Gawker
Craig Davidson is a Canadian novelist. He got all bulked up on steroids because, well, the character for the novel he was writing took steroids, he explains in The Guardian. "My character goes down dark roads. For the sake of the book, I thought I'd travel those roads with him. He begins to work out obsessively. I began to work out obsessively... He takes steroids. I took steroids." Method writing at work! It turns out that gearing up, however, is not so simple. It made his life an utter, living hell. By the fourth day: "I appeared to have breasts. Pendulous, malformed breasts." Other bad things happened. To his testicles. To his... prostate.
I had a misconception that being 'on steroids' involved the ingestion or injection of a single substance, but that was quickly dispelled. Many steroids on their own are either singular of purpose or not terribly effective. This is where 'stacking' comes in: you can put on mass (75mg of testosterone), promote muscle hardness (50mg of Winstrol) and keep water retention to a minimum (50mg of Equipoise).Then the real fun began!
Then, one sleepless night (the steroids also triggered insomnia) my testicles shrunk. Testicular atrophy is the most well-known side-effect of steroid abuse. It's an inherent irony: here you are trying to turn yourself into an über-man while part of the most obvious manifestation of your manhood dwindles before your eyes... Basically, you pump so much testosterone into your system that you rob your gonads of purpose, they lie dormant for the duration of your steroid cycle. And while I knew this would happen, the physical sensation was beyond horrible. I felt this rude clenching inside my scrotum, like a pair of tiny hands had grasped the spermatic cords and tightened into fists. It happened that fast - like a door slammed shut. 'No more testosterone!' my gonads cried. 'Closed for business!' I sat up, gasping, clutching my testicles to make sure they were still there.He also got "cranial swelling," meaning a caveman-like size of his brow. His hair—all his hair—fell out. He peed constanttly. And then... the prostate:
The prostate is an organ I associate with old men... Not, in any way, an organ I should be aware of. And yet I was, because the benign little organ had swollen to the point where it felt like a fist-sized balloon pressed against my testicles. This is a fairly common side-effect; some professional bodybuilders get prostatitis to such an extent they require a catheter.We can all learn from this! Some of us want to suffer for art. Or maybe we want an excuse to suffer, period—which Davidson admits as much: "I persisted in the belief that all suffering on my part was long overdue." Anyway, he's off the 'roids now. Totally.
From Mr. Average... to Superman [Guardian]
Comments
If Craig Davidson's character jumped off a cliff, would he do the same? Sheesh.
Merely from reading this article, I can tell that I would enjoy reading his book.
Couldn't he have just watched WWF or something?
Is that picture real? That's some scary shit. I've never seen Resident Evil because scary dogs scare me.
I just wanted to say that, as a hermetic Canadian/Calgarian writer who checks Gawker every day to bring some 'zazz' into my boring humdrum existence, I am happy to see myself, as well as a picture of a giant 'roided-out dog, covered on your pages. Seriously. And my testicles are back to normal size now, which doesn't make them terribly exceptional but I am nonetheless happy to have them back. The article originally appeared in Esquire, in a bit altered form. Very best, Craig Davidson.
When did writers start to have such an utter lack of imagination? Or research skills? Or common sense?
You go and talk to roid abusers, not become one. Jackass.
Pussy.
Didn't some guy do this for GQ a couple years ago? Or was that sex hormones
The prostate is an organ I associate with old men..."
Please kill me.
and yet, chuck palahniuk beat him to his story. sigh.
I'm using a localized steroid regimen on my left forearm and right calve - going for the "lopsided fiddler crab" look I've longed for since my botany professor danced in class.
I thought he was Scottish?
Esquire doesn't get international rights for its articles?
[www.esquire.com]
Sounds like there are worse times. I will read this book and inject myself with steroids "for authenticity", and, of course, moobs. maybe that is the next step. I will return to all my old mandatory books of Christmas Past and journey with them. I will start with The Color Purple, and just go from there!
It's like Barry Bonds writing If I Did It.
What the heck is up with that dog? This reminds me of an old This American Life episode (on the radio). They measured testosterone level in the staff and it turned out the resident gay had the highest followed by some ladies and then the dudes.
@fiveinchtaint: @crazycatlady: Info on dog is here: [www.dailymail.co.uk]
Help?
...and then he started hitting home runs.
I wish I could trick myself into working out obsessively.
Suffering for art is definitely necessary, it's part of the fun of being an artist.
@Gyrus: I have to disagree that talking to someone whose done something provides the same depth of understanding as experiencing it yourself. I'm not saying you couldn't write a great book by internalizing what you've heard described, but you get a different perspective from experiencing something firsthand. You get the totality of the journey, the behind the scenes, the pitch-black-middle-of-the-night, the subconscious. It's like having kids vs. having friends who have kids. I have a very good idea what the lives of my friends who have kids are like, what are their struggles, what are their fears/joys, what they are doing at 2 o'clock on a Tuesday. But I can only stand on the threshold of what I imagine the feeling of "being mommy" must feel like.
You can't always tell when a writer hasn't personally experienced what they are writing about. But when you can tell that they have, and you've been there too, that's a powerful authenticity, at least for me. David Rakoff's essay about doing a master cleanse comes to mind as a time when I appreciated knowing a writer had really done something. Granted that was nonfiction. But it was interesting because his life was the laboratory and his body was the experiment, and what he wrote about ended up speaking to me, as I'm unfortunately endlessly seeking some kind of intellectual by-product from the diet-schedules that I'm doomed to rely upon.
I wouldn't say you have to take steroids to write about the experience, or to write about it well. But you're going to have to put a lot of work into it somehow, and I don't think any two projects should be approached the same way, so trying the "monkey do, monkey write" way at least once seems like a valid thing to do.
@Bell County: Thanks! Fascinating.
I enjoyed this: She doesn't know she's got a genetic defect. She might give you a nasty lick, that's all.
Sure, but that's what they said about Victoria Beckham too, and now look...
@BeRightBack: Ha! Scarier Spice.
I'm just glad his character doesn't commit suicide at the end.
I was writing a western, but I shot my writing hand in the third chapter.
@Itsjustcatnip: I had to shelve my sci-fi epic after I fell off the roof.
Didn't you guys already cover this guy when he fought Jonathan Ames last year? [gawker.com]
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