Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story Read online

  One night we were camped near a stream, and I woke up with a start because I thought I heard the boars. Then I realized there was nothing on top of me. My tank was gone! I looked around and found it twenty or thirty feet away, sticking tail-up in the water. The nose was submerged, and the cannon was stuck down into the mud. I’d forgotten to apply the big brake, it turned out, and the ground was sloped just enough that the tank had slowly rolled away as we slept. I tried to get it out, but the treads just spun in the mud.

  We had to bring in an eighty-ton towing unit, and it took hours to pull out my tank. Then we had to get it to the repair depot. The turret had to be taken off. The cannon had to be sent out to be specially cleaned. I had to sit in confinement for twenty-four hours for that one.

  I could be a risk even in the tank garage. One morning I started my tank, adjusted my seat, and turned to check the gauges before pulling out. The readings were fine, but I felt the tank shaking a little, like the engine was running rough. I thought, “Maybe you should give it a little gas to smooth it out.” So I gave it gas, keeping an eye on the gauges, but the shaking only got worse. This was very odd. Then I noticed that dust was coming down. I looked up out of the hatch and realized that instead of just revving the engine, I’d set the tank in motion and was pushing it through the garage wall. That’s what was causing the shaking. Then a pipe burst, and water was spurting everywhere, and there was the smell of gas.

  People were screaming “Stop! Stop!” so I shut off the tank. I got out and raced down the length of the garage to find the commanding officer, who knew my father. I figured he was my best hope. I’d seen him just that morning, and he’d said things like, “I ran into your dad the other day and told him how great you’re doing.”

  I knocked on his door and said, “Sir, I think that I caused a little bit of a problem.”

  He was still in a great mood. “Oh, don’t worry about it! What is it, Arnold?”

  “Well, check it out; you’ve got to see.”

  And he said, “Come on.” He patted me on the back as we walked outside, still in the spirit of the morning, as if to say, “You’re doing well.”

  Then he saw the water spurting and guys milling around and the tank jutting through the wall.

  He changed personality instantly: screaming, calling me every name he could think of, saying that he was going to call my father and tell him the opposite of what he’d said before. The veins on his neck were bulging. Then he went cold and snapped, “When I get back from lunch, I want everything to be fixed. That’s the only way to redeem yourself. Get the troops together and do it.”

  The nice thing about the military is that it’s self-sufficient. The division had its own bricklayers and plumbers and building supplies. Luckily, the roof hadn’t fallen down or anything major, and my tank, of course, was made of steel, so it was fine. Guys thought my accident was so funny that they jumped right in to help, so I didn’t have to organize much. By afternoon, we had the pipes fixed and the wall repaired and just had to wait for it to dry so we could put on the stucco outside. I was feeling good because I’d had a chance to learn about mixing cement and laying cinderblock. Of course I had to put up with the whole base teasing me, “Oh, I heard about your tank.” And I had to spend a whole week on KP duty, peeling potatoes with all the other screwups right where everybody could see us when they came to get their food.

  By spring 1966, I was starting to think the army wasn’t necessarily practical for me. My victory in Stuttgart the previous fall had attracted a lot of attention. Albert Busek, one of the organizers of the competition and the editor of Sportrevue magazine, wrote a commentary predicting that bodybuilding was about to enter the Schwarzenegger era. I got several offers to become a professional trainer, including one from Busek’s publisher, Rolf Putziger, who was Germany’s biggest bodybuilding promoter. He offered me a job managing his gym in Munich, Germany, the Universum Sport Studio. It was extremely tempting: there would be a wonderful opportunity for training, and I’d have a better chance to become known. In Austria, bodybuilding was still a sideshow to weight lifting, but in Germany, it was more established in its own right.

  In the bodybuilding world, word had continued to spread about my victory in Stuttgart. I’d been on the cover of several magazines because I made a good story: this Austrian kid who had come out of nowhere and was eighteen years old with nineteen-inch biceps.

  I decided that it made sense to request an early discharge from the army. Along with the request, I submitted a copy of Putziger’s job offer and some of the magazine stories about me. My commanding officers knew my ambition to become a bodybuilding champion, and I thought this would be a great step for me. But I wasn’t holding my breath. While the minimum term of enlistment in the Austrian army was only nine months, tank drivers were required to serve three years because of the cost of their training. I’d heard of drivers getting discharged early because of family illness or because they were needed back on the farm, but I’d never heard of anybody getting discharged to pursue a dream.

  It wasn’t that I disliked the army. In fact, it was one of the best things that had ever happened to me. Being a soldier had done a lot for my self-confidence. Once I was living independently from my family, I found out I could depend on myself. I learned to make comrades of strangers and be a comrade in return. The structure and discipline seemed more natural than at home. If I carried out orders, I felt I’d accomplished something.

  I’d learned a thousand little things in the course of nine months: from washing and mending shirts to frying eggs on the exhaust shield of a tank. I’d slept in the open, guarded barracks for nights on end, and found out that nights without sleep don’t mean that you can’t perform at a high level the next day and that days without food don’t mean you’ll starve. These were things I’d never even thought about before.

  I aimed to be a leader someday, but I knew it was important to learn obedience as well. As Winston Churchill said, the Germans were the best at being at your throat or at your feet, and that same psychology prevailed in the Austrian army. If you let your ego show through, they’d put you in your place. Age eighteen or nineteen is when the mind is ready to absorb this lesson; if you wait till thirty, it’s too late. The more the army confronted us with hardship, the more I felt like “Okay, it’s not going to worry me; bring it on.” Above all, I was proud to be trusted at age eighteen with a fifty-ton machine, even if I didn’t always handle the responsibility as well as I might have.

  My request for an early discharge sat around for months. Before it was acted on, there was one more blot on my military record. In the late spring, we were on a twelve-hour nighttime exercise from six o’clock at night till six in the morning. By two o’clock, the company had maneuvered into positions at the top of a ridge, and the order came down: “Okay, break for food. Tank commanders report for a briefing.”

  I was on the radio joking with a friend who’d just been given a newer version of the Patton tank, the M60, which was powered by diesel. He made the mistake of bragging that his tank was faster than mine. Finally I challenged him to prove it, and we both took off down the ridge. I would have stopped—a voice of reason in my head told me to—but I was winning. The rest of the guys in my tank were going nuts. I heard someone shouting at me to stop, but I thought it was just the other tank driver trying to get the advantage. When I got to the bottom of the ridge, I stopped and looked back for the M60. That was when I noticed a soldier clinging to our turret as if his life depended on it. He and a couple of other infantry had been sitting on the tank when I took off.

  The others had either jumped off or fallen; he was the only one who’d been able to hang on to the end. We turned on our lights and went back up the hill—slowly, so that we wouldn’t run over anybody—and collected the scattered troops. Fortunately, there were no serious injuries. When we arrived at the top, three officers were waiting in a jeep. I drove past and parked my tank as if nothing had happened.

  No sooner had I
climbed out of the hatch than the three officers all started screaming at me, like a chorus. I stood at attention until they were finished. After the yelling stopped, one of the officers stepped forward, glared at me for a moment, and then started to laugh. “Tank Driver Schwarzenegger,” he ordered, “move your tank over there.”

  “Yes sir!” I parked the tank where he had pointed. Climbing out, I noticed that I was standing in deep, thick mud.

  “Now, Tank Driver Schwarzenegger, I want you to crawl down under the length of your tank. When you come out the back, climb up on top, down through the turret, down through the hull, and out of your emergency hatch below. Then do it again.” He ordered me to repeat that circuit fifty times.

  By the time I had finished, four hours later, I was coated with twenty pounds of mud and could barely move. I must have smeared one hundred more pounds of mud inside the tank climbing through. Then I had to drive it back to base and clean it out. The guy could have thrown me in jail for a week, but I must admit that this was a more effective punishment.

  I’ll never know for sure, but I think the tank drag race may have worked in favor of my early-discharge request. A few weeks after the incident, I was called to a hearing with my superiors. The commander had the bodybuilding magazines and my job offer letter on his desk. “Explain this to us,” he said. “You signed up to be a tank driver for three years, and then you requested a few months ago that you want to leave this summer, because you have this position in Munich.”

  I liked the army, I told them, but the Munich job was a giant opportunity for my career.

  “Well,” the officer said with a smile, “due to the fact that you are somewhat unsafe around here, we’ll approve your request and let you go early. We can’t have you crashing any more tanks.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Mr. Universe

  “I CAN ALWAYS GET you a job as a lifeguard at the Thalersee, so just remember if anything goes wrong, you never have to worry.” That’s what Fredi Gerstl told me when I visited him to say good-bye. Fredi was always generous about helping young people, and I knew he meant well, but I wasn’t interested in a lifeguard job or any other safety net. Even though Munich was only two hundred miles from Graz, for me it was the first step on the way from Austria to America.

  I’d heard stories about Munich: how every week a thousand trains came into its train station. I’d heard about the nightlife and the wild atmosphere of the beer halls and on and on. As the train came near to the city, I began seeing more and more houses, and then bigger buildings, and then up ahead the city center. I was wondering in a corner of my brain, “How will I find my way around? How will I survive?” But mostly I was selling myself on the mantra “This is going to be my new home.” I was turning my back on Graz, I was out of there, and Munich was going to be my city, no matter what.

  Munich was a boomtown, even by the standards of the West German economic miracle, which was in full swing by 1966. It was an international city of 1.2 million people. It had just landed the right to host the Summer Olympics in 1972 and the soccer World Cup finals in 1974. Holding the Olympic Games in Munich was meant to symbolize West Germany’s transformation and reemergence into the community of nations as a modern democratic power. Construction cranes were everywhere. The Olympic Stadium was already going up, as were new hotels and office buildings and apartments. All across the city were major excavations for the new subway system, designed to be the most modern and efficient in the world.

  The Hauptbahnhof, or main station, where I was about to get off the train, was at the center of all this. The construction sites needed laborers, and they were streaming in from all over the Mediterranean and the Eastern bloc. In the station waiting rooms and on the platforms, you could hear Spanish, Italian, Slavic, and Turkish languages spoken more often than you heard German. The area around the station was a mix of hotels, nightclubs, shops, flophouses, and commercial buildings. The Universum Sport Studio, the gym where I’d been hired, was on the Schillerstrasse just five minutes from the station. Both sides of the street were lined with nightclubs and strip bars that stayed open till four in the morning. Then at five o’clock, the first breakfast places opened, where you could get sausage or drink beer or eat breakfast. You could always celebrate somewhere. It was the kind of place where a nineteen-year-old kid from the provinces had to get streetwise very fast.

  Albert Busek had promised to have a couple of guys come meet me at the station, and as I walked up the platform, I saw the grinning face of a bodybuilder named Franz Dischinger. Franz had been the junior-division favorite in the Best Built Man in Europe competition in Stuttgart, the title I’d won the year before. He was a good-looking German kid, even taller than me, but his body had not filled out yet, which I think was why the judges had picked me instead. Franz was a joyful guy, and we’d hit it off really well, laughing a lot together. We’d agreed that if I ever came to Munich, we’d be training partners. After we grabbed something to eat at the station, he and his buddy, who had a car, dropped me off at an apartment on the outskirts of town where Rolf Putziger lived.

  I had yet to meet my new boss, but I was glad he had offered to put me up, because I couldn’t afford to rent a room. Putziger turned out to be a heavy, unhealthy-looking old man in a business suit. He was almost bald and had bad teeth when he smiled. He gave me a friendly welcome and showed me around his place; there was a small extra room that he explained would be mine as soon as the bed that he’d ordered for me was delivered. In the meantime, would I mind sleeping on the living room couch? It didn’t bother me at all, I said.

  I thought nothing about this arrangement until a few nights later, when Putziger came in late and instead of going into his bedroom lay down next to me. “Wouldn’t you be more comfortable coming into the bedroom?” he asked. I felt his foot pressing up against mine. I was up off that couch like a shot, grabbing my stuff and heading for the door. My mind was going nuts: what had I gotten myself into? There were always gays among bodybuilders. In Graz, I’d known a guy who had a fantastic home gym where my friends and I would work out sometimes. He was very open about his attraction to men and showed us the section of the city park where the men and boys hung out. But he was a real gentleman and never imposed his sexual orientation on any of us. So I thought I knew what gay men were like. Putziger definitely didn’t seem gay; he looked like a businessman!

  Putziger caught up with me on the street as I stood trying to process what had happened and figure out where to go. He apologized and promised not to bother me if I came back in the house. “You are my guest,” he said. Back inside, of course, he tried to close the deal again, telling me he could understand that I preferred women, but if I’d be his friend, he could get me a car and help my career and so on. Of course, I could have used a real mentor at that point, but not at that cost. I was relieved to get out of there for good the next morning.

  The reason Putziger didn’t fire me was that he needed a star for his gym even more than he needed a lover. Bodybuilding was such an obscure sport that there were only two gyms in Munich, and the larger of the two belonged to Reinhard Smolana, who in 1960 was the first Mr. Germany and who had won Mr. Europe in 1963. Smolana had also already placed third in Mr. Universe competition, so he was without any doubt the best-ranked German bodybuilder and the obvious authority on weight training. His gym was better equipped and more modern than Putziger’s. Customers gravitated to Smolana; my job as the new sensation was to help the Universum Sport Studio compete. Albert Busek, the editor of Sportrevue, who had set all this in motion by suggesting me, turned out to be as honorable as Rolf Putziger was sleazy. When I told him about what had happened, he was disgusted. Since I now had no place to stay, he helped me convert a storeroom in the gym into sleeping quarters. He and I quickly became good friends.

  Albert would have been a doctor or scientist or intellectual if anyone had ever told him to go to the university. Instead, he’d gone to engineering school. He discovered working out and then realized that he
had talents for writing and photography. He asked Putziger if he could do some work for the magazine. “Yeah, give me an article, write something,” Putziger said. After Albert and his wife had twins, and his student funding was cut, he ended up working for Putziger full time. Before long, Albert was running the magazine and had established himself as an expert on the bodybuilding scene. He was sure that I would become the next big thing, and because he wanted to see me succeed, he was willing to be the buffer between Putziger and me.

  Apart from my troubles with the owner, the job was ideal. Putziger’s establishment consisted of the gym, the magazine, and a mail-order business that sold nutritional supplements. The gym itself had several rooms instead of one big hall; it also had windows and natural light rather than the damp concrete walls I had gotten used to at the stadium in Graz. The equipment was more sophisticated than any I’d ever had access to. Besides weights, there was a full set of machines for shoulders, back, and legs. That gave me the opportunity to add exercises that would single out muscles, add definition, and refine my body in ways that are impossible to achieve with free weights alone.

  I’d learned in the army that I loved helping people train, so that part of the job came easily. Over the course of the day, I would teach small groups and do one-on-one sessions with a wild assortment of guys: cops, construction workers, businessmen, intellectuals, athletes, entertainers, Germans and foreigners, young and old, gay and straight. I encouraged American soldiers from the nearby base to train there; the Universum Sport Studio was the first place I’d ever met a black person. Many of our customers were there simply to boost their fitness and health, but we had a core group of competitive weight lifters and bodybuilders whom I could imagine as serious training partners. And I realized that I knew how to rally and challenge guys like that. “Yeah, you can be my training partner; you need help,” I’d joke. As the trainer, I liked being the ringleader, and even though I had very little money, I would take them out for lunch or dinner and pay.