The Hero's Body by William Giraldi

when I did, or else I began when they did. We hadn’t made a pact, hadn’t conspired beforehand, weren’t aware of each other’s hankering for muscularity. But there must have been something in the water, I thought, because so many of us got sick with it.
    Though perhaps it wasn’t all that inscrutable. For working-class kids who came of age in the bigness and bluster of the Reagan ’80s, who were soused on the action flicks of Schwarzenegger and Stallone, on the bombast of Hulk Hogan, muscled physiques were simply what you pined for. What happened to my pals and me in Manville in the early ’90s was part of a grander cultural trend that had jumped to life a decade earlier when the American political mood took a hard-right turn. Cartoonish musclemen, typified by Schwarzenegger and Stallone, arrived to supplant the “girlie-men” of the ’70s, to redeem us from the humiliating failures of Vietnam and the emasculating victories of feminism. If we wanted to win wars, actual and cultural and personal, we needed all the muscle we could get. In Rambo: First Blood Part II , when Rambo’s former colonel springs him from prison so that the great warrior can return to Vietnam in search of POWs, Rambo asks, “Do we get to win this time?”
    I and my pals spent a third of our time talking about weights, a third talking about food, and another third talking about steroids. Of course steroids. We weren’t an overly principled lot, even if I had come from a family that was, nor can I pretend that we had a moral skirmish going on: to do or not to do drugs. There was no moral skirmish because we didn’t think of steroids any differently from the way we thought of fuel for a motorcycle. Nor were we about to be hoodwinked by the culture-wide hypocrisy that declared cigarettes and alcohol—those convivial slaughterers of the untold—perfectly okay, while declaring steroids—the killer of few—perfectly contemptible.
    You can hurl the accusation “cheater” in the bedroom and you can hurl it in the classroom, but you look silly hurling it among bodybuilders in the gym. For the kind of musculature and might we desired, drugs were as necessary as good genes, and yet were still no guarantee. You can’t just inject a torpid stick figure with anabolic steroids and then sit back and watch him transmute into Hercules. All the hard work begins after the injection. Contrary to the popular disdain we often heard, drugs are not “a shortcut,” since the steroidian usually trains longer and harsher, and with more dedication, than his principled and drugless compatriots. This is what we would have said had you confronted us then: If you have a problem with anabolic steroids, good for you, don’t do them. But don’t unload your own problem on us .
    Nothing except literature was more intrinsic to my adolescent identity, my half-formed conception of selfhood, than muscle strength and the Greco-Roman aesthetics of a champion. A champion of what, exactly, I could not have told you. Of vanity, I suppose, since, unless he’s working out at the gym or competing on stage, a bodybuilder doesn’t actually do anything with his beauteous bulk. He just ambles around with it, totes heavy objects for Gram, helps Pa with the furniture. Bodybuilding at the highest level, on the Mr.Olympia dais, is more spectacle than sport, an art form as elite as anything you see in the American Ballet Theater. If you think its everyday uselessness is a fault, recall Dr. Chekhov’s counsel: “Only what is useless is pleasurable.”
    I began aching for steroids after two years of training with Tony, after I turned eighteen and stopped making gains. That aching coincided with his departure from our weekday routine; his work was overdemanding again, his children too needy now, his wife slight with the lymphoma that would eventually erase her. Ever sensitive to abandonment, I