Anabolic Poetics: From Steroids to Stanzas, Part I

An eighteen-gauge syringe teeters like a spent cigarette on the edge of a kitchen plate. The pinky-length needle is gently curved with reuse, sticky now with amber, the dark honey of testosterone enanthate. I watch my friend wipe a single droplet of blood from his outrageously striated shoulder. He puts the tissue on the kitchen table. The tissue blooms and at its center is a single red dot.

“You probably shouldn’t reuse needles, yeah?” I say.

Uncle Nasir struggles to pull the shirt down over his Ninja Turtle shell of a bare back. “Here,” I say, pulling the cotton behind his neck, where his (literally) genetically impossible broadness prevents him from reaching.

“You probably shouldn’t reuse needles, right?” I repeat with a little more confidence, given my friend here can’t really even put on his own shirt.

“Does a virgin teach a porn star how to fuck?” says Uncle Nasir. He laughs. The sheer cotton of his banana-yellow,  H E A V Y   M E T A L  stringer tank twists in the apartment’s A/C breeze. I’m twenty. He is forty-three. It’s 2011, but some part of “Nasir the Nigerian” (which the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections will later list as a known alias) is reminiscing on the 90s. His crop top collection and Family-Matters-style fade remain slick with the knowledge that once, twenty years ago, he was one of Pennsylvania’s top bodybuilders. He once stood on stage in metallic purple posing trunks and flexed while a crowd of admirers cheered (even my ass was shredded, he said). He once took home a big Conan sword as a first-place trophy. You can look me up on the internet, I’d heard him say countless times to strangers, those New Year’s Resolution recruits, pointing to their smartphones.

We had two major things in common. Without fail, Nasir was at the gym every day from 5 P.M. ­­– 10 P.M.’s close. Without fail, I was at the gym every day from 5 P.M. – 10 P.M.’s close. And, most importantly, we’d both been bitten by the “iron bug.”

We actually didn’t even compete in the same sport. I was a powerlifter emerging with nationally competitive numbers on the platform. Nasir was a veteran bodybuilder, and long gone were the days of stepping on his platform, the stage. I was a part-time LSAT tutor and part-time coach. Nasir was a full-time plug: the biggest anabolic steroid dealer for fifty miles—or one hundred, depending on the direction. Nasir dealt only in cash. Nasir didn’t even have the internet (yet). What brought us together was a love of lifting some damn weight, every single day.

Bodybuilding is a pageant. All of the weight training is done behind the scenes. the day-of competition is a celebration of aesthetic beauty. Powerlifting is much more a sport: you pull or push a barbell a single time, one of three ways, or you don’t. It’s a celebration of max strength. Bodybuilding culminates as an expression of weight against your body. Powerlifting culminates as an expression of your body upon the weight. 

In strength sports, steroids are magic. And so, Nasir was our region’s most famous magician. I learned more about the tightrope of hormonal balance, what pushes and pulls us, from Uncle Nasir than I ever would on internet message boards. There was Testosterone “E” and “C” and “P” and, if you needed to take a shot just once a month, “U.” There was Trenbolone, if you wanted to take the same gear as a racing horse. Equipoise, if you wanted to get as jacked as a local farmer’s cattle. Deca-durabolin. Masteron. Primobolan. Scientific names teemed. It all boiled down to the same principle: a magic oil seeps through your tissues for weeks, growing muscle, burning fat.

Anabolics work their wonder over time. Like compound interest, you put half a cc (500mg) of oil into your medial delt, or the upper quadrant of your glute, or the superior mass of your middle thigh, and you push through layer after layer of interstitial muscle, nice and deep where the oil won’t leak. You pull the plunger up, as if to suck something out of yourself. If there are bubbles, withdraw immediately—you’ve hit a vein. If there’s resistance, good. Press the plunger slowly. If you feel like maybe I’ve started talking about poetry, that’s good too. Your body will break up this alchemic honey, binding, absorbing. It’s magic. An infamous 1996 study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that participants who took a supraphysiologic dose (a standard steroid cycle dose ~600mg) of test e and did not exercise gained twice as much muscle as placebo participants who exercised daily.

If you want to be the best bodybuilder, you take steroids. Period. If you want to be the best powerlifter, you take steroids. Period. While my dream was never to be the best, I did have a dream to be as if I were on anabolics. Enhanced. I loved lifting. Once I told a friend, “God, I’d love to get on gear just so I could lift all the time, you know?” He did not, in fact, know.

Shortly after my twenty-first birthday and Nasir’s forty-fourth, discs slipped, herniated, and my L5—that all important basal hub at the foundation of your spine—cracked directly in half. Lumbar folded hamburger-style. Hot dogs be damned. Go big or go home. I was on my way home. No more powerlifting.

Uncle Nasir got a smartphone. “Did you know you can watch real porn on these things?” He told me, excited as a preteen whose parents weren’t home. (I assume, at this time, he’d still been trying to unscramble the Spice Channel.)

“You know they can track everything else you do on that phone?” I said.

“Nah, I’m the only one with the passcode,” he said. Three years later, the smartphone would lead to a DEA raid on his little apartment. He jumped bail and flew back to West Africa. Still active on social media, friends send me photos of Nasir: his shredded torso oiled and glittering in the reflection of a dozen different bathroom mirrors. He’s home now too, still jacked as hell.

I became a professional poet instead of powerlifter. While the only practical application of all my steroid knowledge has been helping pin my FTM transitioning friends, the poetic application still mingles just beneath the blending binaries of our skin.

I’ve been cut loose from the iron bug, but I still chase what it’s like for a thing to be “on steroids,” as they say: enhanced, accelerated. Pedal to the metal, I’m here to smoke ‘em if I’ve got ‘em. A line, a stanza, that perfectly-pitched noun-verb, left-hook, right-hook combo. I want to write somewhere between anabolics and poetics. God, wouldn’t it be great if my poems seep their amber through one reader’s tissue? Hypodermic, I hope I write what gets under my skin. I hope it laughs at the boundaries of genetic constraint, warps physiology, and rebuilds anatomies. So, I write about what rends my core. I write about what I can’t emancipate from my tissues. Meditating on what compounds and complicates us, my anabolism correlates: estrogen, testosterone, growth hormone, insulin—what culminates in an expression of my body against each line and each line against my body.

This is what I try to achieve in a poem. Somewhere between this dark honey and the darkness of our musculature. This is the needle of experience I reuse. Again and again, I press it into my body and push. What pierces flesh and spirit, joints and marrow. Hypodermic. What cuts deeper than this?