Michael Malone - Weebly

The upstairs room was the room where Barnum
kept things.
Things like his weight-lifting equipment. Things like
his political literature and his pictures. Stacked in the
corners with his weights were hundreds of muscle
magazines and magazines of men with guns, and men
being attacked by grizzly bears, and men fording rapids,
killing Viet Cong, and having other adventures. All
jumbled together with them were Nazi magazines and
hobbies-merchandising magazines and hard- porn
magazines and catalogs of antiques. Randomly taped all
over the walls were photographs torn from magazines:
women being subjected to sexual assault, body builders
demonstrating particular exercises. On some of the
latter, arrows pointed to the relevant anatomy to be
improved; other muscle men posed in contorted stasis
like Laocoons of inflated flesh, their sinews twisted,
their faces glossy, narcissistic blanks. Among the
pictures of women chained to walls, roped to beds,
gagged by pasty, black-masked men, was one of a
handsome, sky-eyed Luftwaffe commander who was
neither flexing his biceps nor brutalizing a woman, but