Using Steroids

“Did you guys see Mark McGwire on tv?” Willie says. “I thought he was going to cry. Baseball, they’re a bunch of morons.”

We’re in the gym, lifting easy on a Friday morning. It’s a day off for me, and a different crowd is here during the day – they look mostly like mothers trying to lose the turkey wattle under their arms.

“What are they going to accomplish?” Anton says. “They ride McGwire’s home runs in 1998, knowing he’s juicing. And now they want to tear him down for it. They used him. It’s stupid. It’s not up to baseball to keep kids from buying steroids. It's up to the parents.”

I lean on a nearby squat-rack. “Do you guys juice?” I ask. I’d always wanted to know. These two, they’re always here, lifting hard. Willie, he’s a 170-pound powerlifter, and he has a squat of 535, good for number two in Canada in his weight class. Anton is his workout buddy, not a competing powerlifter, but is nonetheless an incredibly large man. Today, they’re doing deadlifts – six plates a side, and the kids in the corner whisper and peek at them like boys at a dance.

Anton laughs. “The only drug we use is weed, eh Willie?” Willie snickers. “We like to lift early, because now we’ve got all day to smoke pot. Expensive though, when you do it every day.”

Willie gets serious. “No, man…we’ve never juiced. But half the guys here do, and they have no clue how to do it. They want to be 250 in 6 months. It can’t be done, not without your balls falling off. You want some juice?”

I stiffen a bit. “No, I don’t. I’m kind of afraid of what might happen.”

Anton shrugs. “Man, you’ve been here what, three years now? If you took 6 weeks of easy orals, you’d blow up like a balloon, way more than these clowns. You’d be 230 in six weeks, no problem. You only get side effects if you abuse them. Do one cycle a year, and you’ll be a monster, with no worries.”

I’m interested, in spite of myself. 230, that’s how big Arnold was in his prime. “They must be hard to get, though, right?”

Willie points. “That guy, Adam, he juices, has been for five years. You can’t tell though, because he doesn’t know how to lift. He sells Winnie, if you want to buy it. It’s $50 for a two-week supply. Winnie is the shits, man. That’s what Arnie used.”

Winstrol, one of the oldest and best steroids in the world. They inject horses with it – it’s the same hormone as humans have. Blow up like a balloon; the idea of turning myself into some kind of small-town superman, wading through masses of ordinary men is strangely compelling. But why? I don’t even play a sport. Maybe it's the idea that, that you can do anything you want, can handle any problem that might cross your path. That you have power, in a triple share more than any man you might encounter. What can possibly threaten you if you can bench press 500 pounds? In a land of 50-percent obesity, with beer-bellied, fish-belly pale, 33-year-old boys playing Halo together in their dumpy, rented houses, what rewards might come the way of a man who has carved his body through the discipline of the iron and careful use of his own hormone?

The problem is, nobody knows the cost. Nobody knows what steroids do, in moderate doses, to a human body over a long-term basis. There are no studies showing if they are dangerous, beneficial, or anything else. There are no double-blind journal entries posted on PubMed or on the FDA website sharing the results of any steroid experiments on a test group. It’s a great unknown, and I wonder why the guys that know the most about using them are guys like these. Why the stigma? Who knows the truth about them?

Willie hunkers down to do his set of deadlifts. “Baseball, they’re on a witchhunt. They’re after the wrong guys. Legalize them, and let doctors prescribe it so it can be monitored. We can still get them if we wanted, so what’s the point? It’s not up to baseball to change society.”

He grunts, lifting 585 pounds off the floor as his bald head shines under the florescents. Bam, the plates hit the rubber.

“Fuck, last one, Anton. Let’s go, that bag of bud is calling my name.”