The Hero's Body by William Giraldi Page B

one day to find a stranger, some simpering teenage dolt with a handful of cash and the sentence: “I’d like some steroids, please.”
    Who was the derelict here? Disraeli: “Youth is a blunder.” Yes it is. How does anyone survive the wild tacking through youth? But here’s Disraeli again: “Life is too short to be small.” So there you have it. And so I blundered, trying to explain who I was, and then tried to hand him cash in exchange for the ampoules and needles I wanted. But this newly nervous young man—he must have been twenty-three years old, fit, tanned, tattooed, the frequently barbered sort, that Guido haircut Jersey made famous—said that “the shipment” hadn’t yet arrived but that it “definitely, definitely” would within a week. “Definitely, definitely,” he said again, and I remember thinking that a quintuple use of “definitely” didn’t sound very definite at all.
    â€œHey,” he said, as I was leaving, “don’t show up here again.”
    We never heard back from that dealer, but near the end of my senior year of high school, about four months into my training partnership with Drew, a pal of ours was able to get us an oral androgenic steroid named Anadrol. We called it “Drol.” Made to treat osteoporosis and anemia, and eventually administered to those desperate souls eroded by AIDS, Anadrol was the brand name for the drug oxymetholone. A potent chemical concoction that increases size and strength as nothing else can, it performs its magic by bettering the body’s synthesis of protein. That protein synthesis is how all anabolic steroids work, by helping the body produce cells to strengthen the muscle fibers lovingly torn while weight training.
    Drol was so attractive to us not only because of its efficacy, but because it wasn’t an injectable. A lot of my pals had hang-ups about addiction and disease. They dreaded needles—in the early 1990s, “the war on drugs” was still used as a fearsome equivocation, HIV still a nightly news flash—and so weren’t capable of harpooning one into the white foam of their buttocks. The irony is that injectable steroids are much less harmful to your health; unlike pills, they get immediately assimilated by the body without having to pass through the liver and other important parts. Drol, on the other hand: it unleashed hellfire upon the liver. I frequently thought I could feel mine sizzling.
    But in only two weeks I inflated from 155 pounds to 165 pounds, and this for someone who could go many tormenting months without gaining a solitary pound. The new stony roundness of my deltoids and biceps, my lagging pectorals at last catching up, the added body mass I felt in each step, the sway of my quads under sweatpants, the spread of my lats ( latissimus dorsi , those back muscles behind the armpits)—I can recall the inebriation of it still. It was as if I’d finally managed to get myself fully born. Never mind the high blood pressure that caused enfeebling headaches: I’d eat twelve ibuprofens per day, which tore up my stomach, which in turn caused me to eat twelve antacids per day. Never mind my puffed-up face: certain steroids cause water retention, so I had chipmunkish cheeks that were not cute. Never mind, too, the back acne and irritability: back acne was new to me, but irritability—I’d been thinking of it as a sensitive person’s anomie—had been a near-constant for years.
    Ever stolid, my father did not watch me as I sauntered through my days, did not notice the added mass on me, my complaints of headaches. Or if he did, he never said anything to me about it, and I have trouble explaining that. Wouldn’t a committed father have confronted his teenage boy about a body full of steroids? Tony noticed. At a picnic, a family member asked me: “How are you doing?” andmy uncle countered with “ What are