Matt Mahurin

Originally published in the April 2008 issue

The needle is twenty-one gauge, one and a half inches. A hog sticker. Forty of them arrived in a package from Greece. Ever received a package from overseas? You get that puff of air when you rip it open -- air that's traveled thousands of miles. Foreign, like stepping into a stranger's house. The syringe wrapper has instructions in Italian, French, Greek, and Arabic -- not a word of English. But it's a needle. Operation is self-explanatory. I had put them out on my desk a few days ago -- an unignorable fact. An invitation. A threat.

Buck up, laddie. Fortune favors the brave.

What's inside resembles oily piss: 1 cc of Equipoise, a veterinary drug injected into horses, and 2 cc's testosterone cypionate, ten times the testosterone an average man my size naturally produces in a week.

It was going into my ass; plenty of meat there. But the sciatic nerve radiates from my hip, and if I hot-shot the junk into a vein, I could go into cardiac collapse. I tucked a bag of frozen corn beneath my underwear to numb the injection site. The hash marks on the syringe were smudged away by my sweaty hands. That couldn't be a sign of quality medical equipment, could it?

What if I died in this shitty efficiency apartment in Iowa City? I pictured the landlord stumbling upon my body, rotten and bloated. The newspaper headline: "Dumbshit Canadian Found Dead with Needle in Ass."

The needle slid in so easily, I wasn't aware it'd broken the skin. I aspirated and injected into the deep tissue. When I pulled it out, a pressurized stream of blood spurted halfway across the room.

A while back I wrote a novel. A lot of first-time novelists don't stray far from home; their stories are drawn from their lives. Holds true for me: The main character is...well, me. That's not quite true. He's wealthier, pampered, more dismissive. But his deep-seated fears, his inborn weaknesses -- those we share intimately.

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 joins a boxing club. I joined a boxing club.

He takes steroids. I took steroids.

The thing is, I've never done drugs. I therefore lacked the ability to spot the dealer in a room. Such was my quandary when it came to steroids. Where to buy? Who to ask? I'd heard your local gym was a good place, but I didn't have the first clue how to go about that. So I typed "steroids" into Google, which promptly introduced me to an Internet scam. I purchased a bottle of what I thought was a steroid called Dianabol. But what I received was Dianobol, which, for all I know, were rat turds pressed into pill form. Effective as Flintstone chewables.

I'll not go into great detail about how I came to possess real steroids -- or "gear," as we 'roiders call them. The whole thing makes me look as stupid as I was. Suffice it to say the process involved an encrypted e-mail account, a money order wired to Tel Aviv, and weeks of apprehension -- Had I been ripped off? Would DEA agents break down my door? -- before the package arrived, pills and ampules and six vials wrapped in X-ray-proof paper.

Anabolic steroids hit U.S. gyms in the early 1960s, courtesy of John Ziegler, the Americans' team doctor at the 1954 World Weightlifting Championships in Austria. He watched in horror as his countrymen were decimated by Soviet he-men who, he later found out, received testosterone injections as part of their regimen. Ziegler teamed up with a pharmaceutical firm to create the synthetic testosterone Methandrostenolone, better known by its trade name, Dianabol.

The biological function of anabolic (tissue-building) steroids is to stimulate protein synthesis -- that is, heal muscles more quickly and effectively. New muscle is gained, in part, by tearing the tubelike fibers running the length of our muscles; protein molecules attach to the broken chains, creating new muscle. While on steroids, your muscle fibers become greedy, seeking out every stray protein molecule.

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 (75 mg of testosterone), provide muscle hardness (50 mg of Winstrol), and keep water retention to a minimum (50 mg of Equipoise). This stack is injection-intensive: testosterone and Equipoise twice weekly, Winstrol daily. Eleven injections a week.

But that's only steroids. You need drugs to stave off the potential side effects: hair loss, gynecomastia (buildup of breast tissue due to increased estrogen, aka gyno, aka bitch tits), testicular atrophy, cranial and prostate swelling, erratic sex drive, liver impairment, hemorrhoids, impotence, cysts, acne, abscesses, renal failure. Hair loss, gyno, and testicular atrophy should be considered absolute rather than potential hazards: You simply cannot alter your body's chemical makeup so drastically without your body reacting. My own steroid cycle:

-- Dianabol (10 mg tabs, three per day for the first four weeks)

-- Testosterone cypionate (500 mg per week, ten weeks)

-- Equipoise (400 mg per week, ten weeks)

-- Nolvadex (antiestrogen drug; one to four pills daily depending on week)

-- Proviron (male-menopause drug; 25 mg daily)

-- HCG (human chorionic gonadotropin, derived from the urine of pregnant women; used during postcycle therapy to restore natural testosterone levels; 500 iu's twice weekly, administered with an insulin needle)

Some of this stuff showed up in the Mitchell report -- Lenny Dykstra allegedly bought Deca-Durabolin, testosterone, and Dianabol when he was with the Phillies, and Jose Guillen and infielder Matt Williams were both mentioned as testosterone-cypionate users. Doesn't look like it, but mine was a fairly mild cycle. Including diuretics and cutting and hardening agents, professional bodybuilders may have fifteen substances floating around in their systems at any given time. Like alcohol or drugs, a body's tolerance builds up. Top pros might inject up to 2,500 mg of testosterone weekly to produce the desired effect.

The first week of the cycle, my nipples start to itch. Onset of gynecomastia.

Dump enough testosterone into your body, your system counters by upping its estrogen output; this leads to a buildup of breast tissue. After long-term use it can get so bad, some men require surgical breast reductions. I woke up one morning and nearly had a heart attack at the sight of myself. My nipples were the size of sand dollars, stretched smooth as the skin of a balloon. My flesh looked as if it were swelling into small pouches, like the rubberized nipples on a baby bottle.

I appeared to have breasts. Pendulous, malformed...breasts. Or was I just chubby and still out of shape? I didn't know. Gave them a jiggle. Couldn't tell if it was fluid buildup or actual skin. Could you grow new flesh overnight? Maybe these had been there before, back when I wasn't studying every inch of my body. Either way, I didn't want tits -- that would go against the whole purpose of the exercise. I gobbled twice my daily allotment of antiestrogen meds and pulled a ribbed undershirt over my awful sweater puppies.

Double shots of Nolvadex would control the gyno. But by then my hair was falling out.

I went into this with my natural scalp of unruly, bushmanlike red hair. While I'd never been keen on its tendency to coil into ringlets, there had always been plenty of it. Then one morning I was showering, looking at my shampoo-foamed fingers, and spotted dozens of red strands. Soon they were everywhere: my pillow, between my teeth, falling onto the pages of books. I became hyperaware of the way wind felt through my hair: now much colder on the top of my scalp. Not a single follicle seemed moored to my skin.

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 überman while the most obvious manifestation of your manhood dwindles before your eyes. Female users suffer the opposite reaction: Their clitorises become so swelled that in extreme cases they resemble a tiny penis.

Basically, you inject so much testosterone that you rob your gonads of purpose; they enter dormancy for the duration of your cycle. And while I knew this would happen, the physical sensation was beyond horrible. This rude clenching inside my scrotum, a pair of tiny hands grasping the spermatic cords and tightening into fists. "No more testosterone!" my balls cried. "Closed for business!" I sat up in the dark, gasping, clutching them to make sure they were still there. Within days they had shrunk to half their normal size: sad, shriveled grapes.

Another sleepless night a week later, I swore I felt a ridge on my forehead.

Cranial swelling -- most often a Neanderthal-like ridge forming above the user's brow -- is commonly associated with HGH, or human growth hormone, originally made from the pituitary glands of fresh cadavers. But cranial swelling assumes many forms: In addition to "caveman brow," some users find semisolid lumps forming on their foreheads. Some grow to the size of hard-boiled eggs and require surgical removal.

The next morning, an inspection in the bathroom mirror: Was that a slight swelling across the top of my eyebrows? It seemed impossible -- this only happens in extreme cases. My own perceived bulge was not altogether solid, sort of mushy, but I had this terrifying sense my bone structure had somehow been altered.

This was the primary fear I ran up against: Were these changes happening? Would they subside once I quit 'roiding, or were they permanent? I could handle rampant hair loss, a caveman head, shrunken testicles, hell, even tits, so long as it was temporary. What if it wasn't?

My sixth injection goes badly.

I've been shooting my glutes, and while it's relatively painless, the skin has gone tight and I'm guessing the oil hasn't dissolved. I stick my thigh instead.

The needle goes in half an inch before hitting a major nerve. My leg bucks uncontrollably, knee nearly striking my forehead. Blood leaks from the puncture down my leg. I try my calf.

Sitting cross-legged, ankle propped on knee, I push the needle in. Goes in easy, but when I aspirate, the syringe fills with blood: hit a vein. Wipe the needle with rubbing alcohol, try another spot: blood again. Boot the excess onto a paper towel, plug a fresh needle onto the syringe, try again: blood. It's bubbling out of my thigh and the neat triangle of holes in my calf. What am I, all veins?

End up back at my glutes. After injecting, I regret it: A bubble of oil the size of a pearl onion now lies an inch under my skin. When I massage it, the bubble wobbles, all of one piece. It's still there come nighttime. I feel it pressed against my hipbone, solid as a ball bearing. Like the princess with a pea under her mattresses, I have a hard time sleeping.

To embark on a steroid cycle is to devote yourself to rituals. Wake up, eat, medicate, work out, eat, work out, eat, medicate, sleep. Repeat daily for sixteen weeks.

Eating becomes a ritual. To maximize muscle growth, you must take your weight and eat its equivalent in grams of protein per day. But I pushed my target further: 337.5 grams of daily protein.

Consider that a great source of natural protein -- a can of tuna -- contains thirteen grams. I'd have to eat more than twenty-five cans a day. The max I was ever able to ingest was twenty, forked straight from the can. It is sheer lunacy to eat twenty cans of tuna.

I managed to choke down six cans a day, supplemented with five to six protein shakes, and I still fell short of the target. I went through four 2.47-pound tubs of Muscle Milk a week, 158.08 pounds all told. I kept shoveling a limited spectrum of foodstuffs -- tuna, oatmeal, egg whites, boiled chicken -- into my mouth like a robot. Thankfully, Equipoise, developed to increase lean body weight in horses, gave my appetite a healthy boost.

Injections become a ritual. Run the vials under hot water to warm the oil. Draw 1 cc Equipoise, 1.5 cc's testosterone. Tap the syringe to release air bubbles, push the plunger until a bead forms at the pin tip. Swab the injection site and inject slooow, massaging to help it soak in. Wasn't much different from how any addict went about things. You reach a point where the careful steps and resultant anticipation becomes as heady as the rush itself. Sometimes I couldn't stop shaking as I prepared my needles.

The workout becomes a ritual. But I'd push myself past the limit. I'd lift until my arms hung like dead things. I took postworkout naps in the locker room, spread out on a bench, too exhausted to walk home. Once I caught the smell of ozone, saw these awful black lights, came to sprawled on the gym floor.

Week six my prostate swells up.

The prostate is an organ I associate with old men. Surgical-gloved fingers. Not in any way an organ I should be cognizant of. And yet I was, as this benign organ had swollen to the point that it felt like a fist-sized balloon pressed against my testicles. Another fairly common side effect for some professional bodybuilders is prostatitis, which can get to such an extent that they require catheterization. Imagine steroids as an A-bomb: If your testicles are ground zero, your prostate lies squarely in the fallout zone.

I was urinating fifteen times a day. A swollen prostate crimps the urethral tube, making it torture to piss. It also crowds the bladder, making it feel as if you always need to piss, even if there's nothing to pass. I'd stand over the toilet, coaxing, cajoling, only to produce a squirt. My urine took on the disturbingly rich hue of cask-aged brandy.

I heard "vigorous manual relief" helped ease prostate pain. But when I tried this, it felt as though the pipe connecting the sperm factory to its exit had been clothespinned -- not much came out, and the little that did looked embarrassed.

The key, I discovered, was continual application.

I became obsessed with manual relief. Three or four times a day I was manually relieving myself. With all that extra testosterone, it didn't take much to get the motor humming. I was relieving myself to photos of muscle-bound women gracing tubs of protein powder. I was relieving myself to Vanna White. I relieved myself to a perfumed insert ripped from a magazine. To a smell. Wake up, eat, jerk off, work out, eat, jerk off, eat, work out, eat, jerk off, eat, sleep.

The question you're asking by this point is, Why didn't he stop? Why, despite all the awful side effects, did he keep plugging needles into himself?

I'm sure my answer is no different from most users': the results.

Once we pass that period of massive physical change, puberty and growth spurts, we settle into a sense of our bodies. We understand its parameters and capabilities. And though it's disheartening to say, at thirty I was finding evidence of a body on its downslope. While I worked out plenty pre-steroids, I hadn't made a sizable gain in years. In gym parlance, I'd "plateaued."

Ailen Lujo

Steroids shattered the inborn limitations of my body.

I first sensed their effects bench-pressing dumbbells. I usually max out at 170 pounds -- two 85-pound weights. But ten reps with the 85's felt like a warm-up. I was stunned. With trepidation -- I was now eyeing weights that if mishandled could break some ribs -- I picked up the 90-pounders. They went up easy; I gutted out ten reps. An out-of-body sensation: somebody else's arms pushing those weights, someone else's pectorals flexing.

I went up to 100-pounders -- benching roughly my own body weight. I'd been locked at 160 to 170 pounds for years, and in the course of a single workout, I'd shot up 30 pounds.

My workout weights skyrocketed. I was doing wide-grip chin-ups with a 35-pound plate strapped to my waist, shoulder-pressing 75-pound dumbbells, slapping 45-pound plates on the biceps bar, and bottoming out Nautilus machines. My body exploded -- 205 pounds to 235 in the space of a few weeks. In 'roider vernacular, I'd "swallowed the air hose."

I became a huffer, a grunter, a screamer. Anyone who frequents gyms knows those guys who make ungodly noises while hurling weight around. I'd always found their displays childish and tended to look away, as I would from a toddler having a tantrum in a supermarket. So imagine my surprise to find myself bellowing, shrieking, groaning. A silverback gorilla's mating ritual: I wanted everyone to know I was the biggest, toughest motherfucker in the joint.

"Hoooo-aaahhh!"

"Eeeeeee-yahhh!"

"Wa-wa-wa-euuuugh-UH!"

Look at me! I'm a big, strong boy!

It was pathetic. I should have known better -- actually, I did know better, but I didn't let that stop me. Those "pumps" clouded all judgment. My glances at the gym mirrors were at first baffled, "Is that me?" double takes that mutated into looks of preening narcissism. I noticed how light played upon my chest and arms, the pockets of blue shadow filling my new contours.

All fake. Chemical sorcery. Freakish. I hadn't earned it. But it's like the woman with giant fake breasts: Everyone knows they're fake, but dammit if they don't still draw the looks.

That oil I shot into my hip hadn't dissolved. A deep, throbbing pain convinced me I'd developed an abscess. I had a pouch of weeks-old oil inside my hip, walled off by my immune system. If I was lucky, it was sterile. If not, it was infected, the surrounding tissue gone necrotic.

I decided to drain it by injecting an empty needle to draw out the stale oil. My hope was that it was still liquid; if it was congealed, gone to lard, I'd need medical attention.

The needle sunk into the pocket of infected tissue. The pain was expected and oddly bearable. Drawing back the plunger only earned me a few drops of clear broth. I disconnected the syringe and left the needle jutting out, applying pressure to the surrounding skin. Blackish fluid the consistency of crankcase oil dripped out. Disgusting and scary, but the pressure subsided. Once I'd squeezed it out, I filled another syringe with sterile water, attached it to the needle still stuck in my skin, injected it, unclipped the syringe, and squeezed the water out.

A decent job for an untrained meatball the likes of myself. Did the trick: A week later, I could comfortably sleep on my side again.

Week twelve I max out at 240 pounds. Packed on 35 pounds in less than three months.

My body had gone through an extreme thickening process. Pectoral muscles: solid slabs of meat hung off my clavicles. Latissimus dorsi muscles flared out from the midpoint of my back: the "cobra's hood." Triceps and biceps so swelled, my T-shirt sleeves bunched up at my shoulders, too narrow to fit over my arms.

Couldn't walk more than a few blocks before a fist-sized stone settled upon my lower back. There were areas I could not reach due to my new size; to scratch my back, I went to the kitchen for a fork.

One night I was watching a legal drama, one of those ripped-from-the-headlines shows. A morbidly obese man was suing a snack-cake company, which he held responsible for his obesity. The main ingredient in those snack cakes was high-fructose corn syrup, a compound that inhibits the hormone leptin, which signals to the brain that the stomach is full. Essentially, leptin tells us to stop eating. But if this signal is never received, a person will eat past the point of reason or safety.

Steroids are like high-fructose corn syrup: They fool a body into a sense that it is stronger and more resilient than it is. You accomplish feats that in your heart and mind you know are beyond you, but you feel so good, so damn strong, you convince yourself otherwise. After the weight-room euphoria wears off, you're forced to acknowledge the effects of self-delusion. My joints felt hyperextended: constantly popping and cracking, noises like lug nuts in a cement mixer. I felt calcified, hardened, and frighteningly old.

Within a month after my cycle ends, everything has changed.

The first thing I notice upon waking these days is that I feel...well, good. No sluggishness, only minor joint pain. Genuinely refreshed. Then, on my way to the bathroom one morning, I sense a new weight between my legs -- my testicles! Great to have you back, boyos!

The feeling of elation lasts ten paces: my bed to the bathroom mirror.

I'm staring at a human boneyard. Where are my pecs? I see two shriveled bags hanging off my chest. Arms -- dear Lord, my arms! Shapeless shoestrings dangling from a pair of rotten-apple shoulders. Stomach a deflated clown balloon. Legs belonging to a coma victim.

Step on the scale: 222 pounds. Thirteen pounds, most of it fluid, shed virtually overnight.

Now, only the most deluded of 222-pound men can stare into a mirror and see a zombified horror staring back. But I'd lost it. Most of what I'd gained: washed away. Popeye without his spinach. Weak and broken and utterly human. All the needles, the piss of pregnant women running through my veins, the fainting spells and sleepless nights, the muscle knots and bitch tits and shrunken gonads and the hair in my food and fears of abscesses and caveman brow -- every risk I'd taken, all that sweat and toil for fuck-all.

Things worsened at the gym. Chest day: dumbbell presses. I settled on the nineties; if I could lift them, it'd be a ten-pound increase over my precycle max.

I barely got them off my chest. I struggled through a single rep, arms quaking, and hit failure. The dumbbells crashed down as I rolled awkwardly off the bench. A total fraud. Everyone who'd been watching me heave massive weight about, bellowing like a steer in rut -- all these knowing eyes saw me as a charlatan.

I fell into a funk. Scoured my apartment: the tuna, the protein powder -- trash-canned all of it. Next order of business: large pizza, pepperoni and double cheese, wolfed down with gulps from a two-liter bottle of Pepsi. I yearned to get fat and disgusting. The rational part of my mind went, You did the research. You knew this would happen. But the other part -- the part most closely tied to my body, the part now used to the weight-room glances and the more defined, burlier cast of my shadow, the part that relished people ceding room on narrow sidewalks -- was not to be consoled.

I went to the doctor's office. I felt much better with the cycle over, but I still suffered aches and pains. The results:

A partially herniated disc. The result of either bad posture or an accumulation of pressure due to excess body weight. A chiropractic visit was scheduled.

An enlarged prostate. I was prescribed Avodart, which did wonders.

Fluid buildup on left knee -- again, the result of excess weight.

The doctor told me he'd get back to me with the results of my blood work.

I started out overweight at 205 pounds, ended up 208. My body now looked worse than before the steroids. Bloated somehow, like I'd died, my body abandoned in a gassy swamp. Small but prominent nipple-nubbins poked out when I wore anything tighter than a golf shirt.

Had it been worth it? The question presupposes my expectation to benefit from the experience. I embarked on the cycle to bring a sense of real-world truth to my novel. Feel what my character felt, experience that portion of his life to write with conviction about it.

I was somewhat ashamed. What had I done to myself? Jeopardized my chances at having a child? I worried about that more than anything else.

Had it been worth it? Somewhere along the line I'd been let off the hook. My grandfather, father, uncles, men of generations past -- they didn't get the free pass I did. Their lives were poverty, wars, factory floors, untilled fields. They endured. What have I ever had to endure? I felt unworthy of all I'd been so carelessly given. And loathed myself for taking it. Maybe this was a way to put myself back on the hook.

Self-destruction is an underappreciated art form.

I currently weigh 170 pounds. The blood tests showed my liver values were totally out of whack. As I had never been able to convince a woman that I was a viable prospect to make a baby with before using, I'll never know if an inability to conceive, should that end up being the case, is attributable to steroids or the innate decrepitude of my seed.

Did I take steroids to write a book, or did I write a book as an excuse to take steroids? Often all you want is to step off the path you've carved, the terrain having become too rocky -- or in my case, too smooth. And when my body began to fall apart, when the drugs began to destroy me, I persisted under the belief that all suffering on my part was long past due. I would endure. The eventual understanding that a certain nobility underlay my grandfather's suffering, whereas mine was not much more than a masochistic stubbornness -- I'd like to think that stopped me. And when I'd stare at myself naked and porcine in the bathroom mirror, like some escapee from the island of Dr. Moreau, I told myself that if nothing else, I'd suffered. Ashamed to admit I took pride in that, too.