My Neck. My Back. My Shoulders And My Traps.
Thoughts on flexing
There is a photo of me that my wife has since made into a coaster. The photo depicts me at 18 in the late ’90s in what appears to be the kitchen of a house at the Jersey shore, cheap wood veneer cabinets over my shoulder, cans of period-specific Diet Pepsi in view, along with an open bottle of Rolling Rock, a staple on any countertop during my teenage weekends. I’m tanned, shirtless and flexing, arms curled into two parentheses, pecs ablaze, face scrunched as if to acknowledge that this kind of unchecked aggression is funny but yo’ those muscles though! I was months removed from my senior wrestling season, finishing a respectable 16–7, and in fantastic shape. The hard, drink-’til-you-can’t-drink-no-more partying on the weekends could be balanced with intense payback sessions in the gym fueled by peaking testosterone.
Perhaps what’s most remarkable about the photo is my neck. My trapezius muscles, the muscles between the shoulder and neck, were thick and visibly vascular. I was a scholar athlete so someone generously remarked that they were “the meat-stairs leading up to the campus library”. No joke, my neck at that time had a measured a circumference of 18.5”. That’s a lotta salami. I knew this because I had to have my one nice white shirt tailored for formal school events otherwise I couldn’t button the top button when the occasion called for a tie. Only the XLs had collars that could accommodate my neck girdle but being only 5’6”, those shirts were always too long and pillowy, even when tucked in under my brass-buttoned jacket. You’d think the tailor would find these measurements amusing but this was Jersey and, whatever, I was just another Tuesday appointment.
Having thick neck muscles serve a function in wrestling: you often use your neck as a fulcrum when executing various offense and defensive maneuvers. A thick neck prevents your opponent from snapping your head from a standing position, which would put your body in a compromising angle and make it easier for you to be taken down. Football players also train to build up their traps because it helps with tackling and general injury prevention. The head is supposed to be on the outside of the ball carrier as you drive them to the turf with your legs. You’d train in the gym with what we’d call Farmer’s Carries, holding heavy dumbbells in both hands as you squeeze up, trying to engage the traps while trying, as much as possible, to relax your arms.
This was also a moment when WWE and WCW were ascendent, the two primetime television wrestling organizations, and my friends and I couldn’t get enough. Like a lot of things among boys, our fandom for “fake wrestling” started as a joke, after all we were actual wrestlers and televised wrestling bore as much in common to Hungarian ballet as it did to high school scholastic wrestling. But jokes, you know, have punchlines and the line between meta and actual enjoyment quickly disappeared.
All of the professional wrestlers had big traps but the wrestler with the biggest traps was also one of the most famous wrestlers at the time, known simply as “Goldberg”, the “Smith” of American Jewry. I was captivated by Goldberg. I had never known a Jew to be that tall and muscular and menacingly bald, not just bald-bald. Also most Jews in show business go out of their way to disguise their ethnicity — Isadore Demsky to Kirk Douglas, Allen Konigsberg to Woody Allen, Charles Buchinsky to Charles Bronson — and here’s this guy saying “F — you, I’m GOLDBERG”. He had also refused to wrestle on Yom Kippur, which felt like a meaningfully principled position for a fake wrestling program. The Sandy Koufax of my generation. After Goldberg would execute a theatrical finishing move, get the pin, he’d bounce up from the mat and flex his traps, which had so much definition that you could see the striations in the muscle fibers. “I can kill!”, the move suggested, “and I can kill again! Whah! Goldberg!”
In these moments you feel the primal truth of flexing. You’re not just mobilizing blood flow to muscles involved in fight mode. Flexing is the wild animal at full strength, the last thing an opponent sees before annihilation. To flex is to be the face of Shiva the Destroyer.
My traps became a kind of calling card at River Dell High Cchool. Flexing them became an easy crowd-pleaser. What the people wanted — a lethal Quasimodo. By my senior year, flexing my traps became a legitimate form of hello in the hallways before class. Often if a wave of friends walked shoulder to shoulder down the hallway, I’d flex a “hello” to each one in turn — ah-GOOZH! ah-GOOZH! WAM!, POP! WHOOOO! — and by lunch, my shoulders were actually sore.
One flexes so they don’t have to fight. It’s both law of the jungle and Cold War-style containment. You don’t want to mess with this. Please don’t mess with this? I did a lot of posturing in high school but never actually had to fight outside of the parameters of a wrestling mat. Ironically it wasn’t until I went to a leafy liberal arts college in New England did I actually clock anyone in the face, basically at a clip of one incident per year, Freshman through Senior year. Each time it was in defense of my roommate, James (or “Jimmy” when he really got going) whose mouth had a tendency to write checks his body couldn’t cash. The last guy whose face I punched was such a smug, spoiled sonofabitch that I’m convinced I did him a favor. I was a literal hitman sent from the universe because you know what? Some people need to get their face smashed in to let them know that no matter how cosseted an environment they live in, they still live in the world with the rest of us, and sometimes the world is going to punch you in the face.
A friend of mine came over recently and saw the coaster.
“That you?” he said. “No. Way.”
“Uh huh.”
He looked at the photo again and looked back at me. “You know he’s still a part of you,” he said, pointing at my chest. “He’s in there somewhere.”
And you know what, God damn it? I hope he is. That beast within is a tool if I need to assert my will against an unwilling world, the source of Big Zeus Energy. While Goldberg is a corporate product of the WWE, the mythopoetic wildman is a valuable tool in the adult world with which to draw boundaries, get out of our heads, and remember our power. The work of civilization is to make sure that he works for me, forever lurking, there in a jiff.
Practically speaking the strong neck provides the protection I need as my body transitioned from the pride of River Dell wrestling to a jungle gym for a pride of kids, nieces, nephews and feisty puppies. Ah-GOOZSH!
