E
EnzymeX
Guest
This is the story of Steve Michalik, a pro bodybuilder in the 70s. Not a short read, but it is worth it.
The Power and the Gory
FROM THE VILLAGE VOICE - PAUL SOLOTAROFF (1990)
Half the world was in mortal terror of him. He had a sixty inch chest, twenty three inch arms, and when the Anadrol and Bolasterone backed up in his bloodstream, his eyes went as red as the laser scope on an Uzi. He threw people through windows, and chased them madly down Hempstead Turnpike when they had the temerity to cut him off. And in the gym he owned in Farmingdale, the notorious Mr America’s, if he caught you looking at him while he trained, you generally woke up bleeding on the pavement outside. Half out of his mind on androgens and horse steroids; he had this idea that being looked at robbed him of energy, energy that he needed to leg press two thousand pounds.
Nonetheless one day a kid walked up to him between sets and said “I want to be just like you Steve Michalik. I want to be Mr America and Mr Universe.”
“Yeah?” said Michalik in thick contempt. “How bad do you think you want it?”
“Worse than anything in the world,” said the kid, a scrawny seventeen year old with more balls than biceps. “I can honestly say that I would die for a body like yours.”
“Well then you probably will,” snorted Michalik. “Meet me down at the beach tomorrow at six AM sharp. And if you’re like even half a minute late…” The kid was there at six AM pronto, freezing his ass off in a raggedy hood and sweats. “What do we do first?” he asked. “Swim,” grunted Michalik dragging him into the ocean.
Twenty yards out, Michalik suddenly seized the kid by his scalp and pushed him under a wave. The kid flailed punily, wriggling like a speared eel. A half minute, maybe forty five seconds, passed before Michalik let the kid up, sobbing out sea water. He gave the kid a breath, then shoved him down again, holding him under this time until the air bubbles stopped, whereupon he dragged him out by the hood and threw him gasping on the beach. “When you want the title as bad as you wanted that last ****ing
breath,” sneered Michalik “Then and only then can you come talk to me.”
For himself, Michalik only wanted two things anymore. He wanted to walk on stage at the Beacon Theater on November 15, 1986, professional bodybuilding’s Night of Champions and just turn the joint out with his 260 pounds of ripped, stripped, and
shrink wrapped muscle. And then, God help him, he wanted to die. Right there in front of everybody, with all the Flashbulbs popping, he wanted to drop dead huge and hard at the age of thirty nine. and leave a spectacular corpse behind
The pain you see had become just unendurable. Ten years of shot gunning steroids had turned his joints into fish jelly, and spiked his blood pressure so high he had to pack his nose to stop the bleeding. He’d been pissing blood for months, and what was coming out of him now was brown, pure protoplasm that his engorged liver hadn't the wherewithal to break down. And when he came home from the gym at night, his whole body was in
spasm. His eight year old boy, Steve junior, had to pack his skull in ice, trying to take the top 10 percent off his perpetual migraine.
“I knew it was all over for me,” Michalik says. “Every system in my body was shot, my testicles had shrunk to the size of cocktail peanuts. It was only a question of which organ was going to explode on me first. See, we’d all of us [professional bodybuilders] been way over the line for years, and it was like, suddenly all the bills were coming in. Victor Faizowitz took so much shit that his brain exploded. The Aldactazone [a diuretic] sent his body temperature up to one hundred twelve degrees, and he literally melted to death. Another guy, an Egyptian bodybuilder training for the Mr Universe contest, went the same way, a massive hemorrhage from head to toe - died bleeding out of every orifice. And Tommy Sansone, a former Mr America who d been my very first mentor in the gym, blew out his immune system on Anadrol and D ball [Dianabol] and died of tumors all over his body.
“As for me I couldn't wait to join em. I had so much evil in me from all the drugs I was taking that I d go home at night and ask God why he hadn’t killed me yet. And then, in the next breath, I’d say ‘Please, I know I've done a lot of terrible things- sold steroids to kids, beaten the shit out of strangers – but please don t let me go out like a sucker, God. Please let me die hitting that last pose at the Beacon with the crowd on its feet a second standing O.’ ”
Michalik s prayers might better have been addressed to a liver specialist. Two weeks before the show, he woke up the house at four in the morning with an excruciating pain beneath his ribcage. His Wife Thomasma, long since practiced at such emergencies ran off to fetch some ice.
“**** the ice,” he groaned “Call Dr Ludwig.”
Dr Arthur Ludwig, a prominent endocrinologist who had been treating Michalik on and off for a number of years was saddened but unsurprised by the call. ”Frankly,” he told Michalik, “I've been expecting it now for ages. Your friends have been telling me lately how bad you've been abusing the stuff, especially for the last five years.”
That he certainly had. Instead of cycling on and off of steroids, giving his body here and there a couple of months of recuperation, Michalik had been juicing pretty much constantly since 1976, shooting himself with fourteen different drugs and swallowing coupes amounts of six or seven others. Then there was all the speed he was gulping - bennies, black beauties - to get through his seven-hour workouts, and the handful of downs at night to catch four hours of tortuous sleep.
There, at any rate, Michalik was doubled over in bed at four in the morning, his right side screaming like a bomb had gone off in it. “You’d better get him to New York Hospital as fast as you can.” Ludwig told Michalik’s wife over the phone. “They’ve got the best liver specialist on the East Coast there. I’ll meet you in his office in an hour.”
At the hospital they pumped Michalik full of morphine and took a hasty sonogram upstairs. The liver specialist, a brusque puritan who’d been apprised of Michalik’s steroid usage, called him into his office.
“See this?” he pointed to the sonogram scarcely concealing a sneer. “This is what’s left of your liver, Mr Michalik. “And these,” - indicating the four lumps grouped inside it, one of them the size of a ripe grapefruit – “these are hepatic tumors. You have advanced liver cancer sir.”
“I do?” grinned Michalik, practically hugging himself for Joy. “How long you think I’ve got?”
“Mr Michalik do you understand what I’m telling you?” snapped the doctor, apparently miffed that his news hadn’t elicited operatic grief. “You have cancer, and will be dead within weeks or days if I don t operate immediately. And frankly your chances of surviving surgery are –“
“Surgery!” blurted Michalik, looking at the man as if he were Bonkers. You’re not coming near me with a knife. That would leave a scar.”
The doctor was with perfect justice about to order Michalik out of his office when Ludwig walked in. He took a long look at the sonogram and announced that surgery was out of the question. Michalik’s liver was so compromised he would undoubtedly die on the table. Besides, Ludwig adjudged, those weren’t tumors at all. They were something rarer by far but no less deadly: steroid induced cysts or thick sacs of blood and muscle, that were full to bursting - and growing.
He ordered Michalik strapped down- the least movement now could perforate the cysts-and wheeled upstairs to intensive care. The next twenty four hours, he declared, would tell the tale. If, deprived of steroids, the cysts stopped growing, there was a small chance that Michalik might come out of this. If, on the other hand, they fed on whatever junk he’d injected the last couple of days - well he’d get his wish at any rate to die huge.
Michalik knew it was the liver, of course. He might have been heedless, but he was hardly uniformed. In fact, he knew so much about steroids that he d written a manual on their use, and gone on the Today show to debate doctors about their efficacy. Like the steroid gurus of southern California, Michalik was self taught sorcerer whose laboratory was his body. From the age of eleven, he’d read voraciously in biochemistry, obsessed in finding out what made people big. He walked the streets of Brooklyn as a teenager, knocking on physicians doors, begging to be made enlightened about protein synthesis. And years later he scoured the Physicians Desk Reference from cover to cover, searching not only for steroids but for other classes of drugs whose secondary function was to grow muscle
Steroids, Michalik knew, were a kind of God’s play, a way of rewriting his own DNA. He’d grown up skinny and hating himself to his very cell level. According to Michalik, his father, a despotic drunk with enormous forearms, beat him with whatever was close to hand, and smashed his face, for fun, into a plate of mashed potatoes.
“I was small and weak, and my brother Anthony was big and graceful, and my old man made no bones about loving him and hating me,” Michalik recalls. “The minute I walked m from school, it was, ‘You worthless little shit, what are you doing home so early?’ His favorite way to torture me was to tell me he was going to put me in a home. We’d be driving along in Brooklyn somewhere, and we’d pass a building with iron bars on the windows, and he’d stop the car and say to me, ‘Get out. ‘This is the home we’re putting you in.’ I’d be standing there sobbing on the curb - I was maybe eight or nine at the time - and after a while he’d let me get back into the car and drive off laughing at his own little joke.
Fearful and friendless throughout childhood - even his brother was leery of being seen with him - Michalik hid out in comic books and Steve Reeves movies, burning to become huge and invulnerable. At thirteen, he scrubbed toilets in a Vic Tanny spa just to be in the presence of that first generation of iron giants – Eddie Juliani and Leroy Colbert, among others. At twenty, stationed at an Air Force base in Southeast Asia, he ignored sniper fire and the 120 degree heat to bench press a cinder block barbell in an open clearing, telling the corps psychiatrist that he couldn’t be killed because it was his destiny to become Mr. America. And at thirty-four, years after he’d forgotten where he put all his trophies, he was still crawling out of bed at two in the morning to eat his eighth meal of the day because he still wasn’t big enough. As always, there was that fugitive inch or two missing, that final heft without which he wouldn’t even take his shirt off on the beach - for fear that everyone would laugh.
And so of course there were steroids. They’d been around since at least the mid 1930s, when Hitler had them administered to his SS thugs to spike their bloodlust. By the fifties the eastern bloc nations were feeding them to school kids, creating a generation of bioengineered athletes. And in the late sixties, anabolics hit the beaches of California, as US drug companies discovered that there was a vast new market out there of kids who’d swallow anything to double their pecs and their pleasure.
The dynamics of anabolic steroids have been pretty well understood for years. Synthetic variations of the male hormone testosterone, they enter the bloodstream as chemical messengers and attach themselves to muscle cells. Once attached to these cells they deliver their twofold message: grow, and increase endurance.
Steroids accomplish the first task by increasing the synthesis of protein. In sufficient quantities they turn the body into a kind of fusion engine, converting everything, including fat, into mass and energy. A chemical bodybuilder can put on fifty pounds of
muscle in six months because most of the 6000 to 10 000 calories he eats a day are incorporated, not excreted.
The second task - increasing endurance - is achieved by stimulating the synthesis of a molecule called creatine phosphate or CP. CP is essentially hydraulic fluid for muscles, allowing them to do more than just a few seconds work. The more CP you have in your tank, the more power you generate. Olympic weightlifters and defensive linemen have huge stockpiles of CP, some portion of which is undoubtedly genetic. The better part of it though probably comes out of a bottle of Anadrol, a popular oral steroid that makes you big, strong, and savage - and not necessarily in that order.
Over the course of eleven years, Mrchalrk had taken ungodly amounts of Anadrol. If his buddies were taking two 50mg tablets a day he took four. Six weeks later, when he started to plateau, he jacked the ante to eight. So too with Dianabol, another brutal oral steroid. Where once a single 5mg pill sufficed, inevitably he was gulping ten or twelve of them a day, in conjunction with the Anadrol.
The obstacle here was his immune system, which was stubbornly going on about its business neutralizing these poisons with antibodies and shutting down receptor sites on the muscle cells. No matter, Michalik, upping the dosage, simply overwhelmed his immune system, and further addled it by flooding his bloodstream with other drugs.
All the while, of course, he was cognizant of the damage done. He knew, for instance, that Anadrol, like all oral steroids, was utter hell on the liver. An alkylated molecule with a short carbon chain, it had to be hydralrzed, or broken down within twenty-four hours. This put enormous stress on his liver, which had thousands of other chemical transactions to carry out every day, not the least of which was processing the waste from his fifty pounds of new muscle. The Physicians Desk Reference cautions that the smallest amounts of Anadrol may be toxic to the liver, even in patients taking It for only a couple of months for anemia:
WARNING MAY CAUSE PELIOSIS HEPATIS, A CONDITION IN WHICH LIVER TISSUE IS REPLACED WITH BLOOD FILLED CYSTS, OFTEN CAUSING LIVER FAILURE… OFTEN NOT RECOGNIZED UNTIL LIFE THREATENING LIVER FAILURE OR INTRA ABDOMINAL HEMORRHAGE OCCURS… FATAL MALIGNANT LIVER TUMORS ARE ALSO REPORTED.
As lethal as it was, however, Anadrol was like a baby food compared to some of the other stuff Michalik was taking. On the bodybuilding black market, where extraordinary things are still available, Michalik and some of his buddies bought the skulls of dead monkeys. Cracking them open with their bare hands, they drank the hormone rich fluid that poured out of the hypothalamus gland. They filled enormous syringes with a French supplement called Triacana and, aiming for the elusive thyroid gland, shot it right Into their necks. They took so much Ritalin before workouts to psych themselves up that one of Michalik’s training partners, a former Mr Eastern USA, ran out of the gym convinced that he could stop a car with his bare hands. He stood in the passing lane of the Hempstead Turnpike, his feet spread shoulder width apart, bracing for the moment of Impact - and got run over like a dog by a Buick Skylark, both his legs and arms badly broken.
Why, knowing what he knew about these poisons, did Michalik continue taking them? Because he, as well as his buddies and so many thousands of other bodybuilders and football players were fiercely and progressively addicted to steroids. The American medical community is currently divided about whether or not the stuff is addictive. These are the same people who declared after years of thorough study that steroids do not grow muscle. Bodybuilders are still splitting their sides over that howler. Michalik however is unamused.
“First, those morons at the AMA say that steroids don t work, which anyone who’s ever been inside a gym knows is bullshit,” he snorts. “Then ten years later they tell us they re deadly. Oh now they re deadly? Shit that was like the FDA seal of approval for steroids. C’mon everybody they must be good for you the AMA says they’ll kill you!”
“Somehow, I don t know how, I escaped getting addicted to them the first time when I was training for the Mr. America In 1972. Maybe It was because I was on them for such a short stretch, and went relatively light on the stuff. Mostly all it amounted to was a shot in the ass once a week from a doctor in Roslyn. I never found out what was in that shot, but jesus, did it make me crazy. Here I was, a church going, gentle Catholic and suddenly I was pulling people out of restaurant booths and threatening to kill them just because there were no other tables open. I picked up a three hundred pound railroad tie and caved in the side of some guy s truck with it because I thought he d insulted my wife. I was a nut, a psycho, constantly out of control - and then, thank God, the contest came and I won it and got off the juice, and suddenly became human again. I retired and devoted myself entirely to my wife for all the hell I d put her through, and swore I’d never go near that shit again.
A couple of years later, however, something happened that sent him back to the juice, and this time there was no getting off It. I’d bought Thomasina a big house In Farmingdale, and filled it with beautiful things, and was happier than Id ever been in my life. And then one day I found out she’d been having an affair. I was worse than wiped out, my soul was ripped open. It had taken me all those years to finally feel like I was a man to get all the things my father had done to me… and she cut my ****ing heart out.
Michalik went back to the gym, where he’d always solved all problems and started seeing someone we’ll call Dr X. A physician and insider in the subculture, for two decades Dr X had been supplying bodybuilders with all manner of steroids in exchange for sexual favors. Michalik hit him up for a stack of prescriptions, but made it clear that he couldn’t accommodate the doctor sexually, to the latter s keen disappointment. The two, however worked out a satisfactory compromise. Michalik, the champion bodybuilder who was constantly being consulted by young wannabes, directed some of them posthaste to the governance of Dr X.
“They had to find out sooner or later that the road to the title went through Dr X’s office ,” Michalik shrugs. “Nobody on this coast was gonna get to be competition size unless they put out for him - that or they had a daddy in the pharmaceutical business. The night Dr X first tried to seduce me, he showed me pictures of five different champions that he said he’d had sex with. I checked it out later and found out it was all true. Nice business isn’t it, professional bodybu1ld1ng?‘ More pimps and whores than Hollywood.”
Michalik didn’t care about any of that, however. Nor did care if he went crazy or got addicted to steroids. “I didn’t care if I ****ing died from em. All I cared about was getting my body back. I was down to one hundred fifty pounds, which was my
natural body weight, and no one in the gym even knew who I was. Big guys were screaming at me ‘Get off that bench you little punk I wanna use it!’ Three months later I’m two hundred pounds and bench pressing four hundred, and the same guys are coming over to me, going, ‘Hey aren’t t you Steve Michalik! When did you get here?’ And I’d tell em ‘I’ve been here for the last three months mother****er. I’m the guy you pushed off that bench over there, remember!’”
The Power and the Gory
FROM THE VILLAGE VOICE - PAUL SOLOTAROFF (1990)
Half the world was in mortal terror of him. He had a sixty inch chest, twenty three inch arms, and when the Anadrol and Bolasterone backed up in his bloodstream, his eyes went as red as the laser scope on an Uzi. He threw people through windows, and chased them madly down Hempstead Turnpike when they had the temerity to cut him off. And in the gym he owned in Farmingdale, the notorious Mr America’s, if he caught you looking at him while he trained, you generally woke up bleeding on the pavement outside. Half out of his mind on androgens and horse steroids; he had this idea that being looked at robbed him of energy, energy that he needed to leg press two thousand pounds.
Nonetheless one day a kid walked up to him between sets and said “I want to be just like you Steve Michalik. I want to be Mr America and Mr Universe.”
“Yeah?” said Michalik in thick contempt. “How bad do you think you want it?”
“Worse than anything in the world,” said the kid, a scrawny seventeen year old with more balls than biceps. “I can honestly say that I would die for a body like yours.”
“Well then you probably will,” snorted Michalik. “Meet me down at the beach tomorrow at six AM sharp. And if you’re like even half a minute late…” The kid was there at six AM pronto, freezing his ass off in a raggedy hood and sweats. “What do we do first?” he asked. “Swim,” grunted Michalik dragging him into the ocean.
Twenty yards out, Michalik suddenly seized the kid by his scalp and pushed him under a wave. The kid flailed punily, wriggling like a speared eel. A half minute, maybe forty five seconds, passed before Michalik let the kid up, sobbing out sea water. He gave the kid a breath, then shoved him down again, holding him under this time until the air bubbles stopped, whereupon he dragged him out by the hood and threw him gasping on the beach. “When you want the title as bad as you wanted that last ****ing
breath,” sneered Michalik “Then and only then can you come talk to me.”
For himself, Michalik only wanted two things anymore. He wanted to walk on stage at the Beacon Theater on November 15, 1986, professional bodybuilding’s Night of Champions and just turn the joint out with his 260 pounds of ripped, stripped, and
shrink wrapped muscle. And then, God help him, he wanted to die. Right there in front of everybody, with all the Flashbulbs popping, he wanted to drop dead huge and hard at the age of thirty nine. and leave a spectacular corpse behind
The pain you see had become just unendurable. Ten years of shot gunning steroids had turned his joints into fish jelly, and spiked his blood pressure so high he had to pack his nose to stop the bleeding. He’d been pissing blood for months, and what was coming out of him now was brown, pure protoplasm that his engorged liver hadn't the wherewithal to break down. And when he came home from the gym at night, his whole body was in
spasm. His eight year old boy, Steve junior, had to pack his skull in ice, trying to take the top 10 percent off his perpetual migraine.
“I knew it was all over for me,” Michalik says. “Every system in my body was shot, my testicles had shrunk to the size of cocktail peanuts. It was only a question of which organ was going to explode on me first. See, we’d all of us [professional bodybuilders] been way over the line for years, and it was like, suddenly all the bills were coming in. Victor Faizowitz took so much shit that his brain exploded. The Aldactazone [a diuretic] sent his body temperature up to one hundred twelve degrees, and he literally melted to death. Another guy, an Egyptian bodybuilder training for the Mr Universe contest, went the same way, a massive hemorrhage from head to toe - died bleeding out of every orifice. And Tommy Sansone, a former Mr America who d been my very first mentor in the gym, blew out his immune system on Anadrol and D ball [Dianabol] and died of tumors all over his body.
“As for me I couldn't wait to join em. I had so much evil in me from all the drugs I was taking that I d go home at night and ask God why he hadn’t killed me yet. And then, in the next breath, I’d say ‘Please, I know I've done a lot of terrible things- sold steroids to kids, beaten the shit out of strangers – but please don t let me go out like a sucker, God. Please let me die hitting that last pose at the Beacon with the crowd on its feet a second standing O.’ ”
Michalik s prayers might better have been addressed to a liver specialist. Two weeks before the show, he woke up the house at four in the morning with an excruciating pain beneath his ribcage. His Wife Thomasma, long since practiced at such emergencies ran off to fetch some ice.
“**** the ice,” he groaned “Call Dr Ludwig.”
Dr Arthur Ludwig, a prominent endocrinologist who had been treating Michalik on and off for a number of years was saddened but unsurprised by the call. ”Frankly,” he told Michalik, “I've been expecting it now for ages. Your friends have been telling me lately how bad you've been abusing the stuff, especially for the last five years.”
That he certainly had. Instead of cycling on and off of steroids, giving his body here and there a couple of months of recuperation, Michalik had been juicing pretty much constantly since 1976, shooting himself with fourteen different drugs and swallowing coupes amounts of six or seven others. Then there was all the speed he was gulping - bennies, black beauties - to get through his seven-hour workouts, and the handful of downs at night to catch four hours of tortuous sleep.
There, at any rate, Michalik was doubled over in bed at four in the morning, his right side screaming like a bomb had gone off in it. “You’d better get him to New York Hospital as fast as you can.” Ludwig told Michalik’s wife over the phone. “They’ve got the best liver specialist on the East Coast there. I’ll meet you in his office in an hour.”
At the hospital they pumped Michalik full of morphine and took a hasty sonogram upstairs. The liver specialist, a brusque puritan who’d been apprised of Michalik’s steroid usage, called him into his office.
“See this?” he pointed to the sonogram scarcely concealing a sneer. “This is what’s left of your liver, Mr Michalik. “And these,” - indicating the four lumps grouped inside it, one of them the size of a ripe grapefruit – “these are hepatic tumors. You have advanced liver cancer sir.”
“I do?” grinned Michalik, practically hugging himself for Joy. “How long you think I’ve got?”
“Mr Michalik do you understand what I’m telling you?” snapped the doctor, apparently miffed that his news hadn’t elicited operatic grief. “You have cancer, and will be dead within weeks or days if I don t operate immediately. And frankly your chances of surviving surgery are –“
“Surgery!” blurted Michalik, looking at the man as if he were Bonkers. You’re not coming near me with a knife. That would leave a scar.”
The doctor was with perfect justice about to order Michalik out of his office when Ludwig walked in. He took a long look at the sonogram and announced that surgery was out of the question. Michalik’s liver was so compromised he would undoubtedly die on the table. Besides, Ludwig adjudged, those weren’t tumors at all. They were something rarer by far but no less deadly: steroid induced cysts or thick sacs of blood and muscle, that were full to bursting - and growing.
He ordered Michalik strapped down- the least movement now could perforate the cysts-and wheeled upstairs to intensive care. The next twenty four hours, he declared, would tell the tale. If, deprived of steroids, the cysts stopped growing, there was a small chance that Michalik might come out of this. If, on the other hand, they fed on whatever junk he’d injected the last couple of days - well he’d get his wish at any rate to die huge.
Michalik knew it was the liver, of course. He might have been heedless, but he was hardly uniformed. In fact, he knew so much about steroids that he d written a manual on their use, and gone on the Today show to debate doctors about their efficacy. Like the steroid gurus of southern California, Michalik was self taught sorcerer whose laboratory was his body. From the age of eleven, he’d read voraciously in biochemistry, obsessed in finding out what made people big. He walked the streets of Brooklyn as a teenager, knocking on physicians doors, begging to be made enlightened about protein synthesis. And years later he scoured the Physicians Desk Reference from cover to cover, searching not only for steroids but for other classes of drugs whose secondary function was to grow muscle
Steroids, Michalik knew, were a kind of God’s play, a way of rewriting his own DNA. He’d grown up skinny and hating himself to his very cell level. According to Michalik, his father, a despotic drunk with enormous forearms, beat him with whatever was close to hand, and smashed his face, for fun, into a plate of mashed potatoes.
“I was small and weak, and my brother Anthony was big and graceful, and my old man made no bones about loving him and hating me,” Michalik recalls. “The minute I walked m from school, it was, ‘You worthless little shit, what are you doing home so early?’ His favorite way to torture me was to tell me he was going to put me in a home. We’d be driving along in Brooklyn somewhere, and we’d pass a building with iron bars on the windows, and he’d stop the car and say to me, ‘Get out. ‘This is the home we’re putting you in.’ I’d be standing there sobbing on the curb - I was maybe eight or nine at the time - and after a while he’d let me get back into the car and drive off laughing at his own little joke.
Fearful and friendless throughout childhood - even his brother was leery of being seen with him - Michalik hid out in comic books and Steve Reeves movies, burning to become huge and invulnerable. At thirteen, he scrubbed toilets in a Vic Tanny spa just to be in the presence of that first generation of iron giants – Eddie Juliani and Leroy Colbert, among others. At twenty, stationed at an Air Force base in Southeast Asia, he ignored sniper fire and the 120 degree heat to bench press a cinder block barbell in an open clearing, telling the corps psychiatrist that he couldn’t be killed because it was his destiny to become Mr. America. And at thirty-four, years after he’d forgotten where he put all his trophies, he was still crawling out of bed at two in the morning to eat his eighth meal of the day because he still wasn’t big enough. As always, there was that fugitive inch or two missing, that final heft without which he wouldn’t even take his shirt off on the beach - for fear that everyone would laugh.
And so of course there were steroids. They’d been around since at least the mid 1930s, when Hitler had them administered to his SS thugs to spike their bloodlust. By the fifties the eastern bloc nations were feeding them to school kids, creating a generation of bioengineered athletes. And in the late sixties, anabolics hit the beaches of California, as US drug companies discovered that there was a vast new market out there of kids who’d swallow anything to double their pecs and their pleasure.
The dynamics of anabolic steroids have been pretty well understood for years. Synthetic variations of the male hormone testosterone, they enter the bloodstream as chemical messengers and attach themselves to muscle cells. Once attached to these cells they deliver their twofold message: grow, and increase endurance.
Steroids accomplish the first task by increasing the synthesis of protein. In sufficient quantities they turn the body into a kind of fusion engine, converting everything, including fat, into mass and energy. A chemical bodybuilder can put on fifty pounds of
muscle in six months because most of the 6000 to 10 000 calories he eats a day are incorporated, not excreted.
The second task - increasing endurance - is achieved by stimulating the synthesis of a molecule called creatine phosphate or CP. CP is essentially hydraulic fluid for muscles, allowing them to do more than just a few seconds work. The more CP you have in your tank, the more power you generate. Olympic weightlifters and defensive linemen have huge stockpiles of CP, some portion of which is undoubtedly genetic. The better part of it though probably comes out of a bottle of Anadrol, a popular oral steroid that makes you big, strong, and savage - and not necessarily in that order.
Over the course of eleven years, Mrchalrk had taken ungodly amounts of Anadrol. If his buddies were taking two 50mg tablets a day he took four. Six weeks later, when he started to plateau, he jacked the ante to eight. So too with Dianabol, another brutal oral steroid. Where once a single 5mg pill sufficed, inevitably he was gulping ten or twelve of them a day, in conjunction with the Anadrol.
The obstacle here was his immune system, which was stubbornly going on about its business neutralizing these poisons with antibodies and shutting down receptor sites on the muscle cells. No matter, Michalik, upping the dosage, simply overwhelmed his immune system, and further addled it by flooding his bloodstream with other drugs.
All the while, of course, he was cognizant of the damage done. He knew, for instance, that Anadrol, like all oral steroids, was utter hell on the liver. An alkylated molecule with a short carbon chain, it had to be hydralrzed, or broken down within twenty-four hours. This put enormous stress on his liver, which had thousands of other chemical transactions to carry out every day, not the least of which was processing the waste from his fifty pounds of new muscle. The Physicians Desk Reference cautions that the smallest amounts of Anadrol may be toxic to the liver, even in patients taking It for only a couple of months for anemia:
WARNING MAY CAUSE PELIOSIS HEPATIS, A CONDITION IN WHICH LIVER TISSUE IS REPLACED WITH BLOOD FILLED CYSTS, OFTEN CAUSING LIVER FAILURE… OFTEN NOT RECOGNIZED UNTIL LIFE THREATENING LIVER FAILURE OR INTRA ABDOMINAL HEMORRHAGE OCCURS… FATAL MALIGNANT LIVER TUMORS ARE ALSO REPORTED.
As lethal as it was, however, Anadrol was like a baby food compared to some of the other stuff Michalik was taking. On the bodybuilding black market, where extraordinary things are still available, Michalik and some of his buddies bought the skulls of dead monkeys. Cracking them open with their bare hands, they drank the hormone rich fluid that poured out of the hypothalamus gland. They filled enormous syringes with a French supplement called Triacana and, aiming for the elusive thyroid gland, shot it right Into their necks. They took so much Ritalin before workouts to psych themselves up that one of Michalik’s training partners, a former Mr Eastern USA, ran out of the gym convinced that he could stop a car with his bare hands. He stood in the passing lane of the Hempstead Turnpike, his feet spread shoulder width apart, bracing for the moment of Impact - and got run over like a dog by a Buick Skylark, both his legs and arms badly broken.
Why, knowing what he knew about these poisons, did Michalik continue taking them? Because he, as well as his buddies and so many thousands of other bodybuilders and football players were fiercely and progressively addicted to steroids. The American medical community is currently divided about whether or not the stuff is addictive. These are the same people who declared after years of thorough study that steroids do not grow muscle. Bodybuilders are still splitting their sides over that howler. Michalik however is unamused.
“First, those morons at the AMA say that steroids don t work, which anyone who’s ever been inside a gym knows is bullshit,” he snorts. “Then ten years later they tell us they re deadly. Oh now they re deadly? Shit that was like the FDA seal of approval for steroids. C’mon everybody they must be good for you the AMA says they’ll kill you!”
“Somehow, I don t know how, I escaped getting addicted to them the first time when I was training for the Mr. America In 1972. Maybe It was because I was on them for such a short stretch, and went relatively light on the stuff. Mostly all it amounted to was a shot in the ass once a week from a doctor in Roslyn. I never found out what was in that shot, but jesus, did it make me crazy. Here I was, a church going, gentle Catholic and suddenly I was pulling people out of restaurant booths and threatening to kill them just because there were no other tables open. I picked up a three hundred pound railroad tie and caved in the side of some guy s truck with it because I thought he d insulted my wife. I was a nut, a psycho, constantly out of control - and then, thank God, the contest came and I won it and got off the juice, and suddenly became human again. I retired and devoted myself entirely to my wife for all the hell I d put her through, and swore I’d never go near that shit again.
A couple of years later, however, something happened that sent him back to the juice, and this time there was no getting off It. I’d bought Thomasina a big house In Farmingdale, and filled it with beautiful things, and was happier than Id ever been in my life. And then one day I found out she’d been having an affair. I was worse than wiped out, my soul was ripped open. It had taken me all those years to finally feel like I was a man to get all the things my father had done to me… and she cut my ****ing heart out.
Michalik went back to the gym, where he’d always solved all problems and started seeing someone we’ll call Dr X. A physician and insider in the subculture, for two decades Dr X had been supplying bodybuilders with all manner of steroids in exchange for sexual favors. Michalik hit him up for a stack of prescriptions, but made it clear that he couldn’t accommodate the doctor sexually, to the latter s keen disappointment. The two, however worked out a satisfactory compromise. Michalik, the champion bodybuilder who was constantly being consulted by young wannabes, directed some of them posthaste to the governance of Dr X.
“They had to find out sooner or later that the road to the title went through Dr X’s office ,” Michalik shrugs. “Nobody on this coast was gonna get to be competition size unless they put out for him - that or they had a daddy in the pharmaceutical business. The night Dr X first tried to seduce me, he showed me pictures of five different champions that he said he’d had sex with. I checked it out later and found out it was all true. Nice business isn’t it, professional bodybu1ld1ng?‘ More pimps and whores than Hollywood.”
Michalik didn’t care about any of that, however. Nor did care if he went crazy or got addicted to steroids. “I didn’t care if I ****ing died from em. All I cared about was getting my body back. I was down to one hundred fifty pounds, which was my
natural body weight, and no one in the gym even knew who I was. Big guys were screaming at me ‘Get off that bench you little punk I wanna use it!’ Three months later I’m two hundred pounds and bench pressing four hundred, and the same guys are coming over to me, going, ‘Hey aren’t t you Steve Michalik! When did you get here?’ And I’d tell em ‘I’ve been here for the last three months mother****er. I’m the guy you pushed off that bench over there, remember!’”