Read Online Hyper-chondriac by Brian Frazer - Free Book Online Page A

Andrew was born, one of my mother’s brothers, who had a warped sense of humor, sent her a sympathy card as a joke. This infuriated my mother while Andrew was alive, but became even more distasteful after he was buried. My mother and uncle then took a thirty-eight-and-
a-half-year hiatus from speaking due to the misappropriation of a Hallmark product.
    â€œWhen did he die?”
    â€œAbout ten months before you were born.”
    â€œSo you guys actually had five kids. Wow! That’s a lot for Jews.”
    â€œActually”—my mother sighed—“had Andrew lived, we wouldn’t have had you.”
    At that very moment, my entire perspective on life shifted. Not only could I potentially get sick as abruptly as my mother, I could die just as suddenly as Andrew. I was already a frenzied and frantic adolescent, but from that day I learned I was a replacement baby, I turned it up a notch and resolved to accomplish as much as I could as quickly as humanly possible before my time was up. Every hour would be rush hour.
    First thing on the agenda: bodybuilding competitions.
    Â 
    I mailed in my application and entry fee for Mr. Natural New England as a college sophomore. For a mere $40, the president of the American Natural Bodybuilding Conference would allow me to stand on a stage in a tiny Speedo and show strangers my six-pack, which I thought was a bargain.
    For bodybuilding novices, “natural” means steroid-free. A lot of my friends at the gym were taking steroids, but I never even considered it. I had witnessed too many guys who had stopped taking them fall into deep depressions because they couldn’t bench-press as much as they used to. Plus, I didn’t want to feel paranoid and attribute internal pains when I was fifty to some non-FDA-approved shortcut drug I took in my twenties. I had enough anxiety as it was.
    My pre-competition training regimen turned out to be tougher than anything I’d ever done. In addition to lifting weights for two hours a day, I also had to lie in a tanning bed for an hour to toast my pasty-white skin—so that spectators could see the separations between my muscles more easily. For another hour a day, I practiced flexing and holding each pose while maintaining a cheesy smile that told the world that this was effortless. Like it’s normal for a human being to show off the width of his back. I even hired a ballet instructor to help me with my transitions between poses and would awake at four-thirty in the morning for our five o’clock sessions. Not only was bodybuilding getting expensive, but what idiot in college gets up less than three hours after Letterman ends so he can flex his calves?
    And then there’s the eating. Perhaps the worst pitfall in bodybuilding, something that I still battle with, is the feeling that if I’m not perpetually stuffing my face, my muscles will wither away. Calories were stocked as if my body was a Costco warehouse. If I didn’t eat something every two hours, I’d freak and swear that a biceps or quad was deflating. An ex-girlfriend informed me that I had “Bigarexia.” 2
    I was obsessed with keeping my body weight as high as possible. Protein became my best friend. I would eat to maximum capacity every few hours. Seven days a week. Month after month after month. And fuck the cardio. That would burn too many calories and make my muscles long and lean—the antithesis of my life’s new ambition.
    I became so leery of “wasting calories” that I’d wait three hours for my roommates to come home to bring up the mail, rather than squander a precious trip down a flight of stairs. Every ounce of my energy was saved for cosmetic purposes.
    On the rare occasions when I would do anything that could, God forbid, actually stretch a muscle—like shoot a basketball—I would immediately do an extra session of eating and lifting to return my body to its now permanent contracted