3 months ago
21
I haven’t entered a gym since the last millennium, when an instructor took my shilling and promised to turn me into a he-man. At least, I thought he said “he-man”. He might have said “human”. Anyway, I got no closer to becoming a he-man than I did to becoming emperor of China. This failure has rankled. And I blame him.
Lately, gyms have emigrated from shopping centres and high streets to light industrial zones alongside car wreckers, chemical storage facilities and bikie HQs. You see muscled fellows wearing wisp singlets plodding along the backstreets like the strongest, simplest superhero in any franchise – the Hulk, the Thing – the type of erratic champion needing close and constant instruction from the mastermind of the gang lest he accidentally break North America.
Credit: Robin Cowcher
A whiff of the underworld accompanies bodybuilding for me. Is it the thuggishness muscle implies? The fact it can be turned so readily to standover work? Or the fact bikies and crime bosses have recently got so massive? Watching a cop trying to cuff a Coffin Cheater these days is like watching a toddler attempt a Rubik’s Cube.
Maybe muscle gym membership should come with an ankle tracker. One of those devices parolees wear so they can’t slip down to the pub on Tuesday arvo, slurp daytime beers and slide back into the life. You want the Gold Class membership that comes with caramel flavoured “protein shakes”? OK, put this anklet on and surrender your passport.
On the street I smile at bodybuilders for the same reason I smile at pastors, nuns, Hare Krishnas and Goths – just to be nice, to affirm they have a right to belief, or cosplay, or some mix of the two. It seems mean not to, like shouting “rhubarb” in a theatre.
The most frightening car crash I was ever in involved a driver from a family of famous hotheads. It was early morning, and I was a sleep-addled passenger when this fool, hollering along with one of Joe Strummer’s insurrectionist ditties, went off the road and down an embankment, rolling his Renault a couple of times. I was thrashed by a maelstrom of his bric-a-brac: mixtapes, Coke cans, cigarette lighters, footy boots, an oboe, a ping pong paddle… When the death throes of the T14 finally silenced, the driver was lying on top of me in a blizzard of Wonderbra flyers he’d been paid to box-drop but hadn’t. “These bras seem reasonably priced,” I said. “Now get off me.” We climbed up and opened the driver’s door like submariners emerging from the deep, from a mission, from a war … into a day of peace, a day we didn’t deserve.
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And this is where my prejudice against muscle hounds really took flight. We had crashed outside a gym, an outer-suburban tilt-slab bunker veneered with dark glass. On hearing the roar of the crash a dozen or so simulacrum Schwarzeneggers strode outside and began circumnavigating the wreck asking fatheaded questions and pocketing Wonderbra flyers. They were a welcome sight to us. These lads, these eager behemoths, would soon right our car. Except … they were not eager at all.
It turns out extreme muscle is purely aesthetic, a type of beauty pageant, not to be mistaken as useful, not a tool that might be employed in any nine-to-five capacity. These Hercules types (as often stuck to mirrors as blowies to flypaper) are objets d’art, not beasts of burden. None will dig a hole for fear of the bulging disc and the proletarian ignominy involved. None will cart a hay bale unless applauded. None will climb a ladder, being so dangerously top-heavy.
And none could be challenged, coerced, or begged into righting our Renault, though they might have flipped it like a Matchbox toy. They cited historic incidents in which a Mr Olympia or Universe had strained a quad or deltoid helping at home or stretching for the overhead locker while en route to Venice Beach. No way would these blokes engage with the unruly mass of a bright red coupe.
Eventually, some BMX teenagers rode up, excited at the challenge of tipping a car, and we huffed and we puffed until we got the Renault back on its wheels.
I’ve held a grudge against the super-muscled ever since that day and have wondered if they are employable in any practical manner. Whoever saw one in an office? It would be as disquieting as seeing a circus elephant balancing on a drum while a ringmaster cracks a puny whip and shouts, “Hurray for Panky.”
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