I Was a Teenage Gym Rat- Part 2

The next excerpt of the book I'll probably never finish . . .

I finished my ninth grade year with my training in full swing, I was now deeply entrenched into lifting. The following fall I was going to be headed to High School, in the eyes of a 14 year old kid that was the "Big Time". In high school girls had tits and guys had mustaches and cars, I would need to burst onto the scene with a big set of muscles. My only focus for that summer was to eat and train so freaking hard so that when I strutted the halls of my new school in tenth grade I’m going to look like a totally different person. I wanted people to take notice, I wanted to strike fear and awe into my peers. And that’s what I did, it really helped that my puberty and natural testosterone surge was also in full swing and I was growing taller too. By the middle of my sophomore year I was thirty pounds heavier than I was at the end of my freshman year. I was maturing and making gains quickly, at school it was becoming apparent that I was the “kid with the muscles”. This was also the time that I decided that I was outgrowing my basement gym and my toy store bench. I was benching nearly three hundred pounds on this very unsafe bench that was put together with erector set screws, I needed more equipment and it was time to step up into what was locally thought of as the big leagues.  

Ryan’s Gym in Norwood PA was just about the only gym in Delaware County in 1981 and was only a short bike ride from my house. It was a small gym that had been around since the early 1960’s that was located in the basement of a little barber shop but it had a local hardcore reputation. Mainly because of one man. Ron Teufel, Ron was a local guy who grew up near Ryan’s gym and was, at that time, a top IFBB pro bodybuilder who split his time training in Santa Monica, CA with the other pros and here at Ryan’s, he was on the covers of all the major muscle magazines in the late 70’s and early 80’s and a local legend. All the other kids that I knew that lifted in our area knew that Teufel and other huge guys had trained at Ryan’s but none of us dare set foot in there up until now.

Ryan’s was only about three or four miles from where I lived so I convinced my mom to drive me and a few friends there one day, I wasn’t about to walk into that scary place alone so I brought this rag tag posse of morons with me for some reason. She dropped us off and we walked down the stairway which was moldy and musty smelling from the years of sweat, toil and a complete lack of windows or any kind of ventilation. When we walked through the door at the bottom of the steps I thought we just landed in heaven. Ahhhh yes, actual gym equipment, stuff that I only seen in magazines that I could use every day. This was the place where I would really be able to take on my ultimate form of being sickeningly massive and strong. Even though by today’s "globo gym" standards it was a little, hole-in-the-wall, had no air conditioning, busted up, old, rusty equipment and smelled bad, I instantly fell in love with it. As I fumbled around the gym that first day trying to piece together a new routine I couldn’t help but notice this huge hulking figure with his massive back to me as he did triceps push-downs with what looked like a half a ton. He finished his set and turned around and looked right at me and I immediately recognized him. Holy shit, it was NFL All-Pro defensive end for the Jets , member of the dreaded "New York Sack Exchange" and now hall of famer Joe Klecko! He used to train there when he was visiting his family, he had grown up in a nearby town. Man, I knew I was really in with the big boys now and that I better step up my game considerably.

The gym didn’t have a water fountain and this was the days before they sold bottled water everywhere and before people had to be constantly hydrated. So instead of incurring the expense of, god forbid, buying a water fountain the owner Ed had one of those old galvanized metal coolers with the little spout at the bottom. He had an arrangement with the dive bar next door where they allowed him to come over a couple times a day and fill a five gallon bucket up with ice from their ice machine and he would dump it into this disgusting cooler. There were no cups available so we would all just lift up this huge cooler, wrap our lips around the disease infested nozzle and drink from it. In my estimation me and about a couple hundred other dudes drank from that filthy ass cooler for years, luckily this was 1981 and AIDS hadn't been invented yet because I know none of those sifty guys were practicing safe sex. Shit, half of the members there had done hard time.  I can still recall fondly that glorious day when I walked down there and saw that one of the guys, who was a plumber, had salvaged an old, worn out water fountain from a job he was working and installed it in the changing room. That was a historic day in Ryan’s Gym history, that was when I knew that we really heading into the 21st Century with style and class.

Joining Ryan’s was my one way ticket to hugeness though. For the first time I could do things like dips, pec dec, hack squats, leg extensions, have access to heavy dumbbells and Nautilus machines, All the things I used to see in magazines but could never do at home. But it was really a beat ass, local gym owned by an eccentric nut job named Ed Ryan and full of shady deviants. It was definitely an all-male type of place and run by the rules of survival of the fittest and anarchy. If you were a teenager, the unwritten rule was you could only go to the gym after school and you better get your ass out before 5:00 because after that was when the men came in. I know this because I happen to venture in there a little too late one day and it was made clear to me by guys much older and bigger than me that “kids” time is before 5:00 and they didn’t want me in their way. There were a pretty good crew of us high school kids in there during the day, in 1981 weightlifting and joining gyms wasn't so mainstream and not many guys at my school were into lifting. So it was cool to meet kids from other schools that were more like me, total iron addicts. It also helped my training because here were lifters my age, at my level that I could be challenged by and test myself against. The atmosphere became very competitive, but in a friendly way

Still, as intimidating, dirty and crammed full of what mostly was homemade equipped as it was, I really loved the place. It became my second home and all I ever wanted to do was jet out of school, drop my shit off at home and race down to the gym. I was even so bold that I told the owner Ed Ryan that by the time I was nineteen I was going to be the biggest and strongest guy in there. Of course this forecast came from two sources. One was the fact that when Arnold was nineteen he was already about 250lbs of raw muscle, had won the Mr Universe and of course, so would I. The other factor was how fast I was making gains and growing. Ed Ryan looked surprised and kind of chuckled and just said, “Ok Bull, I’m looking forward to it”, Ed called everyone “bull”. He patronized me so bad that day that I was surprised he didn’t pat me on the head like a child. I filed that in the “Ok, you’ll see buddy” folder I kept in my head.

Just as predicted the access to more equipment and the more ideas I could steal off of the more experienced lifters the more I grew and got stronger. Much like Arnold sent for his best friend Franco Columbu when he came to America I told my cousin David he had to get over to Ryan’s and train with me. When the older guys saw our crazy, wild abandon style of training they would laugh and snicker, Looking back I’m sure I would have laughed at us too. We also noticed that most of the guys laughing at us weren’t training very hard at all. But back then we were young kids who were on a mission. Arnold never listened to the naysayers then neither would we. One of the established members there was a guy named “Concrete” Pete. Not named because he was a concrete worker but nicknamed himself that because it rhymed, he even had his own Concrete Pete t-shirts printed up. Pete had done a few teenage bodybuilding shows in his glory days, he had a very slim, yet defined physique and was well respected at the gym. One day he sat us down after witnessing us doing some really heavy, yet very sloppy T-bar rows and tried to intervene for our own good. “Take it easy guys, you are trying to lift way too much weight too soon, you look like two guys who are on the fast track to getting hurt, train smarter not harder” he pleaded. We walked away and both had the same attitude, “who the fuck was this guy to tell us not to train hard? He has no idea who we are and exactly where we are headed”. Yep, kids are pretty stupid and we were no different. We definitely were determined little suckers though.

I started training there six days a week, I split my body up into three workouts and bombed away on them twice a week. The only day I didn’t train was Sundays but only because Ryan’s wasn’t open on Sundays. One day I asked Ed Ryan why he wasn’t opened on Sundays and his exact response was, “Gotta keep the sabbath Bull”. Since Ed Ryan was so strange and something of a mystery none of us really knew anything about him. I just thought to myself, “Hmmm I see it all clearly now, Ed is a righteous man, a simple man of god” Then only a few weeks later I entered the gym through the back door and Ed and some of his old cronies were watching a stag film against the wall in this dark corner of the gym. Not a video tape mind you, which would have somehow been less pervy, but they had an old movie projector flickering some horrible silent porno from the 70’s against the paneling. Ed says to me, “Hey Bull you gotta see this!” Now I was only fifteen years old and even I knew that there was something very wrong about a bunch of adult men inviting a kid to watch porn with them.  They didn't seem to think it was anything out of the ordinary though. It was then that I realized this was not the Pius man that preached to me about his holy Sundays. He probably just wanted one freaking day each week where he didn’t have to come and sit in that sweaty ass gym all day.