middle; that’s why they had the summit in Vienna in the first place. The meeting didn’t go well. At one point, after making a hostile demand, Khrushchev said, “It’s up to the US to decide whether there will be war or peace,” and Kennedy answered ominously, “Then, Mr. Chairman, there will be a war. It will be a cold, long winter.” When Khrushchev put up the wall in Berlin that fall, you heard adults telling one another, “This is it.” The gendarmerie was then the closest thing Austria had to an army, and my father had to go to the border with his military uniform and all his gear. He was away a week until the crisis cooled down.
In the meantime, we had lots of tension, lots of drills. My class of thirty or so adolescent boys was full of testosterone, but nobody wanted a war. Our interest was more in girls. They were a mystery, especially for kids like me who did not have sisters, and the only time we got to see them at school was in the courtyard before class because they were taught in their own wing of the building. These were the same girls we’d grown up with all our lives, but suddenly they seemed like aliens. How do you talk to them? We’d just reached the point where we were feeling sexual attraction, but it came out in odd ways—like the morning we ambushed them with snowballs in the yard before school.
Our first class of the day was math. Instead of opening the textbook, the teacher said, “I saw you guys out there. We better talk about this.”
We worried we were in for it—this was the same guy who had broken my friend’s front teeth. But today he was on a nonviolent track. “You guys want those girls to like you, right?” A few of us nodded our heads. “It is natural that you want that because we love the opposite sex. Eventually you want to kiss them, you want to hug them, and you want to make love to them. Isn’t that what everyone wants to do here?”
More people nodded. “So don’t tell me it makes sense to throw a snowball into a girl’s face! Is that the way you express your love? Is that the way you say ‘I really like you’? Where did you figure that out?”
Now he really had our attention. “Because when
A lot of our fathers had never had this conversation with us. We realized that if you wanted a girl, you had to make an effort to have a conversation, not just drool like a horny dog. You had to establish a comfort level. I’d been one of the guys throwing snowballs. And I took these tips and carefully stored them away.
During the very last week of class, I had a revelation about my future. It came to me during an essay-writing assignment, of all things. The history teacher always liked to pick four or five kids and pass out pages of the newspaper and make us write reports discussing whatever article or photo interested us. This time, as it happened, I was picked, and he handed me the sports page. On it was a photo of Mr. Austria, Kurt Marnul, setting a record in the bench press: 190 kilograms.
I felt inspired by the guy’s achievement. But what really struck me was that he was wearing glasses. They were distinctive; a little tinted. I associated glasses with intellectuals: teachers and priests. Yet here was Kurt Marnul lying on the bench with his tank-top shirt and tiny waist, an enormous chest, and this huge weight above his chest—and he had on glasses. I kept staring at the picture. How could someone who looked like a professor from the neck up be bench-pressing 190 kilos? That’s what I wrote in my essay. I read it out loud and was pleased when I got a good laugh. But I came away fascinated that a man could be both smart and powerful.
Along with my new interest in girls, I was more conscious of my body. I was beginning to pay close attention to sports: looking at athletes, how they worked out, how they used their bodies. A year before, it meant nothing; now it meant everything.
As soon as school ended, my friends and I all made a beeline for the Thalersee. That was our big summer hangout; we’d swim and have mud fights and kick soccer balls around. I quickly started making friends among the boxers, wrestlers, and other athletes. The previous summer, I’d gotten to know one of the lifeguards, Willi Richter, who was in his twenties. He let me be his sidekick and help with his work. Willi was a good all-around athlete. When he wasn’t on duty, I’d tag along as he worked out. He had this whole routine of using the park as his gym, doing chin-ups on the trees, push-ups and squats in the dirt, running up the trails, and doing standing jumps. Once in a while he’d hit a bicep pose for me, and it would look great.
Willi was friends with a pair of brothers who were really well developed. One was in university and one was a little younger. They were lifters, bodybuilders, and the day I met them, they were practicing shot put. They asked if I wanted to try, and started teaching me the turns and steps. Then we went up to that tree where Willi was doing chin-ups again. All of a sudden he said, “Why don’t you try?” I barely could hold on because the branch was thick and you had to have really strong fingers. I managed one or two reps, and then I slipped off. Willi said, “You know, if you practice this the whole summer, I guarantee you will be able to do ten, which would be quite an accomplishment. And I bet your lats would grow a centimeter on each side.” By
I thought, “Wow, that’s interesting, just from that one exercise.” And then we followed him up the hill through the rest of his routine. From then on, I did the exercises with him every day.
The summer before, Willi had taken me to the World Weight Lifting Championship in Vienna. We rode up in a car with a bunch of guys, a four-hour drive. The trip took longer than we thought, so we only we got there for the last event, which was the super-heavyweight lifters. The winner was an enormous Russian named Yuri Vlasov. There were thousands of people in the auditorium yelling and screaming after he pressed 190.5 kilos, or 420 pounds, over his head. The weight lifting was followed by a bodybuilding contest, Mr. World, and this was my first time seeing guys oiled up and pumped and posing, showing off their physiques. Afterward we got to go backstage and see Vlasov in person. I don’t know how we got in—maybe someone had a connection through the weight lifting club in Graz.
It was an adventure, and I had a great time, but at age thirteen, I didn’t think any of it had to do with me. A year later, though, everything was starting to register, and I realized I wanted to be strong and muscular. I’d just seen the movie
A couple of days later, Willi announced, “Tonight Kurt Marnul is coming to the lake. You know, the guy that you saw in the picture?”
“Great!” I said. So I waited around with one of my classmates. We were swimming and having our usual mud fights when finally Marnul showed up with a beautiful girl.
He wore a tight T-shirt and dark slacks and those same tinted glasses. After changing clothes in the lifeguard’s shack, he came out in this tiny bathing suit. We were all flipping out. How unbelievable he looked! He was known for having gigantic deltoid and trapezius muscles, and sure enough, his shoulders were huge. And he had the small waist, the ridged abdominal muscles—the whole look.
Then the girl who was with him put on her bathing suit—a bikini—and she also looked stunning. We said hello and then just kind of hovered, watching while they swam.
Now I was definitely inspired. Marnul came to the lake all the time, it turned out, often with the most fantastic girls. He was nice to me and my friend Karl Gerstl because he knew he was our idol. Karl was a blond kid about my size and a couple of years older whom I’d introduced myself to one day after noticing that he had built up some muscle. “Do you work out?” I asked.
“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “I started with chin-ups and a hundred sit-ups a day, but I don’t know what else to do.” So I’d invited him to work out every day with Willi and me. Marnul would give us exercises.
Soon a few more men joined: friends of Willi’s and guys from the gym where Kurt worked out, all of them older than me. The oldest was a heavyset guy in his forties named Mui. He had been a professional wrestler in his heyday; now he just worked out with weights. Like Marnul, Mui was a bachelor. He lived on a government stipend and was a professional student at the university; a cool guy, very political and smart, who spoke fluent English. He played an essential role in our group because he translated the English and American muscle magazines as well as
We always had girls around—girls who wanted to work out with us or just fool around. Europe was always far less puritanical than the United States. Dealing with the body was much more open—less hiding, less weirdness. It wasn’t unusual to see nude sunbathers in private areas of the lake. My friends would vacation at nudist colonies in Yugoslavia and France. It made them feel free. And with its hillsides, bushes, and trails, the Thalersee was a
