The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [35]
Using the trapezius as our compass (its attachment at the occipital bone being north), we are able to get oriented. Directly to the east and west, we find the deltoid muscles, which look like epaulets draping each shoulder. Deep to the deltoids are the four rotator cuff muscles and, just medial to them, the major and minor rhomboideus muscles, so named for their tilted rectangle, or rhomboid, shape. I have known of these muscles for years but only in the parlance of the gym—delts and traps and so forth. When seen as flesh, they command a higher level of respect, it seems to me. It just would not sound right to use lats, for instance, to refer to the huge sweep of muscle rising from the small of the back to the axillae, the armpits. (This is the muscle—a single muscle, in fact—that gives bodybuilders that distinctive triangular silhouette.) No, here in the anatomy lab, it deserves to be called by its full formal name, the latissimus dorsi.
The musculature of the back goes four layers deep. Leaving one side of our cadaver intact, we carefully dissect the other, exposing the intermediate and then the deep back muscles. Within an hour, we have reached the very core of the body, the long, vertical erector spinae muscles lying in grooves on each side of the spinal column. These are the primary “good posture” muscles, vital to keeping our backs erect, and, indeed, they do look powerful. I pull out my notepad to jot down my observations, though my impulse is not to describe the muscles but to draw them, to rough out a map of the back. In truth, my sketch looks like something scribbled in the middle of the night while half-asleep—a doodle from a dream. But when I get home and check it against my own back in the bathroom mirror—shirt off, sketch in one hand, hand mirror in the other—I can see the same shapes under my skin.
Wonderful, I think. I have the back of a sixty-two-year-old female truck driver.
I feel faintly ridiculous doing this but still find it cool. I angle for a look at my lower back and, in the act of turning the mirror, turn back thirty years. Clear as can be, I see myself at fifteen in my bedroom in the basement of my childhood home in Spokane: using the blue plastic hand mirror I’ve borrowed from my sisters’ bathroom, I am trying to get a look at my lats in the full-length mirror on the back of my door. Scattered on the floor in front of me are the following items: a set of free weights, a recent Christmas present from my parents; the Universal Bodybuilding manual that came with it; a cloth measuring tape lifted from Mom’s sewing table; and my journal, which, since starting my weight-lifting regime, doubles as a training diary.
I had discovered weight lifting just five months earlier in freshman PE. To my own surprise, I’d found that I was naturally pretty strong, more so than most of the boys, so I had kept at it. This was probably the closest I had ever come to being good at a sport. Though I was not a “ninety-pound weakling,” I also wasn’t tall or self-confident or immune to being picked on. Making myself bigger would be a way to repel certain boys and, had I been truly honest with myself at the time, maybe a way to attract certain others.
I could already tell I was making gains with the weights. The proof was right there in my journal, where, along with my written entries, I had been charting my “stats”—measurements of my chest size, biceps, calves, even my neck. And it still is there, I find after digging up those old spiral notebooks, each one dated and signed upon completion. Though I hadn’t looked at any of my journals in a good five years, my response had not changed since the last time: I would be mortified if someone were to read these. Burn ’em, for God’s sake, I tell myself, the whole box, right now. But I know I could not strike the match. Like H. V. Carter, who lived to old age yet never parted with his diaries, I expect I will do the same.
To someone who has never kept one, this may be the