The Hero's Body by William Giraldi Read Free Book Online

absentee he’d perfect in high school.
    My father might not have pressed machismo upon me, but he certainly nudged, hinted. He reared us on Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris movies: Fists of Fury and Return of the Dragon, The Octagon and Lone Wolf McQuade . He said to me one morning, Chuck Norris’s autobiography in hand, “Bruce Lee was small, but Chuck Norris says he was pound for pound the strongest man he’s ever known.” As a child, I too was small, and so I hear that line now as the subtle incitation it must have been, as my father’s particular means of encouragement.
    Soon I was enthralled by ninjas—lithe but mighty ninjas—after I was somehow allowed to watch those staples of the 1980s ninja-movie craze, Enter the Ninja and Revenge of the Ninja , cyclones ofcinematic violence starring Sho Kosugi. Pop would point and mock when, donned in a ninja suit, I darted from tree to tree in what I thought was stealth mode. Of course the Asian man was too feminine, too hairless, for Pop’s standards. When I tried to share with him a VHS tape of a Sho Kosugi film, he mocked him: “That guy’s just a little shit. I’d knock him right over.”
    My ninja posture then mutated into a fixation on Sly Stallone’s Rocky and Rambo , the accidental kitsch of Schwarzenegger in Conan the Barbarian and Commando , and the ruckus of pro wrestling, all that shirt-ripping and American-hero jingoism of Hulk Hogan. My brother and I, with innumerable brothers across this land in the mid- ’80s, nearly splintered our spinal columns imitating the maneuvers of pro wrestlers: flying dropkicks, atomic elbows, full nelsons, body slams, pile drivers into pillows.
    The original Rambo film, First Blood , came to HBO in 1983, and this constituted an event in my family, an excitation beyond reason shared by my uncle Tony and my father. The scene that had stirred them, the scene they wanted me to see, showed Stallone sewing up an astounding gash in his upper arm, a gash sustained after he’d leapt from a cliff and plunged through a ceiling of treetops. In his guttural Stallone voice, my father delivered the most repeatable line in the movie, when John Rambo tells a pursuant policeman via walkie-talkie, “You want a war, I’ll give you a war you won’t believe.”
    One autumn night after the house had gone to sleep, I watched First Blood alone in the dark, all through me that thrill small boys feel when they glimpse someone, some thing , they want to become. My father and uncle had insisted that I watch First Blood because they must have hoped that it would stir my desire to become someone like John Rambo. And it worked for a while; that night inaugurated a three-year preoccupation with Rambo and Stallone, one that had me dressing, every day , in an unsightly patchwork of camouflage, also carrying a survival knife, razored on one side, serratedon the other. The hollow handle contained matchsticks, a compass, a needle and thread in case I had to sew up a gash in my arm.
    For a significant stretch of my childhood, still clad in those unsightly camouflage fatigues, I was certain that I’d become a soldier of fortune. I began hoarding canteens, survival manuals, backpacks of nonperishables—the Cold War still had several years of chill left—and magazines that featured firearms, explosives, stories of mercenaries killing enemies of the United States in some Central American boscage.
    Our father gave my brother and me a BB gun and compound hunting bow when we were still too short to see over the kitchen counter. With the BB gun I assassinated innocent crows after I’d read Native American stories that told me they were death incarnate, and my brother shot our babysitter, also innocent, square in the face. The BB got lodged in the bone of her chin and had to be surgically excised, and Mike was forced to make the lonesome walk down the street to apologize.
    Why this near eye-losing