Hercules finally broached the subject of bodybuilding. He had avoided it until then afraid that it would be like talking to Johnny Unitas. "Oh yeah, Johnny, I throw a football too." Hercules had known something of the joy of pumping, but here was this man (the avatar!), this man who had built a temple to himself and carried it around, an objective correlative of his huge ego. What was it like?

"When you reach that pumped-up feeling, and everything's tight. The tightness of the muscle, and the pump, means that you have trained well and that it will get bigger...There's a certain high to the experience in the gymnasium, it's the same high as you would experience when you come when you have sex...It's like--the ultimate. The training is like leading up to the pump and sex is like leading up to coming."

Hercules asked Arnold if it bothered him that lots of his fans were homosexuals--it bothered Hercules, the specter of a dark room full of hungry queens had kept him from ever seeing "Pumping Iron." "I don't think it bothers Newsweek that homosexuals buy Newsweek." Arnold was, of course, being openminded, a treacherous attitude for an existentialist. Hercules respected him for it.

There was a mob at the Coop when Arnold got there, oglers, curiosity seekers, and bodybuilding enthusiasts, some girls, some kids, one member of the Porcellian Club, the Harvard Crew, Caroline Kennedy.

"Do you drink liquid protein Ahnold?"

"No, I get my protein through regular foods."

"Milk and egg?"

"Regular food, you know. Meat, eggs, fish."

"Gosh, could you imagine if he turned his shoulders to shake your hand?" someone said. "He'd blot out the sun."

"Tell that guy not to announce me over the microphone as the bodybuilder," Arnold was saying. "I think my writing ability has succeeded the bodybuilding. Announce me as the best-selling author." A Coop employee spoke to Arnold in German, and left. "Every time I come here she wants me to sit here naked," Arnold said. "I told her she should take her clothes off."

Hercules and a friend watched as Arnold signed books for customers and scraps of paper for little kids, listened as he bantered about skiing.

"It's like that scene in the "Bride of Frankenstein" when the monster talks," he said. "Look, people are afraid to come forward."

It was true. The mob more or less kept their distance, individuals approached on eggshells. They sensed that those arms, arms like thighs, had been built by an essentially destructive impulse, that at the slightest provocation Arnold might elicit painful obeisance with those big blue boots. Finally someone summoned the nerve. (To be stomped by Arnold!)

"I'll have to convince my girlfriend to start working out."

"Oh just force her," Arnold said.

"Do you think Arnold does well?" the friend said.

I don't know, "Hercules said. "There was an article in Penthouse by one of Arnold's ex-girlfriends that implied, well..." Hercules held up his pinkie.

Arnold finally finished signing. Hercules shook his hand, promised to show him the Kennedy Library the next time he was up, directed him to the Harvest. Six-times Mr. Olympia, but still a big kid, he walked like a big kid, kind of lurching, walked right into cars on the way down the street. There really was something childlike about Arnold, Hercules decided, not in a bad way, but something refreshing in his simple outlook on life, his naive egoism, his sense of endless possibility. Hercules went back to the gym to lift weights.

In another day, he could have been a Reich Marshal.