Steroid Nation
by Shaun Assael

There's an extraordinary new "history book" out and it ought to be mandatory reading for every musclehead or musclehead wanna-be. It's called Steroid Nation, Juiced Home Run Totals, Anti-aging Miracles, and a Hercules in Every High School: The Secret History of America's True Drug Addiction, written by ESPN The Magazine writer Shaun Assael.

The title certainly describes the theme of the book, but it doesn't do the content justice. Steroid Nation is as much a detective story as it is an expose on the steroid culture. While characters like Lyle Alzado and Victor Conte are pivotal to the story, the lynchpin (of both the book and our steroid culture) is Dan Duchaine.

Being a musclehead and not knowing Dan is like being a baseball player and not knowing Babe Ruth. Dan was the original "guru," dispensing drug and diet information to professional male and female bodybuilders from the early 80's until his death in 2000. Duchaine's crude little pamphlet, The Underground Steroid Handbook, was perhaps the most influential publication in bodybuilding history.

I knew Dan well. I was his editor at Muscle Media 2000 where he was one of the two or three most influential writers, but beyond that, Dan was one of the last of bodybuilding's colorful characters and the world is much more drab without him.

This fascinating book juxtaposes Duchaine's journey with the journeys of other familiar names from our industry, names that constitute a rogue's gallery of one-time steroid users and abusers like Michael Zumpano, Bill Phillips, Patrick Arnold, the aforementioned Victor Conte, Bruce Kneller, and many others.

The following is an excerpt from Steroid Nation. While the author, Shaun Assael, gave me my pick of chapters or sections, I chose the introduction; I think it captures the flavor of the book pretty well. Here it is in its entirety.

— TC

venice beach, california
June 1981

Dan Duchaine rode his scooter past the roller girls, the Valley kids, and the wannabe rockers on the Venice Beach boardwalk, until he finally arrived at the Mecca of American bodybuilding, Gold's Gym.

Parking his bike, he listened to the sound of weight machines coming from inside. They clanged in an inchoate rhythm, creating a drumbeat that was, like jazz, at once chaotic and determined.

In the five years since Gold's was made famous by Arnold Schwarzenegger in Pumping Iron, it had become a mix of high and low culture: part tourist destination, part celebrity hot spot, part dumbbell speakeasy. People came to Gold's to reinvent themselves, and in that regard Dan Duchaine was no different from anyone else.

Gold's Gym, Venice.

He had been on his own since he was 13, or, if you looked at it another way, forever. Taken in by a pair of Maine mill workers who couldn't have a child of their own, he watched his adoptive mother drop dead shortly after his 10th birthday, and his dad two years later.

Abandoned for a second time, he raised himself in their modest bungalow cottage, visited occasionally by his aunt and the grandparents who lived a block away and who couldn't figure out how they had been saddled with a child who acted unlike anyone else in the town of Westbrook.

He pushed the limits of his school's dress code with Nehru jackets and berets, and as soon as he got a driver's license, he tooled around in a 1959 Impala that his father had left in the garage. Among the people in Westbrook, it was generally agreed that Dan Duchaine was the most flamboyant.

Still, it was hard to top the crowd that filled Gold's this Sunday morning. In one corner, Duchaine spied the muscle-bound twins with mullets who called themselves the Barbarian Brothers. In another, he saw Lisa Lyon, a bodybuilding diva who arrived for her workout in the skintight leather dress and spiked collar that she had worn the night before.

The Barbarian Brothers, with Pete Grymkowski looking on.

Lisa Lyon, photographed by Robert Mappelthorpe.

This was the in-crowd, the Arnoldistas. And looking at them, Duchaine felt acutely aware of his own station as a wannabe. After four years studying drama at Boston University, and a few more spinning his wheels at a bike shop in Maine, he wasn't going to be the famous actor the locals in Westbrook had expected. But that didn't mean that he still couldn't look for a stage.

Drugs like Deca-Durabolin and Dianabol had changed Duchaine. He had started taking them in college in the mid-1970s and watched the gawky kid from Maine disappear. At 29, he still wasn't good looking. His face was too awkward for that. His eyes were set a bit too closely to the bridge of his nose, one slightly higher than the other. His lips were thin and pursed, his ears low-hanging orbs.

Even his black hair, which fell over his head like a helmet, defied styling. Yet he had found a life posing in small-time bodybuilding contests around Boston that finally allowed him to put his acting skills to use. His body, never the most chiseled, somehow became graceful, his look searching and intense.

Dan Duchaine

But he had taken things as far as he could on his own, and now had come to the one place where he could take them further. A small group was gathered in the middle of the gym, and he wove his way past the weight machines to join them. They were gathered for a class that the Muscle Beach cognoscenti affectionately called Sunday School, where once a week anyone could drop in and
tune up.

The man who was teaching the class was everything Duchaine was not. Mike Zumpano was a strapping, good-looking 23-year-old with flowing black hair and an easy manner that belied an eagle eye for the scene. Zumpano knew that bodybuilding competitions paid nothing compared to what someone could make on the side at Gold's, which was why a workout was never just a workout.

Sometimes, it served as an advertisement for the drugs that fueled it, sometimes as a come-on for sex. More than a few bodybuilders supported themselves by letting rich studio executives perform favors on them in the backs of limousines with tinted windows or allowing "schmoes" to massage them for a few hundred bucks.

From his spot at the reception desk, Zumpano was their musclehead maître d'hôtel. One day, he picked up the gym's phone to hear a woman go on about how her ex-husband was ruining her life. Was there anyone, she asked, who could rough him up for just $200? Zumpano yelled, "I got a hardship case here. Anyone interested?" A 400-pound regular took the gig.

Gold's had plenty of other secrets. Zumpano knew pharmaceutical reps from the major drug companies who stopped by periodically to make side money selling drug samples to the lifters. And he knew those lifters' secrets. There was the woman who begged him to let her in past midnight so she could work out in the nude. (It happened when she was strung out on heroin.)

And there was the friendly cocaine dealer who gave free samples to a third of the bodybuilders, eagerly getting them hooked; when they couldn't afford to buy any more, he traded them drugs for information about where their sugar daddies kept their expensive cars. Then he sold the information to a mob-run theft ring.

Keeping a protective eye over things, Zumpano zeroed in on Duchaine as he sat on the edge of a weight bench. He had seen the newcomer around the gym a few times before; typical easterner, fast-talking and fidgety, he thought. Then he passed around a flyer and watched Duchaine eagerly grab for it. As Zumpano talked about the sources of information about steroids that he had listed on the sheet, he watched Duchaine write notes at a feverish pace. When the class ended, Duchaine walked up to him.

"How about I buy you breakfast?" he asked. Zumpano, who was a little hungry, agreed.

As they dug into steaming plates of eggs at Rose Café, Zumpano could see that Duchaine was every bit the operator that he had imagined. Some people reveal themselves slowly. Duchaine was in a race to say as much about himself as he could.

He was living on the outskirts of town with his wife, Lee, who had followed him from Maine. For now, he was working as a process server "until I can get unemployment." And although Duchaine did most of the prattling, Zumpano had the distinct feeling that he was being measured for something. But what?

It soon became clearer as the weeks passed. As Duchaine became a regular at Sunday School, Zumpano began to look forward to their breakfasts. Duchaine was odd but endearingly so. For one thing, he loved turn-of-the-century recumbent bicycles and frequently sketched futuristic designs for them on napkins. He also read voraciously, alternating between Chekhov and the latest pharmaceutical study to catch his eye at the UCLA biomedical library, which he entered with a bogus ID scammed at Gold's.

Dan Duchaine's "Low Fat" recumbent bike. Only a few were made.

His ironies seemed endless. For a guy who seemed outwardly conservative — his closet was filled with chinos and polo shirts — he had a decadent catalog of things that he wanted to try, including a 1945 Château La Fleur-Pétrus and a threesome. (He was willing to sample them separately or together.) What really bound the two men, however, was the idea that Duchaine kept coming back to: They were at the beginning of something big.

The Olympics were coming to Los Angeles in 1984 and with them a caravan of athletes who would be on the lookout for the latest muscle-building concoctions. They could laugh about which Gold's regulars were trying to follow Arnold into the movies. But five years after the debut of Pumping Iron, everyone in L.A. wanted the Schwarzenegger look.

More ominously, a new disease that was killing gay men in San Francisco had begun its fatal migration down the Pacific coast. Gay men were turning to steroids to prevent the disease's wasting affect.

Duchaine might not have known as much as Zumpano did about steroids, but he knew enough to understand that, at this moment, in this place, he had stumbled into his future. All the arrows pointed in one direction — to a drug that was almost mystical in its powers, that could turn men into supermen, that could heal the sick, that could make just about anyone feel younger.

And yet, remarkably, steroids didn't have a true constituency. They cut across age and class lines and were undeniably effective, yet they were still subject to whisper campaigns and unflattering propaganda. Steroids needed a champion, a spokesman, a zealot. Duchaine had used them to reinvent himself. Now he wanted to return the favor and reinvent them for America.

One day, he dropped by Zumpano's apartment overcome with excitement. "Jump on, I have something I want to show you," he said.

Zumpano grabbed his knapsack and slid onto the back of the scooter. Once they were underway, Duchaine handed him a page of handwritten notes.

Zumpano started reading.

"We know this will make us a lot of enemies," the notes began. "But although we'll antagonize many of you, we thought we should tell the truth about steroids."

"What's this?" Zumpano asked.

"It's the beginning of the book we're going to write."

A how-to guide for steroid users struck Zumpano as a good idea. He had started researching them to gain a better understanding of his own physiology and already had egg cartons full of files.

Why not share his knowledge? The reason for Sunday School was to keep guys from taking the wrong things, or the right things in the wrong doses. Granted, he wasn't a doctor, but he knew as much as any MD he had ever met, especially the ones who preyed on the bodybuilders by trading steroids for sex. Why not put it all in a book? Why not empower guys to make the right decisions?

Duchaine had even bigger ideas. He saw it as a manifesto, a statement of principles regarding life and how to live it. He would be calling on a new generation to drop in and turn on. As they arrived on the pier at Santa Monica, Duchaine turned to Zumpano.

"This is how we're going to be famous," he said.

Zumpano climbed off the back of the scooter and looked at his friend. "You're crazy, you know that, Dan?"

Duchaine wasn't giving up. He read Zumpano a list of words he had picked out for the title. Bible. Muscle. Underground. Anabolic. Zumpano watched the Ferris wheel on the beach turn and tried to put the puzzle pieces together. "What about the Underground Steroid Handbook?" he asked.

Being friends with Duchaine was one thing. Being his business partner was another. He started showing up to Zumpano's apartment early in the mornings with bags full of fresh fruit — pomegranates, oranges, and mangos — and would announce, "Time to write."

Over ten feverish days in October 1981, Zumpano worked around the clock, dumping all that he knew onto the creaky keys of an Underwood typewriter. Duchaine picked up the pages each morning, occasionally tweaking text, but mostly leaving his partner alone.

When it was finally done, they took it to a friend who had an offset press in his garage and had it typeset into 18 pages, framed by a brown cover of slightly thicker stock. Half how-to-manual, half catalog, their anonymously written manifesto mixed serious discussion with a wit that reflected their rebel mindset.

The original "Underground Steroid Handbook.

"We're going to tell you how to keep your doctor happy with your health while you are on steroids," began its authors. "You need protein to make muscles grow, but you need to convince the cell to grow. That's one thing that steroids do." In their introduction, they pointed out that artificial steroids are "those made outside the body," and that they came in two forms: "oral, as a tablet to be swallowed, and injectable, as a liquid to be placed within the muscle."

But the real heart of it — what Duchaine called "maybe the most valuable information you'll find in this book" — was the listing of the drugs themselves. Anadrol. Anavar. Bolasterone. Deca-Durabolin. Dianabol. Down the line they went, with 29 drugs in all. Each listing had a review and often a suggested price. ("Anavar doesn't make you all that big, it makes you very strong.") And each, they pointed out, was easily available from the right kind of doctor.

"Most doctors have formed an opinion on steroids, which means they don't like them. Lucky for us though there is a large number of what we call the 'businessman doctor.' These guys are out to hustle a buck... Look for the young ones just out of medical school. Young doctors have a different morality than then older ones. Many do the standard recreational drugs and are open minded about steroids."

In early 1982, a tiny ad appeared in Muscle Builder & Power magazine hawking the Underground Steroid Handbook for Men and Women.Checks or money orders for $6, it announced, could be made payable to a company called OEM Media and sent to a P.O. Box in Venice.

A few days after the ad appeared, Duchaine visited the mailbox, which was in a small cigar shop on Venice Boulevard. He wasn't sure what he would find, but felt confident that there would be at least a letter or two. A disappointed look crossed his face when he found it empty. As he turned to shuffle out, he mumbled to the counterman, "I hoped we'd have something."

"But you do," the clerk replied, and he handed Duchaine a stack of nearly a hundred envelopes that wouldn't fit in the box.

Duchaine rushed back to the small office that Zumpano kept at Gold's and carefully counted out each check. When they passed $500, they ran into an alley behind Gold's and started kicking a can like kids. Then the budding gurus spent it as fast as it had come in. Zumpano paid off a phone bill that a friend's drunken mother had run up at his apartment.

Duchaine bought some clothes — more chinos and polo shirts — and took his partner to lunch at a restaurant owned by a hot new chef, Wolfgang Puck. With what was left, they went on a three-day spending spree. And when they ran out of money, more envelopes were waiting.

And more arrived after that. An order for 5,000 books from France, another for 3,000 from Germany. Opening them became such a chore that Zumpano asked his housekeeper to help. By the spring of 1982, they had sold 80,000 books, making nearly a half-million dollars.

At tax time, Zumpano asked Duchaine how much they should declare. Duchaine looked at him disbelievingly. "Taxes? Fuck taxes. Fuck the government." His nose wasn't pressed against the window of Sunday School any longer. He was finally an Arnoldista. And like the rest of them, he had reinvented himself with a new image, one right out of Shakespeare: The Guru of Venice.

Steroid Nation is available nation-wide at bookstores, or you can buy it from Amazon here.

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