Muscle Read online

Page 2


  These men never sucked in their cheeks. Just the opposite, they puffed and preened through the pages, displaying their frightening wares of tanned tissue and bulging veins in the most Herculean poses: the crab, the javelin throw, the back double-biceps. And always, every few pages, there was Arnold.

  The Education had been clear on Arnold’s history. Born in 1948 to middle-class parents in Graz, Austria, he began his communion with iron at the age of fifteen. He approached the weights with what Gaines and Butler in their book Pumping Iron labeled such “joy and fierceness” that just five years later, barely out of his teens, he won his first Mr. Universe title. By the time he retired, “The Austrian Oak” had won Mr. Universe four more times and the most prestigious title in bodybuilding, Mr. Olympia, an unprecedented seven times. Arnold ruled bodybuilding in the way Muhammad Ali ruled boxing, with enough skill and charisma to dumbfound critics and competitors alike.

  But it didn’t end there. Upon his retirement from bodybuilding, Arnold simply changed fields, making himself part of the Zeitgeist with his ascension to the silver screen and his marriage to Maria Shriver.

  Through iron, he had got what he wanted: big-balled muscles and a permanent pass to the Kennedy compound. Surely, I thought at my desk, if he could do that, then I could fulfill my own more limited ambition and gain 20 to 30 pounds.

  But I had a feeling it wouldn’t be easy. Gone were the days of Indian clubs and Charles Atlas. I had seen a photo of him once, smiling and flexing on the beach, supporting a pair of bathing beauties on his broad shoulders. He made lifting seem as easy and pleasant as a Sunday afternoon stroll in the park.

  In the pages of the magazines spread out before me, however, there was not a smile to be found on these modern-day builders. Just a look of grim determination, as lifter after lifter grunted, strained, heaved, and pulled black iron in California gyms. They seemed close to bursting from the stress. How far they’d come from the days of Charles Atlas. It was not at all clear that these modern men were even of the same species.

  I sat in my cubicle and inhaled anxiously. I hadn’t counted on the pain angle—not to this degree anyway. I wavered just for a moment, but then made my decision. If this “no pain, no gain” adage were true, then, I would learn not just to accept pain, but to embrace it.

  With that resolve, I found myself after work grimly purchasing the necessities for my mission. I bought a stiff leather weight-lifting belt, a pair of canvas sneakers, jocks, and gray sweats. What else would I need? Bandages? A stretcher? Clutching my new gym bag to my bony chest, I made it to the Vanderbilt Y on East Forty-seventh Street, just a few blocks from my job. With my corporate discount, the price was negligible.

  There I sat in my black, size 38-L suit, as Mr. Quigley, the head membership coordinator, spoke to me of the advantages of the gym.

  “We’ve got jogging,” he said, “though, of course, you have to run in packs. …”

  “Packs?” I asked, confused.

  “Yes,” he sighed. “For safety’s sake. To lessen the probability factor of attack by EDPs on the street.”

  “EDPs?” I asked.

  “Yes, you know, Emotionally Disturbed People.”

  I knew. The subway skell and his ilk—the reason I was there. I barely heard Mr. Quigley as he ran through the Y’s other sports programs: basketball, swimming, karate. I didn’t hear him at all when he spoke of ceramics, modern dance, and acting. I couldn’t, the din upstairs was deafening. Mr. Quigley lifted his head and frowned as the ceiling quaked and white specks of plaster rained down on our heads.

  “The weight room?” I asked, unable to contain my excitement.

  “It makes me physically ill,” Mr. Quigley grimaced. He shook his head sadly. The sagging heavy jowels, the eyes ringed with fatigue made him look like a rheumy basset hound. “Perverts. Animals. We don’t like these people any more than you do,” he said. “We don’t encourage them, you understand, but we can’t just stop them from coming in. We are, after all, a Christian organization.”

  This struck me as odd. After all, just that afternoon The Education had cleared up my own misconceptions. Arnold had stated categorically that the weight room was not a breeding ground for cripples and addicts, sexual deviants and dangerously unbalanced men. No, that was a false and absurd surmise from a prejudiced public, he’d said.

  The muscle magazines concurred, taking great pains to explain that gyms are actually a haven of safety in a world rife with disease, poverty, and prejudice. They are the stronghold of democracy, they said, where every lifter, regardless of color or creed, is free to pursue personal physique gains. Just bring a “positive mental attitude,” and you’ll be among like-minded friends in the gym, the magazines promised, happy, healthy, and feeling terrific.

  So, in some confusion, I pocketed the new membership card Mr. Quigley gave me, and headed up the steps to the Y’s locker room that night. I pulled my new sweatshirt over my head, and collected myself on the wooden bench by my locker before venturing to the weight room.

  “Remember,” I prodded myself, hitting my fist into my cupped hand, “joy and fierceness,” “joy and fierceness.” I leaped up and strode to the door. It wasn’t until I actually set a foot inside that I panicked.

  First, it was the heat. It felt like a Saigon summer. My legs buckled from it. Then the crowd—I was amazed the room could hold them all. Everywhere around me, there were men. Hundreds of them. I say men, mind you, because, despite what the magazines suggested (“Lifting is family fun!”), there were no women or children present.

  I recognized the fierceness immediately. The air was filled with violence. On the far side of the room, among the scattered dumbbells and barbells—the “free-weights” I recognized from the magazines—gathered a muscular band of men about ten strong. Many of them wore camouflage pants and black combat boots. They punctuated their exercises with savage screams and directed murderous glances toward the fifty or so thinner men who were working out near me.

  The men on my side of the room were engaged in pulling cables or lifting bars connected to two skeletal, chrome structures immediately before me. All I could hear, aside from the background rock music, were wrenching groans of despair and the monotonous clinking of iron. All I could see beneath the sickly glow of the few working fluorescent bulbs were the sagging shoulders and bent brows of the defeated. So much for joy.

  The floor was a dumbbell graveyard. A few were chrome, but most were flat, ugly, black iron, and they covered the interconnecting rubber black mats that passed for a rug. The walls, coated in dimpled black rubber, supported steel racks of all sizes, some apparently to accommodate certain exercises, others to house the iron equipment. The windows were covered with corroded iron bars. The whole hopeless thing looked like a nightmare out of Piranesi.

  I hadn’t the faintest idea how to proceed. Should I simply select one of the weights at my feet and start swinging it, as if I were an iron veteran? I bent forward to pick one of the smaller ones up from the floor, when a fist hit my kidney, and a scream pierced my ear.

  “Move your ass, stork!”

  I sagged to my knees from the blow and looked directly into the eyes of a double amputee. On his chest he wore a shirt that said Bert, on his head a baseball cap that said “Do the Hustle.” He covered what was left of his legs with a Hefty garbage bag, drawn tight around his waist by his weight-lifting belt. There was no wheelchair in sight. The size of his massive arms made me wonder if he’d ever used one.

  “I beg your pardon,” I muttered, feeling my aching kidney with one hand, shamed that I had inconvenienced him. “Can I help you get a weight?” I asked, in an attempt to remedy the situation.

  “Fuck off, new meat!” he roared, scuttling off to join his huge friends at the free-weight sector.

  By the time I regained my feet, this raucous band turned on me. At first, the chant was barely audible above the thunderous pulse of rock
music, but it soon grew deafening.

  “New meat! New meat!” the group sang, led by Bert, the snarling gargoyle. “NEW MEAT! NEW MEAT!”

  My heart started racing. I began to hyperventilate. This was something I hadn’t encountered in The Education or the magazines. What’s next? I wondered. Rape? Public hanging? I was preparing to flee and abandon the whole endeavor for one of the Y’s safer offerings—ceramics perhaps—when a figure sprang up from behind the neighboring machine and grabbed my hand.

  “Hi, I’m Austin and a Capricorn!” he shouted above the clamor with a smile. Though he was a bag of bones himself, his T-shirt read, “If you’re going to be a bear, be a grizzly!”

  I was too frightened to say a word. It might be a trap, I remember thinking. Warily, I accepted his hand.

  “Oh, don’t worry about those sillies.” He waved at the beefy troop on the far side of the room. No longer chanting, they now bickered among themselves and directed their fury at the Olympic barbells and dumbbells in their hands.

  “They don’t mean any harm—not really,” Austin assured me. “I couldn’t help but notice you before back in the banana republic,” he tittered, motioning to the locker room.

  I explained to Austin as politely as possible that I had come to the Y with one intention only, and that was physical development. He understood immediately.

  “Jesus, what wouldn’t we all give for a few more inches,” he sighed.

  “Should I start with free-weights?” I asked.

  “Sorry, babe,” he said, putting his arm around my shoulder, “but you’ve got to learn to walk before you can run.”

  He steered me away from the free-weight side, toward his friends.

  With Austin’s help, I made the acquaintance of the two machines that dominated this part of the room. These were called “the Universals,” named after their manufacturer, The Universal Machine Corporation based in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. They looked like the kind of stripped-down equipment U.S. astronauts had left on the moon. According to Austin, they would be my principal means of physical transformation.

  “What we’re all doing here is called ‘circuit training,’” Austin said, grandly waving his arms at the men before us.

  I looked at the men by the machines. Heads bowed, they trudged from one exercise station to wait in line by another. They looked about as happy as war-torn collaborators awaiting execution. The only sound I heard from them was a mechanical recitation as they counted their repetitions during each set.

  “It’s called a ‘circuit,’” said Austin. “As you can see, we all do a little tour around the machine, stopping at certain stations along the way. Doesn’t matter which of the two machines you choose, they’re duplicates to ease the congestion. Now, see, all you have to do is lie on a bench, sit on a stool, or stand, depending on the exercise, and push or pull a bar or cable connected to a weight stack in the machine. One complete tour of all the stations, about ten in all, is a circuit. That should take you about 30 minutes. Three complete circuits is a workout.”

  I peered into the machine’s metal innards. There were numerous weight stacks within the rectangular frame of the contraption. Each stack was attached to a pulley or a bar projected outward to a stool or station.

  “Is it safe?” I asked, prodding the cold steel of a weight stack with my finger.

  Austin laughed at my anxiety. “Look, you’re a Virgo, am I right or am I right? I knew it! You Virgos are so fussy. These machines are much safer than those free-weights over there, believe me.”

  I looked over at the free-weight section. Just then, a short black man with absurdly huge legs wrapped his fingers tightly around another man’s neck.

  “Sweepea, Goddamnit! Call me by my fuckin’ name. I ain’t Mousie! I’m The Portuguese Rambo, you fuck!” he screamed.

  Sweepea’s face was rapidly turning purple. I looked around the room. No one was even watching. I glanced back at Austin.

  “Oh, it doesn’t mean a thing. Mousie, oh, I mean ‘The Portuguese Rambo’—he likes to be called that, you know—well, he’s very excitable. This sort of thing happens every night. It’s part of the process,” Austin explained.

  He brought my attention back to the machines. With the Universal, he said, the weight is always connected to the machine. You never have to balance it, just push or pull. With free-weights, there is no intermediary between you and the weights. If you lose your grip with them, you might well crush your face.

  “Machines are less efficient than free-weights if you really want size, since they do some of the work for you, but they’re a great place to start,” Austin told me. I understood. I needed a few months on training wheels before tackling the real stuff.

  “Look, I’ll take you through your first circuit, if you like,” Austin said.

  He ushered me off to a Naugahyde bench dripping with sweat. I lay flat down on it and watched as he inserted a metal pin in the weight stack by my head. The stack in the machine was connected to a bar that jutted out over my chest. Twelve times, I pushed the bar from my chest to arm’s length. I started turning beetroot-red after the eighth rep. This was my introduction to the bench press.

  “Breathe!” Austin shouted, hovering over me. “Like you’re having a baby!”

  At the shoulder, or deltoid, press, I perfected my breathing. I sat on a stool facing the Universal, grabbed the bar by my shoulders with both hands, and pushed it over my head. I exhaled when I pushed the bar up, and inhaled when I eased it down. At the seated rowing station, I sat on the floor, my feet braced against the machine, and made like a collegiate rower, substituting a handgrip, cable and weight stack for an oar. This was for my back or “lats,” as Austin called them (the abbreviated form of latissimus dorsi).

  I learned that my arms were really divided into two muscles: triceps, or the back of the arm, and biceps, the bulge at the top. Austin adjusted the stack as I worked my triceps by pushing down on a bar cabled to the top of one of the machine’s stations. For my biceps, I fell in line with the others, waited my turn, then grabbed a handlebar at thigh height and curled it up to my chest.

  That was it for my upper body. Push or pull and recover; fall in line for the next exercise; push or pull and recover. It was a continuing theme. Already, I could feel a nasty degree of pain.

  Austin laughed. “Believe me, it’s perfectly normal. You see, you tear the muscle each time you work out. That’s why you wait 48 hours before working the same muscle again. If you don’t, you just flog the thing to death, and it’s of no use to anyone.”

  Legs were next, broken down into my “quads” or quadriceps, the front of the thighs; “hams” or hamstrings, the back of the thighs; and calves. The Universal had special steel pedals for exercising the quads. I settled myself into the Naugahyde chair, braced my arms on the metal grips by my hips, and pushed, 12 times.

  Austin went next, then led me to the line for the leg curl station, where I lay flat on my stomach on a bench, fit my legs under a padded bar, and, bending at the knee, brought the bar up with my heels to touch my hamstrings for 12 repetitions.

  My first circuit was complete at the calf station, where I stood on a narrow plank of wood, and raised myself on tiptoe and back down again using only my calves. The exercise seemed absurdly simple until Austin added a padded yoke to my shoulders connecting me to a weight stack in the machine.

  That was it, upper and lower body. I’d just completed my first circuit. I sat down, too confused to be exhausted. I had two more circuits to go for my first workout.

  “What about that?” I asked, pointing at a man who held a bar in both hands and was busy shrugging his shoulders toward the sky.

  “Oh that. That’s for the trapezius muscles. I think ‘traps’ look unsightly on a man,” Austin sniffed.

  I noticed that none of the men by the machines had them. On the far side of the room, though, everyone did. These “trap
s” bunched up like single grapefruits on either side of the neck. They were thoroughly intimidating. I couldn’t wait to get them.

  “Anyway, I’ve just taught you the basics. For every exercise, there are tons of variations. You’ll see as you go along.”

  Just then, a man dressed in a singlet and what appeared to be a tutu broke from the line for the deltoid press to introduce himself to me.

  Quickly, Austin pushed him away, hissing, “Back off, Mary. He’s mine!” The man skulked back to his station.

  I couldn’t let this go on any longer. “Is this a gay gym?” I asked.

  “Look, honey,” he replied. “All gyms are gay.”

  I examined the men by the machines. There Austin seemed right. “But what about them?” I asked, pointing to the free-weight lifters.

  Austin laughed out loud. “Especially them,” he said. “They just don’t know it yet!”

  I thanked Austin for the circuit and the information, and, as gently as possible, told him that I didn’t think I’d be needing a training partner for the rest of the workout.

  As he walked disconsolately back to his friends, I set about mastering the machine. “Joy and fierceness,” I reminded myself, “joy and fierceness.” I adjusted the weight so that I could accomplish the mandatory 12 repetitions. Invariably, I began pumping them out with ease, imagining the day I would walk unmolested through the streets. But before long, I was whimpering and hideously contorting my aching body as I pushed the last few up.

  The men by the machine eyed me warily. I could sense it. I was doing something wrong. No one else at the machines seemed even to be trying.

  Austin came over. “Take it easy,” he whispered, “don’t get into such a flap. Remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day.” But his words meant nothing to me. After jerking and bouncing my way through two more circuits, I silently congratulated myself—I was already one of the stronger men on that side of the room. I left the weight room flushed with victory.