Nearly ten years ago sports pages across the nation headlined the news of the indictment of a San Francisco man charged with distributing steroids out of an obscure blood-testing laboratory near the San Francisco Airport. That fact had nearly escaped my attention until I bungled across a newsstand at Broadway and 86th where Victor Conte’s name leapt out at me from a tabloid’s back sports page like some rabid rat lying in wait.
Forty years ago at about the age of eight Jack Lalanne became my hero. From the very first black and white infomercial he had me when he’d describe his theory of dynamic tension which was a series of techniques he had developed from studying jungle cats in the zoo.
When I reached sixteen I had not the desires of my pals which revolved around the acquiring of letter jackets or muscle cars. No my dream was to be muscled. That summer I got a job in the state capitol stamping expired drivers licenses. Without a car my evenings consisted of hanging around the trailer park – that is, my summer digs. My dad was seldom around. He was usually out tripping the light fantastic on someone’s graft payback.
One summer afternoon I gave in to desire by visiting Pat Vidan’s body building studio in Indianapolis. The studio was situated a block from the famous Indy 500 race track where Pat had become a legend for waving the checkered flag on every Indy winner since around the time they invented the wheel or or least the internal combustion engine.
Pat Vidan met me at the door. He was dressed in black stretch pants and a white polo shirt. During his guided tour through his studio I noticed a sign that said all new memberships were closed. Pat looking like a blond better chiseled version of Victor Mature complete with a crew cut assured me this wasn’t necessarily the case.
“Don’t pay any heed,” replied Pat, with a knowing wink, “that’s just to keep the blackies’ out!” Busing was a big issue then and Pat thought they’d soon be busing them to his studio.
In less harried times my racial sensitivity might have been keener and the nurture versus nature thing clearer had my pineal gland not been congenitally undersized and Bob the mailman not danced a jig out front of my house on the day of Martin Luther King’s assassination.
After a few sessions I realized that I had not the stomach let alone abs or guts for that matter to be part of his underground Nazi muscle club and their full dollop of racist trimmings.
Thirty years later that desire like an uncontained geyser spewed forth again. What I had denied myself as a teenager was now ‘de rigueur’ in Manhattan’s iron man competition, or what’s commonly known as dating. I might have been able to keep it under the surface, sublimate it to something useful until that fateful night when I was harassed by drunken yuppies.
My plane had just landed a few hours before on a flight from Cambodia. They mistook my references to Pol Pot as an invitation to smoke pot. They later chased me ‘wilding’ style from a pizza joint on West 71st to deep within the bowels of Central Park where my body was offered up as a Dionysian sacrifice to violence.
I tried the gym but now my flesh was prisoner to the inexorable laws of entropy and middle age. Not only had the demon of diminishing returns reared its ugly head but it had set its sharp little teeth deep into my flabby buttocks.
I remained undaunted and searched the Internet for solutions. I visited innumerable chat rooms, portals, websites, and bulletin boards but the secrets of the buffed and chiseled eluded me. Next I tried the blogo-sphere and read the text equivalent of the amount of paper produced by forty acres of trees or roughly the carbon neutral needs of Vatican City. Yet no closer was I to the grail. On the verge of giving up a felicitous keystroke stayed my hand. I awoke to the splash screen of an obscure social network called MaxGlute. My initial questions smacking of naiveté or government entrapment were rebuffed. Begging gained nothing.
Perseverance finally paid off when someone finally took pity and guided me toward magazines such as Testosterone where I could bone up on the subject. The shibboleths for passage were the names of steroid molecules: 17-hydroxy, 13-dimethyl, and phenanthren. As my net ‘cred’ grew I was more trusted and one day some one flipped me the password that got me into the portal Anabolic. It was a secret site that preached building body mass through chemistry. And from there I found a pathway to a group who lurked in the shadows of the newsgroup: misc.mass.fitness.weights.
And that’s where I first came into contact with Victor Conte.
One day his e-mail appeared like the clear dawn of a new day. In answer to my numerous pleadings Conti advised me that I would need to ingest at least 150 mg. of oxandrolone per day to achieve the desired mass. I was ecstatic, until the sticker shock of one hundred dollars a day brought me crashing back to reality.
“Price too big league for me, Victor,” I whined, “Have something in generics?”
“Anabolic generics? Where do you think you are kid, Calcutta?”
“No! I’m just a regular schmoe, not one of your pampered world class athletes,” I sniveled. “You do any pro bono work by chance? ”
My effrontery was met by silence of the deep space kind, good for radio telescopes not so good for deltoid development.
Resigned, I trundled back to my upper Westside gym and resumed under the watchful eye of Beria, a one eyed Russian trainer, his regimen of corporeal punishment involving weights, free and the lesser free, the Schindler Stairmaster, and Torquemada’s old school armada of mass and strength torture devices. Every muscle group was monitored with the zeal of a Hun but after nearly a month little appreciable change was detected, sadly. Hell, the Mekong in Vietnam had better deltoids!
In desperation, with bended mouse in hand, I reached out to Conti once more. I begged for his help.
This time he took pity on me and wrote the following: ‘Tonto, we have a new trial in infancy - code named Kontiki. Very hush hush! I’ll do my best to get you in. Keep your eyes out for a package via snail mail. Instructions contained within.’
The postscript mentioned certain obligations which immediately piqued my interest.
‘Not to worry, just some nickel and dime testing,’ he replied, ‘won’t interfere a bit with your love life.’
Like if I had one. I agreed to the terms and Victor gave me a special e-mail drop:
Send4Victory@yahoo.com.
On reflection I had ample forewarning. With each successive package the notes became darker, almost paranoiac. “Be careful what you write,” he warned, “big brother might be watching!” But such caveats held no sway, I was too engaged line dancing with the ripped, chiseled sugar plums in my head.
The instructions called for my body’s subjection to thirty days of the swallowing, shooting and depositing of various pills, fluids, ointments, jells, and unguents followed in lock step by another thirty days of similar duress but in reverse.
Weeks passed and I detected no seismic shift amongst the key muscle groups. Feeling despondent and on the verge of giving up I decided to go out and get soused. I woke up the next morning feeling nauseas and a distinct saliva aftertaste of dead spiders. Passing the hall mirror on the way to the bathroom I caught my reflection which nearly provoked a massive coronary.
People took notice. Even my temp co-workers who usually spent most of the mornings bickering over lunch venues were startled enough to turn their collective heads. One day even I was asked to sub for somebody on my corporate softball team. Softball, for staffers, presented a golden opportunity to suck up to management, but for temps, the only upside was the hope that management might finally remember your name.
The game was played at the southern end of the Great Lawn in the heart of Central Park. They gave me a number 7 baseball jersey that fit as snug as an accordion monkey’s jacket and carried a slight whiff of vomitus.
First time at the plate I swung wildly at the first pitch. I collected myself and hitched up my pants. The next pitch high over the plate spun me around like a whirling dervish and landed me on my ass much to the delight of the crowd. I called time. This is the moment where some old crusty manager comes out and offers sage advice or else some punk ass little kid tells you to knock it out. Nothing of the sort unless you count that pissed off park vagabond off the third base line screaming at me for a quarter. I righted myself and set my stance. The next pitch some high heat down the pipe I blasted out past the outer asphalt track circling the Great Lawn. Few noticed since we were ten runs behind.
My next trip to the plate I adjusted the mechanics of my swing to produce a tighter motion. Oddly my eyes seemed keener this time to the plate. The first pitched I eyed all the way from its release to the catchers glove. On the second pitch I came around on the ball with such velocity that I sent it out like a space shot in a careening trajectory toward the Delacorte pond. This time there were a few cheers from the stands even though we were now sixteen runs behind.
Finally, in my last at bat, I crushed the ball so monstrously that the compression blasted it over the ramparts of Belvedere castle. Pandemonium ensued and the opposition cried foul. They demanded that I be ejected and the game forfeited under a rule prohibiting ‘ringers’ derived from an ancient Anglo-Saxon common law principle that you can’t call faeries or and sprites from the depths to help you.
The tabloids were hawking the story the very next morning. The sports headlined a story of a mysterious middle aged man who hit three monster shots in a Great Lawn softball game. There was even a picture of a fragment from the cornice of the castle that was allegedly chipped by the so-called Colossus of Swat. That news made Steinbrenner stop drooling and lapse out of his dementia and into a more comfortable rage.
“We gotta find this guy! This Mantle, this Hobbes, this Hobgoblin… get ‘em in pinstripes.”
A generous bounty was offered by the Boss creating the combustible effect of a match to a tinderbox a riotous manhunt ensued a type not seen in New York since David Berkowitz stalked Brooklyn.
Swagger
Pumped by the press clippings and my new celebrity status I couldn’t help myself in calling Conte to lay on the braggadocio. The buzz had alerted his retinue of factotums who had thoroughly briefed him by the time I called. Victor was juiced to the max when he picked up.
“You’ve gone off the reservation!” he growled.
“What do you mean?”
“You think I gave you the go ahead to prance around Manhattan like Little Lord Fauntleroy?”
“No, Vic… I, uh… well…” I stammered.
“Remember, you’re stealth, baby!” he said in a pimp daddy tone, “Always under the radar, ok?”
“Gotcha!”
Victor handed me over to one of his lab boys who ran me through a barrage of questions in that comforting dulcet tone of a hospice worker. My flub on the thirty-second question gave the guy pause.
“What did you did differently in your regimen in this last trimester," he asked pointedly.
“I used the Cream…. I used the Clear,” I stammered, “I used the Clear I used the Cream!”
“Which one?”
“The Clear maybe… the Cream perhaps… I don’t know!”
“Both together? Have you gone mad?”
“No, I just lost the instructions and winged it.”
The sound of sirens filled the line, as if someone had bolted out an emergency door. Victor was pissed when he got back on and demanded all details of my – his words - roll-your-own regime.
“You must stop with the Cream right now. The prowess you have shown of late is just a temporary side effect of your unsupervised experiments. You’re over-testosteroned and we need to re-balance you!”
“Are you saying there might be side effects?”
“Our preliminary testing on rats showed a contraindication.”
“What? Contraindication… what mumbo jumbo is this?”
“In your case… five pound testicles,” he replied.
Grasping first at my balls and then at straws I wondered out loud, “As long as I’m eight feet tall I see no…”
He cut me to the quick, “You’ll stay your vertically challenged self.”
If he had his druthers he’d cut me from the program pronto but the prospect of having me on the street unsupervised was far too risky.
“I have a new trial that will eliminate such unwanted residuals,” he offered.
Conte continued: "I have a reputation to uphold.
"Reputation? What reputation? You're running 'roids in the shadow of Oakland airport."
“Family business going all the way back to my grandfather.”
“My granddad had quite a reputation in the old country. The body building cognoscenti loved him. Until things went astray...”
“Astray… in what way?”
“It was a case of guilt by association. His reputation had reached the ears of Mussolini who entreated him to come to Rome and work as his personal trainer. And my granddad said no. But Il Duce wasn’t one to be denied in a time when Benito was more focused on the shape of his maximus glutemus than say the logistics of his rear guard deployment. One fine day as my granddad was taking a stroll he was nabbed by men in a black sedan and hauled straight to Rome.”
“So, he met his demise in Rome?”
“Italian fascists aren’t Nazis… they appreciate a man who can both train a deltoid and turn out a plate of linguini Alfredo. He was a court favorite but by early ’44 he had to hoof it out of Roma bypass his town of Testosteroni to just stay steps, steps of his own invention, ahead of the angry, vindictive mob.”
“Yeah, fascists can be real vicious bastards!”
“Far worse than anything on either side of the political spectrum,” he said pausing for effect, “creditors!”
From that moment on Victor Conte became for me the Count of Testosteroni.
to be continued:
