FITNESS CONFIDENTIAL (6 page)

But that’s what we’re creating today.

Back in the seventies, there were no TV commercials for fitness equipment, running shoes, diets or weight loss pills. We had commercials for terrible stuff like cigarettes and hard liquor, yet we were thinner and healthier as a nation because we moved more. We did it naturally as part of our daily living, not because we were told to do it. In fact, the only time exercise was mentioned on TV was when you heard things in an ad like, “I'd walk a mile for a Camel.” Ironic, huh?

So that’s the problem. What’s the solution?

Simple. If we don’t get our exercise naturally any more, we need to get it another way. I’m going to show you how. And I’m going to make it fun. This is a crusade for me. A passion. Exercise changed my life—and I mean that literally.

Exercise literally changed my life.

Let me tell you how.

Part Two

EXERCISE TO WIN

Chapter Seven

JACK LALANNE SAVED MY LIFE

When I was six years old, I had a blockage in my ears that left me legally deaf. Fortunately, surgery corrected it. Unfortunately, this happened when I was learning to speak, so I had a terrible speech impediment. You know how deaf people sound when they talk?

That’s how I talked.

At the time, I was living in Donaldsonville, a small southern town in Louisiana. It was a combination of Mayberry and that backward town where they wouldn’t let you dance in
Footloose
. My parents were both public school teachers. I’ve never seen two people work harder to educate kids in my life. When I’m home, folks still come up to me and tell me what my parents meant to them. But, because they spent their whole lives working in the public school system, they knew firsthand how much it sucked, which is why they were determined that their kids go to private school. In Louisiana, most private schools have some sort of affiliation with a religion.

I went to Catholic school.

It was hell.

From the time I stepped on the bus until the time I got home, kids ridiculed me because of the way I talked. Even worse, I ended up repeating the second grade. After I finished it the first time, the nuns got together and told my parents I should stay back again because my math and reading skills were weak—even though I had passing grades.

This caused huge fights in my house, the only time I’ve ever seen my parents argue. My father thought that the stigma of repeating a grade far outweighed any extra benefit I might get. My mother disagreed. She thought that it wouldn’t hurt me to mature a little.

Because I come from an Italian family, my mother won.

So I repeated the second grade, which only made the abuse worse. The kids teased me relentlessly. They called me “Vinna” because that’s how I pronounced my name.

Even the nuns mocked me.

I’d try to participate in class and, as soon as I spoke in my Marlee Matlin style, they’d tell me to “get the grits out of your mouth” which only let the other kids know that I was fair game.

You think I’m exaggerating, but these nuns were no angels. Their favorite sport was coming up with new ways to torture kids and I was a favorite target. One of the reasons I didn’t want to repeat second grade was because they had so much fun abusing me the first time around.

Here’s an example. I was called to the front of the class for “deliberate disobedience.” The nun told me to roll my pants up above my knees. While I was doing that, she walked over to her desk and pulled out a brown paper bag. She walked back to me, reached a hand into the bag and retrieved a fistful of uncooked Mahatma rice, which she sprinkled on the hardwood floor.

“Now kneel in it,” she said.

I wasn’t sure I’d heard right. “But there’s rice—”

“Now.”

There was a gasp from the classroom. I put my hands on the floor to ease my bare knees onto the hard kernels of rice. As soon as they touched, I could feel puncture wounds, so I immediately shot to my feet.

“You still want to disobey me?” she shouted.

“No, but—”

“Get on your knees now!”

I did. Even though I was in incredible pain, I decided that I wasn’t going to let her beat me. I was just going to take it. And I was able to, until she walked up to me holding two paperback bibles.

“Hold your hands out,” she said.

I did. She placed a bible in each hand to add to the weight driving my knees into the rice.

“If you drop either of these,” she continued, “you’ll be showing disrespect to Jesus and your time’s going to start over.”

But you never said how much time I had to begin with, I thought, so how can it start over? Luckily, I didn’t say that. My hands quivered as I tried to hold as still as possible. Any movement made the rice dig deeper. From behind me, I heard a girl crying. Her name was Penny. I glanced at her and saw that she was looking at the two puddles of blood that had formed on the floor beneath my knees.

Finally, the nun turned to me and said, “Get up. You disgust me. Your punishment’s over. Take a seat.”

I did as I was told.

Later, when my mom asked me how I cut both of my knees, I told her I got hurt on the playground.

By the way, you want to know what I did to deserve such a punishment? During class, there was some construction going on outside. The nun had warned us to pay attention to her and not look out the window. Just then, there was a loud bang out on the construction site. The whole class, startled, looked over, then quickly turned back.

I wasn’t quick enough.

I got the rice treatment because I’d looked out the window a second too long.

But it wasn’t just the nuns who made my life hell. The other kids in school used to start fights with me as they mocked the way I spoke. One kid would kneel behind me while another pushed me backward, knocking me to the ground. I’d fight back and then more would pile on.

The bus was no better.

I rode with the public school kids, which meant there was a whole new crop of students to beat on me. One day, a couple of them got off a stop early just to kick my ass before walking home. Every day I’d go home with scrapes and bruises and tell my concerned mother that I’d fallen down in the playground.

This went on for years. There was no safe place to hide from the constant torment. I was in hell. I wished I was dead. Or a superhero. How great would it be to be able to fight back and protect myself? Unfortunately, even though I was only nine, I knew superheros were just cartoon characters.

There was no hope.

I tried to escape my life by watching Wide World of Sports on TV. I don’t know if you remember it, but you could always see athletic people in exotic locations all around the globe. Over the course of an hour, you’d go from a motorcycle race on the Isle of Mann to a ski jumping competition in Kitzbuhel.

You’re probably thinking the same thing I was thinking. Where the hell is Kitzbuhel? Answer: Austria.

I really wanted to go there. It looked so clean and the people seemed nice. I was in such a bad mental state that I thought a place that housed a Nazi death camp during WWII was better than where I was living.

And then, a miracle happened.

I was getting ready to turn off the TV after watching Wide World of Sports when a new show came on featuring a very muscled guy doing exercises. His name was Jack Lalanne. He seemed like a God and I wondered how he got to look like that. That’s when my nine-year old brain put it together. Weight lifting.

For the first time, I realized that lifting weights up and down could lead to putting on muscle. And if you did it enough, you could maybe end up looking like Jack Lalanne.

Who needed cartoon superheroes? He was the real deal!

I wanted to start lifting weights. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any. But what I did have was a hollowed out piece of metal pipe and a couple of bricks—the kind with the holes in the center. I’d slide the bricks onto each end of the pipe and lift it up and down. Which kind of worked, except the bricks would slide down the pipe and rip up my hands.

I didn’t care. I did it anyway.

One day, my Uncle Frank asked me what happened to my hands. I told him about my gym in the backyard. He wanted to see it, so I took him out and demonstrated my lifting technique, promptly cutting my hands again.

“You really want to do this?” he asked.

I told him I wanted to be like Jack Lalanne. He said he knew someone better than Jack Lalanne, which I knew was bullshit because there wasn’t anyone in the world better than Jack Lalanne.

Except there was.

Joe Bonadona.

This guy made Jack look like a wimp. His pecs were like Honeybaked hams. His biceps reminded me of oversized pythons. He had quads like sequoias, and a stomach that looked like it was carved out of marble by Michelangelo. My Uncle introduced us. Joe shook my hand in his giant fist and said, “Hello, Vinnie.”

Not “Vinna.” Vinnie.

For the first time in as long as I could remember, I met someone who didn’t mock me. From that moment on, I didn’t care what anyone said, I was going to be like that guy.

He had a gym. It was about fifteen by fifteen, with walls made of cinderblock and a tin roof. The equipment was made by a local welder. The benches didn’t have any upholstery—the seats were raw wood. Instead of having pull-down machines, he had pullies hanging from the rafters threaded with a rope tied to a t-bar that he hung weights on. In the summer, if it was a hundred degrees outside, it was a hundred and thirty inside.

It was heaven.

Joe didn’t allow many people to work out there. Aside from Joe, there was this other buff guy named Charlee. He had a great tan and long brown hair that hung halfway down his back. He looked like he belonged on the cover of a Harlequin romance novel, if the guys on those covers could kick your ass.

Then there was a black guy named Batiste, although everyone called him Bat. He was always quiet. He eventually moved to Ohio and did really well in body building competitions.

Finally, there was Joe’s younger brother, Meatball. That’s right, Meatball Bonadona. Meat was in pretty good shape, but he wasn’t all that serious about working out. If the other guys spent four hours in the gym, he was in and out in an hour, and most of that time was spent cracking jokes. I liked him a lot.

And then there was me.

Joe had one rule I had to follow if I wanted to work out in his place. “I want you here five days a week,” he told me. “If you miss a day, don’t come back.”

Looking back on it, Joe probably thought that a kid my age would never stick to the program and I’d be out of there in a couple of weeks, tops. What he didn’t realize was that I was at such a low point that I was literally ready to hang myself.

It was my only shot.

So Joe told me not to miss a day and I never did. In fact, there were days I’d go to school with a fever because it was within walking distance of the gym and I needed the school bus to get me close to it, rain or shine, sickness or health. Those four cinderblock walls gave me hope for a better future.

As soon as I started pumping iron, my body changed quickly. In fact, adults used to tell me, “Be careful, because as soon as you stop working out, those muscles are going to turn to fat.” But I knew that would never happen because I knew that I would never stop working out.

When I was eleven, Joe decided to take me from Donaldsonville, my small town in the Bayou, to Gonzalez, which had the first real gym I’d ever seen. He told me to bench press two-hundred pounds because he wanted to prove to the gym owner that he was training an eleven-year-old who could bench such a crazy amount of weight. But I didn’t bench press two-hundred pounds that day.

I benched two-ten.

The reason was simple. I was used to the bench press at Joe’s gym, which didn’t have any foam padding on it. It was just raw oak, which used to stain the back of my t-shirts with blood when the wood cut into my skin. But that bench at the fancy gym was so comfortable that I was able to do another ten pounds easy.

The adults in the place were amazed. And supportive. It was a good feeling. Soon, the kids at school started to respect me and the teasing stopped.

Except that’s not true …

The kids didn’t respect or like me any more than they did before and the teasing got even worse. The only difference was that, now, the kids started coming at me in larger groups. So instead of fighting a kid here and there, I found myself fighting three or more kids at a time. And, of course, the school considered me the problem. Once you get that label, it never goes away.

This all culminated at the end of sixth grade, when a record five kids tried to beat the shit out of me. But I’d gotten pretty good at fighting by then and I ended up kicking the shit out of them. The only thing I suffered was a ripped t-shirt. But I knew I wasn’t going to get away with it that easy. The coach, Lou Latino—and, no, I’m not making that up—saw the fight and took me to the office. On the way, we had a curious conversation.

“Do you know that there’s actually a legal way to kick kid’s asses and have people applaud you for it?” he asked.

“No,” I said, but I was certainly interested in hearing more.

“Did you get held back a few years ago?”

I nodded. “Yeah.” I braced myself, afraid he was getting ready to tease me. But he didn’t say anything else. He just dropped me off at the office and they sent me home.

The next day, the coach called my house and told my parents that the JV football team was made up of eighth and ninth graders, although only the ninth graders really played. The eighth graders were basically blocking dummies.

My parents wondered what this had to do with me, because I was only in sixth grade. The coach explained that he did some checking and, because I was held back a year, I was a year older than the other students in my grade and, insurance wise, I would be eligible to join the JV team in my seventh grade year—something that had never happened in the history of the school.

So I joined.

The JV team got the hand-me-down crappy equipment that was dumped by the varsity team. The ninth graders got first pick. Then the eighth graders got what was left. Being the only seventh grader, I got the scraps that no one wanted. My helmet was made for high school kids, who were the size of adults. My head banged around inside it like a sneaker in a dryer.