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the unsubtle flirting between sets of lunges, sets of squats, workout moans and faces remarkably coital, part brunt, part bliss.
    For two years I’d been reading in muscle magazines about gyms such as this, but those articles must have been too puritanical because they forgot to tell me about the humming sexuality, the pre-orgasmic splendor of the place, those about-to-give-birth attitudes. Nurse Whitman said it: Urge and urge and urge, / Always the procreant urge of the world . For an eighteen-year-old kid who’d misplaced God and didn’t much mind, it was a festival of carnality and better than any heaven you could have conjured for me.
    It’s true that the Edge was the district primarily of the weightlifter and dogged bodybuilder—it was like being in a wilderness of erections: large, hard, vascular men planted everywhere around you—but for the sake of its survival, the gym also humored normal people, the loafered and the desk-glued who clicked keyboards at various firms in the vicinity, some of whom were hand-held through timid exercises by trainers who looked like surfers. The presence of these normal ones was welcome, as planets welcome their moons. It was they who gawked, who provided the stunned audience for our daily Mardi Gras of muscle. A gym such as the Edge was a gym only in the most literal, practical meaning. For those of us who would make it our home, who would come of age there, and become the ambassadors of its kingdom, its physical utility was only one part of its value.
    I’ve heard certain tweeds describe a gym as a microcosm of society, complete with its own lexicon ( pumped, shredded, juiced ), its own cruel hierarchies (the largest men and fittest women, those Santas among elves, rule the upper stratum, while the pencil necks and chubbers are the unfortunate helots), and its own regulated behavior (don’t you dare touch a machine or weight when a world-beater is using it). That might be accurate, gyms might have their own flesh-and-ironecosystem, but for me and the circle that would adopt me, the Edge was theater and church before it was anything else, the ancient triumvirate of ritual and drama and play. We relished the stage-like atmosphere of it all, this theater in the round, relished its most performative aspects, the music and the pageantry, the costumes and the exhibitionism. You should have seen the multicolored outfits I stretched over my frame. An elastane one-piece, striped in turquoise and white, was not the worst of it. A night at the gym often felt like a night of kabuki in a strip club.
    Or else our body mass as Mass, because for the many failed Catholics among us, bodybuilding was both a form of homage to and revolt from the flesh-centered mythos of Catholicism. We said to the Church, in effect, You want a fixation on the flesh of our battered Messiah? We’ll make ourselves into messiahs, self-saviors. With this iron we’ll torture ourselves into godliness . The Satan of Paradise Lost , that unrivaled insurgent, describes himself and his legion of the fallen as self-begot, self-rais’d / By our own quick’ning power , and that’s the kind of sublime, steroidal ego to which bodybuilders aspire.
    We wanted to be totems, objects of veneration and warning, of the extraordinary and the occult. A tired psychologist will tell you that we wanted these things because we were internally minuscule people with the psyches of hurt birds, and I don’t deny the trace of accuracy in that claim. But the more exciting assessment might be this: we wanted sexiness and seduction and exhilaration, some communion with the sacred in a culture that no longer acclaimed the sacred, and, above all, we wanted brotherhood. We wanted to belong.

    I began by training with those boyhood pals who’d joined the Edge before me. The way we trained, we couldn’t train alone. We required partners, spotters to supervise the high poundage we lifted.During a bench