BIGCHEST: CONFESSIONS OF A TIT MAN

Larry Duplechan

 

 

 

 

 

I’m pretty sure it all started with Steve Reeves. For the benefit of people younger than myself (and lately, that seems to include just about everybody), Steve Reeves was sort of the Arnold Schwarzenegger of the 1950s and ’60s—only back in those days, success in professional bodybuilding could be parlayed into a career in action/adventure movies but not into the governorship of California. By 1950, Reeves had won all of the major bodybuilding contests then in existence (well, both of them: it was Mr. America, Mr. Universe, and that was it). In the early’50s, he appeared as sort of beefcake window dressing in a couple of biggish Hollywood movies (I seem to recall seeing him lifting Jane Powell with one hand); and in 1958 he sojourned to Italy where he starred in the title role of Hercules. The sequel, Hercules Unchained, followed in 1959.

By the late 1960s, by which time I was a boy on the cusp of my teen years, both of Steve Reeves’s Hercules movies (in addition to his other post-Hercules flicks such as Romulus and Remus and The Last Days of Pompeii—all of them Italian-made sword-and-sandal epics so, well, Herculean, that I still think of them as “Hercules movies”) were staples of afternoon and late-night television, at least in the greater Los Angeles area. Back in the day, KCOP-Channel 9’s “Million Dollar Movie” showed the same movie every day at 4:00 P.M. for five consecutive days, Monday through Friday—which is why I can still recite The Pajama Game (Doris Day and John Raitt) nearly word-forword, song-for-song; and why Hercules starring Steve Reeves is etched upon my brain as indelibly as the Pledge of Allegiance.

As with any beautiful thing, words cannot do justice to the beauty of Steve Reeves in his heyday. He was square-jawed and boyishly handsome (even with the close-cropped beard he wore in his Hercules movies), with a head of thick, wavy dark hair. At just over six feet tall and weighing 215 pounds, Reeves sported one version of the perfect physique: a twenty-nine-inch waist, manta-ray lats flaring up to impossibly wide shoulders, and a fifty-two-inch chest. That’s right—a fifty-two-inch chest. As a boy, I found that chest absolutely fascinating; not only the superhuman breadth and depth of Reeves’s rib cage, but especially the twin mounds of chest muscle for which I had, at that time, no proper name. They bulged when Steve crossed his massive arms and bounced heavily when he ran. I don’t know if I or my brother Lloyd (two and a half years younger than myself, and a Hercules fan himself—though not in quite the same way I was), first coined the term, but at some point we began referring to Steve Reeves’s impressive set of chest muscles as “bigchest” (one word, accent on the first syllable). As in, “Wow, did you see his bigchest move when he killed that hydra?”

By that point (the age of eleven or twelve), I knew, and on some level accepted the fact, that I liked to look at other boys and good-looking, athletic grown men. Hercules taught me that I really liked men with big muscles, and that I especially liked men with bigchest. But it was an episode of “Bewitched” that taught me the correct term for what I liked so much. All I remember of the scene itself was that there was a female client at the ad agency where Darrin Stevens worked and for some reason there was a line-up of competitive-size bodybuilders in posing trunks being presented to this client. My prepubescent crotch swelled to aching as the musclemen posed and flexed, until finally they all began making their chest muscles bounce up and down. The lady client asked, “How do they make those things pop like that?” Someone (maybe Darrin, maybe Larry Tate, maybe someone else), answered, “Those ‘things’ are called pecs.”

Pecs. I liked pecs. And I really liked seeing them bounce. On some variety show at about the same time, I remember seeing a bodybuilder make his pecs bounce rhythmically (right-left-right-left) while whistling “shave-and-a-haircut, two-bits,” which nearly shorted out my circuits, and left me with a fairly vibrating hard-on I had no idea what to do with (I wouldn’t discover masturbation for another couple of years).

Back in the day (and we’re talking the mid- to late 1960s here), television wasn’t the smorgasbord of shirtless hunks that it is nowadays (and I’m not even counting premium cable channels—on the CW, it’s a relative rarity to see a young man with his shirt on). It wasn’t that you never saw men with their shirts off—this was the era of the Beach Party movies—it’s just that most actors weren’t particularly buff in those days. Everybody seemed to know How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, but America wasn’t nearly so concerned with the proper stuffing of the wild tank top. Sightings of a really good set of pecs on the tube were few and far between when I was a chest-crazy kid, but I still remember some of them, fortysomething years later. Johnny Weissmuller’s pecs were overripe even in his first film appearances in the late 1930s, and over the twenty-odd years of his career as star of MGM’s series of Tarzan movies (Saturday afternoon movie staples), they grew increasingly pendulous. I minded not a whit. Gordon Scott was another massive-but-not-lean Tarzan, and something of a male Jane Russell, chestwise: a full-figured guy. Former footballer Mike Henry was the first truly ripped Tarzan, and his pecs seemed to have been chiseled from solid granite. Needless to say, if a Hercules movie wasn’t on tap, a Tarzan movie would do me just fine.

When Peter Lupus (pre–“Mission Impossible”) showed off his Mr. America physique to Annette Funicello in Muscle Beach Party—inviting her to “Look at that tricep. See how I can make it ripple?”—I was staring not at the rippling of Peter’s truly impressive upper arm, but at the way the pec nearest that arm bunched and bulged as he flexed. While he was no muscle god, Alejandro Rey (Carlos Ramirez in “The Flying Nun,” one of my favorite shows at the time—hey, I was just a kid) sported a set of lean, muscle-striated pecs in his all-too-infrequent shirtless shots. Even the relatively mature Eddie Albert appeared sans shirt at least once on “Green Acres” (wearing only pajama bottoms, if memory serves), showing a more-than-respectable set of pecs, especially for a man his age—though his chest was so hairy his pelt obscured his nipples completely. I vividly recall my kid brother commenting, “He has no dots!”

If I had to wait for the occasional glance at shirtless man-tits on TV, the good news was that growing up in Southern California afforded me a view of plenty of well-muscled shirtless boys and men, “live” and up close. As it happened, the onslaught of puberty (and the unrequited longings and inconvenient erections that went with it), coincided with a two-year stay in Sacramento, where we were the only black family in the neighborhood, and where the long, hot summers meant the neighborhood boys spent most of their non-school time with their shirts off. And much as I hated mandatory P.E. in school, it had the desirable side effect that even the least athletically inclined boys were usually in pretty good physical condition. And boys who played sports or lifted a dumbbell now and again were like walking porno. I remember with particular fondness the Meyers brothers from down the street: Greg, Andy and Jeff—handsome, tousle-haired, touch-football-on-the-front-lawn-playing boys with near-identical hairless, sculpted chests that I found mouthwatering, individually or as a trio. There was Roy Jarrett, who kept me hiding my boner behind my books my sophomore year in high school. Hazel-eyed with close-cropped, curly, honey-colored hair, Roy was so beautiful I made believe I was interested in becoming a Jehovah’s Witness just so I could watch his lips as he read aloud from his green-bound Bible. Seeing Roy’s perfect pecs in the boys’ locker room, fresh from the showers, droplets of water falling from his perky nipples, was a religious experience such as neither Roy’s Kingdom Hall nor my Baptist church could afford me.

Mr. Shell, our next-door neighbor (and the father of a couple of the kids I palled around with), was as unlikely as his sons to be seen after working hours wearing a shirt. Mr. Shell’s pecs were reminiscent of Johnny Weissmuller’s—just a shout away from man-boobs—and sat atop something of a beer belly. But as with the early Tarzan, I cared not a whit. I thrilled to the sight of those meaty pecs bouncing, quite independent of each other, as Mr. Shell ran toward me during one of the frequent games of kick-the-can he organized with the neighborhood kids. As with heterosexual tit-men and the female breast, I don’t really have a working concept of “too big” when it comes to the male chest. And besides, Mr. Shell was good looking, considerably more fun than my own father (no slouch in the pecs department himself, but he wouldn’t have been talked into playing in the street with a bunch of kids at the point of a gun), and in addition to his somewhat gone-to-seed bigchest, Mr. Shell also had beautiful feet (but that’s another fetish).

Then there was Dick Beeson, my P.E. teacher during junior year in high school. Coach Beeson was handsome enough and buff enough to have starred as either Hercules or Tarzan (he made TV-Tarzan Ron Ely look like a flagpole by comparison). Underneath his polo shirt, Coach Beeson’s pecs formed a high-set mantle of muscle you could have set football trophies on. The one time I saw him without that shirt (emerging from his office to quell some sort of locker-room shenanigans, wearing only his gym shorts, not only magnificently bare-chested but—bonus!—barefoot), I’m pretty sure I made a noise and my hands were just barely fast enough to cover my instantaneous erection with a towel. It was while replaying that scene in my testosterone-poisoned little teenaged brain, humping my sheets as quietly as I could so as not to awaken my brother in the twin bed across the room, that I had my first orgasm, hosing down at least half my mattress with what I remember as an inordinate volume of yeasty-smelling boy cum. Following a brief spasm of fear that I might have somehow shot blood and might die of my self-inflicted wound, I spent the next several years’ worth of spare moments doing little other than masturbating, often while thinking about Coach Beeson.

My desire for Coach Beeson (his feet and face, thighs and ass, biceps, triceps and especially pecs) was accompanied by the newfound desire to have pecs of my own. I started lifting weights, grunting out set after set of bench presses on the school’s Olympic weight machine like a boy possessed, my eyes quite literally on the prize: when I wasn’t actually staring at Coach Beeson’s awesome rack, I was visualizing it. And as very often happens when one is truly focused, I achieved my goal.

It only took about twenty years.

See, I was a late bloomer. I sang soprano until I was nearly fifteen, and didn’t reach my adult height (all of five foot eight) until I was seventeen and entering college. Even then, I was every ounce of 125 pounds. So even though all that weight training made me unexpectedly strong for my size (I was a surprisingly good arm wrestler, known for taking down boys outweighing me by twenty or thirty pounds), I just couldn’t seem to get big. All my efforts to the contrary, I remained so slender that by my freshman year in college, I found I was often mistaken for a woman. Daily, even. In a T-shirt, Levi’s and sneakers, I was addressed, “Excuse me, Miss,” by strangers and was constantly hit on by lesbians. I’d come home, seething, to my then-boyfriend (now my husband), Greg, who quipped, “Whip out your dick. That’ll show ’em.” (By the way: while I can truthfully say I married for love, it does not hurt matters that my husband has a dynamite set of pecs.) There were no public whippings-out of my dick. Instead, I worked out all the harder. And in time, I finally began to see results—in my arms. And while my chest development continued to disappoint, my new biceps/triceps combo (and the tight T-shirts I wore to display them) succeeded in rendering me considerably less equivocal, genderwise.

I was in my midthirties—countless bench presses, dumbbell flies, cable crossovers and protein shakes later—when a cute young gay dude (recently hired in the word processing department where I also toiled), sidled up to me, a flirtatious twinkle in his eye, and said, “Dude, you lift trucks or something?” By that point, I had grown used to a certain number of compliments on the size of my arms. “Small Japanese trucks, mostly,” I replied. “Why do you ask?” The cutie responded, “Big chest.”

Yes! To paraphrase Jean Hagen in Singin’ in the Rain, all my hard work had not been in vain for nothin’. I wasn’t sure when exactly it had happened, but I had apparently, finally, achieved my goal: bigchest was mine. That little exchange with the word processing muffin was sufficiently significant for me that I fictionalized it in my third novel.

So in case you’re ever in the mood to flatter me regarding my physique, keep in mind that my father has great arms, and his father had great arms, so if any body part was going to develop, it was going to be my arms. And since I’m still a big fan of snug-fitting T-shirts, arms are what most people tend to notice first. But relatively speaking, arms were easy. Chest was tough. Compliment my pecs, and you’re sure to get a smile out of me. Hey, I might even bounce ’em for ya.