The Hero's Body by William Giraldi Page B

relationship with my father, if you could call it that, was ill-fated from the word go. It couldn’t have lasted a month. He kept up his membership at the Jack LaLanne gym for a while longer, but he never met another woman there. He’d be single for seven more years, his only female love from the woman who bore him.

VII
    Victor and I, along with some other pals from the Edge, had been traipsing around central Jersey some Saturdays to attend different amateur bodybuilding competitions. And at one of these shows, as we watched the teenage division, my pals became convinced that I could beat every guy up there, that I had the desirable aesthetics to excel on stage: “You could take those dudes, bro,” and “Dudes all got toothpick arms, bro,” and “Those dudes ain’t stacked like you, bro” (most of our sentences contained a dude and a bro ). And it was true, mostly; one kid carried about as much muscle as a high-school swimmer.
    That Saturday morning, reclined in an auditorium somewhere in the intestines of our state, after what was really the most piddling instigation of friends, we decided: in two months, I’d represent the Edge in the teenage division at the Muscle Beach bodybuilding competition in Point Pleasant, New Jersey. This decision, it seems to me now, should have been paired with a feeling of momentousness. I’d never before done anything like it, was not a performer, naked or otherwise, at ease on stages. But I remember no momentousness. What I remember is the sense of inevitability, and a desperation not to disappoint the guys at the Edge who wanted me to do this.
    At only 175 pounds, I was in no way large, nothing close to what you see in magazines. If you put normal clothes on me I lookedlike any athletic kid, a lacrosse or football player perhaps. But my arms and shoulders were well built and round; those were always my kindest body parts. Unlike my lagging chest and calves that always needed extra doses of loving anguish, my arms and shoulders grew without too much coercion from me. And my waist was only twenty-eight inches, which allowed me that coveted V-shape. Bodybuilders can’t be fireplugs.
    Also, because I was naturally light and lean, with an over-rapid metabolism that made it an Augean effort for me to gain weight, I had the body-fat percentage of an Olympic runner, five to six percent, and for the bodybuilding stage, that’s a blessing you cannot inject. What’s more, in addition to having full muscle bellies, I had narrow joints, the joints of a fifth-grader. All of which meant that I appeared much more rotundly muscular, much more the bodybuilder, than I actually was. That appearance, or call it an illusion, is indispensible for the competitive bodybuilder. When he’s onstage, nobody cares about how much he can bench press. It’s not a strength contest; it’s an art contest.
    A weightlifter wants mass; a bodybuilder wants that too, but at a certain point, in preparation for a competition, he’s focused on conditioning, on diaphanous skin and vascularity, a symphony of form, the symmetry of his physique, how it all gels and melds: trapeziuses curving into deltoids curving into pectorals, biceps flowing into forearms, hamstrings into calves, quadriceps into kneecaps, lats into a tiny waist. And so the bodybuilder is a renegade aesthete, an underground artist whose medium is muscle tissue, whose implements of creation are food and iron.
    That stereotype with which bodybuilders are saddled—self-aggrandizers and simps, inauthentic athletes, all show and no go—has always been an injustice put forth by those with no eye for harmony on the human body, or those too fearful to admit the animality in man, too fearful to catch our own reflection infellow hominoids, in the mighty chimp from whom we’ve sprung. Tell some people they’re a primate and watch their faces become uncomprehending.
    Balance and proportion, rhythm