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press the spotter helped raise the barbell from the rack, and then he was there either to prevent you from dropping the thing onto your esophagus, or to prod you through a round of forced reps. We used forced reps at the end of a set when the muscle was mostly spent. The spotter gripped the bar to help us complete two more, three more, four more, shouting us through the burn—it was like a delivery room: push, push, push, push —and that’s partly how big guys get big, by shocking the deepest muscle tissue into expansion. Your muscles don’t want to grow. They’re perfectly content to remain as they are, which is why you need a shock campaign if your goal is size and strength.
    My boyhood pals were frequently helpful but our schedules were never quite in sync. More important: they were muscular and strong but without the necessary violence of mind, the savagery of will I’d learned from my uncle. I don’t mean they didn’t care about training; I mean they were too well-mannered, their attitude toward the weights much too polite. I needed to pick fights with those barbells and dumbbells and plates, to kick and spit at them, grab them as if I had to throttle their heft in order to keep that heft from throttling me. After a hellacious, hollering set of straight-bar curls, I’d slam, clang the bar back into the rack, as if to tell it: You lose . My pals wanted a workout; I wanted warfare—against the weakling I’d been. They didn’t mind eighty percent engagement; I considered that a waste and a shame when it wasn’t a sin. What was the point of this enterprise if you weren’t going to bring every particle of yourself to its execution?
    Here was the Giraldi family machismo at last making itself known in me, the machismo I’d internalized now seeking vent. Maybe with that uncompromising attitude I stopped feeling, for a time, as if I was not really Pop’s grandson, not really my father’s son. I didn’t carry that awareness with me through my days, wasn’t unduly conscious of needing to impress either Pop or my father. They weren’t privy tomy training methods at the Edge; they never went to see what my life was like there. Pop had once or twice visited Tony and me in the dungeon—he stood aside to comment and correct—but my father, entangled on multiple fronts, never did. That’s not an accusation. What happens in the gym between a man and his partner and their muscles is not unlike what happens in the bedroom between a man and his partner and their genitalia, between the confessing and the confessor, and so uninitiated spectators can be a concentration-kill.
    There’s something to that. At the Edge, you made sure your awe stayed furtive. You didn’t openly goggle those Atlasian others, but rather tried for glimpses in that funhouse—everywhere the mirrors gave the impression of rooms within rooms—because there was a contradictory sense that a workout was private. A public and publicized privacy, but privacy just the same. And yet in most cases the furtiveness wasn’t necessary at all. Those who were rubberneck-worthy wanted your awe and ogling, wanted to see the lust and wonder on your face. That’s part of why we’d made the Edge our home—it was what we lived for.

V
    The Greek athletes at the gymnasium shaved their pubic patches. Hairlessness as a symbol of youth’s vitality. Porn stars barber their genitalia in a suggestion of pre-pubescence. Look how smooth , how godly, is that magnificent sculpture, the Farnese Hercules.
    Our upstairs bathtub half-filled with tepid, milkish water, tinged with pink, my body afroth, throat to toes, with shaving foam. I was seated on the rim of the tub with a razor, rivulets of blood like raspberry sauce in whipped cream, wincing through the nicks. How was this done? The two blades of the razor kept getting crammed with hair. I’d slide it three inches and it