LOUISIANA LEGS - William Giraldi

ODE TO
LOUISIANA LEGS
The only people who take bodybuilders
seriously are other bodybuilders.
BY WILLIAM GIRALDI
He came up in Natchitoches, Louisiana,
as Edward Andrew Loraditch, the adopted
son of penurious incompetents, but
by the time we collided in South Carolina in
1994, he was “Damien Lords,” a bodybuilder
with a granite physique so enormous, so beautifully
grotesque, that he looked invented by
an unholy geneticist. When I first beheld him
swashbuckling mostly naked and android-like
on the sand in North Myrtle Beach, I thought
his quadriceps might register on the Richter
scale. Those were the legs of a rhinoceros:
colossal, bronzed masses of striated meat that
quaked above his knees with each step. Nineteen
years old and a bodybuilder myself, I was
erased in the shadow of this blond Goliath.
92 THE OXFORD AMERICAN } BEST OF THE SOUTH } ISSUE 69
World Gym on Highway 17 had just hired me
as a trainer, and Damien had heard about the
new guy.
He said, “I saw you walkin’ down 17 yesterday,
Billy Boy. Those sweet girls had you
for lunch.”
The day before, I had become stymied in
the thick summer traffic of Black Bike Week:
Every African American who owns a motorcycle
in the South arrives in Myrtle Beach for
untold hours of happy sin. Rather than wait in
traffic, I abandoned my car in a lot and ambled
up the highway, duffel bag in hand, wearing
nothing but fitted nylon shorts no larger than
underwear. When I approached an SUV loaded
with busty black women, three of them
spilled from the windows with video cameras,
hooting at me, asking me to pose, to come
closer. One swung open the back door and
called me Baby Kisses, and as I got near, she
grabbed my wrist and yanked me into their
Ford. They said, “Pass that Baby Kisses over
to me,” and “Let me feel Baby Kisses,” all the
while groping my arms and calves. Damien
had seen this from his spot in traffic.
“Looks like you’ll get along at the beach
just fine,” he said, and I simply could not
blink away from those quadriceps and calves
planted before me like sequoias.
Later that afternoon, we walked to his
condo a block from the beach, and he cooked
a meal of steamed chicken and broccoli with
brown rice—food that tasted no better than
cardboard, but we were used to it. His girlfriend’s
bathing suits and thong panties were
all over the living room like dropped handkerchiefs,
and in a corner sat his electric piano
and acoustic guitar. He belted out a saccharine
Elton John ballad and then several of his own
heart-ravaged tunes, and after that we spent
every day together for ten dizzy months:
training and eating, sunbathing and boasting,
club-going with strippers and vagabonds, but
also reading aloud to each other from Dostoyevsky,
writing songs and poems, and talking,
hour upon hour, about words and music.
I had just moved to the South from New Jersey
because I was a melancholy lad looking for
a change and wanting to be a novelist. Damien
had arrived at the beach by way of Fayetteville,
North Carolina, where he had been stationed
at Fort Bragg with the 82nd Airborne
as a paratrooper/medic. The military had been
his passage out of Natchitoches, away from a
The author (left) with Damien Lords, 1994.
Opposite: “Cardinal” by Colin Brant.
O x f o rd A m e r i c a n . o rg

Adam Baumgold Gallery
life that wanted to smother his dreams. Two
months after his service ended, a doctor at the
VA diagnosed him with Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Bizarrely, the cancer—and the two years
of chemo and radiation that killed it—did
nothing to diminish his physique. In fact, he
was much larger now than he had been prior
to treatment. We liked to hypothesize about
how the radiation, à la superhero physics,
might have altered his DNA and thyroid and
morphed him into a gorgeous monster. No
matter what he did or didn’t do—diet, training,
Pentecostal prayer—it was impossible for
him to shed the muscle mass.
You need to understand how unnatural
this is. Most bodybuilders and weightlifters,
even if pumped full of anabolic steroids and
growth hormone, make only minimal gains
each year. The legs, especially, are an obstinate
series of muscles that refuse to develop easily.
Some of us would squat with so much weight
The cardinal. Obvious, right? Then you
agree. Rarer than the copper-breasted
robin (rockin’ though it may be), and rarer
than the gray or black birds filling the trees,
less crazy than the blue jay, less obsessive and
noisy than the ruby-headed woodpecker, and,
unlike the unmasked buzzard, not repulsive.
It’s beautiful. A gift of color in winter. When
you’re sick in bed with the February flu, it’s
a welcome visitor on the branch out the window.
A spot of joy on the windowsill. It could
be your mother or father spirited back to you.
It could be an old friend’s affectionate thought.
It could be your fantasy lover, stalking you for
a change. Even the duller cardinals, the female
that the barbell bent slightly across our backs,
or leg press with so many forty-five-pound
plates that no more could fit on the machine,
and even then our legs wouldn’t grow. If Damien
had ever squatted or leg pressed, his
quads would have swelled and then detonated.
He had the freakiest legs in the South and
he didn’t even try.
In his novel Body, Harry Crews christens
bodybuilders “the mysterious others,” “the
mad imaginings of a mad artist.” We relished
this mystery, this exclusivity: our physiques
as artwork. Both men and women would approach
us on the beach and ask to be photographed
with Damien. But already, at almost
twenty years old, I was losing the Hellenic
inclination to worship the physical form, to
want allegiance with the Homeric heroes I had
been reading about since high school. Anyway,
I didn’t have genes mutated enough to
turn pro. Damien had those genes, and I have
ODE TO
REGIONAL PRIDE
A red flower.
BY JOHN HOLMAN
and juvenile kinds, with the ruby beak on the
shady face, are more wonderful than the crow.
little doubt that he would have made a supreme
champion, what Crews calls a “worldbeater.”
He could have been known around
the globe as Louisiana Legs.
But he had different ideas: music, college,
money. His enormity became a burden; the
guitar looked like a fork in his hands. The
only people who take bodybuilders seriously
are other bodybuilders. When I quit bodybuilding,
my size dropped and I reverted to
the string bean I had always been. Damien’s
impressive muscle mass is still stuck to him,
even though he doesn’t train anymore and
hasn’t thought of himself as a bodybuilder
in fifteen years or more. He moves all over
the South, working in real estate, and is once
again Andrew Loraditch. When asked now
why he chose bodybuilding for so long if he
had always had more dignified plans for himself,
he’ll say, “What else was I supposed to
do with these legs?” ø
In first grade or kindergarten, second or third,
I learned the North Carolina state flower and
bird. The dogwood and the cardinal. It was my
first taste of regional pride, to be able to claim
the cardinal, the red bird, the best, as ours. But
it is the state bird of seven states, four of them
Southern. So add Virginia, West Virginia, and
Kentucky. And acknowledge that Ohio, Illinois,
and Indiana know the best bird when
they see it. Cardinals are described as noble in
carriage, beautiful of plumage, excellent singers.
They brighten bushes, adorn the yard.
And in spring, the adult male is a red flower
in flight; in autumn, a red leaf in flutter; and
in summer, a small red scarf on the wind. ø
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