I picked up Gladiator: A True Story Of ‘Roids, Rage, And Redemption, the brutally honest tell-all from American Gladiator Dan “Nitro” Clark, intending to mock its author from a safe distance. Oh, what sport I planned to make of the foibles! For weeks, I would point at the book accusingly and bray with laughter. “Haw! Haw! Haw!” was my exact sentiment. The Silly Show-Biz Book Club post I planned to write belonged very much to the Nelson Muntz School Of Literary Criticism. Muntz is one the preeminent thinkers of our age: his “I jeer, therefore I am” philosophy pervades the Internet.
Then I started reading Gladiator, and something strange happened. I came to laugh at Nitro, but I ended up empathizing with him and getting wrapped up in his sordid steroid saga. I found myself emotionally invested in his hard-fought battle to wean himself off the juice. And I’m not just writing that because we share an editor and a publishing house. Our editor is the great Brant Rumble. When choosing an editor, I have but one criteria: How manly is his name? In this case, Rumble just barely beat out Brock Savage and Bronco Thunder. I proposed doing shared events with Nitro where we’d read from our respective memoirs, then fight each other in the parking lot. I figure since Nitro is off the juice, it’d be an even match.
Nitro, a.k.a. Dan Clark, grew up as the son of a shy Japanese mother and a moody American womanizer who had a girl in every port, generally of the professional sort. In lean, stripped-down prose, Clark provides a snapshot into the psyche-warping sights and sounds of his atypical boyhood in Vietnam alongside his brother and father:
When I was ten years old… I see my dad bloody and beat the shit out of a guy.
I see my dad writhing on the floor, suffering a heart attack.
I see my dad beat the shit out of my brother.
I see my dad cry and drink himself to oblivion after my brother’s death.
I see my dad fuck two prostitutes while I lie in the same bed.
I see my father wave good-bye to me as I board the plane to return to United States, alone.
While Clark was still a boy, he watched his older brother die of electrocution trying to recover one of his younger brother’s drawings. These formative traumas don’t excuse Clark’s adult misbehavior, but it’s easy to see why he viewed the world as scary, random, and cruel. If the game is rigged anyway, why not get ahead by any means necessary?
Chubby and insecure, Clark found salvation in sports. The football field afforded him a place where he could sublimate his aggression and inner torment, where he could be reborn as a warrior. It gave his life direction and purpose. So when an injury threatened to derail a promising career, he welcomed any elixir that would restore his athletic mojo.
Enter steroids. Clark began using steroids in 1982, during the Wild West stage of the drug’s soaring popularity, when usage was an open secret among gym rats looking to jump-start the evolutionary process and skip straight to the superhuman stage. Steroids didn’t change Clark. They didn’t make him angry or confrontational. They merely sharpened and amplified the rage already present. Clark’s childhood demons never went away, they just grew stronger and more dangerous with every injection.
Clark was smart enough to find jobs that offered an outlet for his rage. He was an unusually aggressive bouncer, a replacement player during the NFL strike, and ultimately an American Gladiator. American Gladiators turned Clark and his Nitro alter ego into a punchline and a superstar. But he was living a lie. When the world looked at Clark’s impossibly buff body squeezed into red, white, and blue spandex, they saw a Greek god. When Clark looked at himself in the mirror, he saw a fraud. There was a horrifying gulf between image and reality.
Like so many converts to the glory of steroids, Clark became a freelance mad scientist, using his body as a subject. He goes into excruciating detail about the drugs’ physical effects. During one particularly gruesome passage, he describes getting breast-reduction surgery to deal with his grotesquely swollen man-boobs. He writes wrenchingly about struggling to get an erection after steroids and withdrawal play havoc with his testosterone, and about having sex with a former steroid addict whose clitoris had grown to freakishly large proportions.