Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story Read online

  Gold’s quickly became home for me because that’s where I felt grounded. There was always a bunch of guys hanging around the desk, and all the regulars had nicknames, like Fat Arm Charlie and Brownie and Snail. Zabo Koszewski worked there for many years and was Joe Gold’s close friend. They called him “the Chief.” He had the best abdominals—he did one thousand reps of abs every day—and was really ripped. My abs weren’t like that, and the first thing Zabo told me when we met was that I needed to go on a diet. “You know?” he observed. “You’re chubby.” Joe Gold nicknamed me “Balloon Belly,” and from then on, I was known as “Balloon Belly” and “Chubby.”

  Zabo, who came from New Jersey and whose first name was Irvin, had a whole collection of hashish pipes. We went over to his house every so often to get stoned. He read science-fiction novels day and night. Everything was, “Hey, man, wow!” and “Groovy!” and “Far out!” But that was normal around Venice. To smoke a joint was so casual it was like drinking a beer. You would go to someone’s house, no matter who it was, and he’d light up a joint and say, “Have a hit.” Or light up a hashish pipe, depending on how sophisticated he was.

  I learned quickly what people meant when they said, “This is groovy.” “This is cool.” I found out that astrology was a big deal while trying to chat up this gorgeous girl. I said, “You and I, it seems like we really belong together; we should go out for dinner.”

  But she said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, what sign are you?”

  So I said, “Leo.”

  “That’s not for me. That’s really not for me. Thank you, but no thank you.”

  And she was gone. I went to the gym the next day and said, “Guys, I have a little problem here. I’m still learning.” And I told them the story.

  Zabo knew just what to do. He said, “Man, you got to say, ‘I’m the best sign.’ Try that.”

  It took only a few weeks before another situation came up. I was talking to a girl at lunch, and she asked, “What sign are you?”

  And I said, “What do you guess?”

  “Well, what?”

  “The best!”

  So she said, “You mean . . . Capricorn?”

  “Yes!” I exclaimed. “How did you know?”

  “I’m telling you, it’s amazing because that fits so well with me, and I get along so well with you, I mean, this is like, wow!” She was excited and so happy. So I started reading up on the zodiac signs, all the characteristics associated with them, and how they match up together.

  Using Gold’s as my base, it was easy to make friends. The place was a melting pot of characters from all over the world: Australians, Africans, Europeans. I’d work out in the morning and say to a couple of guys, “Hey, do you want to go to lunch?” We’d go, and they’d tell me about their lives, and I’d tell them about mine, and we’d become buddies. At night I’d come back to train again, meet a different set of guys, go out with them for dinner, and get to know them too.

  I was amazed by how readily people invited me to their homes and by how much Americans liked to celebrate. I’d never celebrated a birthday until I came to America; I had never even seen a cake with candles. But a girl invited me to her birthday party, and when my birthday came the following summer, the guys at the gym had a cake and candles for me. A guy would say, “I have to go home because it’s my sister’s first day of school, so we’re going to celebrate.” Or “Today is my parents’ anniversary.” I could not remember my parents ever even talking about their anniversary.

  When Thanksgiving came, I had nothing planned because I didn’t understand the tradition of this American holiday. But Bill Drake brought me to his house. I got to meet his mom, who served this extraordinary meal, and his dad, who was a professional comedian and was very, very funny. We have a saying in Austria: “You’re so sweet I could eat you!” But because of the translation problem, when I tried using that to compliment Mrs. Drake, it came out really lewd. The whole family burst out laughing.

  I felt even more amazed when a girl I dated invited me to her parents’ house for Christmas. I said to myself, “God, I don’t want to disrupt the family holiday.” Not only did they treat me like a son but also every family member gave me a gift.

  All of this hospitality was new and welcome, but it bothered me that I did not know how to respond. For instance, I’d never heard of sending a thank-you note, and yet Americans seemed to send them all the time. “That is so weird,” I thought. “Why can’t you just say thank you over the phone or in person?” That’s the way we did it in Europe. But here Joe Weider would invite me and a girlfriend to dinner, and afterward she’d say, “Give me his address because I want to write him a thank-you note.”

  And I would say, “Nah, come on, we already thanked him when we left.”

  “No, no, no, no, I grew up with manners.”

  I realized I’d better get with the program and learn American manners. Or maybe they were also European manners and I’d just never noticed. I checked with friends back in Europe in case I’d missed something. No, I had not; America really was different.

  As a first step, I made it a rule to date only American girls; I did not want to hang out with girls who knew German. And I immediately signed up for English classes at Santa Monica Community College. I wanted my English to be good enough so that I could read newspapers and textbooks and go on to classes in other subjects. I wanted to speed up the process of learning to think, read, and write like an American. I didn’t want to just wait till I picked it up.

  One weekend a couple of girls took me up to San Francisco, and we stayed in Golden Gate Park. I said to myself, “This is unbelievable, how free people are in America. Look at this! Now we’re sleeping at night in the park, and everyone is friendly.” I didn’t realize until much later that I had arrived in California at a totally crazy cultural moment. It was the late sixties, there was the hippie movement, free love, all this incredible change. The Vietnam War was at its peak. Richard Nixon was about to be elected president. Americans at the time felt like the world was turning upside down. But I had no idea that it hadn’t always been this way. “So this is America,” I thought.

  I never heard many conversations about Vietnam. But personally I loved the idea of America pushing back on Communism, so if anybody had asked me, I’d have been for the war. I’d have said, “Fucking Communists, I despise them.” I grew up next door to Hungary, and we always lived under the threat of Communism. Were they going to push through Austria just like they did Hungary in ’56? Were we going to get caught in a nuclear exchange? The danger was so close. And we saw the effect that Communism had on the Czechs, the Polish, the Hungarians, the Bulgarians, the Yugoslavs, the East Germans—everywhere there was Communism around us. I remember going to West Berlin for a bodybuilding exhibition. I’d looked across the Berlin Wall, across the border, and seen how dismal life was on the other side. It was literally like two different weathers. It felt like I was in sunshine and when you looked across the wall at East Berlin, there was rain. It was horrible. Horrible. So I felt very good that America was fighting Communism big-time.

  It never struck me as strange that the girls I was dating weren’t putting on makeup or lipstick or painting their nails. I thought having hairy legs and underarms was normal because in Europe none of the women waxed or shaved. In fact, I got caught by surprise by it one morning the following summer. I was in the shower with a girlfriend—we’d watched the Apollo astronauts make the first moonwalk on my little black-and-white TV the night before—and she asked. “Do you have a razor?”

  “Why do you need a razor?”

  “I hate these nubs on my legs.” I didn’t know what “nubs” meant, so she explained.

  “What?” I said. “You shave?”

  “Yeah, I shave my legs. It’s so gross.” I’d never heard that expression either. But I gave her my razor and watched her soap her legs, her calves, her shins, her knees, and shave them like she’d been doing it for five thousand years. Later that day I said to the
guys at the gym, “Today a chick shaved in my fuckin’ shower. Have you ever seen that?”

  They looked at one another solemnly, nodded, and said, “Yeaaah.” Then everybody cracked up. I tried to explain: “Oh, because in Europe, girls are all with the Bavarian look, you know, with the hair all over.” That just made them laugh harder.

  Eventually I pieced it together. Some of the girls I dated didn’t shave: this was their protest against the establishment. They felt the beauty market was all about exploiting sex and telling people what to do, so they were rejecting that by being more natural. It was all part of the hippie era. The flowery dresses, the frizzy hair, the food they ate. They all wore beads, lots of beads. They brought incense to my apartment, so the whole place stank. That was bad, but I felt they were on the right track with the freedom of smoking a joint and the naturalness of nudity. All that was wonderful. I’d grown up a little bit like that myself, with the uninhibited scene at the Thalersee.

  —

  All that laid-back stuff was great, but my mission in America was clear. I was on a path. I needed to train like hell, diet like hell, eat well, and win more major titles the following fall. Weider had promised me a year, and I knew that if I did those things, I’d be on a roll.

  Winning a couple of Mr. Universe contests in London didn’t make me anywhere near the best bodybuilder in the world. There were too many overlapping titles, and not everyone was competing in the same place. Being the best would really come down to beating champions like the guys whose pictures I had hanging all over the walls of my room: Reg Park, Dave Draper, Frank Zane, Bill Pearl, Larry Scott, Chuck Sipes, Serge Nubret. They had inspired me, and I said to myself, “These are the kinds of people I have to go through eventually.” My victories had put me in their league, but I was the newcomer with a lot left to prove.

  At the very top of the pedestal was Sergio Oliva, the 230-pound, twenty-seven-year-old Cuban emigré. By now the muscle magazines simply called him the Myth. He’d taken his most recent Mr. Olympia title that fall in New York unopposed: not one of the other four bodybuilding champions invited to compete even showed up.

  Oliva’s background was even more unusual than mine. His father was a sugarcane laborer in pre-Castro Cuba, and during the revolution in the 1950s, Sergio enlisted in General Fulgencio Batista’s army alongside his dad. After Fidel Castro and his rebel forces prevailed, Sergio established himself as an athlete. He was an Olympic weight lifter of much higher caliber than me, ending up on the Cuban team in the 1962 Central American and Caribbean Games. He would have led the team in the 1964 Olympics if he had not hated Castro’s regime so much that he defected to the United States along with many of his teammates. He was also a terrific baseball player. That’s what had helped him refine his waist: tens of thousands of reps twisting to swing a bat.

  I’d met Sergio at the 1968 Mr. Universe contest in Miami, where he gave a posing demonstration that drove the audience wild. As one of the muscle magazines put it, his posing split the concrete. There was no question that Sergio was still way out of my reach. He was really ripped and pound for pound thicker, with more muscle intensity than I had. He had the rare ability among bodybuilders to look fantastic just standing relaxed. His silhouette was the best I’d ever seen: a perfect V-shape tapering from very wide shoulders to a naturally narrow, tubular waist and hips. The “victory pose,” Sergio’s trademark, was a move that very few bodybuilders in competition would even attempt. It involved simply facing the audience with the legs together and the arms extended straight overhead. It exposed the body completely: the huge, sweeping thighs built up from Olympic lifting, the tiny waist, and the near-perfect abdominals, triceps, and serratus. (The serrati are muscles on the sides of the rib cage.)

  I was determined to beat this man eventually, but I was still far from having the kind of body I would need. I’d come to America like a hundred-carat diamond that everyone was looking at and saying, “Holy shit.” But the diamond was only rough cut. It was not ready for display, at least not by American standards. Building a totally world-class body typically takes ten years at least, and I’d been training for only six. But I came on strong, and people were saying, “Look at the size of this young kid. What the hell? This guy, to me, has the most potential.” So I’d won my victories in Europe as much on promise and courage as on the fine points of my physique. A huge amount work still remained to be done.

  The ideal of bodybuilding is visual perfection, like an ancient Greek statue come to life. You sculpt your body the way an artist chisels stone. Say you need to add bulk and definition to your rear deltoid. You have to choose from an inventory of exercises for that muscle. The weight, the bench, or the machine becomes your chisel, and the sculpting could take a year.

  This means you have to be able to see your body honestly and analyze its flaws. The judges in the top competitions scrutinize every detail: muscle size, definition, proportion, and symmetry. They even look at veins, which indicate an absence of fat under the skin.

  In the mirror I could see plenty of strong points and plenty of weaknesses. I’d succeeded in building a foundation of power and mass. By combining Olympic lifting, power lifting, and bodybuilding, I’d developed a very thick and wide back, close to perfect. My biceps were extraordinary in size, height, and muscle peak. I had ripped pectoral muscles, and the best side-chest pose of anybody. I had a real bodybuilder’s frame, with wide shoulders and narrow hips, which helped me achieve that ideal V shape that is one element of perfection.

  But I also had some shortcomings. Relative to my torso, my limbs were too long. So I was always having to build the arms and legs to make the proportions seem right. Even with massive twenty-nine-inch thighs, my legs still looked on the thin side. My calves fell short compared to my thighs, and my triceps fell short compared to the biceps.

  The challenge was to take the curse off all those weak points. It’s human nature to work on the things that we are good at. If you have big biceps, you want to do an endless number of curls because it’s so satisfying to see this major bicep flex. To be successful, however, you must be brutal with yourself and focus on the flaws. That’s when your eye, your honesty, and your ability to listen to others come in. Bodybuilders who are blind to themselves or deaf to others usually fall behind.

  Even more challenging is the biological fact that, in every individual, some body parts develop more readily than others. So when you start working out, you might find yourself saying after two years, “Gee, isn’t it interesting that my forearms never got really as muscular as the upper arms,” or “Isn’t it interesting that my calves somehow aren’t growing so much.” That was my particular bugaboo—the calves. I started out training them ten sets three times a week just like the other body parts, but they did not respond the same way. Other muscle groups were way ahead.

  Reg Park gave me the wake-up call on that. He had perfect twenty-one-inch calves, so fully developed that each one looked like an upside-down valentine heart under the skin. When I trained with him in South Africa, I saw what he did to achieve that. He trained his calves every day, not just three times a week, and with a mind-blowing amount of weight. I was proud that I’d worked up to calf raises with three hundred pounds, but Reg had a cable system that let him apply one thousand. I said to myself, “This is what I need to do. I have to train my calves totally differently and not give them even a chance of not growing.” When I got to California, I made a point of cutting off all my sweatpants at the knees. I would keep my strongpoints covered—my biceps, my chest, my back, my thighs—but I made sure that my calves were exposed so everyone could see. I was relentless and did fifteen sets, sometimes twenty sets, of calf raises every single day.

  I knew all the muscles I needed to focus on systematically. In general, I had better muscles for pulling motions (biceps, lats, and back muscles) than for pressing motions (front deltoids and triceps). It was one of those hereditary things that meant I had to push those muscles much harder and do more sets. I’d built
the big back, but now I had to think about creating the ideal definition and separation between the lats and the pecs and the serratus. I had to do exercises for the serratus, so that meant more closed-grip chin-ups. I had to lower the lats a little, which meant more cable raises and one-arm raises. I had to get the rear deltoids, which meant more lateral raises, in which you hold a dumbbell in each hand while standing and lift them straight out to the sides.

  I had a whole list of muscles to attack: the rear deltoid and the lower latissimus and the intercostals and the abdominals and the calves, and blah, blah, blah! These all had to be built and chiseled and separated and brought into proper proportion to one another. Each morning, I’d get breakfast with one or two training buddies, usually at a deli called Zucky’s on the corner of Fifth Street and Wilshire Boulevard. They had tuna, they had eggs, they had salmon, all the things I liked. Or we would go to one of those family breakfast places like Denny’s.

  Unless I had English class, I would go straight to Gold’s and work out. Afterward, we might hit the beach, where there would be more exercises on the open-air weight-lifting platform, plus swimming and jogging and lying on the sand to perfect our tans. Or I’d go over to Joe Weider’s building and work with the guys cooking up stories for the magazine.

  I always split my routine into two training sessions. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings, I would focus on, say, chest and back. At night I would come back and work on my thighs and calves, and then practice posing and do other exercises. On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, it was shoulders, arms, and forearms. Of course, calves every day, abs every day except Sunday, which was a rest day.

  Often for lunch or dinner we’d hit one of the local smorgasbords. Growing up in Europe, I’d never even heard of a smorgasbord. The idea of a restaurant where you could eat all you wanted would have been incomprehensible. The bodybuilders would start with five, six, or seven eggs, after which we’d go to the next station and eat all the tomatoes and vegetables. Then we would have the steak, and then the fish. Muscle magazines in those days were always warning that you had to have your amino acids, and that you had to be careful because the amino acids in certain foods weren’t complete. “Hey,” we said, “let’s not even think about it; let’s just eat all the proteins. We have the egg, the fish, the beef, the turkey, the cheese—let’s just have it all!” You would think the owners of the smorgasbord would have charged us more at least. But they treated us no different from any other customer. It was as if God had created a restaurant for bodybuilders.