The Hero's Body by William Giraldi Page A

did not perceive Tony’s leaving as such, and I took that as a hopeful sign, that maybe my bolstered exterior was beginning to bolster my interior. Steroid use had to coincide with Tony’s hiatus because he never would have consented to it, and it wouldn’t have been possible for me to conceal it from him. He knew what a steroidal physique looked like: the gibbous shoulders and biceps, the splashes of acne on the back, the weekly strength gains, the rising poundage, the blessed barbarity of the workouts. He’d passed me the skills and tricks I’d needed to forge on without him, and I had his go-ahead to keep training in his basement.
    I recruited my closest friend, Drew; we’d been pals since we were waist-high, living across the road from one another on the North 3rd Avenue in Manville. He had developed biceps, deltoids, pectorals, but his back was flat and lagging and he had spindles for legs. Tony’s favorite bit of ridicule for a guy with a weak lower body was “His legs don’t even touch,” meaning the adductor magnus muscles—the inner thighs—weren’t developed enough to meet in the middle. Like Pop, I had strong legs and shoulders, and a strong back, and forearms like bowling pins (pals were always feeling my forearms), but my pecs were pathetic (they felt concave to me) and this was a daily fount of embarrassment and anxiety. Drew was one year older and twenty pounds heavier than me, but our numbers in every exercisewere equal. We made a compatible duo in my uncle’s dungeon, and I felt more than a little pride in being able to teach him the methods my uncle had taught me.
    Your body responds immediately when you first begin your bout with the iron, but your muscle tissue is so designed that the longer you train, the tougher it is to add mass. After several months or years, depending on your genes, you plateau. The dreaded plateau, an ogre whose name we dared not utter. It arrives unbidden and unexplained. Your body stalls. You’re eating just as much, training just as hard, but your muscle tissue has quit calling you back, is no longer stimulated by the iron. Never mind making gains in strength and mass: now you’re battling—eating and training like a loon—just to keep what you’ve got. It’s a spirit-sapping problem. Or, gratuitously worse than plateauing, you slip, slide back, your numbers start to drop—both your body weight and the weight on the bar—and this is a demoralization that feels epic, an annihilation on your ego.
    You could slave for weeks or months, glutting yourself just to gain five pounds of muscle, just to add ten-pound plates to your bench press or squat. And then something happens. The scallywag Phys. Ed. teacher makes you trot laps around the soccer field. (I was usually truant during gym class because I couldn’t afford to waste calories on such silliness as that. I needed those calories to grow.) Or you get a cold and miss a workout, and then, God help you, the cold graduates to influenza and you miss a week, ten days, twelve days, you miss scores of meals, scores of them, even the relief of sleep irked by sickness. And then those fought-for pounds, those incredibly precious five or six pounds for which you suffered for several weeks or months, have vanished from you. You could nearly whiff the smoke of their vanishing: poof . I was, like an anorexic in reverse, always standing on a scale.

    Drew knew an all-purpose drug dealer who ate every night at the pizzeria where he worked, a derelict who’d said that he was about to come into “a shipment” of steroids from some hardcore gym in New York. Here’s how brazen I was: after learning of this derelict’s rooftop address—he lived on a roof—I pedaled my twelve-speed bicycle there and knocked on a doorish thing unevenly hung. Imagine being in the paranoid profession of drug dealing and opening your rooftop “door”