Hyper-chondriac (6 page)

First thing on the agenda: bodybuilding competitions.

 

I mailed in my application and entry fee for Mr. Natural New England as a college sophomore. For a mere $40, the president of the American Natural Bodybuilding Conference would allow me to stand on a stage in a tiny Speedo and show strangers my six-pack, which I thought was a bargain.

For bodybuilding novices, “natural” means steroid-free. A lot of my friends at the gym were taking steroids, but I never even considered it. I had witnessed too many guys who had stopped taking them fall into deep depressions because they couldn't bench-press as much as they used to. Plus, I didn't want to feel paranoid and attribute internal pains when I was fifty to some non-FDA-approved shortcut drug I took in my twenties. I had enough anxiety as it was.

My pre-competition training regimen turned out to be tougher than anything I'd ever done. In addition to lifting weights for two hours a day, I also had to lie in a tanning bed for an hour to toast my pasty-white skin—so that spectators could see the separations between my muscles more easily. For another hour a day, I practiced flexing and holding each pose while maintaining a cheesy smile that told the world that this was effortless. Like it's normal for a human being to show off the width of his back. I even hired a ballet instructor to help me with my transitions between poses and would awake at four-thirty in the morning for our five o'clock sessions. Not only was bodybuilding getting expensive, but what idiot in college gets up less than three hours after Letterman ends so he can flex his calves?

And then there's the eating. Perhaps the worst pitfall in bodybuilding, something that I still battle with, is the feeling that if I'm not perpetually stuffing my face, my muscles will wither away. Calories were stocked as if my body was a Costco warehouse. If I didn't eat something every two hours, I'd freak and swear that a biceps or quad was deflating. An ex-girlfriend informed me that I had “Bigarexia.”
²

I was obsessed with keeping my body weight as high as possible. Protein became my best friend. I would eat to maximum capacity every few hours. Seven days a week. Month after month after month. And fuck the cardio. That would burn too many calories and make my muscles long and lean—the antithesis of my life's new ambition.

I became so leery of “wasting calories” that I'd wait three hours for my roommates to come home to bring up the mail, rather than squander a precious trip down a flight of stairs. Every ounce of my energy was saved for cosmetic purposes.

On the rare occasions when I would do anything that could, God forbid, actually
stretch
a muscle—like shoot a basketball—I would immediately do an extra session of eating and lifting to return my body to its now permanent contracted state. I became so fanatical that even when I spent a semester abroad in Robertsau, France, I'd travel over an hour a day each way just to get to a gym. The extent of my cross-cultural experience was converting pounds into kilograms.

During the last seven or eight weeks before the competition, I wrote down everything I ate in a notebook and would add up each day's caloric intake. Banana: 100; Orange: 65; Can of tuna in water: 175; Milk shake: 1,650. Abnormally large banana: 130 (estimated). I would pace myself for a minimum of 6,000 calories a day. But as the competition drew closer, I had to gradually taper off, to whittle away every ounce of fat. And the last week was killer: 800 calories a day. Total. While still working out for two hours. And taking sixteen college credits.

 

The big day finally arrived. The Huntington, Long Island, auditorium was packed with five hundred fans who had eagerly paid $10 to see striations in men's quads. I was glad I'd told my friends not to come. I didn't need the extra pressure, although there was nobody around anyway. They were all in Fort Lauderdale on spring break like normal college sophomores.

I felt like shit. My muscles were exhausted. My brain was fried. My stomach was the size of a walnut (38 calories). I looked better than I ever had, but was probably less healthy at that moment than the fat guy dry-mopping the stage.

The other bodybuilders were all in the back room, doing push-ups to inflate their muscles and having their pals coat their bodies with baby oil—as you can imagine, an intense and not particularly friendly group of people. But I was too caught up in myself to really care. Besides, I was one of them.

Even under optimum circumstances, there usually wasn't a lot of chatter between bodybuilders. Occasionally, I'd run into a friend from the gym on the street and, no matter who it was, this is pretty much the entire conversation:

“What are you training today?”

“Back and shoulders.”

“I'm doing tris and quads.”

“Well…lemme know if you need a spot.”

“'Kay.”

They called my group out onto the stage and the flashbulbs in the audience flickered. I was standing in my red Speedo with the number 13 safety-pinned to my hip, sandwiched between some guy named Jordan, who probably weighed close to forty pounds more than me, and someone named Dan who had killer abs but no discernible chest.

The judges bleated out poses and all of us simultaneously flexed the appropriate muscles. The double-biceps flex. The left quad flex. The right triceps flex. Applause erupted for each pose.

While onstage battling hunger and guys with better tans, it hit me. Other men were judging my body. And I was letting them. And I had that dumb “This is effortless” smile on my face the whole time and I thought, “I am so fucking gay right now I cannot stand it.”

But I had worked too hard to walk away and I wasn't going to wilt under those 3,000-watt klieg lights. Besides, I had just noticed that both Jordan and Dan were starting to tire. I thought I had a chance. I decided to put all my pain and discomfort on pause. I had worked too hard to get to this point, and I could always go to therapy later to figure out why I was doing this. Right now, it was time to kick some bodybuilding ass. I unleashed my phony smile as I displayed as many veins as possible while simultaneously squeezing my pecs together and expanding my back.

As the judges prepared to announce the winners, I assumed I had finished third or fourth. I thought I had dieted a little too much and had become too lean for my own good. Plus, I didn't have throngs of worshippers with signs shouting out my name and quite possibly bribing the judges with amino acids and protein shakes. The results poured in over a very loud loudspeaker. In third place…I can't remember…it was a long time ago. In second place…still have no idea…I'm not great with names of men in Speedos. When they announced that I had finished first, I was in shock. I was Mr. Natural New England 1984. Tall division. I won a large trophy the size of Erin Moran.

However, victory would soon turn to defeat.

Since I had barely eaten over the past few weeks I was literally starving. Luckily, it was time to celebrate. So off I went, by myself, for a post-competition meal to that Mecca of health: IHOP. There my trophy and I ordered a large plate of pancakes, which I wolfed down before the maple syrup had even hit the sides. But I wasn't through. I was craving pizza like a picnic ant. So I went across the street and proceeded to eat an entire pie. Eight slices. In about ten minutes. All by myself.

As the last remnants of crust slid down my throat, I came to a startling conclusion. I didn't feel well. My stomach was killing me. Of course it was! I had gone from 800 calories a day for the past two weeks to 800 calories a minute. I was a moron and my digestive system was in shock.

After a difficult drive back to my parents' house, I staggered inside holding my trophy and they bombarded me with questions about the contest. My mother released the biggest smile I had seen since she took care of me when I had chicken pox. My father insisted I wear his Superman ring for the rest of the week. I just wanted to lie down. But my stomach wouldn't let me. When I couldn't even make it up the stairs to my bedroom, my dad drove me to the hospital.

A doctor informed me that I had eaten so much food that my exponentially expanding stomach had gone through a part of my diaphragm wall. I was diagnosed with a hiatal hernia. I faced potential surgery. In the meantime the gastroenterologist ordered me to have the head of my bed raised to prevent acid from going into my esophagus during the night. Oh, and not to eat
anything,
not even a rice cake. Arnold never mentioned this in his encyclopedia. Thankfully, nearly three days later, after fasting like a Falun Gong leader and letting some 19,000 or so calories take a trip through my intestines, I felt much better.

And I had learned a valuable lesson. Bodybuilding was stupid. And, in hindsight, not exactly a path to calmness. I was tightly wound to begin with; now I was tightly wound with a collection of interminably contracted muscles. Besides, it was time-consuming, expensive and destructive to the mind, skin and internal organs. The pinnacle of pointless self-absorption.

On the other hand, the Mr. Southern Connecticut competition was coming up in April.

And the more trophies I won, the more likely the Nazis would skip over our house and head for the Scheinermanns next door. Now
they
were skinny.

2Bigarexia is ostensibly the opposite of anorexia, the latter of which my friend Josh, who knows every doctor in town, has but won't admit.

The one thing Jews and bodybuilders have in common: we love our food. So when I got that knock on my dorm door, just two months after starting my freshman year of college, I wasn't surprised. Bobby Zellers was looking for someone to represent our floor in the Häagen-Dazs ice cream eating contest at the student center. His first stop was my room.

Although I was by no means a large person, when it came to food I was an absolute animal. And it wasn't just prepping for bodybuilding competitions that made me a savage. I was one way before I ever touched a barbell. Because of my mother's illness, all of my adolescent meals were initiated by the following conversation.

“What do you want tonight? McDonald's, Arby's or Kentucky Fried Chicken?”

“McDonald's.”

“Two Big Macs, large fries and a strawberry shake?”

“Yeah. Thanks, Dad.”

Not only did my father have to continue teaching first grade and take care of four children and my mother, he was also a full-time waiter.

The other kids in my neighborhood had a different routine. At a preordained time each night, they'd rush home so they could sit around a table with their families to discuss their lives as they ate delicious home-cooked meals. What losers!
My
dad came home from work, took our orders and forty-five minutes later we'd be handed a paper bag with our burgers, drumsticks or roast beef sandwiches. Then off we'd go to our respective rooms to sit alone in front of our respective ten-inch black-and-white TV sets and chow down. No forks, no knives, and often the only napkins would be what we were wearing. We didn't even use spoons for our occasional soup—instead we just tipped the bowl backward and funneled the broth down our throats. I didn't think of us as barbarians; we were just cutting out the cutlery middleman.

The only time we ever sat down and ate together as a family was on Thanksgiving. My dad and I would drive down and pick up a precooked turkey and stuffing from Zorn's, which not only had live turkeys roaming around in the gated area out back but had live peacocks as well—but not to eat, apparently just to make the turkeys feel less attractive.

We'd then pick out some premade stuffing and a prekilled turkey and warm them up in our preheated oven, which was so seldom used we could have just left the door open and let my little sister use it as a desk. Regardless of our diligent preparation, we never made it through the entire meal intact.

Family dining was like playing the game Ker-Plunk: a group of marbles are supported by a series of plastic sticks inserted into a clear Lucite tower. Each player then removes one of the sticks in the hope that it won't be the one to send all of the marbles spiraling to their deaths like a group of handcuffed lemmings. No matter how carefully we watched our words or actions, one of us would invariably end the game of dinner by saying or doing the wrong thing.

“Brian, leave all of the dark meat for your mother, please.”

“There's plenty here. She's not going to eat all of it.”

“I asked you to
please
leave it!”

“Forget it, Sam!”

Ker-plunk!

Then my mother would storm off and go hobbling upstairs, which would take quite a while and give us plenty of time to try to persuade her to return to the table.

“Ma, come sit down! I put all the dark meat back!”

“Mom! We never get to eat together! Mark drove all the way from Oswego for this!”

“Maw, cool yer pitz and sit back down!”

But our fake peals of protest were ignored. The meal as we knew it was over and we'd have to wait another twelve months for our next food reunion. Anyone who was still hungry would finish in the privacy of his or her own bedroom while watching Tim Conway and Harvey Korman giggle on
The Carol Burnett Show.

Basically, those truncated Thanksgiving Day meals were the only non-fast-food meals in our house. Which explains my seamless transition into the world of college cafeteria cuisine. While all the other freshmen were incessantly bitching about the food being unhealthy and bland, not only was I pleased with the quality, I was ecstatic about the quantity. It was a veritable two-semester all-you-can-eat buffet.

For me, the Emerson College cafeteria was the happiest place on earth. And I was all for taking advantage of the system. I'd get a large plate of eggplant parmesan, rice and potatoes and then tear into it with the planet's oldest utensils: my hands.

I had no idea this was odd. I thought other students were staring at me because they were just looking around and randomly stopping their eyes at each eater. Instead, they were enjoying the spectacle of my prehistoric dining methods as I violently tore apart food with my fingers. I later learned that the speed at which I ate was astonishing, too. I could go through three plates of food before people sitting near me had even finished one. On the rare occasion that someone would be dumb enough to split an off-campus pizza with me, they'd quickly regret it. They'd be lucky to finish their second slice before the rest of the pie was nestled in my stomach.

My college peers thought I'd been raised by wolverines. Or badgers. Or some other animal that had no concept of how to hold a fork, which to this day is still a little awkward for me. I suppose my parents had far bigger problems than worrying about eating etiquette.

I had unknowingly become a sideshow attraction. After polishing off my entrée, I would trudge over to the ice cream tub for dessert and, without thinking, pile six or seven scoops onto a sugar cone that certainly wasn't built for all that extra weight. I had no idea this was unusual, despite the fact that I was carrying a cone of 10,000 calories which I either needed to hold down by my waist or tilt my head skyward to lick. Then there'd be a race against time before all the Rocky Road or Caramel Swirl would drip through the point of the sugar cone onto the ground. Time usually lost. I wish I'd just been showing off. That would have been a much easier habit to break.

With all the shit I was pouring into my body, it was a miracle I wasn't getting fat along with all the other freshmen. I guess lifting barbells for two hours every day plus a fast metabolism offsets a lot of power eating.

So when Bobby Zellers asked me to represent the sixth floor of our dorm for the Häagen-Dazs contest I was elated. More free food? I'm there! And the best part, with the calorie-whittling phase of the New York Metropolitan bodybuilding competition still months away, I was free to pound down whatever I wanted.

 

The competition took place in the student center and the place was packed tighter than a quart of Baskin Robbins Nutty Coconut. There were a dozen of us seated behind a pair of really long folding card tables adorned in our complimentary red, one-size-fits-all Häagen-Dazs T-shirts.

I was dwarfed by the other competitors and felt like a featherweight in a heavyweight bout. Tommy Murran was the favorite. He weighed nearly three hundred pounds and his mouth was so large it looked as if he could have swallowed a pumpkin whole. Warren Henneman was also expected to be a dairy conqueror. He tipped the scales at about 225, played center for the college basketball team and was extremely athletic. Frankly, I couldn't have cared less who won as long as I got to eat free ice cream for the next fifteen minutes.

The rules were simple. Eat as much Häagen-Dazs as possible really really fast. Which was pretty much what I'd been doing my entire life—only not on a stage.

The Häagen-Dazs representative blew a whistle and the contest began. For the next quarter of an hour a dozen non-lactose-intolerant students would be eating cold stuff. I had a little advantage. While everyone else was struggling with a variety of spoons and scoopers, I dug my fleshy claws in and scooped out fistfuls of ice cream. No need for teaspoons and tablespoons when you have handspoons.

A switch in my head went off and I was like a South African diamond miner tunneling into pint after pint of Häagen-Dazs. I went through my first container in a little over two minutes while Tommy Murran was barely halfway through his.

The shocked Häagen-Dazs rep immediately placed pint number two in front of me and I attacked it with a vengeance. Warren Henneman was trying to be way too neat, as if he were eating in front of the Queen. It's a competition about eating, not etiquette, schmuck!!! However, there would be no trash-talking, since all of our mouths were occupied.

I breezed into my third pint. Everyone else remained on his first. My chunky competitors were quickly being left in the dust.

“Gimme another pint, Ice Cream Man!!!!” I mumbled as I discarded my most recently devoured container onto the ground.

Ten minutes into the competition, I had finished nearly four pints. As I continued to scoff down my Fudge Swirl, I realized several things. One: I should have brought mittens. My hands were freezing. It felt as if I had been in a snowball fight for the last three days. Two: my teeth, tongue, palate and throat were starting to get uncomfortable, as if a glacier was passing through my esophagus. Three: when does the hot apple pie competition start, 'cause this is starting to blow?

As my entourage of ice cream merged down my larynx, my brain finally sent a message down to my mouth to close up shop. I couldn't finish the contest. And it had nothing to do with my stomach being full.

My entire head felt like an ice sculpture and my fingers were totally numb. But in the scant twelve minutes I'd been eating frozen stuff, I had managed to quaff down a school record four and a half pints. Unless one of the other contestants could eat an unlikely pint a minute, this thing was in the bag. And both Tommy Murran and Warren Henneman looked nauseated.

I sat and watched the final three minutes with a giant headache, wishing I had been born wearing a parka.

When the lactose settled, I had won handily. As the crowd cheered my gluttony, I felt like Nixon in '72, squashing a squadron of McGoverns. Then the proud Häagen-Dazs representative stepped onto the stage and awarded me my prize: a certificate for a free scoop of Häagen-Dazs for everyone on my dorm floor. Huh? That's it? No giant cone-shaped trophy? No silo of sprinkles? No entry into the Ice Cream Hall of Fame? I hated this contest! I had risked my life and extremities for my fellow students and all I got was the equivalent of $1.50, which, even back in the early '80s, sucked.

 

There were no high fives exchanged that day. An hour later, my hands were still so numb I had trouble unlocking my dorm room door. And forget about flossing. I woke up the next morning and although my fingers had thawed, my mouth was still throbbing. There was no way I could make my History of TV class that day.

I went to the school infirmary and told the doctor what happened. Hi, I'm the idiot who ate five pints of ice cream in ten minutes so my friends could all get free sugar cones. Li'l help?

The doctor examined my mouth and informed me that I had frostbite. I thought only Eskimos, Iditarod mushers and Clarence Birdseye got frostbite—not college freshmen seated at folding tables in heated ballrooms in October. I was instructed to gargle with warm cider vinegar for three weeks and stay away from cold things. But, as always, now that I had a diagnosis and a solution, I was pleased: committed to healing yet another self-inflicted wound.

For the better part of the next month, I drove my roommate (and me) crazy with the acrid odor of the cider vinegar and my perpetual gargling sessions. Unlike whistling, gargling is one of the few noises that annoys even the person doing it. I reminded my cohabitant that this was the price he had to pay for the free scoop of pistachio I had scored him. Now put the cap back on the toothpaste, you cretin!

 

About a month later, my face finally felt like my face. And despite all the ice cream trauma, I was soon back in the cafeteria stuffing myself and arguing with everyone that college food really
was
delicious.