The Hero's Body by William Giraldi Page A

but it wasn’t the pain that bugged us. Pain we did not mind. Tits we did. Some among our number went under the scalpel to undo the humiliation.
    The acne harvested by steroids, the high blood pressure, the bitch tits and frequent headaches: tolerable consequences of trying to meet the Western standard of male beauty, much the way anorexic women become famished, hirsute, hideous in their quest to be loved. The male bodybuilder and the female anorexic are equal though opposite manifestations of steady social arm-twisting. Women will be thin, men will be muscular, or both will be nobody. The equivalence of genders is nowhere more apparent than in a gym.

    I was twelve, twelve and a half years old, pumping gas at a station in the next town. The owner, we’d heard, was a notorious “fruitcake,” his wife an elaborate blind. But this confused me, because with a sashay like that, I was certain there was no blind big enough. Certain queer -scorning pals warned me not to pump gas there because the owner would trick me into the bathroom and try to wedge himself into my jeans. But I didn’t believe he’d do this—he’d never been anything but kind to me—and I was proven right. He didn’t.
    But I did this to him: it was one of those August middays when the asphalt was about to melt, the heat coming as much from below as above. I was working a shift with one of my best pals, who was also not made nervous by the owner’s sashay, although this pal was a part-time gay-hater who amputated fruitcake to fruit , and rather enjoyed saying it, enjoyed saying it so much he greeted me with it: “Hey, fruit” and “What’s up, fruit?” and sometimes just plain “Fruit,” in the lilt you use when you say someone’s name upon seeing him after a longish spell.
    (This aside is not quite poetic justice but it falls within a nearby taxonomy. The same pal with fruitcake always on his lips was one of three brothers, two of them extroverted, all sons of a brash fireman. The first son was a heavy-metal head and car mechanic; the second, my pal, a titanic football fiend; and the third, the youngest, was—always had been—inward, awkward, skulkingly cautious, too effete in the macho oxygen of his household. Over the next decade he centimetered himself from the closet, to the no-doubt-thunderous disquiet of his family. Before I left Manville for good at nineteen, I placed a copy of Housman’s A Shropshire Lad discreetly on the youngest brother’s desk: a token of fraternity from one misfit to another. So my pal who called everyone fruitcake when we were twelve years old would be, before long, confronting that slur in a fashion he couldn’t then fathom.)
    In this tsunami of August heat a quivering Ford pickup, rusted through the quarter panels and missing its tailgate, dinged the bell for gas. My pal and I were mawing pizza slices and gumballs in the office, and I walked out into a ninety-eight degrees that felt more liquid than gas. The guy in the pickup, a laborer with a granite paunch, week-old beard, engine grease to his elbows, said what you’d expect him to say: “Fill ’er up.”
    And so that’s what I did, filled ’er up. When she was full, he handed me the cash and the Ford grumbled away. And not ten minutes later,as I was feeding another thirsty tank, I saw this man sweating back into the gas station, from the direction in which he’d just departed. His thumb was jabbing over his shoulder. “What did you put in my truck?” he said.
    â€œYour truck?”
    â€œWhat did you just put in my truck?”
    â€œGas?” I said.
    â€œDid you just put diesel in my truck?”
    I looked at the diesel pump, and there it was, looking back at me. Yes, I’d just put diesel fuel into his apparently gasoline-engine Ford. But he’d pulled up to that pump and told me to fill it. Of course the pumps were close enough to