Joe was giving me some heavy-duty stink eye. I could see his thoughts. Great. Nice fucking work, Miller. Not only do you screw things up for your own faggot self, you screw things up for everybody.
“Maybe we should go,” said Nicole.
I was actually concerned Joe might kick my ass later. But he didn’t.
Nicole apparently warmed back up to him as we wended our way down the canyon. I heard some slurping and bumping in the backseat. Later he told me he “cooter-banged” her back there.
The Incredible
Shrinking Man
As the Olympia drew nearer, Big Bill began cutting and de
fi
ning his physique. He tailored his sets from low reps at high weights to high reps at low weights, and in this manner molded his muscles from the inside out. He was ripped by late spring; his lats and pecs and delts were scored with
fi
ngers. He was a monster, a behemoth, the Samson of biblical lore—something Rodin might have sculpted in the feverish throes of a laudanum binge. To see him lumbering around the house in his underwear—navigating tight corners, ducking light
fi
xtures, drinking milk straight from the carton, and crushing the empty half-gallon container effortlessly in his mighty clutches—was to witness a true freak of nature. Everything looked small next to him; a fatburger looked like a novel appetizer between his
fi
ngers, a table setting like a child’s tea set. He looked
better than in ’80, altogether
more massive and deeply pocketed. He could scarcely wink without triggering some muscular response. The mere act of chewing set his traps to rippling from his neck to his shoulders. His right pec swelled like a pig bladder every time he raised his tiny fork. I was beginning to think Big Bill might be destined for Olympus at last.
In July he started complaining of fatigue and reduced endurance during workouts. His right leg began swelling, so he worked that much harder on the left. For two weeks he forged onward in spite of the ailments. No pain, no gain. But one afternoon at Gold’s in the middle of an incline press, a tightening in the chest simply could not be ignored, and Doug was forced to spot him. Big Bill was so lightheaded that he nearly tumbled getting to his feet. Doug rushed him to Cedars-Sinai.
On the phone Doug was uncharacteristically calm and serious.
“You gotta get down here,” he said.
“You know I can’t do that.”
“You gotta.”
“I can’t.”
He was silent on the other end. I could hear him breathing out of his mouth. “You need to grow up,” he said,
fi
nally. “You need to put that shit behind you.”
I insisted that Doug meet me in the parking lot at Cedars. I found him leaning on the hood of the Malibu next to a laundry truck. He was still in his neoprene short-sl
eeved bodysuit. The nubby protu
berances in his breadbasket left very little to the imagination.
“Why don’t you put some pants on?” I said.
“What for?”
“Because maybe the whole world doesn’t want to look at your nut sack.”
“Who cares? Anyways, I don’t have any pants. They’re at the gym. Now, c’mon, hurry up, we gotta see the doctor now. Then we can see Dad.”
I sat down on the bumper of the laundry van.
“What’re you doing? Let’s go.”
I gazed across the lot, away from the hospital. A Mexican guy in coveralls was pruning shrubs nearby. “Just give me a sec,” I said.
Doug shifted his weight restlessly from one massive leg to the other, and gave a little tug at his breadbasket to let his nuts breathe.
Listening to the steely precision of the Mexican’s shears at work, I couldn’t summon the will to get up off that bumper. “I can’t do it,” I said.
“Oh, please,” he sighed. “Get over it.”
“You don’t understand. You were too young. You don’t remember.”
“Don’t fraternize me, ass-lick. Dad’s in there and there’s something wrong with him. He might be fucking dying, for all we know.
So quit being such a baby and suck it up. Why are you always such a little wuss about everything? What are you afraid of ?”
Somebody said that the things we fear the most have already happened to us. I think they were right.
When Doug saw that there were tears in my eyes, he softened a bit, and sat down beside me and rested a heavy arm on my back. I could smell his armpit. “It’s not even the same hospital,” he observed gently.
“I know. You’re right. I’m being a baby, I know I am. It’s just that
…
”
But I choked on the words. My stomach tightened in an instant, and my insides set to trembling in a paroxysm of yearning like nothing I had ever felt before, not even for Lulu.
“It’s okay,” said Doug, squeezing my shoulder with his massive hand. “Get it out of your system.”
For nearly a decade I had been in despair, really and truly in despair, not even knowing I was in despair. Of all the unlikely guides to hold my hand through the haunted halls of this darkest place, fate had chosen my brother Doug, with his overactive pituitary and his Neanderthal delicacy.
“C’mon, ass-munch,” he said, giving my shoulder an impatient squeeze. “Get it together. We gotta talk to the doctor.”
I walked right through those double glass doors just as naturally as if I’d been walking into Ralphs. The hospital was everything I remembered: the big colored Legos, the dead chemical air. The light made me queasy, but none of it was as bad as I anticipated.
The doctor was Asian. His name was a verb—Chew, I think. He had a facial tic that caused his left eye to wink intermittently, so that you didn’t want to look him in the eye when he talked to you, because you were afraid he might think you were staring at his tic. But then when he wasn’t looking at you, you wanted to look at his tic.
“Your father is experiencing what’s called cardiomyopathy. That means the walls of his heart have thickened.” Dr. Chew clipped an X-ray to the light box. “As a result, his cardiac functions have been signi
fi
cantly compromised. That’s what caused the swelling and the dizziness. His blood has thickened.”
“How did it happen? Is it from working out?”
His left eye twitched. “Not exactly,” he said. He turned his attention toward the X-rays. “You see this shaded area around the heart, here? That’s the thickening. Normally this shaded area would be considerably thinner.”
“What caused it?” I said.
“It could have been a number of things.” Chew
fi
dgeted distractedly with the corner of an X-ray. His eye twitched again. “But I strongly suspect steroid use.”
I was absolutely dumbstruck. I looked to Doug, with his jaw hanging agape like a steam shovel, and I knew he was as shocked as me. Big Bill juiced? How could this possibly be? Big Bill had always remained above suspicion, perhaps because his gonzo work ethic and uncompromising veneer were so easily confused with moral fortitude.
Where were the indicators: the hypod
ermics, the tracks, the volatil
ity, the unchecked aggression?
The very idea was unthinkable: gain without pain. Big Bill would never accept such a proposition. And yet it was true. The proof was in the massive arms and shoulders. But most of all, it was in the thickening walls of the heart.
“Is he gonna die?” said Doug.
“No. Probably not anytime soon. Your father’s condition is manageable. He’s going to be facing some lifestyle changes, however.”
I remember looking at the X-ray and thinking it strange to see Big Bill’s superhuman physique photographed from the inside out—how fragile and human it looked without all that muscle buffering it.
Big Bill was upbeat in his hospital bed, grinning less with relief, it seemed, than with forced levity. As in all varieties of clothing, Big Bill looked ridiculous in his hospital gown. The nurse had been forced to slit it up the side to get it to
fi
t over his massive trunk.
“I smell hamburgers,” he said. “I’m ready to strap on a feed bag.”
“I’ll bet,” I said.
Doug stood at a distance, tight-lipped and sullen. I think he felt betrayed. I’d never put Big Bill on a pedestal in the
fi
rst place—he’d proved himself to be unfailingly human long ago—so I was not outraged by his breach of moral conduct so much as genuinely surprised. I still couldn’t see how he’d managed to hide such a big thing. But for Doug, the discovery was nothing less than a loss of innocence. I don’t think he ever forgave Big Bill for the juice.
“You should have seen your little brother at the wheel,” said Big Bill.
“You’d have been proud. We must have run
fi
ve reds, eh Champ?”
Doug grunted.
“That ice cream truck darn near T-boned us on Slauson. But your brother here just swung around him like old Steve McQueen.”
“Shut up, Dad,” he said. “You’re not fooling anyone.”
Big Bill knew a short ending when he heard one. His face colored, and he turned his attention toward the window, away from Doug and me. I felt sort of bad for him.
“You want me to bring you some books from home or anything?
Magazines?”
“No thanks, Tiger. I’m sure they’ve got plenty of stuff here.”
Big Bill stayed at Cedars for the better part of a week. Dr. Chew assigned him a strict regimen of anticoagulants and
fi
brinolysis and thrombolytics and lots of other voodoo intended to thin his blood.
As for the thickening heart, time would tell.
When word got around about Big Bill’s condition, cards arrived from Joe Wieder and the Mentzer brothers and Tom Platz and Lee Haney himself, and I can’t help but think that a collective shiver ran down the spine of professional bodybuilding. How many of these guys were really juiced? When I started running through my father’s rippling associates one by one, very few of them managed to elude my suspicions. The body had limits, limits to how fast it could convert protein, limits to the amount of muscle mass it could pile onto a lean frame, limits to how far one could push the conditioning envelope without allowing the body to recover. Every one of these guys tested those limits around the clock, looking for an edge, maybe even a shortcut to that ten thousand–dollar take at the Mr. Biggest Little City in the World competition at the Silver Legacy in Reno, or perhaps a share in something bigger—a Universe, or an Olympia—so you could convert those winnings into mortgage payments and hams and twelve-pound glasses for your oily-faced kid. What choice did a guy have but to look for an edge?
What were the options? Squeezing yourself into a forklift? Selling women’s shoes?
The days crept by through March and April and into May without any word from Lulu. My bold offensive had been a complete
fl
op. I must have started a hundred letters begging her forgiveness, begging her to forget what I said and let me accept her terms. I’d gladly be her brother and nothing more, if only to be near her. But I could never send them, I suppose because I knew deep down that such an enterprise would only drive me crazy with frustration, and that anything short of possessing Lulu would be a profound disappointment anyway, so I was better off trying to forget her altogether.
I didn’t give two shits about having a sister.
Big Bill formally announced his retirement in the September issue of
Muscle
magazine, which ran a four-page spread entitled “Big Bad Bill is Sweet William Now.” The article was not your standard musclehead fare. The piece was actually quite bizarre by any measure, written by somebody named Scot Menninger (note, as I did, that it was Scot with one T), who infused the tribute with a certain epic, if not gay, poetry, not unlike Big Bill’s posing.
“And yet Miller, when we hold him up to the light, glistens like some Grecian god come down from Olympus
…
”
This particular line struck a chord with Doug, and threatened to become a mantra.
“And yet,” he would say, philosophically, applying his deodorant in vain, “Miller, when we hold him up to the light, glistens like some caramel-coated turd coming down the pipe
…
”
There was hope even for Doug, I decided.
Health and Fitness
also ran a piece on Big Bill. The author, Dale Munger, opted for a more prosaic
approach in his tribute, chroni
cling, in twenty-
fi
ve hundred words, Big Bill’s harrowing chase for that ever-elusive Mr. Olympia. Munger made Big Bill sound courageous, compulsive, tireless in his pursuit, like some silver-eyed Ahab on an impossible quest.
Big Bill, of course, much preferred this second treatment. The gay poetry thing was an embarrassment. He was convinced that the gay army was taking over bodybuilding and using it as a recruiting device in their conspiracy to thwart the propagation of the species and turn everybody into vegetarians. He may have been right.