the short wooden stool sitting empty there at the blackboard and stood before him at his desk with the stool cocked at my side. The teacher shrieked, fifteen kids gaped. The ex-friend didn’t try to rise, just smirked up at me, his face a pufferfish, flushed and swollen from steroids. All I had to do was swing and his skull would break, his cheekbones crack, his teeth scatter onto the floor. He’d earned that.

  The cliché is “heat of the moment,” but I didn’t feel any heat now that I was there before him. What I felt was the cool awareness that I didn’t want to hurt him that badly. I didn’t want the consequences of that hurt. I lowered the stool with one hand and jabbed a finger at his face with the other: “You go near her again and I will end you.” And he did an unexpected thing then; he didn’t protest or offer denials or reciprocal promises of destruction. Instead, he folded his arms at his chest and pouted—a first grader’s disappointed pout, but disappointed in what I couldn’t say.

  By this time the teacher was tugging at my sleeve, yanking me toward the door. I let the stool drop and I left, returned to class in time to learn something about Kurt Vonnegut, the clutch of his moral imagination. But I wasn’t there long; the vice-principal was at the door now, saying, “Let’s go, get your stuff, Giraldi,” and he led me from the building, suspended me for the rest of that week. And the conversation that night at the dinner table sounded just like this:

  “You didn’t knock him out?” Pop said.

  “He attacked your sister and you didn’t knock him out?” my father said.

  “He didn’t attack her,” I said. “He scared her, is all.”

  Pop said: “He scares your sister and you don’t knock him out?”

  “I let him know what he needed to know,” I said. “He won’t go near her again.”

  “He goes near her again, you knock him out,” my father said. “What are those muscles for if you’re not gonna knock him out?”

  So that, then, was the chief value they saw in the physique I’d begun to build: how well it let me knock out another male. And if I had tried to tell them that I didn’t comprehend my body in that way, as a hammer to inflict damage on other males? What good would that have done? I said nothing.

  X

  The morning of the show, the prejudging portion, a muster of attendees mistaking gaudiness for godliness, not an overweight ice-cream lover among them, skin enough for a porn convention, outfits with an emphasis on both the “out” and the “fit.” The air inside the auditorium was charged and hard to breathe, crammed with bovine strut, men grazing from containers, ripping protein bars with their teeth. Female bodybuilders hulling through hallways like the genetic joke of some insane god, women who’d made themselves complete strangers to ovulation, their faces mannishly square from steroids, breasts abolished, voices baritone—Atlases in drag.

  Victor stood with me in a queue near the face of the stage so I could sign in, receive my number badge, and hand over the CD with my posing song for later that night. We tried to spot the other teens, to gauge my competition, but they all looked the same to me: sandals, thigh-flared workout pants, hoodies zipped to the throat, duffel bags like pocketbooks beneath their arms.

  Backstage, Victor sprayed another sheath of bronzer on me, then added an enamel of posing oil, its odor like the flavored lubricant in your bedroom. The noxious fumes of the body paint were a smog in that tight air, every man backstage laminated with the stuff, his face scrunched, trying not to inhale it. We stood or sat in our posing trunks before mirrors, eighty mostly-nudes from all weight divisions, pumping up with dumbbells and barbells, some lying on the floor with their legs up on benches to reduce water retention in their legs, eyeballs spookily aglow against newly coppered hides, nobody speaking, each sizing up the other, everybody emotionally withered from the diet. A paramedic stood sentry in a starched white button-up in case someone passed out, his stethescope round his neck and ready to sound our unhinged hearts.

  I nudged Victor in unease, nodded to the teens who dwarfed me, the full lobes of their pectorals. Two teens in particular were blessed with size and superior scaffolding, both humped with muscle; their ears looked muscled. One of them was the kid we’d spotted at our hotel the day before, his skin a dazzling obsidian; he needed no bronzer. I’m sure I’d never duped myself into believing that I had those same genetic gifts, and yet there I was, having been talked into this, an impostor backstage with these teen freaks who would trounce me.

  Victor whispered, “You’re shredded, bro. That dude’s not peeled like you,” and “You’re nails, man, got veins everywhere,” and “Don’t sweat them dudes. You’re nails.” But it was impossible not to sweat because I was wearing nine layers of epidermis in a Sahara of body heat. There were eight guys in the teenage division and I was sure—it was a stomach-pit surety—that I was better than only two of them. So: sixth place for me, it seemed. You don’t get a trophy for sixth place, and you make no one proud.

  Soon the teens were summoned to center stage, lined up by number, elbow to elbow, our backs flared, legs and abs tensed, behind us a silver-spangled curtain on loan from a strip show. The announcer called the first move, four quarter-turns to the right, and then he called out the mandatory poses, one by one, beginning with Front Double Biceps. We held each pose for twelve, thirteen seconds, and although that’s not long to clench your breath, the body feels it as much longer because the flexing forces an onrush of blood, the dilation of veins, each muscle group leaping distinct and hard. What’s more, you’ve got to be aware of the other guys because the wily ones will try to inch forward on the stage in an attempt to stand out.

  I was pinned there between the two largest teens, crushingly aware of how little I must look, merely planar by contrast. I could hear Rude and Sid shouting at me, though not Victor (Victor didn’t shout). I heard “Abs!” and “Calves!”—reminders to flex them, to pose from the floor up: calves first, then legs, then abs, then the upper body. During the rear poses, Rude shouted, “Hams!” because apparently I was forgetting about my hamstrings, which were rather easy to forget about because I didn’t have any. Sid yelled, “Glutes!” and I squeezed my buttocks into striated squa
res.

  We’d practiced each pose for several weeks and yet, when you’re a first-timer, an unfortunate thing can happen up there. In the heat of it, all the posing prep falls aside and you begin simply trying to keep pace with those beside you, aping whatever they do, because surely they have more experience than your sorry self. Pose by pose—Side Chest, Back Lat Spread, Back Double Biceps, and the rest—I simply tried to keep up with the leviathans who flanked me, looking side to side to see their poses, their stances, whatever in the world their faces were doing.

  The head judge then scattered the lineup, microphoned where he wanted us to stand: “Number 22, next to number 19. Number 20 in between Numbers 21 and 18.” This meant they were comparing the best physiques more scrupulously. I knew it was an ominous sign to be on either end of the line because that meant they didn’t care to compare you, and not, alas, because you were incomparable. You wanted to be at the center of the lineup; that’s usually where the top placers appear at this point. Although I wasn’t at the center, I also hadn’t been exiled to either end. So, the slightest fattening of hope, then, among such pounding doubt. And once again the judges bullwhipped us through the eight compulsory poses.

  Those who contend that bodybuilding isn’t a sport because it lacks utility, a specific function of physicality, have never attempted rounds of competitive poses in lanes of scorching spotlight. The skill lies first in the difficult mastering of muscle development and nutrition, in the wedding of power with grace—grace is the body thinking clearly—and then in this racking exposition of the outcome. Hitting and holding those poses in such heat, with a body that dehydrated, with the elbows, shoulders, and thighs of others nudging greasily into me, was as difficult, as technical, as building the muscles in the first place.

  I can half understand the cynic’s charges of homophilia: those male bodies, ninety-eight percent nude, grunting and sweating, slick together. But it doesn’t come remotely close to feeling that way. It feels like combat, not prelude to coitus. The bodybuilding stage, with its strictness of rules, its rigidity of judgment and ferocity of competition, its stress and its heat, destroys any possibility of eroticism. The art/sport display, the objectifying of the body into pure aesthetics, into lines and form and flow, empties it of all sexuality. You actually forget you’re naked. That’s why no bodybuilder ever worries about sprouting an erection on stage; there’s simply no space up there for an erogenous zone.

  After that second round of compulsory poses, the judges dismissed us, thanked us, and I walked off stage cramping in my quads. Victor was there in the wings with a towel and he patted the sweat from me. The head of a Poland Spring bottle peeked from the side pocket of his shorts like a periscope, and when I grabbed for it, he swatted my hand away. Then he unscrewed the cap and carefully filled it with barely two milliliters of water, which evaporated on my tongue before I could swallow. He and the others from the Edge would remain to watch the prejudging of the other weight classes, but they instructed me to return to the hotel.

  “Go lay down, stay off your feet.”

  “Put your legs up on pillows to keep the water out of ’em.”

  “For the love of God, whatever you do, don’t drink any water.”

  “Find a hamburger and eat it. You looked a little flat up there. You need to fill out. A hamburger will fill you out.”

  “Sips maybe to get the burger down.”

  “Sips, fucker, no more than sips.”

  “But overall, great, man. You held your own up there.”

  “You looked killer, dude.”

  “You looked great.”

  “You looked good. It ain’t over. Tonight still matters. At this point, the judges are eighty percent sure of the placements, I’d say, so tonight still matters. You can’t screw up anything between now and then.”

  “Yeah, you looked a little flat, as I’m saying. So go get a hamburger. Get two. No water.”

  That might sound counterintuitive, a mooing hamburger and bun, but my body fat percentage was so low, my metabolism so high, and my anabolic rate so efficient after those many weeks of training and diet, that the burger’s density of fat and carbs would get stuffed directly into the muscle bellies, keeping them round and causing my veins to surge. A hamburger for the average American is a cardiac catastrophe in the making; a hamburger for the bodybuilder on contest day is a necessary nectar.

  I found a plaque-friendly grill on the way from the auditorium—you could smell the cholesterol a block away—and bought the hamburgers. Trying to eat them in my motel room without any water took an hour. After jerking shut the blinds I dialed my house and then my grandparents’, but no one answered at either place. Without traffic, Point Pleasant was an hour south of Manville, and I wanted to remind my family to leave early enough; the show began at seven. On the bed, on a sheet already dyed with streaks of bronzer, needing to sleep and feeling myself fill from the burgers, I lay half in dream, half in fearful remembrance, and what I dream-remembered was this:

  Six months earlier, Victor and I and some others from the Edge attended the prejudging portion of a minor bodybuilding contest held at a high school auditorium in north Jersey. One of the competitors was mentally disabled, maybe twenty years old; you could see the slight warp, the frozen twitch, in his face. He wasn’t just unmuscled—he looked shriveled from malnutrition, earnestly straining and oblivious. He’d applied a layer of oil and shaved his body, but nobody had told him about self-tanner, and so he glowed ghoulishly on stage next to dark copper hides, all of them many times more massive. The universal nightmare in which you’re naked in front of a crowd of people mocking you? This blanched stick figure was that nightmare incarnate, except he didn’t know it.

  Somehow this had been allowed to happen, but no one seemed to know what to do about it now. The judges and other competitors were paused in perplexity and embarrassment, and then determined to move forward, and then paused again. The head judge’s voice in the microphone quavered with umms and errs. He looked left and right for help from the other judges, but no help came. The fifty or so spectators reddened, quaked with quiet laughter, and I could hear the whispers around me: Who let a retard onstage?

  The guys from the Edge slid low in their seats, their baseball caps yanked down over their brows, literally crying from the unexpected comedy of this. I was afraid my own tears would come then, and that they wouldn’t be from laughter—that release of emotion would have been the end of me at the Edge. Because I could see, there in the front row, a blocky silver-haired man in mismatched garb, his eyeglasses built for star-gazing, something warped in his face too, pitched eagerly forward in his seat, ignoring the ridicule, beaming encouragement and faith up to the ghoulish kid who’d been wrongly placed on that stage—beaming at his son.

  Backstage at the night show, after Victor varnished me with a final layer of posing oil, I could hear the auditorium filling, the balanced pre-performance din. I asked Victor to check if he could spot my family in their seats, but he couldn’t make out anyone. Hundreds of spectating faces somehow coalesce into a single face. I’d heard someone say that the traffic on the Garden State Parkway was clogged for miles into Point Pleasant—early August was the crest of beach season, carloads in swarm for a Saturday night’s play—and I guessed that my family was idling in that clog. The teens would be first to compete, and so I was certain that my father, Pop, and Tony would miss me onstage.

  It all unfolded quickly then, in the way events do after so much buildup. The teen division was instructed to form a queue at the curtain, and each guy would perform his solo routine before we were called onstage for another posing competition. When it was my turn, the announcer sang my number and name in the drawn-out, faux-dramatic manner of every boxing announcer you’ve ever heard. I walked in to the clapping, the orchestra of whistles and hoots from the Edge crowd. The way the lights were angled, I couldn’t see farther than the judges’ table and the first two rows. The rest was a bleary canvas of beiges and blacks. But my body could
feel the noise of them all, their mass humming along my bones. Flashbulbs were going off to my right like a squadron of fireflies who knew my name.

  When the song began, I performed my routine—a banana-sack ballet, as I’d come to think of it—just as we’d rehearsed it for the last several weeks. Or at least I tried to. It felt hectic up there, and I was conscious of missing certain beats, of being either a second too quick or too slow to hit a pose. I thought I could hear Sid or Rude shouting, “Time!” over my song, by which he meant Keep in time with the music. The guys who’d gone before me looked somewhat clumsy in their choreography, and so I strained for agility, for elegance, aware that elegance can’t be had by straining. And just as I was starting to relax, to feel semi-assured in the routine, to remember all my beats, the volume descended and the song disappeared. I’d seen guys bow at this point, or else kiss their hands toward the audience in appreciation, but I swiped my wet brow and waved goodbye, squinting into the lights as I tried to spot my family.

  I stood by in the wing, stage left, while the others performed, baby-sipping from a water bottle, hopped-up now, feeling a muscle tautness just shy of cramping, Victor behind me with a towel, blending my sweat into the oil, saying, “Killer job, you nailed it,” but I didn’t believe that. Gawking at the obsidian beauty who was just then performing to a hip-hop blend of Naughty by Nature and the Wu Tang Clan, I couldn’t believe that. After the last guy’s routine, we were all summoned to center stage to go through the mandatory poses. I was near the heart of the lineup again, dwarfed again, and if the guys from the Edge were yelling reminders at me, I couldn’t hear them over the crowd.