Stranger Than Fiction (True Stories)
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She showed me the coiled little wires and the pacemaker buried in his chest and told me he had a history of heart attack after heart attack.
About this same time, a national bodybuilding magazine ran an occasional little feature in its back pages. It wasn't in every issue, and it wasn't in very many, but each feature was a catch-up profile about a star bodybuilder from the 1980s. These were the guys that Ed and Bill wanted to become. Back then, these stars posed and gave interviews swearing they were blessed with great genetics and determination, they just worked hard and ate well, they never used steroids. They swore.
In the update features, these same guys were pale and doughy, battling health problems from diabetes to cancer. And they admitted they had been using steroids, and monkeying with their insulin levels, and shooting human growth hormone.
I knew all this, and I still jumped off the cliff.
My friends didn't stop me. They only told me to eat enough protein to make the investment worthwhile. Still, I didn't buy the ten-pound blocks of egg white. I never filled my fridge with rows and rows of foil-wrapped boneless, skinless chicken breasts and baked potatoes the way Ed and Bill used to. The way they used to stock up for each steroid cycle like it was a six-week siege. I wasn't that dedicated.
I just took the little white pills and worked out and one day in the shower, I noticed my nuts were disappearing.
Okay, I'm sorry. I promised a lot of friends I wouldn't go here, but this was the turning point. When the old goose eggs shrink to Ping-Pong balls, then to marbles, then your doctor asks if you want a refill on your Anadrol script, it's easy to say no.
Here you are, looking great, bright and alert, pumped and ripped, you're looking more like a man than you ever have, but you're less of a man where it counts. You're becoming the simulacrum of masculinity.
Besides, going into this, the appeal of being a freaky, massive pile of muscle had already started to wane. Sure, at first it would be fun, like owning a rambling Victorian mansion covered in gingerbread trim; but after the first couple weeks the constant maintenance would eat up my life. I could never wander very far from a gym. I'd be eating egg protein every hour. All this, and the whole project would still collapse some day.
My father was dead, Ed and Bill were a mess, and I was fast losing faith in tangible shit. Tangible, temporal shit. Here I'd written a story, a make-believe book, and it was making me more money than any real work I'd ever done. I had about a thirty-day window of free time between my book obligations and the opening of the Fight Club movie. Here was a thirty-day experiment, an updated Jack London adventure packaged in a little brown bottle.
I jumped off the cliff because it was an adventure.
And for thirty days I felt complete. But just until the tiny white pills ran out. Temporarily permanent. Complete and independent of everything. Everything except the Anadrol.
The woman in Sacramento, hosting that barbecue all those years ago, she'd said, "Those friends of yours, they're crazy."
Beside the swimming pool, the man cradled the brittle cactus skeleton of his masculinity, the woman still stared at her clumps of bleached "cougar fur" that I had trimmed off Ed's crew cut. Pumped and huge in their tank tops, Ed and Bill disappeared, lumbering down the road. Out in the dark was the cougar. Or other cougars.
The hostess said, "Why do men have to do such stupid things?"
"As long as America has a frontier," Thomas Jefferson used to say, "there will be a place for America's misfits and adventurers."
Now Ed and Bill are fat eyesores, but that summer, really, dude, they were massive. A good pump… my father… the Anadrol… all that's left is the intangible story. The legend.
And, okay, that thing about frontiers, maybe it wasn't Thomas Jefferson, but you get the idea.
There will always be cougars outside. It's such a chick thing to think life should just go on forever.
The People Can
You go to sea tired. After all the business of scraping and painting the hull, loading provisions, replacing equipment, and stocking parts, after you take an advance on your pay and maybe prepay your rent for the three months you won't be home, after you settle your affairs, you leave
Inside "the people can" or "locked in the tube" as submariners call their patrol, it's a culture of quiet. In the exercise area, the free weights are coated in thick black rubber. Between the weight plates of the Universal equipment are red rubber pads. Officers and crew wear tennis shoes, and holding almost everything-from plumbing to the running treadmill, anywhere metal meets metal-are rubber isolators to prevent rattling or drumming. The chairs have a thick rubber cap on each leg. Off watch, you listen to music on headphones. The USS Louisiana, SSBN-743, is coated to deaden enemy sonar and stay hidden, but any loud, sharp noise they make might be heard by someone listening within twenty-five miles.
"When you go to the bathroom," says the Louisiana's supply officer, Lieutenant Patrick Smith, "you need to lower the seat in case the ship makes a funny roll. A slamming lid could give us away."
"They don't all go at once," says the executive officer, Pete Hanlon, as he describes what happens if the ship changes depth with toilet seats left open. "You'll be on the bridge and hear WANG! Then WANG! Then WANG! One after another, and you'll see the captain getting tighter and tighter."
At any point, a third of the crew may be asleep, so during a patrol the only overhead light in each bunk room is the small red fluorescent light near the curtained doorway. Almost all you hear is the rush of air in the ventilation system. Each crew bunk holds nine berths, triple-deckers, in a U-shape facing the doorway. Each berth, called a "rack," has a six-inch-thick foam mattress that may or may not be dented by your alternate on the submarine's alternate crew. Two crews alternate taking the Louisiana on patrol, the Gold Crew and the Blue Crew. If the guy who sleeps in your rack while you're in port weighs 250 pounds and leaves a dent, says Gold Crew mess management specialist Andrew Montroy, then you stuff towels under it. Each berth lifts to reveal a four-inch-deep storage space you call a "coffin locker." Heavy burgundy curtains close each bunk off from the rest. At the head of each mattress is a reading light and a panel with an outlet and controls for a stereo headset similar to the system used on passenger airliners. You have four different types of music from a system that plays compact discs brought on board by the crew. You have volume and balance controls. You have an air vent. Also at the head of each rack is an oxygen mask.