The Hero's Body (14 page)

I must
have been in the first or second grade, perspiring out in a baseball field at the edge of town, close enough to the river to smell its muddy wend, the summer now enormously ablaze, the sun all places, all at once. This was Little League practice, the coach the father of two boys who lived on our block. One son was the pitcher, a year older than me; the other son was my classmate, the star hitter.

We didn't have a baseball household, not even close. Baseball isn't a motor or muscle sport, and so it wasn't considered masculine enough. We didn't give a damn about the Yankees, the team for whom everybody else in Manville hooted. And yet somehow there I was, squinting in that unbelievable barrage of sun, a shortstop in a white-and-marigold Manville Pizza uniform. Local businesses sponsored
this Little League, provided the outfits, and the teams were called by their names: the pub or the pharmacy, the insurance company or the confectioner.

On this day, my father came to practice to participate, humored by the coach, who knew he had no baseballing abililty. He came directly from a sun-charred day of roofing or framing. The coach, in contrast, was a foreman of some kind; he wandered around a plant with a clipboard and hardhat, made leisurely phone calls in a swivel chair, ate elongated lunches in an air-conditioned office. There they were, two snapshots of fatherhood, side by side at home plate: the rested and the ragged, one broad and tall with a greedy erectness, one much shorter, stouter, as if in perpetual duck of a right hand. One in pressed khakis, a laundered shirt, and smudgeless sneakers, ashen from the indoors, and the other in clothes that looked meat-ground, boots that were battle-worn and too heavy to walk in, his hands and limbs a pastiche of blood-sketched nicks and scratches.

My father's task was to stand at home plate, next to a basket of baseballs, and hit flies and grounders to us so that we might scamper after them. You know the trick: you've got to lob the ball in front of yourself with your left hand, then quickly regain your both-handed grip on the bat, then swing to send the ball soaring out among the waiting ones. Except my father couldn't do this; he just couldn't regain his grip on the bat quickly enough, and so the ball belly-flopped in the packed sand at his feet, or else he missed when he swung and so the ball again belly-flopped in the sand.

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.”