“Chubby.”
Zabo, who came from New Jersey and whose first name was Irvin, had a whole collection of hashish pipes. We went over to his house every so often to get stoned. He read science-fiction novels day and night. Everything was, “Hey, man, wow!” and “Groovy!” and “Far out!” But that was normal around Venice. To smoke a joint was so casual it was like drinking a beer. You would go to someone’s house, no matter who it was, and he’d light up a joint and say, “Have a hit.” Or light up a hashish pipe, depending on how sophisticated he was.
I learned quickly what people meant when they said, “This is groovy.” “This is cool.” I found out that astrology was a big deal while trying to chat up this gorgeous girl. I said, “You and I, it seems like we really belong together; we should go out for dinner.”
But she said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, what sign are you?”
So I said, “Leo.”
“That’s not for me. That’s really not for me. Thank you, but no thank you.”
And she was gone. I went to the gym the next day and said, “Guys, I have a little problem here. I’m still learning.” And I told them the story.
Zabo knew just what to do. He said, “Man, you got to say, ‘I’m the
It took only a few weeks before another situation came up. I was talking to a girl at lunch, and she asked, “What sign are you?”
And I said, “What do you guess?”
“Well, what?”
“The best!”
So she said, “You mean … Capricorn?”
“Yes!” I exclaimed. “How did you know?”
“I’m telling you, it’s amazing because that fits so well with me, and I get along so well with you, I mean, this is like, wow!” She was excited and so happy. So I started reading up on the zodiac signs, all the characteristics associated with them, and how they match up together.
Using Gold’s as my base, it was easy to make friends. The place was a melting pot of characters from all over the world: Australians, Africans, Europeans. I’d work out in the morning and say to a couple of guys, “Hey, do you want to go to lunch?” We’d go, and they’d tell me about their lives, and I’d tell them about mine, and we’d become buddies. At night I’d come back to train again, meet a different set of guys, go out with them for dinner, and get to know them too.
I was amazed by how readily people invited me to their homes and by how much Americans liked to celebrate. I’d never celebrated a birthday until I came to America; I had never even seen a cake with candles. But a girl invited me to her birthday party, and when my birthday came the following summer, the guys at the gym had a cake and candles for me. A guy would say, “I have to go home because it’s my sister’s first day of school, so we’re going to celebrate.” Or “Today is my parents’ anniversary.” I could not remember my parents ever even
When Thanksgiving came, I had nothing planned because I didn’t understand the tradition of this American holiday. But Bill Drake brought me to his house. I got to meet his mom, who served this extraordinary meal, and his dad, who was a professional comedian and was very, very funny. We have a saying in Austria: “You’re so sweet I could eat you!” But because of the translation problem, when I tried using that to compliment Mrs. Drake, it came out really lewd. The whole family burst out laughing.
I felt even more amazed when a girl I dated invited me to her parents’ house for Christmas. I said to myself, “God, I don’t want to disrupt the family holiday.” Not only did they treat me like a son but also every family member gave me a gift.
All of this hospitality was new and welcome, but it bothered me that I did not know how to respond. For instance, I’d never heard of sending a thank-you note, and yet Americans seemed to send them all the time. “That is so weird,” I thought. “Why can’t you just say thank you over the phone or in person?” That’s the way we did it in Europe. But here Joe Weider would invite me and a girlfriend to dinner, and afterward she’d say, “Give me his address because I want to write him a thank-you note.”
And I would say, “Nah, come on, we already thanked him when we left.”
“No, no, no, no, I grew up with manners.”
I realized I’d better get with the program and learn American manners. Or maybe they were also European manners and I’d just never noticed. I checked with friends back in Europe in case I’d missed something. No, I had not; America really was different.
As a first step, I made it a rule to date only American girls; I did not want to hang out with girls who knew German. And I immediately signed up for English classes at Santa Monica Community College. I wanted my English to be good enough so that I could read newspapers and textbooks and go on to classes in other subjects. I wanted to speed up the process of learning to think, read, and write like an American. I didn’t want to just wait till I picked it up.
One weekend a couple of girls took me up to San Francisco, and we stayed in Golden Gate Park. I said to myself, “This is unbelievable, how free people are in America. Look at this! Now we’re sleeping at night in the park, and everyone is friendly.” I didn’t realize until much later that I had arrived in California at a totally crazy cultural moment. It was the late sixties, there was the hippie movement, free love, all this incredible change. The Vietnam War was at its peak. Richard Nixon was about to be elected president. Americans at the time felt like the world was turning upside down. But I had no idea that it hadn’t always been this way. “So this is America,” I thought.
I never heard many conversations about Vietnam. But personally I loved the idea of America pushing back on Communism, so if anybody had asked me, I’d have been for the war. I’d have said, “Fucking Communists, I despise them.” I grew up next door to Hungary, and we always lived under the threat of Communism. Were they going to push through Austria just like they did Hungary in ’56? Were we going to get caught in a nuclear exchange? The danger was so close. And we saw the effect that Communism had on the Czechs, the Polish, the Hungarians, the Bulgarians, the Yugoslavs, the East Germans—everywhere there was Communism around us. I remember going to West Berlin for a bodybuilding exhibition. I’d looked across the Berlin Wall, across the border, and seen how dismal life was on the other side. It was literally like two different weathers. It felt like I was in sunshine and when you looked across the wall at East Berlin, there was rain. It was horrible. Horrible. So I felt very good that America was fighting Communism big-time.
It never struck me as strange that the girls I was dating weren’t putting on makeup or lipstick or painting their nails. I thought having hairy legs and underarms was normal because in Europe none of the women waxed or shaved. In fact, I got caught by surprise by it one morning the following summer. I was in the shower with a girlfriend—we’d watched the Apollo astronauts make the first moonwalk on my little black-and-white TV the night before—and she asked. “Do you have a razor?”
“Why do you need a razor?”
“I hate these nubs on my legs.” I didn’t know what “nubs” meant, so she explained.
“What?” I said. “You shave?”
“Yeah, I shave my legs. It’s so gross.” I’d never heard that expression either. But I gave her my razor and watched her soap her legs, her calves, her shins, her knees, and shave them like she’d been doing it for five thousand years. Later that day I said to the guys at the gym, “Today a chick shaved in my fuckin’ shower. Have you ever seen that?”
They looked at one another solemnly, nodded, and said, “Yeaaah.” Then everybody cracked up. I tried to explain: “Oh, because in Europe, girls are all with the Bavarian look, you know, with the hair all over.” That just made them laugh harder.
Eventually I pieced it together. Some of the girls I dated didn’t shave: this was their protest against the establishment. They felt the beauty market was all about exploiting sex and telling people what to do, so they were rejecting that by being more natural. It was all part of the hippie era. The flowery dresses, the frizzy hair, the food they ate. They all wore beads, lots of beads. They brought incense to my apartment, so the whole place stank. That was bad, but I felt they were on the right track with the freedom of smoking a joint and the naturalness of nudity. All that was wonderful. I’d grown up a little bit like that myself, with the uninhibited scene at the Thalersee.
All that laid-back stuff was great, but my mission in America was clear. I was on a path. I needed to train like
