Read Online The Hero's Body by William Giraldi - Free Book Online

you doing?” He meant “What drugs are you doing?” But he never mentioned it to me again. Perhaps he thought it was my father’s task to fix the trouble I’d given myself, or perhaps he thought it wasn’t trouble at all. Like most families, mine often chose to cover its eyes and ears in an attempt to maintain peace. They pretended that problems weren’t problems because meddling caused other problems.
    A teenager is already a squall of hormones; that mortifying passage from boy to man shouldn’t be further disrupted by synthetic testosterone or something called oxymetholone. But don’t believe the after-school specials and alarmist brochures: steroids don’t make marauding goons, don’t turn placid males into Visigoths. On anabolic steroids, you are only more of what you were. The patient stay patient; the impetuous get impetuous and are glad for the excuse. Here’s what I know for sure: I raised the physical stakes for myself. I required this next step. To ignore the all-natural code of my family, to become the only Giraldi to flood myself with steroids, I must have been pantingly desperate for some semblance of power, for my place among men.

    I had no intention of shipping off for college, no spurring from my father to do so; my grades were painfully average, and despite my private life as a reader, I didn’t think that the university world was open to me. I wanted to linger in town because I was in love with a girl who was lingering too, and because I wanted to weightlift. By the time I was paroled from high school in ’92, a coven of boyhood friends had begun training at a gym in the next town called the Physical Edge. I’d known for several months that the dungeoned isolation of my uncle’s basement would no longer suffice. Every bodybuilder eventually requires an atmosphere ofincitement and arousal, a dynamizing gym republic, full membership in the cult.
    I’d been all along too sapling, too uncertain of myself, not muscled enough to join the Edge or any of the less fervid gyms in the area. I remember fearing ridicule, the possibility of not belonging, of being jeered back through the door by freaky-looking beasts. But I was stronger and more muscular, more steroidal, than many of the pals who were already training there. It was the combination of Anadrol and graduating high school—the wideness of adulthood before me like the prelude to embrace—that gave me the necessary poise to walk into the Edge that first day.
    Set back in a spottily wooded industrial park, behind leaning plots of corn, the Edge was a crimson-and-silver sprawl of modern equipment and Olympic free weights, five thousand square feet of mirror and metal. An aerobics room of chants ( and one and two and three ), an alcove of stationary bikes, treadmills, and StairMasters. Manifold machines of transformation, pulley machines and Smith machines, squat racks, flat and incline and decline benches, a battalion of gray dumbbells, black barbells, red faces pinched and grunting under them. Framed photos of pro bodybuilders in muscular tableau. Everywhere the iron-to-iron slap of plates beneath speakers pealing Soundgarden, Nirvana, Metallica, such distortion-fueled bruit. Everywhere the scent of rubber, oil, and sweat.
    On my first day there, I tried to carry myself as if I were accustomed to such onsets of stimuli, but I’m not sure I succeeded. You’ve seen a six-year-old at a summer carnival, his eyes and limbs manic to take in, to test, all things, all at once? It was like that for me. When I tell you that the Edge was electrified by eroticism, I don’t mean covertly. I mean the eroticism was flagrant, women and men tending to their vanity and fending off their deaths, quarter-dressed and sweating, spandex shorts with priapic knolls or else split crotches blotted with damp, nipples in salute, the aromas of bodies in extremis,arms and legs aglint with their exertions,