I’m working on the bicep plateload, struggling through super slow reps and inching my way past pain. “C’mon, impress me. Keep coming. One more rep. Now. I’ll tell you when to stop. I want another rep or this workout is over. I’m walking away, do you hear?” Bernie says.
I open my eyes wide wide and look up at him. I adore the man and his dialogue and I can feel a grin sneaking up. There’s a Nautilus rule: only the muscle being worked is allowed to respond. The face and body remain motionless. I stare hard at the metal bars in my hands. When “9 ½ Weeks” came out, I saw it six times and spent five-hundred dollars on lacy panties, bras, and garter belts at a bra boutique in a suburban strip mall on Leslie south of Cummer. “Look at her arms,” a customer said staring at my purple veins ripe as any junky’s. “You can have them too,” I said and proceeded to extol the virtues of bodybuilding and Bernie and Wingfield. The saleslady and customer didn’t say anything. I could feel the weight of their silence, but I was on my precontest high.
I don’t know when I started thinking about bodybuilding contests or even when I first heard about them. I worried Bernie might be getting bored counting all those reps. He had an image, he said, of me on stage, incredibly muscled and vascular. So one morning after my legs gave way from a leg press/leg extension superset, I told Bernie I was ready to compete. “You’re the only one who can help me,” I said, “who can make me work when I don’t want to and push me through pain. And the only one who can stop me from eating.” I bought little black books at Shopper’s Drug Mart in which Bernie would track the day’s exercises, weights, and reps, and at home I’d write little bits for him, logging my food intake, sliding in words about his grandeur as a coach, my doubts, goals, competitive longings and some home-grown conflict to ensnare my born-again Christian coach. Before each training session I hand him the book and he reads. Once I recorded eating twelve-hundred calories and he threw the book down and walked away. And another time, on a Saturday, I sat down in front of an open fridge and consumed over three-thousand calories in one sitting, I was that angry.
I have a soft-cover book that lists calories which I know by heart. You can call out any food and I know the calorie count. Bernie lets me eat five-hundred calories a day and I include lettuce, and cucumbers and celery and green peppers in the count. I eat tuna from the tin. I row on the Concept Two for two hours a day and for twenty minutes after each meal. One morning I visited another club, managed by a friend of Bernie’s, Fisher. “Fisher says you’re rowing all wrong,” Bernie told me the following day. “Oh yeah?” I said, because I’m proud of my rowing. I even have the Olympic Concept Two practice booklet beside me which I consult regularly. “Listen know-it-all, you’re rowing wrong. Fisher says you’re leaning way too far back and you’re going to hurt your back.” “So why didn’t he say anything?” “Because you’re mine,” Bernie says.
The contest is in November. In July I weigh a hundred and thirteen. On the first of August I weigh myself on my bathroom scale and it registers one hundred. I drive to Wingfield with my window open and music blaring. “You look horrible,” Bernie says when I sit in front of his desk. “But one hundred—I reached our goal,” I say. “You still look horrible,” he says. “I know, I feel horrible,” I say and walk off. “Where you going?” he says. “To eat,” I say.
An audio tape plays is playing as I drive north on Bayview. “You are a furnace; you burn what you eat quickly and efficiently. You are a burning furnace. . . ” I pull over. Wow. I know I’m good and suggestive as all hell, but this tape is working—red hot pokers twist in my chest. I replay the tape. The pain increases. I can drive only one block and I pull over for the second.
I’m sitting behind white curtains at the York University Sports Clinic. There’s a jabbing pain at the side of and behind my left knee. “Maybe you’re not warming up properly and the load is too heavy,” the doctor says, tells me to take one month off training, and advises me to see my family doctor. “You’re at eight percent body fat,” he says and I say, “Really?” and I smile. The family doctor says my prognosis is good; I’ve got two daughters and every incentive to get better. Still, she wants me to come in once a week for blood work. “Also, I’m having pains in my chest,” I say and tell her about the tape. Dr. Pariser has been going to India every year for the past five years, so I figure she’d understand. She arranges a test. In Montreal I was hung up on eating beets and Dr. MacKinnon at the Royal Vic almost did an emergency exploratory. First, I had to pee standing up and on film. “I can’t pee standing up,” I said, although I liked the idea of being in the movies.
Why do doctors have to schedule appointments to deal out lab results? “Peptic ulcer” was what Dr. Pariser said and gave me a prescription to eat every three hours. Abie came home with five bottles of cherry Maalox. Years later I studied transformational psychotherapy with an eastern bent, hypnosis, Time Line, and NLP. And even at those times when I was feeling quite exalted, my Inner Critic would rear up with the photo of my fluorescent insides, “Your body is a burning furnace . . .”
