Muscle by Samuel Wilson Fussell

Author:Samuel Wilson Fussell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2015-02-09T20:41:46+00:00

9. THE VOCATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES

“WHO IS HE?” TENDS TO ACCOMPANY “WHAT IS HE?” AND SOMETIMES TO PRECEDE IT, AND THE CONSEQUENCES IN LIFE AS IN ART ARE COMIC OR TRAGIC OR IN THE GREAT GREY WASTES BETWEEN.

—PETER STANSKY AND WILLIAM ABRAHAMS

My mother tried. God, how she tried. Through the mail came a ceramic toothbrush rack in the shape of a muscular torso, a porcelain toilet roll holder made of bulging biceps. I was on her mind, that much was clear.

To her friends, she called me “a substance in search of a form.” I wasn’t really a bodybuilder, she explained, I was Baudelaire. In place of dyed green hair and revolutionary poesy, I, iron iconoclast, simply substituted “the Walk” and the shock of drug-fed muscles. Like the long line of artists who had preceded me, I spent my days throwing bricks through stained-glass windows in my own manner.

That was her public stance, at least. In private, she fretted that I had chosen for myself a long and arduous form of suicide. My father was less charitable. He didn’t give me the benefit of an aesthetic creed, however wayward. “I can feel your contempt, Son,” he had written in a recent letter. “Since you first emerged crying from your mother’s womb, you’ve always begrudged the world for its failure to measure up.”

To him, I wasn’t an agent provocateur or even a grotesquerie, but a derelict, plain and simple. “I understand the urge to spit,” he wrote to his son, the muscle stooge, “but does it have to be facing the wind?” He had sent me but one communication since then, enclosing the heavily underlined Frost poem, “The Road Not Taken,” and the University of Pennsylvania Law School application.

But if to my parents my life in bodybuilding represented the perils of free will, to my friends at Oxford the whole thing sounded Falstaffian, as if I were reveling in Southern California as some kind of anarchic Lord of Misrule. They thought the whole thing sounded sort of fun, until, that is, the photographs of my juiced-up body circulated. Then, with these bloated, billowing muscle shots in hand, they thought the whole thing kind of sick. The suggestive “Samuel is looking rather butch” progressed to the dismissive “obviously he’s gone queer.” Even my most loyal friend couldn’t conceal his apprehension: “You have really worked a transformation of your outer self, Samuel, and I would be fascinated to know how you motivated yourself to lift weights with such diligence and faithfulness. I am curious because when, years ago, I seriously considered trying to become a concert pianist, I was unable to make myself persevere through the tedium of practice, and I tend to imagine that biceps curls and bench presses must be the finger exercises of bodybuilding.”

But if iron hadn’t yet reached Oxford, it had reached every other pocket of the globe. The television in our living room showed bodybuilders in commercials, in sitcoms, even in game shows. Shows like “American Gladiators” and “Roller Games” presented

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