Page 344 - Some Dance to Remember

314 Jack Fritscher

6

I knew only later what Ryan did not know then. Kick had moved up
from oral steroids to injectable Decadurobolin. He was on the needle. He
was on the juice. Ryan should have suspected that Kick’s great increase in
muscle growth was due less to mind control and imaging than it was to
chemicals, but he wanted to believe in the power of Kick’s head and heart
to create naturally the new physique that was on a par with professional
bodybuilders.
A man has only so much soul to fill up his flesh. If he takes steroids,
his body grows so unnaturally big his natural soul cannot expand to fill
it up. The soul stretches, dilutes, thins, weakens. All the former natural
Force and Energy pales even as the false Frankenstein flesh grows bigger.
Magnanimity, largeness of the soul, is a relative gift. A lucky man is born
with enough soul to fill his body. He is gracious, kind, loving.
Steroids undo a man’s natural luck. His body, in a kind of retro
anorexia nervosa, outstrips his soul. His flesh thickens the way one’s hands
thicken after applauding a great performance; the hands still move, artic-
ulate, around the bones and sinews, but they are bigger, harder, less sensi-
tive than before. They don’t feel like the same hands. Once so thickened
by steroids, the bodybuilder becomes duplicitous, like the alcoholic who
is a surreptitious drinker, trying to work both ends against the middle,
the way Kick worked Ryan, to pump up the soul he knows has become
nervous, anxious, too small for his pumped-up flesh. His soul becomes
lost in his huge new physical proportions. He falls from grace.
Once, Ryan had recognized Kick as Adam before the Fall. He could
hardly recognize this new Kick who had come back to him speaking of
love for Logan.
The steroids had made his body bigger. He wanted Ryan to make his
soul grow to fill it. All along, Ryan thought that Kick’s magnanimity had
been larger than his natural body. Within that big-souled limit, he had
rationalized Kick’s careful use of the unnatural oral growth hormones.
Musclemania has no conscience.
Ryan would allow almost anything that could make Kick’s physical
being grow to match the Energy of his soul which he touched so intimately
in their night-games. What he should not have allowed was Kick’s body
growing too massive for his soul. But Ryan did not know that Kick told
only the half-truth. He masked the source of his muscle growth. He talked
of harder workouts with Logan. He never mentioned the real intensified
motives for his monthly trips to Dr. Steroid’s castle laboratory in El Lay.

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