Your Body is a Burning Furnace

Bernie is the first jock I’ve ever met. His tight white t-shirt is pressed and tucked in. At Nautilus One female members wearing assorted high-crotched leotards laugh and toss their heads back when they talk to him. I wear a black and brown imitation leopard suit with straps that criss-cross in the back. Young chicks and older chicks determined to look like the young chicks grind their way through an hour of aerobics while men on stair climbers and cycles look on. It’s one hell of a girlie show. In their aerobic highs, the women shower and talk over the sound of steaming water, while I work on the Nautilus equipment. One set, maximum intensity, twelve sets total. Bernie says I’m the strongest woman in the club. I miss him when he moves to another club, and Miriam, who wears dramatic eye make-up and black lace underwear and was married to an Israeli who beat her so now she lives in a bungalow in Downsview with her parents and her little girl, says we should visit the new club on Chesswood Drive.

I wear my skin-coloured shimmery tights and my leopard leotard under a one-piece steel-blue sweat suit cinched with a wide suede belt and my high cowboy boots, and I drive to Wingfield with the excitement of a Saturday night disco chick on the prowl. The ice on the streets shimmers in the winter sun. I slip every year. Most people walk with purpose, I walk and swear between steps—shit shit fuck shit fuck shit—until I reach the entrance. Swearing takes the edge off. This Wingfield is an impressive place: receptionist, courts, a lounge with round tables, a theatre-sized VCR screen. “I don’t know,” I say to Esther who is waiting for me, “I don’t know,” but I can’t help grinning.

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 my bathroom scale with the yellow padding registers one hundred. Even on the third try. 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 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 think, this tape is working—red hot pokers twist in my chest. I replay the tape. The pain increases so I drive a block and pull over for the next.

Behind white curtains at the York University Sports Clinic, I sit in my cotton cutt-offs and black sports bra. A jabbing pain sears along the side of and behind my left knee. “Maybe you’re not warming up properly and the load is too heavy,” the doctor says, telling me to take one month off training. “You’re at eight percent body fat,” he says and I say, “Really?” and I smile. Our family doctor says my prognosis is good; I’ve got two daughters and every incentive to get better. “Bodybuilding is not about health,” I say. She wants me to come in once a week for blood work. I tell her about my chest pains and the hypnosis 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 involving an X-Ray and video. In Montreal, in the summer of ’72, I thought I was pissing blood. 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. He was checking his schedule and asked, “By the way, what have you been eating the past few days?” “I have this thing about beets,” I said. The doctor shut his day timer and showed me to the door. “We almost did an emergency exploratory,” he said. “Why didn’t you mention your diet?” “You didn’t ask,” I said, which is a line Garth deals out decades later to which I say how could I ask if I didn’t know and he says that’s your problem isn’t it?

Dr. Pariser says I have a peptic ulcer, so I phone Abie who comes home with five bottles of cherry Maalox. He’s good when I’m sick. Same with the girls. Years later when I study transformational psychotherapy with an eastern bent, hypnosis, Time Line, and NLP and I'm spitting up platitudes, my Inner Critic rears up with the photo of my fluorescent insides, “Your body is a burning furnace . . .”