03/18/2008: "Here's..."

...a .pdf of the Steroids article, to download, for free. It was sent by my new email pal from Bodybuilding.com. Also, for the sake of fairness, I will link to the thread where it occurs, where I'm called, amongst other things, a liar, a jagoff, a yellow journalist (I wish I was a journalist, yellow or otherwise! I'd be making a decent living, at least), and a "queerbait" by the same guy I thought I'd made amends with. This is the way it goes with the Internet: amicable one minute, calling you queerbait the next. The whole liar aspect is sort of annoying. I mean, there's a picture of me jacking the crap into my ass. Unless that's vegetable oil in there. I wish to hell it was. I'll say this for the benefit of people who may come here from that forum:

I'm a fiction writer. I've never been fact-checked. As a fiction writer, if I want a character to have 3 eyes, I give that character 3 eyes. I don't have to explain myself. For this, nonfiction, yes, of course I did. I spent 1.5 hours on the phone with the Esquire fact checker over this article. She called doctors, she hammered me on the facts. This whole 30 to 13 grams of protein seems a problem. I found this online:

http://www.howstuffworks.com/food3.htm

... so there I see 13g protein on the label. I'm sure some cans have 30g protein---in fact, I'm sure I've eaten cans with 30 gms protein. Basically, with James Frey and all the others out there, magazines have become hyperaware of falsities. The article wouldn't have run if it was full of lies. I would've been paid a kill fee, at best, or maybe just told to fuck off. As I would've deserved. It has to be understood: experiences differ. I've said to someone who asked: "first of all, I'd never recommend steroids. But if you're going to do them, understand your genetic history. If you've got good genes, a good family history of athletic parents and so forth, steroids might twine with the good genetic history and benefit you, for all I know. That said, if you've got bad genetics, like the Davidsons (bless my family, but we're not athletes), steroids might just make things worse." Which is what they did for me. My body may've been a Murphy's Law of steroid abuse. I have no idea. Certainly I know people who've had more pleasurable steroiding experiences. This was mine. I'll defend myself no further, because I know in my heart it's not needed.

Another misconception about the article: the photos are deceiving, simply in their order. The first one, where I'm filling myself with drugs, is AT THE END OF MY CYCLE. That is what roids did to me. Made me fat and disgusting. The second one is when I HAVE NO STEROIDS IN ME. That is from last summer, over a year since I did steroids, at my boxing match with Jonathan Ames. That is me, naturally, after lots of cardio, very little weight training, and a lot of boxing training.

So. Read the article and judge for yourself. Anyone who's read this blog for awhile knows, I've been hammered before and I'm sure will be hammered again. I'll post all the links as I made a promise I would.

http://www.youshare.com/view.php?file=EsquireApril08-Roids.pdf

http://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=106542271

http://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=106543131

All best, Craig.