The Hero's Body (2 page)

Youth ends when we perceive that no one wants our gay abandon. And the end may come in two ways: the realization that other people dislike it, or that we ourselves cannot continue with it. Weak men grow older in the first way, strong men in the second
.

—Cesare Pavese

I

Eight months after meningitis,
in the late spring of 1990, recently heart-thrashed by my first girlfriend, scrapped for a football star, weighing barely a buck and a quarter, spattered with acne, both earlobes aglitter with silver studs and my hairdo a mullet like a lemur's tail, and here is what happened to me:

In the deadening heat of a May afternoon, stultified by sadness and boredom, I wandered over to my uncle Tony's house and found him weightlifting in the pro-grade gym he'd installed in one half of his cobwebbed basement, AC/DC yawping from a set of speakers. The song? “Problem Child.” Tony lived across the street from my grandparents, where my father, siblings, and I ate dinner each weeknight, and so I'd known about his gym—he'd built and welded most of it himself—but never had a reason to care about it. Earnestly unjockish, I'd long considered myself the artistic sort. I kept a notebook full of dismal poems, song lyrics, quotes from writers I wanted to remember. My hero was the reptilian rock god Axl Rose. Filthy and skinny, he looked hepatitic and I thought I should too.

But there in my uncle's basement, my sallow non-physique mocking me from a wall of cracked mirrors, I clutched onto one of the smaller barbells and strained through a round of bicep curls, aping my uncle, who for whatever reason did not laugh or chase me away. And with that barbell in my grip, with blood surging through my
slender arms, entire precincts inside me popped to life. Engorged veins pressed against the skin of my tiny biceps, and I rolled up the sleeves of my T-shirt to see them better, to watch their pulsing in the mirror.

Wordlessly I did what my uncle did, trailed him from the barbells to the dumbbells to the pulley machine, trying to keep up, mouthing along to the boisterous lyrics. And in the thirty minutes I spent down there that first day, I had sensations of baptism or birth. Those were thirty minutes during which I'd forgotten to feel even a shard of pity for myself. I didn't know if I was lifting weights the right way, but I knew that I had just been claimed by something holy. I'd return to his basement the following day, and the day after that. I'd return every weekday for two years.

I see it clearly now: I was prompted by more than a need to stave off my melancholy, prompted by forces I couldn't have anticipated or explained. There was the obvious motive, a desperation to alter my twiggy physique, transform it into a monument worthy of my ex-girlfriend's lust, a kind of revenge so important to shafted teenage boys. The footballer for whom she'd ditched me? Just two weeks before I wandered down into my uncle's basement, he'd rammed me against a classroom door, said for me to meet him outside, “so I can teach you a lesson,” and I was too shaken to ask him what lesson that might be, since
he
was the thieving scoundrel between us. Of course I didn't meet him outside; he'd have ruined me in a fistfight. He and his pals called me exactly what you'd expect them to call me:
pussy, sissy, faggot
.

There was also the chronic memory of that month-long meningitis, the successful shame of my body's failing, the need to fortress myself with muscle in order to spare my father the high cost of my weakness, to preempt whatever disease might choose me next. But the mightiest motive, the one not entirely apparent to me? To obtain the acceptance of my father and uncles and the imperious grandfather
we called “Pop”—to forge a spot for myself in this family of unapologetic, unforgiving masculinity.

Before we
return to that basement and those weights, there are certain essential details you need to know about where and how I was raised, details that will help explain how bodybuilding was for me both impossible and inevitable, and how it developed into an obsession that included brutalizing workouts, anabolic steroids, competitions, an absolute revamping of the self.

My hometown's name, Manville, lets you know precisely what you're getting: pure Jersey. A town of plumbers and masons, pickup trucks and motorcycles, bars, liquor stores, and football fields, diners, churches, and auto repair shops, and a notorious, all-nude strip club once called Frank's Chicken House. Go to central Jersey, ask any working-class guy over thirty about Frank's Chicken House, and he'll point the way: the town of Manville, right off Route 206, fifteen minutes from the sylvan spread of Princeton, a town straight from the blue notes of a Springsteen song.

Manville was no Princeton. A meager two and a half square miles of low-lying land, the town is bordered by the Raritan River at the north and east. Roughly once a decade, it gets swallowed by an end-times flood. It was named for the Johns-Manville Corporation, which produced asbestos building materials that ravaged the lungs of its many workers. The manufacturing plant, defunct by the time I was a child, sat on Main Street, blocks-long behind rusted fences, vacant but for the spirits of the dead flitting through those empty spaces in search of better air to breathe.

It was one thing to grow up in this blue-collar zip code, and quite another to be raised by men for whom masculinity was not just a way of being but a sacral creed. I've seen photographs of Pop from 1945,
sepia shots made more flaxen by time, thick cloth-like rectangles of paper, curled under at the edges. Pop is sixteen years old in these shots, on a jagged rock wall by the bridge, high above the water. He's with his closest pal, Ed Stowe, both in swimming trunks, both heavy with muscle. They are weightlifters, bodybuilders, backyard boxers, and they've come to this rock wall by the river to peacock the results of their training, to flex their suntanned brawn for posterity. Stowe is Thorish, tall, broad, and blond, while Pop has a powerlifter's density. He resembles the era's ideal of muscular, masculine beauty, Steve Reeves, he of the
Hercules
films, one of the first famed American bodybuilders.

Pop and Stowe do indeed look like men in those photos I remember, not teenage boys. Such confidence and well-honed bulk, square faces shaded with stubble, no magenta sprays of acne. Among his assorted boasts, Pop often recalled shaving in the sixth grade, when the other boys were still tickled by cartoons and waiting for pubic hair. As a teen, Pop had muscle and body hair that let him pass for twice his age, and later they earned him the moniker “Magilla Gorilla” from one of my crueler boyhood friends.

Pop always spoke of Stowe in a reverential tenor lifted by swells of sorrow. He believed Stowe was part genius, “ahead of his time” when it came to the particulars of weight training and exercise, nutrition and health. One of Stowe's maverick ideas was that the human body has the ability to cure itself of any illness. It needs neither medicine nor food to recover from whatever malady has attacked it. Sips of water, perhaps a wedge of grapefruit, but otherwise you did not burn the body's energy sources on digestion and you did not further pollute it with laboratory concoctions. You left the wise body alone and waited while it purged the pathogens. Ed Stowe died of starvation in the Arizona desert where he'd gone to consult some turbanned guru of wellness. “Ahead of his time” is morosely exact: he leapt forty years into the future, straight into the hole of his grave.

When Pop first told me about Stowe, I was twelve years old, with my best pal at the time, and when we biked off into the Manville gloaming, after Pop finished with his stories of Stowe, my pal asked me, “Did you see your grandfather got tears in his eyes when he was telling us about that guy?”

“Bullshit,” I said. “No way.”

“There was a tear,” he said. “I saw it.”

And I said, “Pop doesn't
have
tears.”

One of my earliest memories of Pop, circa 1978, when I was three: he cable-tied a one-foot rubber doll of the Incredible Hulk to the grille of his pickup truck. He'd drive around Manville with this green doll scouting the way, and whenever he stopped at our house to visit, he'd exit his truck with the Hulk's dramatic growl and upper-body flexing.

But it was Spider-Man for me. Not Superman and not the Incredible Hulk, those mesomorphic wall-punchers leaving messes of people and property. There was a finesse to Spider-Man, such sleekness and stealth. That liberating mask was the clincher; you could see the faces of Superman and the Hulk, and I thought that a woeful disadvantage. The Spider-Man of the late '70s barely had a bulge anywhere under his fitted suit, even where he couldn't have helped but to have one. Unmuscled, he immobilized foes without harming them, and that seemed to me, at three years old, a noble thing.

Children are natural obsessives. For a month I'd been wearing Spider-Man pajamas throughout the day and making web-shot sounds, my wrists aimed at relatives. To reward this obsession, my family arranged for someone to costume himself as Spider-Man and come to our house. When from our front walkway I saw him approach me in an unwise amble I mistook for menace, I wept and howled and frantically climbed up my father. This must have been disappointing; I was no brave little boy.

Later that year I was in an operating room about to be anesthetized, about to have tubes inserted into my ears. My canals weren't
draining; my family had thought I was disobedient but I was just deaf. The doctor asked me this asinine question: “Would you like a needle, or would you like to blow up a balloon?” and I answered as any child would. This duplicitous doctor then set a black mask over my face—I remember it descending like night—and four cool hands staked me to the table by my ankles and wrists. Just before the gas unleashed its sleep, I strained to snap free, and my thought was not of Spider-Man web-whirling through the heights of a metropolis, but of Pop, of that great green beast called Hulk.

Pop and my father and two uncles admired weightlifters and footballers, wrestlers and boxers, lumberjacks, hunters, woodsmen. Celebrants of risk, they valued muscles, motorcycles, the dignified endurance of pain. Their Homeric standards of manhood divvied men into the heroic or the cowardly, with scant space for gradation. Heroes were immortalized in song, cowards promptly forgotten. This wouldn't have been an issue growing up except that I wasn't like them. I was made of other molecules, of what felt like lesser stuff. As the firstborn son, as the fourth William Giraldi, the pressures were always there, the sense of masculine expectation always acute. But I was the bearer of patrilineal traditions in name only, insufficiently macho and no doubt under suspicion as a potential pansy.

In his “Calamus” sequence, Whitman is “resolv'd to sing no songs to-day but those of manly attachment.” This is a tale of men because my mother left us when I was ten years old, and so our upbringing fell solely to my father and his family. I realized what was happening between my parents about a year earlier. Lying on my bed one night, in the sudden dark of autumn, the deadened limbo of Sunday evening, I listened to my parents quarreling downstairs. Their voices floated up to me as if from a television set in a closed room; I could make out just the occasional word, sometimes a phrase or clause. But the individual words didn't matter; their tone conveyed it all. Disturbances were coming.

When the voices stopped after an hour, and when I heard the door
to my parents' bedroom click shut, I slid from bed, crept downstairs to see what clues I could find left over from their quarrel. There, in the dark of our kitchen, lit only by the weak bulb above the stove, my father sagged in a stool at the counter. At first I didn't notice him there, but then he said my name, and I went to him, feeling caught at something, caught
in
something, but I couldn't say what, couldn't identify the new web in which he and I were now stuck.

Unsure of how the separation would play out, this is what he said to me: “No matter what happens, I'll always be your father.” The following year my mother would be gone, and without balking my father would fill both roles. There is a tale to tell about my mother, too, I know, and perhaps one day I will earn the mercy to tell it, but she is absent from these pages because she was largely absent from our lives, and that absence helped to place me in the hard clamp of the paternal.

Tony brought me to my first bodybuilding show just after my parents' divorce, when I was too young to assimilate the spectacle or understand why it mattered. Sitting in that auditorium, encircled by muscle, by a wall of aftershave, I felt the breath of panic on me, the prelude to a raid of anxiety. I told Tony I needed the bathroom, thinking that he'd let me go alone, that I could take several minutes to shake off whatever was attacking me. A ten-year-old, it seems, can be unmanned among the manly. Instead, I pulled him away from the best part of the show and stood uselessly at the urinal while he leaned against a sink, looking at his watch.

This was when the men of my family still thought it possible that I might evolve into an athletic worthy, maybe a soldier, someone more daringly masculine than what I showed signs of becoming.