November ninety-five—four years after Danny gets home from Desert Storm—I shoot my dog, Bandit, for getting into the trash. 

Anabolic steroid-induced mania, it was. 

I get huge. Scars all over. Striae distensae up and down the triceps and pec-delt tie-ins. Worse along the sartorius, but I won’t take off my pants for you to see. 

Got more scars on this body, too. One on my chin right there by the mentalis comes from Danny on a bender. Has a ring on when he does it. Batavia High School. Class of eighty-eight.

In ninety-one, Danny comes home from his war with a General Discharge and a general meanness that plagues my last two years of Elgin-Larkin. Every day he drinks and fights and kicks my ass. Every day he calls me faggot. Every day he calls me weak. 

I juice just to get him off me. 

From a crooked trainer I score weight gainers—Test-E one-fifty—which I take twice a week every week for ten weeks. Gains, brother, gains. Add ten pounds of mass. Body fat cuts to eleven percent.

I love the way I look, the way I feel, but I don’t know post-cycle therapy back then, so everything crashes. Hormones tank. Wither back to my natural one-sixty in no time. 

First serious cycle comes after Danny lays his Kawasaki down near the Fox River bluff on the westbound lanes of Army Trail Road. 

While he rots in the VA with a mandible fracture and mouthful of missing teeth, I take a fourteen-week Test-E/Deca/Winny stack that gives me massive gains of bulk and strength. 

Girls and guys on the street, girls and guys at the gym, Mom, Danny—everybody notices my new physique. To my frame I pack thirty pounds of lean mass and find strength I don’t know possible.

When the impound yard says to get Danny’s bike, I hoist the wreck onto the tailgate of my truck no problem just so that abusive motherfucker gets to see. 

I am indestructible. 

Puncture marks on my abs come from the cop I assault on my nineteenth birthday. I’m climbing over a twelve-foot chain-link in the alley behind McTavern’s, and he grabs me by the ankle halfway over, sinking the fence’s metal fuck-you spikes a good quarter inch in five spots between the obliques. Still can’t do a proper sit-up. But I get away. I tumble over the other side and run off into the night. 

Other scars get on me, too. 

One day I strangle Danny for wearing one of my old shirts without asking, and I push Mom down the stairs when she comes to his defense. Danny swings at me, and I return the favor, breaking his jaw again in the process. Danny and Mom spend the night in Saint Joe’s while I await my first court date in County.

I’ll have others.

After Bandit, I’ll graduate to Twenty-Sixth and California in Chicago. Reckless discharge of a firearm is a Class IV felony in Illinois, as is aggravated cruelty to a companion animal, and because I am guilty of both, I will do my time downstate. 

Big Muddy River Correctional Center. IDOC. 

I am two hundred and twenty-two pounds when they intake me at Ina. Twenty inches around, my biceps. Calves like coffee cans. My chest, a keg. I can press three hundred seventy pounds on the bench. Squat five hundred. Clean three forty. My body requires three thousand five hundred daily calories to stay that size, three thousand eight hundred daily calories to grow. 

I am a monster. 

But I am not big in Big Mud. Can’t be. No gear.

No gear in Ina. No gear in Stateville. No gear in Cook County before.  

I am my biggest in my backyard that night with Bandit, finished with my bulking cycle, in the midst of a cut.  

Look at me there in the moonlight. 

Look at me, denuded.

See, look! Look, I am a specimen. 

Look! The vascularity. The proportion.

Blink and you miss it.

Ah, there it goes. 

See?

See? See how it’s gone already? 

I crumple, even.

There, I go to my knees.

There, I go to a ball. 

I am right there a fraction of what I am right there. 

I am naked.

I am stupid.

I am feeble.

I am small.

~~~

Big Hark is a writer from Chicago.