Body, p.1
Body, page 1
BODY
Harry Crews
This book is for my son
Byron Jason Crews
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This is a work of the imagination. None of this ever happened anywhere except between the covers of this book. My friends in the world of bodybuilding will recognize that I have borrowed elements from both amateur and professional contests and brought them together to make something that does not exist and has never existed. Said another way, bodybuilding has been forced to serve the needs of fiction rather than the other way around. Consequently, any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental and not intended.
Walking the wire is living,
The rest is just waiting.
-KARL WALLENDA, in conversation
a few weeks before he fell to
his death in 1978
ONE
She was called Shereel Dupont, which was not her real name, and she had missed her period for the last three months running, but she was not pregnant and knew it. No, it was much better and much worse than that. It was partly due—even her name that was not her name—to pumping iron and starving to death on nothing but vitamin packets and protein powder and broiled flounder without butter or salt. But it was mainly due to Russell Morgan, called Russell Muscle, but only behind his back, never to his face. Russell was the one who had found her and trained her and named her, changed everything about her, even the way she talked, demanding that she lose her Georgia accent, as he forced her toward some ultimate shape that only he could see. He was not a man to talk much, but he had always made it clear that he was the only one that needed to see, that needed to know.
In the gym after the third set of prone presses with a hundred and fifty pounds on the bar (she competed at one hundred twenty-four) her pectoral muscles, lean and long as a swimmer’s, but as sharply layered and defined as if they had been etched with acid, her pecs under her breasts—each the size of a hard-boiled egg—burned like fire. Still it was not enough to achieve his secret vision of what they ought to be. It was never enough.
“Another set,” Russell said.
“It burns,” she said. “Jesus, I’ve got the burn.”
He watched her where she stood, her breathing rapid and shallow, hurting, the sound of other bodybuilders snorting and grunting all around her, the noise of iron plates clanging through the air heavy with motes of dust under the fluorescent lights.
For a half minute he watched her, nothing showing in his face, then: “I’ll tell you when you burn.”
“I hurt, Russell,” she said.
“I’ll tell you when you hurt,” he said.
And she would go back onto the bench under the weighted bar for another set, for whatever was still required of her.
Well, at least after the contest Saturday night she would have a little layoff, whatever Russell gave her, from the gym. She would be able to take more carbohydrates, more calories, and as a little body fat came back, so would her periods, which, strangely, she missed.
She got off the bed where she had been lying, trying to block out the shouts and squeals of laughter coming from the hotel pool below her window, and went to stand naked in front of the mirror. She could not believe herself. She turned slightly and could not believe the smooth sliding of muscle against muscle cleaving tautly to her fine bones.
It was only when she was among other worldbeaters—like those down by the pool waiting this final day before contest just as she was—it was only then that she could believe herself. No other woman in the gym where she trained (Russell’s Emporium of Pain), and no other woman in the city where she lived, could quite make her believe what she had done to herself.
It was only when she came together with the mysterious others, all of them coming from far cities, to stand nearly naked in front of a thundering audience—it was only then that she fully realized what it was to be special, special in her blood and flesh and sweat and most of all her pain.
A key scraped in the lock of the door. It was Russell Morgan, six feet three inches tall, two hundred and forty pounds, no longer competitive at the age of forty-five but the sight of him even now with a thirty-three-inch waist and a fifty-two-inch chest sometimes caused people to do unseemly things like run their cars off the road.
He was wearing a pair of swim trunks and he was absolutely hairless. He used Nair on his body because the absence of hair made the cuts between his muscles show better.
His pointed calves were diamond shaped and the great lobes of his chest stood separate and distinct.
When he started to go bald at forty, he shaved his head and kept it shaved. All or nothing, that was Russell Morgan. He demanded of himself the same kind of discipline that he demanded of those he trained.
He stood in the doorway watching Shereel, naked before the mirror. He had a bathroom scale in his right hand.
“You look heavy,” he said.
“Russell, I need a drink of water,” she said.
He looked at his wristwatch. “In two hours, you can have four ounces of water or four ice cubes to suck on, whichever you prefer. I’m a reasonable man.”
He closed the door behind him, walked to her, and set the scale on the floor.
“I’m so dry I can’t even spit,” she said.
“You don’t need to spit, you need to dry out. Dry, dry, dry. Dehydrated. Coming in at a hundred and twenty-four, you’ll win it all. And you will come in at a hundred and twenty-four.” He paused. “Get on the scale.”
“Aw, Russell,” she said, but she got on the scale.
He bent to watch the needle swing. He was utterly still, staring at the scale. She saw the muscles tighten across his shoulders and the tendons stand in the back of his thick neck, and she knew.
In a flat, frightening voice, all the more scary because it was so soft, he said: “Suffering Mother of God, one twenty-five. Forty-eight hours to show time and you’re a goddamn pound over.”
“I can’t make it, Russell.”
“You’ll make weight. I’m here to make you make it.”
He walked over to the room air conditioner and turned off the fan. Then he turned the thermostat to high heat. When he came back to her, he slipped out of his swim trunks.
She looked down at him. “Good Lord, Russell.”
He said, “The weight has got to go.”
She was a little beside herself. This had never happened before. He’d seen her naked before. He had to see her naked, to check her gluts, her groin, her lower abdominals and how tightly they all tied in, the leanness, the symmetry, but never this. His own nakedness was new, and it brought something boiling to her heart that was a kind of terror.
“I could go to the sauna,” she said. “I could swim laps.”
“But then they’d see you, wouldn’t they,” he said. “I want’m to get loose in the bowels when you slip out of your robe to warm up backstage before the contest. Psych, little girl, psych.”
Russell never let anyone see the woman he was entering from his gym until backstage just before show time. He himself had done it that way when he was competing and he did it now with those he trained. He thought it gave him an edge.
He stepped close to her and took her face in his hands, hands so huge they held her head like an orange.
The room was getting hotter and hotter and the squeals and shouts of laughter from the pool below their window grew with the heat. Or so it seemed to Shereel, her head caught in Russell’s hands. He rocked it gently, tenderly.
Russell said, “Just think of it as another workout. A friend of mine, Duffy Deeter, told me that and I’ve come to believe it. Fucking is just another workout.”
“Russell, I…”
He shook her, not roughly, but not tenderly either. “Don’t talk. Listen. You’ve got to put your heart in this. Your heart. You’ve got to work. You want that water? You want a nice cool piece of ice to suck on? Here’s where you earn it. Earn it here or you don’t get it.”
And so, there in the steaming Blue Flamingo Hotel room in the middle of Miami Beach, there started a bizarre dance, pointed toward four ounces of water, a twisting and bending and violent thrusting that made Shereel’s head ring like a bell tower. Russell handled her as easily as if she had been a child, all the while exhorting her to “Work, goddammit, work!”
But try as she would, all she could think of was that her mamma and daddy, along with her two brothers and sister and former fiance—maybe still her fiance—were all driving down from south Georgia to watch the show this weekend. They had never seen her compete, didn’t understand it, but they had seen pictures she had sent them of herself in other competitions and they were curious and they loved her.
Gradually though, the splashing of the pool turned into four ounces of cold water in her head and the tiny glass of water washed away the images of her family and of what she was doing here on the bed which Russell’s severe thrusting and rooting had already broken. He was washed down in sweat when she went clearly and completely out of her head and her body showed the first faint moisture.
They broke most of the furniture in the room with Russell snorting and screaming like a madman. “You’re a goddamn champion! Work! Get lean! Lean!”
Because her fluid intake had been so carefully monitored, she never would have thought she could have sweated as she was sweating, but when they finally ended on the floor among what was left of the splintered coffee table, she was wetter than Russell. And it had been he who had quit, gasping for air. He was bleeding from long thin scratches across his back and along his legs. Welts were ri
sing in his heavily muscled shoulders, welts that would turn into ugly bruises later. But Shereel was totally unmarked, her fine skin as smooth and unblemished as ever. Because through all the twisting and jamming, hunching and thrusting, Russell had been very careful not to leave any sign of struggle on her. It would not do to mar the flesh he had brought here to win the world.
“Enough,” he said in a hoarse, breathless whisper. “We’re where we needed to go.”
And they were. When she got on the scale she was a hundred and twenty-three pounds. Only when she saw the weight did it occur to her that during the entire time he had thrashed her— turning her over and over, standing her on her head, on her feet, on her back, on her belly—it was only then that she realized that he had never kissed her. Not that she wanted him to. But she had never been fucked and not kissed. (Her brother, to bedevil her: “Know why you don’t kiss a cow when you fuck it? Too far to walk. Har, har, har.”)
Russell said, “You can have five ounces of water.”
She turned on him, her face tight, her teeth bared. “I only want two goddamn ounces! And leave the heat on.”
“All right,” shouted Russell. “You’ve finally got your game face on.”
It was then that he kissed her, a long kiss which he did not notice she permitted but did not return.
TWO
They were sitting in lounge chairs by the pool, Russell in nothing but his trunks, Shereel in a terry-cloth robe that covered her entirely. Only her tiny golden feet were exposed. A straw sun hat shadowed her face, itself half-covered by aviator sunglasses.
All about them, in the pool, in chaise longues, were enormously muscled men, their bodies veined and hairless—and women without body fat, their skin diaphanous, their movements languid and deliberate, abdominal walls ridged with rows of muscle so sharply defined as to seem unreal, the mad imaginings of a mad artist.
Everybody seemed perfect of his kind, teeth incredibly white, hair thick and wildly beautiful, eyes clear and shining with a kind of mindless confidence, as though the world would never die, could never die. Age and death seemed defeated here. They all conspicuously ignored one another as they moved in the contained monuments they had made of themselves. Their skins circumscribed their worlds, worlds they inhabited with obvious joy, contentment, and pride.
Without turning her head, Shereel said, “What about the room?”
“What about it?” said Russell.
“You wrecked it. Everything is smashed,” she said.
“Fuck the room. We’ve got a contest to win. I’ll take care of it when the time comes.” He paused and squinted up at the sun. “I admire your discipline with the water.”
She did not answer.
“I’ve always admired you,” he said.
She looked at him curiously. He had never said that before, and he could see on her face what she was thinking.
“You always knew it,” he said.
“It’s hard to know somebody admires you when they’re screaming at you,” she said.
“The screaming was necessary. It was all necessary,” he said.
She affected a yawn and pulled her hat lower.
“Just keep your game face,” he said. “We’ve come this far.”
“Yeah,” she said. “We’ve come this far.”
He turned in his chair and took her shoulder. “Keep reminding yourself of what this is. The top of the world. The best is here. Beat’m and there’s nobody left to beat. So many endorsements will come, you’ll have to hire somebody to count’m. The gym will grow like a flower. Franchises. Money.” He regarded his thick, perfectly shaped hands. “I’ll take care of you.”
“Don’t let it get too thick, Russell.”
“Only the truth,” he said.
She was about to answer when a black man, who must have been two hundred and sixty pounds and was taller than Russell, walked up. He was wearing a T-shirt over his swimsuit. Across the front of his shirt was the legend:
BLACK MAGIC GYMNASIUM
DETROIT, MICHIGAN
HOME OF MARVELLA WASHINGTON, CHAMPION
Shereel knew who he was. He had been a famous and fierce competitor in his day.
“What’s happening, Russell?” He showed a mouthful of perfect teeth.
“I thought you’d tell me, Wall.”
Shereel had seen copies of old strength magazines when he had been blowing everybody off the stage. Wallace the Wall he’d been called. “Just called Wallace now. The wall’s gone.”
Russell smiled. “Yeah, I can see.”
“Watch your mouth, white boy,” Wallace said. But it was said in a good-natured, bantering voice.
“You’re not going to start niggering me, are you, Wall?”
“I didn’t come all the way from Detroit to nigger you, Russell Muscle.”
“You know I don’t like to be called that,” said Russell.
“I know,” Wallace said.
“So tell me anyway,” said Russell. “What are you doing here?”
“Didn’t you hear, man? The Ms. and Mr. Cosmos is being held here.” He paused and looked long across the pool where a young black girl, a single shining muscle of a girl, and a white ropey boy were going through their posing routines in tandem. “Fuck the Mr. Cosmos,” he said, “I brought the Ms. Cosmos. Hell, I ain’t greedy. Ms. Cosmos is enough, and I brought her all the way from Dee-troit City.”
“Sure you did, Wall,” said Russell, confidently. He was confident. “Sure you did.”
Wallace rolled his eyes and sighed. Then he turned to Shereel. “It’s good to see you, Miss Dupont—even if I can’t see you.”
“It’s good to see you, Wallace,” she said from under her hat.
Russell said, “Her tan’s peaked. She’s peaked. Class of the field.”
Wallace ignored him. “You looked awful good in Los Angeles.”
“Good enough to win,” said Russell.
Wallace looked at him now. “You bring anybody for the men’s division?”
“We’re here for one championship, same as you. Ms. Cosmos. Shereel’s wanted it bad enough. Nothing here can touch her. If I was you I’d save myself some expenses and pack up and go back home now.”
“It’s always a pleasure talking to a gentleman, Russell Muscle.” He turned to go but stopped long enough to say, “Ah, Miss Dupont, Marvella is looking for you. And I wouldn’t doubt before it’s over she finds you. You might check over your shoulder now and then.”
When he was gone, Russell said, “Asshole.”
“He’s not a bad guy,” said Shereel.
Russell glowered and growled and rattled in his throat. “Everybody here’s an asshole. Babykillers! Fatherfucking fags and faglets! Don’t you goddamn forget it!” Then hissing: “It’s those scumbags against us. I want to see some hate cook in you. Hate, goddammit.”
“Russell,” said Shereel calmly, “you’re a madman.”
“I’ll show you what madness is before this is over,” he said. “I’ll show you crazy.”
An announcement came over the public address system above the pool. “Will Miss Dorothy Turnipseed please pick up the house phone for a message at the desk?”
Shereel’s head jerked upward.
Russell said, “Don’t move. Don’t move an inch.”
“That’ll be my family,” she said. “It couldn’t be anybody else.”
“Don’t they know your goddamn name’s not Turnipseed anymore? Don’t they know you’re Shereel Dupont?”
“They know that’s my stage name.”
“Your stage name.” It was a statement.
“That was what was stamped on the contest photos I sent them. I had to tell’m something. They wouldn’t understand anything like changing my name.”
Russell had forgotten all about her family coming to the competition. “Jesus Christ,” he said, “if this gets out it could lose it for us. Nobody named Dorothy Turnipseed could ever be Ms. Cosmos.”
The voice on the PA system asked if Miss Turnipseed was in the hotel.
“You stay put,” said Russell. “I’ll pick up the phone and handle this.”
He got out of his chair and strode toward the phone at the side of the pool. Shereel watched him go and the thought occurred to her that if her name wasn’t Turnipseed, she probably wouldn’t be sitting here beside the Blue Flamingo Hotel pool now.
