The Hero's Body

II

In conscious emulation of Pop when he was young, my uncle Tony got serious about weightlifting in his twenties. Like my father, he'd been a wrestler in high school, then earned a black belt in karate. I can recall the poster of Bruce Lee tacked up in his basement, behind the punching bag and speed bag, the bloody scowl of the great martial artist as he's about to punt an enemy. Tony had always seen himself as too unmuscled (he hadn't inherited Pop's effortless bulk), and so, after wrestling and karate, weightlifting seemed the natural next step for him.

In the 1980s, he trained with some hardcore Jersey bodybuilders - animals who squatted six hundred pounds, the barbells bending across their backs as if they were rubber - at elite bastions of brawn that were more dungeon than gym: cracked mirrors, leaky pipes, buckets for puking, heavy-metal music that rattled your bones. No place for the hausfrau or noodle-limbed executive. Realms of self-torture where the 150-pound dumbbells never needed dusting.

When I joined Tony in his basement that first day, he'd just begun bodybuilding again after a four-year hiatus, one occasioned by the demands of children, but also by the burnout that came from years of harsh training. To train as he did Monday through Friday, and to do it without the accelerant of steroids, after nine-hour days of a carpenter's toil, the hauling of lumber and pounding of nails, up and down a ladder with hundred-pound stacks of shingles at a noontime hot enough to make tar run, all while he was trying to preserve calories so that his muscles could repair, so that he had enough fuel for another racking session at the gym that day - seven years of that will wipe a man out.

Once my uncle understood that I was committed to bodybuilding, once he realized that I wasn't going to go away - it was summer now and I had little else to do - he accepted me as his partner. We trained together every weekday from three thirty to five o'clock, ninety iron-handed minutes, and he taught me the draconian habits he'd learned at those Jersey gyms in the '80s. Uncles provide boys an avenue of freedom that fathers never can, a welcome into the saltier, slightly more pernicious arenas of adulthood.

As the middle brother, Tony was quieter than my father, less antic, and compared to my uncle Nicky, he was not as daring. Nicky once rode his two-stroke Rickman dirt bike down the hallway of Manville High School - I'm told it sounded like the apocalypse. It often works out that way: while the oldest brother gets all the independence and the youngest brother gets all the attention, the middle brother, strained between the two, retreats inward. Not strafed by divorce and debt and three kids to manage alone, he was more available than my father.

Five days a week he and I performed an enactment of that old initiation rite, everywhere in myth and fact, of the grown male escorting the adolescent into manhood by way of challenging tasks. This is what our routine looked like, a three-day cycle:

Monday: Chest and triceps. (Four sets, heavy weight, low reps.)

Tuesday: Back and biceps. (Four sets, heavy weight, low reps.)

Wednesday: Shoulders and legs. (Four sets, heavy weight, low reps.)

Thursday: Chest and triceps. (Three sets, lighter weight, higher reps.)

Friday: Back and biceps. (Three sets, lighter weight, higher reps.)

Monday: Shoulders and legs. (Four sets, heavy weight, low reps.)

It took several weeks for me to learn the myriad exercises for each body part, how to train properly, heavy enough without getting hurt. My uncle was more patient than I'd thought possible. During straight-bar bicep curls: 'You gotta widen your grip on the bar. Too narrow like that and all the pressure's on your forearms. You gotta feel it in your bis: squeeze your bis at the top of the rep. Don't swing the bar, either. Bend your knees half an inch, arch your back.'

During squats: 'Don't go down so far or you won't be able to get back up. You want your hamstrings about parallel with the floor, maybe just an inch deeper. Don't lean forward, either, or you'll fall over. Stay straight up and down. Keep your head up or you'll fall forward. Keep the bar across your shoulders, not on the back of your neck.'

During bench presses: 'That grip is too wide. You see the grooves here in the bar? Line up your grip in those grooves. Too wide like that and you're not working the center of your chest, you're working your armpits. You want muscular armpits?'

During dead lifts: 'You heave the bar from the ground up. Never start with your back or you'll wrench your spine out of place. Start the lift in your feet, your legs, and then unfold with your back, but always an arched back. Head up at the mirror, always head up. A smooth motion, never jerky.'

Near the start of our training together, during a bout of seated dumbbell curls - 'Twist your wrist inward at the top of the rep so the bi squeezes' - I performed the first set easily enough with twenty-five-pound weights. When it was time for my second set, I grabbed the twenty-five-pounders again, and Tony said, 'What are you doing?'

We looked at one another in the mirror; he was behind me with a bottle, half water, half orange juice. I said, 'My second set.'

'You just did ten reps no problem with those puny things. You could've done twelve. You wanna grow or not? Get the thirty-pounders.'

And I made the mistake of saying, 'These twenty-five-pounders feel pretty good, though.'

'They feel pretty good, huh? We ain't down here to feel pretty good. We're down here to feel pain. And if you can do ten to twelve reps in any exercise, then the weight ain't high enough. And if the weight ain't high enough, you ain't ever gonna grow. The aim is six to eight reps. So grab the thirty-pound dumbbells, and if you can do ten reps with those, then grab the thirty-five-pounders. Quit pussyfootin' around.'

Each week mirrors reflected the wizardly transformation: the rounding of my deltoids and pectorals, the filling of my biceps, the pronounced horseshoe of my triceps, a thickening and broadening of my back, trapezius muscles bumping up from both sides at the base of my neck, quadriceps sweeping out from my waist in two directions, hamstrings and calf muscles beginning to protrude. Muscle pounds sticking, strength increasing within my very grip, the graduation from thirty-pound dumbbells to forty-pounders to fifty-pounders, sliding more plates ('wheels' was our name for the largest, the forty-five-pounders) onto the bench press, the shoulder press, squats, straight-bar and preacher-bar curls, spitting and moaning, grunting and goading one another with come on and three more and push it out. It was a partnership of inspiriting pain.

Thursdays and Fridays were often slightly less intense because, if we'd trained heavy enough Monday through Wednesday, each body part would be too sore to be blitzed again. That soreness was the goal. It meant we'd been barbarian enough, meant the deep, slowtwitch muscle fibers had been properly damaged during exercise, a kind of controlled demolition by the expansion and contraction that happen while weightlifting. Soreness is a signal that you're growing, because that's how a muscle adds mass: during the reparation process, the amino-acid rebuilding of torn tissue. When I woke each morning and wasn't in pain from the previous day's workout, I berated myself until three thirty when it was time to try again, much more savagely this time, a cussing ninety minutes of severity that erased the backslash between pleasure and pain.

You don't get strong and big while bodybuilding; you get strong and big while resting from bodybuilding. The more you rest and eat, the more you grow. With a gutful of egg protein, I fell instantly asleep each night before eight thirty, and my slumber was so consummate, so weighted, I'd wake in the exact position in which I'd blacked out. No pill, no bottle, no smoke or aerobic intercourse has ever allotted me the immovable slumber that occurred after a session of hellward training. I've been missing that subterranean sleep for twenty years.

What happened to me in the fluorescent corner of that basement was a literal empowering, a structural overhaul. All that summer, those initial results, the evolution I witnessed, manifest in my every step, each time I moved, a solidifying, an engorging I could feel in bed with me as I slept, how the growth was noticed by others, complimented, admired: it all produced an elation I hadn't suspected was available to me. I'd bumbled into being devirginized a year earlier and even that gift, the rapture of sex, could not compete with the fortified sense of self I gained in that basement.

One evening after a workout, I walked two blocks, shirtless, to a convenience store for a quart of milk to drink, and in the tunnel beneath the rails I passed an older girl from our neighborhood, seventeen or eighteen now, someone I'd been looking at half my life. Her name began with a V, and because of her, V still seems to me the most erotic letter in our alphabet. She was forever walking across town trailing smoke and hairspray, walking with purpose, to keg parties and the apartments of leather-jacketed men, I imagined, hoop earrings like bracelets, her purse a satchel of secrets beneath the freckled whiteness of her lovely arm. What wonders that purse must have held: cigarettes and pager, lipstick and...