Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [42]
I’d heard of guys at school who could bench-press 200 pounds, even 250. I’d heard that one of the football players could do 275, and I was struggling with 60? Was I really this weak?
Yes, I was. And small. And afraid. And a coward.
These words about myself were not new, but today they felt less like the end and more like a beginning.
5
AT PLEASANT SPA, just under the rack of Playboy, Hustler, and Swank was a row of wrestling and muscle magazines. One was called Muscle Builder. On the cover was a man staring into the camera like we’d just interrupted his privacy and he didn’t like it. His massive arms were crossed over his bare chest, and it was so muscled you could hide coins between his pectorals, a new word I was learning, others too: deltoids and trapezius, latissimus dorsi, biceps, triceps, quadriceps, and erector spinae, the muscles of a man’s body that, when fully developed, made him powerful and powerful-looking.
I borrowed money from my sister and bought that magazine, rolled it up, carried it home, and studied every page. In it were men with sixty-inch chests and twenty-two-inch arms. They could bench-press 400 to 500 pounds for repetitions. They were curling more weight than my body. They looked like shaved and massive rage to me, so muscled from feet to neck that their faces and heads appeared small and out of place on top of their shoulders.
Three days later I’d already worked out three times. Every muscle I had ached. At the bus stop in the morning, I didn’t talk to anyone at the corner. I didn’t even look at Glenn P. When the bus pulled up, I sat in the middle and avoided the bottle getting passed around in the back. At the high school, I walked by the grate and went directly to my homeroom and waited for the bell. After school I walked home and into the basement where I started doing bench presses for my chest, overhead presses for my shoulders, bent-over rows for my back. Sometime that week, Mom had called Pop and told him about Jeb getting beat up by a grown man, and later that same night, not long after we’d eaten something in front of the TV, Pop walked in with a friend of his from the college, a poet or artist. He was tall and quiet and wore an overcoat like men who owned suits had to wear. Standing next to him, Pop looked short, and he was smiling like he was out on an adventure of some kind. He was wearing corduroys and a sweatshirt. Maybe he saw me looking at it because he said, “I wore this to hide my wrists. I don’t want this guy to see my small wrists.” He laughed and went up to Jeb’s room to check his face.
Mom and Pop’s friend chatted like they’d known each other a long time ago. Soon Pop came back downstairs and said, “Okay, let’s go talk to this guy. I just hope he doesn’t see my fucking wrists.”
Then they were gone. I stood in the dark front room and watched him drive down Columbia Park to Main, my father who’d told me once that he’d never been in a fight, that he’d joined the Marines to prove to his own father he was a man, and I began to sense again that there were some things Pop just did not know, that not everybody can be reasoned with or talked to.
I don’t remember if they ever found the J.s’ house, but it didn’t matter anyway. The only way to fight was not to have small wrists in the first place. To build so much muscle, your enemy would feel only fear before you killed him.
I turned and walked fast back down to the basement.
A FEW months later, the summer of 1975, I was working out six days a week, two hours at a time, on a split