Arnies of the Night

Attanasio wondered whether he could call himself Hercules. Despite his skinny arms and pathetic inability to lose weight over the course of two decades, Attanasio had always fancied himself a lifter of weights, had put in the hours in the cellar, yeah, pumping with the sump pump. His uncle and eponym, he knew, had once been on the cover of Muscle magazine. So let us follow Hercules as he travels with Arnold.

Hercules had trouble getting to the WCVB studios out in Needham. He finally threatened to walk, only 20 miles; it aroused the maternal instincts of a friend of his. On two hours sleep (Hercules always hated the morning) Hercules tried to frame questions. There was something in bodybuilding that touched the existentialist in Hercules, although he found it hard to express. He suspected that Arnold lived out on the edge (where else would you use all those muscles?), that Arnold too was an existentialist. It was not insignificant to Hercules that America had become a nation of joggers, that America had a jogging president at the time the embassies started to burn. Why jog? Hercules remembered seeing a frog's heart pumping away in saline solution, two hours after the frog died. Joggers were interested in living long lives, not necessarily good ones; they forgot that, as Engels wrote, "Quality changes quality."

Arnold was already being interviewed when Hercules made it to WCVB. He ran a lumpy matron through some bent-arm flyes to increase her bustline. "Look, it's growing already." There was a satellite photo of Iranians whipping themselves on the second monitor. The woman did some more flyes.

"The guy's in great shape," said someone in William Shatner's entourage. Shatner followed Arnold on "Good Day"; he looked fat, Hercules couldn't tell where his belly ended and his chest began.

"Yecch," said the woman beside him. Hercules knew several women who found Arnold's physique unappealing, who said they couldn't imagine sleeping with him. For his own reasons, Hercules couldn't imagine sleeping with him either, a diferent story and one, Hercules would hear, not altogether foreign to bodybuilding.

Arnold finally emerged and they headed to the limo, Arnold a head taller and half again as wide as Hercules, with new long hair and blue Western boots made of something like armadillo skin. Hercules decided to start by talking about the book, Arnold's Bodyshaping for Women; it was safest (don't offend the Austrian Oak!) and besides, Hercules instantly liked Arnold, recognized the glint of Teutonic madness in his eyes.

"The question was just to put a program together for women that is economical, and to fight through that stereotype image and myth about the female being the weaker sex and all those things which is a bunch of crap." Arnold sounded a little like Henry Kissinger, a little like Bela Lugosi. He told Hercules about how women have 25-30 per cent fewer muscle cells, how they don't have testosterone, how he never met a woman who was satisfied with her looks. Then--

"Could we haf some colt air in de back?" --and suddenly, Hercules saw it: in another day, this man could have been a Reich Marshal. But it was an ugly thought, it all happened too soon to be sure, and Hercules shelved it till later. He decided to ask Arnold about his latest movie. Conan the Barbarian. Shooting was delayed until spring. Arnold said, because of his various commitments. "It could be that I'm doing another project before then, because I just got a script that was very good. It's called "The Jayne Mansfield Story.'"

It seemed to Hercules that Arnold was a striver. Hercules had no small dose of Prometheanism himself, even for his 20 years, although he sometimes thought he would be happier with a house in the suburbs, kids, maybe a Cuisinart, but no novel burning inside him. Hercules wondered if Arnold missed the bourgeois mellow life.

"But the bottom line is, I do miss it sometimes, yes, especially when I'm on the road a lot, then whenever I go back to California I usually visit friends who have families and this way I get a feeling a little bit of that kind of family life--the dog, the cat, the children around screaming, this and that."

Hercules kept probing, trying to find Arnold the Man. It was obvious the guy had a tremendous ego, although this didn't bother Hercules, he had dealt with oceanic egos, he had one himself. He even found it appealing: here was a hero, a man who would move the world with a large enough lever and his own belief in himself. "I set a goal and I go after it...I'm not at all tense about it. I visualize it, I see it in front of me that it will happen, and then it's just a matter of motions, going through motions and working up to that level."

The point, to Hercules at least, was that Arnold had these goals, that he had dedicated himself, made something out of nothing. People cavilled about bodybuilding, what a thing to dedicate your life to! Hercules didn't see that but he believed it didn't matter what you dedicated yourself to, it was even better if it was absurd. Hercules saw gleamings of Arnold the Existentialist.

Arnold saw Arnold the Businessman.

"Investments take guts," Arnold said as they arrived at the Ritz-Carlton. "The people that have all the smarts in the world in economics, they end up working for a corporation. But the people that have knowledge but guts, they go out on their own...The fun of taking a risk is, to me, a very enjoyable thing."

In front of the hotel two autograph hounds attacked Arnold. The pair went to have tea, chatted about the Longinian ideal, the habit of greatness, idols--Arnold's idol in acting was Burt Reynolds. Arnold bantered with the waiters, it was always Arnold, not Arnold Schwarzenegger or Mr. Schwarzenegger or Mr. Arnold. That meant something to Hercules, it meant that Arnold was more than a weightlifter or an actor or a businessman or an author--Arnold was Arnold. Suddenly Hercules desperately wanted a pair of blue armadillo boots.

Hercules finally broached the subject of bodybuilding. He had avoided it until then afraid that it would be like talking to Johnny Unitas. "Oh yeah, Johnny, I throw a football too." Hercules had known something of the joy of pumping, but here was this man (the avatar!), this man who had built a temple to himself and carried it around, an objective correlative of his huge ego. What was it like?

"When you reach that pumped-up feeling, and everything's tight. The tightness of the muscle, and the pump, means that you have trained well and that it will get bigger...There's a certain high to the experience in the gymnasium, it's the same high as you would experience when you come when you have sex...It's like--the ultimate. The training is like leading up to the pump and sex is like leading up to coming."

Hercules asked Arnold if it bothered him that lots of his fans were homosexuals--it bothered Hercules, the specter of a dark room full of hungry queens had kept him from ever seeing "Pumping Iron." "I don't think it bothers Newsweek that homosexuals buy Newsweek." Arnold was, of course, being openminded, a treacherous attitude for an existentialist. Hercules respected him for it.

There was a mob at the Coop when Arnold got there, oglers, curiosity seekers, and bodybuilding enthusiasts, some girls, some kids, one member of the Porcellian Club, the Harvard Crew, Caroline Kennedy.

"Do you drink liquid protein Ahnold?"

"No, I get my protein through regular foods."

"Milk and egg?"

"Regular food, you know. Meat, eggs, fish."

"Gosh, could you imagine if he turned his shoulders to shake your hand?" someone said. "He'd blot out the sun."

"Tell that guy not to announce me over the microphone as the bodybuilder," Arnold was saying. "I think my writing ability has succeeded the bodybuilding. Announce me as the best-selling author." A Coop employee spoke to Arnold in German, and left. "Every time I come here she wants me to sit here naked," Arnold said. "I told her she should take her clothes off."

Hercules and a friend watched as Arnold signed books for customers and scraps of paper for little kids, listened as he bantered about skiing.

"It's like that scene in the "Bride of Frankenstein" when the monster talks," he said. "Look, people are afraid to come forward."

It was true. The mob more or less kept their distance, individuals approached on eggshells. They sensed that those arms, arms like thighs, had been built by an essentially destructive impulse, that at the slightest provocation Arnold might elicit painful obeisance with those big blue boots. Finally someone summoned the nerve. (To be stomped by Arnold!)

"I'll have to convince my girlfriend to start working out."

"Oh just force her," Arnold said.

"Do you think Arnold does well?" the friend said.

I don't know, "Hercules said. "There was an article in Penthouse by one of Arnold's ex-girlfriends that implied, well..." Hercules held up his pinkie.

Arnold finally finished signing. Hercules shook his hand, promised to show him the Kennedy Library the next time he was up, directed him to the Harvest. Six-times Mr. Olympia, but still a big kid, he walked like a big kid, kind of lurching, walked right into cars on the way down the street. There really was something childlike about Arnold, Hercules decided, not in a bad way, but something refreshing in his simple outlook on life, his naive egoism, his sense of endless possibility. Hercules went back to the gym to lift weights.

In another day, he could have been a Reich Marshal.