Extracts
Break On Through - Americanized Version 1998

Written by LA VADE aka Rapsodomy © 1998
Chapter 21 - Venus Rising

My kid sister took me to see the movie The Doors and that’s where it all started, where it all started to go wrong. I have never regretted any of it, nor wished any of it were different.
Over a year earlier I’d joined a weight-watching club, I was a member for eight months and dropped my weight by 30 pounds but by then I was looking for something more. I quit drinking and became addicted to my local gym, circuit-training 3 times a week.
It was Miller, an ex-boyfriend who introduced me physically to what seemed like my destiny, bodybuilding. I’d grown up with bodybuilding so it wasn’t strange to be introduced to it at some stage in my life but what I wasn’t prepared for was to find out that I was pretty good at it. My father was British and grew up in the original Mecca of bodybuilding London where Arnie won four Mr Universe titles.
This was way before Joe Weider decided to send out spies to see if the Austrian Oak was myth or reality.
My dad had a bunch of UK titles and after moving to the states held the Mr Dade City title five years in a row. I often used to flip through the photo album mom had collected over the years and look at the pictures with awe never thinking one day I’d be starting an album of my own. So, even though I was a girl, nobody objected to it, not my father, my mom, my friends. I always knew I would, one day, follow a path taken by my father but I figured it would be career-wise, he was a mechanic and I loved cars and engines more than anything. Besides, I thought I had my chosen sport; I’d been a swimmer for over a decade. Sure, I loved to swim but I’d gotten real sick of the constant head colds.
The thing is, with months and months of constant dieting at the weight-watching club, which included complete sobriety, well, it all began to take its toll. I began to miss being able to party. I felt so restricted, like I was living a half-life. Only existing to lose weight. All the things I loved weren’t on offer anymore. It was like life wasn’t on offer anymore, at least not to me and the rest of the poor saps at the weight-loss club. Sure, I was getting natural highs from working out and that gave me a buzz, but what I really started to miss was the buzz a person gets from knowing they’re damn well alive and damn well kicking ass.
I decided to quit the weight-loss club and go it alone. I’d gone through hell there anyway. Way too oppressive and demoralising a regime for anyone to stomach longer than I had. I was already pretty traumatised. I hated the weighing rituals. I hated the negative attitude if I didn’t continue to lose more and more weight. I was five foot nothing weighing about 100 pounds sopping wet but somehow they still made me feel overweight. With more spare time to concentrate on bodybuilding I wasn’t worried that I wouldn’t get to my ideal weight. In fact, I was sure I would. At the time it didn’t occur to me I had a problem.
Miller’s gym was called Bullies. I really enjoyed training at there and everyone there took it very seriously. Naturally I did too. I began to research the sport on the Internet, read every book I could lay my hands on, talked about it non-stop, worked out at home, at work, everywhere I could. I lived and breathed it you could say. I was very impressed with the results I was getting, I wasn’t losing weight, I was gaining muscle and I loved the way it made me feel. I loved the way I looked. I was quickly addicted. Saturdays were my favourite; that’s when the club had integrated sessions so I got to work out with the guys. I loved to spend hours working hard as the dudes gave their support and advice.
They were nice guys, the nicest being Billy and Manny, they encouraged me, spotted me when I needed it and didn’t make me feel any less a body builder just because I was a girl. The sessions would start at around 11-o’clock and would last till late afternoon. We’d have this Saturday ritual where we’d finish off with a walk around the town centre, still in our training gear, to round the day off with some well deserved strutting and posing. There were about half a dozen of us, (the numbers would rise and fall each week), and as we worked so damn hard we were known as The Chaingang.
As I said, the Chaingang were serious as all hell about the bodybuilding. I guess some of the guys were taking steroids but I never saw any and the gym owner never offered me any. When I met Miller about 4 years before, he’d been this tall skinny guy; nowadays he was 250lbs and regularly bench pressing as much. Rumour had it he was not only taking steroids but doubling up too.
None of that really mattered to me. I wasn’t going to do that, besides, I didn’t need to. I’d been developing just fine on my own. In some muscle areas, I’d developed faster than the guys. Let me be clear, I couldn’t always compete with their strength and in some areas, due to my gender, I just couldn’t get that ripped, like in the abdominal area. However, I held my own and as a small bonus my genes gave me calves they couldn't compete with and as envious of their six-packs I was, they were just as or even more envious of my calf muscles! They used to spy on me, on the look-out to discover my secret, I never told them it was probably just genes on my Dad's side of the family or maybe the swimming, who knows?
As for the rest of me, for a girl, I did the best I could with what I had. Shoulders, deltoids, pectorals, forearms, and trapeziums. I kept supple too, spending as much time doing callisthenics as actually pumping iron. The training made me feel almost immortal. The natural high, the pumped tension; the lactic acid build up made everything hard to the touch. It was better than sex. A pure adrenaline rush.
Before bodybuilding, I had hated the way I looked in a mirror and more often than not avoided mirrors like the plague, now I have to admit I was doing a deal of posing. I’m not sure if what I’m describing was a vanity as such, more surprise and wonder. The transformation was so rapid, about four months, it simply amazed me and I felt a need to keep reminding myself that it was actually the same person in the reflection. I felt good about myself. I felt hard, taught, sinewy, lithe, perfectly in tune with my inner workings. I tried to imitate the pictures of Arnie in the books I’d got from the library. Up on my tiptoes with a graceful sideways turn to a full double-biceps pose. I liked what I saw. I continued to diet but my weight had reached a plateau. Anyway, I’d forgotten all about the dreaded scales I knew muscle weighed more than fatty tissue, and I was so stoked by what I had become that I felt I didn’t need to lose anymore.
After a while, those glorious Saturday sessions began to spill over into Saturday nights. Manny worked the door in a local nightclub called The Saratoga. He was always able to get us in and as we were all sober and we all had cars we’d meet up before hand in the parking lot and shoot the breeze before going into the club later on. At first we were all pretty cool about being sober. In fact we got quite a kick out of it. We kind of made a big deal out of making sure everyone knew what we were. The clothes we wore were the clothes only bodybuilders would wear. Tight jeans, muscle vests etc. and we proudly sported our soft drinks and chewed our sugar-free gum like Texan cowboys chewing tobacco. We kept in our group and spent the night eyeing up the drunkards with barely disguised disdain. I adored it. All of a sudden I wasn’t the short girl who had carried her puppy fat into her twenties with her. It seemed like, perhaps by some minor miracle, that I’d become this knockout cool chick with a body as hard as Kevlar. And, what was more, as I was the only girl who joined the integrated sessions who still had enough feminine curves to stop traffic I was always the very centre of their attention and more often than not, of every male around them too.
I used to make my own clothes because I could never find anything that made enough of a statement. I was in a very safe environment with the guys around me all the time so I pretty much went to town. This one dress, which I had to pour myself into, must have been the shortest, the most figure-hugging of any dress ever created. It was so skimpy I actually couldn’t wear any underwear with it. It was blood red and felt absolutely amazing to wear, especially as I was secretly naked under it. The guys didn’t leer at me; rather they sort of gave me a lot of admiring looks of approval and made it clear they all wanted to be seen talking to me.
Miller, who was always lurking somewhere in the background, like an older brother, got quite antsy by it all, although he never really explained why and I didn’t really care to ask why, after all, it had been he who had ended our relationship all those years ago Sure we were still very close but I wasn’t his girl anymore, he made sure of that and I wasn’t hurt anymore but I had been at the time. I figured perhaps he didn’t like the way I’d changed or perhaps he was jealous he wasn’t part of the group. Maybe he felt he should have had some form of formal recognition being the person who had initially introduced me to the club and by default, receive some of the credit. I don’t know but while it was all great fun, we soon got bored.

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Written by LA VADE aka Rapsodomy © 1998