The Anatomy of Obsession

She was not born this way, looking like a man. Just a few years back you might have seen her any day on Venice Beach--an adorable young woman, about 120 pounds, who loved the healthy life and wanted only to be something special to someone.

She found her someone at Gold’s Gym. He was a rich and kinky man who convinced her that she had what is known in bodybuilding lingo as “the genetic gift”--the build of a potential champion. She had the biceps, triceps, delts, glutes, the small joints and short muscle beds that would make her a big winner, he told her. He volunteered to be her sponsor, in return for certain favors--he bought her a car, paid her rent, hired a trainer famed for getting the job done. Together, the two men began their work. Her only task was to obey them.

For a while, the regimen of workouts, daily drug injections and unpalatable diets worked. She built the body needed to compete. She won championships and felt like a star, fawned over or stared at wherever she went.

She easily ignored the reason for the stares--the male characteristics that appeared slowly at first and then seemed to overwhelm everything feminine about her: the copious body hair, the beard that required daily shaving, the lowered voice, even the emergence of an appendage normally found only on men.

By that time, she had lost track of the real world, was bored by so-called “normal” physiques, didn’t care what regular people thought. In her world, her body was normal. But soon the drugs took their irreversible toll--her body wore itself out, her competitive value expired, her boyfriend found more tempting bodies to ruin. She was left to pursue her fate alone, which is how this sweet little girl from Texas wound up as a 200-pound wrestler in Asia.

The story is based on fact, says Katie Arnoldi, who translated it into fiction in her first novel, “Chemical Pink.” The book is a quick and sordid read, an erotic hoot, a flat story of physical obsession on many levels, with few literary dimensions. Joan Didion describes it on the jacket as “ice-cool momentum on the surface and all shock below.” USA Today’s reviewer wrote: “This is not a well-plotted novel. And, yes, there is such a thing as too much sex.” But she called it “one of the most compelling books of the season.” The story has been optioned for a film with Kevin Spacey mentioned as the demonic benefactor.

But the real allure of the book is none of the above. It is the fact that lives like those described can be found any day at the place we assume to be the most health-conscious spot on Earth: the gym.

Arnoldi, a former bodybuilder, says she wrote what she knew. And it is clear from her pages--which are peppered with precise information about specific drugs and diets, right down to the number of cc’s injected and the number of ounces to eat--that she had on-scene knowledge.

Sit with her any morning in the parking lot of the beach-side Gold’s Gym, a world-famous mecca of fitness, and you will see them arrive by car and bike: women with legs like tree trunks, with faces ever so slightly distorted into something not female. You cannot tell from looking that their voices are slightly lower than they were a month before. Or that their anatomical parts and body functions are slowly changing, even as their muscles are inflating.

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Because competitive bodybuilding is such a small part of the physical fitness culture in America, because so few people follow the competitions, and because those in bodybuilding who know about the use of illegal substances are the same people who earn their living by ingesting and/or prescribing them, the subject has not generated as much stir as it has in other sports.

Anabolic steroids are key among the performance enhancers. They promote growth of muscle tissue, but it is illegal to possess or use them without a doctor’s prescription. The Anabolic Steroids Act of 1990 makes those prescriptions illegal for anything other than a legitimate medical condition. However, a huge black market in the drugs makes them available.

Few people care, says Dr. Don H. Catlin, director of the UCLA Olympic Analytical Laboratory, which is the official drug-testing office for the U.S. Olympic Committees, the NFL and the NCAA. “Bodybuilding is a very minuscule part of society. If you are part of that subculture, and you are hugely overdeveloped, you are looking great,” he says. And that subculture is the natural laboratory for studying the effect of steroid use, because it is known to contain so many users, he says.

Many of the same drugs are “a huge problem even in Olympic sports . . . sports like track and field, weightlifting, cycling--the drugs are used to tweak certain parts of the body,” Catlin says.

Professor John Hoberman of the University of Texas has followed the drugs-in-sports scene for years and written books on the subject. He says the subject doesn’t cause much ripple in the world at large because “there is such ambivalence toward performance enhancing drugs that work. And steroids work.

“Regulation is not efficient because I believe there’s a conflict of interest. On one hand, the people in control are depending on the success of their athletes. On the other hand, they are charged with regulating the drugs that will boost the performance of those athletes.”

Women who take excessive amounts of the drugs, he confirms, stop having menstrual periods, lose their breast tissue and develop male characteristics. He adds that they also produce an aphrodisiac effect that is uncomfortable to deal with and possibly irreversible.

Hoberman says the cult of the hyper-muscled body extends way beyond the relatively small world of bodybuilding and of elite Olympic sports into everyday society.

The ideal of the sculpted-muscle look influences fashion, movies and advertising. In the toy industry, he says, “for years, hyper-muscled figures have dominated the action-figure scene. Those toys are selling the symbolic effects of drugs without peddling the drugs themselves,” Hoberman says.

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Arnoldi, 42, is not someone you’d pick out of a lineup to bring the drugs-in-sports problem to America’s table. She was a child of privilege, whose father, Richard Anawalt, owned lumber companies in Los Angeles. She attended the Westlake School, Scripps College, earned a degree in art history and settled down at 23 as the wife of Los Angeles artist Chuck Arnoldi, 13 years her senior. They live at Point Dume, on beach property that her father bought and built homes on for his children. Now, she has two children, 10 and 12, and the natural good looks of the Beach Boys’ ideal girl: petite, curvy, blond, a flawless tawny complexion. But for two years, she says, she looked “quite different” than she does now.

After being ordered to bed for six months prior to the birth of her second child, she says she was bored, out of shape, tired of trying unsuccessfully to be a writer (“I wrote endlessly, but nothing ever got published”), and so she threw herself into bodybuilding after the baby was born.

It helped, of course, that her husband’s art studio was a short stroll from the Venice gym and that she had once had a nutty fitness trainer at the Santa Monica YWCA who taught her the joy of feeling not just fit--but highly muscular. “I looked different then than I do now. I was smaller, but I was va-voom,” she says.

At Gold’s, her trainer was an expert. She became a part of the small, hard-core crowd who all knew each other and worked out daily in order to compete--and who slowly tuned out the real world, she says, as they got deeper into the gym life. She started training in the mid-’80s, and in 1992 she finally won what she calls a “small-time contest”--the Southern California bodybuilding championship.

“But getting to that point was so hard, so time-consuming, and such a sacrifice that by the time I got up on stage I was already over the desire to do it. I realized that to go on, I would have to start taking drugs. To build the density of muscle needed to compete on a higher level, you must take physique-altering drugs. I wasn’t into that.” By this time she’d been on the scene so long, had so many acquaintances, knew so many trainers who were using drugs and procuring them for clients, that a number of amazing tales had been stored--almost without her knowing it--in her brain. (The drug-dispensing trainers, she emphasizes, are independents and not affiliated with Gold’s or any other gym.)

After giving up bodybuilding and trying a stint at long-board competitive surfing, she went back to writing. This time, the stories came pouring out. The nutty former YMCA trainer with missing teeth, the woman who’d lost every vestige of femininity, the pervert who’d persuaded young women to service his strange needs in return for pumping them up with steroids, the cast of trainers and wannabes and hangers-on--even the magazine that sells the sexual services of hyper-muscled women--all were culled from what she had actually seen and heard.

Although people who read the book cannot imagine that such weirdness and fatal obsessions really exist, Arnoldi can prove (and produce others who confirm) that they do.

One longtime trainer says the book’s lead male character is based on a guy who still hangs out in the exercise room, scanning for women with the looks and the insecurities that will lure them into his malevolent web. They say he is one of dozens of “gym rats” whose private fantasies involve women strong enough to crush bones between their arms or legs. Another gym regular who does not want her name used, and who has read Arnoldi’s book, says: “All she did was change some names. The rest of it is true. It is still happening today.”

In the book, the heroine’s own daughter tells her mother that she is beginning to look like a freak, that other kids make fun of her when she comes to collect the child at school. The mother seems oblivious and unconcerned.

Is that possible?

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Personal trainer Elena Dattomo, 45, says yes. Dattomo’s verbal resume includes a list of contest wins: “the Illinois Novice, the Illinois Cup, third in the ’90 USA, fifth in the ’91 North America, fourth in the ’92 USA . . .” and so on. At first, Dattomo used no drugs. “But on stage, they stare at every part of you. You go to the judges after the contest, and they tell you where you need to get bigger or leaner. It’s not directly telling you to take drugs, but it’s impossible for any human to get big enough without some sort of enhancement. . . .”

So she began taking light doses, she says, and only stopped when she realized that “women who don’t stop get really freaky looking--although they look in the mirror and they don’t see the freaky part.” They see only the muscle definition, the bulk they are building. Outsiders may think them unattractive, she says, but they see themselves as beautiful. In the end, they become addicted, “not to the drugs themselves, but to the feeling you get in your body. Even standing still, you can feel your body blowing up and pumping. I remember that even when I was sleeping, I could feel my rear delts pumping. That kind of feeling is what’s addicting.”

Annie Roe is a former competitive bodybuilder who says she never used drugs. Now 63 and a successful trainer, she praises the sport but sees its flip side. “At first, I couldn’t tell who was on drugs and who wasn’t. Now, I don’t even have to turn around. I can tell from hearing a voice that the effects of drugs are beginning. The vocal cords start to thicken.” But, she adds, “you cannot win serious competitions without the drugs. And you cannot reverse the effects once you’ve taken too many.”

Trainers and doctors agree that if a woman stops soon enough, the effects are mostly reversible. But they also say that too many drugs, taken too long, produce irreversible effects. “I’ve known several who stopped too late and then needed surgery to correct the masculine structure that had crept into their faces. I know women who look so masculine, they’ve been asked to use the men’s room in public places,” Roe says.

And the experts agree that the regimen of what drugs to take, what dosage and when to take them is passed on by word of mouth, from trainer to trainer. “It’s oral tradition,” says Arnoldi, who says she got specifics from people who trusted her not to reveal their names.

Medical experts say that the impact of the drugs on other parts of the body--such as the heart and brain--is not known.

“Athletes don’t evaluate risks and benefits when they are young and strong and competing,” says UCLA’s Catlin. “It’s only years later that they wonder--when they get a little chest pain or something else goes wrong--whether it could have been caused by the drugs.”

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Ben Weider, 77, president of Quebec-based International Federation of Body Builders, conceded that drugs are used in the sport, “but only for those who want an illegal shortcut.” Weider and his brother Joe run the world of bodybuilding from offices in Canada and Woodland Hills. The IFBB, which they founded in 1946 now has branches in 172 countries. It has specific anti-doping rules, Ben Weider says. But not all competitors are tested--only the winners. He maintains that anyone who tests positive gets a two-year suspension and the federation to which the person belongs will be fined $2,000.

Arnoldi scoffs at the idea of testing. She hasn’t seen it in her career, she says. In fact, drug usage is so pervasive, and so acknowledged, that she was able to get specific recipes.

In one scene from the book, the heroine stands on a posing platform in a teeny bikini, while her Teutonic trainer and boyfriend assess her assets:

“Ja. Good vee. Glutes. Traps.” Hendrik walked around the platform. “The calves are small, but we can use Pump n Pose.”

Pump n Pose was a new compound. Its inventor refused to list the pharmaceutical components but claimed it was legal and that when administered into small muscle groups it could cause permanent swelling of that muscle. . . .

Hendrik picked up his briefcase, took out a list and handed it to Charles.

The list includes dosages and timing for administering Testosterone Propinate, Deca-Durabolin, Primabolan Depo, Anadrol along with growth hormone and insulin.

The amorous sections are too bizarre to print here. It was titillating enough to get published, which confirmed Arnoldi’s early belief that her true calling is as a writer.

These days, she hits the gym just for pleasure. Certainly not for friendship, because since the book was published, “nobody talks to me anymore,” she says. It doesn’t really matter, she adds. She’s already onto her next project.

“My new book is about over-privileged adults on the Westside of Los Angeles and the effects of their behavior on their very troubled children. It’s a novel, but I have a lot to say about that world. In fact, this new one is kind of more horrifying than my first one.”